CHAPTER 1

VENICE, SESTIERE DI DORSODURO

It was the middle of the afternoon, and the windows of the old palazzo were partially opened to the crisp spring air. The study, filled with books and artwork obsessively arranged and cataloged and situated, overlooked the narrow canal, and the light that the room received was reflected off the buildings opposite, their weathered colors throwing off pale hues of apricot and lilac, wan ocher and coral and vanilla.

The sounds of the canal rose up on the summer heat and drifted into the room as well, carrying the voices of tourists strolling on the small fondamenta, the slosh of a passing gondola, the voices of merchants unloading produce from a small barge, water lapping under the bridge just beyond the window, a woman’s laughter.

“Just put them here,” the German said to the dealer, spreading his arms out over the long refectory table at which he sat and that he used as a working desk. He had moved aside orderly piles of paperwork and books to provide a clean surface.

The dealer nodded deferentially and approached the table with an oversize leather portfolio. His name was Claude Corsier, and he was a private art dealer from Geneva. He specialized in the drawings of artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the secondary market. That is, deceased artists. His unusual ceremonious manner was not a demonstration of particular respect for the German client. Corsier was known for his courtesy to everyone, billionaire and housemaid alike. It was said that his manner was a reflection of his lifelong respect for the artwork in which he traded.

Corsier put his portfolio on a small, marble-topped side table a step or two from his client and opened it. He was a large man, with big hands that one normally associated with farmworkers and laborers. But Corsier’s hands were pale and soft, his nails manicured; they had never been darkened by the sun or stained by soil or lifted anything heavier than a folio reference book. His burly physique was genetic, not occupational. He had been bookish since childhood.

Each drawing was enclosed in its own acid-free paper folder to protect it. After opening the first folder, Corsier turned it around and placed it on the table before the German.

“First, the Italians you wanted to see. Giovanni Boldini. Becoming very difficult to find these days. Six images here, and a small, quick sketch of a hand on the back of the sheet. These are studies for portraits, it seems, but the finished work, if it was ever completed, has never been identified.” Leaning over the refectory table, he gently pointed to an image with the barrel end of a marbled fountain pen. The pen was less intrusive than using one’s finger. “The turned head is quite good here,” he said.

The German, whose name was Wolfram Schrade, nodded, bending over the sketch to look at it closely. He picked up a horn-handled magnifying glass from the table and examined each image on the sheet of paper. There were six.

“These are very nice,” Schrade said. His accent was heavy, but attractive, sophisticated.

“I like them,” Corsier agreed modestly.

The German picked up the paper and looked at the drawing on the back. Corsier watched him as he turned and held it up to the diffused light from the windows. He was a handsome man, tall and lean, in his early fifties. His hair was thick and coarse, and Corsier had always marveled that it very nearly was the exact color of old vellum. His features were fine, a straight, narrow nose, a rather wide mouth with a full lower lip. The irises of his eyes were odd, almost lacking in any pigmentation at all.

Without commenting further, Schrade closed the folder, set it aside, and looked at Corsier, who was already turning to get a second one.

“Ettore Tito,” Corsier said, placing the next opened folder before his client. “Studies for La Perla, now in a private collection. Very fine nudes. . . . The treatment here”—again the fountain pen pointed out a delicate line—“is exquisite, the way he handled the shadow at this concavity on the shoulder.”

Schrade closed the folder and set it aside with the other one.

“And this artist is most difficult to find. . . .” Corsier was unfolding a third folder.

The presentation took up the better part of an hour, and by the time Corsier had shown his client nine works, the most he had ever shown him at one sitting, the light coming into the room from the canal had become richer with the lower angle of the sun. The circular rulli piombati panes in the Renaissance windows were now concentric smears of pastel.

The drawings were stacked at Schrade’s left elbow, and Corsier stood in front of the refectory table and folded his soft hands, looking down at the seated client.

“I will have all of them,” Schrade said.

Corsier made a slight “as you wish” gesture with his hands. He had sold this man a fortune over the past dozen years, and this lot alone was a small fortune in itself.

“A drink to celebrate?” the German asked.

Corsier tilted his head forward, a bow of assent. Schrade got up from behind his desk and stepped across the marble floor to a sixteenth-century cabinet of dark walnut and opened the doors to reveal bottles of liquor. Two bottles were already opened, and he poured Corsier a glass of Prosecco, the dealer’s favored drink with which to close a sale, and a glass of Bordolino for himself.

“Please, sit for a while,” he said, giving the aperitivo to Corsier and gesturing to a pair of heavy, X-frame wooden armchairs nearer the windows. When they were seated, the German raised his glass and said, “To resolution.”

Corsier was already drinking the Prosecco when he realized the toast didn’t make any sense to him. He was still swallowing, relishing the movement of the drink on his palate, when Schrade continued.

“I assume you’ve observed your usual discretion about bringing these to me,” he said.

“Of course.”

“There is no record that you’ve come here?”

“None.”

“You’ve always been reliable on that score,” Schrade conceded.

“All of my clients require discretion.” Corsier took another large drink of the Prosecco.

The next few minutes were spent in casual conversation about drawings. The German was a voracious collector, and Corsier knew that he had large personal collections in his homes in Paris and Berlin. More than likely the drawings Corsier had just sold him would go to one of these two locations, where his client had elaborate archival spaces for exhibiting his collections.

“As for the matter of payment,” Schrade said offhandedly, “I’m sure you won’t mind if I settle with you later.”

Corsier’s last sip of Prosecco stuck in his throat and refused to go down. He struggled with it as his thoughts suddenly swarmed, turning, tacking, veering first in one direction, then in another, as he tried to concentrate on the most important implications of what his client had just said.

First of all, this was now the second time. Wolfram Schrade already owed Corsier for a group of symbolists’ drawings that Corsier had brought him four months before, perhaps the best group of symbolists that Corsier had ever had in his possession and which he had collected over a period of nearly a year, specifically with this client in mind. There had been an even dozen drawings of extraordinary quality. It had come to 1.3 million Deutsche marks. Corsier had taken them to the German’s Berlin home. Where he had left them. With only a promise of payment.

That was not so extraordinary. It wasn’t an entirely comfortable position to be in, but he had known his client for twelve years and had never had any trouble collecting. So he had taken a deep breath. . . .

Now this. Nine drawings by the increasingly popular nineteenth-century Italian realists. Almost a million Deutsche marks. The German’s assumption that Corsier would carry him yet again was appalling. Especially since in the corner behind the refectory table sat a computer. Its screen was dark, but a small lime green light burned on the keyboard, proving to Corsier that it still had a heartbeat. On more than a few occasions Schrade had turned around at his desk—in Paris or Berlin or here—and paid Corsier instantly from his accounts in Liechtenstein or Cyprus. So Corsier knew that it could be done. He was just an electrical spark away from two million Deutsche marks.

He managed to swallow the Prosecco.

The more serious implication of Schrade’s remark, the one that had caused a sudden empty space in Corsier’s chest, a huge cavity without tissue or feeling or breath, was the implication that these two reversals in their relationship—for, to a man of Corsier’s sensibilities, they were irrefutably reversals—were premonitory.

Schrade knew!

Corsier looked at his client, whose neutral coloring was a perfect foil for the dusty colors that fell on him, the failing light passing through the concentric striations in the small panes of the windows. He heard a gondola, the thick chuck-chuck-chuck of the oar in the rowlock as the boat was propelled along the canal. He concentrated, desperate to absorb everything in these last moments. Was that a cat mewing? A barrel, or something like it, being rolled along the fondamenta? What could it be if not a barrel? A cart?

All of this aural sensitivity had gone through his brain in an instant, no longer than it had taken him to swallow the imperceptibly hesitant Prosecco. After all, Corsier was a professional. He had been an operator most of his adult life, and he had done nearly all of his work in the brutal, high-stakes world of wealthy men. He had survived, and he had been successful. Corsier had brass balls, as a matter of fact. Though, to be sure, he himself would never, ever, have expressed it in such crass language.

“Oh,” he said, lowering his glass. “This is very awkward for me, I’m afraid.” He knitted his brow and looked squarely at Schrade. “This seriously affects my liquidity. After accommodating your last request . . . well, this is most difficult.”

“Difficult?” Schrade smiled ever so slightly. “Well, I certainly understand the awkwardness of a loss of . . . liquidity.”

It was a pointed remark. Corsier knew that his client was never going to baldly state the real subject of this conversation. Corsier pursed his mouth thoughtfully as though he were trying to ferret out a mutually agreeable resolution. In fact, he was concentrating as he had never concentrated before in his life, bringing to bear his entire genetic code on one single thing: not bolting for the door.

He was stunned at how complete, how all consuming, was his fear.

How would it happen? A gunshot? Poison? Torture to make him tell everything, even things he could no longer remember himself, and then end it with simple asphyxiation? Why this charade first? This cruel pretense of civility? He couldn’t imagine, but he struggled with the nausea and continued to play his own part flawlessly.

“This is really quite irregular. Very difficult for me.”

“I’m sorry,” Schrade said, which he clearly was not.

“How long do you think you will need to delay payment?”

“Payment? Oh, I plan to resolve this as quickly as possible.”

The double meanings shimmered before Corsier’s sightless eyes. Venice, he thought, what a monumental surprise to die in Venice. He would never have imagined it. Never.

• • •

As he rode in his host’s private launch back down the Grand Canal on his way to Marco Polo Airport, Claude Corsier was numb with fear. He was also tremulous with hope. There was the launch driver and a companion. After they passed through the mouth of the Grand Canal and skirted San Giorgio Maggiore, more than ten kilometers remained across the lagoon to the airport. He looked at the two men in front of him. Was one of them the executioner? Surely not. They hardly paid him any attention.

My God, Corsier thought, if he ever got away from this situation, he would disappear so thoroughly that he would become as invisible as breath.

The wind picked up and the launch slapped the waves with a hard, rhythmic jolt, throwing a light spray from the hull. A short distance away he could see the public vaporettos filled with tourists headed to the same destination. He fought to avoid hyperventilation. His thoughts swung wildly back and forth between black, oppressive fear and an almost giddy exhilaration.

Then he thought of the drawings. Holy Mary. The wretched German was going to get twenty-one of some of the finest drawings Corsier had ever possessed . . . for absolutely nothing.

 

 

CHAPTER 2

HOUSTON

The first time he saw her was through the clear, moonstone colors of water. Suddenly she entered his peripheral vision, gliding past him in the opposite direction, her long legs close together and scissoring gently, trailing an unstrung necklace of tiny silver bubbles.

She wore a black, membrane-sheer suit, and her dark hair, pulled back from her face and held in place by a single band at the nape of her neck, spread out behind her like a billow of ink let loose in the water. Though she wore a small pair of swimming goggles that partially obscured her eyes, he could see from the shape of her face and mouth that she was Asian.

That morning she got out of the pool only a few minutes before he did. By the time he had completed his last lap and pulled himself from the water, she was nearly finished drying off, bending to towel between her thighs, her wet hair pulled to one side and draped over her shoulder. Without acknowledging him, she turned and walked away beside the pool toward the women’s dressing room, nonchalant, as though they had done this together for decades, leaving a code of damp footprints behind her.

• • •

At seven o’clock in the morning the Olympic-size lap pool at the River Oaks Swimming Club is deserted. The water is glass still. The fresh early light, entering obliquely through the upper windows, refracts off the arched angles of the lofty groined ceiling and plunges into the water, penetrating all the way to the pale floor of the pool. It is quiet.

Every day for nearly four years Harry Strand had come here to swim, well before even the earliest club member appeared at eight o’clock. It was a routine he had interrupted only once, for a period of three weeks, when his wife died. That had been eleven months ago. Her death had shaken him more deeply than anything that had ever happened to him. She had come to him late and had left him too soon, a flash of clarity in a life tangled with obscurities. He was approaching fifty when she died, and she had been eleven years younger. Though they were not in their youth anymore, they had no reason to believe that time was short. Her sudden death had sent him reeling, wobbling to the far edges, where he had teetered precariously, dangerously close to breaking down, before wobbling back toward a holding pattern, to the old, anxious tensions of former times.

