Men in Space (13 page)

Although it is not my place to state this, I now understand my superiors’ reason for preventing me from making arrests or recovering the artwork, and find them commendable. They know where the painting is, and what is being done with it, and by whom. They have a holding signal on the whole conspiracy. This gives them enormous power. This power, to me, is almost tangible: sitting in my car beside the carp tank on Lidická, I feel it rushing through the air around me – and feel that I, too, am held by it, or rather within it: neither its origin nor its destination but one of its relays, its repeaters. I am satisfied with this: satisfied with my place within the overall field of transmission. As long as they know where the painting is, and who is doing what to it, the field will remain strong. I continued listening and, with the exception of short periods during which I allow myself to be relieved, still continue, waiting until such time as …

* * * * *

Roger’s leaning on his elbow, elbow on the table, fingers lightly tapping on the bandage over his right eyebrow. He’s been doing this for two days now, can’t resist it: a kind of primal pleasure comes from running through the gamut of sensations underneath the bandage, ranging up from numbness through that tingly tickling on to pain – then how the pain itself stabs, burns and dovetails back to numbness once again. It’s like eating sushi: having the palate teased, seared and anaesthetized with every mouthful. There’s some bruising just below the socket too, which over the last two days has changed from shitty brown to a kind of aquamarine blue that he quite likes, and after playing the register above the eye he strokes the bone there too, pulling the skin one
way and then another, imagining he’s distributing the colour, squelching it around, like an artist mixing pigments …

He’s into physical sensation right now. That having his eye cracked should have immediately preceded sex with Barbara seems happily coincidental: both events have opened up reserves of sensitivity he never knew he had. Even walking to the bar just now it felt as if his feet were lightly caressing the ice as they slipped over it; then his heels digging into it, firm and assertive, the cold moving up his arms to grab hold of his chest, his shoulders, brilliant winter light around him screaming silently with bright-blue pleasure. Life’s good – has been good ever since he stepped into Jean-Luc’s atelier two days ago. Tyrone, the spaced-out black guy with the gun, turned out to be some kind of performance artist who’s been booked to do Pod Stalinem on New Year’s Eve, and he’s asked Roger if he’ll knock out images for that show just like he was doing at the party. He met another Yank at Jean-Luc’s too: Michael, an adman from New York who’s heading up a whole agency here in Prague. Michael gave him his card and told him to call by if he wanted to have a look at the equipment his outfit’s using. The next afternoon, after he and Barbara had done it so many times they’d broken his bed’s frame, he pulled his clothes on and went round there – and was led around an editing-suite eldorado: Beta machines, Cubase, an Avid … Michael told him that he had a photo shoot planned for New Year’s Eve and wanted a club setting for it, so why didn’t they just transfer the whole studio over to Pod Stalinem, and while they took their photos Roger could use the hardware to mix and project his films? That’s three amazingly good things,
bam-bam-bam
, all from the same night …

Michael’s lent Roger a camcorder with which he’s been filming left, right and centre, getting buildings, architecture, images of city. Honza’s been driving him around in his giant blue truck, driving him all over Prague. Tyrone’s event’s
called
Lift-off: A Launch Party for the Czech Republic
– the stroke of midnight on December 31st being the moment of the new state’s birth. Roger’s going to use Michael’s Avid to mix his rushes of trams, people and bridges together and then layer over that the street map of Prague he bought at the airport when he first got here and larger-scale maps of all of Bohemia and Moravia he’s pulled from an old school atlas Barbara brought him; then he’ll lay the whole thing against one of his Apollo images, the rocket taking off, and get it all projected on and splattered across the stage. It’s going to be so good he just can’t wait. Each time he puts the camera down he gets fidgety, starts playing with the cut again: the tickling, then the stab, the burn …

The bar’s door opens and that American girl Heidi walks in and immediately catches sight of him. He tenses up: hasn’t seen her since the party, when he kind of came on to her, then dumped her for the more attractive B., which was kind of a crap thing to do. It’s just unfortunate, because she was really sweet. She’s coming over to Roger and Honza’s table. The door opens again; Nick Boardaman walks in holding two large shopping bags, looking around the bar, presumably for Heidi. He sees her, then sees them too and waves, all beamy. Heidi seems pretty beamy too as she sits down.

