CHAPTER 31

BERLIN, SCHWANENWERDER

The villa sat on the island like a stone outcropping emerging from the deep emerald of the German woods. A nineteenth-century residence in the neoclassical style, it was made of gray limestone. From its high elevation it commanded a panoramic view that took in the exclusive villa district of Nikolassee on the opposite shore as well as the broad waist of the Havel River. In the distance the river narrowed as it neared Pichelsdorf, the densely wooded banks closing in and gradually swallowing the water in a throat of green.

A Mercedes motored slowly across the bridge from the mainland and proceeded to make its way along the narrow drive to the gates below the villa. Here the Mercedes stopped while Bill Howard presented his identification at the gatehouse, then continued up a serpentine lane to a motor court in front of the villa.

The view from here was stunning in the summer sunshine, but Howard did not bother to stop and look at it. He was welcomed by a young man dressed in a business suit and carrying a clipboard who led him into the villa and up several flights of wide stone stairways whose steps were so shallow that the climb was hardly noticeable at all. At every turn Howard caught sight of the Havel from windows that perfectly framed different views and brought him to the top of the stairs and an anteroom.

If he had known what he was looking at, which he did not, he would have found himself surrounded by works of art by some of the finest French, German, and Flemish artists of the late Gothic period: van Eyck, da Fabriano, Bosch, Fouquet, and Wiertz. Careful thought had gone into the manner in which the works were displayed, their sequence, their visual impact, their dominant color schemes, subtleties completely lost on Bill Howard. In fact, he had mused privately that the overall effect of this curious collection of paintings was rather grim and severe. He also assumed that the art in the anteroom had cost a fortune. This time he was closer to the mark.

Though several doorways exited off this anteroom, he was ushered toward the one straight in front of him. The room he entered was perhaps four times as long as its width and terminated at the far end with a huge window that once again provided a spectacular view of the heavily bowered Havel. More paintings and drawings hung along the high walls of the room, and down the center of its entire length was a series of waist-high lime wood cabinets with narrow horizontal shelves that contained scores of leather-bound portfolio boxes. Each box had gilt stamping on its face and spine, identifying a specific collection of drawings. One portfolio lay open on the slanted top of each cabinet, its contents ready for perusal. Farther toward the windows was a sitting area, and beyond that, just in front of the window itself, was a massive antique desk at which sat Wolfram Schrade.

Howard had been here many times before, and he knew the routine. Schrade was busy at his desk, so Howard did not speak to him but took a seat in one of the armchairs in the sitting area. Schrade ignored him. Howard let his eyes wander around the room. The place was a goddamn museum. It gave him the creeps.

After about ten minutes Howard heard some shuffling at the desk. He looked around to see Schrade standing, taking off his reading glasses as he came round the side of his desk. He was buttoning a double-breasted navy blue suit, which he wore over a tailor-made white shirt with medium-width crimson stripes. No tie. He was tall and lean, his face angular with a straight nose. His hair was thick, the color of sun-bleached flax.

“What about the woman?” Schrade asked, as if they were picking up a conversation of a few minutes earlier. His accent was not subtle, but neither was it distracting. His voice was unconcerned, his manner relaxed. Howard had never seen him otherwise.

Howard explained that the hunch he had had about her from the beginning was proving to be right. He thought she had become sympathetic with Strand. He no longer considered her reliable.

“Have you told this to Payton?”

“No.”

“I see. Well, I am finished fucking with them, then,” Schrade said. “I want her put away.”

There it was, Schrade’s peculiar phrase that Howard always found so jarring. In his own experience the phrase was veterinary, and he wondered how Schrade had come by it in English. Howard, who did not consider himself squeamish, found it a particularly brutal expression.

He whistled softly under his breath. “You’re talking about an FIS agent now. That’s going to get a response. . . .”

“They are not going to respond to anything,” Schrade said with indifferent disdain. “Strand knows the thing is finished. Besides that, she obviously means something to him. Where are they?”

“Bellagio. My tech people said this morning the signal hadn’t moved. . . .”

“Oh, your ‘tech people.’” Despite his languid manner, Schrade was expert at conveying frigid sarcasm. He was standing in front of Howard in his distinctive manner, erect posture, though not rigid, with his unoccupied arms hanging straight down by his sides. He appeared to be very comfortable that way, feeling no need to cross his arms or put his hands in his pockets or otherwise engage himself in some type of self-conscious body language that most other people could hardly avoid.

