Authors: Tom McCarthy
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Literary, #Post-Communism - Europe; Eastern, #Art Thefts
Somewhere up in the grey sky an aeroplane groans by, descending towards Ruzyn?, wheels clunking out to feel their way through cloud into this new year. Back on the ground, the cabin’s door swings open and the African steps out. Inside the box it’s even colder for some reason. Nick’s fingers won’t grip on the coin that’s in his pocket, have to scoop it out instead; as valuable seconds tick away it drops back twice before he brings it up towards the slit. It’s zero-zero, then four-four for the UK, and then you have to drop the zero, so it’s one-eight-one, then … His father picks up.
“Duncan Boardaman.”
“Hi Pops.”
“Nick! Where are you?”
“Prague. Where did you think I’d be?”
He hears his mother in the background, his father telling her:
Your son, from Prague
. His father’s about to tell him she looks beautiful and pass him on.
“How was the uncoupling?”
“From Slovakia? Seamless. Mission accomplished without hitch.” He makes a crackling sound, as though he were reporting the news from an international space station.
“I’ll pass you to your mother, who’s looking beautiful. We’ve just done a New Year’s jog.”
The receiver hangs in the air of the kitchen for a few seconds, picking up the scrape of feet on red clay tiles, a coffee mug being set down on the sideboard. Through the window at the end, beside the blue towel hanging on its wooden rail, the garden will be cold and hard, silver with frost if the sun’s out, or if it’s snowed then white with green blades poking through. His mother’s voice comes on the line:
“Happy New Year.”
“Happy New Year.”
“How are you?”
“Fine. Cold.”
“We saw pictures of Prague on New Year’s Eve.”
“Yeah, it’s a new country now. How was New Year in London?”
“It was strange this time, with Dad gone. Oh! Somebody phoned from Amsterdam for you.”
“Was it Julia Emerson?”
“Emerson, yes, like Ralph Waldo. She wants you to start at
European Art
in February. She left a number here.”
“
Art in Europe
. When did she call?”
“Two days ago. I’ve been trying to call you, but the number didn’t work. I got a prerecorded operator saying something in Czech.”
He’s been getting this, too, each time he tries to call Ivan: that infuriating
na-na-NAH
routine, three rising pips, then some nasal slapper telling him that the number he’s dialled isn’t in service. Nick asks his mother:
“Did she leave
Art in Europe
’s number?”
“Yes. I’ll give it to you. Hang on.”
“Oh! I haven’t got a pen. I’ll … hello?”
“Yes, I’m back. The number’s …”
“I don’t have a pen. I’ll have to memorize the number and then hang up and ring her straight away.”
She reads him the number. He repeats it to her twice, then quickly says goodbye and, severing the connection, dials it. A well-to-do English girl’s voice answers:
“Hello,
Art in Europe
?”
“Hello, could I speak to Julia Emerson?”
“She’s not here right now. Can I take a message?”
“This is Nicholas Boardaman. She phoned me in London. Only I’m in Prague.”
“Oh yes, I know who you are. You can call her at home.”
He goes through the same routine with her as he did with his mother. She laughs as he explains to her why he has to hang up. He pictures her as young, pretty and smart. Home Counties, West London at a pinch. Always has a pen on her, a Filofax … One of the South Americans is tapping on the window, holding up a watchless wrist. Nick holds his index finger up:
one minute
. Julia Emerson turns out not to be at home. Nick leaves Maňásek’s number on her answering machine, then remembers it’s not working and changes his message halfway through, telling her he’ll phone her later today – before remembering that he hasn’t written her number down. The South American is tapping again. Nick hangs up and leaves the cabin.
Art in Europe
. That means he’ll be leaving Prague. Karolina, Ivan, cold mornings naked up at AVU all seem to telescope away from him. It’s a vertiginous feeling. He’ll have to get over to Amsterdam, sort out a place to live. Mladen mentioned a friend of his who lives there. Maybe Julia Emerson will help him. But it doesn’t matter: getting the job’s the main thing.
