2. The Forger’s Psychodrama

The workshop of Elias Voss existed in a part of Voldrome that the city’s official maps had long since abandoned. It occupied the gutted shell of an old linden-wood drying kiln on the banks of the Drava Canal, a district where the streetlights buzzed in the key of migraine and the only pedestrians at 3 a.m. were feral cats and men who had traded their names for chemical escape. The building’s exterior was a scab of corrugated iron and rotting brick, indistinguishable from the derelict warehouses that flanked it. But inside, Voss had constructed a cathedral of the fake.

Croft followed Lasko through a series of reinforced steel doors, each one unlocking with a sequence of biometric scans that seemed excessive for a simple art forger. The final door opened onto a space that stole his breath. It was vast and cathedral-quiet, lit by calibrated halogen lamps that reproduced the exact color temperature of Mediterranean noon. Rows of workbenches held scattered fragments of antiquity: the arm of a kouros, the head of a cycladic idol, shattered amphorae waiting to be reassembled into nonexistent wholes. Jars of powdered pigments stood labeled in a code Croft couldn’t decipher. A fume hood hummed over a tray of what looked like ancient bronze patina in progress. And at the center of it all, illuminated like a sacrificial altar, sat a sarcophagus.

It was a thing of terrible beauty. The terracotta surface had been fired to a deep, volcanic red, then artificially aged with layers of calcite deposit and the ghostly watermark of centuries. The lid bore the reclining figure of a woman, her features neither wholly Etruscan nor wholly invented—a hybrid of archaic smile and something far more knowing, more carnal. Her hands rested on her abdomen, but the fingers were too long, too grasping, as if she were clawing at something buried beneath her skin. And her face: it was a mask within a mask, the outer layer serene, the inner layer—visible only if one stared at the optical illusion Voss had baked into the glaze—suggesting a rictus of grief or ecstasy.

Croft heard himself exhale. He had spent years analyzing the mechanics of deception, but this was something else entirely. This was not fraud. This was faith.

“You like her,” said a voice from the shadows. It was not a question.

Elias Voss emerged from behind a rack of hanging plaster molds, wiping his hands on a rag that had once been white. He was a man of about sixty, barrel-chested and thick-armed, with a shock of white hair that stood up from his scalp as if permanently electrified. His eyes were the pale blue of a gas flame, and they held no warmth whatsoever. He looked at Croft the way a butcher might look at a new cleaver—assessing its weight, its balance, its capacity for damage.

“She’s a sarcophagus,” Voss continued, walking toward the terracotta figure. “Specifically, what I call the Sarcophagus of the Etruscan Whore-Priestess. There is no such thing in the historical record. I invented her. But by the time I’m finished, every archaeologist in Europe will swear on their mother’s grave that she was dug from a tomb outside Tarquinia. The legend I’ve attached to her—a curse of impotence on any man who claims ownership without earning her blessing—will be more real to them than the dirt in their own fingernails.”

Lasko circled the sarcophagus with the predatory reverence of a man appraising a weapon. “And the Duke of Montferrat? What will she be to him?”

“Everything,” Voss said. He tapped a laptop on the nearest bench, and a cascade of data from Aletheia’s files spilled across the screen. “I’ve read the algorithm’s profile. The Duke is a man whose entire identity is built on a foundation of genealogical panic. His grandfather was rumored to be sterile—the Duke’s own father was born after a mysterious nine-month absence by the Duchess and a convenient visit from a Swiss ‘fertility specialist.’ The Montferrat bloodline is a fiction, and the Duke knows it. He has spent forty million euros in the last decade acquiring artifacts associated with male potency: ithyphallic herms, Renaissance paintings of Priapus, a supposedly enchanted bull’s horn from Minoan Crete. The algorithm says he will be unable to resist a sacred object that threatens the very thing he fears losing most. He will buy her not despite the curse, but because of it. He will want to prove he is the exception.”

Croft stared at the reclining woman’s face, that doubled expression of serenity and agony. “And what happens when he discovers the curse is real? Not the magic—the psychological fracture you’re engineering.”

“Then we will have done our job,” Voss said flatly. “I don’t care about the Duke’s psyche. I care about the truth this object will force into his home. Every noble house in this continent is built on a mass grave of lies. I’m merely providing the shovel.”

There was something in Voss’s voice that went beyond professional cynicism. Croft recognized it because he had heard it in his own voice during the worst months after Kovac. It was the sound of a man whose hatred had become so refined that it functioned as a religion.

