Silver

by Steven Savile

  It was three degrees colder than it was in the street. The huge iron radiators were at least half a century old, and no doubt the boiler feeding them was just as decrepit. Brass mailboxes lined the right-hand side wall of the small antechamber. Konstantin ran his fingers over the names, stopping at G. Metzger. He didn't have a key for the box. He didn't need one. It wasn't a particularly sophisticated lock. Mailboxes seldom were. The mail, it seemed, was sacrosanct. Again, that was a marked difference from his world, where the mail was monitored, censored and often used to incriminate, no matter that Stalin had been dead for the best part of sixty years. Old habits die hard.

  He took his key chain out of his pocket, sorting through them until he found a small enough bump key. Konstantin took his left shoe off and set it down on the small shelf beneath the mailboxes. The theory behind the bump key was simple: all of the grooves filed down to their lowest peak setting. He slipped it all of the way into the lock, then eased it out a single notch. He applied the slightest of pressure to the key, as though beginning to turn it, then bumped the key with the heel of his shoe. The sudden sharp impact caused the pins to jump out of the rotator, giving him the fraction of a second he needed to turn the key. It took him four seconds to open the mailbox.

  He sorted through the envelopes as he walked up the stairs. Every groove from every dragged foot was worn deep into the steps, and the wrought-iron filigree beneath the polished-smooth banister had oxidized to the richest red. There were more than twenty envelopes, and the majority of them were computer-generated mass-mailings or this month's bills. Even with three flights of stairs to climb he hadn't managed to read more than half of the dead man's letter. He didn't really need to read any more than that.

  Only one envelope was handwritten. People didn't send letters anymore. That made a handwritten envelope something of a curiosity. He teased one of the seams open, careful not to contaminate the glued edge. There was no way of knowing if the contents of the envelope were important, but there was no sense in treating them any other way. If needs be, the old man could get the saliva used to lick the stamp and seal the envelope analyzed, its DNA lifted for comparison or identification purposes. There was so much about this new world that was every bit as frightening as anything that had ever happened in Stalinist Russia.

  He reached Metzger's door. The brass number in the center of it had turned green. What he read caused him to check the ate stamped on the envelope. It had been posted the day before--the same day Grey Metzger had killed himself. The processing time was stamped at 16:00 CET. The precise moment Metzger had hung up his phone and burned.

  It was a love letter, but it talked about him, not to him, as though the writer knew he would never read it but needed to get these words down, to make them exist; as though, like the little girl with her paper cranes, by setting them down God would read them and would remember her man and her love for him--which, Konstantin extrapolated the thought, meant the writer had known Metzger was going to die when she wrote it. He grunted. That meant she had mailed it out with an almost prescient precision. Was she involved? No, he shook his head. This wasn't the confession of his killer. There was no mocking tone, no gloating. Only sadness. Her words were so intense. It wasn't about Metzger at all, it was about his woman. The one Lethe hadn't been able to find on the paper trail.

  It was about leverage.

  They'd given her the chance to put it all down on paper, and they'd led her to the post office and mailed the letter out at the precise moment the man she loved burned himself alive.

  Who were these people?

  The strange tense wasn't because she had known he was dead--she wasn't mourning him--it was because she knew she was going to be dead when he read it. It had kept her quiet, given her something to focus on, but she would have known she was a dead woman walking. She hadn't collapsed, she'd written the letter. That took strength. Strength meant she would almost certainly have tried to tell him what had happened to her, somehow, somewhere in the letter.

  Did they have pet words? Did she say "remember when we sat on the steps of the Berliner Dom" or "I've never forgotten the rain-filled day we walked hand in hand in the shadow of Checkpoint Charlie"? Something, a reference to a place, a name, anything? There had to be something buried in all of these words of love, a clue that told them who had taken her, or where, something. There had to be. She had been strong enough to write the letter; that meant she had to be smart enough to help them now, from beyond the grave.

  He stuffed it into his pocket and kicked his shoe off again. He'd finish it inside.

