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 much 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.