第52章 The Second Man on the Wall

Morning came up the river the colour of unprimed canvas, and Viktor crossed the bridge again with Nikolai while Hana stayed behind to sit with the guard, because an old man who has spoken a lifetime's words in one evening needs someone in the room afterward, someone who will not ask him to say any of it twice. The city had washed itself in the night. Statues stood along the bridge balustrade in their coats of pale soot, holding their stone objects out to the fog, and under the arches the water moved with the slow confidence of something that has outlasted every regime that ever claimed it. "His name was Aleksei Sorokin," the guard had told them over the remains of breakfast, laying the words down one at a time like instruments on a felt cloth. "Lieutenant, border troops, seconded from signals because he understood wire and wireless and the mathematics of listening. He was not a cruel man. He was a precise one, which in that army amounted to the same trouble. He wrote his report in triplicate within the week — I obtained a look at the routing stamp years afterwards, through a man who owed me clocks. It went up the chain and came back down with a single word across the first page: BURY. Someone very high had decided that a border post where the truth walked past a rifle on a Tuesday was a post that did not exist. Sorokin was transferred within the month. Punished quietly, promoted sideways, sent east to count antennas. And he did the thing that precise men do instead of forgetting." The old man's hands made a small rectangle in the air, the shape of a notebook. "He kept his own copy." Viktor sat very still. "The report describes the crossing." "It describes everything. The hour. The ice. The parcel's size against the courier's chest. My challenge and my answer — because there were two men on that wall, reader, and only one of them was watching the trees." He turned his glass on the table, half a revolution, like a screw being set. "For seventy years that notebook has been the loose thread on the coat of everything your grandfather built, and men have come asking about it with increasing politeness. First came the ones from my old service, in the fifties, with their grey suits and their questions shaped like hooks. Then the Czechs, after the thaw, gentler, embarrassed, taking notes they would file under nothing. Then, three years ago, a lawyer from Zurich, wanting to buy border memorabilia for a private museum of the cold war, offering sums that insult us both by repeating them. And last month —" the pale eyes came up and fixed on Viktor with the patience of a scope, " — last month it was a woman." Nikolai set down his cup. "Describe her." "I could describe her faster by describing what she left. Grey suit, good shoes, hair pinned as if by regulation, eyes that counted the room the way a jeweller counts stones before deciding which are paste. She carried a folder of documents so correct they looked ironed. A foundation, she said. Historical preservation. They pay modest pensions to veterans of frontier units, they record testimonies, would I consent to an interview about conditions of service in nineteen forty-seven. Conditions of service." The old man smiled without warmth. "I consented to nothing. I made tea. She asked four hundred questions and forty-nine of them were about February. When she left I checked the room, because a clockmender checks things, it is the whole of his religion. My lock had been oiled. Not badly oiled — beautifully oiled, with the right oil, sparingly, by professionals. Papers I had left in a certain order lay in a different order, arranged to be discovered. Nothing taken. Everything read." The room above the shop held its silence. Down in the street a delivery van passed, and Viktor found himself noting its number without meaning to, the old habit surfacing like a face in underpainting. "They are back," Nikolai said quietly. "Or they never left." They walked back the long way, along the river side of the street, and it was Nikolai who stopped outside the tobacco shop opposite the clockmaker's door and stood looking not at the shop but at its reflection in the dark window across the way. "That flat," he said. "Second floor. Curtains new, gas meter dusty, bell push wired but the wire is bright at the join. Rented furnished by a man who never sleeps in the bed, because the bed is made with hospital corners and the pillow has no dent." He said it flatly, reading the building the way Viktor read a canvas, layer under layer. "There is a car on the corner by the embankment steps. It has been there since we crossed. Different driver since yesterday — same seat position, moved forward, tall man, short man. They change every forty minutes, on the quarter hour, which means a schedule, which means an institution. Institutions are patient, Viktor. Men work for money and get tired. Institutions work for reasons and get budgets." "And the chalk?" Viktor said, because he had seen it too, ten paces back: a small white tick at knee height on the lamppost's north face, fresh over the ghost of an older tick washed grey by rain. He had watched couriers' chalk marks come and go on three continents of walls. Marks like these meant one thing. Someone was confirming that a place remained what it had been believed to be — that a watcher post was still watched, that a route still ran, that an object still sat where the ledger said it sat. You did not chalk a lamppost for a week's surveillance. You chalked it for years. Back at the studio above the bakery the light was already going amber, and Hana met them in the doorway with her coat still on, and he knew before she spoke. She held out an envelope, heavy paper, hand-delivered, no stamp. It had arrived an hour before at the framing shop of Tomas Hruby in Josefov — the old fence was ninety-one now and sold picture rails to tourists, but he still received the mail of a trade that had officially never existed — and Tomas had sent it up the hill with his boy because, as the note pinned to it said, in a crabbed hand that smelled of gold leaf: THIS ONE MADE ME COLD, AND I AM HARD TO CHILL. The envelope held a single sheet on paper so fine it felt like skin. THE MERIDIAN FOUNDATION, the letterhead said, GENEVA — VIENNA — PRAGUE, and beneath it a paragraph of perfect courtesy proposing, on behalf of an anonymous benefactor, the acquisition of the complete exhibition corpus of the Artists' Line for permanent preservation, terms generous, timeline respectful, all scholarly credit assured. And enclosed with the letter, unexplained, was a photograph. It showed the gallery in Malá Strana, the white walls, the visitors moving among the paintings — and at the centre of the image, sharp, clear, shot from inside the room at eye level within the last day, hung the original first wall, the painting his grandfather had begun in 1947 and Viktor himself had finished in the room above the river. Viktor studied the photograph for a long time. Then he turned it over. On the back, in pencil, in a small unhurried hand, someone had written a catalogue number and two words: STILL AUTHENTIC. "They have someone inside the gallery," Hana said. "They have someone inside the story," Viktor said.