He paused, regarding Strand with glacial disapproval.
“You should have been a philosopher or a theologian, Harry, because real life has always confused you. You would have been better off in a profession where the answer to every real-world problem is just another question. The hard answers in life, the reality of brutal solutions, always made you queasy. You had this . . . exasperating weakness for empathy.”
He paused, and again he almost smiled.
“But you were very good at deception, I’ll give you that. It isn’t much, manipulating shadows, orchestrating subtleties, subterfuge, but you did have a natural ability for it. In fact, you have proved to be altogether too good at it in the end, haven’t you, Harry? Predictably, you have finally succumbed to the single greatest risk of your profession: self-deception. Even at this very moment you are befuddled. The moral gray stretches out from you in every direction, and you have lost your way in the barrens of your own confusion.
“That business about the hospitals . . . about the schools . . . that thin, sanctimonious soup for the weak conscience. I think you actually convinced yourself that those things would absolve you from the guilt of all these deaths that you so willfully pretended would not happen.”
Outside, the summer storm intensified and leaden clouds descended over the city, pulling a shroud of gray over Carlos Place, the little island of plane trees, and the tarnished statue of the inward shrugging nude. The rain quickened and began to fall in drifting sheets. The windows now let in not light, but darkness, and the mandarin red walls of the library deepened and turned a grim, hematic hue.
Strand said nothing. Schrade was right, of course. Strand did feel guilty for all the lives lost. There were ways to rationalize their deaths, ways of escape that sounded reasonable, and he had tried them all. But the guilt remained, a stain with just enough of the truth mixed into it to make it indelible.
Strand walked halfway down the length of the table and stopped a few steps from Schrade, who, having satisfied himself momentarily with his bitter soliloquy, had turned away from Strand again and stared straight out the windows.
Strand had to acknowledge Schrade’s despicable form of bravery. He was still holding the gun, and in the face of the kind of loathing and threatened menace that Schrade had just unleashed, any man might be expected to be provoked to a sudden rash impulse.
Schrade showed no fear that such a thing might happen. Yet he remained seated. He made no effort to leave, a tacit acknowledgment of Strand’s control of the situation. Schrade was not feeling comfortable enough to offer a physical challenge. He recognized the instability of the moment and stared straight ahead, toward the muted light of the storm.
Strand sat on the table again, as before, one leg on the floor, the other one dangling from the knee. He continued to study Schrade. Then he lifted his chin, indicating the two pictures leaning on the bookcase counter behind Schrade.
“The two Schieles,” he said, “the ones you came to see. Do you know who’s offering them?”
Schrade didn’t bother to answer.
Strand looked at Knight. “Tell him, Carrington.”
Knight actually hesitated. Avarice was a strong rival to the survival instinct. Finally he said, “Claude Corsier.”
This time Schrade reacted sharply, glaring at Strand.
“I’m curious about him,” Strand said. “I noticed you didn’t list him among those I’m responsible for killing. How did you miss him, Wolf?”
Schrade was suddenly distracted, not listening closely. Conspiracy was his heart’s milieu. He was good at it, and he fell to it naturally. He understood its intimacies. Only a hint of it in other men leavened his imagination.
“Yeah,” Strand said, “I suspect the Schieles are forgeries. I wasn’t the only one who wanted you to be here.”
Schrade’s eyes turned thoughtfully to the library windows, to the gloom that had swallowed Carlos Place and obscured the buildings on either side, and to the windows of the Connaught, some of which were lighted, some of which were dark.
• • •
Corsier held his breath as he peered into the lenses of the binoculars, his back tight and aching, his headphones in place. He strained to hear more clearly, to see more clearly through the ashen dusk that had descended during the last few minutes of the storm.
“Damn! What do the dials say?”
“He is too far away to be killed outright,” Skerlic answered. “It would tear him up, he might linger . . . but he would eventually die, I think.”
“So would Harry.”