For the three rare years of his marriage to Romy, he had actually felt as though he had accrued some real measure of an elusive emotional equanimity. She had redeemed him from a lifetime of dissembling and increasing self-dissatisfaction and had taught him to believe in the simple reality of virtue. Then she was gone.

The morning swim was one of the things he did to keep his brain from flying apart. It was a place and a way to begin the day with a reliable rhythm, an affirmation of purpose on a small scale and of peace at the heart of the universe. The aquatic ritual had been Romy’s idea, a regimen deliberately put into play to contravene nearly twenty years of obfuscation. She had said, only half-joking, that the daily immersion would cleanse him, a circadian baptism to remind him that his life had changed.

So, after the funeral, after the horrible, soul-consuming afterbirth of death had passed and he was left with the silence and the solitude, he had returned to the rhythms of the water and the light to try to steady himself all over again. Even in Romy’s absence, he found himself turning to her for help, to her idea of a proper ceremony for rebirth and a new beginning.

• • •

The woman in the black Lycra tank suit came to swim laps beside him in the long empty pool every day for twelve consecutive days. She swam exactly half an hour. Sometimes she was there when he arrived, though she seemed to have preceded him by only minutes, and left while he was still swimming. Sometimes she came after he was already well into his laps, and she was still there when he left. Either way, for nearly two weeks they shared the same water and the same silence and the same light.

During those days it had happened a few times, by sheer chance, that they would swim for a while in tandem, and as he turned his head to the side with every other stroke of his arm, he would see her long, sleek body slipping through the water as smoothly as it had ever been done, perhaps as smoothly as it could be done. Her form was impeccable. Then, gradually, his longer strokes would separate them again, and he would see her only in passing.

The twelve days they swam together were odd in just about every respect. Inevitably during that time their eyes connected briefly, but neither of them ever acknowledged the other. They never spoke. Yet by the twelfth day Strand had grown comfortable with her company, something he would not have expected. If he had been told in advance that another person would begin swimming with him at the exact same hour, he would have resented the intrusion immensely. It would have ruined everything that he sought in that particular hour of the day.

As it turned out, that hadn’t happened. Very quickly, by the fifth day, he had begun to accept that she was going to be there. She possessed a discernible serenity that easily counterbalanced what he would otherwise surely have considered a disruption. She blended remarkably well into the equation he sought in those sequestered mornings.

Then she stopped coming. That had been over a month ago, and he hadn’t seen her since.

He had inquired about her. The swimming club was private and very discreet. The only thing he could learn about her was that her name had been listed as Mara Song, recently arrived in Houston from Rome. No address, of course, and no telephone number were available to him. For an instant he thought about leaving a message for her at the club, in the event that she had begun swimming at another time of day, then immediately rejected that as being far too overt. In fact, he didn’t know why he wanted to meet her at all. Just about everything argued against it. If he wanted companionship, if he wanted to begin seeing someone, it didn’t have to happen like this. He knew a number of women who were respectfully keeping their distance—some keeping less of a distance than others, to be sure—waiting for him to decide to resume his life.

He was also aware of the irony of what he wanted. He could easily have spoken to her a dozen times—literally—during the two weeks she had joined him in the water, but he hadn’t. Now that he couldn’t, he wanted to.

So, with some effort, he tried to put the prospect of meeting Mara Song out of his mind. It didn’t really make any sense. But he never swam now without thinking of her, thinking that at any moment she might suddenly be there, slipping through the light-illumined water, a dizzy trail of bubbles shimmering behind her like a visible scent.

 

 

CHAPTER 3

After leaving the club, Strand went slightly out of his way home to a small neighborhood bakery with a dozen tables under a rattan-covered patio surrounded by catalpa trees. Every morning Strand was the first of a loyal clientele to arrive.

He always sat at the same table in the patio, the nearest to a large and unusual outdoor aquarium watched over by a pair of small, brilliantly colored macaws that looked as though they had flown through a freshly painted rainbow. He ate breakfast—the only meal served at the bakery—and read the newspaper while the macaws scolded and cajoled the fish and each other, and anything that moved, sometimes inching to the near end of their perch to read over Strand’s shoulder.

Around nine o’clock he pulled into the porte cochere at home and went straight to the kitchen to make a pot of coffee. Harry Strand lived and worked in a two-story home in the museum district, an expensive address just a few streets off Bissonnet. The home was old, with Mediterranean influences and made of stolid, gray limestone. The minute he and Romy had seen it they had loved it and bought it within a week of arriving in Houston. They had lived in Vienna before they were married, and the warm and fertile Mexican Gulf coast was an exotic and welcome change for them.

The house was on a quiet, narrow lane that meandered among other aged and behemoth domiciles, most of them only partially visible behind a well-groomed wilderness of oaks and palms, azaleas and laurel, boxwood, quince, and bougainvillea. Encompassing stone or brick walls shrouded in vines were de rigueur, and privacy was as precious as time itself.

Built on all four sides of a central courtyard, the home sheltered a large carved stone fountain at its heart. Semitropical plants filled the courtyard, and their care and cultivation had been Romy’s abiding passion. Often Strand would watch her from the windows by his desk as she dawdled among the tiled paths, pinching a faded blossom here, monitoring a pale new shoot there, checking the progress of the long awaited efflorescence of a favorite species.

She had been content here, in this home and its environs, and Strand had frequently reminded himself that their shared happiness was uncommon good fortune. It wasn’t anything he had ever experienced before, and he had told himself that he would be a fool if he ever, even for a moment, took for granted the wonderful balance they had managed to achieve together.

He had also known that balance, by its very definition, was fragile.

Meret Spier, Strand’s assistant, had become irreplaceable after Romy’s death. She had begun working for them two years earlier, when their workload had increased to the point that they couldn’t handle it between them. Fresh out of graduate school at the University of Chicago, Meret had recently returned to Houston after failing to find a position with the museums in the Chicago area. After Romy’s death, Meret simply became indispensable. Strand paid her very well and even increased her salary significantly when she had to take over so many of Romy’s responsibilities. She was worth every dime of it. Aside from her impeccable scholarship, she was intelligent and low-key, facile at reading between the lines, and perceptive when assessing personalities, all invaluable attributes when dealing with art collectors, who could be as eccentric as the artists they collected.

The rooms that formed Strand’s offices also served as the showrooms for the drawings he owned and sold. They occupied the entire left wing of the house as seen from the front entry. Most of these rooms were accessible from the peristyle that surrounded the courtyard. The porch of the peristyle was deep, providing a buffering shade from the summer heat and reducing the glare from the sunny courtyard.

Strand’s office was the first in order from the front of the house to the back. It opened onto the broad front entry hall as well as into the courtyard, with a third door communicating with the library that separated Strand’s office from Meret’s. The walls of both offices were covered with framed drawings and a few paintings. In the library a long antique walnut table used for research sat squarely in the center of the room and was usually cluttered with recently consulted volumes, slips of paper protruding from their pages. All of these rooms were generous spaces with sitting areas and comfortable furnishings, and each of them communicated with the others through a short arched passageway with a wrought-iron gate the height of the passageway placed midway. The gates were covered on one side with plate glass to muffle sound for privacy when the gates were closed. A fourth room was for storage, where rows of thin, vertical shelving for paintings and drawings lined the walls. This was also a work area for packaging artwork to be shipped and for receiving.

Every morning at nine-thirty Meret let herself into the front entry of the house and went straight through to the peristyle. This morning, like many others, Strand saw her enter the colonnade with an armload of documents and walk around to her office door, where she let herself in. While she was settling in, he stepped out into the courtyard and crossed to the other side to the kitchen. He prepared two cups of coffee and took them back around the colonnade to Meret’s door. She was already standing there, holding it open for him.

“Perfect,” she said, taking her cup at the door. “There are a few things you ought to deal with straightaway,” she began. Meret was organized, and there were limits to the amount of time she would allow a loose end to remain loose. Strand increasingly took advantage of this, letting unessential details go unattended, knowing that if they were even potentially important, Meret would catch them and bring them to his attention.

“Such as . . .”

“Such as these,” she said, snatching a pink Post-it off her desk and waving it at him. She kept “to do” things on the bright adhesive squares, and sometimes the whole left side of her desk blushed with ranks of reminders.

Strand settled into an armchair beside the sofa where Meret presided during their morning conversations. She sat down, her legs and feet together, and stuck the pink note on the hem of her skirt, which left more than half her leg exposed. Meret was not a petite young woman, but she knew instinctively how to dress to her best advantage. The stylish short skirts and revealing blouses that she favored were worn with a sexy intelligence that told you immediately that she knew what she was doing. Degas or Maillol would have asked her to take off her clothes in a minute. She would have done it, relishing the adventure and the humor of it, though she would have charged them by the quarter hour and wanted her payment in cash. On top of that, she would have had a highly educated opinion of the artist’s efforts.

“Leaman Stannish,” she began, holding her cup and saucer like a duchess. “The matter of his Gérome studies.”

“What do you think?”

“I thought we’d agreed they were too weak.”

“That’s what I remembered.”

“Then you have to let him know we’re passing.”

“I’ve been putting that off . . .”

Meret looked at him with her best “that’s the point of this conversation” expression.

“. . . but he’s got those fine, those very fine, Carpeaux drawings, the sculpture studies . . .”

“And you don’t want to piss him off,” she said.

“Right.”

“What he’s saying is, You want my Carpeaux? Take my Gérome first.”

“That’s right.”

“You shouldn’t play that game.”

Strand sipped his coffee. “I know. Write him and tell him we can’t do it.”

Meret stiffened. “You’ve got to write him, Harry. Stannish is a pain in the ass, but you can’t afford to alienate the guy. He knows he’s being unfair, and he’s also very much aware of your reputation as an ethical dealer. He’d much rather operate under that cloak of respectability than work in the market without it. He’ll come around.”

Strand nodded. “I’ll let him know.” He had already decided what to do, but it was good to hear Meret’s opinions coinciding with his. It had gotten to the point that he was no longer testing her to see how her judgment and instincts were maturing; now he was actually relying on her counsel to confirm his own instincts.

“I’ll mail it this afternoon,” Meret said pointedly, putting him on notice that he was expected to do it today.

Strand nodded again.

Meret glanced at her lap. “You got another fax late yesterday from Denise Yarrow in San Francisco. She wants to add the Eakins collection to her ‘reconsider’ list.”

“She’s going to wear me out.”

“She always does this, but . . . she always comes through, too.” Meret was consistently optimistic. She was upbeat. She did not believe in fate’s negative side, and Strand found it surprising how many times she was rewarded for her bright expectations.

“First,” she said, “Aldo Chiappini called yesterday and wants to know when you’ll be coming to Rome. He wants a specific date. I think he’s got someone else interested in the Fuselis.” She raised her eyes at him expectantly. “They’re worth the trip. That many together . . . fine quality.”

“You’re right. I don’t want to lose those. I’ll check my calendar later this morning and give you a date. I’ll call Aldo, too. Smooth his feathers.”

“Next, this,” Meret said, holding up the pink note by the tips of her tapered fingers. “A woman called yesterday who said she had a collection of drawings she wants to sell and wants to know if you would handle it. Said you were recommended to her by Reynolds Truscott in New York.”

“Good old Reynolds.”

“Says she has Maillol, Klimt, Delvaux, Ingres, Balthus.”

Strand gave her a skeptical look.

Meret raised a testimonial hand, an eager expression on her face.

“That’s an odd grouping. What’s her name?”

“Mrs. Mitchell Reinhardt.”

“First name?”

Meret shrugged, sipping her coffee.

“Did you look her up in the collector’s catalog?”

Meret nodded. “Not listed.”

“Did she say anything else?”

“Uh . . . as soon as possible.” She leaned over and handed Strand a second piece of pink paper with the address on it.

“I’m going to call Reynolds first,” he said. “Get some idea of what I’m getting into.”

The prospect of seeing drawings by these artists whose works seldom came available on the market anymore prompted Strand to call Reynolds Truscott within the hour. But Truscott was of little help. He did not know the woman personally, he said, he had gotten her name from a dealer friend of his in London who specialized in twentieth-century British paintings. This man had mentioned her almost incidentally in a conversation, said he knew a woman who had recently moved to the United States, to Texas, who had an interesting little collection of drawings. Then one day Mrs. Reinhardt herself had called Truscott, using the British dealer as a reference, and asked if he knew any reputable dealers in her area. Thus Strand. That’s all Truscott knew about her.

