第28章 The Ledger

The painting came the following week, wrapped in grey cloth and carried by two of Sokolov's men who set it on the bench without a word and left without waiting. It was an eighteenth-century portrait, a woman in a dark shawl, cut from its frame and rolled face inward, the way men carried paintings who did not trust the men they carried them for. A note in the Colonel's hand lay on top: Make it honest. Sokolov had said that a painter must be earned, and Viktor understood that this was the earning, the first true commission, the thing that would tell the Colonel whether the forger could be trusted with the real work. He unrolled the canvas on the bench and looked at it the way a doctor looks at a patient, cataloguing the damage before deciding what to save. The paint was old and honest, the face of the woman painted by a hand that had known what it was doing, and the lining had been replaced at some point in the last thirty years by someone who had not known, and Viktor's eye went to the lining the way his eye always went to the place where a thing had been touched by a stranger. He worked on it for three days, cleaning the old varnish, feeding the cracks, laying the paint back into the places where it had lifted, and on the third night, with the lamp low and the river black beyond the window, he lifted the lining away from the back of the canvas and found what the stranger who had replaced it had hidden. It was not a message. It was a ledger, written in a tight, sloping hand on paper that had been sized with gesso and pressed flat against the old weave, a list of names and dates and sums that covered the whole of the back of the canvas, and Viktor stood with it in his hands and understood that he had been given, without meaning to receive it, the thing the whole route was moving toward. It was the record of the Artists' Line, the account of a decade of crossings, every painting that had been moved, every man who had paid, every name that had been hidden twice. And in the middle of the list, between a payment for a Dutch landscape and a delivery to Vienna, there was an entry that made the floor go out from under him: the name of a man, and a date, and a sum, and a single word in the margin that he had learned to read in a dying man's studio. The word was MAREK. He did not move. He had spent fifteen years learning to hold his hands still when the work asked it, and he held them still now, with the ledger heavy against his palm and the name burning in his memory, and he thought about the list of pigments that had carried the acrostic, about READ THE WALL, about the tight, sloping hand of a man who had died on his floor. The hand that had written the ledger was the same hand. The entry was in Marek's own writing, the sum was in Marek's own figures, and the date was two days before the shot, and Viktor understood that the ledger was not the network's record at all. It was Marek's. The handler had kept the account himself, the way a man keeps the one thing that can be used against him, and he had hidden it where the only man who could find it was the man who had been paid to make the network's paintings honest. The painting had been cut from its frame and moved, and the ledger had come with it, and the whole route, the whole machine, the whole of Sokolov's careful game had been built to move this one piece of paper west. He worked all night. He copied the ledger onto a sheet of tracing paper, page by page, name by name, sum by sum, in the same order, in a hand that was not his own and not Marek's, and when the copy was done he buried it in the false panel beneath the floorboards of the studio, next to the true painting and the second map and the scrap of paper with VIENNA written on it. Then he put the original back beneath the lining, and he cleaned the canvas, and he laid the varnish, and he stood back and looked at the woman in the dark shawl and told himself the name of his own game. The ledger would go to Sokolov with the painting, as if it had never been seen, and the copy would stay under the floor, and the name in the margin would sit in his memory like a splinter under the skin. He had been paid to make the painting honest. He had made it honest, and he had made himself dangerous, and he was going to need to be. Josef came at dawn with his old cloth satchel, because the varnish was the part that took two hands, and the two of them worked in silence, the way they had always worked, and it was Josef who found the mark on the doorframe, the small scrape in the wood that had not been there the night before, and it was Josef who looked at Viktor and signed: You have been watched tonight. Viktor did not stop working. He signed back: I have been watched every night since the first photograph. Josef signed: Not like this. Viktor set down the brush and went to the window and looked down at the street, and there was a car idling at the corner with its lights off, and a man standing in the doorway of the shuttered shop across the water, a man who stood the way Sokolov's men stood, patient and flat-eyed, and Viktor understood that the test had not ended with the third wall. The test had ended with the painting, and the painting had two sets of eyes on it now, and the ledger under the lining had become the most dangerous thing in the city. He turned back to the bench and finished the varnish with a steady hand, because a man who trembles in front of a witness is a man who has something to hide, and Viktor Orlov had just given himself a very good reason to have nothing in his hands at all. Sokolov came for the painting that evening, and he stood in the room above the river and looked at the woman in the dark shawl for a long time, and he did not look at the back of the canvas, and he did not look at the lining, and he said: You have made her honest. Viktor signed: She was always honest. She was only hidden. Sokolov's eyes came up from the painting and rested on Viktor, and there was something in them that Viktor had seen once before, in the eyes of a collector who has just realized that the forger he is buying from knows more than the painting. What did you find, he said. It was not a question. Viktor signed, without a flicker: I found a good painting and a bad lining. I replaced the lining. That is all I found. Sokolov looked at him for a long moment, and the room went very quiet, and then the Colonel smiled his second true smile and said: Then you have found what I sent it to find. And he took the painting and left, and Viktor stood at the window with the ledger copy burning under the floorboards and understood that he had passed the test and failed it at the same moment, and that the Colonel knew more than he had been told, and that the name in the margin was now the only thing in the city that belonged to Viktor Orlov alone.