I’m an art critic. Yeah, I write for
Art in Europe
. Yeah, that’s right …
Bars stretched along canals unfold in his imagination; he populates them with Dutch girls who are impressed by him. As he leaves the cabin he lets out a loud whoop. The people still queuing turn to look at him, then look away again.
* * * * *
… that the equipment had been changed. The change had been implemented in the period between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, as foreseen. I had, of course, been made aware of this, but it had slipped my mind during the days I spent in their entirety outside Ivan Maňásek’s apartment. It was only when I entered Headquarters after resting for several hours that I became aware of it again. I was making my way to the equipment store to be issued with my new radio when I bumped into my colleague Robinek, who, looking at my directional microphone, addressed a question to me. Sleep had done little to improve my ears’ condition, and I had to ask him to repeat his question several times. Eventually I understood him to be asking whether I was returning from the Korunní swoop. Completely unaware that such an event had been planned, let alone that it was occurring at this very moment, I ran from the building. My car was still where I had left it the previous night, some distance from Headquarters; not wanting to waste time by going through the process of requisitioning another one, I hailed a taxi and made straight for Korunní.
On my arrival there, I found the area around the entrance to Associate Markov’s building cordoned off. From my taxi’s window I could see Associate Markov, a man whom I recognized from photographs as Subject himself and a woman unknown to me being led handcuffed from the building by uniformed officers. Behind them, 2 [two] officers in plain clothes were carrying what I assume were the 2 [two] paintings I’d observed being transported from Maňásek’s the previous night. The paintings had been removed from their paper wrapping and re-covered in bubbled plastic. The whole operation was being directed by Lieutenant Forman, whom I could see positioned some metres from the building’s door. Around him were my colleagues Rosický and Novotný, and sundry members of the visual surveillance team I’d seen outside Maňásek’s throughout the previous week.
Naturally wishing to announce my presence to the Lieutenant, I instructed the taxi driver to proceed through the police cordon towards the front door of Korunní 75 [seventy-five]. Unfortunately, the officers manning this cordon were unknown to me; moreover, when I reached into my pocket for my police badge, I realized that I had left it in my car the previous night. An officer leant into the car to instruct us to turn around; I tried to explain who I was, but he cut me off, saying something which the ringing in my ears prevented me from hearing. Beyond him, I could see that all the people directly involved in the swoop – Lieutenant Forman, Rosický, Novotný and their teams – who were all those to whom I was known, were now departing, leaving me with no means of verifying the claims I was trying to express, viz. that I was a policeman detailed to this very case. I stepped out of the taxi and started walking in the direction of the cars into which they were now entering. As I did so, the officer with whom I had been remonstrating, entirely without warning, struck me on the side of my head with his baton, causing me to fall down to the ground, where my head was once again struck, this time by the pavement as it hit it. As a consequence of this …
* * * * *
c/o Martin Blažek etc
4th January 1993
My dear Han
,
A dreadful thing has happened: Ivan Maňásek is dead. He fell from the windows of his atelier on New Year’s Eve and landed in the street below. He lives –
lived
– right on the top floor of his building: the fifth, maybe the sixth. Impossible to survive a fall like that. It’s really horrible
.
