第68章 The Second Open Session

Hartmann's symposium opened at three in a hall that smelled of velvet and institutional carpet, under chandeliers built for coronations now renting themselves out to conferences, and the silver-haired doctor took the podium with the serenity of a man who believes the autopsy has been scheduled for the other fellow. Ministries sat in the third row. Cameras lined the aisle. Volkov occupied the last seat of the last row wearing the expression of furniture. Rooke stood at the back by the doors, coat over his arm, a man attending a lecture in a city he was passing through. And in the front row, uninvited and undeniable, sat Irena Sorokina in a grey suit, with a portfolio squared on her knees. For forty minutes Hartmann was magnificent. Carbon results, he announced, obtained from samples lawfully removed during a documented study visit, indicated anomalies in the organic binders of certain celebrated walls — anomalies consistent either with later intervention or with manufacture outside the claimed dates; he regretted; science was not polite; the corpus required independent custodianship. Slides bloomed and multiplied, tables marched, and the courtroom Nikolai had predicted assembled itself beam by beam in the heads of everyone present, until Hartmann invited questions with the small bow of a man closing a net. Viktor walked to the front from the audience, unhurried, carrying nothing but a pointer. "Doctor, I will save the committee time. Your binder anomaly is real, and I can name its cause to the month." A stir; Hartmann's serenity adjusted half a degree. "In 1955 the gallery's founders relined two panels after flood damage, using a beeswax–resin mixture purchased in Vienna through the trade supplier whose invoices survive in our archive, which I have deposited with the notary this morning, batch numbers included. Your samples were taken — your own published sampling map shows where — precisely along those two relined margins. You measured 1955 and called it doubt." He let the murmur crest and fall. "But since we are gathered to examine materials, let us examine some properly. Bring the screens, please." What followed entered the profession's oral history before the week was out. Side by side, at high magnification: the Brno variant's craquelure and the Prague crate canvas's craquelure, hesitation placed upon identical hesitation, stroke following stroke like a signature traced twice — same hand, same order, same vanity. Linen pitch compared against 1947 looms and against modern mills. Ground fluorescence, blue against amber. Then the manifest, the excise trail, the wax impression with its crossed tools enlarged until the brush and key stared down the hall, and finally the halo: chemistry's verdict on thirty-one manufactured testimonies, and beside it, projected vast above the ministers' heads, a dead lieutenant's pencil translated into a pale wall above ice with nine bricks carrying their sentence, and beneath the image, in plain type, the chain of custody from Leningrad annex to Vienna depot to Prague notary, every link dated, every link named. "The corpus does not require custodianship," Viktor said into the silence. "It requires readers. We are manufacturing them as fast as the other side manufactures doubts." Then Sorokina rose, and the hall understood it had been saving itself for this. She testified for eleven minutes from a sworn statement: the audit; commissions billed to the Foundation in chess openings the board had never ordered; the second-wall commission authorised by chairman Walter Iselin, invoiced as documentation historique, paid from preservation funds; her termination by telephone; her photographs, certified, distributed to the ministries' representatives in sealed folders even now travelling down the third row. A counsel for the Foundation attempted half a sentence from the floor and was extinguished by the sight of the minutes in her hand bearing Iselin's initials beside the invoice description. Iselin himself was not present. His resignation, typed, undated, and delivered by messenger during her testimony, was read aloud by the moderator in the voice people use for weather warnings, and the hall watched two governments' worth of posture recalibrate in real time: provisional freezing of the foundation's accounts, requested from the floor, seconded from two directions, minuted by a man suddenly writing very fast indeed. Hartmann took it standing, which was to his credit, and fell anyway, because Viktor had saved him for last. The doctor's own sampling map, projected one final time, was overlaid — point by point, coordinates in red — against the consignment records of the consulting practice of Dr. Eberhard Hartmann, Vienna: every sample location corresponding to a painting his practice had examined, framed, transported, or authenticated within the preceding year. He had not been auditing the corpus. He had been touring his own inventory with a scalpel, generating the pathology he was hired to discover. The slides went dark on his career mid-gesture, hand still raised toward evidence that had turned in his grip like a tool in an unlit workshop, and the cameras, who had come for a scandal and been handed a dissection, did their duty without mercy. Afterward, in the emptying hall, Volkov approached through the chair-stacking and touched the dossier's corner as if testing varnish. "The fourth man's index," he said quietly. "Complete, including the expansion of a certain personnel number into a certain name, which took my service fifty years and cost more than you would credit. I no longer offer it as price, Orlov. I deposit it — Monday, with your notary, alongside everyone else's confessions — on one condition: your school teaches inside the archive. My successors must learn to read what my generation learned to bury." "Open lectures," Viktor agreed. "Open shelves. That is the whole syllabus." Rooke paused at the doors on his way out, adjusting a cuff. "My directorate framed a second photograph today," he said. "The queue outside. Leverage cuts both ways; yours is the sharper edge this season. Watch the canal side tonight, painter. Audits that fail tend to end in fires, and failed men get careless about whose building burns." The fire bells began while the hall lights were still coming up, distant, then nearer, then multiplied — and every face turning instinctively to the tall windows saw, above the rooflines southeastward, above the canal side of Landstrasse where a stable-door workshop had kept banker's hours for sixty years, the sky beginning, softly, ruinously, to glow.