“Hi! Can we join you?”

“Sure. A pleasure. You know Honza? Honza, Heidi.”

“I guess I saw you at that party,” she says, shaking Honza’s hand. “That night’s pretty hazy.” She’s wearing purple shades, as though she were still hung-over. She turns to Roger and asks him: “How’s your eye?”

“Seven stitches. They’ll come out in a week. The eyebrow’ll take longer to grow back … How are you, anyway?”

“I’m great. I’ve been hanging at Nick’s, with Ivan.” Was that
with
as in
with with
, or just
with
? “It’s so cool to watch an artist working.
When
he’s working …” She smiles to herself and wriggles. It was
with with
– or at least she wants
him to think it was. Nick joins them, sets the shopping bags down on the table and says:

“Hey, Roger! How’s the eye?”

“Fine. Seven stitches. You been stocking up on groceries?”

“Oh no. Heidi and I are on a mission. We’re gofers for the noble cause of art.”

He’s stoned, Roger can tell. Heidi says:

“Ivan’s sent us out with a great list of ingredients that he needs to mix pigments and texture and varnish and, like, hold the colours on this old painting he’s been hired to copy.”

“Copy? How do you mean?”

“Copy. There’s this old painting of some saint, and he’s been hired to make a copy of it.”

“So what type of ingredients have you been …”

“Ahem.” Nick raises his finger, pulls a piece of paper from his back pocket, unfolds it, holds it out in front of him like one of those old town criers and reads: “Whiting powder, rabbit-skin glue, methylated spirits, cotton wool, ketone-resin crystals, white spirit, beeswax, jelly …”

“Jelly?”

“Sorry:
jell-o
,” he says, mimicking an American accent.

“What’s that for?”

“Apparently,” Heidi says, “it has to go on underneath this stuff called Gesso.”

“You want more?” Nick asks, turning his list over. “There’s wire wool, sandpaper, carbon paper, purified water, garlic …”

“Garlic?”

“Mordant for the gold leaf,” Heidi explains again. “Weird, huh? It’s a kind of icon painting. There’s all this gold around the saint’s head. Like a massive halo.”

“And he’s using real gold leaf?”

“Not just any gold leaf,” Nick says. “It must be twenty-three and a quarter carat. He’s got that already. He’s got so much of it that he’s blowing it around the atelier for kicks.
You should see the place. There’s so much stuff laid around the floor that you’d think he was making, I don’t know, a monster or a bomb or something. Or some high-tech glue …” Heidi swipes at him with open palm. Nick laughs and ducks, then goes on: “Agape, I mean agate …”

“For burnishing the gold,” Heidi’s still annotating. “We’re learning
so
much …”

“… suede, natural sponge, eggs – although I’m worried that these ones are too white.” Nick delves into his shopping bag and pulls a smaller paper bag out; then, cupping this in his hand, he lifts an egg from it and hands the egg to Roger. It is very white, but all eggs are like that here: the hens must be anaemic. Roger throws it up into the air six or so inches above his open palm, catches it, throws it up again …

“What does he want
eggs
for?”

“They’re for making tempera.” Heidi’s eyes are covered by the purple shades, but Roger can see her eyebrows moving up and down, following the egg. “That’s what makes these icon paintings kind of shiny. That and the gold.”

“… dental plaster, two ice-cube trays, bottle of vodka …”

“Vodka!”

“Maybe it has thinning qualities. Or cleaning ones. It worked on your eye.” She’s not that hazy, then, if she remembers that part. Nick folds the list and slips it back into his pocket, sits down with them and says:

“There’s more. We’ve been out for three hours already. Ivan’s obsessed. He’s been at it for a couple of days. He’s got boards of wood, and all these tins of powder, and saucepans. He’s totally into it. He’s smoking dope all day and working on this thing. Sketching it again and again and again. And doing all these diagrams. It’s like some kind of mathematics: really methodical – exactly the opposite from how he does his own art.”

Dope, huh? Actually, Roger wouldn’t mind a little weed. And Honza’s out of action for the afternoon, going to take
his band ice-skating on some river out of town, and Barbara’s visiting her parents …

“Are you going there now?”