“You lost something to them,” Croft said. “To the old families.”

Voss turned to him with that butcher’s assessment again, and for a long moment, the only sound was the hum of the fume hood. Then Voss pulled up a stool and sat, his broad shoulders slumping slightly.

“I was not always a forger, Herr Croft. Thirty years ago, I was a conceptual artist of some reputation. I created installations that explored the relationship between authenticity and power. My most famous piece—you will not have heard of it, because it no longer exists—was called ‘The Inventory of Inheritance.’ I broke into the estate sale of the bankrupted House of Ostendorff, a minor aristocratic family from the northern provinces, and I purchased every single object they had put up for auction. Paintings, furniture, love letters, christening gowns. I then assembled these objects into a labyrinthine sculpture and invited the public to walk through the ruins of a dying bloodline. The Ostendorff matriarch, a woman of eighty, attended the opening. She stood in the center of my labyrinth and wept.”

He paused, and Croft saw the old rage flicker behind the gas-flame eyes.

“Her grandson, a financier named Konrad Ostendorff, sued me for possession of the family’s ‘spiritual property.’ The court, stacked with his fraternity brothers from the University of St. Gallen, ruled in his favor. They dismantled my installation piece by piece, returned every object to the family, and ordered me to pay damages that bankrupted my studio and ended my career. Konrad Ostendorff sent me a handwritten note afterward. It said, ‘Some things are not for strangers to touch.’ He died four years ago of a heart attack in a Zurich hotel room with a prostitute young enough to be his granddaughter. But the damage to me was done.”

Voss gestured at the sarcophagus. “I have spent the two decades since learning to touch everything they hold sacred. I can replicate a Caravaggio, a Cellini salt cellar, a Tang dynasty horse. But Lasko’s algorithm showed me something I had never considered: that the best forgery is not a copy of an existing object, but the creation of an object that should have existed. It fills a void in their pathological needs. This sarcophagus is not a lie. It is a prophecy.”

Croft felt the weight of his own Psycho-Physical Inventory pressing against his thoughts. He understood, with a clarity that was almost nauseating, why Lasko had brought him here. Voss was not just a forger; he was a mirror of Croft’s own self-destruction, a man who had converted his ruin into a weapon. The algorithm had chosen them both, and it had chosen them precisely because they were broken in complementary ways.

“How do you place it?” Croft asked, forcing his mind back to the practical. “The sarcophagus. You can’t just list it on an auction site.”

Lasko resumed his slow circling. “We have a network. The algorithm has identified not just the targets but the intermediaries they trust. In the Duke of Montferrat’s case, the weak point is his antiquities advisor, a disgraced archaeologist named Dr. Hildegard Vorst. She was expelled from the University of Innsbruck for selling excavation rights to private collectors. She now operates out of a gallery in the freeport district of Geneva, specializing in objects whose provenance is, shall we say, poetically flexible. She owes a great deal of money to a great many dangerous people, and she is also—according to Aletheia—deeply susceptible to flattery from powerful men. Voss has already established contact through a shell identity. She believes she has discovered an undocumented Etruscan sarcophagus in a private Austrian collection, and she is eager to broker a sale to the Duke.”

“The Geneva Freeport,” Croft murmured. The name conjured images of climate-controlled vaults stuffed with Picassos and golden chariots, a shadow economy of the absurdly wealthy where art was traded like cryptocurrency and never saw the light of day. It was the perfect ecosystem for a lie.

“The sarcophagus will be smuggled into a vault there next week,” Voss said. “Dr. Vorst will ‘authenticate’ it using a combination of genuine scientific tests—thermoluminescence dating, x-ray fluorescence—that I have already calibrated to confirm a seventh-century BCE origin. The curse legend will be seeded through a network of specialized antiquities forums and whispered to the Duke through a separate channel, a rival dealer whom Aletheia has identified as the Duke’s primary source of clandestine acquisitions. The rival will try to discourage the purchase, which the Duke will interpret as an attempt to cheat him out of a prize. He will rush to acquire it. That is the pattern.”

Croft walked closer to the sarcophagus. The woman’s hands seemed to have shifted slightly in the changing light, the grasping fingers now appearing to beckon. He felt a chill that was not entirely rational.

“And if the Duke is smarter than the algorithm predicts? If he resists?”

