by Greg Egan
The line, the ‘scratch’, was there in the file.
Hengartner – who’d treasured this icon in secret, and who’d somehow known that it would fetch an extraordinary price – had left behind an image of it with a small but unmistakable flaw, and made sure that it was seen by every prospective buyer.
That had to mean something, but I had no idea what.
* * *
A list of the dates when Lombardy had fallen in and out of Austrian hands, committed to memory when I was sixteen years old, just about exhausted my knowledge of the Habsburg empire. Which should hardly have mattered in 2013, but I felt disconcertingly ill prepared all the same.
In my hotel room, I unpacked my bags, then looked out warily across the rooftops of Vienna. I could see Saint Stephen’s Cathedral in the distance; the southern tower, almost detached from the main hall, was topped with a spire like a filigree radio antenna. The roof of the hall was decorated with richly coloured tiles, forming an eye-catching zigzag pattern of chevrons and diamonds – as if someone had draped a giant Mongolian rug over the building to keep it warm. But then, anything less exotic would have been a disappointment.
De Angelis had died in the same hotel (in the room directly above me, with much the same view). Booked in under her own name. Paying with her own plastic, when she could have used anonymous cash. Did that prove that she’d had nothing to be ashamed of – that she’d been threatened, not bribed?
I spent half the morning trying to persuade the hotel manager that the local police wouldn’t lock him up for allowing me to speak to his staff about the murder; the whole idea seemed to strike him as akin to treason. ‘If a Viennese citizen died in Milan,’ I argued patiently, ‘wouldn’t you expect an accredited Austrian investigator to receive every courtesy there?’
‘We would send a delegation of police to liaise with the Milanese authorities, not a private detective acting alone.’
I was getting nowhere, so I backed off. Besides, I had an appointment to keep.
My long-awaited expense-account lunch with a black-marketeer turned out to be in a health-food restaurant. Back in Milan, I’d paid several million lira to a net-based ‘introduction agency’ to put me in touch with ‘Anton’. He was much younger than I’d expected; he looked about twenty, and he radiated the kind of self-assurance I’d only come across before in wealthy adolescent drug dealers. I managed once again to avoid using my atrocious German; Anton spoke CNN English, with an accent that I took to be Hungarian.
I handed him the auction catalogue, open at the relevant page; he glanced at the picture of the icon. ‘Oh yeah. The Vladimir. I could get you another one, exactly like this. Ten thousand US dollars.’
‘I don’t want a forged replica.’ Attractive as the idea was, Masini would never have fallen for it. ‘Or even a similar contemporary piece. I want to know who asked for this. Who spread the word that it was going to change hands in Zürich, and that they’d pay to have it brought east.’
I had to make a conscious effort not to look down to see where he’d placed his feet. Before he’d arrived, I’d discreetly dropped a pinch of silica microspheres onto the floor beneath the table. Each one contained a tiny accelerometer – an array of springy silicon beams a few microns across, fabricated on the same chip as a simple, low-power microprocessor. If just one, out of the fifty thousand I’d scattered, still adhered to his shoes the next time we met, I’d be able to interrogate it in infra-red and learn exactly where he’d been. Or exactly where he kept this pair of shoes when he changed into another.
Anton said, ‘Icons move west.’ He made it sound like a law of nature. ‘Through Prague or Budapest, to Vienna, Salzburg, Munich. That’s the way everything’s set up.’
‘For five million Swiss francs, don’t you think someone might have made the effort to switch from their traditional lines of supply?’
He scowled. ‘Five million! I don’t believe that. What makes this worth five million?’
‘You’re the expert. You tell me.’
He glared at me as if he suspected that I was mocking him, then looked down at the catalogue again. This time he even read the commentary. He said cautiously, ‘Maybe it’s older than the auctioneers thought. If it’s really, say, fifteenth century, the price could almost make sense. Maybe your client guessed the true age … and so did someone else.’ He sighed. ‘It will be expensive finding out who, though. People will be very reluctant to talk.’