“Oh yes,” Nick says. “We’ll have a beer or two, then hop on the twelve.”

“Can I come with you? I could film him working or something.”

“Sure. You’ll love it. It’s really interesting.”

“What’s he copying an icon painting for anyway?”

“Who knows? I suppose whoever owns it needs a second one for, you know, a museum. Or they want to give a copy to a friend. Or maybe it’s some guy with two children, and he’s old and is going to pop his clogs quite soon, and he’s got two sons, right, and they both want the painting when he’s gone, and so he’s getting it made again, but properly, so no one’ll know which is the original and which the copy …”

Heidi’s made her right hand into a glove-puppet snake without the glove, moving its fingers up and down against the thumb, mimicking the movement of Nick’s jaw. Roger and Honza laugh. Nick says:

“Well how am I supposed to know what it’s for? I tell you what, though: I saw my friend Anton in the street with one of his dodgy Bulgarian pals just now, when you’d already come in here, Heidi – just as I came out of the
potraviny
with the eggs. They were off up to Strahov for some football game. And I told him that you and I’d been out gathering all this weird shit for this painting he’s asked Maňásek to do, and he just blanked me.”

“You mean he didn’t even say hello?” Heidi asks.

“No, he said hello OK, but when I talked about the painting he just didn’t answer. Twice. And then he went off to this game.”

“So maybe it’s a present for this other guy he was with,” Heidi says. “A surprise.”

“Heidi, they’re thugs. Not Anton – he just works with
them. But they steal cars and sell fake passports and launder money and who knows what. People like that don’t give each other church paintings for Christmas. Like they’re meant to say, ‘Oh yippee! It’s my favourite saint! Thanks ever so much!’ ”

The waiter comes round, slams down four beers and draws four more lines across their table’s docket. The door opens again and Karel, Kristina, Jiří and Kuba walk in. They’ve got Mladen with them. Kuba’s got three pairs of ice skates hanging across his shoulders. Honza taps his finger on the back of his wrist as they all walk over:
You’re late
.

“We had to wait until my parents were at their flat,” Kuba says in Czech as he sits down. “That’s where the skates were. I didn’t have a key.”

“I thought you had to be naked up at AVU,” Mladen says, in English, to Nick.

“School’s out.”

“Strange. For us architecture students, no. I must be there in two hours to talk to my professor about essay I have write.”

“Written,” says Heidi.

“What?”

“Oh, I’m sorry … Nothing.”

“I like your sunglasses,” he tells her.

“Thanks,” she says. “They’re proper glasses. I lost my usual pair in that French guy’s atelier. If any of you see him, could you ask him if he found them?”

“I’ll ask him,” Nick says.

“May I try them?” Kristina asks Heidi.

“Sure, but they won’t work unless you’re short-sighted just like me.”

Kristina puts them on and turns her head round, whistling. She’s sitting across from Roger, right beside the window, and the shades reflect the street outside, the part of street he can’t see, that’s behind his back. There’s wooden scaffolding
running along the bar’s façade and on along the façades of the whole block. As people pass beneath this scaffolding it looks as though they’re walking down a tunnel into and out of her skull. Some construction workers who were standing at the bar knocking off small shots of
slivovice
a few minutes ago are reflected in the lenses: they’re holding gas blowtorches to the buildings’ plasterwork, stripping off old names. It’s happening all over Prague: as the state signs on plastic boards that must have covered the tops of shopfronts for more than forty years come down, the names of pre-war traders are emerging from beneath them, only to be burned off again. When Kristina moves her head, the torches’ flames come right into the middle of the lenses, where they blaze like fiery pupils.
Got
to get this. Roger delves into his bag and pulls out Michael’s camcorder.

“Can I film you? It’s just that the effect your – don’t move! – yeah, like that, the effect of the street inside your shades, it’s really visually fascinating.”

Heidi says:

“We should haul ass over to Ivan’s soon. You want to come too, Mladen?”

“OK.”

Kristina moves her head towards him; he moves his head back, dragging the camcorder with it so she’ll stay in focus – there it is, right there, this is …

“
Jesus
Christ!”

He’s knocked his head against the wall, and the camcorder’s jabbed into his gash – right over the stitches,
really
fucking painful …

“Are you OK?” Nick asks.