The Color Of Night (13 page)

“I was assigned to work with him because he was a passionate art collector and had a scholarly hunger for knowledge about it. Read constantly. Studied. That was our connection. Much of our communication occurred in that context. It was an efficient and useful cover. Unfortunately, Schrade pursued art as ruthlessly as he pursued everything else. It wasn’t a pretty thing to see, and I hated that he was even remotely involved in something that meant so much to me.”

Strand twisted his shoulders against the window frame, trying to alleviate the growing tension.

“What troubled me the most about what we were about to do was that we were turning a blind eye on too much crime. Considering the amount—and type—of criminal enterprises Schrade was involved in, by giving him a free hand, regardless of the kind of information he was feeding to us, I thought we were dangerously close to becoming part of the problem instead of part of the solution. I didn’t like it at all.”

Mara sat straight backed as a sphinx and just as silent, watching him. He could hardly blame her. God only knew what he would say next, where this was taking him and, by extension, her too.

He shook his head and looked outside again. Her total focus on him was understandable, but it was also disconcerting.

“God help me, I went ahead with it.”

“You know how much Harry hated Wolfram Schrade,” Ariana said. “You must’ve known.”

“Sure.”

“He was never comfortable having to launder for him.”

“Nobody was asking him to be comfortable with it.”

She threw him an amused look. He could barely hide his intolerance of Strand, who had never been enough of a team player in his opinion. Howard used to keep a firmer grip on his biases. Things changed. Ariana ignored his testiness.

“It’s too late to talk about scruples, too late to claim we had any”—she shook her head, remembering—“but Harry came the closest of any of us to agonizing over what we did for Schrade.”

“Bullshit.”

“No, Bill, it’s true. Harry never believed in the ‘percentages’ argument, that official explanation that we all pretended was a genuine justification. Help one murderer kill a few people and use the information he gives us to prevent ten murderers from killing hundreds of people.”

“Well, he may not have believed it, but he bloody well spent nearly twenty years doing just exactly that,” Howard said.

“Maybe, but he paid a terrible price.”

“We all do. That’s the cost of fighting a war. You sacrifice the few to save the many. The concept is as old as civilization.”

“See,” she said. “You have it all worked out, a little moral formula that sums it all up neatly so that we don’t have to confront the terrible things that we do. If someone asks us how we could do such things, if, in the middle of the night, we ask ourselves how we could have done such things, we immediately hold up the formula, like a talisman. It makes everything justifiable, helps us look at ourselves in the mirror without turning away in shame.” She stopped. “Harry refused to do that.”

“Christ, you sound like you want to canonize him.”

“I am just trying to help you understand what I am about to tell you, Bill. It may be more complex than it first appears to you.”

In a way, she sympathized with Bill Howard. He had not advanced in the FIS the way he had wanted. He would end his career as a station chief, and although that in itself was an admirable accomplishment and Vienna was a plum assignment, it was not as good as having a headquarters position with division-level responsibilities in Washington. That was what Howard wanted and had wanted for a long time and would never get. Now this scandal. It had happened on his watch, and Howard knew that it had destroyed even the slightest little ray of hope that he might have been able to keep alive that maybe, someday, he would be called out of the dubious shadows and into the respectable light of a Washington directorate office.

“One day—it was May about five years ago—I got a message from Harry. I was in Prague. He was in Rome, soon to leave, and wanted to meet me as soon as possible. We agreed on Trieste. It was the next evening before we were able to meet, and a wet cold front was moving across the Adriatic. We sat in a small café on a side street a couple of blocks off the waterfront, and all during the meal I had no idea what the meeting was about.

“Finally, Harry told me he had a proposition. He said he wanted me to know that he was going to be retiring in a little over a year. He wanted me to know so I could be thinking about what I wanted to do.”

She stopped. “Could I have another cigarette?”

Howard gave her one, lighted it, and she went on.