  It only took him nine seconds to open Metzger's front door in exactly the same way he had bumped the lock on the mailbox.

  Konstantin closed the door behind him.The apartment was everything he would have expected from a middle-class existence. The hallway doubled as the library, shelved floor to ceiling with the battered spines of academia and the occasional concession to pop culture. There were very few novels, he noticed, scanning the titles. The books nearest the door were almost exclusively concerned with the Byzantine period. As he moved toward the living room the time line moved with him. The majority of interest seemed to be focused on Medieval Europe, which made sense.

  The last bookcase was filled with cheap, trashy airport novels. The spines were creased, the pages dog-eared, as though each one had been read a dozen times. He took one down from the shelf and thumbed through it. On the inside he saw a price written in pencil and the stamp of a second-hand bookstore in the city. He tried three more, selected at random. They all bore the same secondhand stamp.

  There was a television, a small portable set that had to be over twenty years old. It didn't dominate the room. Indeed, given the angle it was on, it was almost certainly never watched. There was nothing to say it even worked. Konstantin assumed that these dog-eared paperbacks had replaced the television in Grey Metzger's life. Like Russia, the Germans protected their language obsessively, dubbing the endless reruns of American sitcoms. It would have come as something of a culture shock to an Englishman who probably thought the world revolved around his mother tongue. Konstantin shelved the book.

  The hallway opened into a high-ceilinged room. The drapes where thick, heavy green velvet, tied back with a thick gold brocade rope. The hook in the wall had an exquisitely molded lion's head. It was a small detail, but as the KGB had drilled into him, the truth was in the details. There were dozens of tiny details, from the wainscoting on the sash window and the original ropes laid into the side of the frame to the black and white tiles that made a chessboard of the floor, or rather the three broken ones that might have been proof of a struggle. Konstantin walked slowly around the room, then sank into the faux Chesterfield sofa in the middle of the room.

  He put his feet up on the granite-topped coffee table. The room barely looked lived in. He had expected it to be strewn with journals and academic literature, with forgotten coffee cups and other signs of the absent-minded professor, but Grey Metzger was meticulously ordered and fastidiously tidy. Like a man who had been a guest here, not the owner.

  Or like a man whose life had been purged away before he could come in and look at it, he thought.

  There was a single painting on the wall. Konstantin recognized it: Sorrow. It was a print, rather than the original, but that was hardly surprising--a school teacher would not have had the wherewithal to on a painting worth upwards of fifty million dollars. It was, Konstantin thought, an ugly image to have on the wall where you did most of your living.

  There was a fish tank beneath it, but there were no fish in it.

  Konstantin was beginning to get a feel for the man he was following.

  He checked the rest of the apartment.

  There was a neatly made bed with white silk sheets in the one bedroom, and a manikin draped with the dead man's clothes stood in the corner, looking like the Ghost of Christmas Past come to haunt the room. The rug appeared to be an elk hide. There was little in the way of personality to the room, not so m
uch as an alarm clock on the side table. He checked the drawers. They were empty. That, more than anything else, convinced him that the apartment had been cleaned by whoever had last set foot in the place. It would be pointless dusting for fingerprints.

  In the center of the bathroom was a beautiful antique porcelain bathtub set on pedestal legs. Again, like the details in the curtain hooks in the front room, the legs were molded in the likeness of lions. There were no shampoo bottles, no body washes or facial scrubs. There wasn't a toothbrush in the cup on the sink. He ran his finger along the top of the medicine cabinet--it came away without so much as a speck of dust on it.

  The narrow galley kitchen was just as bare. He opened the cupboards one at a time, but after the first he knew it was pointless. There wasn't a single package of junk food in any of them. No boxes of cereal. No tea bags. No dried spaghetti or noodles or any other staple of fast-food living. There should have been moldy bread, curdled milk in the refrigerator, cheese blue with bacteria and many other signs of abandonment. But there wasn't. The purge had been absolute. There was nothing of Grey Metzger left in the place save those few clothes on the manikin and the books.