Skerlic said nothing. For a moment he studied Corsier’s sooty silhouette a short distance away, then slowly put his eyes back to his own pair of lenses.
Suddenly Corsier grabbed the telephone off a little table nearby and dialed. He cocked up the earphones on one side of his head, put the receiver to one ear, and bent again to his binoculars.
The telephone rang once, and Corsier saw everyone in the room turn to look at it. It rang a second time, a third. No one in Knight’s library moved.
“Come on, Harry,” Corsier coaxed under his breath. “Answer it . . . answer it.”
Suddenly Schrade leaped up, grabbed the telephone, and threw it, jerking its cord out of the wall.
“Oh! God . . .”
Corsier slammed down the receiver.
“I need to do it,” Skerlic said, his voice steady. “While he is standing.”
“No!”
“If he moves any farther away . . .”
“No!” Corsier had practically crawled into the room on the other side of the rain. “No one is talking.”
• • •
Schrade’s outburst brought everyone to their feet. Tension filled the room. Schrade’s attention was still focused on the windows. No one said a word.
Strand knew exactly what he was thinking.
What happened next covered a span of twelve seconds.
Schrade suddenly turned and lunged for Strand. But Strand had been expecting it, and with a full swing of his arm he hit Schrade on the side of the head with his fist, staggering him. Having missed his opportunity and dazed by the blow, Schrade thought only of getting away from the windows. He fell back away from the table to take refuge behind the column of bookcases that separated the two broad windows. Knight, seeing that Schrade perceived a threat from the windows, fell back with him, and the two of them stopped against the bookcase cabinets, their backs to Schiele’s naked women.
• • •
The two explosions were horrific.
A surprising amount of detail can be absorbed by the brain and retained with remarkable clarity in the infinitesimal duration between the blast of an explosion and its effects. Strand was too close—twice as close as Mara—to retain more than a flash, but the detail of what his brain perceived was as precise as if the instant had been photographed for him to study: Schrade was lifted, disemboweled, and hurled in halves across the distance that separated him from Strand. His rib cage preceded his lower torso and legs, which followed like a whorling, unraveling ball of twine thrown whipping and twirling into the air. His head hurtled past Strand’s face, whistling like a banshee, far in front of the rest of him.
EPILOGUE
QUAI DES GRANDS AUGUSTINS, PARIS
Mara Song sat at a table by the window and watched the early autumn light soften to a pale peach on the spires of Sainte-Chapelle across the Seine. The lunch-hour crowds had long since cleared out of the restaurant and the few customers who remained were outnumbered by the waiters, who generally ignored them as they went about their business of changing tablecloths, sweeping the floors, preparing for the evening clientele.
Eugene Payton came into the restaurant and spotted her immediately, waving off a waiter who had started toward him. Mara turned her face away and listened to his footsteps on the floor, slowing as he drew near. When he stopped, she looked up.
“Well, it’s good to see you again, finally,” Payton said.
Mara nodde
d dismissively.
“No, honestly.” Payton grinned. “It is.” He unbuttoned his suit coat, pulled out the chair opposite her, and sat down. “We’ve talked so much by telephone and fax and e-mail during the last couple of months that it doesn’t seem as though it’s been that long since Camp Peary.”
“It seems that long to me,” she said. “And more.”
Gene Payton was second in command of the Foreign Intelligence Service. Strand had said that Payton was among the best of them. He had always been on the fast track to the top, and he understood the intelligence business in a way that very few did. He believed that the FIS was important, that it was even essential. He did not believe that it had a holy mission, which made a big difference in the way he saw the role and responsibilities of his officers.
“You’re looking good, Mara,” Payton said, clasping his hands on the table after ordering a cup of coffee from the waiter. He rigorously avoided letting his eyes go near her scars. She imagined he had rehearsed it, repeated to himself over and over not to look at them. He must have decided that he would candidly refer to her wounds right at the beginning. That would seem open and honest, without being gratuitous or unnaturally oblivious. “We were worried when we saw the photographs after your first operation.” He smiled. “But I can see those concerns were unwarranted. You look great.”