“Harry said, ‘Before I leave, Ana, I want to burn Wolf.’ I stared at him across the table. I couldn’t believe my ears. He said he was going to give me and Claude a chance to get in on the operation if we wanted. If I was interested, he would arrange a meeting for all of us, probably the only meeting in which we would all be together at the same time. He said there would be a lot of money in it for all of us. Enough for us to protect ourselves from retaliation if we used our heads. Though he wouldn’t tell me much more than that, he did answer enough questions for me to say that, yes, I was interested and I would like to be included in that meeting.

“Then Harry hesitated—just that, a hesitation. That little thing gave me some idea of the enormity of what he was planning. Harry never gave himself away like that. He was a master of opacity… the ‘poker face,’ you say.” She smoked. “The first thing out of his mouth was, ‘Marie is designing the plan.’”

“Good… God…” For a split second she thought Howard was going to smile.

“I don’t know the details, of course I wouldn’t,” Ariana went on, ignoring him, “but I know that she had a major role in putting it all together. Claude and I became couriers. For the next several months we traveled constantly. We carried legal documents and communications. Often we met in Brussels and Liechtenstein with the legal wizard they got to carry out Marie’s scheme. On her advice, Strand himself went to Los Angeles and recruited this man. Dennis Clymer. I’m not sure what he did, but it was very complex and, eventually, legal. Or so I understood. It was through him that everything Marie diverted from Schrade’s money laundering operations—or at least the part she handled—found its way into the legitimate marketplace. After six months Harry closed down the operation.”

“Closed it down? What went wrong?”

“Nothing. Everything was running perfectly. Harry said that was the best time to quit, before we made any mistakes. Not only had we avoided mistakes, but if we quit then, we would have six months to take our time and carefully cover our tracks from every conceivable direction. We would have time to think, time to make sure.”

Ariana drew long on her cigarette and exhaled the smoke slowly, lazily.

“It would take you a decade to extract that money now,” she said. “Actually, I don’t know that it can ever be done.”

Howard stared at her, silent for a moment.

“How in the hell could Schrade let something like that get by him?”

“At some point in life everyone has to trust someone, Bill. Even people like Wolfram Schrade. It’s not possible to live without doing that. Wolf kept a sharp eye on his money, at least on what the computers told him he had. And on what Marie told him he had. That’s the great leap of faith of modern finance. I even do that. I get a piece of paper from the bank in Cyprus that tells me how much money I have there. Is it
really
there?” She shrugged.

Howard had been concentrating on something.

“A moment ago… you used the word ‘enormity.’” He was sober. “What kind of money are we talking about here?”

“Well, I don’t know exactly,” she said. “All I know is that I’ve been getting a percentage of part of it. You know, the interest thrown off by part of it.”

“How much?”

She hesitated. “I get almost a million U.S. dollars annually.”

Howard’s face sagged. “Fuck.”

Ariana had never heard Bill Howard say that word.

“In… credible,” he said softly. “In… credible.”

He dropped his face into his hands, his elbows resting on his knees. He rubbed his face. He rested his forehead in the palms of his hands.

“And you all shared in it.”

Ariana nodded.

“This… Clymer, yourself…”

“Me and Claude and Clymer and Marie and Harry.”

“Five of you.”

“As far as I know.”

“Goddamn.” Howard’s eyes rolled to the side as he calculated. “I suppose you all shared equally. You said the interest… that’s, hell, that’s five million in
interest
—just
interest.
” He gaped at her. “I don’t even… I don’t even know how to calculate the principal on something like that.” He stopped. “Are you
sure
?”

“What do you think, Bill?”

Howard spoke softly. “You stupid idiots. And you’re surprised that Schrade wants to kill you?”

“Of course not, not after he found out what we had done. But I am surprised that he finally discovered it.”

Howard was incensed but controlling it. “You’ve been talking interest here. What about the principal?”

“Harry stipulated that we never touch the principal. We’ve been splitting only the interest.”

