The Color Of Night (16 page)

Ariana gaped, recovered, and forced a smile. She spoke hesitatingly.

“How could I forget her? She predicted everything exactly wrong.” Her smile faded. “The last time I saw her it was winter in Athens. She had a terrible cold.”

“Well, I saw Guy Parain in Geneva, almost a year ago. He told me she’d died.”

They visited a few moments about her and other old friends, other times and other places, until Howard found the diversion too distracting to tolerate.

“For Christ’s sake, Harry. I don’t have time for this.”

Strand turned on him abruptly, almost angrily.

“
You
don’t have the time? What about the two of us, Bill? How much time do we have? That’s a problem for us right now. Time.”

“You want me to tell them to stop Schrade or you’ll blow this thing apart? Jesus. Have you thought about what that means?”

Strand locked his eyes on Howard.

“Wolfram Schrade is conducting a scorched earth policy against me. Romy. Every physical thing I own on this earth was in that house in Houston. As well as most of my memories. Not to mention the two wasted lives.” He paused. “What do people do, Bill, when something like this is happening to them?” He paused. “Have I
thought
about it? You impertinent son of a bitch.”

Silence.

“This is it?” Howard clearly didn’t want to take this back to Washington.

“I’m stripped down to my life and a suitcase,” Strand said. “That’s all I have left. Do you really think there’s any question what I want you to do?”

Howard looked down at his Pharisaer, largely unconsumed, picked up the tiny fluted glass of rum, and sipped it. He put down the glass, watched his own fingers turn it this way and that.

“This implied threat…”

“It’s an explicit promise.”

Howard nodded, still looking at the tiny glass. “This is backed up…”

“After what we did to Schrade”—Strand had recovered a measure of self-control—“even though we were careful, even though we were thorough and we thought we had gotten away with it cleanly, and on top of that, covered our tracks, even with all that confidence, do you really think I wouldn’t also have had the imagination to envision a day like this? Do you really think I wouldn’t have a plan for such a development?”

Howard sighed and sat back. He looked at Ariana and shook his head. His expression was sober, even grim. Finally he looked at Strand.

“So this is one of those ‘if anything happens to me’ threats, I guess.”

Strand said nothing.

“I don’t know what they’re going to do, Harry. I can’t imagine… can’t imagine.”

“Just make it clear to them.”

“Oh, I’ll do that.” He paused. “Harry, listen, the most dangerous thing you can do to these people is get the upper hand.” He lifted the tiny fluted glass and drank the last of the rum, then put the glass on the table, upside-down. “It makes them desperate.”

The two men dawdled along the center aisle of St. Vitus’s Cathedral. They were dwarfed by the immense, soaring height of the cathedral ceiling, a vaulted work of intricately webbed Gothic tracery as high above them as heaven itself. Tourists walked quietly all about them in the massive nave, the hissing of whispers and the murmuring of lowered voices creating an aural undercurrent befitting the respect due hallowed stones.

The taller man was middle-aged and dressed impeccably in a dove gray suit. He wore a stiffly starched white shirt with a high, spread collar, cobalt blue striped tie knotted in a firm Windsor. There was a sparkling white pocket handkerchief in the breast pocket of his suit coat. He walked with his hands clasped behind his back in a dignified way that seemed befitting of another era when correctness of carriage in public places was a matter of manners. He was broad shouldered and wore a mustache and goatee, very neatly trimmed and peppered with gray.

As they strolled, he stooped slightly toward his companion in order to hear better what he was saying. The companion was a man perhaps twenty years younger, dressed casually in dark trousers, a faded striped dress shirt, olive sweater vest, and a flea market sport coat. The shorter man was stocky, with a round florid face, his tight cheeks beginning to show outcroppings of scarlet spider veins. He had pale eyes and a button nose, and though he might have been a little heavier than a doctor would have advised, he exuded an air of military efficiency and capability.

The taller man was concentrating on the remarks the shorter man was making about a document the latter was reading and which he held in his right hand.