“I don’t have any complaints,” she said. Fine. She didn’t want him to say any more about it. He had something to tell her and she wanted him to get on with it. There was no need for small talk, as if their meeting was social, as if they could actually relax with each other. Cordiality seemed ill-suited to the circumstances.
Payton paused a moment as the waiter left his coffee. He poured in some cream and stirred.
“Okay,” he said, putting down his spoon. “I’ll get right to the point.” Payton was no fool. Whatever else, he was not that. “I can’t say that the final decision on all of this was unanimous, but it was a solid decision. Everyone understands that it’s the decision. Anybody who doesn’t like it can take a hike. It’s that solid.”
Mara lifted her glass and sipped the Bordeaux she had been nursing for the past twenty minutes.
“FIS is walking away from it, Mara,” he said. “Officially, unofficially, on the record, off the record, casually, formally, on the books, off the books, any way you can describe it. We’re out.”
Mara couldn’t help herself. She dropped her head and closed her eyes. She was suddenly weak, as if she had received an injection of morphine. Jesus Christ.
“I’ve got to tell you,” Payton went on, “letting the money get away from them, that killed them. Some of them couldn’t believe it. The scheme has their grudging admiration, but if it hadn’t been for the offsetting circumstances, the grudging part would have far outweighed the admiration part. For some of them, it always will.”
“What about the investigation? Where do they all stand on it?”
Payton cautiously took a sip of coffee. “Scotland Yard and the Bundeskriminalamt,” he said, “are inundated with possibilities, hundreds of leads, thousands of names, scores of new relationships and connections. They’ll be investigating Schrade’s assassination for a decade. They’ll never solve it. The German intelligence community is shut tight on this. So are the British. So are we.”
He looked out the window to the Seine, and Mara thought he was trying to decide whether or not to bring up something else.
“The wild card was that the international media got hold of the information about Schrade’s double life first. That pissed off the law enforcement agencies and the intelligence community. Rumor got way ahead of reality. The gaudy headlines made everyone cringe: ‘RECLUSIVE BILLIONAIRE TIED TO INTERNATIONAL CRIME SYNDICATES. GERMAN BILLIONAIRE LINKED TO GLOBAL CRIME LORDS.’ That kind of thing was alarming all of us. It could’ve gotten out of hand and pulled us all into a full-blown international scandal.”
Mara remained silent.
“A lot of questions had to be answered. People are still scrambling. Once the cat was out of the bag, the media wanted to know what else was in the bag and what it was doing in there.” He paused, looked down at his cup. “Whoever did that created a firestorm.”
She said nothing. He wasn’t going to get any reaction from her.
Payton took another sip of coffee. “But the mitigating factor was that the media received no information connecting Schrade to the FIS, or to any intelligence service. Just information about his crime world connections. That gave the whole intelligence community deniability when the inevitable spy rumors started flying around. No one ever definitively tied Schrade to any agency.”
“That was good.”
“Yeah”—Payton gazed at the quayside again—“that was good.”
Another couple left the café. The place was practically closed.
Payton turned back to Mara. “As far as your situation was concerned, the clincher was the information about Bill Howard.” He paused. “You know, Mara, we didn’t have a clue about him. The son of a bitch, he might’ve retired and we’d never have known.”
“Have you found him yet?” Mara asked.
Payton shook his head in disgust. “No, and with the kind of money he’s got he’ll be able to buy a hell of a lot of ghost help. This could take a long time. Plus, it’s got to be done in silence. Rules of the game.”
She nodded.
“Anyway, everyone knew you didn’t have to do that. I mean, it worked to your advantage, it was a score on your side of the ledger.”
“That’s not why—”
“I know, I know,” Payton held up his hand to stop her, “that’s what I mean. Everybody knew that, and that’s why it gave you the edge.”
