The lights suddenly came on, clearly visible through the windows at the top of the wide doors that swung open to give access to the double-car interior. As he started his car, a curtain or some kind of drape was pulled across the windows, creating a glow through the cloth.
Having put the car in gear, Corsier turned on the parking lights and idled around the corner and into the mews, moving past the other garages and doorways before pulling to a stop outside the address at which he had an appointment.
He cut the car’s motor, reached over into the rear seat, and picked up the two Schiele forgeries, which were carefully wrapped for protection. He locked the car and walked around to the doorway slightly recessed into the wall beside the garage doors and rang the bell. The door was poorly lighted by a single lamp on a curved bar coming down from the wall above, and Corsier could see vines of some sort growing all around the doorway and over his head.
Waiting for an answer, he looked around the mews. It was not exactly an upscale neighborhood, not ratty, but solidly lower middle class. He smelled curry cooking and tried to identify from which of the open second-story windows it might be wafting. His heart began tripping rapidly when a motor scooter entered the opposite end of the L-shaped mews and pulled up to a doorway several removed from where he was standing. He turned away, took a firmer grip on the forgeries, and then flinched when the door opened suddenly.
“Okay, come in,” Skerlic said, backing away, opening the door wider. He was wearing an undershirt and a pair of baggy trousers. He smelled of gin and cigarettes.
They immediately turned into the garage area, but not before the curious Corsier got a glimpse into the kitchen, where an old woman with her head covered Islamic fashion sat spraddle legged in a plastic chair, watching a tiny television that flickered pale light into her face.
“In here,” Skerlic said, gripping his arm, hurrying him on.
Inside the garage a workbench made of a thick piece of plywood placed across sawhorses sat in the center of the space, lighted by two light bulbs partially covered with improvised pasteboard shades. Woodworking tools were scattered about on the bench, which was littered with wood shavings, an electric drill, and various gadgets that Corsier did not recognize. In the middle of all this, resting front down on a ragged towel to protect their surfaces, were the two picture frames that Corsier had sent from France to an address other than this one.
Standing on the other side of the bench was a very pregnant woman who appeared to be somewhere in her middle thirties. She also was wearing the traditional Islamic women’s headscarf, but her misshapen dress was Western and clearly not designed as a maternity garment. Its hem was hiked up in front to compensate for the additional volume it was so awkwardly covering. She had dusky, Middle Eastern coloring and features. Her left hand, which was gripping some sort of wood-carving tool, rested on the rounded shelf of her protruding stomach. Her right hand, holding a smoldering cigarette, rested on the edge of the bench. She was staring at Corsier as though she could pierce his mind and discern any disingenuity he might utter in the next few moments. It was an oddly tense situation, almost a confrontation.
Skerlic said, “Those are the pictures?”
“Yes . . . yes,” Corsier said quickly, pulling his eyes away from the woman.
Skerlic held out a thick hand, and Corsier gave him the drawings.
“Be careful with them,” Corsier managed to say. He felt as if he had risked the dark woman’s wrath, but the drawings were invaluable.
Skerlic nodded, unimpressed, and turned and leaned the drawings up against the garage wall. He gestured to the woman.
“Tell him how it works.”
The woman flicked her hot eyes at Skerlic, then turned them on Corsier.
“Move up to the table,” she said. “I’ll go over it step by step.”
Corsier was astonished. Her English had no Mediterranean accent. It was American.
She turned slightly and leaned the side of her tight belly against the edge of the plywood. She gestured with the hand that held the cigarette, strewing ashes among the wood shavings. Huge damp splotches of perspiration stained the underarms of her dress and the material between her distended breasts.
“Your two frames,” she said. “They’re good, thick and heavy like we needed. In each of them I’ve routed out a groove an inch wide, an inch deep.” She ran the middle finger of the hand holding the cigarette around the edges of the nearest frame. “It’s cut to within a half a centimeter of the carved surface on the front of the frame.”
She reached into the junk on the table and picked up a scrap of metal channeling as shiny as chrome.
“I made a frame of this stuff,” she said, holding up the piece of metal to one eye and looking at him through the U-shaped channeling, “just slightly smaller than the groove so that it would fit snugly inside. Okay?” She tossed the scrap into a pile of shavings. “That shit right there,” she said, pointing to the channeling, “has special properties. The little bit that we got cost us more than anything else in this operation. That special.”
With her middle finger, the remaining stump of cigarette smoldering next to it, she scratched her belly at the point where Corsier imagined her navel must be, taking into consideration its substantial displacement due to her condition.
“Then I took the plastic explosive and rolled it into a fat noodle,” the woman went on. “I laid it into the channeling and smoothed it out, pressing it in, packing it in until the metal groove was completely full, no air pockets, just metal to plastic contact, hundred percent. Then I laid the packed channeling into the groove, facedown, so that the explosive is jammed up to the wood just under the gilded surface of the front of the frame. Okay?”