“You ought to reconsider what you’re doing to Strand,” Howard said.

“No.”

“No, shit. I’m going to tell you, you kill that woman he’s with now, and he’ll never let go of a single goddamn Deutsche mark of what he took from you. Hell, he’s got to think he can save her life by giving it up.” He paused. “Most people, Wolf, respond to pressure when they have some reason to. You take away a man’s reason to live—”

“Nothing is going to save her life.”

“Fine. Whatever.” Howard glared at him. Vicious fucker. Howard always walked a narrow line with Schrade. He had to exhibit a certain amount of brazen aggression. Schrade understood and appreciated that. But he couldn’t push it too far. Fear and fortune were closely aligned in Schrade’s orbit. Right now the guy was as serene as a nun. Howard couldn’t figure it out. He always looked as though he were wearing new clothes. His shirts and suits were unfailingly fresh and crisp. His damn pants were never even wrinkled at the crotch after he had been sitting behind his desk all day. Did he have some kind of fetish about putting on new clothes every day? That would be weird, even for Schrade.

“I have to tell you . . .” Howard started out carefully; he didn’t want to provoke the goose until he’d put one more golden egg in his own Liechtenstein account, but he had to conduct some business here. “The FIS is pretty damn hot about the way you handled the Houston hit. That was over the top.”

“The man responsible for that fiasco has been put away,” Schrade said. “That was regrettable.”

“They’re trying to contain the investigation, but, Jesus . . .” Howard hesitated, again wanting to be careful. “It’s thrown us into an emergency situation back in the States.”

Schrade’s clear eyes picked up the faintest hint of a pale glacial blue from his navy suit.

“Yes, I imagine it has. You realize, of course, I don’t give a damn. If the FIS had not been so feeble, this would not be happening. You understand, if it had not been for the very”—here his voice allowed a tonal change of nearly imperceptible difference—“thinnest margin of chance, I would never have known about this disaster in the first place. If Dennis Clymer had not made the mistake of using the same tactics to embezzle for one of Lodato’s clients, if that client’s accountant hadn’t bungled the plan, if I hadn’t agreed to launder a certain sum for Lodato, and if my accountants hadn’t seen a curious familiar pattern in Clymer’s Lodato scheme . . .” Schrade paused and approached to the very edge of Howard’s chair. “If all of that had not happened, none of this would have been discovered at all.”

Howard was looking up at him, a perspective he didn’t like. These had become Schrade’s mantras: the thinnest margin, the stupidity of the FIS, his terrible financial losses.

“That, Mr. Howard, is too many ifs,” Schrade concluded. “The FIS should not have sent you with this little complaint.” Pause. “Considering our relationship, you should not have even passed it on to me.”

“I still have to work for them.”

“That is no concern of mine.” Schrade turned away and walked to the nearest of the lime wood cabinets, where he began idly paging through the drawings displayed there.

Finally he was doing something with his hands, Howard thought.

“It ought to be,” Howard said. “You’re making a fortune off the intelligence I’m still passing along to you.”

“No, it ought not to be,” Schrade disagreed with a mild finality, still studying the drawings. “My only concern regarding you is whether you are useful to me.” He looked at Howard. “Everyone is always ‘making a fortune’ off of something or someone. I hear that hyperbole all the time.”

The starched young man who had escorted Howard into the house entered the room. Schrade turned his head.

“The two representatives from Christie’s and the woman from the Galerie Séverine are here.”

Schrade gave a dismissive nod to the young man, then looked back at Howard.

“I want to see you again tomorrow. Same time. There are some additional concerns on this issue. Aside from that, I have several client requests for intelligence. Very important. Lucrative. For both of us.”

Howard began to get up out of the overstuffed armchair, but Schrade was through and had already turned toward his desk, unfolding his reading glasses as he went. By the time Howard had gained his feet, Schrade was sitting in his chair, already absorbed in his reading. Howard paused and looked at him a moment. The impertinent son of a bitch. Never said hello, never said good-bye. Those were transitional niceties of human communication that, over the years, Schrade had gradually abridged, and then completely eliminated, from his dealings with people. At the exact moment he was through with you, you ceased to exist. The man had no soul; he really had no need for one. The only time Howard had ever seen him behave with anything resembling an actual human emotion was when he encountered new pieces of art that he wanted to buy. Only then, in the presence of oil and canvas, when his pale, pellucid eyes fell on sheets of paper scrabbled and scratched with pen or pencil or chalk, did he appear to want to interact with something outside his own intellect. Such an absence of human needs was frightening.