He was silent a moment, looking at the buildings on the Ile de la Cité. Mara looked out to the Seine also. Her face ached, but it didn’t matter anymore. Time would pass, the scars would heal. The ones on her body, anyway. Right now was not the time to think about the others.
“One question,” Payton said, turning back to Mara. “This is for me—just me, believe it or not.”
Mara did believe it. “What’s that?”
“How did you get away from there? I know Mayfair was immobile with shock after the explosion. It’s not exactly on Scotland Yard’s hot patrol list. The weather was bad. The response time was bad. But still . . . shit, you were both blown up.”
A simple question. It seemed ingenuous enough. But within the last year her life had undergone irreversible changes. Ingenuous. The word had almost lost its meaning.
“I can’t talk about that,” she said, dropping her eyes to the last deep mulberry sips of wine left in her glass. “If it’s over, it’s over.” She hesitated, then looked up at him. “I don’t know how you people do this, how you make a life out of it. There are always more questions than answers, more tragedies than triumphs . . . and more secrets than all of it put together.”
Even for a man as circumspect as Gene Payton, even for a guy who knew the ropes and the rules as well as he did, the frustration was written all over his face. Still, he was destined to disappointment. That was the nature of his business. Almost all of the men and women in the intelligence profession died taking an entire nightful of secrets with them.
They visited a little longer, but they really had nothing to say to each other beyond the business of business. Though Mara’s connection to Payton and the FIS had been intense and indelible, it had been brief. And it had been stormy. She had breached trusts; she had abandoned loyalties. Regardless of the extenuating circumstances, the bridges lay smoldering and in ruins. There just wasn’t anything else to say.
Payton left. They would never see each other again. There would never be any need to.
• • •
Mara reached up and absently touched the side of her face, the tips of her fingers tracing the silky surfaces of the tender, helical scars. Touching them, checking them, had become a habit. She was trying to break it. She was the only patron remaining in the c
afé nearly half an hour later when the door from the Quai des Grands-Augustins opened again and Claude Corsier walked in. He was dressed like the most correct member of the Académie Française. He walked over and stood looking down at her. She was never self-conscious about the scars with Corsier. She always had the feeling that when he looked at her they disappeared. It was a way he had.
“Sit down, Claude.”
Corsier shook his head at a questioning waiter and sat down.
“I followed him for a while,” he said. “There was no one else.” He had kept his mustache and goatee. The look suited him.
“They’re walking away from it,” Mara said. “They’re not going to come after us. Your name never came up. It’s over.”
“My God.” Corsier gasped and sat back. He had been fatalistic about the outcome. In the three months since the explosion Corsier had been glum. He had gained little peace from his deliverance from Schrade. Too much—and too many—had been lost in the process.
The Swiss turned his face away to the street, and Mara studied his profile. Corsier had been horrified that he had allowed the Serb to deceive him about the precision of the explosives. He should have known better. And he was horrified that Skerlic had detonated both bombs, slaughtering Carrington Knight for no reason at all. What he had found most difficult to live with was that he himself had benefited enormously from Knight’s death. Knight was the only person who could have tied Corsier to the assassination. He had been the only unresolved flaw in Corsier’s plan, the one reason Corsier had resigned himself to being a fugitive for the rest of his life.
He had been lucky, but the price had been steep, and he would not pay it off in a lifetime.
Though Mara had been badly hurt, none of her wounds had been life threatening. Because the Schiele forgeries had been sitting on the bookcase countertop, above the level of the library table, and because Mara had been twice the distance from the explosion as Strand, the extra millisecond had given her time to react. The top of the heavy table had shielded her from the greater force of the blast. By the time an appalled Corsier had run across Carlos Place, Mara had already dragged Strand, bleeding badly, down to the first floor, away from the fire and smoke. Corsier had gotten them out the back door, into Mount Row, and away from the building as the crowds had begun to gather in the rain in Carlos Place.
The Color of Night Page 38