“There aren’t that many of you concentrating on drawings,” Truscott said. “She was surprised to find someone in Houston.”

“If she’s a collector, she should have known about me.”

“Hello—modesty? Well, the fact is I don’t think she is a collector,” Truscott said, lowering his voice in a tone of confidentiality. “I think this is a divorce thing.”

 

 

CHAPTER 4

When Strand called Mrs. Reinhardt to make an appointment, she gave him an address in Tanglewood, an upscale neighborhood near the posh Post Oak shopping district in West Houston. The address did not live up to the reputation of its environs. La Violetta Terrace was a cluster of old town houses tucked deep into a wood of dark pines and aged water oaks whose ponderous boughs were draped with verdigris beards of Spanish moss that hung limp in the warm spring air. The motley brick facades of the town houses had acquired a rusty patina of neglect, and the tight little meander of a lane that fronted the small gardens of each address had the faded air of a disregarded byway.

Strand parked in front of Mrs. Reinhardt’s address and got out of the car. He followed a pathway of dun bricks through a tiny garden of ordinary shrubs, nandina and boxwood and wax ligustrum. The midmorning sun penetrated the thick overstory in broken amber streams and fell onto the crown of a small dogwood near the front door, the soft light illuminating the pale pink blossoms as if it were a theatrical spotlight.

He rang the doorbell and waited. All around him the dense woods dampened every sound to quietude, the constant rumble of city traffic seemed distant, and even a contentious blue jay sounded more disgruntled than raucous.

Strand was not a man who was often caught flat-footed, slapped in the face by surprise, but when the door opened and he found himself staring squarely into the unsuspecting eyes of Mara Song, he was caught off guard.

“I’m Harry Strand,” he managed to say with deceptive equanimity. He wasn’t sure his face was playing along.

“Mara Reinhardt,” she said, smiling, a little wearily he thought. Her handshake was light, and he could feel her warmth and the slenderness of her body in the shape of her hand. He had to will his eyes to relax, not to gaze on her. “I appreciate your coming,” she said, backing away from the door and letting him in.

She didn’t have a trace of a foreign accent; she was one hundred percent American bred and born. Her eyes were just below level with his, which meant that she was a tall woman, certainly tall for an Asian. The mouth that he had seen with such effect through the moonstone water he now saw had a slight dimple to one side that gave her smile a suggestion of irony. Her dark hair was again pulled to one side and fell over the front of her shoulder. She was wearing a long saffron shirtwaist dress with short sleeves.

“I have the drawings in another room,” she said, getting right to the point. “I’ve been working in here, and it’s cluttered. Anyway, the light’s bad.”

She led Strand through a modest living room with an abundance of art books scattered about in rambling stacks. The furniture was pedestrian and told him nothing about her. He guessed that it had been included with the town house lease. As they passed through the room he glimpsed some uncommon touches here and there, a small draped table with a collection of softly burnished black pottery and three white lilies lolling in one of the lean amphorae, a rich throw glinting with gold threads tossed over the corner of the dreary sofa, an expensive and beautiful Anatolian medallion rug with predominant colors of scarlet and pollen yellow. These, he imagined, were Mara Song.

In just a few steps they had crossed a hallway and entered a bright sunroom with tall windows looking out into a small enclosed courtyard filled with potted plants. The stones in the courtyard were still wet from the morning watering. There was another sofa here and several comfortable rattan armchairs. The drawings were mounted in archival folders and were arranged in an approximate semicircle on these pieces of furniture, propped up against the backs of the cushions.

“Here they are,” she said. “They’re in alphabetical order. Balthus . . . Delvaux . . . Ingres . . .” She stepped slowly past them in review, her right hand, wrist up, indicating each artist by flicking a long index finger at each drawing. “Klimt . . . and Maillol.”

Then she stopped and turned around.

“Five men. Seven naked women,” she said matter-of-factly.

There were indeed seven drawings, and Strand was delighted to see that they were very fine examples of the artists’ work. In fact, the collection was superior, and as they talked about each drawing, he realized that even though she was not a “collector” she had an educated and discerning eye and that her appreciation for these drawings went far beyond their financial value. She had a genuine affection for them.

As he stood before the pictures, Strand’s mind was divided between the images and the woman who owned them. He remembered Truscott saying that he thought the sale of the art was being prompted by a “divorce thing,” and he assumed that also accounted for the discrepancy between her two names. The drawings were going to bring a handsome price; he guessed that a handsome price had been paid to acquire them. Since Mara Song was having to sell them, Strand surmised that she had not come out well in her divorce.

After they had talked for a while about the drawings, she took a step back, folded her arms, and looked at him.

“They’re jewels, aren’t they?” she said.

He noted the distance from her waist to the hem of her skirt, and he remembered the long legs slipping through the bright water.

“Have you owned these awhile?” he asked.

“Most of them about four years.”

Strand scanned the drawings again, his hands in his pockets as he stepped back away from them, too, beside her, surveying the group of images.

“I’m guessing that you already know I won’t have any trouble selling these,” he said. “You seem to know very well what you’re doing here. I’ll be glad to go ahead and work up appraisals and all of that whenever you’re ready.”

She didn’t say anything for a moment, and Strand turned his head slightly to observe her. She was thoughtful, but her expression was uncommunicative.

“You don’t want to sell them,” he said.

“I teach art,” she said. “I know how . . . wonderful these things are.” She turned to him. “Before five years ago I never in my wildest dreams imagined that I would ever own art like this myself. Then, for a while, a small window of time, I could afford them.” She shook her head. “I’m afraid if I get rid of them, I’ll never ever be able to afford anything like them again.”

Strand said nothing.

“I’m going through a divorce,” she said. “I don’t need the money, but the fact is, I’m not going to be in the same financial comfort zone that I was in while I was married. I just thought I ought to, sort of, take stock.”

“These aren’t easy choices,” Strand said. “I’ve been a dealer and collector all my life, and I have to face these choices all the time. Can’t keep them all, no matter how much you love them. I tell myself that the pleasure of just having them for a while is a value every bit as real as the profit I’ll get when I sell them. It’s a mind game. It’s really the truth, too.”

When he turned back to her she was looking at him, the beginning of a smile on her mouth. But it never quite developed. They looked at each other, and for a fleeting moment he thought he sensed in her expression a vague notion of having seen him before.

“Would you like a cup of coffee?” she asked. “I made a fresh pot about an hour ago.”

“No, I’m fine. Thanks, though.”

The filtered sun was gilding the plants in the garden behind her, outlining her gray silhouette with a thin seam of gold. She would not have been universally considered beautiful, for her features, when taken individually, could not have been described as classical. Her nose was a little more prominent than Asian features usually allowed, and there was a small rise in the bridge. She had high cheekbones, and her eyes were as much Caucasian as Eastern. But regarded as a whole, these attributes conspired to make Mara Song a striking woman. She sure as hell lived up to his memory of her from the swimming pool. She was still looking at him, her arms crossed again as before. Then with her middle fingers she lightly touched her full lower lip.

“How long have you been married?” she asked abruptly.

He frowned at her, and she tilted her left hand back and touched her ring finger with her thumb.

“Oh. It would have been four years . . . well, in July.”

She didn’t move her eyes or speak.

“She died in an automobile accident. Almost a year ago.”

Her face fell. “I’m sorry.” She was embarrassed.

“No, that’s all right.”

There was a pause. She was visibly uneasy.

“This divorce,” she said. “I find myself wondering how long people have been married.” She shrugged. “That’s pretty strange, I think. But that’s what I do.” Her eyes fixed on him. “I am sorry about your wife. My first husband died suddenly also, an odd heart condition. So I know . . .”

“It happens to people all the time,” Strand said, not wanting to talk about it anymore.

The sun had found an opening in the overstory now and was flooding the courtyard behind her in brightness. He could see the shadowy silhouettes of her long legs backlighted through the saffron summer dress, and again, in his mind, he saw her long body stretched out, in the opalescent water.

She obviously did not recognize him from those mornings at the pool a month earlier, and Strand decided to see how she would react to being reminded.

“You know,” he said, “I think we’ve almost met before.”

The phrasing was unnecessarily cryptic, and the instant he spoke he wished he had said it differently. Her reaction confirmed his mistake. She turned to him, a look of suspicion playing nervously at the corners of her eyes.

“What do you mean?”

“I swim every morning at the River Oaks Swimming Club. Five or six weeks ago I think you came there every morning for a couple of weeks and swam laps at the same time I was there. There were only the two of us.”

She studied him, still tentative, her mind searching back for the connection, her eyes raking his features for a hint of recognition. For a moment Strand thought he had made a terrible mistake. She almost had the look of a woman who was slowly realizing that the man she was talking to had been stalking her.

“I remember that,” she said in dismay. Then happy, relieved, she added, “Yeah, I do remember that. We swam together for about two weeks and never spoke a word.”

Strand smiled.

She laughed, now even more relieved. “That was you?”

“Odd, isn’t it?”

“Well, it is odd. Did you know who I was when you came here today?”

“Not until you opened the door. You used a different name.”

Slightly suspicious again. “You knew the name I used at the swim club?”

“When you stopped coming, I asked about you.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to know who you were.”

There was a moment when her face registered the unpleasant possibilities that must have suddenly sprung into her mind. Then in an instant she realized the innocence of it all, and she began to laugh.

He grinned. “Why did you stop coming?”

“Oh, long story.” She was still smiling.

• • •

They sat at her kitchen table next to the sunroom and talked, the seven drawings still propped on the cushions of the chairs and sofa, the reflected brightness of the sunny courtyard cheering the uncheerful sobriety of the tired town house. With only a few gentle questions from Strand, she pliantly, though not eagerly, talked a little more about herself.

She told him of her first marriage. She and her husband both had been art teachers at the Farnese Academy in Rome, and after his death she had stayed on there. In a few years she had met and married Mitchell Reinhardt, and for four years she had endured a marriage that from its consummation never found its balance, wobbling on unsteadily until it had become so shaky that no ballast could steady it, and she had filed for divorce.

“It was a sorry end,” she said, reaching over to a vase of geraniums sitting to one side of the table. She picked an orange red flower and toyed with its petals. The strong fragrance of geranium spilled into the room when she broke the stem.

“I’ve tried to sort it out for four years,” she added. “I take some responsibility. He deserves some. It was so wrong it could never have been right, and I do blame myself for not realizing that sooner.” She shrugged. “I quit wailing and throwing sand and ashes in the air a long time ago. Self-indulgence really isn’t of major interest to me.”

She stopped, looking at the flower, thinking of something. He watched her fingers as they felt the velvety petals and then plucked one and placed it alone on the tablecloth.

“Then you’re living here now?” Strand asked.

She looked up. “Oh, no, I’m just here for a few months. Mitchell’s lawyer—well, the one handling the divorce, anyway—is here. It’s easier if I am, too. The papers are complicated.”

“Where will you go, after it’s all over?”

“Back to Rome.”

“To teach.”

“That’s right.” She hesitated. “The thing is, I got a good deal in the divorce. Mitchell’s been wealthy all his life, and he’s used to defending his net worth. I knew he was prepared for a battle. I didn’t want a battle, and I didn’t want his money, certainly not bad enough to make a career out of getting it. I just wanted it to be over. He did have one thing I wanted, a home in Sallustiano in Rome. I told him I’d walk away from the usual financial fracas if he’d give me the seven drawings and the Sallustiano house with enough money in a trust for its upkeep and to pay the taxes on it for the rest of my life. He could be free of me with just a couple of straight, flat-out transactions. No strings.”

She sat back and looked at Strand. “He agreed.”

Strand studied her. She was turned aside from the table, her legs crossed at the knees under the saffron skirt, leaning slightly forward, her arms crossed on her long thigh, hands dangling limp. Her expression was open, frank.

She leveled her dark eyes on him. “I still have the teaching job. I was getting along just fine financially before he came along, and I was paying rent.” She smiled a little. “I sure as hell wasn’t living in a villa.”

Then she straightened her back, a gesture that said she had had enough of talking about herself.

