第8章 Double Cross

The visitor's arithmetic began compounding within the month, and it fell due in Vienna, which Viktor entered legally, nervously, and under a name he reserved for railways. The pretext was sound and even necessary: the wall consumed lead white at a rate no Prague shop could satisfy without gossip, and the successor to old Weiss on a street near the Opernring still stocked Dutch lead in cakes, uncut, unmolested by inventory lists. He carried with him, for cover, a finished Biedermeier panel owed to a broker there, one of the modest commissions that had padded his obedience through the spring. The errand should have cost an afternoon. It cost him his remaining belief that any single intelligence governed the thing he had been conscripted into. The broker kept offices above a leather goods shop, rooms arranged to make waiting feel like surveillance, and he received the panel with the distracted warmth of a man counting something else behind his eyes. Business concluded, he grew expansive in the manner of men who have decided you are temporarily important, and produced from a locked drawer a packet of photographs, glossy, recent, casually dealt across the desk like a hand of patience. He wanted, he said, a professional opinion, since the pictures concerned workmanship beyond his own competence. Viktor looked down at masonry. A stretch of fortress wall filled frame after frame, painted at architectural scale on linen, photographed in sections while drying on some unknown studio wall, and along its lower courses ran a pale diagonal splice that he knew the way a father knows a birthmark. His own composition stood reproduced on another man's canvas, brick for brick, merlon for merlon, down to the lime-scallop islands he had labored over with felt tools at three in the morning. Yet the hand was not his. The tonal transitions betrayed a smoother, lazier brush, the splice ran four courses instead of five, and one tarpaulin heap had migrated half a meter toward the tower, errors invisible to anyone who had never lived inside the original photograph for eleven nights. Someone else held a print of the same sky-taken image and was painting the same forty meters somewhere south of Prague, worse and faster, and the Viennese broker was shopping the result with the breezy greed of a man selling tickets to two ships he believed would never meet. Viktor gave his opinion in careful fragments, praising what deserved contempt and querying what he already knew, and left carrying the memory rather than the photographs, which the broker retrieved too quickly. Out on the street, Vienna performed its usual indifference around him, trams ringing, chestnut leaves pasting themselves to wet pavements, and inside that indifference he conducted a rapid audit of catastrophes. Only two explanations survived inspection, and each was a trapdoor. Either his own reference photograph had been copied and issued twice, meaning his client ran parallel productions and considered painters interchangeable, or the commission itself had been subcontracted through a second channel, meaning the institution's floorboards concealed exactly the kind of current his handler had feared. Both explanations ended with surplus artists, and he understood with clarity that tasted of copper which category of expense he belonged to. He reported it at the next Thursday meeting, in signs, because both men had begun distrusting air. The visitor absorbed the account without interruption, standing in his preferred corner where sightlines met, and when Viktor described the migrating tarpaulin the man's hands went still in a way Viktor had learned to read as alarm. Confirmation followed, delivered aloud in a voice sanded flat. There is no second commission, the handler said. There are two clients. One ordered the wall through channels I can see the edges of. The other ordered it through channels that do not officially exist, and one of those clients intends to learn what the wall says before the other does. He let that stand for a moment, then added, with the nearest approach to humor the season allowed, that duplicating a secret is how organizations announce they have stopped being one organization. Within nine days the Viennese broker supplied the period at the end of that sentence. News traveled to Prague through the leather trade, whose gossip outran newspapers by a week: the shop above the leather goods premises had closed overnight, the broker gone to visit a cousin in Linz, except that a body answering his description had been taken from the Danube canal by a municipal dredger, pockets intact, watch running, everything about the drowning correct except the man's lifelong horror of water. No paragraph connected the death to paintings. None needed to. Curiosity, Viktor reflected, examining his own reflection in a darkened window, apparently billed in arrears, and his own account stood open, since he alone in Prague could testify that the dead man had been showing photographs of a canvas that officially did not exist. Pressure arrived next at the perimeter, testing the frame rather than the canvas. A stranger visited Tomas's shop posing as a theatrical designer seeking large-format linen suppliers, asked graceful questions about which studios could handle eight-meter stretchers, admired a sample of double-ground priming with slightly too much expertise, and left a card printed with a telephone number that rang uselessly forever. Tomas relayed the visit in person, having walked a detour of half the old town to arrive at a bakery that sold nothing, and the old fence's message was brief and bleak. They are mapping the trade, he said, the way army engineers map a river before choosing where to bridge it, and when engineers finish their maps, construction follows. Then he put on his hat and added, before the door shut, that a man who paints two walls should consider which one he is standing against. At the following meeting the handler changed more than schedule. He came early, stayed long, swept the studio for devices with a powder brush borrowed from the bench, and for the first time paid Viktor a compliment that contained no institution in it, signing that the splice on the true canvas was worth a man's whole career and would outlive everyone who knew why it mattered. Before leaving he altered the terms of their contact entirely. Dead letters would replace visits for a season, chalk marks on a chosen culvert, cards in the lion's mouth rotated among three new sites. The Thursday man, he explained, had become a shape that watchers might be learning, so the Thursday man must briefly not exist. At the head of the stairs he paused, as he had paused once before, and this time he signed a sentence that reorganized Viktor's loyalties more efficiently than any oath. Trust the work and me, the hands said, in that order, and no longer the people who pay for either. ---