Back in his flat, he pulls his shoes off, fetches his shaving mirror and spare razor blade from the bathroom and chops what’s left of the speed into a line. He takes his hundred-crown note out and rolls it up, but then decides to save the line for later and covers the mirror with an upturned cigar box. By the telephone a page, torn from one of his magazines, has had a message scrawled on it: Meet Joost van Straten in MXM any time today until five. And kiss my butt. Van Straten: that’s the Dutch gallerist. He’ll sleep for a couple of hours, then go. He sits back in his armchair and looks around him. Toys have spilt across the floor from the freight carton he plundered yesterday for objects to add to his collage. The collage itself is hanging on the wall above his chair. There’s that old photograph glued to the canvas: his parents sitting on a rug beside the river near Radotín and, behind them, Petr and himself, aged maybe eight. Nineteen sixty-six or — seven. Just before his father’s death. Petr must be four. He has got Hájek’s morose grin. Comes from the time Ivan dropped a big radio onto his head, flattened it like Giacometti’s sculptures of his own brother … his own brother … ask Nick. What was the monk’s name? Ivan looks away from the collage, towards the ceiling. The wooden angel’s hanging there. No aura about her: she’s just a wooden block, hasn’t even got legs — just long, rusty nails snaking out from the wood where her genitalia should be: must’ve been joined to the altar at the hip. She dangles from the bar beneath the skylight, her head slightly twisted to one side and tilted back, her eyes focused on some point beyond, or perhaps within, the skylight’s dirty glass. It’s not up there, whatever she was meant to be looking for — not any more, at least: more likely lying on some stretch of pavement. Everything falls back, eventually …
It must be pushing noon now. Three hours’, four hours’ sleep, then he’ll go over to MXM and see this Joost van Straten. Ivan moves into his bedroom and lies down, staring, like the wooden angel, at the skylight. Just before he drifts off into sleep, the jagged and curved smudges on its surface morph into the half-familiar shapes of a broken metronome, a suffocating fish.
* * * * *
… to be informed, upon reporting back for work shortly after 9 [nine] a.m., that my presence was requested at the National Central Bureau of Interpol. I was informed that I’d require a security card in order to enter the building in which the meeting was to take place, and was issued with one. I was, further, informed that the office of the Interpol NCB had recently been moved, as part of the general overhaul we were experiencing, to the very building which housed my own department and in which I was already, as on most days, standing, but that since the requirement to be issued with security cards when visiting Interpol buildings had not yet been rescinded in the light of this fact, I would need one nonetheless. These facts, these glitches, are not important: what is important is that the austere office of the NCB has called me, that I have been called.
Passing through the floors above my own en route to the meeting, I was able to observe the extent to which the entire organization of the Central Criminal Police is being reconfigured. I saw stacked-up files from Organized Crime being transferred onto Criminal Intelligence shelves, Photo-Fit Department boxes merged with Modus Operandi ones, Fingerprinting slides inserted into Scene of Crime Department records. In one corridor I saw rows of cabinets containing pre-lustration STB files waiting to be accommodated somewhere within the new structure. The Slovak section was being disbanded; a whole storey had been designated as a dumping ground for files relating to that portion of our country soon to become independent Slovakia; yet records from the Slovak regions of Košice and Bratislava were still coming in by fax, telex and computer, to be filed, copied and indexed. New sections were being created to liaise with Western European institutions such as TREVI, Europol and the PJCC. The thin plywood partitions separating various offices were being torn down and repositioned. This is the price of realignment: old attachments must be severed, new ones formed. Everything must have its place.
Upon arrival at the office of the NCB, I was led into a room in which I found my colleagues Rosický, from the Financial Intelligence Department, and Novotný, from the Photo-Fit Department, seated. A few moments later, Lieutenant Forman entered with an officer from Interpol to whom, showing great deference, he introduced the three of us. This officer explained to us that we had been assembled here because the activities in which each of us was currently engaged pertained, or might pertain, to a stolen artwork which Interpol were particularly eager to recover. The artwork in question, he informed us, had recently been stolen from a museum in Bulgaria. He passed round a copy of it, taken, as the Cyrillic small print at the base of the page made clear, from a Bulgarian catalogue or textbook. It depicted a male figure floating above a landscape. Below him were mountains, below these houses and, to the right of these, a large blue area across which square objects were being shunted or shuffled into position by small men. The men were either repositioning these objects or else tending to them, as though they were fine-tuning listening devices. None of them looked up towards the main figure, who floated above them in a sky of silver. He wore a red robe on his body, and around his head had a large halo of bright gold. To the right of his feet, above the small men’s square objects, was a line of text written in an archaic form of Cyrillic — or so I assumed, as, being vaguely familiar with modern Bulgarian Cyrillic, I would have been able to read the words had they been written in this script.
The officer from Interpol informed us that this painting had been stolen recently, and that it was highly probable that it was headed west — and, moreover, highly possible that it would pass through Prague. He had called Novotný, Rosický and myself into the office because we were engaged in monitoring known Bulgarian criminals such as Subject and Associates. He urged us to increase our scrutiny of these criminals and their networks over the following days and weeks, and informed us that resources would be made available for us to do so with immediate effect.
While I considered which new surveillance equipment to install in view of this directive, where to install it, and how many auxiliary people I would need to co-opt to work with me to do so, I continued examining the reproduction of the painting. Although, being old, it was certainly not intended to represent such things, what its action (if one can apply that term to such a static scene) most suggested to my mind was the transmission and reception of signals. The blocks to which the small men tended took on the character, even more strongly than they had on my first viewing of the image, of transmitters; the rough silver of the sky suggested a transmission medium, the bright gold around the floating figure’s head a zone of reception; the text, perhaps, depicted the transmissions’ content — content which was, as so often in our field of work, encrypted. The mountains were dotted with angular objects which protruded from them: these, to my mind, suggested aerials or antennae. This made sense: hills, mountains, outcroppings of rock and other such bodies adversely affect a signal, causing multi-path interference. Aerials, such as depicted (so it seemed to me) by the angular objects, would help rectify this problem, aiding the passage of messages from the boxes set in the blue surface upwards to the floating figure, or perhaps vice versa, in the contrary direction. I am aware that my interpretation was highly subjective, and doubtless coloured by the surveillance considerations I was simultaneously entertaining, but this is how the painting presented itself to my mind, and I trust I am not misguided in deeming this fact worthy of inclusion in these notes.