Men in Space (3 page)

“Very fitting,” Ilievski murmurs.

They move across the lawn, among the sculptures. Some of the figures are facing one another; others are turned away to stare towards the house, the river. Some are so decrepit that rusty wires protrude from their arms and thighs. Cracked elbows, a shoulder and two torsos curled up fetally litter the ground. It reminds Anton of pictures Helena once showed him of Pompeians fossilized in lava. Next to a discus thrower an enormous iron cast of Stalin’s head lies on its side, eyes gazing blankly at the athlete’s feet. One ear has fallen off and sits upturned towards the sky. Ilievski raps his knuckles on
the head. The raps make a deep, low clunking, like a broken bell. Did he say fitting?

“Sorry? Fitting?”

“Yes. These sculptures. To what I want to talk to you about: art.”

Art? Ilievski? Janachkov will be buying him tickets for the ballet next. Ili takes a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of his cashmere coat and lights one up. Anton says:

“I’m not really an expert …”

Ilievski chuckles. “I don’t want to talk about art, Anton. I’ve never understood that stuff. A car or a house are worth something. They do things for you. But a picture, a sculpture – they’ve got no use, and yet people will pay huge amounts …”

“Surplus value.”

“What?”

“Surplus value. It’s in Marx …”

Ilievski snorts derisively. “That’s probably why I haven’t heard of it. I don’t want to talk about art: I want to talk about a
piece
of art. Different kettle of fish. And before we go on, let’s understand that this one’s special.”

“Special?”

“Not for general discussion. To be kept between you and me.”

“Understood.”

“A painting,” Ilievski watches Rambo urinate against the gymnast as he speaks, “was delivered from Sofia last night. Needs to go to America.”

Now it’s Anton’s turn to snort. “Don’t we all?”

Ilievski turns and clasps him by the shoulder again; again his fingers dent his flesh, prod his nerves. He looks at Anton, eyes full of sympathy, then lets his hand fall, tilts his head back, blows out smoke and continues:

“This painting is quite old. It’s a religious painting, some kind of saint. You know the type.”

“An icon,” Anton says.

“That’s right, an icon. Well, with art, there’s usually no problem. It goes straight through Austria or Germany, through up-and-running routes, officials taken care of, you know the routine …”

Does he? Anton’s always wondered how it fits together, how it’s all connected: cells in Sofia and Berlin, Vienna, Istanbul, syndicates in London and the States, parts of a system linked by half-submerged chains … Back in November, when the body of that eighteen-year-old boy was found in Průhonice Park with its organs removed, the Helicopter Murder, he lay awake each night for a week staring at the poster of Santana on the wall and shuddering as every passing tram cast images of scalpel-sharp chopper blades into the bedroom, wondering if maybe, just maybe, one of those shady Middle-Eastern men he’d shepherded around, or else a transfer of funds he’d made by telephone on Ilievski’s behalf through offices in Moscow or Athens, had facilitated, however indirectly, this crime’s perpetration. How would he know? Chains and networks, parts all reacting to the other parts, negotiating the steps and swivels of some complex dance. He’s never seen an overview. Has Ilievski? Physics 7, Sofia Faculty of Engineering: the basic mechanical principle by which the turning effect of a force about a given axis, its leverage or “moment”, can be said to be directly relational to the distance from the pivot to the line of the force – this principle, they were told, was universally applicable. All systems have pivotal points: identify these and the whole structure will leap into focus. For an instant, Anton’s back in the white classroom watching Professor Toitov twiddle his pointer’s tip just inches from the whiteboard’s elaborate system diagrams – diagrams charting systems far beyond the field of engineering: economic, biological – daring his star pupils to locate the pivotal point before he does; and then the sighs, almost gasps, that spread around the room each time
the point’s identified, rotational axis deduced, distance and moment calculated, the structure charted and contained, as though behind the physics lay a need for reassurance that these sprawling masses weren’t just accidents of time and circumstance, unmappable because unplanned …

“But this particular icon,” Ilievski’s saying, “is, apparently, exceptionally valuable. Too hot to deal with in the usual way.”

“So how do you want to get it to America?”

“I don’t. The police are going to recover it right here in Europe.”