  Konstantin reached into his pocket for the letter. Could they have been so thorough and so careless at the same time? He went back through to the living room, but instead of sitting on the leather sofa he perched on the windowsill so that he could look out over the People's Park as he read it again.

  He read the letter through, start to finish, three times. The first thing he noticed this time was that she had called him Graham, his full name, not Grey, not the short, affectionate version a lover might be expected to use. That seemed odd given that Grey used the shortened version of his name on almost every official document Lethe had uncovered. The second thing that stuck out was that she hadn't signed it with her name, rather she'd called herself Sorrow's Bride. That was hardly the goodbye a lover would want to remembered by.

  The rest of the letter was the usual string of sentimental stuff and nonsense that had his eyes glazing over after thirty seconds. He forced himself to concentrate, going over each sentence slowly, looking for an out-of-place word, looking at how the letters themselves rested on the lines in case she'd elevated the occasional letter to spell out some second message within the message--a way of talking to them from beyond the grave. There was nothing that he could see.

  He sat there for an hour, the midday sun streaming in through the windows in bright unbroken beams. The heat through the glass prickled his skin. Konstantin looked up from the letter and saw Van Gogh's Sorrow, with her sagging breasts, weeping into her hands, and he was again struck by how ugly the painting really was, especially for the only piece of art in the place. He put the letter back in the envelope and the envelope back inside his pocket and went over to the painting. He reached up and ran his fingers over it, feeling for any imperfections on the canvas. He worked his fingers from the top edge of the frame down, slowly. He chewed on his lower lip, not realizing he was doing it. There was nothing. The frame was perfectly smooth. He ran his hand up and down the sides of the frame again, refusing to believe he was wrong. Second time was no more revealing. He hadn't really expected the cryptic epigraph to mean anything, but it had been worth a try.

  He grunted.

  It had been too easy to think she'd simply point him to the hidden treasure, X marks the spot.

  For the sake of thoroughness, he lifted down the picture. There wasn't a safe hidden away conveniently behind the picture, of course. The sun-shadow outline of the picture was stained deeply enough to suggest the picture had hung there for years, not a few days.

  Konstantin hoisted it up, tilting the frame to re-hang it when something fell out from the back and clattered on the tiled floor. He put Sorrow back down and picked up the white gold wedding band that had fallen out from the back of the picture. There was an engraving on the inside of the ring: a series of digits, probably the date of the wedding, he thought. Only, according to the paper trail, Grey Metzger had never been married. Sorrow's Bride indeed.

  He pocketed the ring and flipped the painting over. The USB thumb drive taped to the inside of the frame was so small he had almost missed it. He peeled away the tiny strip of tape and pocketed the stick along with the letter and the ring.

  "Who were you?" he asked, rubbing at his chin as he looked down at the painting on the floor. His skin was rough with stubble. It had been forty-eight hours since he had shaved. He knew from experience that that was enough to transform him from human into some atavistic throw-back that could be used to scare the living daylights out of young children--and grown men at four a.m. for that matter.

  Who was this woman who called herself the Bride of Sorrow? Everything about her presence of mind in the face of death screamed CIA, MI6, KGB, Mossad, any one of them but absolutely one of them. He might not know who she was, but he was pretty damned sure she wasn't a school teacher.

  The answer to that question, and possibly so many others, was almost certainly on the flash drive. He wanted to get a look at it before he turned it over to Lethe. That meant finding a computer.

  Konstantin re-hung the picture and left the apartment, knowing he'd found all there was to find in the dead man's home.

  9

  The Secrets of Fatima Dominico Neri was a sour-faced little man with the weight of the world on his slouched shoulders. He was cut from the typical Italian male cloth-interesting features rather than outright handsome, dark-skinned and narrow, his torso an inverted equilateral triangle of jutting ribs beneath a wrinkled cotton shirt. He sat across the table from Noah, sipping at a double-shot espresso in a stupidly small cup.

