Within the space of three hours Arkady watched Korchow conclude negotiations for a Saffavid Dynasty miniature of the assassination of some prince whose name Arkady forgot two minutes after Korchow told it to him; two David Grossman first editions (“Have you read The Smile of the Lamb? No? You really must. One of those human masterpieces in which one can feel the breath, the promise, of posthumanity.”); and a portion of the True Cross encased in an exceptionally gaudy twelfth-century Byzantine reliquary (“The real value is in the packaging, Arkady. There’s a lesson there. Remember it.”).
Each time they stepped through the sonic curtain into the next high rollers’ room and sat together, encased in a cocoon of artificial silence, while the dealer fetched the next illicit treasure for Korchow’s delectation, Arkady expected the KnowlesSyndicate A to broach the real subject of interest between them. And each time Arkady was disappointed yet again.
Only between the third and fourth stops on the shopping tour—by which time Korchow had dropped a sum of money that would have provided a year’s worth of air, food, and water for all of RostovSyndicate—did Arkady succeed in picking the two stolid-looking young Israelis out of the crowd.
“Are they followingus?”
“Don’t stare, Arkady. It’s embarrassing.”
He glanced surreptitiously at the young men while Korchow threaded along the narrow stone street ahead of him. Was it only those two, or was there another team as well? And was he completely crazy for thinking that the buxom schoolgirl bouncing along the opposite sidewalk was the same person as the frumpily dressed housewife who’d trudged by not five minutes ago pulling a wheeled grocery cart?
“They don’t look embarrassed,” he told Korchow.
“Who said it was themyou were embarrassing?”
“Sorry,” Arkady began—and then he rounded a corner in Korchow’s wake and ran smack into absolutely the last face he ever expected to see on Earth.
The face stared down at him from a billboard the size of a house. The eyes were shadowed with the sorrow of hard experience. The square jaw was set in a frown of heroic determination. The perfectly balanced musculature of the bare chest was a paean in flesh and blood to the technical mastery of its AzizSyndicate designers.
There was a caption below the picture, though Arkady didn’t need to read it to know what spin the image came from: see AHMED AZIZ in THE TIME OF CRUEL MIRACLES“Ahmed Aziz?” Arkady mouthed.
“Well,” Korchow said mildly, “humans watch art spins too. Though I’ve been told they recut the endings before they release Syndicate spins for UN audiences. Apparently humans don’t find lovers’ suicide pacts quite as romantic as we do.” He squinted up at the billboard, arms crossed thoughtfully. “Our Ahmed’s better-looking than the one who stars in the spins, don’t you think?”
The possessive was hard enough for Arkady to parse that it took him a moment to understand who Korchow was talking about and draw the obvious connection.
Korchow sighed patiently. “I handled his debriefing too. I would have told you, if you’d ever trusted me enough to ask.”
“Anyway, he’s not better-looking,” Arkady said. “He’s just nicer. It makes him seem better-looking.”
He looked over to find Korchow grinning indulgently at him.
“What?”
“You’re an idiot, Arkady. But you’re a sweet idiot. I’ll say that for you. How you survived four months in Arkasha’s back pocket I’ll never fathom.”
Only at the fifth stop did Korchow finally begin to show his cards. This store’s street front consisted of one windowless door tucked behind a sweating stone buttress in the angle of an alley so narrow that Arkady wondered if the sun ever shone on the place. The brass sign advertised “antiquities” in French, English, Hebrew, and Arabic; but the lettering was so small that Arkady had to stoop to read it.
Walking into the place was like walking into a cave. The windows were hermetically sealed and the closed shutters blocked out what little light might have trickled through the smeared glass. The shop’s single room seemed to fall away unevenly into the shadows, as if the cobweb-infested ceiling and the carpet-lined floor drew closer together the deeper you penetrated into the building’s entrails. The man behind the counter was as oddly built as his shop. Only when he stepped out from behind the counter to greet them could Arkady make sense of his unusual proportions; he was a dwarf, and he’d been standing on a pile of carpets half a dozen deep. Indeed, the farther back in the shop you went, the deeper the carpets got, until in the back of the place they were stacked up in slithering chest-high piles, fragrant with the perfume of mothballs and long-dead sheep.
But the carpets, however impressive they were, turned out to be a mere sideline. Once they were settled in the back room, slightly shabbier than the ones preceding it, and had suffered through the same tea and the same honeyed cakes and the same desultory small talk, the dwarf began to shuffle across the mounded carpets in a pair of frayed and faded bedroom slippers, extracting curious little flat boxes from corners whose very existence Arkady had not suspected. And from the boxes, handling the pages with infinite delicacy, he began to produce his miniatures.
“Yes, yes,” Korchow said to the first painting the dwarf presented, an ornate illustration of the Prophet—or at least Arkady assumed that was who it was; his face was completely obscured by a fluttering silken veil—riding to Heaven on a decidedly seductive-looking sphinx. Two more miniatures, also of religious themes, followed it, and Korchow showed little more interest in them than he had in the first piece.
The dealer cleared his throat. “Perhaps you might be more interested in more, er, secular themes?”
“Oh, assuredly,” Korchow said with a smile that Arkady felt himself to be quite incapable of interpreting.
The man shuffled to the back of the room, his slippers whispering on the wool nap of the carpets, and produced a slim portfolio of unbound pieces.
“Oh my,” Korchow murmured when he looked at the first one.
Arkady looked, blinked, and looked away.
“Poor Arkady. A great man once observed that politics was like sausage: a commodity best enjoyed without inquiring too closely into the manufacturing process. One might say the same thing of human reproduction in general.”
“Not to your taste?” the dealer asked in tones of careful neutrality.
“Not to my young friend’s taste, at any rate. I imagine he would prefer something a bit more…ahem…refined.”
The dwarf glanced between Korchow and Arkady, his face giving away nothing. He slid a second portfolio out from beneath the first, as if he’d had it ready all along, and opened it.
There was only one miniature inside, and it was clearly a picture of tremendous value. Arkady could see that even before he began to grasp the subject of the painting.
“By the Master of Tabriz,” the dealer said. “You are familiar with the story? It is said to represent the Shah with his lover the night before he was assassinated.”
Korchow’s eyes slid sideways toward Arkady. “Do you like it?”
The miniature depicted two young men of exceptional physical beauty. They were as identical as crèchemates, though Arkady couldn’t tell whether the resemblance was real or a mere product of the artist’s manner. They were so completely swathed in silk, from their spotless white turbans to their patterned robes and their pointed and filigreed and gold-leafed slippers, that the shapes they formed on the page bore no relation to the warm, breathing, living bodies within. All their life was in their black eyes, which the long-dead artist had limned in the finest wisp of sable. And all around them the painted garden, which should have been as flat and static as every other priceless painted garden Arkady had seen that afternoon, seemed to pulse and flow like water running under ice. Trees twined and twisted their dark limbs about each other. Flowers flamed in the grass and swept in bright torrents around the lovers’ feet.