Howard turned and walked out of the long museum of Schrade’s mind, accompanied only by the sound of his own footsteps and a sour taste in his mouth.

 

 

CHAPTER 32

ANTIBES, FRENCH RIVIERA

Charles Rousset cautiously made his way along the stone path that for a few meters clung to the curve of the precipice above the Cap d’Antibes like a swallow’s nest glued to a cliff before it gained solid ground again and ascended toward the old house. He paused a moment and turned to enjoy the view of the Mediterranean. There was a haze over the water today, an impressionist’s interpretation. How could one help but be romantic about such a stunning perspective?

Reluctantly he turned back again to the path, which, like the house to which it led, was in a state of neglect, not from indifference, but from a lack of the proper funds to maintain it. At one time it had been a pristine piece of real estate. In the 1950s it had been purchased by a London banker who lavished a great deal of his fortune on it. In those days the footpath had been lined with brilliant bowers of saffron sepiara and the blindingly bright cerise bracts of the bougainvillea. Exotic flowering cycas marked each turning of the way, and pastel perennials of every color snuggled in among the crevices and corners.

Those were former days. The banker and his wife were long since gone, as were the flowers and the blooming trees. Common cactus and weeds had now overgrown the edges of the footpath, and unforgiving rocks gouged up through the flat stones to make walking a precarious effort.

The house was large but could not be called a proper villa. It was sited handsomely above the blue-and-green bay, and though its stucco was cracked and stained, though the stones of its courtyard and terrace were loosened and hosted sprays of dried native grass, and though some of its terra-cotta roof tiles were slipping and askew, the style and beauty of the house still gave Rousset a thrill as he rounded the last turn in the footpath and came upon it, silhouetted against the ageless Mediterranean.

Edith Vernon was the only child of the banker who had built the house, and when her father died, in much reduced circumstances, the house was the only thing he left her. Though it was debt free, Edie, who was now in her early sixties, was hard-pressed to keep it up and pay the proper taxes. When her father was in his financial heyday, Edie was in hers as well. An art student in her university years, she fully partook of Rome’s la dolce vita, and her beauty opened what few doors her father’s money would not. Though the memories of those days remained, they were all that remained, and Edie had scratched out a poor living during the last two decades, trying to live off her art. Like many artists, she was a better copier of others’ work than she was a creator of her own. At this she was brilliant.

“Good God!” she exclaimed. She was standing solidly in the kitchen doorway, her hands on her hips, looking out at him. “Claude?”

“Indeed.”

She gaped at him.

“And”—he tipped his head forward in a polite bow, smiling—“Charles Rousset.”

“My Gahhhhd! I don’t believe it!”

“Oh, do, Edie. You really must.” Corsier laughed as Edie stepped outside and embraced him. She was wearing a long peasant skirt and a cotton blouse hanging loose to distract from the fact that she no longer had much of a definable waist. Her long honey-colored hair was shot through with gray, and she had it pulled back and piled in a rough chignon. She was thicker now, but even so there was something undeniably sensual about her that made hugging her a pleasure. She smelled of lavender and the musk of oil paints.

She stepped back and put the palm of one hand against his goatee. “This becomes you, dear. Very fetching.” He smiled. “The Schieles,” she said. “I did these . . . these darlings for you?”

“Indeed.”

“Oh, Claude!” She clapped her hands together. “Quelle intrigue!”

• • •

They had tea on the frumpy terrace and brought each other up-to-date on the gossipy parts of their lives in the intervening five years since they had seen each other. Corsier, of course, left out almost everything, and he supposed that Edie did also.

“Well,” she said finally, setting aside the tiny wicker tea table and putting her hands on her knees, which were spread apart underneath the long skirt, “let’s get down to business.”

She got up and returned in a moment with two drawing boards with butcher’s paper covering the image on each. She propped them against the legs of the tea table and went out again, returning instantly with two thin easels, which she set up with their backs to the house so that the pictures would catch the light from the sea. She put a board on each easel and removed the papers. Then she stepped back beside Corsier so that they could look at the pictures together.

Corsier smiled. He was thrilled.

“You like them, then,” she said.

“They’re perfect.” He got up from his chair and went over to look at each of them more closely. “Edie,” he said, his face glued to the pictures, “these are exquisite.”