Suddenly the shorter man stopped squarely in the center of the nave and closed the document and rolled it up in a tube. Holding it in his right hand, he turned and gestured with it toward the other man.

“This… this is very serious business,” he said.

“Oh, without a doubt, Mr. Skerlic,” an obviously bogus name, but since Claude Corsier was using the equally bogus name of Charles Rousset, he felt compelled to refer to him in some appropriate way.

Someone dropped one of the hinged prayer benches on the backs of the pews, and the slap of heavy wood against stone echoed throughout the enormous nave.

“He’s not just any man,” Skerlic said, beginning to construct the scaffolding of reasons that would support the high price he planned to quote.

“No.”

“He has his own intelligence… his own agents…”

“Yes.”

“Very difficult.”

“Surely that, but a man can always be killed, can’t he?”

Mr. Skerlic looked at Rousset with his most sober expression, and then a faint, almost cunning smile flickered across his mouth and then passed away.

Rousset moved to walk on, and Skerlic followed. Neither of them spoke for a while as they idled toward the side aisles of the cathedral and passed under the long enfilade of Gothic arches where a succession of chapels lined the walls on either side of the nave. The older man stopped in front of one of them and gazed up at the stained-glass window above it and with one hand stroked his mustache and goatee. He was silent. “A lovely thing, this window,” he said.

“When do you want this done?” Skerlic was standing slightly behind his companion, not even interested enough in the window to approach the chapel railing.

Rousset did not answer immediately but continued gazing up at the brilliant Gothic illuminations of the window made all the more striking by its setting in the gloomy chapel.

Sighing, and allowing a small shake of his head, the gentlemanly Rousset turned with resignation to his impatient acquaintance. Clasping his hands once more behind him as he faced the brighter nave from the shadows of the side aisle, he said, “As soon as you can do it with certainty. Every hour we can add to his sentence in hell the better.”

Skerlic nodded. He was tapping his right leg with the rolled-up papers. Maybe he should just go back to Belgrade. This didn’t feel right. After all, the target was a man of some significance. And who was this guy?

“No, I don’t care when, Mr. Skerlic. That is, the date is not critical, if that is what you mean. Though if it happened within the next instant it would not be soon enough.”

He stopped. They were standing in front of the chapel, looking out at the milling, pacific wanderers in the dusk light of the cathedral. They might have been two husbands waiting for their tardy wives to read every last word of yet another inscription or to ogle the munificence of silver and gold in yet another chapel.

“As to how it’s done,” Rousset said, “I do have some insight into that. That is, I have some essential ideas about how this man is to be approached. Crucial ideas.”

Skerlic bridled slightly at this encroachment into his profession.

“Your man is nothing special,” he said, risking the case he had been building for a high price. “We’ve done plenty of men who thought they were untouchable. He won’t be the first in line on that score.”

“Oh, I’m not questioning your ability, Mr. Skerlic,” Rousset said reassuringly. “I’m quite familiar with your résumé. No, I mean merely to hand you an advantage.”

Rousset watched Skerlic closely as the Serb’s eyes looked down the length of the cathedral toward the chancel, his attention distracted momentarily by the universe of gilded motes that hung in the light penetrating the clerestory high above them, the slanting rays plummeting a hundred feet to the stone floor below. Rousset guessed the Serb knew little of cathedrals or architecture or religion, yet was he somehow moved by being in the midst of its beauty and immensity? The Serb’s eyes fixed on one of the mote-laden rays and followed it down, down past the triforium, down through the base of heaven, down past the Gothic arches, down past the bundled stone pillars, and finally to the stone floor, where it shattered like a glittering breath.

“I have the advantage already,” Skerlic said, turning suddenly to Rousset with a sober expression, “just by virtue of setting out to do it.”

“But surely you want all the advantages you can get.”

“Of course I do. And I’ll make sure I have them, or I won’t do it.”

Rousset nodded. The little Serb was a prickly bastard. But he was the man he wanted.

“If it were, say, a bomb,” Rousset ventured again with polite persistence, “I could provide you with the place and opportunity. I have the wherewithal to do that. You would be responsible for doing it, of course, but… well, since I know him so well I could save you a great deal of time.”