“As for the drawings”—she looked over at them—“well, they just suddenly seem like such an extravagance now that I’m no longer in that league. I don’t know.” She puckered her mouth to one side as she looked at the drawings.

“My part of it will take some time,” Strand said. “I don’t know what kind of timetable you’re expecting, but I’ll need a few weeks at the very least to work up an appraisal. And then some more time to contact potential buyers. I expect they’ll sell fairly quickly.”

“I should be in Houston for another month or two,” Mara said. Her hands were folded in her lap now, and she was looking into the courtyard, presenting her profile to Strand.

“And you want the drawings sold by the time you go back to Rome.”

“I think so.”

“Okay, then,” Strand said, taking one of his cards out of his pocket and handing it to her. “Whenever you’re ready. I’d like to have the drawings while I’m working up the appraisals. I have very good security. They’ll be safe.”

She swung her leg a few times, looking at his card as she touched her bottom lip with her middle fingers, thinking. She made no move to end their conversation, no subtle gesture to indicate they were through. She idly flicked the bottom corner of his card with the fingernail of her little finger.

She looked up. “When could you begin working on the appraisals?”

“Whenever you want.”

She dropped her hand to her lap and laid the card on her long thigh, looking at it.

She looked up. “What about tomorrow?”

“Okay.”

“I have some letters, bills of sale, other items of provenance on some of them. They’re still in the bank. I’ll pick them up and bring everything to you in the morning. What would be a good time?”

“Same as today? Ten o’clock?”

“Sure. That’s perfect.”

“Good, I’ll look forward to it,” he said, standing.

“This has been kind of you,” she said. “I appreciate it very much.”

“My pleasure.” He smiled. “It’s good to be reunited with a misplaced mirage.”

 

 

CHAPTER 5

BRUSSELS, BELGIUM

Dennis Clymer had been in Brussels forty-eight hours. It was his third trip to the city in as many weeks, and it was his last stop before returning home. In the past month he had spent time in most of the capitals of Europe, carrying his black Hermés briefcase to meetings in glass office towers in London, to elegant old-world restaurants in Prague, to the shady terrace of a pale ocher villa overlooking Monaco and the hazy Mediterranean, to a stolid dacha deep in a forest outside St. Petersburg that smelled of woodsmoke and shchi and was filled with objets d’art.

Clymer was at home in all of these places. Unlike the stereotypical American, he was eminently adaptable. He was fluent in German and French, but he conducted business only in English. Four times a year he made these hectic trips, usually a two- or three-week period during which he shuttled from one European country to the next, crisscrossing his own path, doubling back, retracing routes he had traveled two days or ten days before. Though he routinely stayed in small, exclusive hotels, he rarely stayed in the same hotel in succession in any city in Europe, and only recently when he was in Brussels did he ever make a predictable diversion from a schedule that was otherwise fast paced and seemingly random.

Dennis Clymer was forty-three years old, had a master’s in economics from Stanford University and a law degree from UCLA. He lived in the tony Brentwood section of Los Angeles. He and his second wife had two children, daughters from her first marriage. Clymer had a son by his first wife who lived with his mother in the San Fernando Valley. He had visiting rights with the boy but often had to cancel his visitations because of his busy schedule. He paid little attention to his family. His business took up most of his time.

As Clymer walked out of the Métropole Hotel in the center of Brussels, he had come to the end of a hammering schedule. Mentally he suddenly shifted gears. He had two nights in Brussels before he returned to Los Angeles, and he planned to spend both of them in the same place.

After returning to his own rooms in the Copthorne Stéphanie on the fashionable Avenue Louise, he bathed and changed clothes. The long afternoon meeting in a suite at the Métropole was with a slow-speaking Londoner who smoked dark Honduran cigars and a woman from Lyons who favored a particularly nasty kind of cigarette. His California lungs were screaming for fresh air. Just as dusk was settling over the city, Clymer left his hotel and walked out onto the avenue.

The lights were coming on all over Brussels, and the spring air was crisp, the sky deepening from peach to amber. He turned right on Avenue Louise and headed toward a large boulevard that lay just ahead. He was in the heart of the city’s most exclusive district, which exuded luxury in its public and private residences and sparkling shops.

At the Avenue de la Toison d’Or/Guldenvlieslaan, Clymer crossed to the other side, where it became Boulevard Waterloo/Waterloolaan, and once again turned right, walking in the failing light past posh jewelry shops and art galleries and chic boutiques filled with designer clothing. Smartly dressed shoppers strolled unhurriedly along the boulevard, among them Dennis Clymer, feeling very much pleased with himself for having once again negotiated nearly a month’s worth of complex transactions for his clients. He anticipated the evening with the satisfaction of a man who was using his considerable intellect to make tons of money. To him Brussels never seemed more charming, and his place in it never seemed more deserved or appropriate. Everything was just as he wanted it.

He turned into Rue du Pépin/Kernstraat and made his way past a string of boisterous nightclubs, entirely oblivious to their allures. Beyond these he turned left to the Place du Petit Sablon, a quiet square with a beautiful formal garden in its center, and to one side, its front door illuminated by the green glow of lamplight reflected off the boughs of a sheltering chestnut, was his favorite restaurant, Chez Marius en Provence.

Clymer had made reservations in the name of Paul Franck. He was shown to his table—he had asked for a quiet corner—and immediately ordered a bottle of Bordeaux, a Premier Grand Cru Classé from St.-Emilion. He had just finished his first glass when he saw her smiling at him past the shoulder of the maître d’ as she allowed herself to be shown to the table.

Clymer beamed and stood as she approached. The maître d’ withdrew, and Clymer took her hand and kissed her gently on the offered cheek, catching the familiar scent of sachet.

“It has been an endless week,” she said, showing no hint of being tired as she sat down. Dennis Clymer relished every accented syllable.

She was one of over five thousand translators employed by the European Commission, which had its headquarters buildings only a few kilometers away. Clymer had met her on his last trip to Europe two months earlier. In fact, his present trip could have waited another quarter, but the memory of her had made it seem more urgent. During the past three weeks, Clymer, whom she knew only as Paul Franck, had managed to spend one night of each week with her.

The affair was a surprise to Dennis Clymer. He was not the kind of man who had a roving eye, though his travels frequently put him in situations of opportunity. He was, primarily, interested only in business, and the clients he represented used him for precisely this reason. They did not indulge miscalculations, and though Clymer was reaping stunning profits for his services, which he wisely invested and did not squander, he was cognizant of the fact that a failure to perform could very well have more serious consequences than a loss of income.

In short, he was a man who was under a good deal of stress, though it was a point of importance with him never to show it. He was on a very fast track, and for a long time now the money he was making was the only seduction to which he allowed himself to succumb.

She was nothing like the women he usually met when he traveled. Some of his clients always had beautiful women hovering about, and any of them happily would have indulged Dennis Clymer’s requests. But Clymer was wary. Not only did he not trust these gorgeous, tightly fleshed creatures, but he didn’t want to appear to his clients as having a weakness that possibly could be exploited. He kept his mind on his business and his hands on his black Hermés briefcase.

He had met her, however, in a situation unrelated to his business and well away from the people he represented. The absolute unpredictability of their meeting was what made him comfortable with her. He had been walking through the chic Galerie Louise, one of the several elegant shopping arcades in the center of the city, when he impulsively stepped into a leather goods shop. The place smelled richly of oiled leather, and he wandered around a corner to the briefcases where a woman was trying to decide which attaché to buy for her boss, a busy man who had asked her to get one for him to replace an old one. Unable to decide among the dozens there, she saw Clymer standing nearby and asked him his opinion.

She was not a stunning beauty, though she was quite pretty in a fresh, uncalculating way. She did not have the sleek, self-aware figure of the women he studiously avoided: she was a little hippy, though pleasantly so. Her hair was butter blond, and she wore it pulled back in a practical style vaguely reminiscent of the 1940s. She wore a smart, working woman’s suit. Clymer noted that she had a quick, genuine smile and a charming way of knitting her brow when he offered a bit of sensible advice about briefcases. After a few minutes she chose one of his recommendations. As she was paying they chatted. When he told her he was from Los Angeles, she brightened with curiosity and asked if he knew any movie stars.

They ate an early dinner together at a little sidewalk café a few doors from the leather shop, and he told a few movie star stories, embroidering a little on his personal familiarity with a few famous names. She told him about her work as translator with the European Commission, about how she had studied languages in Paris, how she had worked for a while for IBM in Berlin before coming back to Brussels.

She had an unassuming manner, and Clymer quickly felt comfortable being with her. They lingered for a long while over their meal and then coffee, and when it seemed time to go she surprised him by asking him if he would like to join her for a drink. She knew a quiet place nearby with tables in a garden.

They drank more than either intended, so much so that Clymer forgot his habitual cautiousness when she asked him if he would like to see where she lived, perhaps have a last drink with her. They walked down Avenue Louise underneath the overhanging chestnuts that bordered the boulevard and turned into a side street in a historical residential district dating from the 1890s. She rented the top floor of an old three-story home, and it was there, his head lightened by alcohol and his mind full of the scent of sachet, that he had sexual relations with her, eventually falling asleep against the softest, palest breasts he had ever imagined.

The affair was born full-blown and unhesitating, surprising them both. Clearly they were inexperienced in such adventure, and the swift pace was inflammatory. Clymer could not stay away from her. Still, he was a man habituated to discipline, and that did not change. Having reflexively invented Paul Franck in the leather shop, he stayed with it. He did not invite her to his rooms in the Stéphanie, and she never asked to go there. At night, as they lay in the quiet of her bed and talked about their lives, he discreetly re-created himself. He gave little thought to where all this was leading, and apparently, neither did she. The affair itself was its own reward. They didn’t think about the future. It was not that sort of affair. They merely were enjoying the thrill of unexpected sexual abandon. Somehow it seemed entirely benign because it was not calculated. It was as surprising as a snowfall in July.

• • •

He told her he had only tonight and the next before he had to return to Los Angeles. They had finished eating and were lingering over a second bottle of Bordeaux.

She considered this a moment, pensively.

“And tomorrow? What about tomorrow?”

“I don’t have any more business here.”

“Then stay with me. Tonight, tomorrow, tomorrow night.” She raised her eyebrows, allowed a wry smile. “I will call my office and say to them that I am ill. It won’t matter.”

Her expression was anticipatory and hopeful. Clymer hesitated at the suggestion.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“You don’t know?” She mocked surprise and leaned toward him gently, the small candle between them throwing a timid, flickering light over the tops of her breasts. “How could you not know?”

They walked arm in arm along Boulevard Waterloo/Waterloolaan, a couple lost in an outdated gesture of romance, naive characters in an old movie. The wine had made them uncaring of such a simple demonstration of affection, and they were oblivious of the chic scene through which they strolled to Avenue Louise. Yet again they walked unhurriedly under the dark, looming chestnuts and soon turned into her street and followed the slow, descending curve, the globes of the street lamps lighting a pale beaded glow in front of them.

They must have passed the parked car, but Dennis Clymer didn’t remember seeing it. Two isolated images were embedded in his consciousness in those stunning last moments: first, one of the men who grabbed him and forced the drugged cloth over his nose and mouth smelled of a sickly cologne; second, in the confusion he saw her step back, unaccosted, unafraid. In the lamplight their eyes met: she was calm.

• • •

The Belgian police judiciaire did not identify Dennis Clymer’s body for nearly three weeks, and only then because of a birthmark under his left arm. His head and hands were never found.

 

 

CHAPTER 6

When Mara Song arrived at Strand’s house the next morning, Meret went to the front door to answer the bell. Strand was finishing a letter when he heard their voices. Through the windows near his desk he saw them coming out of the central hallway into the peristyle. Mara was carrying a single large portfolio, and Meret was leading her around to the library door.

Strand stood and walked into the library, meeting them at the door just as Meret was pushing it open. Her face turned away from Mara, she flashed a sly smile at him. She excused herself and retreated to her office.

Mara Song’s hair was pulled back and knotted behind her neck, and she was wearing a loosely cut linen shirt tucked into tailored linen trousers. Her smile was relaxed.

“Beautiful place,” she said, looking around the library as she laid her portfolio on the library table. “Would you mind showing me around a bit? Have you got time?”

“Sure,” he said.