“He won’t,” Lasko said. “That’s what Aletheia taught us about disability claims, isn’t it? The system is designed to be irresistible. The human variable is not courage or wisdom; it’s pattern. The Duke is a pattern. You were a pattern. I am a pattern. The only thing that separates us is whether we can read our own file before the machine does.”

Croft looked at Voss. “And what does your file say, Herr Voss?”

The forger’s face went very still. He did not answer immediately. Instead, he picked up a small brush and began touching up the edge of the sarcophagus lid, his movements precise and utterly controlled. “My file,” he said finally, “is the reason I asked Lasko to bring you here. The algorithm says that I am a man who will complete his revenge and then seek a poetic form of self-destruction. It predicts I will not survive the Montferrat affair. It has mapped my own death drive with the same precision it mapped the Duke’s desires.”

He set down the brush and turned to face Croft directly. “I am telling you this because I want you to know that I am aware of my own algorithm. I am not a blind instrument. And I want you to watch me, Herr Croft. I want you to watch and see whether a man can outrun his own quantified soul.”

The workshop fell silent. The reclining woman’s double face gazed up at the halogen sun. Somewhere in the distance, a barge horn sounded on the Drava Canal, low and mournful.

Croft spent the next several days in a state of suspended disbelief, watching as the machinery of the con assembled itself around him. He met Dr. Hildegard Vorst via encrypted video conference, a gaunt woman with the nervous energy of a cornered fox, who spoke of the sarcophagus in the breathless tones of religious revelation. He reviewed the forged provenance documents—a chain of ownership stretching back to a fictitious Austrian count whose estate records Voss had embedded in actual historical archives three years earlier, planting a paper trail like a sleeper agent. He watched Lasko move money through a labyrinth of shell companies in the Isla de la Palma, Mauritius, and the Ydroan Sovereign District, each transfer calibrated to vanish beneath the threshold of regulatory scrutiny.

And all the while, the algorithm hummed in the background, updating its projections. The Duke of Montferrat’s Psycho-Physical Inventory now showed a ninety-seven percent probability of acquisition within forty-eight hours of viewing the sarcophagus. His predicted psychological fracture timeline was three weeks post-acquisition, escalating from paranoid suspicion of his son-in-law to public denunciation to, potentially, violence. The probability of violence was marked at sixty-two percent.

Croft stared at that number for a long time. Then he closed the file and poured himself a drink.

The call came on a Thursday evening, as the Voldrome rain was once again smearing the city into a watercolor of grey and neon. It was Vorst, her voice trembling with suppressed excitement.

“He’s seen the photographs,” she said. “The Duke. He flew to Geneva this morning. He wants to view the piece in person tonight. I’ve arranged a private showing in Vault 17-C. He’s bringing his personal conservator.”

Lasko, seated across from Croft in the basalt conference room, allowed himself a rare full smile. It was, Croft thought, the smile of a man watching a fuse burn toward a powder keg.

“Then it’s done,” Lasko said. “The bait is set. We move to phase two tomorrow.”

He turned to Croft, and the smile faded slightly, replaced by something more complicated. “You’ve been quiet these past days, Julian. More than usual. What troubles you?”

Croft swirled the schnapps in his mug, watching the liquid cling to the ceramic. “Voss,” he said. “He knows the algorithm predicts his death. And he’s still walking toward it. That’s not courage. That’s something else.”

“It’s the same thing that made you walk into this room,” Lasko said. “The algorithm doesn’t create our desires. It just names them. It gives us permission to become what we already are. Voss wants to burn, and he wants the fire to take the aristocracy with him. You wanted permission to externalize your guilt. I—” He paused. “I want to see the look on their faces when they realize that their entire world is a forgery.”

“And what does your file say you’ll become after that?”

Lasko’s light-absorbing eyes met Croft’s, and for a fraction of a second, something unguarded flickered there. Then it was gone.

“My file,” he said, “is the only one I’ve never read. Good night, Julian. Tomorrow, the Duke makes his first payment.”

He stood and walked out, leaving Croft alone with the humming screens and the rain-streaked glass and the image of the sarcophagus, rotating slowly on the central monitor. The Etruscan woman’s hands seemed to have moved again. Now they were not beckoning. They were reaching for something just beyond the frame.

Croft set down his mug. He did not sleep that night. Instead, he sat in the dark and tried to calculate, with the last shreds of his actuarial mind, the exact moment when a pattern became a fate.