“Schiele,” she said, “the man’s a freak. Insane.” She came up beside Corsier. “You were very precise, as usual, Claude. I confess, I wasn’t always sure I was doing the right thing. You said to have her arms thus, as in this picture. Her legs thus. Her hair thus, but opposite, as in that picture. Her eyes looking directly at you, but vacant.”

“I left the color to you.”

“I knew them. I remember the originals that I’ve seen as though I had owned them myself.”

She pondered her drawings. “Despite your assurances to the contrary, I had a friend in Berlin send me some old drawing paper he had salvaged from a prewar paper mill near Munich. It’ll pass close examination, but not a chemical analysis. The pencil wasn’t a problem. Getting the right shade on the watercolor was a little tough.”

Corsier stepped back again from the two pictures, each of them roughly twenty-one inches high by fourteen inches wide. Both of them were unabashed exhibitionist portrayals of the female body, the distinctive mark of Egon Schiele. The first was a pencil drawing of a nude woman standing, looking at herself in the mirror. The back of the woman was nearest the viewer, and then another, smaller image of the woman was seen from the front, behind the first image, this one being the actual reflection. She was vamping for the artist, wearing only black stockings pulled up to midthigh. She had short bobbed hair and thin, horizontal eyes encircled by smoky shading.

The second picture was of two nude young women, done in pencil and watercolor. The two women lounged on a dark amethyst drapery. One of them had bobbed hair, the other long raven tresses. Their pubic hair was as jet as their ringlets, and there were pale splotches of lilac on their cheeks and nipples. Both of them were looking at the artist, one of them from the corners of her eyes as though she were just in the beginning movements of looking away.

“Nineteen eleven,” Corsier said. “I wanted them to precede his harsh, ectomorphic later works. You’ve done a wonderful job, Edie, of making them sensual while hinting at the meanness that was soon to dominate his style.”

“Those rather prissy mouths,” Edie said. “I liked doing them. I liked doing the eyes.” She paused. “But the pelvis on this one”—she pointed to one of the figures—“was difficult . . . maddening. Those explicit crotches on them were problems.” She laughed at herself.

“Good use of the amethyst”—Corsier came in closer to the dual portrait—“on the drapery, darker at the edges. Mmmmmm. I like this horizontal line above her stomach.” He perused the drawings for a long time.

Finally he straightened up. “Les splendide!”

Edie laughed. “God,” she said, “I can’t believe I’ve done this.” She stepped back and leaned on a stone pillar. “I don’t know what’s going on here, Claude,” she said, her voice a little more sober, “but frankly, at my age prison doesn’t suit me at all.”

Corsier turned around, his bearish body seeming even more formidable in his dapper linen suit. He came over to her and leaned on the other side of the pillar.

“Edie, just take the money, my dear, and forget about the drawings. They are destined to be short-lived.”

“Really.”

“Indeed.”

“What does that mean?”

“Destroyed.”

“Bloody hell,” she said.

They were both looking at the pictures.

“I suppose one is better off ignorant,” she mused.

“As far as you are concerned, I love Schiele, couldn’t afford them, and you made copies for me.”

“Except there are no originals.”

“Even better. You imagined Schiele for me.”

They said nothing for a moment.

“I need the money,” she said by way of explanation.

“You didn’t have to say that.”

“Odd,” she said. “I’m proud of them. Just as Schiele must have been proud when he did something like them.”

“You should be proud,” Corsier said. “No one would ever know the difference. Ever. Schiele would receive kudos for them. Why should it be any different for you?”

“Because they came from my cold intellect, Claude, not from a searing fire in my gut.” She sighed. “Credit where credit’s due. Come on. Let’s box them up for you.”

 

 

CHAPTER 33

PARIS

The hotel was small. Another of Strand’s former haunts, it opened onto one of the narrow streets in the Quatre Septembre, a short walk from the Boulevard des Capucines.

“Harry.” Mara’s voice intruded into his dream, the illogical plot of which quickly began rearranging itself to accommodate her. “Harry.” The second time she spoke, the sound was different, and he began to wake. “Harry, wake up.”

When he finally roused himself, he saw her standing at the foot of the bed. She reached down and put a hand on his foot. Behind her the windows of their room were open, the curtains pulled aside to let in the morning sounds of the neighborhood. He could see the sun on the buildings across the street.