Though she was careful not to be too intrusive, Mara was nevertheless very interested in everything having to do with the house. She asked about its history, how long Strand had lived here, whether the garden was already designed as it was now. She asked about the furniture, much of which Strand and Romy had bought in antique shops in Europe, and she asked about his own collection of drawings, where he had bought them, and why.

Strand watched her as he talked. She was as curious about him now as he had been about her, but she was far less reserved in satisfying her curiosity. With every exchange in their conversation he learned as much about her as she did of him. She was proving to be complex, though he was reasonably sure that she would not have characterized herself in that way. He was slowly beginning to suspect that Mara Song’s personality was like the clear, bright sliver of the new moon: what you saw was stunning, but by far the greater part of it was hidden in shadow and would emerge only slowly.

In a little while they came full circle to the library. They sat at the long table, both on the same side, and Mara opened the portfolio and took out a folder.

“I think I can help you a little and save you some time on the appraisal,” she began, laying out several sheets of paper with densely typed lines. “I have a fair amount of data on the provenance of each drawing.”

She put the pages between them, then began going through her documentation beginning with the Klimt drawing, citing its catalog references, a history of its sales, and a brief description of the work, whether it was a fully executed drawing or a study for a later work.

When she finished, she sat back and tucked a loose bit of hair behind an ear. “It’s a beginning, anyway,” she said.

“It’s more than that.” Strand was still looking at the last document. “You’ve saved me a lot of work. I appreciate it.”

“The truth is,” she said, “I was afraid of getting ripped off. I’d never paid that kind of money for anything before in my life. It made me uncharacteristically thorough.”

Strand was skeptical about this last remark. He was quite sure that Mara was, in fact, a very methodical woman.

He paged through the portfolio, looking at the seven drawings once again. They were superb, all of them, each in its own special way.

“This last one,” he said, “Delvaux’s Réticence. He’s a different kind of draftsman from the others. What were your thoughts behind this purchase?”

She smiled as if he had caught her in a deception.

“It was the most spontaneous purchase of them all,” she said almost reluctantly. She mused on the drawing. “Delvaux tended to simplify his technique, which of course fits perfectly well with the psychological content of his eerie imagery.” She reached out and touched the edge of the paper. “But here, in this drawing, it looks as if he is going to allow the classical draftsman in him to take over—and here and here—then he reins it in. Here, for instance. Then again it emerges here.” She tapped the paper. “That sort of thing goes on all over this drawing. In that sense, it’s a kind of schizophrenic image. I’m not sure he knew what the hell he was doing.” She tilted her head, looking at the drawing. “But then there’s the title . . . so . . . Anyway, when I saw this I thought I sensed a different kind of Delvaux psychology hiding here, which instantly appealed to me.”

For a little while neither of them spoke. Strand concentrated on the drawings, appreciating her eye and her astute sense of what she valued. Then, uneasily, he became aware of her studying him.

Though he had done precisely the same thing to her the morning before, their proximity—he could easily have put an arm around her—made him self-conscious. When he looked up from the drawings, she was watching him with an expression of keen interest. Having been caught, she quickly altered her expression to one of benign, but uninformative, pleasance.

“How did you end up in Texas?” she asked.

“That seems odd to you?”

“Not odd, but . . . well, interesting.”

“Why?”

She laughed. “Oh, come on,” she said. “You know what I mean. I’ll bet you haven’t lived here very long. I mean, not many years, anyway. For one thing, your card: ‘Paul Davies, Dealer in Fine Art.’ Why not ‘Harold Strand’? You bought someone’s business.”

“Harold?”

“Well, whatever.”

“You didn’t ask Truscott? He can be very informative about dealer gossip.”

“I don’t know Mr. Truscott. He was just a ‘trustworthy’ name a London dealer gave me.” She paused. “You’re being evasive.”

“Okay,” Strand conceded. He hated talking about himself and had several stock responses to such questions. “Here’s a cheap version of how I got here. When I was just out of the university—Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina—I went to work for a jewelry importer in New Orleans. I’d gotten a liberal arts degree, which prepared me for nothing in particular and everything in general. The jewelry importer was stingy with his employees and generous with himself. Collected art. It was my first exposure to fine art, and I fell in love with everything about it. I went back to school and got a master’s degree in art history. I worked for a gallery in San Francisco for a while. Learned the business. Opened my own gallery, but apparently I hadn’t learned enough business. I went broke. Got a job with a private collector in New York, an old man who had recently developed a passion for drawings and was raiding Europe. By this time I’d already zeroed in on drawings, too. We continued to educate each other.

“One day he walked in and told me he was dying of cancer. He wanted me to oversee the liquidation of his holdings. He said he wanted to reward me for my services, and since I was putting myself out of a job I might as well get a commission on it. So I became his broker rather than his employee. It was a generous gift. In one form or another, that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.”

“You’ve spent most of your career in New York?”

“No. London. Rome. Paris. Geneva. Vienna. Those are the places where I’d built my connections when I was buying for the old man, so that’s where I headed and stayed. The old guy was good to me. He knew what kind of education I was getting.”

“Did you meet your wife in Europe?”

“My first wife?”

She nodded, but he saw immediately that she had actually meant Romy. He told her about his first wife. She had been the daughter of a British MP who was a promoter of the EC when it was even less popular in England than it was now and who had more money than his profligate daughter could spend even in her most irresponsible binges. He told her briefly of their life in London, of his wife’s indiscretions, of her destructive addictions, of her hair-raising escapades in polite society, and of her attempts at suicide.

After all that, Mara didn’t have the heart to ask about Romy. He knew she wouldn’t.

“So you lived mostly in London.”

“A lot over the years, but not mostly.”

“Always as an art dealer?”

“Always.”

“So . . .” She repeated her first question: “How did you end up in Texas?”

Strand reached out and closed the portfolio. Behind her the courtyard was losing its light as the Gulf clouds built up outside. It was beginning to look like rain. The contrast of light and shadow in the library was softening to a monochromatic gray.

“Paul Davies went to Europe every year to buy art,” Strand said. “He was from California, but he’d married a woman from Houston and moved here nearly thirty years ago. He was a very fine dealer, and I’d known him most of that time. When he died five years ago, his wife called me and wanted to know if I would be interested in buying his business. Romy and I were feeling adventurous. We took her up on her offer and moved to Houston. Paul had built a respectable reputation in the U.S. Since I’d spent most of my time in Europe and was less well known here, it just seemed to make good business sense to retain his name.” He opened his hands. “It was that simple.”

“No ego involved? You didn’t want to use your own name?”

“I have to make a living. Ego follows that.”

Mara looked around at the library and the house. “Just how good does your living have to be before you can give your ego a little satisfaction?”

Strand shrugged. “I have a low-maintenance ego.”

Mara stared at him, her head turned ever so slightly at an angle, almost as if she were listening for something. Her face was a study in thoughts that seemed to venture far beyond the present conversation.

“I wonder,” she said, “if you’d be interested in going to an art exhibit with me this afternoon?”

“The Menil surrealist exhibit?”

“Yes . . . exactly.”

“You know,” he said, “I would.”

 

 

CHAPTER 7

Strand asked her to stay for lunch, suggesting that they go to the Menil Museum immediately afterward. Though surprised by the invitation, she agreed. Strand called Meret to join them, and they went across the courtyard to the kitchen.

While the two women started a tuna salad, Strand began cutting potatoes into thin strips, which he then deep-fried until they were nut brown and crispy. When everything was ready, Meret put on a Wynton Marsalis CD, lowered the volume, and they sat at the long refectory table in the middle of the kitchen.

It was their usual custom that Strand and Meret lunched together in the kitchen. Sometimes she went out and sometimes he did, but generally they prepared casual lunches of sandwiches or salads in the kitchen nearly every day. They talked or didn’t talk, read, listened to music. It was relaxed and without ceremony. On occasion one of Meret’s girlfriends might join them, which Strand always enjoyed. Now and then another art dealer who was visiting Strand when lunchtime arrived might be asked to stay. But Strand’s invitations were reserved for the few people with whom he felt especially comfortable.

The conversation never flagged, and the two women quickly established an easygoing rapport. They could easily have lingered at the table for the rest of the afternoon, but soon the telephone began to ring, and Meret excused herself. Strand and Mara put away the food, cleaned up the dishes, and then left for the museum.

The Menil’s surrealist holdings were famous, and Strand had seen exhibitions from them as often as they had been presented over the four years he had been in Houston. The surrealists were always popular, and he was not surprised to find a crowd at the museum. Which suited him perfectly. He had come not to see the exhibit, but to see Mara Song.

When they entered the museum Strand stayed with Mara for the first fifteen or twenty minutes and then gradually moved to drawings on an adjacent wall, then to those on the other side of the room, periodically separating himself from her by allowing the ebb and flow of the crowd to come between them. At first she sometimes would glance around to find him, but eventually she became entirely absorbed in the drawings and forgot about him altogether. Carrying her bag over one shoulder and holding her sunglasses in her hand, Mara moved slowly from image to image, concentrating on each drawing as if she were trying to peer into the very fiber of the paper itself. She ignored the unavoidable jostling of the crowd, having eyes only for the individual pieces of art before her, often remaining so long in front of an image that she reminded Strand of one of those photographs in which the central image was the only thing in focus, while the crowds surrounding the subject appeared as a blurry swirl of movement.

He watched her from every angle as they moved through the exhibition rooms, sometimes observing her from only a few feet away, sometimes through a doorway, sometimes glimpsing her through the movement of heads and bodies and limbs of the crowd. What he saw was a woman who was captivated by a form of art that, compared to other media, was an unobtrusive world apart. To genuinely appreciate drawings, one had to be attracted to their inherent subtlety, to their modesty and intimacy. Most collectors of drawings believed that in some elemental way a drawing was a direct link to the mind of the artist in a manner that other forms of expression could not be. When one peered closely enough at the accumulated lines of a drawn image, or even at a few solitary strokes, one could almost believe that one saw the intent of the artist, and sometimes his discipline and sometimes his abandon, in a way that was bracing in its immediacy.

In a world defined by an insatiable hunger to gorge its senses with explosions of color and fulmination of sound and unrelenting activity, looking intently at a drawing on a piece of paper was an almost ascetic act. Strand found it, in her, beguiling.

When there was only a single room of drawings left to see, he drifted back to her and they finished the exhibit together.

Outside the threat of rain had passed and the sun was bearing down through the heavy air. The humidity was so high that their sunglasses fogged over immediately when they put them on. Mara laughed about this and said she found the city’s semitropical atmosphere a challenge to feminine grace. On the other hand, she added, wiping off her sunglasses on the hem of her dress, she thought there was something sexy about the heat.

They returned to Strand’s house and sat for a few minutes in the air-conditioned library, sipping iced tea.

“Well, that was fun,” Mara said. “It was, uh, it was comfortable being with you.” Then, frowning, watching him closely, “I hope that doesn’t sound . . . odd to you.”

“No, not at all.” He smiled. “I know what you mean.”

Mara daubed at the sweat on her glass with her napkin, thinking.

“You don’t know,” she said tentatively, “how much I appreciate your asking me to have lunch here, with you and Meret. It’s the first normal thing I’ve done in . . . ages.”

“Normal?”

Her eyes roamed the bookshelves. “Well, maybe normal isn’t the right word, but, I don’t know . . . comfortable, normal . . .” She took a deep breath. “It felt . . . tranquil.”

She looked up cautiously to see how that might strike him.

He nodded.

“I’m just trying to say that it felt good to be included in something like that.” She shook her head. “With this really absurd divorce grinding on, sometimes I feel an absence of context, as though I’m just not quite meshing with . . . anything.” She stopped. “This is muddy water to you, isn’t it? I’m not making myself very clear.”

Strand nodded. “I’ve enjoyed today, too. It’s been a good thing, for both of us.”

She looked at her watch. “Well, the morning appointment has turned into most of the day.” She stood. “It’s been wonderful. Thank you very much, Harry Strand.”

• • •

The time of day that Harry Strand hated finally arrived. It used to be his favorite, the hour just before dusk when the sun was poised only a few degrees above the horizon and the sharp light of the southern spring relented to the inevitable demise of another day. In the garden of the courtyard, protected by the stone walls of the old house, shade had already enveloped the fountain and the palms, and the blue hues of evening were alchemizing the tropical greens of Romy’s garden into deepening shadows.