  He looked like he hadn't slept in a week. That disheveled look and the half-awake eyes no doubt made him painfully popular with the fairer sex, Noah thought. Neri looked like the kind of man who didn't so much love them and leave them as he did the kind of man who skipped the whole love thing and went straight for the checkbook to pay the alimony. He stared at Noah. The scrutiny was almost uncomfortable.

  That was hardly surprising, Neri was Carabinieri.

  Rome was burdened by half a dozen levels of police, from traffic cops to jail cops and forestry police all the way to the normal beat cops. The Carabinieri were set aside from all of them. They were military police.

  Only Neri's eyes looked the part, Noah thought, studying the man back openly. If he'd been pushed to guess a career, he would have said journalist. The gun worn casually at his hip killed that career path, though.

  "So," Neri said, setting the espresso cup down on the cheap white saucer. The coffee left a near-black stain around the inside of the cup. Noah could only imagine what it was busy doing to the detective's stomach lining. "You think this is all somehow linked to the suicide in Piazza San Pietro two days ago?"

  Noah nodded.

  News had begun to filter through from Berlin, so Neri was taking him more seriously than he would have even two hours ago. The threat had suddenly become credible, and this was Neri's city. The Carabinieri man pinched the bottom of his nose, both fingers almost disappearing up his nostrils as he thought about what it meant to Rome.

  "Forgive my bluntness, Mister Larkin, but an hour ago my office put in a call to your government. They deny that you are working on their behalf, which I admit does not surprise me. When has your government ever owned up to spying?"

  "I am not a spy," Noah said.

  The Italian wasn't listening to him and carried on as though presenting a case: "And yet despite the fact you have no verifiable credentials to back up your wild claims, you obviously know far too much about what happened in the piazza not to be some sort of intelligence officer. Either that, or you were more directly involved. So I ask myself this: were you involved? You do not look like a terrorist." He grunted a soft chuckle at that. "Not that any of us know what a terrorist looks like, eh?"

  "Indeed," Noah said. He decided against saying anything more. Neri would come to the point, eventually.

 
Neri reached into his pocket and pulled out a battered tobacco tin. He opened it and took out the fixings for a thin licorice paper smoke, rolling it neatly between his fingers. It was a well practiced motion that needed no thought. Placing the cigarette between his lips he took out his lighter, sparked the wheel against the flint and inhaled with a slow, deep sigh of pleasure as he lit the cigarette. He drew a second lungful of smoke, letting it leak out through his nose before he carried on with his thought. "So then I think perhaps Mister Larkin is a well-known journalist where he comes from and he is here in Rome fishing for a story? It was a reasonable guess. Unfortunately none of the papers in your country appear to know who the hell you are. So not a journalist, not with your government, that leaves me in something of a quandary. What I am saying is, why shouldn't I arrest you right here and now?"

  "If you thought I was involved, you wouldn't have come out to meet me in this rather overpriced cafe, would you?"

  "Or perhaps the couple at the table over there are not a young couple in love but are actually my men. And the older gentleman over there, studying the newspaper so intently, perhaps he is actually one of mine waiting for the signal to take you in?"

  Noah looked at the young couple. There was a Rough Guide on the table between them. The man was dressed like a fairly typical straight-out-ofuniversity backpacker. His sneakers were a little too clean for someone who'd been slogging around Europe on an Inter-Rail ticket for a month, but otherwise he looked the part. The girl was pretty, blonde, and petite, all the things a younger Noah would have fallen for. They looked good together. They fit. He watched them talk for a moment. He couldn't hear exactly what they were saying above the lunchtime noise of the cafe, but he could hear enough to know the guy had a fairly broad Mancunian accent and seemed to be spouting the usual bollocks a postgrad on vacation in Rome would. It wasn't the kind of attention to detail he would have expected from an undercover policeman, so he felt relatively confident when he told Neri, "They aren't. Iar d know."