Read Online Men in Space by Tom McCarthy - Free Book Online Page B

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 theentire 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