Romy’s garden. Romy’s time of day. Sometimes Strand still kept their ritual, sitting in the quiet with a glass of ice-chilled Scotch. But it wasn’t any good anymore. The companionship was gone, the exchanges of small concerns and expressions of small delights. The Scotch remained. More of it now than before, of course. It didn’t replace what he had had, but for a little while every day it dulled the regret of having lost it.

Tonight, instead of taking his drink into the courtyard, Strand took it into the library, put on a CD of Lucia di Lammermoor, and took down all of his books on the five artists who had created Mara Song’s drawings. He put all the books on the library table, pulled his chair close, took a sip of Scotch, and began searching through the books.

After nearly an hour, Strand went into the kitchen to pour another drink. He returned to the library, turned off all the lights except a small one, and kicked off his shoes, propping his feet on the seat of another chair. Lucia di Lammermoor was well into its tragic story as he let his eyes settle on the drawing illuminated by the dim light on the wall at the end of the library table. There, in a space especially created in the center of the bookshelves, was his own Maillol drawing, a conté study of a nude the artist had done in preparation for executing the lithographic illustrations for the French-language edition of Lucian of Samosota’s The Dialogues of the Courtesans.

The image was of a woman who, in the process of walking away from the viewer, turns in midstride and looks back. It was the first drawing that Strand and Romy had bought together, shortly after she’d come to live with him while he was in Vienna. He had discovered it in the home of an old Austrian banker whose family had retained Strand to appraise his art collection prior to selling his estate. It was a lovely thing, and when he’d shown it to Romy she had reacted to it passionately. She had become intrigued by the tenuous message implied in the turn of the woman’s hips, by the curiosity conveyed in the twist of her neck and her tilted shoulders, her head, bent slightly and turned to cast a sidelong glance at the viewer.

The number of hours Strand had sat here looking at this drawing during the last year was well into the hundreds. Or so it seemed. Though the house was full of art that they had collected during their years together, this single drawing held more of Romy’s soul than any of them; when he was in its presence, he was in Romy’s presence.

It was at this moment that Strand suddenly thought of Mara Song. She was the first woman since Romy who had worked her way unbidden into his thoughts. He was just superstitious enough to find that of significance, though he had no idea what significance to attach to it. Maybe it simply meant that it had been long enough, and Mara’s appearance at this point in his life was nothing more than a gift of time and circumstance.

 

 

CHAPTER 8

Within a few days of receiving Mara’s drawings, Strand finished his appraisal of her images and asked her to come over to review it. She came in the middle of the afternoon, and they talked about his conclusions and how he would approach the sale. Mara was still there when Meret left at five o’clock. They had drinks. They talked. Strand suggested they go to Chiara’s for dinner.

A few days after that Mara called him to say she had received legal papers from Italy that represented yet another hurdle in her complex divorce proceedings. Would he like to celebrate—quietly? She had learned of a Thai restaurant that might be good. They ended the evening talking over drinks in the garden of Strand’s house.

Gradually, with neither of them bringing attention to it, the subject of the sale of the drawings fell away. Mara returned the drawings to the bank vault. Strand didn’t mention it because the sale of the drawings was a conclusion and introduced a connection to the end of something. He didn’t ask Mara why she had dropped the subject.

The next few weeks passed quickly. Strand and Mara saw a lot of each other, each of them growing increasingly at ease with calling the other to suggest dinner at a favorite restaurant or a movie or just to get together at either of their homes for a meal, which often ran late.

Mara came frequently enough to Strand’s at the end of the day that she and Meret soon became good friends. Often when Mara was coming over for the evening she would show up a little early, before Meret left for the day, and the two of them would have an early glass of wine and visit while Strand finished whatever he was doing in his office.

Sometimes on weekends when Meret wasn’t working, Mara would come over and spend the day, browsing in Harry’s library or playing CDs from his collection while he worked at his desk. She would bring her sketchbooks and curl up in a chair somewhere and work quietly. They would have drinks in the garden and talk, a pastime of which neither of them seemed to tire, every conversation bringing to each of them an accumulative knowledge of the other that continued to stabilize their friendship.

And it remained a friendship, a close friendship, but nothing more than that. Mara always went home in the evenings, or Strand did when he was at her place. Increasingly, though, Strand’s house became the place where they were most comfortable.

Strand thought a lot about what would happen if the relationship turned more intimate. In a way he yearned for it, but in another way he very much wanted to keep it just the way it was. He tried to make peace with his ambivalence, but in the end he couldn’t bring himself to remove the boundary line that protected him from a level of complication that he still wanted to avoid.

For her part, Mara seemed at ease with this, and their friendship settled into a routine in which they desired and sought nothing more than simply to be in each other’s company. But it quickly moved beyond that to the point where they very much desired each other’s presence, and the alacrity with which this happened surprised both of them.

May and June passed from the calendar in this manner, and the first anniversary of Romy’s death slipped quietly past in a single summer night, its hurt and heartache softened, at least to the point of being bearable, by Mara’s reassuring presence. July was almost gone when Strand told Mara that he was going to have to start traveling.

“Really? For how long?” She was curled up in an armchair in his office, near the windows and his desk, sketching by the oblique light that came in from the courtyard. She had gathered her hair in a loose pile on her head to keep it out of her face while she sketched, securing it in place with a couple of pencils. She was barefoot, and she was eating a frozen lime bar, a napkin in her lap.

“A few weeks.” Strand put down his pen and pushed away from his desk. He had kicked off his shoes under the desk and propped his feet on an ottoman.

“Where are you going?”

“San Francisco, then Rome. I’ve got a collection of Eakins portrait studies that I’ve been putting together for a client in San Francisco, and a man in Rome has got a little bunch of Fuseli drawings that I’d be a fool to pass up.”

Mara finished her lime bar and wiped her mouth with the napkin and then carefully wrapped the stick in the napkin.

“You’ve been working on these a long time?”

“Most of the year.”

“Sounds like fun,” she said, but she wasn’t successful at hiding her disappointment at the prospect of his leaving. Strand was a little surprised, and gratified, at her reaction. “When are you leaving?”

“In a couple of days.”

“Oh, that soon?”

She was pursing her lips slightly, her eyes diverted to her pencil as she doodled distractedly in the bottom corner of her sketchpad.

“I was wondering,” he said, “when I get back from San Francisco if you’d like to go on to Rome with me.”

Her pencil stopped. She didn’t look up. She said, “Oh . . . well . . .”

He could see her mind working in her face, something he was beginning to appreciate about her. It was an unusually transparent behavior, a lack of calculation that he found refreshing. His entire professional life had been spent dealing with people under control. Spontaneity, apparent spontaneity, was rare.

“In a few days?” she asked, still not looking up.

“Right.”

She nodded slightly, as if having confirmed something to herself, and then she looked up at him.

“I want to say something, Harry.” Her face reflected just a hint of acknowledgment that she thought she was stepping into risky water. “I’m forty-two. I don’t want to pretend that I’m in my twenties, and that I’m engaged in some sort of game here. One, I don’t have the patience for it anymore. Two, I don’t have the time for it anymore. I’ve wasted too much of it already. I must have thrown away five years in the last twelve months. Three, I want you to know, without having to be coy about it, that I like you very much, and, frankly, I don’t want you to wander away before we get to know each other better. Really get to know each other.”

She stopped, but not long enough for him to say anything before she went on.

“If you don’t have the same . . . interest . . . in continuing this in a serious way, just tell me. I’ve been through quite a lot in the past couple of years, and I think I can handle honest answers if they’ve got honest feelings behind them. You don’t strike me as the kind of man who’d be cruel about it if you didn’t want this to go on.”

She paused again, but again she didn’t let him interrupt her train of thought.

“I guess what I’m trying to say is, well, I think I’m a romantic woman, but at this point in my life it seems to me that good common sense is just as important.

“I’ve been burned pretty badly with this marriage, Harry, despite my bravado about it. I just can’t make that kind of mistake again.” She stopped and looked down. “But we seem to have so much to offer each other. If this is a . . . possibility for us, well, I’d hate for us to miss an opportunity simply because we didn’t know how to talk to each other about what we’re really feeling.” Again she confronted him with her eyes. “I don’t want the rituals of . . . getting to know each other to confuse what we might be genuinely feeling. We can’t mistake, or misrepresent, our feelings for each other, Harry. Either way.” She paused. “I think . . . that would be a shame.”

He couldn’t answer her immediately. Though she had spoken haltingly, there was no misunderstanding the depth of her feelings, and Strand wanted to accord her the same considerate deliberation.

“I can’t think of anything I’d like better than to continue this . . . as long as we can.” He thought a moment, his arms crossed. “I don’t know how far down the road I’m thinking. I don’t know that I have ‘plans.’ . . .”

“No”—Mara sat up in her chair, putting the sketchpad down on the floor—“I didn’t mean that you had to spell it out for me. I, it’s just that, a trip like that, it could change things.” She stopped, seemingly frustrated at her own inability to express precisely what she was thinking. “Harry, you know what I mean here. I’m so very grateful to you for our friendship . . . for you sharing your home, for Meret’s friendship . . . for you including me in your life.” She took a deep breath. “For me, it could easily go farther than this. It seems like we’re at that point where this could become something else, something more.”

“But you don’t want to do that yet. Or maybe ever.”

“It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s that I’m afraid to if . . . Look, I don’t want sex to complicate a friendship. If it’s only going to be a friendship.”

Strand stood, put his hands in his pockets, and leaned his shoulder against the window frame. He looked outside a moment and tried to straighten out his thoughts. When he turned back to her she was reaching up and taking the two pencils out of her hair. She tossed them onto the floor by her sketchpad, shook out her hair, and leaned back in the corner of the chair and looked at him.

“Do you think it’s possible that you could be expecting too much from this?” Strand asked.

“Expecting too much? What do you think is out of proportion in what I’ve just said?”

“It sounds to me like you’re wanting guarantees.”

She frowned at him, waiting for him to go on.

“Guarantees,” Strand said, “that you won’t get hurt. Guarantees that I’m going to be the kind of person you want me to be. Guarantees that I’m not going to disappoint you.”

For a moment neither of them said anything, and this time he had no perception whatsoever of what was going on in her mind. The silence went on longer than he imagined it would. She broke her gaze and looked away. She nodded slightly, as if to herself, her eyes finding and settling on a drawing on the wall near her chair.

“Okay, I see your point,” she said. “Maybe I’m trying to be too careful.” She shook her head, thinking. “Maybe I’m, I don’t know, trying too hard to avoid the common little disasters that destroy a relationship, the kind of things that afterward, when it doesn’t work out and it’s over, you say to yourself, I should have seen that coming.”

“I’d like to do that, too,” Strand said. “But you can’t take the risk out of being human. Especially the kind of risks that two people take when they’re trying to feel their way into each other’s lives.”

She seemed embarrassed and at the same time a little sad, a reaction that puzzled him.

“Believe me,” he said, trying to diffuse her confusion, “I didn’t mean to push this. It was only a suggestion.”

“Harry, I’d love to go to Rome with you. I would dearly love to.” She smiled apologetically. “I don’t know. I guess I thought I wanted it too much.”

“Good,” he said, smiling too.

 

 

CHAPTER 9

ROME

Ariana Kiriasis sat on a large, damask-upholstered divan in the upstairs sala of her home in a quiet street in the Aventino, the southernmost of Rome’s seven hills. She was looking out to the view over her balcony, the double doors of which were thrown open to the pleasant morning air and to the sound of crows in the stone pines on the grounds of the nearby churches of Santi Bonifacio e Alessio and Santa Sabina. This single view was the reason she had bought the old house, as well as the reason it was grossly overpriced, considering its wretched plumbing and deteriorating stucco walls, which she had had to pay handsomely to have repaired.

Having an artistic and romantic eye, she had never regretted her decision. To the northwest, the view encompassed a long stretch of the Tiber and all of the district of Trastevere. On a day like today, with a slight haze in the summer air, the filtered light illuminated the dome of Saint Peter’s with exquisite effect, as though it were a colossal pearl hurled from heaven onto the muddy banks of the Tiber.

