第69章 The Fire on the Canal

Prague held them, and Vienna reported it: radio first, then wire copy, then photographs by morning, and the household above the bakery spent the night the way households spend nights when the news is of a distance measured in friends and enemies alike, gathered around the telephone while another city burned on the far side of it. Atelier Bruckner went up in the third hour of Sunday night, comprehensively, professionally: the canal-side windows breathing orange, the stable door standing open to admit the draught that finishes what ignition begins, and the watching window across the lane — Nikolai's map supplied the detail from a Viennese bulletin — dark for the first time in memory, its newspaper reader evidently elsewhere, employed. By Tuesday the picture had assembled itself from fire marshals and customs clerks and one apologetic bonded-depot manager, and it read like a confession nobody had bothered to keep secret. The aging oven's fuel store, improperly closed, say the insurers; accelerant, say the marshals, off the record; the racks of period stretchers consumed, the pigment bench consumed, the coffin-sized oven split by heat, the chess-opening ledgers ash identifiable only by their bindings' scorched hinges. Nothing criminal survived the crime except its scale. And in the middle of the wreckage, laid flat on the flooded cellar steps under a fire blanket folded with tradesman's neatness, smoke-stained at one corner and otherwise unharmed, the patrols had found a painting: sixty-one by eighty-six centimetres — no. Smaller. The first message, the founder's wall with its door painted open onto light, addressed in block letters on the wrapping to THE READER, PRAGUE, and released to him through the consulate by Wednesday noon because whatever else the case contained, it contained no law against returning stolen property to the man it was stolen from. Viktor unwrapped it alone, in the studio, with the raking lamp, and read the theft's completion like a letter received. Under the door of light, where his compass holes had slept invisible for seventy years, the ground surface carried now the faintest possible burnishing along lines finer than freckles — the chart lifted, transferred by a technique he could reconstruct in his head and chose not to admire: the bearings, the intervals, the route east, raised off the panel the way a decal raises, leaving the painting whole, the promise intact, the address gone. He has finished his homework, Viktor thought, with the specific chill of a teacher whose student has surpassed the syllabus. The fire was not escape; it was housekeeping — the mirror-factory erased so that Meridian's frozen accountants could never buy their forger back with his own inventory, every commissioned lie burned unread, the Teacher walking free of employers, evidence, and employers' evidence in one clean night, keeping for himself only what could not be confiscated: the craft, the chart, and the page he still needed. Because he still needed it. The wrapping held a second item: not a threat, not an invitation this time, but a railway timetable for the week, Prague to Moscow, with the Thursday express circled in pencil — and against one southbound connection, a note in the iron-coloured ink: The acquaintance on the river has booked us both. He travels as he always travels, which is to say as nobody. Bring the page, reader, or bring the refusal; the wall will be read either way, and only one of us intends to read it in daylight. "He is telling us where and when," Hana said slowly, "which means he wants witnesses, or wants us thinking he wants witnesses, which is the same trap one floor up." "Or he wants the contest," Viktor said. "Fifty years of copying taught him what originals know: value requires comparison. He does not want the wall read alone. He wants the reading contested, judged, witnessed — he wants, God help us, an examination, with the two of us as invigilators of each other." He weighed the timetable and found it, like all his trade's documents, honest about everything except intent. "Then we go as witnesses. All the way, in the open, on the circled train." Sorokina arrived at dusk with her resignation letter framed — actually framed, Otto's joinery, done that afternoon by post as a joke that only the two of them would survive — and declared herself added to the party by right of inheritance: my grandfather's road ran east once, she said, and I have spent a lifetime filing other people's routes, and I propose to walk one of mine before I am pensioned by another committee. Volkov contributed, through the notary, a slim envelope already: the fourth man's index, complete, and expanded at entry 447 into a name, a rank, and a 1947 posting that made the personnel-number clerk at last a man with a street address in Moscow — the denunciation's drafter, the permit's stamper, the keeper of the second road's paperwork, alive until 1979 by the index's arithmetic, buried where the index did not say. And Josef came at nine with slivovice and the card. Old, soft-edged, decades out of circulation, a Moscow telephone exchange and a single name worn to initials by handling — the favour owed to a restorer who once kept silent in a small white room, redeemable once, by one caller, on a line that Josef swore still answered if you had the patience of the trade. Viktor dialled from the bakery's dead-letter extension at ten, and the line rang four times and opened on silence with breathing in it, and he said what he had prepared the way one primes a panel, thin and even: The painter's son is coming east to read a wall. My grandfather built the road; I am asking to walk it in the open, with witnesses. The voice, when it came, was old and dry and entirely unhurried, an institution speaking through one remaining throat: Come by rail, as declared. The wall is where the founder left it, and colder than his notes suggest. Bring nothing that writes, painter. Bring the eyes. The line closed without ceremony, and Viktor sat listening to the dial tone, which hummed in his ear like a struck tuning fork, one long steady note under everything, the sound, he thought, of a question that had waited seventy years deciding to be asked.