第61章 The Noon Appointment

She came at noon exactly, which told Viktor that she had watched them as closely as they had watched her, because punctuality aimed at a stranger is a message, and the message was: I know when your morning ends. Irena Sorokina climbed the bakery stairs in her grey suit with rain still beaded on the shoulders of it, declined the chair Josef pushed toward her, and stood instead with her back to the north window, where the light could do what it liked with her face and she could watch the door. Hana sat within reach of the telephone. Nikolai did not sit at all. "You have something for me," she said. Viktor laid the guard's confession on the work table between them, squared to the edge the way documents are squared for a camera, but he kept his hand flat on the pages a moment longer, because terms first were how his trade survived meetings. "Signed at noon yesterday with his true name, witnessed, dated. You will read it here. You will take photographs of every page and leave the original with me until it is read aloud in public, at whatever hour we choose together, because a confession given to one foundation is evidence, and a confession given to a room is history." He lifted his hand. "Your grandfather wrote his page in the dark, Frau Sorokina. This one was written in daylight. It deserves to stay there." She read standing, all of it, twice, and while she read the studio conducted itself around her with the studied carelessness of people listening hard — Jenda grinding pigment he had no intention of using, Hana winding the clock that did not need winding, Josef repairing a frame joint that had waited fifteen years already and could wait through this. When she finished, Sorokina set the pages down, aligned their corners with one fingertip, and looked older by some measurement Viktor could not name, as if a weight had been moved from one shoulder to the other. "He never learned my grandfather's name," she said. "Seventy years on opposite sides of one night, and neither knew the other's name. My family carried exile like a coat. He carried a shop sign in flaking gold. And both of us were paying rent on the same silence." She took out her camera, a small silver thing, and photographed the confession page by page under the lamp, unhurried, thorough, a professional closing an inventory, and only when she had finished did she deliver what she had clearly climbed the stairs to deliver. "You should hear how the board spent its Wednesday, Herr Orlov, because I sat in the room until Tuesday, and loyalty has a shelf life I have now exceeded. Hartmann's samples are being written up for publication — not whispers this time; a symposium, invited ministries, the full courtroom your young man predicted. The centrepiece will be a newly surfaced second wall." "There is no second wall in Vienna," Hana said. "There is one in Prague, behind plaster, and it stays there." "There will be," Sorokina said, "by Sunday. Commissioned last spring, painted through the summer, aged in an oven the size of a coffin. Thirteen names in the margin, in your family script. When it is exposed — and Hartmann will expose it himself, that is the mechanism, doubt detonated on schedule — the world will conclude that everything your exhibitions touched was manufactured, including the true wall, including the confession I now hold photographs of, including my grandfather's notebook. You cannot refute a forgery you never saw coming, because the refutation requires the very expertise the scandal has discredited. That is the architecture. I have watched the drawings for eleven months." She returned the camera to her bag with a small precise click. "One more item for your inventory. Bay three of the depot on the canal, where our icon slept under stencil, was emptied on Thursday night. The charter manifest filed at Schwechat says Prague. Someone is bringing the Mother of God home, painter, and I no longer believe it is my board doing the sending." "The Teacher," Viktor said. "The Teacher," she agreed, "who, you will be interested to learn, appears in my board's own ledgers as a supplier who was paid for commissions the board never ordered. I found the entries during the audit. Sicilian Defence, Caro-Kann, Queen's Gambit Declined — openings nobody at Meridian plays. He has been billing my employers for years of work they did not know they were buying, and storing the product where they believed their own treasure lay. A man who runs accounts inside another man's books, Herr Orlov, is not a contractor. He is a tenant, and the building does not know it." At the head of the stairs she paused, one hand on the rail, and added, without turning, in the voice of a woman reading a margin aloud: "You have until Sunday. So do I. I would think about which of us the room will believe, and then I would think about the fact that we may need the same room." They heard her heels go down the four flights and out into the street, measured as a metronome, and the door below closed with the sound of a period being set on a long clause. For a moment nobody moved. Hana reached past the clock and dialled the gallery to warn the night watch, and Josef began, without being asked, to square the room — rags folded inward, lamps cooled, the confession locked in the drawer whose key lived, by long tradition, inside the brush box — while Viktor stood at the north window watching the street below absorb a grey suit into its ordinary morning, and understood that the week had changed shape overnight: once, the enemy had been an institution buying silence, which was a war of prices; now a single craftsman was arranging both sides like furniture, which was a war of hands. Then Tomas Hruby's boy came up two steps at a time with a carpenter's grin dying on his face as he read theirs, and handed over the note that had come an hour before to the framing shop in Josefov, folded around a photograph of a waybill. A crate had arrived at the gallery cellar that morning, the note said, sent from Vienna, excise stamps intact, addressed in careful block letters not to the curator, not to the Foundation, but to the exhibition itself, and the two words of the address smelled, Tomas wrote, of gold leaf and cold weather: FOR THE READER.