This was the view Ariana stared at now, but it was not the view she was seeing. So intensely was her mind engaged that she actually saw nothing at all. On the sofa beside her, and scattered over the floor around her small slippered feet, were the pages of the morning’s International Herald Tribune, which her maid brought to her every morning with her espresso and pastry.

Ariana had been through every page of it. She had been through every column . . . several times. She did not find, she could not find, the item that she had depended upon seeing every first week of the month for the past four years. It was usually in the form of an advertisement, and usually the smallest one the newspaper would sell. The word “art” or “drawing” always appeared in the advertisement, which might address anything having to do with art, the sale of art supplies, an art auction, an estate sale, an exhibition. Sometimes they were fanciful. Corsier was like that. He could be droll. Within the brief advertisement were two things meant for Ariana to read: first, there was the name “Claude Corsier” in a coded form and in one of five languages; and second, there was a coded date on which the next month’s advertisement would appear.

Her own advertisement, meeting similar criteria and intended for Corsier’s eyes, had appeared two days earlier in the same newspaper.

She had already gotten up and gone to the writing desk in her bedroom to check Corsier’s previous month’s advertisement and to confirm today’s date. She had already spent a lot of time staring at the crumpled newspaper, leaning forward on the sofa, her elbows on her thighs, the fingers of both hands embedded deep into her wiry hair as her mind raced over the possibilities for the advertisement’s conspicuous absence. None of the possibilities made any sense except the worst one. She felt distinctly as she imagined a woman might feel who one morning found that dreaded lump in her breast after a lifetime of knowing that her family medical history and her own habits had predisposed her to that inevitable discovery. It had finally happened. Still, it was a shock.

Suddenly she dropped her gaze from the white dome of Saint Peter’s to the newspaper on the worn and faded Persian carpet. The sudden change from bright to dark blinded her momentarily. She waited. Her sight returned from the edges inward. As the newspaper reappeared it struck her as really quite odd that she and Claude Corsier had never discussed exactly what they would do in this situation. They had created a system for mutual notification, but beyond that . . . Well, there was nothing beyond that, and she was dumbfounded by the shroud of isolation that had dropped over her in the last twenty minutes. Before coffee she had a place in life. Friends. Lovers. Companions. After a few bites of her torta di mele and a demitasse of espresso, she was suddenly an alien in that same world.

Actually, that wasn’t quite right, either. She was no longer in the same world that she had lived in before the torte and espresso. She had been dragged backward in time into a former life. When she thought about it now, it seemed so far removed from her present life that it was as though it had all happened to another person. Yet, strangely, certain events, certain moments, faces, bits of conversation, the sound of a voice, a betrayal, the touch of a lover, a death, a fragrance, all of it was as immediate to her as the events of last night.

And that was what petrified her.

Ariana picked up the telephone.

VIENNA . . . FIVE DAYS LATER

The second-floor flat was in an old apartment building in a residential street in Wieden, the fourth district. The little street was shrouded by fat chestnut trees whose broad boughs reached all the way to the window where Ariana sat watching and waiting for him, a cool Austrian breeze carrying the smoke from her cigarette out into the dappled light of late afternoon. She could hear people passing by on the sidewalk below, and she could catch glimpses of them through leaves.

Even though she had never been to these rooms before, they were already familiar to her. For the better part of two decades she had met Harry Strand and others in countless rooms like these in Prague and Rome and Athens, in Budapest, Berlin, and Trieste, all over Europe. For security reasons they moved regularly to different streets in different cities, but eventually all the safe houses in all the cities became the same. Their differences were completely obscured because they were all used in the same way for the same reasons—a place to plot, a place to escape to, a place to tryst and to share secrets, a place to wait for the inevitable encrypted message to move on. This one reeked with the stale odors of former meetings. It was an odor she would forever associate with the taut business of bringing one’s fears under control.

She heard the key working at the lock in the door, and she turned in her chair and watched as the door swung open and he walked into the room.

“Ariana,” he said.

“Hello, Bill.”

He closed the door and flipped the deadlock. When he turned around again he stood still a moment, looking at her from the denser shadows away from the windows. She couldn’t see his face, but she knew he could see hers.

She mashed out the last of her cigarette and stood up. He moved away from the door, taking off his suit coat as he came into the center of the room. After taking a pack of cigarettes from the inner breast pocket of the coat, he folded the coat and draped it over the back of a chair. He tossed the cigarettes onto the sofa.

“What’s it been?” he asked as she approached him. “Nearly five years?” He made no gesture of greeting. The intervening years were nothing.

She said, “Something like that.”

They regarded each other awkwardly, and then Bill Howard sat on the sofa and crossed his legs. He picked up the cigarettes, took one for himself and then offered one to her. She took it from him and bent down for the tiny flame he held up to her. He had a handsome, old-fashioned gold lighter, heavily engraved and much worn. It was the only elegant thing about the man, and it didn’t seem to fit him at all. She had always wondered how he came to have it. She wasn’t surprised to see he was still using it.

Howard smelled of an American shaving lotion, the same lotion she remembered from the years before. She had seen a bottle of it once in his bathroom in a hotel in Salonika. It was emerald green. Nothing exotic, a cheap aftershave that could be purchased in any pharmacy.

Bill Howard had put on weight, but other than that he had not changed. He was still wearing suits in tones of brown, the same unremarkable hue as his thinning hair. He wore a white shirt and a tie—geometric patterns in burgundy and beige—that could have been one from those earlier years. As always he looked as if he had dressed without paying attention to what he was doing, as if he had had something else on his mind.

She pulled heavily on her cigarette and crossed her arms again. None of the lamps in the room were turned on, and the only light came from the window, tinted with green reflected off the broad leaves of the chestnuts. The apartment was dowdy with forty-year-old furniture that needed reupholstering. The place made her terribly sad.

“Still beautiful,” Howard said, appraising her in the pale light. “Greek women, I remember, have a way of ignoring the passing years.”

“I thought you weren’t going to come,” she said, disregarding his remark.

“I’m sorry it took so long.” He looked around.

“I’ve been waiting in these damn rooms for five days,” she said.

“I was traveling.”

“They might have told me that.”

“You’ve forgotten how it is.”

“I haven’t forgotten a single moment,” she said.

Howard said nothing.

“Claude Corsier has disappeared,” she said.

He didn’t have much of a reaction, only a fleeting frown.

“What do you mean?”

She looked at him, tense, restless. “Which of those words don’t you understand?”

“You’ve been keeping in touch with him?”

“Yes.”

“Really. And with Strand, too?”

“No.”

“Okay,” he said, shifting his shoulders on the sofa, settling in, “go ahead and tell me what’s going on.”

Ariana nodded and took a long drag on her cigarette for support. She collected herself.

“After the FIS changed our mission to criminal intelligence, everything changed for us . . . who worked with Harry. Even before that we knew things were going to be different after the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union disintegrated. The cold war was over. We knew we were living through the end of an era. Harry said the FIS was being forced to . . . you say, downsize. Even though we had been redirected”—she shrugged—“we saw how easily we could be thrown away when we were no longer useful in a certain way.

“Harry . . . well, all of us . . . the three of us made certain plans to, uh, ‘improve’ our retirement situation. It was late in the day for me,” she continued. “I was approaching middle age, had no money to speak of and no pension waiting for me. No husband and no prospects of getting one—that’s too high a price to pay for security. I decided to look after myself.”

Howard’s expression changed slightly, taking on the impassive rigidity one often saw in people who suddenly realized they were about to hear news that they expected would shock them. They reflexively prepared themselves with a kind of facial fortification.

“We developed a strategy to get away with some money, a scheme. It went on for exactly six months, until Harry closed it down nearly six months before he retired.”

Howard’s face fell. “Jesus . . . Christ . . . Wolf Schrade?”

She nodded. “Of course, everyone scattered after that. We never saw each other again. None of us.”

Howard had forgotten to smoke his cigarette. It smoldered between his fingers.

“But Claude and I decided we wanted to stay in touch with each other. We agreed on a secret way to communicate, a way to make sure that each of us knew the other was still alive. A warning system.”

“He’s missed his turn.”

“Exactly.” She smoked, her stomach aching from the tension.

Howard wasn’t interested so much in Claude Corsier’s disappearance. “How much did Schrade lose?” His voice betrayed a forced stoicism.

She hesitated. “Millions.”

“How many?”

“I don’t know. Quite a few.”

Howard didn’t react.

“The way it was set up,” Ariana went on, “he didn’t know. It was a very good operation. Very good. Extensive planning.” She paused. “I think he has finally puzzled out what happened. And who did it.”

“Shit.” Howard remembered his cigarette, which had burned down to the filter and was stinking. He put it in the ashtray.

“The point is,” she said, “I think this is going to get dirty. This is very complex.”

“God . . . damn.” Howard swallowed. “This was Harry’s idea, wasn’t it?”

Ariana looked at him. “We were all involved. . . .”

“But it was Harry’s idea.”

“You’ve got to understand—”

Howard held up one hand to stop her. His face had grown red. He was furious. She knew the reality here. Bill Howard didn’t give a damn that Ariana was afraid, that she believed she was going to be killed, and that she was desperate for protection. What was coursing through his thoughts like a fever was that his twenty-three-year career in the Foreign Intelligence Service, a carefully shepherded career, was suddenly as unstable as the smoke wisping up from the end of her cigarette.

She smelled food cooking, a thick odor that she couldn’t identify. It lacked the tangy sharpness she would have smelled in Salonika or Athens, or even Rome. She turned away from Howard’s silence and moved back to the window. Below, a car purred by slowly in the street.

She wasn’t sure where she stood legally on this, but the game was intricate from the point of view of international law. It had all taken place in the gray areas of the spying game, and it was her guess that it would unravel in the same sphere. Behind her she heard the flick and scratch of Howard’s lighter. A pause while he inhaled.

“I can’t believe you people thought you’d get by with this,” he said, his voice husky with smoke. “Screw a guy like Schrade and just get slick away with it.”

She turned around. “It was a lot of money. Harry, well, you know, he inspired a lot of confidence. We thought we had a good chance. You know better than I do that people like Schrade steal from each other all the time.”

“And they get killed all the time. It’s a violent vocation.”

“Maybe, but then a lot of others get away with it, too, don’t they? It happens. We thought it could happen to us.”

She put out her cigarette in the ashtray she had left on the windowsill. Her heart was loping erratically. Below on the sidewalk a couple paused under the trees to talk in the fading light. She could see only the lower part of the woman’s skirt and her legs.

She turned around and came back toward the sofa. She avoided a heavy armchair with its loathsome upholstery worn bare in spots by the buttocks of spies and traitors and the women who slept with them. She pulled around a wooden dining chair and positioned it in front of him.

“Claude Corsier,” Howard mused, “that son of a bitch would’ve picked the devil’s pocket for spare change if he thought the extra pennies would help him buy another goddamned little scratchy drawing.”

“He took a lot of risks for you, too, Bill. And you didn’t pay him shit.”

“I haven’t forgotten that.” He dropped his eyes to the dead cigarette butts in the ashtray beside him. He was lost in thought. Then he closed his eyes and slowly shook his head. “Jesus H. Christ,” he said. He looked up at her. “And what did your cut come to?”

“A lot.” She wasn’t going to get into that until she knew if they were going to help her.

Howard swore again. “Strand knows about this, that Claude’s disappeared?”

“I don’t know.” She knew he wasn’t going to believe this. None of them had ever really understood Harry Strand.

“Our agreement,” she said, “actually, it was Harry’s stipulation, was that we would never contact him after this was over. Never even try. Ever. And I haven’t.”

Howard was already shaking his head. “I don’t buy that, Ariana. You worked together too long, went through too much. You were like a family. He couldn’t do that.”

“Well, he did, Bill.” She was finding it difficult to stay calm. Both of them were barely handling the tension. “None of you ever really understood what you were dealing with in Harry Strand. The reason you find this idea so confounding is that you never could have made that kind of decision yourself. It’s too extreme, too radical. That’s why Harry was so successful for you for so many years. He never let reality get in the way of possibility. That is why he is what he is . . . and why you are what you are.”

Howard said nothing for a little while, and though she couldn’t read his face, she sensed his agitation.