I said, ‘You know where I’m staying. Once you find someone who needs persuading, let me know.’
He nodded sullenly, as if he’d seriously hoped I might have handed over a large wad of cash for miscellaneous bribes. I almost asked him about the ‘scratch’ – Could it be some kind of coded message to the cognoscenti that the icon is older than it seems? – but I didn’t want to make a fool of myself. He’d seen it, and said nothing; perhaps it was just a meaningless computer glitch after all.
When I’d paid the bill, he stood up to depart, then bent down towards me and said quietly, ‘If you mention what I’m doing, to anyone, I’ll have you killed.’
I kept a straight face, and replied, ‘Vice versa.’
When he was gone, I tried to laugh. Stupid, swaggering child. I couldn’t quite get the right sound out, though. I didn’t imagine he’d be very happy if he found out what he’d trodden in. I took out my notepad, consulted the appointments diary, then let my right arm hang beside me for a second, dousing the floor with a fry-your-brains code to the remaining microspheres.
Then I took the pictures of De Angelis from my wallet and held it in front of me on the table.
I said, ‘Am I in any danger? What do you think?’
She stared back at me, not quite smiling. The expression in her eyes might have been amusement, or it might have been concern. Not indifference; I was sure of that. But she didn’t seem prepared to start dispensing predictions or advice.
* * *
Just as I was psyching myself up to tackle the hotel manager again, the relevant bureaucrat in the city government finally agreed to fax the hotel a pro-forma statement acknowledging that my licence was recognised throughout the jurisdiction. That seemed to satisfy the manager, though it said no more than the documents I’d already shown him.
The clerk at the check-in desk barely remembered De Angelis; he couldn’t say if she’d been cheerful or nervous, friendly or terse. She’d carried her own luggage; a porter remembered seeing her with the attaché case, and an overnight bag. (She’d spent the night in Zürich before collecting the icon.) She hadn’t used room service, or any of the hotel restaurants.
The cleaner who’d found the body had been born in Turin, according to his supervisor. I wasn’t sure if that was going to be a help or a hindrance. When I tracked him down in a basement storeroom, he said stubbornly, in German, ‘I told the police everything. Why are you bothering me? Go and ask them, if you want to know the facts.’
He turned his back on me. He seemed to be stock-taking carpet shampoo and disinfectant, but he made it look like a matter or urgency.
I said, ‘It must have been a shock for you. Someone so young. An eighty-year-old guest dying in her sleep, you’d probably take it in your stride. But Gianna was twenty-seven. A tragedy.’
He tensed up at the sound of her name; I could see his shoulders tighten. Six days later? A woman he’d never even met?
I said, ‘You didn’t see her any time before, did you? You didn’t talk to her?’
‘No.’
I didn’t believe him. The manager was a small-minded cretin; fraternising was probably strictly forbidden. This guy was in his twenties, good-looking, spoke the same language. What had he done? Flirted with her harmlessly in a corridor for thirty seconds? And now he was afraid he’d lose his job if he admitted it?
‘No one else will find out, if you tell me what she said. You have my word. It’s not like the cops; nothing has to be official. All I want to do is help lock up the fuckers who killed her.’
H
e put down the bar-code scanner and turned to face me. ‘I just asked her where she was from. What she was doing in town.’
Hairs stood up on the back of my neck. It had taken me so long to get even this close to her, I couldn’t quite believe it was happening.
‘How did she react?’
‘She was polite. Friendly. She seemed nervous, though. Distracted.’
‘And what did she say?’
‘She said she was from Milan.’
‘What else?’
‘When I asked her why she was in Vienna, she said she was playing chaperone.’
‘What?’
‘She said she wasn’t staying long. And she was only here to play chaperone. To an older lady.’