Whenever it was possible, Strand always insisted on a room that faced out from the front of the hotel. It was usually louder, but the sound of the city provided him with an aural orientation to the rhythm of his surroundings. Because he had traveled a great deal, crossing time zones as readily as he crossed the street, and because he more often than not stayed in small, neighborhood hotels, such a synchronization helped him adjust his body clock to the meter of his new environment. Mara didn’t seem to mind.

“Is something wrong?” The attitude of her body told him there was.

“I just didn’t want you to sleep late. I’m nervous about this afternoon.”

“Go ahead and bathe,” he said. “I’ll order some coffee.”

“I’ve already bathed,” she said. “You slept right through it. The coffee’s on its way.”

Something was wrong.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just couldn’t sleep. I want to talk to you.”

“Okay,” he said. He threw back the covers. “Let me shower, wake up.” He got out of bed, stiff from the long hours behind the steering wheel. His stomach was already tightening as he went into the bathroom to bathe.

• • •

“Harry,” she said, leaning forward, her elbows on her thighs, her hands twisting a napkin. “This . . . is very hard for me. It’s almost impossible for me. . . .”

Mara was sitting on a small sofa, he was in an armchair. The coffee and pastries were between them. He had managed to quickly choke down a croissant while she was making some preliminary remarks, circling around to get to the real substance of her concern, which was not, he soon realized, the afternoon meeting with Obando.

This was going to be bad. Stepping back mentally, he tried to gain some distance from the condensed emotion that was building between them. He watched himself in the armchair; it was as if he already knew the change of direction that the plot was going to take, as if he could see what the duped protagonist—Strand himself—could not yet see, that his world was about to encounter yet another upheaval.

“Harry, I love you,” she blurted suddenly, “I didn’t know that I was going to. I . . . it . . . Harry, it caught me off guard. How the hell could I have known?”

She looked at him, her head tilted to one side in suppliance. There were no tears, but he was jarred by the expression in her eyes. In a breath he understood that her emotion came from those arid places that waited inside everyone, places to which one was driven unwillingly, when there were no alternatives, and from which no one returned without a translation of the heart.

“God,” he heard himself say. “Not Schrade.”

“No, Harry, no, no. It’s Bill Howard. I work for the FIS. Harry, I didn’t know you. How could I have known that this would happen to me . . . to us?”

She stopped, searching for the right words, unable to find them.

“Harry . . . my God, you’ve got to understand how this is killing me, how wrong it all has become for me. Everything changed after I got to know you, everything turned inside out, it all went wrong.”

When she stopped again, beside herself with inexpressible feelings, she quickly turned away, and Strand had a few heartbeats in which to become aware of his own emotions. He was numb. How incredibly stupid he had been, how completely he had misread her. How wrong he had been about Romy’s death. How irresponsible he had been about Meret. If he could be so thoroughly deceived in these matters, what other delusions lay behind him? What other failures of discernment lay ahead? He thought of how much he hated Bill Howard for doing this. He thought of how much he loved Mara in spite of it.

He stood and walked around the coffee table and sat beside her on the sofa. He put his arms around her and pulled her to him as she bowed her face against his chest. He felt like a fool, but he was too old, and not fool enough, to believe that he should walk away from her. Christ, this was a savage business.

“Mara, listen to me,” he said. “Listen to me. We’ve got to talk this out. We’ve got to figure out where we stand, how we feel, what we’re going to do.”

He felt her shudder, but he didn’t think she was crying. Neither of them spoke. Outside, the Quatre Septembre had worked its way to midday.

Finally Mara pulled away from him, averting her face, and stood. “Let me wash up,” she said, and walked out of the room.

He waited, stunned, listening to the running water. She could have been sent by Schrade, and he would have behaved the same way. He would have fallen in love with her anyway. It could have been tragic. That it hadn’t been was no credit to him. It took his breath away.

When she returned, her eyes swollen and red—she had not allowed him to see even a single tear—she was still composing herself. She didn’t come back to him on the sofa, but rather walked to the armchair where he had been sitting before and sat down. Holding a damp washcloth, she stared at it, kneading it as she gathered her thoughts. She was in control again and determined to stay that way.

“You know how it works,” she said, finally looking up at him. “They recruit for something like this. I’m not FIS. In Rome, after my husband died, we had a friend who worked at the American embassy. He and his wife were very kind to me. At a party at their house one night I met one of the FBI’s legats. When he found out I had lived in Rome for so many years, he was very interested. I got to know him. One night I got a call from him. He asked if I was familiar with a certain part of the city. I was. He said he was looking for someone in that area, and would I mind riding along with him as a kind of neighborhood guide. We spent most of the afternoon together, and I know now, after some experience, that he was evaluating me.

