Florian's Gate (45 page)

While they worked their way down one wall, Katya started on the other side, listed a dozen numbers, then began painstakingly checking the files. Jeffrey struggled not to despair; they had managed to inspect only nineteen crates in the first hour, and the room held at least four or five hundred. The only consolation was that Katya appeared to be making three times the progress they did, although Rokovski greeted her each time their paths crossed with another derisive snort. It was clear he expected to have to go back and duplicate her efforts. Jeffrey was not sure the man was wrong.

Katya reentered the storage room chanting a number under her breath. Something in her tone made both the men look up from their labors. She fingered dozens of crates, examining the stencils. “Here. Check this one next.”

“What for?” Jeffrey asked.

“How nice,” interrupted Rokovski, fatigue giving rise to sarcasm. “Did you find that under ‘R' for Rubens?”

“No,” she replied, her poise untouched. “This number
corresponds to a card labeled
Projekty Studenckie, Akademia Sztuk Pieknych
.”

“Student projects from the Academy of Fine Arts,” Rokovski translated. “What on earth is that doing here?”

“It seems to me,” Katya said, “that student work has no place in a museum vault. And anyone checking the inventory would open this crate last.”

The crate was dragged out with renewed haste. Rokovski jammed the screwdriver under one corner, slipped, cursed and slammed it back into place with a vengeance. The wood creaked and complained and finally gave. Together he and Jeffrey pulled off the lid.

The first painting they lifted out was a mediocre pastoral scene. Next came two standard still-lifes, and under that a snowy landscape with a frozen river. Jeffrey reached for the next painting, the next to the last one, and as he pulled it out his heart lurched.

“There's something here,” he said.

“It's too heavy by far,” Rokovski agreed.

The painting was of dead hunting trophies. They turned it over, laid it flat, and saw that set into its back was a second, smaller, older frame.

“Bingo,” Jeffrey said.

The student painting was just large enough to allow the smaller frame to fit snugly inside. They discovered as they tried to remove it that small thin nails had been hammered through the outer frame to seal it in place, to ensure that it would not be easily inspected. Because there were no nailheads, they used the screwdriver to probe between the frames, damaging the outer frame if necessary, and breaking the nails with a sharp upward twist. When all six were broken and the inner frame free, Jeffrey found his hands were shaking.

He turned to Rokovski, said, “You do it.”

“With pleasure.” He reached down with trembling hands, gently separated the inner frame, and lifted out the painting.

It was the Rubens.

They knelt around it in silence for a long, long while. Finally Rokovski stood, moved to the workshop table, cleared off a space, and gingerly set the painting down. He walked around it, inspecting it from various angles.

“I must say that when you told me about this,” Rokovski said quietly, “I came back by the museum and looked carefully at the painting on exhibit. I inspected it as best I could without drawing attention to myself.”

“So did we,” Jeffrey replied.

“I could find nothing that left me thinking that here was a forgery. Nothing. But I am not an expert at classical painting, and I thought that perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps, you understand, just perhaps. And now that I stand here before this original, I see that indeed I was.”

“It is a masterpiece,” Katya agreed quietly.

Some of the other exposed paintings that littered the cramped little room were quality pieces, but there was something more to this one, something that drew the eye despite the room's poor lighting and the painting's relatively small size. The pale face framed a pair of dark eyes whose depths contained an unfathomable spark, a mysterious light that
demanded
attention.

It was indeed a master work.

That evening, while waiting to go to the airport and meet Alexander's plane, Jeffrey told Katya of his talk with Gregor. She listened to his account with the same absorption that she had shown him the evening before. At the conclusion she told him, “You're going to have to reach some decisions of your own before you can pray for Alexander, Jeffrey.”

He nodded. “I've been thinking about that.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I've got to get my own relationship with God back in order,” he replied.

She reached across and took his hand. “It's the way I have always dreamed of our relationship beginning.”

He stared at her. “This is what you've been waiting for?”