* * *
Chaperone? I lay awake half the night, trying to make sense of that. Did it imply that she hadn’t given up custodianship of the icon? That she was still guarding it when she died? That she considered it to be Luciano Masini’s property, and still fully intended to deliver it to him, right to the end?
What had the ‘taxi driver’ said to her? Bring the icon to Vienna for a day? No need to let it out of your sight? We don’t want to steal it … we just want to borrow it? To pray to it one last time before it vanishes into another Western bank vault? But what was so special about this copy of the Vladimir Mother of God that made it worth so much trouble? The same thing that made it worth five million Swiss francs to Masini, possibly – but what?
And why had De Angelis blown her job, and risked imprisonment, to go along with the scheme? Even if she’d been blind to the obvious fact that it was all a set-up, what could they have offered her in exchange for flushing her career and reputation down the drain?
I’d only been asleep ten or twenty minutes when I was woken by someone pounding on the door of my room. By the time I’d staggered out of bed and pulled on my trousers, the police had grown impatient and let themselves in with a pass key. It wasn’t quite two a.m.
There were four of them, two in uniform. One waved a photograph in front of my face. I squinted at it.
‘Did you speak to this man? Yesterday?’
It was Anton. I nodded. If they didn’t already know the answer, they wouldn’t have asked the question.
‘Will you come with us, please?’
‘Why?’
‘Because your friend is dead.’
They showed me the body, so I could confirm that it really was the same man. He’d been shot in the chest and dumped near the canal. Not in it; maybe the killers had been disturbed. In the morgue, the corpse was definitely shoeless, but it would have been worth sending out the microspheres’ code, just in case – the things could end up in the strangest places (nostrils, for a start). But before I could think of a plausible excuse to take the notepad from my pocket, they’d pulled the sheet back over his head and led me away for questioning.
The police had found my name and number in ‘Anton’s’ notepad (if they knew his real name, they were keeping it to themselves … along with several other things I would have liked to have known, such as whether or not the ballistics matched the bullet used on De Angelis). I recounted the whole conversation in the restaurant, but left out the (illegal) microspheres; they’d find them soon enough, and I had nothing to gain by volunteering a confession.
I was treated with appropriate disdain, but not even verbally abused, really – a five-star rating; I’d had ribs broken in Seveso, and a testicle crushed in Marseille. At half-past four, I was free to leave.
Crossing from the interview room to the elevator, I passed half a dozen small offices; they were separated by partitions, but not fully enclosed. On one desk was a cardboard box, full of items of clothing in plastic bags.
I walked past, then stopped just out of sight. There was a man and a woman in the office, neither of whom I’d seen before, talking and making notes.
I walked back and poked my head into the office. I said, ‘Excuse me … could you tell me … please—?’ I spoke German with the worst accent I could manage; I had a head start, it must have been dire. They stared at me, appalled. Visibly struggling for words, I pulled out my notepad and hit a few keys, fumbling with the phrasebook software, walking deeper into the office. I thought I saw a pair of shoes out of the corner of my eye, but I couldn’t be certain. ‘Could you tell me please where I could find the nearest public convenience?’
The man said, ‘Get out of here before I kick your head in.’
I backed out, smiling uncertainly. ‘Grazie, signore! Danke schön! ’
There was a surveillance camera in the elevator; I didn’t even glance at the notepad. Ditto for the foyer. Out on the street, I finally looked down.
I had the data from two hundred and seven microspheres. The software was already busy reconstructing Anton’s trail.
I was on the verge of shouting for joy, when it occurred to me that I might have been better off if I hadn’t been able to follow him.
* * *
The first place he’d gone from the restaurant looked like home; no one answered the door, but I could glimpse posters of several of the continent’s most pretentious rock bands through the windows. If not his own, maybe a friend’s place, or a girlfriend’s. I sat in an open-air café across the street, sketching the visible outline of the apartment, guessing at walls and furniture, playing back the trace for the hours he’d spent there, then modifying my guesses, trying again.