Howard’s hand was in front of his mouth, holding the cigarette as he sucked on it. “And how does that work?”

“It just shows up in my account in Cyprus. Quarterly.”

“Who’s responsible for that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re just trusting whoever.”

“That’s right.” She smiled grimly. “I told you, that’s how the world is today. Marie set it up.”

Howard was still, brooding in the dull lamplight, the smoke from his cigarette rising in front of him, sometimes fogging around the lampshade before dissipating, adding another layer of acrid stench to the wallpaper in the room of conspiracies.

“Okay,” he said after a minute or two, “okay, you don’t know where Harry and Marie are.”

“No.”

“Claude’s gone.”

She nodded.

“Clymer?”

“I have no idea.”

Howard smoked. Ariana had put out her cigarette a while ago and wanted another, but she had already smoked far too much. What she wanted was a drink, but she didn’t say so.

“I don’t understand why you’re not already dead,” he grunted as he shifted on the sofa. His white shirt was growing more wrinkled by the hour. “He obviously found Claude.”

“Maybe that was because Claude was still selling him drawings.”

“What?”

“He signaled that in one of his advertisements.”

“So he was sticking his head in the lion’s mouth.”

“Something like that.”

“I didn’t have any idea that mild-mannered bear had that kind of balls.”

“There’s a lot you didn’t have any idea about, Bill.”

Howard snorted, looked toward the green light of the window. “You people… I don’t know.” He turned back to her. “You don’t know anything about how Schrade reacted to this? You don’t know what he’s doing? Do you know
anything
about him?”

“I heard he cut his ties with the FIS about eighteen months ago.”

“No, damn it. I mean about this, about discovering what the hell you’ve done.”

“All I know is that Claude did not put his advertisement in the
International Herald Tribune.
I know that means that he couldn’t. I know that is the trigger that was supposed to warn me that something had broken loose.” She paused for emphasis. “And I know Schrade’s going to kill me if the FIS doesn’t stop him.”

Howard nodded impatiently, irritated at her persistence.

“Okay, okay. They’re going to want to hear more from you, that’s for damn sure. I’ll take it back to them. I’ll do the best I can, but, hell, this is huge. This is a fucking disaster.”

Ariana stared at him. She didn’t like the way he was sounding. She had a bad feeling about it. Panic grew in her chest, and every beat of her heart became a labored struggle for breath and for self-control.

Until now Mara’s eyes had never left him, not even for a second, not even a glance away. As Strand moved from the window and began pacing, she got up from the bed and walked to the closet, tossing her towel over the back of a chair. She slipped on her dressing gown, tying the sash as she walked to the French doors to look outside. Strand stopped pacing and looked at her. She had folded her arms, and the light coming in from the balcony struck her across her chest and fell the full length of her to the floor. Her face was in the shadow.

He felt so terribly bad for her. He had presented himself to her as being stable and reliable and, if complex, at least straightforward. Strand knew very well how he came across to most people, and he had always used that knowledge to his advantage. If things had been different, she might never have known at all about the man within the man, even if she had lived with him for the rest of their lives.

All of this ran through Strand’s mind as he paused before going on. He wanted her to put his deception into its proper context. Time, he knew, was growing short, but he needed to set things right between them if he could. He realized that whatever he salvaged out of this mess he salvaged for them, not just for himself. If he was going to have anything to live for when all of this was over, he had to redeem himself to Mara Song.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

There was a moment of silence as she continued looking out over the balcony. The peacock nearby cried several times, a wild, otherworldly sound.

“I don’t have any idea how to answer such a question,” she said.

“I know this sounds bizarre…”

She nodded. “Yes, exactly. Bizarre.” Her eyes were focused on the palms in the garden. “I want you to get to the point, Harry. You said something horrible had happened. I need for you to get to the point of all this.” She paused. “Then I’ll tell you if I’m all right.”

Strand took a few steps, to the edge of the sunlight on the stone floor.