Without even paying attention to what she was doing, out of habit, she field stripped the cigarette, rolling it between her fingers until the ash, the few remaining grains of tobacco, and the bit of paper were all disintegrated. All the while she was looking at the picture frames.
“This is a cool deal,” she said. She straightened and pressed her fists into her lower back as she leaned forward and backward. She looked at Corsier, and with her right hand she pressed the material of her dress down between her breasts, daubing the perspiration. “Ever been pregnant?” She didn’t grin. She asked it as though it were a straight, legitimate question. Her dark eyes waited for an answer.
Corsier felt the beginnings of a nervous smile, but her somber expression stopped him.
“Uh . . . no.”
“Don’t ever do it,” she said. “That little shiver you get from the sex is a good thing, but it’s definitely not worth nine months of complete biological upheaval.”
Corsier glanced at Skerlic. The little Serb was perspiring also. He lifted a fat hand and drank some gin from an absurdly filthy glass.
The woman leaned against the table again, this time gesturing with the wood-carving tool.
“Here and here,” she said, getting back to her explanation, “detonators. Radio operated. Okay? And here”—she jabbed at two points on either side of the center of the frame—“little mikes. They’re going to look like some kind of bracket pieces when I get through with them. From the front they’re just going to be a deep groove in the ornate carving. That’s why I had to have this kind of frame.”
“Microphones?”
She raised her eyebrows. “Got to know when to detonate,” she explained. “I was under the impression that this is a no-margin-for-error, no-fuck-up situation here. Very serious.”
Corsier nodded.
“Well, then, you want to be able to identify your target. The way this is designed, when you hear his voice in focus, at a particular decibel level”—she flicked her eyes at Skerlic—“he’ll have the audio equipment to determine when that happens—then your target’s head is right in the center of the frame, the right distance, presenting you with maximum exposure. He’s up close, examining the drawing . . . asking for it.” She jerked her head at Skerlic. “He presses the button
. The explosion’s going to take the guy’s head clean off his shoulders.”
She straightened up, obviously miserable.
“What you’ve got here is a humane hit,” she said, groping around in the wood shavings for her cigarettes. She took one out of the pack and lighted it with a plastic turquoise lighter, which she then tossed back into the wood shavings. “The channeling, like I said, is special shit, a metal alloy that will control the direction of the blast out the front of the frame in a concentrated pattern. Minimal, if any, collateral damage. However, woe to the target.” She raised a flattened hand and kissed it front and back. “Praise be to Allah.”
Claude Corsier stared at the woman. The accumulative effect of her manner and her lethal monologue froze his spine. This woman was a living, waking nightmare.
She leaned against the garage wall and looked at Corsier with the same dark expression she had turned on him when he had walked into the room. She was through.
Corsier looked at the perspiring Skerlic. “What next?” he asked.
“We will finish the frames—the microphones will take some fine tuning. The radio frequencies are very precise, very important. Then we will put in the drawings.”
“They are easily damaged,” Corsier reminded. “I can’t stress that enough.”
“I know this,” Skerlic said impatiently. “I know this.” He took another drink of gin.
Corsier wondered how well the gin and explosives mixed. For a jarring second he had the irrational fear that the garage might explode spontaneously, ignited by the fumes on Skerlic’s breath.
“What next?” Corsier repeated.
“You will have to set a date with the dealer,” Skerlic said. “I want you to get a room at the Connaught Hotel. I want to work from there. It’s a perfect location. Perfect.”
“Christ. The Connaught.” Because of its convenient location, Corsier had stayed there many times before when dealing with Carrington Knight. It struck him as bizarre to use this grand old place as a staging point for Schrade’s assassination. But if that was what it took . . . At least the hotel staff were well acquainted with him. It was not always easy to get a room at the Connaught. Prior familiarity was always an advantage, and an absolute necessity if one wanted a room on short notice.
“You have to go,” Skerlic said. “We have to finish.”
“Yes . . . yes,” Corsier said. He looked at the woman. It seemed grotesque to thank her, but he felt compelled to say something. “Good . . . good,” he said, nodding. “Good,” he repeated as he turned to go. She was staring at him out of floating coils of smoke, a dark Medusa.
CHAPTER 37
PARIS
Strand walked to the end of the Boulevard des Capucines, continued on to the Boulevard des Italiens and then to Boulevard Montmartre. The sidewalks were crowded, and the end-of-the-day traffic was heavy, which was good. He went into the Passage des Panoramas and stayed in its narrow corridors for some time, wandering, waiting, watching, before he was back on the streets, following Rue St. Marc to Richelieu and then on to the Métro station at Rue Drouot, where he descended, allowing himself to be caught up and swept along with the crowds. He got onto a train and then got off again just before it pulled away.
With his mind replaying Obando’s revelations, he watched the faces closely, monitoring the pedestrian flow, looking for another body that might suddenly turn against the grain as he did. The cynical Colombian had inadvertently confirmed Lu’s report of Howard’s treachery. Strand wondered how long it had been going on, if it had been going on when Strand was still with the FIS.