The waiter looked over my shoulder at the multiple exposure of stick figures filling the screen. ‘Are you a choreographer?’
‘Yes.’
‘How exciting! What’s the name of the dance?’
‘ ‘‘Making Phone Calls And Waiting Impatiently’’. It’s an hommage to my two idols and mentors, Twyla Tharp and Pina Bausch.’ The waiter was impressed.
After three hours, and no sign of life, I moved on. Anton had stopped by at another apartment, briefly. This one was occupied by a thin blonde woman in her late teens.
I said, ‘I’m a friend of Anton’s. Do you know where I could find him?’
She’d been crying. ‘I don’t know anyone by that name.’ She slammed the door. I stood in the hallway for a moment, wondering: Did I kill him? Did someone detect the spheres, and put a bullet in his heart because of them? But if they’d found them, they would have destroyed them; there would have been no trail to follow.
He’d only visited one more location before taking a car trip to the canal, lying very still. It turned out to be a detached two-storey house in an upmarket district. I didn’t ring the doorbell. There was no convenient observation post, so I did a single walk-by. The curtains were drawn; no vehicles were parked near by.
A few blocks away, I sat on a bench in a small park and started phoning databases. The house had been leased just three days before; I had no trouble finding out about the owner – a corporate lawyer with property all over the city – but I couldn’t get hold of the new tenant’s name.
Vienna had a centralised utilities map, to keep people from digging into underground power cables and phone lines by accident. Phone lines were useless to me; no one who made the slightest effort could be bugged that way any more. But the houses had natural gas; easier to swim through than water, and much less noisy.
I bought a shovel, boots, gloves, a pair of white overalls, and a safety helmet. I captured an image of the gas company logo from its telephone directory entry, and jet-sprayed it onto the helmet; from a distance, it looked quite authentic. I summoned up all the bravado I had left, and returned to the street – beyond sight of the house, but as close to it as I dared. I shifted a few paving slabs out of the way, then started digging. It was early afternoon; there was light traffic, but very few pedestrians. An old man peeked out at me from a window of the nearest house. I resisted the urge to wave to him; it wouldn’t have rung true.
I reached the gas main, climbed down into the hole, and pressed a small package against the PVC; it extruded a hollow needle which melted the plastic chemically, maintain
ing the seal as it penetrated the walls of the pipe. Someone passed by on the footpath, walking two large slobbering dogs; I didn’t look up.
The control box chimed softly, signalling success. I refilled the hole, replaced the paving slabs, and returned to the hotel for some sleep.
* * *
I’d left a narrow fibre-optic cable leading from the buried control box to the unpaved ground around a nearby tree, the end just a few millimetres beneath the soil. The next morning, I collected all the stored data, then went back to the hotel to sift through it.
Several hundred bugs had made it into the house’s gas pipes and back to the control box, several times – eavesdropping in hour-long overlapping shifts, then returning to disgorge the results. The individual sound tracks were often abysmal, but by processing all of them together the software could usually come up with intelligible speech.
There were five voices, three male, two female. All used French, though I wouldn’t have sworn it was everyone’s native tongue.
I pieced things together slowly. They didn’t have the icon; they’d been hired to find it, by someone called Katulski. Apparently they’d paid Anton to keep an ear to the ground, but he’d come back to them asking for more money, in exchange for not switching his loyalty to me. The trouble was, he really had nothing tangible to offer … and they’d just had a tip-off from another source. References to his murder were oblique, but maybe he’d tried to blackmail them in some way when they’d told him he was no longer needed. One thing was absolutely clear, though; they were taking turns watching an apartment on the other side of the city, where they believed the man who’d killed De Angelis would eventually show up.
I hired a car and followed two of them when they set out to relieve the watch. They’d rented a room across the street from their target; with my IR binoculars I could see where they were aiming theirs. The place under observation looked empty; all I could make out through the tatty curtains was peeling paint.