The police are taking blood samples, to see if he was drunk. I wouldn’t bet against a positive result on that count. Drugs are suspected also. Ditto. They
are
presuming that it was an accident, though – not suicide. The skylights were stained half black from all the pollution that Prague’s filthy air had been depositing over the years, and it seems Maňásek got the idea into his mad head to clean them some time just before midnight on the thirty-first. It
is
the kind of thing he’d do. I can picture him saying to himself in that archaic English: “I shall embark upon the new year with pristine skylights!” – although, obviously, he’d have said it in Czech. While we’re on the subject of language: his mother told me he’d been smartly dressed
, dressed to go out. Zum Ausgehen gekleidet
, she said (we talked in German): as though Death had used his fall to make a cheap pun …
His mother’s scary: a big Russian woman. I met her on the second (Happy New Year, by the way. I tried to phone you on the very stroke of midnight – where were you?), not long after I’d heard the news. I’d been at Martin’s gallery, and one of his hopeless artists mentioned it by the by when he came round, so I went straight over to Maňásek’s place. There were flowers in the street, bunches propped up against the building’s wall. His concierge was brushing the snow from the steps. It snowed quite a bit over Christmas, but hasn’t for a few days since, so the snow was packed down and dented – and I couldn’t for the life of me prevent myself from looking at the dents around the flowers and thinking, “Did he make that one? Was it there he fell?” Kind of perverse, I know …
The concierge was a real cunt. These old Czechs all speak German – she probably got plenty of practice during the war, denouncing her Jewish neighbours – so I explained to her in German that I was a friend of Maňásek, and she just said: “
Er ist tot.
” I swear I saw a glint in her eyes as
she said this. She told me as I started up the stairs that Maňásek’s mother and brother were there. When she said this – grunted it
, Muuutter, Brüüüder
– I thought twice about continuing, but did anyway as I’d insisted that she let me in. I found them in his atelier, packing his belongings into boxes. I started to explain who I was, but the mother immediately started ordering me around, told me to lift this and sort through these and so on. I suppose she must have been in shock, denial, whatever you call it these days. She made me and her other son carry all these boxes down the stairs. The other son’s very odd: looks like an idiotic version of his brother. Grinned the whole time, like a stupid schoolboy. I told him who I was but he just grinned more – clearly didn’t understand German. I’m not sure that he understood anything at all, let alone this situation. Out of his depth completely
.
It gets stranger: while we were moving boxes out of the flat onto the top landing, a screaming came from downstairs – a woman’s voice at first, then two women’s voices. It sounded as though Maňásek had professional mourners, like in ancient Greece or Egypt. The first wailer was a hysterical girl of thirty-odd, and her wailing was directed at the concierge. Not just her wailing, at that: she’d thrown a bucket of hot water at the old bat – whence the second set of wails. The hysterical young girl was shouting over and over again the word
Bulharský!
– for some reason. Maňásek’s neighbours had come out and were trying to calm her down. Ivan’s mother gazed on, looking perplexed
.
The old concierge, still wailing, slunk into her lair and must have phoned the police, as two of these turned up just minutes later, in plain clothes. Completely unmoved by the sopping witch’s plight, they seemed very keen to talk with the hysterical girl, who’d been taken into a kindly neighbour’s flat and was being fed cups of
Čaj.
A set of
negotiations followed as to whether she could be persuaded to come out and accompany them to the station. Eventually she emerged, and allowed herself to be driven off. No sooner had she and her escorts gone, though, than
another
pair of policemen turned up, this time wearing uniform. They’d been sent, it turned out, to seal Maňásek’s flat. They did at least allow us to remove the last of the boxes before doing this
.
People in Prague are obsessed with flats. It’s worse than back in Amsterdam. They’ll bribe, screw, even marry to procure a good one. Ivan Maňásek’s death, it occurred to me as we left the building, announced itself to the world in the form of an empty, sealed-off flat
.
They’d hired a truck. As we all stood beside it and I tried to prevent my gaze from wandering back to the dents around the flowers against the wall, Maňásek’s mother finally asked me how I knew her son. She looked up just before she asked me, and her eyes widened and then seemed to suddenly contract, as though the reality of Maňásek’s fall were just at that moment hitting home – and then she lowered her head once more and asked me what my connection to her son was. Had been. I told her all about the Eastern European exhibition, how I’d planned to include some of his work in it and so on and her eyes widened again, and she said that she’d like the show to go ahead. Not that I’d proposed to cancel it, mind you, although I wasn’t about to correct her on this point – but anyway she said she’d like the show to go ahead, and would I come to her place the next day to select the works of Maňásek that I intended to exhibit? So I said:
Natürlich.