“I couldn't say it, Jeffrey. I couldn't ask. It couldn't be something you decided on because of me. It had to be something you did for yourself, for Him.” She drank him with her eyes. “It's been the hardest thing I have ever waited for in all my life.”

“All this time, all . . .” Slowly he shook his head. “This is incredible.”

“My father became a Christian because it was the only way that Mama would marry him,” Katya said. “Mama once told me she thinks making him give that promise was the greatest sin she ever committed. It kept him from ever finding Christ on his own, and in the end it drove him away from both of us, because he was living a lie, one she forced on him.”

“So you waited,” Jeffrey breathed, dumbfounded. “And hoped.”

“And prayed,” she added. “Prayed harder than I have ever prayed for anything in my entire life.”

“But why the distance, Katya? Why the coldness? Was that because of your father, too?”

“No,” she replied quietly. “Well, yes, I suppose in a way it all comes back to that first great hurt. But my first year at university, I met an older man. I gave too much too fast, Jeffrey. I didn't take time to see who it was that I was spending time with. I let myself be taken in by a lie, by a mask he wore because it suited him. I can look back now and understand that all he really wanted was to have me. When I refused, and explained that my faith didn't allow it, he tried every way he could to force me away from God.”

She dropped her eyes to the hand she held in hers, her voice as gentle as the finger stroking his palm. “I was so busy trying to convince myself that deep down he really cared for me that I couldn't see the truth. And because of that I stayed around longer and let him hurt me more. I did not understand how a man could lie so, could care so little for me as a person that he would keep tearing at what was most important in my
life, trying to destroy my faith just so he could sleep with me. Then one day I finally realized that he didn't care for me at all, just for my body, just for satisfying some hunger of his. It made me feel like dirt.

“After that, my life revolved around my studies and taking care of Mama. “ She looked up, gave him the slightest hint of a smile. “And then this dashing young man came up to my table at the university, and he was neither a student, nor a believer. All the same problems, all the same mistakes, all over again.”

She reached across and traced a feathery line down the side of his face. “And I could feel myself falling head over heels for him,” she whispered, “like I had never fallen for anyone in my entire life. And I was so scared, Jeffrey. So very scared.”

“There's no need to be frightened, Katya.”

“I'm beginning to believe you,” she said, and leaned forward to kiss him.

CHAPTER 24

Alexander was his normal silent self on the ride into Cracow from the airport that evening. Jeffrey played the patient companion and said little of his own activities, other than the fact that perhaps the solution to their export document problem had been discovered. Alexander replied to the news with a single nod of his head and the request that they go straight to Gregor's apartment instead of the hotel.

Gregor limped out to the landing, greeted his cousin with the traditional pair of kisses and the words, “You have been on my heart night and day, dear cousin. Night and day.”

“I am grateful.” Alexander seemed unsure of why he was there. “Is it too late for us to speak?”

“Of course not. I have just put on water for tea. Come in, come in.”

Gregor led him to the apartment's only comfortable chair. “Pull it up close to the bed, cousin. I have perhaps done a bit too much today, and my bones are eager for a rest.”

“Perhaps I should return tomorrow, then.”

“Nonsense. I can rest while we are talking.” He turned to the alcove and asked over his shoulder, “Will you take tea with us, Jeffrey?”

He looked uncomfortably at Alexander. “Maybe it would be better if I left.”

“There is no need as far as I am concerned,” Alexander replied. “You have walked with me this far; you may as well be in for the kill.”

“No one is to be killed,” Gregor replied, returning from the alcove bearing two steaming glasses. Silently he nodded Jeffrey toward a straight-backed chair in the room's far corner. “Although there would be no greater gift you could give me or your Maker than a decision to die to the things of this world.”

Alexander sipped at his tea. “Even if I did consider the act
as a serious possibility, I would find it positively mortifying to see the look of satisfaction on some priest's face. Imagine his pleasure at bringing a long-time offender like me to his knees.”