“You said …”

“And at the same time …” a dramatic pause here, smirking, dark brown eyes holding Anton’s own, wrinkles almost overflowing with the knowledge they’re keeping tucked between their ridges, “it will go to America.”

He releases Anton’s eyes and throws his cigarette down, looks for Rambo, whistles.

“You can’t work that one out, can you, Brains?”

Rambo appears, wet, from behind the discus thrower. Ilievski leans down towards him, rubs his ears and waits for Anton’s answer. Anton hasn’t got one: he looks around, embarrassed, shoulders raised.

“I give up.”

Ilievski grabs Anton’s head, one hand on each side, and pulls it down onto his lips, which kiss it – twice, emphatically, like an emperor heaping honour on a subject. He hands the head back, jubilant.

“Ha ha! It’s passed the Anton test! If he doesn’t get it …”

He moves his own head towards Anton’s now, glances around the lawn, as though the sculptures were eavesdropping, then whispers:

“Listen. We need to make a copy of the painting.”

He moves his head away, looking at Anton intently.

“A copy? Why not just take a photograph?”

Ilievski, abandoning his surreptitious air, steps back and laughs loudly. The glass-fronted house laughs with him, and carries on laughing for a second after he’s stopped. He steps forwards again and gently raps on Anton’s crown the same way as he rapped on Stalin’s two minutes ago.

“Oh Anton. A copy! Not a likeness: a copy! An
identical
copy.”

“And that’s what the police will …”

Ilievski’s standing back and smiling, arms resting crossed on his wide chest.

“But that’s genius! How did you think of that?”

Now Ilievski’s face clouds over as he shrugs:

“Instructions. You know …”

In a white Sofia classroom, Ilievski and his cars, his men, his cashmere coats all shrink down to small dots on Toitov’s board, as far removed from any pivotal point as distant moons from the planets they orbit. Anton feels, just for an instant, very close to him.

“That’s why I’m asking you,” says Ilievski, looking out across the lawn. “You know art people; you go to all the galleries …”

“Well, I don’t really go to
all
of them. I was just by one, half an hour ago, on my way …”

“That guy we met outside Blatnička, the art journalist …”

“Which one?”

“The English guy. Your friend. Your neighbour. Teaches at AVU.”

“Oh, Nick. He’s moved, but we still see each other. But he doesn’t really teach there: what he does is he …”

“Well, whatever. I’m just saying that you’re better placed than Janachkov or Koulin to deal with this one.”

“Well, if you put it …”

“I do, I do put it that way. Got a cultured man on my team; got to use him before he disappears to America. You’ve already got the visa, no?”

“Yes, but Helena won’t go, not without …”

His voice trails off, and the two men stand in silence for a while before Ilievski resumes:

“I want you to go and find someone to copy the painting. Don’t tell them what it is, but make sure they don’t shout about it all the same. I’ll pay fifty thousand crowns, and I want it done as quickly as possible.”

“OK.”

“Good. Rambo!”

Anton turns around and looks over to the house. The long window panes are caked with grime, but inside he can make out hardened lumps of clay sitting abandoned on wooden trestle tables at whose feet lie buckets of dried-up plaster, broken cans and fragments of iron casting. On the main floor, sculpture parts that have found their way in from the garden have been conjoined with other sculpture parts, welded together in new configurations in which athletes’ arms and workers’ thighs segue into weapons which in turn become sections of some larger, vaguer mechanism slowly forming on the workshop floor: a strange assemblage that suggests a figure wired into some kind of capsule. The figure’s head is resting against a thick horizontal column that looks like the roller in the typewriter Helena writes all those letters on. Rambo starts barking. Anton and Ilievski turn round: a woman’s walking towards them from a dirt track next to some allotments – an old woman, moving slowly, carrying a bucket. Rambo bounces up to her; she stops, strokes Rambo’s head, then continues towards them.

“Good day.” She sets down the bucket.

“Good day,” they answer in unison, like schoolchildren.

“Are you looking for someone?” She’s got no teeth.

“No,” replies Ilievski, looking back towards the lawn. “We were looking at these sculptures.”

“They belonged to Jiří Ondříček. That’s his house. He collected them. He’s dead now.”

“When did he die?”

“Last year.” The woman scrapes her stubbly chin before adding, redundantly: “He was an artist.”