“How is this going to work?” she asked. It was time for blunt questions.

He shook his head. “I don’t know.” He sounded tired. “Anyway, it’s not for me to decide, you know. It’s them.”

“It’s the same thing.”

“No. Big difference. I’m out here. They’re back there. It’s not the same thing at all.”

Ariana felt a resurging nausea. “You tell them I want to talk,” she said. “I’ll tell them everything—but I want protection from Schrade. They need to know what happened.”

“What about Harry? This can’t be good for him.”

She fixed her eyes on him. She felt near tears, but she fought it. “You tell me about Harry,” she said coldly.

“What.”

“Is he alive, Bill?”

“How the hell do I know?” He started to say something else but stopped.

Neither of them trusted the other, but Ariana was at a distinct disadvantage. They both knew it.

“I need to know what I’m dealing with here, Ariana,” Howard said. “Give me some idea of where you’re going with this. I’ve got to know where this is headed before I can take it back to the guys who call the shots.”

She really had no choice.

 

 

CHAPTER 10

ROME

Mara’s home near the Piazza Sallustio was a lovely place with a garden surrounded by high walls and well-kept grounds. In the 1950s and 1960s, when the nearby Via Veneto was the center of European la dolce vita, the home was owned by a titled family from Monaco who put it to good use entertaining the glitterati of those heady days. Today the area had slipped into genteel quietude. The real estate was still choice and expensive.

Mara seemed most comfortable here; she had scattered throughout the house the myriad small personal items that one kept around simply because one liked something’s shape or color or had fond remembrances associated with its acquisition.

Here, too, Harry Strand saw for the first time some of Mara’s fully developed drawings, which she had framed and hung throughout the house. She had not told him that they were hers. They had been there nearly a week before he had enough leisure time to wander unhurriedly through the large rooms and examine all the paintings and drawings she had accumulated.

She was a far better artist than she had allowed him to see from the sketching she had been doing in Houston, having implied that her work was little more than academic. She had a very fine hand, a sound grounding in draftsmanship, and a genuinely original eye. She had a few figure studies, but most were studies of Roman architecture and city scenes.

When Strand looked at these pictures, Mara came into a clearer focus. It is inherent in an artist’s work to be revelatory, and Mara’s drawings were no exception. In the way she expressed the attitude of a seated nude, in the way she brought the light to a church or palazzo, or chose a perspective of one of Rome’s countless small, winding streets, she revealed, incrementally, ever more of her mind and personality and gave him access to other dimensions of understanding her. He saw nothing in these works to lessen his growing affection for her. He saw everything to enhance it.

After he had finished the week-long process of acquiring the Fuseli drawings, he and Mara began showing each other “their” Rome. They were surprised to learn that in the past they had spent many months in Rome at the same time, and Mara found it intriguing to speculate that with their common interests they might very well have been in some of the same galleries or museums or restaurants at the same time. In reality, however, Strand knew that his Rome and Mara’s Rome, despite all their common interests, had never had the remotest chance of overlapping. They had been, in fact, worlds apart.

None of that mattered, for in the Rome of the present they stopped pretending that the very thing each of them had desired, and each had believed was inevitable from their first meeting, was not going to happen.

They had been dining late at Toula, which had become their favorite restaurant, an understated place at the throat of the tiny Via della Lupa in the center of the city. They lingered long over desserts and more wine, then walked awhile in the narrow streets near the Pantheon in the cool of an evening so rare that it seemed to have been conjured for them from antiquity. She leaned against him in the taxi, and he could smell her, not her perfume, but the fragrance of her skin, and the ride to Sallustiano took them through a Rome that had never seemed to Strand more beautiful or ancient.

There was no decision, no word spoken, as they climbed the stairs together. With Mara still holding to his arm, he simply walked past his own bedroom and followed her into hers.

He undressed her by the opened balcony doors above the palms, the late Roman breeze moving all about them like a vague memory he could never quite remember. She waited for his hands, head bowed, leaning into him slightly with a grace of controlled desire that he had never before experienced with a woman. When her dress fell away to the floor, she was naked. As he touched her waist, traced his fingers over the rise of her hips, and gently moved his hands up to cup her breasts, she leaned her head forward and put her lips lightly upon his neck. The feel of her was as new and erotic to him as the first moment he had ever felt a woman’s naked breasts, that long lifetime ago as an astonished boy.

• • •

“I just got a call from an old friend,” Mara said, approaching the door to the room where Strand had been spending the afternoon poring over half a dozen art books he had bought that afternoon in the Largo Chigi. “A woman I’ve known for years. We’re going to have drinks at a little café near the bottom of Veneto. Want to go along?”

Strand looked at his watch and then outside to the courtyard, where the light was already softening in the late afternoon.

“You still want to have dinner at Toula’s at nine?” he asked.

“Sure.”

“Then I think I’ll pass.”

“She’s going to be disappointed.”

Strand shrugged. “I’ll open a bottle of something here and think about you at dusk.”

She came across the room to the sofa, where he sat among books and papers scattered about him, and leaned over the back of the sofa, put her arms around his neck, and kissed him.

“She’s pretty,” she whispered. “You’ll be missing something.”

“Well, that’s enticing”—Strand scratched his temple with his pencil—“but I really don’t want to stop in the middle of this. Tell her . . . it pained me to forgo the pleasure of her company.”

“Yeah,” Mara said, straightening up, “she’ll swoon.” She turned and headed for the door, grabbing her shoulder bag from a chair on the way out. “See you later.”

Strand worked for nearly an hour more before he stopped, laid aside a folio volume of early Renaissance architectural drawings, and rubbed his eyes. He hadn’t even gotten up from the sofa since Mara left, and he needed to stretch his legs and go to the bathroom. First he turned on a few lamps, giving the room a soft amber glow.

This generous room had become Strand’s favorite place in the house because of its antique furniture and broad doorways opening to the loggia and courtyard. Pictures hung everywhere here, covering the high walls, hanging over the fireplace and over the doors. There were tall narrow paintings and horizontal drawings, some with elaborate frames, some with simple ones, square pictures, small oval ones; oils, pastels, pencil, charcoal, and metal point. One of Mara’s rare large nudes hung on the north wall, a dominant piece that Strand liked very much. In one corner of the room was an easel and a small table cluttered with pencil and charcoal boxes with colorful French and Italian labels.

He went down the corridor to the bathroom, and when he returned he opened the French doors to the evening air, standing and looking out with his hands in his pockets. Somewhere in another concealed garden a peacock cried. The city was all around him, yet the only evidence of it was a faraway and almost imperceptible hum of traffic.

Leaving the French doors open, he stepped outside and stood for a moment in the loggia. The east wall in the courtyard was rosy and deepening quickly as the sun fell behind the Janiculum across the Tiber. He stepped out onto the cinder path that followed the wall and began walking, his shoes making a crunching sound on the cinder. At the far end of the garden he stopped and listened to the peacock again and took a deep breath of the air. The air of Rome changed at dusk and acquired a special quality in the same way that the city’s famous light took on a unique character of its own at certain times of the year. At night the air was nearer to antiquity than in the day, and one could imagine with greater clarity the men and women of former ages.

He moved on, rounding the garden on his way back to the loggia. When he was nearly there he looked toward the French doors, anticipating that the amber glow from the few lamps in the room would be even richer in color now with the greater darkness. Instead he saw a jarring, pale light, flickering against the panes of the French doors.

He stopped. The television? Was Mara home? She hadn’t touched the television since they had arrived.

His heart began to lope, and all of his old reflexes roused themselves as he studied the pale light from the darkness where he stood. Then he walked on. He stepped up on the loggia and entered the villa through the French doors.

No one was there. He called out. Nothing. The house, his sixth sense told him, was empty.

Between the fireplace and the French doors was a small black statue, an admirable study of a Maillol nude. It sat on what must have been a narrow pedestal covered with a faded scarlet Renaissance damask with fleur-de-lis pattern in gold thread and a gold cord trim.

Next to it was a dark, heavy antique table upon which sat a black television and a VCR. On a shelf below were half a dozen cassettes, all of them labeled with Mara’s handwriting: “Master drawings, the Uffizi”; “Drawing collection, Villa Borghese”; “Modern drawing exhibit, American Academy”; “Balthus exhibit, Academia Valentino.” Strand had looked at the labels before, but he had never watched the tapes.

The VCR was on, static dancing on the fluorescing screen. A cassette was half out of the slot.

Strand walked over to it and took it out. No label, no identification. He put it back into the slot and pushed it in. The slot door closed. The gears whirred. He stood, watching, as it began to play. The Balthus exhibit. Mara’s voice narrating. The images were sharp and in color, and Mara was doing a good job, taking the exhibit slowly, coming in close on the paintings and drawings, narrating, reading the attributions on the labels below or to the side of each piece.

After fifteen or twenty seconds, Mara’s narration was abruptly interrupted and a grainy black-and-white tape began to play. A timing counter showed up in the lower left corner of the screen. A gummy, hot feeling washed over him as he immediately recognized the characteristics of a surveillance tape. He stood, riveted, in front of the screen. There was no audio track, and the only sound in the room was the slight hiss of the tape whirring slowly on the spinner heads inside the player.

The camera seemed to be mounted on the dashboard of a car. It was night, and the headlights of the car picked up traffic traveling in the same direction on what appeared to be an expressway. Headlights from approaching traffic across a median flared in bright streams as they approached and disappeared. The car moved in and out of the general stream of traffic with no discernible purpose. After a few moments it became clear that only one car had been in front of them consistently through all the lane switching and the passing and being passed.

Strand tried in vain to identify the locale: highway markers and exit signs had been manipulated and deliberately blurred. The cars were American; that was all he could tell. The camera car stayed so far back behind its target that Strand couldn’t tell anything about the driver or even how many people were in the car, and when the driver braked or switched lanes the tail and signal lights caused a halo effect that obscured its identifying marks even more.

What the hell was this?

The traffic grew thinner, then sparse. The car being taped took an exit onto an access road, then turned onto what appeared to be a country road. The nighttime conditions and the relatively narrow field of vision afforded by the headlights did not allow Strand to gain any significant information from the terrain. Once or twice he thought he saw sand dunes.

The two cars then turned off onto a smaller road, which, though it was still paved, was most likely on private land. Suddenly the speed of the cars accelerated dramatically. The camera car quickly closed on the car in front of it, and in a sickening instant Strand recognized his old Land Rover. Before he had time to make his mind work around that realization, a spotlight came on in the camera car, lighting the back of the driver’s head in the lead car just as she looked around.

It was Romy.

Strand’s legs buckled, and he dropped to one knee. His eyes stayed locked on the video screen. He had no awareness of whether he was sitting or kneeling: he was cognizant only of the mind-numbing fact that he was watching Romy’s last moments.

Romy’s car careened wildly in the turns of the narrow paved lane, the chase car’s headlights losing her just as she was sliding or skidding on the edges of the road. Marshland brush and sand dunes jumped in and out of the headlights, and then suddenly the chase car’s lights were squarely on the Land Rover. Once, twice, three times the chase car accelerated and rammed into the rear of the Land Rover, the camera shuddering violently with the impact. In the illumination of the handheld spotlight, Strand could actually see Romy’s head snap from the impact of each fierce jolt, and he could see her arms wildly fighting the steering wheel.

Abruptly the bridge railing was in front of her. The Land Rover began to fishtail out of control and careened off the road, plunging into the tidal stream. Water shot up high above the headlights of the chase car, glittering like an explosion in the bright lights; the chase car itself barely managed to stay on the pavement and clear the railing as it skidded to a stop in the middle of the bridge.

The camera was snatched from the dash, and nothing was clear for a few moments. Then the spotlight snapped on again and the camera was looking down into the tidal stream, the Land Rover’s rear end just scarcely visible out of the water, the brake lights burning steadily, then flickering out.

The camera stayed a long time on the rear end of the Rover. A long time.

When the tape finally played out and the machine clicked off, Strand fell over on his side. His face was wet. He felt partially paralyzed, as if a brain aneurysm had rendered him immobile. He coughed up bile, fought back nausea.

Romy’s pale, horror-stricken face was fixed in his mind.

God. God. How could he have been so wrong about it all?