The Serb pondered the gentleman’s demeanor and finicky manner of dress.

He nodded. “When the time is right, maybe we could use some of your ideas.”

“Then you’re confident,” the tall man said.

“Oh…” Skerlic nodded with conviction, pulling down the corners of his small mouth in a shrug of assurance. The Balkan bitterness, the internecine struggles, the racial hatreds, the criminal enterprises that rushed into the vacuum created by incessant war, all of it had taught him that he had a knack for killing. The more he did it, the better he got and the less it bothered him. As far as he was concerned, everyone was ripe for dying, and he might as well be around to help them along and get paid for doing it. And with modern technology, it was so easy nowadays. Confident? “Oh, yes.”

“Then you will do it?”

“Well”—Skerlic looked away smugly—“I will do it, but I’m not sure you will have me do it. It’s a matter of money.”

“What is your fee?”

“Two hundred thousand. Deutsche marks.”

Rousset stared at the Serb. He was delighted. He was prepared to pay more than that, but he didn’t want to appear as though that kind of money didn’t hurt him. He swallowed deliberately, though there was no need. It was for the Serb.

Skerlic saw the reflex and raised his eyebrows and allowed his eyelids to sink lazily in a “take it or leave it” expression.

“I will agree to that,” Rousset said, a hint of strain in his voice.

Skerlic slapped the side of his leg once with his rolled document. “I may have some need to get a message to you. Do you have an e-mail address?”

They exchanged addresses.

“That’s that, then,” Rousset said. “And the payment?”

“Don’t worry about the payment.” The little Serb looked at the older man. “When I’m ready for it, I’ll want it all.”

“Of course.” Rousset hesitated. “I’ll need proof, naturally, that you’ve done your job.”

“That won’t be a problem.”

They didn’t shake hands. Skerlic simply turned away and walked back out into the vast nave, moving through shafts of light, his own decisive and irreverent footsteps clearly distinguishable from among the shuffling soles of the tourists, until the last shadow swallowed him and he was gone, somewhere near the chapel of St. Wenceslas and the Golden Portal.

Claude Corsier, one hand behind his back, the other tugging pensively at the salt-and-pepper goatee, watched Skerlic leave. He didn’t know exactly what he had expected, but he hadn’t expected that. As a lover of art, he was naturally a little romantic as well, and the dark angel that he had imagined he would meet for this conspiracy had been quite other than this abrupt and testy little Serb with pale eyes and a deteriorating complexion. Still, he did have to admit, there was something of the smell of death about him.

Strand flew to Geneva as early as he could the next morning, chartering a private plane out of Schwechat to avoid the paper trail of the commercial airlines. When he arrived he checked into the Beau-Rivage on the Quai du Mont-Blanc on Lake Geneva.

He called Mara. She was not happy to hear of his delay. He tried to be reassuring, but it was obvious she was not convinced. He couldn’t blame her. Her situation was horrible, and she had very few options for extricating herself. She was largely dependent on him at this point, and he feared that sooner or later she would either find some other options or create some of her own. He was eager to get back to her to dispel the obscurities that were accumulating between them.

He told her to go to Milan and buy a specific kind of laptop. He gave her the e-mail address he wanted her to use and said that all further communication should be through the Internet. Once they made contact, he would give her information about the encryption key he wanted to use.

They talked a few minutes longer. Neither was satisfied with the way the conversation ended.

That afternoon he went to a computer store near the Place Bel-Air and bought the same computer he had told Mara to buy. Then he returned to his room and set it up.

He left the hotel well after dark and walked toward the Rhône on the Quai des Bergues, to Parain’s, a restaurant on the quay overlooking the water with a clear, sparkling view of the lights on the left bank across the Rhône.

He gave the maître d’ his name, and they started toward the tables next to the windows looking onto the lake. When Strand spotted her, sitting with her back to him, he touched the maître d’ on the arm. The man retreated immediately. Strand approached the table and bent down and kissed her neck.