Ilievski snorts again. “We could’ve got him to do it,” he says to Anton in Bulgarian. Anton smiles. The old woman tenses up.

“What’s that? What did you say?”

“Who owns the house now?”

The woman shrugs. Anton’s looking over her shoulder at the allotments. The woman says:

“There’s nothing over there. The island doesn’t join onto Thomayerovy Park: you have to go back round the other way. Past the shipyard and the metro.”

“We’ll just go and walk the dog down there.” Ilievski and Anton move on. The woman stands still, following them with her gaze. Foreigners.

“She probably thought we wanted to buy the place,” says Anton, skirting round a puddle.

“Not a bad idea. Prime property value. A hotel …”

They walk past the allotments, to the island’s edge. An inlet cuts in from the Vltava; on the far side are bare willow trees, then Thomayerovy Park rising up to Libeň. Rambo dabs and laps at the still water. Anton looks back towards the house, the lawn, the sculptures. He pictures this Jiří Ondříček cutting and welding, trying to synthesize something new and miraculous from all this debris, some vision he could vaguely make out hovering round the edges of his own, but which he never got to realize or communicate …

“If the artist’s dead, he can’t explain what he was doing,” he muses. Ilievski says:

“It’s possible. A bit extreme. I wouldn’t want …”

His voice trails off again. He’s watching the willow branches lightly ripple. He watches them intently, then snaps out of it and says:

“Anyway. I want it done as soon as possible. The painting’s
at my place. You can come and get it as soon as you’ve found an artist to make the copy. Here,” he pulls a wad of notes from his coat pocket, hands it to Anton, then checks his watch, “are twenty-five. Rest on completion. I’ve got to run now. Rambo!”

Anton watches him walk back towards the car market. There’s a set of beehives beside the allotments. All the bees will be inside now, sleeping out the winter, just like Uncle Stoyann’s bees. Anton would help him collect the honey, drawing it from the trays of moulded wax they slid out of the hives one by one. They’d slice the hardened wax roof from each tray to let the honey out, then fix the tray to the arm that span around inside the plastic tub. Centripetal force creating centrifuge. You turned a handle on the tub’s exterior and the tray orbited inside faster and faster, the outward pressure generated by the motion sucking the honey from the combs, so hard that it shot out, hit the tub’s walls and trickled down towards the bottom. Simple engineering principles: a perfect little system with its pivotal point set at the interface of handle-shaft and turbine, and its moment, consequently, strong. Only, in engineering terms, what he and Uncle Stoyann were performing was a feat not of construction but of separation: trays from hives, bees’ labour from bees, honey from each wax cell into which it had been stuffed. Anton remembers seeing one bee who’d clung to his comb as it was slid out and mounted in the tub, then fallen into the vast ocean of honey and drowned. He recalls how gravity had dragged the lifeless body halfway down, then stopped it at the point at which the resultant of the set of vectors in the semi-solid mass had become zero. On this bright December day, he’ll carry the image from the island with him, carry it around the golden city: a bee, suspended in a vitreous yellow block, buried and floating at the same time, quite alone.

* * * * *

 … by means of a Ruble drop transmitter operating in the VHF part of the spectrum. This device is crystal-controlled, to prevent drift. Equipped with single-frequency-receiver circuitry and multiple-tone filter, it can be activated and deactivated remotely from the listening post, whose holding signal keeps the drop transmitter on air for no longer than it needs to be, thus avoiding battery run-down, or at least greatly deferring it. Colleagues posing as workmen had installed a repeater in a fire hydrant outside Subject’s house 2 [two] days prior to stake-out, affording me a listening range of 1/2 [half] a kilometre. The drop transmitter’s frequency was set at 91.7 [ninety-one point seven] MHz, just below that of Radio Jedná (formerly Radio Stalin), thus ensuring that its output would be occluded by the commercial broadcaster’s output on all non-modified receivers. In this manner, I was able to obtain a strong signal, with good signal-to-noise ratio, while ensuring that this signal remained snuggled. I trust I am not being immodest in stating that I am good at this: I can always get a signal. Indeed, it was made clear to me that it was for this reason that I was given this particular assignment. I must, however, register my anxiety that if the use of Ruble drop transmitters is phased out, as planned, the quality of future surveillance operations will decrease. I do not think I am alone in fearing this.