As he moved through the crowds, dawdling and reversing, his thoughts never left the conversation he had just had with Mario Obando. It was time to face up to the fact that his scheme was failing miserably.
Finally, satisfied that he was not being followed, he headed back to the Quatre Septembre.
There was a brasserie near the hotel, a medium-size, bustling place a few steps below street level. Large windows across the front afforded a view through a wrought-iron grille on the sidewalk. After dark, the lights from the street played crazily upon the murky panes of the windows like sparks flying up from a fire.
They went there immediately, in the dusk. There was an early crowd, young people from the couture shops and studios not far away, but they were not loud.
After the waiter came and took their orders, Strand looked at Mara and took a deep breath.
“Damn,” he said, shaking his head slowly.
“You want to go first?” she asked. She was wearing a one-piece cotton knit dress of navy blue. With her black hair and carmine lips she was a striking figure.
He told her everything, even of Romy’s relationship to Schrade. She was shocked and several times looked away as if trying to comprehend it all.
“I don’t know why I didn’t tell you before,” he said. “It doesn’t make any difference, except that it makes everything even more horrible.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
“That was another reason she was able to pull off the embezzlement so well. He trusted her more than the other money managers he had working for him. She stretched his confidence in her to the limit. It bought us a lot of time, gave us more room to maneuver.”
Mara stared at him. He knew what she was going to say.
“She must have hated him,” she said. “I know she loved you, that she would have done anything for you, but . . . she must have hated him so much.”
Strand looked away. Even getting close to that subject made him suddenly empty, as if the marrow were being withdrawn from his bones by the sheer gravity of the sadness of that story.
Mara reached out and put her hand on his. “Harry”—she squeezed his hand until he turned and looked at her—“thank you for telling me. I’m grateful that you felt you could tell me.”
For a moment they said nothing as they looked at each other, then Mara took her hand away from his.
“You want to hear about Howard?”
Strand nodded.
“I got him on the Internet,” she said, swallowing. “I told him I was confused, scared, didn’t know what to do. I confessed that I’d fallen in love with you, but I didn’t know if I could just turn my back on the FIS, the U.S., all that. I didn’t want to be a traitor. If that was the logical extension of what I was doing, if that was the way it was going to be interpreted, I didn’t know if I could handle it.”
“How did he take it?”
“I don’t think he was buying it at first. I couldn’t get a real good feel for nuance on the Internet.”
“How did you leave it?”
“He wants to meet. I said I’d get back to him. I kept it open, just as you said.” She hesitated. “But Harry, how in the hell could you ever do anything with him again?”
Strand knew what she was thinking.
“We just don’t want to cut him off, that’s all,” he said. “We don’t want to cut off anybody. We need as much flexibility as possible.”
Their sandwiches came, and they stopped talking for a few minutes while they ate, each of them pursuing separate thoughts. The sounds of the brasserie returned to Strand’s consciousness: the low gabble of the couture crowd, the clink of china and flatware, the hum of indistinguishable conversations.
After a while Mara wiped her mouth, took a drink of her coffee, and looked at him.
“Then who’s next? Lodato or Grachev?”
Strand thought a moment. He might as well tell her straight out.
“I’m not going to waste my time with either one of them,” he said. “They’re going to give me the same reasons for not going after Schrade as the other two did. Schrade’s way out ahead of me on this. He’s made sure that all of them are finding him to be very useful right now. I’ve told you, he understands the psychology of revenge. Money, enough of it, will even buy off hate. As long as it keeps coming in.”
Mara leaned toward him. “Harry, go to the FIS. They can get between you and Schrade. I know
they can.”
“It would never happen.”
“You can hand them a mole, for God’s sake!”
“And I worked for that mole for a dozen years. What kinds of questions does that raise, Mara? After stealing millions from Schrade, what kind of credibility do I have? You want to know the truth? They’d rather have the money I took from Schrade than the mole. Exposing Howard would mean tons of bad publicity for them. Getting the money would mean tons of good publicity. They can retire Howard and sweep him under the carpet. He can be made to go away very easily.”
“Then you expose him. Threaten to go public if they don’t give you—us—protection.”
“Going public is character suicide. It wouldn’t take much at all for the FIS to provide ‘proof ’ to the media that I was part of Howard’s rogue operations. Don’t forget, I was already one step in that direction by agreeing to run Schrade in the first place.”
She looked at him steadily across the table. “You’re making a lot of assumptions again,” she said.
“I worked for them for twenty years.”
She paused. “Then . . . what, Harry?”
“I’m working on a couple of ideas.”
“Like what?”
“Mara, I’ve really got to sort some things out in my mind, okay? Give me some breathing room.”
Her dark eyes searched his. As they looked at each other he had the feeling that she knew exactly where he was going with this. She knew, but she didn’t press him on it. She was giving him room, giving him time to get his mind around an unthinkable alternative. She knew what he was dealing with, and he guessed that it frightened her as much as it did him. It had to. But she waited.
“I love you, Harry.”
It wasn’t what he had expected.
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The Color of Night Page 23
