“Looks like a document,” Litzi said. “Two pages, or maybe two different documents.”
At the top of each frame was a tiny blob that might be an official crest or logo.
“We need to get it developed,” I said. “But we can’t give it to just anyone.”
I thought of George Smiley, and the negatives he’d discovered among the last effects of his Vladimir. He’d developed them himself, in the basement of his flat on Bywater Street, but I didn’t have a clue about that sort of thing.
“I know someone at the Archives who can help,” Litzi said.
“Do you trust him?”
“She. Yes. And she owes me a favor.”
She got out her cell phone. The whole transaction took less than a minute.
“We have to hurry, she wants to leave soon.”
The bonus was that I got to see where Litzi worked, because her office was just downstairs from the Prunksaal, the court library of Emperor Charles VI, a bibliophile’s baroque paradise of patterned marble floors, ceiling frescoes, gilded woodwork, and floor-to-ceiling books, with an ample supply of ladders and stairways for reaching each and every volume.
“How did I ever miss this place when I was a boy?”
“It’s not like you could have just walked in. And would you have been half as impressed when you were sixteen? I doubt there are too many Lemasters up there.”
“Snob. What did our photo developer say?”
“She’ll have our prints in forty minutes.”
She gazed up toward the highest shelves, where someone on a ladder was carefully dusting a row of leather bindings.
“We’re dinosaurs, aren’t we?” she said. “Books are like Latin, the new dead language. Even most of the manuscripts I deal with have been digitized. So is everything that people write about them. Dust to dust, places like this. I should show you around before it all disappears.”
She gave me the cook’s tour, and we strolled companionably from shelf to shelf. The smell alone was intoxicating-all those pages, lovingly tended. Then her phone buzzed.
“Thanks. Be right there.” She hung up. “Wait for me at one of those tables. If anyone asks, say you’re with me.”
She returned with a manila envelope and a magnifying glass and sat down next to me. She opened the envelope and pulled out two eight-by-ten prints.
“Oh, my,” she said.
“It’s all in Russian. Do you have a translator?”
“Yes. But without knowing what it says…”
“Right. Not a good idea.”
“There’s a Russian cultural center near here.”
“Not the one run by the embassy?”
“God, no. This one’s private. I’ve been to their gallery. It’s just around the corner from Vladimir, in fact. Artsy-craftsy types, very anti-Putin.”
“Or so they say.”
“Do you have a better idea?”
“Let’s go.”
She checked her watch.
“I’d better call first. I’ve got one of their cards.”
She dug into her purse, but something brought her up short. Frowning, she pulled out an ivory-colored envelope, sealed, with nothing written on the outside.
“Did you put this here?” she asked, inspecting it carefully.
“No. But I recognize the stationery.”
She turned it over and held it to the light. Her training in authenticating old manuscripts paid off right away.
“Gohrsmuhle, if I had to guess, but from quite a few years ago. I’m not sure they make this anymore.”
“I have a box of it at home. It’s mine.”
“Like the first one, you mean? You didn’t tell me the paper was Gohrsmuhle.” She rubbed her fingers on the envelope the way a bank teller rubs a twenty to see if it’s real. It brought a smile to her face. “Wasn’t this the stationery you used for your letters from Berlin?”
“Very good.”
“How can you possibly have any left?”
“I only use it for important correspondence.”
“How do you think it got in my purse?”
“When’s the last time you opened it?”
“Not at Burger King, we didn’t buy anything. The Braunerhof, probably, before we went to Vladimir’s.”
“Could Vladimir have done it?”
She shook her head.
“If he’d even come close to me I’d have kicked out his kneecaps.” Then her eyes lit up. “Those kids outside the Burger King, the ones on skateboards. One bumped me as they passed. His friends laughed.”
“Really?” I was skeptical. “If my handler has started hiring off the street, then he’s taking things up a notch, or just getting reckless.”
“Maybe we should read the message.”
She slit the top edge with a fingernail and withdrew a page of my stationery, folded neatly. He’d been using my Royal again. A page from a book was pasted on the paper, with a short message typed above it:
Deliver V’ss proofs ASAP
The page was another one from Knee Knockers, probably Dad’s copy. I winced, feeling like someone who kept receiving severed fingers and toes from a kidnapper. We read the passage.
Boris arrived late to the Burggarten, but that was his style. So was sloppiness in general. With each step, the vodka bottle clanked against the key ring in his overcoat pocket. Eventually he grew annoyed enough by the sound to stop and move his keys to the opposite pocket, an occasion which of course called for another shot of vodka. He wiped his mouth on a sleeve and continued. Only when he came within a block of the dead drop did he actually begin taking proper precautions, an oversight which would be logged into Hartley’s report as the Russian’s “fatal error.” The mailbox, at least, looked secure enough. It was a stone just to the right of a statue of Emperor Franz Josef I at the south end of the park, marked with a small slash of yellow chalk. Glancing around carelessly for onlookers, Boris slipped a small plastic bag from his trousers, lifted the stone, placed the bag underneath, then dropped the stone back into place. He took out a stub of chalk from his pocket and made a cross through the slash.
“So you’re supposed to deliver these negatives?” Litzi asked.
“To a dead drop in the Burggarten. Where presumably someone will pick them up.”
“Good thing we made prints. Sounds like he wants them right away. So what happened to Boris?”
“What?”
“In the book. It mentioned his ‘fatal error.’”
“Oh.” I swallowed. “Someone followed him. They waited until he was back at his apartment, then shot him in the face.”
“Is everyone in these books shot in the face?”
“It was a common KGB tactic.”
“Does you handler know you’d be aware of that?”
“Probably.”
“I don’t enjoy his sense of humor.”
“Maybe he isn’t joking. Where’s that card for the cultural center?”
She searched her purse again and dug it out from the bottom.
“The New Moscow Cultural Center,” she read. “Founded 1994. Art. Literature. Translations. Here’s their number.”
