‘You think it might be fake?’ asked Carter.
‘I have no idea,’ replied Wilby, ‘but we’re going to someone who does.’
‘Now?’
‘Immediately! This kind of thing can’t wait. This is big, Carter. This is really big. It’s one thing to be moving food around. A man can get rich doing that. But money! And Russian money! This is exactly what I was afraid might happen.’
‘But if it’s counterfeit—’ Carter began.
Wilby didn’t let him finish. ‘That’s what we’re going to find out.’ Once more, he climbed to his feet. ‘Come on!’ he said. ‘Get up!’
Wilby’s confusion was gone, replaced by a nervous, almost frantic energy that worried Carter even more.
‘Wait two minutes,’ ordered Wilby, ‘then follow me out. Make sure you keep twenty paces back.’ And then he was gone.
For a few seconds after Wilby had departed, Carter stood alone in the meat locker. He felt like one of those bell-helmeted deep-sea divers plodding around with lead-weighted shoes on the ocean floor, depending on a single hose connecting him to his air supply up on the surface. The only thing that stood between Carter, the agent with an invented criminal past, and Carter the actual ex-convict, now working for one of the biggest black marketeers in the country, was a man who had just appeared to be on the verge of losing control.
Carter stepped out of the freezer and the warm, early summer air wrapped itself around him like damp towels. He emerged from the butcher shop just as Wilby was turning the corner from Jennerstrasse onto the main road, leaving a trail of bloody footprints for Carter to follow.
Wilby’s path meandered over into the Nippes district; a warren of little streets and alleyways in which, if he had not kept his eyes on Wilby, Carter would soon have become lost.
Carter tried to memorise the names of the streets◦– Cranach, Steinberger, Wilhelm◦– but he soon gave up since Wilby was not moving in a direct line, as if he feared that he was being followed by somebody other than Carter.
They arrived, eventually, at a small antique bookshop on Erzbergerplatz. It was wedged between two closed storefronts, their windows whitewashed blind and doorways clogged with dead leaves and scraps of old newspaper. Above the dusty window of the bookshop, painted in dull red letters outlined in gold, was a single word◦– Thesinger. Behind the window, placed on fragile-looking stands, were even more fragile-looking volumes whose gilded Sütterlin script was indecipherable to Carter. Between the cloth-wrapped bindings, their once-bright colours rubbed away to the white canvas threads beneath, their crumbled pages looked ready to disintegrate even at the slightest touch. Carter found himself marvelling at the fact that something so delicate could have survived the storm of war when everything else around here, even the mighty cathedral that might once have protected these books, looked as if it had been picked up by a giant and shaken apart before being dropped to the ground in a heap.
Ahead of them, just entering the shop, was a thin man with a tattered-looking suitcase and a brown trench coat which sagged so far off his shoulders that he had been forced to roll up the sleeves.
As Carter and Wilby walked into Thesinger’s bookshop, a little bell tied to the doorframe jangled to announce their arrival. They passed by the man with the suitcase, who was now sitting in a tired but comfortable-looking chair in front of a little round table, on which rested an ashtray crammed with the charred twigs of burned-out matches. Two other men, almost as gaunt and dishevelled as their companion, sat around the table, lounging in mismatched furniture. The tattered man was in the process of rolling himself a cigarette with a shred of newspaper. Open on his knee was a battered little tin, from which the man plucked shreds of tobacco mixed with what appeared to be strands of dried corn silk.
The others at the table watched him patiently, their eyes softened with pity. Their friend had obviously fallen on hard times, and Carter wondered if that suitcase contained books he had come to sell to Thesinger, or whether it was everything he owned.
Wilby was talking to a short, heavyset man with thin, curly white hair resting on his head like a cloud. He wore a wool cardigan with leather patches running from the cuff all the way to the elbow and a pipe stem sticking from one of the pockets.
‘This is Mr Thesinger,’ said Wilby. He made no attempt to introduce Carter and the man with the white hair didn’t ask about his name.
‘I hear you have brought me a treasure,’ said Thesinger.
‘It might be,’ replied Carter, ‘and it might not.’
‘We shall see.’ Thesinger motioned for them to follow him into a back room, where books were stacked waist deep in every corner. In the centre of this crowded space stood a drafting table. Bolted to one end was a long-stemmed lamp which stooped over the table like a heron. On the table itself lay a large magnifying glass, of the kind Carter’s father had used for tying fishing flies.
Wilby removed one of the Russian notes from his pocket and laid it on the table. ‘What do you think of that?’ he asked.
Other than a slight narrowing of his eyes, Thesinger betrayed no emotion. He turned on the lamp. Then he fished a pair of glasses from one pocket of his cardigan and put them on. He manoeuvred the magnifying glass until the bill seemed to rise up into the air, a jumbled mass of colour and words. For a long time, Thesinger hunched over the table staring at the bill, his breath blooming and fading and blooming again on the lens.
The two spectators remained almost motionless, as if afraid to break the spell under which the old man appeared to have fallen.
At last Thesinger straightened his back, removed his glasses and, with a gesture of fatigue, pinched his thumb and index finger into the corners of his eyes. ‘It’s counterfeit,’ he whispered.
Wilby and Carter breathed out simultaneously.
‘But it is a very good one,’ added Thesinger. ‘In fact, it is the best I’ve ever seen, and Soviet currency is notoriously difficult to fake.’
‘Why is that?’ asked Carter.
‘In the engraving of the plates from which the currency is printed,’ explained Thesinger, ‘they use a laborious process called “micro-intaglio”. The creation of the platens◦– the copper plates on which the design of the note is engraved◦– can take months and is extremely time-consuming. In micro-intaglio, ridges are made in the plate which are then filled with ink and pressed into the paper, rather than just resting upon the surface. The resulting grooves in the note are too slight to be detected by the human hand, but they give an overall appearance that is genuinely three-dimensional, even if the person looking at the bill can’t quite understand what gives it the look of authenticity. Some people mistake it for metallic compounds in the inks that give it a particular lustre, but in fact it is caused by the interplay of light upon the minutely recessed grooves in which the inks themselves are embedded. Another trick they use is borrowed from the makers of Persian carpets.’
‘Carpets?’ asked Wilby.
‘The Persians would always work a deliberate flaw into their design, in the belief that only God could achieve perfection. In a similar way, the plate engravers for Russian bank notes work in very slight faults: a minuscule break in a single line amongst hundreds of other lines which are cross-hatched together for the purpose of shading a number or a person’s face◦– a technique engravers call “guilloche”. A counterfeiter mistakes these details for printing errors and corrects them but, in doing so, creates an actual flaw in the design. The composition of the Russian paper is also highly unusual. They use rayon fibre mixed in with the cotton, which means that if you crumple one of the bills’◦– he picked up the twenty-five-rouble note and, holding it by his ear, folded it into his fist◦– ‘it has a characteristically softer sound than if you crumple an American dollar or a British pound.’