Well then, the long and the short of it, my dear Han, is that you shall shortly be receiving a crate with ten paintings by Ivan Patrik Maňásek, 1958–92, enclosed inside. I’ve addressed it to Windtunnelkade because I know that Piet’s away for one week and the Stedelijk Bureau will be unstaffed
.
You can just tuck the crate into a corner of your workshop, to keep the boys’ grubby hands off it. And you’d treat it with some reverence if you knew what I’d been through to acquire the works! When I turned up at her place the next day, the woman wouldn’t let me leave! She stuffed all this inedible Russian food down my gullet. The brother wasn’t there – but thankfully Maňásek’s flatmate was, a young English boy named Nicholas Boardaman. I’d actually seen him before, although not with his clothes on: he’d been (I should tell you before you get all suspicious) the model in a life-drawing class Martin and I had passed by on our visit to AVU. Small town – small continent, in fact: he’s moving in a couple of weeks to Amsterdam, where he’ll start working for
Art in Europe
, the journal edited by that thick English woman Julia Emerson. Didn’t she once welsh on paying you for a poster? At any rate, I gave him my number and told him to call when he gets here – there – to Amsterdam
.
I must have turned up half an hour or so before him, though. She made me eat all these open sandwiches with various types of chemical paste on them, and drink some kind of home-made vodka that makes the genever you keep knocking back taste good by comparison. She watched me, smiling, while I ate; she was unnaturally calm. I asked her where the paintings were; but she kept saying “Later, later” and pouring me more of her Siberian antifreeze. Now I see where Maňásek got that side of his constitution from. When I finally made it into the room where his paintings were stored, she followed me in and scrutinized my every move. Not suspiciously, mind you – just really
intently
. It was impossible to concentrate
.
Fortunately, the doorbell rang: this was Nicholas, who’d arrived to reclaim his possessions that had been cleared out of Maňásek’s atelier with everything else. He’d been staying at a friend’s when the accident happened, apparently, and hadn’t returned until late on the second. I came out to the
kitchen and introduced myself, then slipped quietly back while Mother Russia went to work on him. I think she made him fix a pipe or something: a constant hammering was wafting from there for a good five minutes – after which she came through and scrutinized the selection I’d made, talking me through each one. She’s absolutely ignorant about art (I learnt later that she’d taught Russian to schoolchildren before the Velvet Revolution made her job redundant), and said things like “People will like this one: it’s got a lot of colour in it”. This went on for perhaps another half-hour. She kept popping out to stir the meal that she was cooking for us (the chemical paste was just an hors d’oeuvre), then clumping back to offer me further painterly insights
.
The meal was too much. Not only did the food have dog hairs in it (Mother Russia had a mongrel that whelped around the floor), but whatever tranquillizers she was on were – coupled with huge amounts of her home-made Sputnik rocket fuel – sending her poor mind in all kinds of directions. It took Nicholas and me an hour to break loose. We shared a taxi, as it turned out that Nicholas was staying with a friend of his who lives just round the corner from Martin. I helped him carry his case up to his friend’s flat: a beautiful young student named Gábina. Her father runs Prague’s main photography gallery. The three of us went and had a drink together. Nicholas is pretty well informed about the Eastern European art scene. If Bos Kleinhuis turns out to be still sulking at me and Piet, I think I’ll ask Nicholas to write the catalogue for the forthcoming show. We went to a new bar just between Martin’s and Gábina’s flat. The bar was completely white: the walls, the chairs, even the piano that stood in the middle of the floor. As though we’d gone to heaven – which, of course
, we
hadn’t: Maňásek had. He’d gone somewhere, at any rate. Goodness knows where. Out, apparently
.
Must run now. Expect crate. Thank you for paying phone bill. Depart for Tallinn tomorrow. Love you. Leave the windows dirty
.
Joost xxxxxxx