It was one of the few times Jeffrey ever heard Gregor take a sharp tone. “If he takes pleasure for himself, then he is no priest, no matter what his earthly garb.”

“Perhaps not, dear cousin. But your standards are sadly not held by all.”

“They are not mine and they are not standards,” Gregor replied hotly. He eased himself into a seated position on his bed and stretched his legs out with a sigh. “They are instructions, the first of which is true humility. You kneel to no mortal force when you cast your sins on the Savior. You bow your head to no mortal power.”

Alexander smiled. “Do I detect an open wound?”

“There are some human failings I find harder to forgive than others,” Gregor replied. “I do not ever want to think that a prideful Pharisee in priestly robes stood between you and eternal life.”

“Eternal life,” Alexander murmured. “There were times when I truly thought that I would live forever. Or at least that my days should never end.”

“God willing, you shall have eternal life. He stands and knocks at the door to your heart. Will you not let Him enter?”

Alexander reached over and patted Gregor's shoulder. “You will be the death of me.”

“The life, dear cousin. The life of you.”

“An interesting concept. Quite an amusing change from the memories crowding up around me.”

“Memories far easier to bear if you bore them not alone,” Gregor replied.

“Yes,” Alexander murmured, turning his gaze toward his steaming tea. “The burdens have become quite heavy.”

“Do you wish to speak of them?”

Alexander hesitated, said to his glass, “It is so hard
sometimes to understand how we feel. Our emotions are so very abstract. So we give them form, a name or place, and through this name an identity. For me, all fear, all dread, all hatred, is located at Florian's Gate. These feelings, this place, I have avoided all my life.”

“Many of us have such a place,” Gregor said quietly, “although it is not always something with a form as concrete as yours. To walk through this portal would be to confront these fears, to press through them, and to leave forgiveness in their wake.”

“I could not,” Alexander replied. “You are asking the impossible.”

“Only because you insist on taking that walk alone,” Gregor said. “You treat your fears and your hatreds as your most precious possessions. You allow them to define who you are, where you go, what you think. Imagine, my oldest and dearest friend, how life might be if love were there in their place.”

Alexander gave no sign that he had even heard. He was silent for a very long time, the loudest sound in the room being the ticking of Gregor's bedside clock. Then he said, “I survived my time of suffering because I was
determined
to live. It was
my
strength.
My
will. And yet, as I find myself coming to face the same door which I escaped from so long ago, I wonder, my dear cousin. The past reaches up to surround me, and at times I feel that I have escaped from nothing at all. And the strength of my will does not appear to be powerful enough this time to save me.”

Gregor shifted his head and looked upward, said to the ceiling, “It is possible to hurt so much, suffer so terribly, that life loses all meaning. This you know, my friend. You have seen it for yourself, and known its appeal. Death becomes not necessarily something welcome, but rather something
acceptable
. It can be a mental pain that pushes you to this brink, or emotional, or physical, sometimes even spiritual. Those who disbelieve the extent of another's suffering simply
because the wounds are not visible are not only insensitive, they are dangerous. They literally push a sufferer toward death's door.”

“That is one accusation I would never make of you,” Alexander said quietly. “Your sensitivity is most painfully accurate.”

“One basic element of suffering,” Gregor went on, “is the way it makes time slow down. A sufferer finds it increasingly difficult to see beyond this moment of pain. He or she finds it almost impossible to believe that the suffering will ever end. It becomes the all in all of life. Pain is the start, the now, the finish.”

“Indeed,” Alexander murmured, his shoulders bowed, his head lowered almost to his hands.

“A sufferer comes to dread the night,” Gregor told the roof above his head. “Once it arrives, it never seems to end. The darkness can become suffocating in its power to isolate, to smother hope, to increase aloneness. The person thinks, ‘How long before I get up? The night drags on, and I toss till dawn.' Those are the words of Job, my old friend. He knew, and he said it well.