第65章 Page Thirteen

Sorokina arrived at the studio before breakfast, unannounced, which by then was the only way anyone decent arrived, and she came holding her camera bag in both hands like a woman carrying verdicts. Hana took her coat. Nobody offered the chair this time; the household had stopped pretending the visits were social. "You cut it out yourself," Viktor said, without greeting, because the trade had taught him that some seams must be named before they can be read. "The notebook you laid before the notary is shy one leaf, and the stitching at pages twelve and fourteen is proud by a millimetre, and pride in stitching is a decision, not damage. Where is page thirteen, Frau Sorokina?" For a moment the Registrar of the Meridian Foundation stood in the bakery studio being neither registrar nor foundation, only a tall tired heiress of a long exile, and then she reached into the inner pocket of the grey jacket and laid on the table a strip of paper folded to the size of a playing card, yellowed, soft-edged, worn nearly translucent along its creases from decades of being carried somewhere close to the skin. "My grandmother sewed it into a glove cuff in 1968, when we left," she said. "My grandfather cut it loose the week he received the word BURY across his report — he understood instantly what a report that must not exist makes of its witnesses, and he divided his testimony the way careful men divide assets, so that no single search, however thorough, could ever hold all of him. The notebook was the decoy he let them hunt. The page was the inheritance he meant someone to earn." Her mouth did something that was not quite a smile. "You have earned it, Herr Orlov, or Thursday's appointment on your jetty has; either way, the page is done waiting." Unfolded, under the lamp, in pencil gone the colour of weak tea, Aleksei Sorokin's ruled precision marched down the page in Russian, and Hana read it aloud while the studio held still, translating as she went because some inheritances should travel by voice. Three nights after the crossing, the lieutenant had gone back — off patrol, off the record, walking the north bank with a soldier's dislike of unfinished arithmetic — and he had found boot prints ending at a water-stair below a brickworks chimney, and on the stair, being loaded into a grey van with diplomatic plates, a flat wooden case the size of a painting. He had noted the plate number, complete, in figures. And as the van pulled away he had caught one exchange between the loaders, in German across a Russian night, the only words the wind carried: Bruckner sagt, es eilt. Bruckner says it is urgent. Beneath that, in the same disciplined hand, the sentence the family had bled for: Er blickte nach Süden, wo der andere gegangen war. He looked south, the way the other had gone. And beneath that, dated three days later still, the entry that made Viktor close his eyes: the lieutenant, unable to let the plates die in a drawer, had checked the route permit through a friend in the transport office, and the permit bore, in the corner where approvals lived, the stamp of a ministry office identified only by personnel number. "The number from your father's annex," Sorokina said quietly, watching his face. "The office that drafted a denunciation in 1952 also stamped a permit in 1947 for a van carrying a painting case north. The man who destroyed your father guarded the second road. Whatever your family and mine have been mourning for seventy years, painter, we have been mourning the same murder weapon from different banks." Viktor spread the morning's inventory on the table with the deliberation of a man laying out surgical tools: Pavel's annex pages; the confession photographs; the crate manifest from Vienna; the enlargement, still drying, of nothing yet — and told her, because daylight had been the price and the promise both, about the jetty, the offer, the compass-pricked chart sleeping under the founder's door of light, and the empty bay three with its charter manifest saying Prague. She listened the way auditors listen, motionless, filing, and when he finished she was silent for the length of four breaths. "Then hear the board's morning," she said. "At eight I was dissolved. My commission terminated by telephone, security escort to my flat, the courtesy of an hour to pack. They believe I leaked the audit. I did leak the audit." She said it without emphasis, a fact among facts. "Before the escort arrived I used my hour on the ledgers, and photographed the commission pages, and one entry I want you to see, because initials are a language too. W.I. — the second-wall commission, the Prague delivery — W.I. is not a client. Walter Iselin signs the board's minutes. The Foundation commissioned its own counterfeit, through its chairman, and paid for it from the preservation fund, and the invoice description reads, in French, documentation historique. They are not buying and selling lies, Herr Orlov. They are manufacturing their own evidence, because authenticating a lie they inherited shamed them, and forging one they own felt, to gentlemen of a certain age, like housekeeping." The studio absorbed it. Downstairs the bakery's ovens — dead for years — might as well have been lit, the room was so warm with purpose. Hana was already listing aloud: photographs certified, notary, ministries, the symposium moved to Sunday per Hartmann's circular that morning; and Viktor let the voices run together into their plan-shape while he looked at the worn strip of paper and understood what the Teacher truly wanted with it — the plates, the chimney, the water-stair, the address confirmed in a dead officer's hand — and what the founder had truly hidden under his door of light, and why a journey planned for 1949 had a destination drawn in compass holes finer than freckles. "One correction to your timetable," he said at last, to all of them, in the weighing voice, head a little to one side. "Sunday belongs to Hartmann unless we take it from him, and Monday the icon opens in a laboratory, and after that comes Moscow, because the chart points east and page thirteen names the road it follows. But none of it moves until the Mother of God is in this city, in the open, under our notary's eye — so first, today, we learn where a charter flies when its manifest lies." He gathered the page, squared its creases with a fingertip, the way one squares a panel into its stretcher, and handed it back to her open-palmed. "Keep it carried, Frau Sorokina. It has spent seventy years learning the job."