“Little by little over the next six months, he exposed me to more and more of the FBI’s responsibilities, the kinds of things they were involved in. Never anything really confidential, just overview stuff. All the while they were doing background checks on me.

“Anyway, a little surveillance situation here, a stakeout there . . . I liked it. I liked it a lot. And they liked what I did. After a year or so I became, essentially, the equivalent of a special support group member, a civilian used as support personnel in surveillance operations.”

She sighed heavily, still recovering, catching her breath. She looked toward the windows, kneading the washcloth. Her eyes began to redden again, but she cleared her throat and looked directly at him.

“When the FIS initiated this operation, they created a profile of the kind of woman they wanted. They went to the FBI first because of their large SSG pool. Not being FBI agents, SSGs weren’t in any of the computer files, wouldn’t be picked up by the private international clearinghouses. That’s why Darras didn’t find me. They knew you’d check me out. Everything else is true that you know about me. The screwed-up marriage. All of it. All of that was perfect background as far as they were concerned.

“They sent me through a crash course at the training center at Camp Peary, and when they thought I was ready they put me out there on a very long tether. They had a high respect for your counterintelligence abilities. For your sixth sense. The ‘dangle’ was a very cautious one. I showed up at the pool, then disappeared for a month. They were willing to take it very slowly, very carefully.” She looked down at her coffee. “They wanted to make sure that the hook set when you took it.”

Strand felt his face flush.

“I wasn’t any good at it, Harry,” she said. “They didn’t want me to make any contact with them while we were getting to know each other. They were afraid of you. So I was just let go. On my own. I was completely separated from them, as if I’d never known them.”

Again she sighed, a kind of jerky catch of breath.

“I didn’t hear from them at all until you went to San Francisco. A guy named Richard Nathan was my handler as long as we stayed in the States. If the situation moved to Europe, as they expected it would, I would work with Bill Howard.”

“So what were you supposed to do?”

“The money.” She was trying to be dispassionate, trying to be succinct, professional. “I was supposed to find out how much, where it was. How you had taken care of it. Once they had some basic information they were confident they could move on it. Seize it. There was so much, they were willing to go to great lengths.”

“What about me?”

“They just wanted the money.”

Strand looked at her. Did she really believe that? Was she lying to him, or was she kidding herself? She must have seen something in his face.

“I know,” she said. “Yeah, I did believe it. I had no reason not to. Of course, as I learned more as I got into it . . .” She let her voice trail off.

“So they’ve always known where we were?”

She nodded.

“Now, too?”

“No. Not now. I had a tag. A fountain pen I kept in my purse. I left it in the hotel in Bellagio. They don’t even know that we crossed over the lake to see Lu. As far as I know, the pen’s still in the hotel.”

“Then they know what I’m doing.”

“No. They don’t know that, either. I’ve been holding out on them for a long time, Harry. There’s so much I haven’t told them. Almost everything. Howard’s all over me now. I’m sure he knows what I’m doing. He’s furious.”

Strand tried to regain his balance, trying to factor in and absorb all the readjustments to the reality of his situation.

“What about the tape of Romy?” he asked suddenly, almost without thinking.

“No, Harry. I didn’t know anything about that. I don’t think they did, either, to tell you the truth.”

“When did you last speak to Bill Howard?”

She told him everything about their conversation in Bellagio two days earlier.

“I don’t believe him,” Strand said when she was through. “You’re right about him being suspicious of you. Howard’s been around too long not to recognize a miscarriage. He knows you’re not going to stay with it. He knows this conversation we’re having right now is inevitable. He knew it before you did. And if he knew it, and if he was telling the truth about Washington going after me, he should have brought you in and had me picked up. But he hasn’t done that.” Strand looked toward the windows. “I don’t think he’s gone back to Washington with this. Something’s wrong with this.”

Mara cleared her throat. He watched her as she held the cool, damp washcloth to her eyes for a moment. His mind was flying over the possibilities. There was so much to think about, it made him queasy. It occurred to him—shot into his mind like a bright spark—that she might be lying. Just as quickly he decided that if she was, if all of this doubled back on him again, they could have him. If she wasn’t who he thought she was, whatever was left was nothing he wanted. He could understand what she had done. God help him, it wasn’t all that different from what had happened with Romy. If he had learned anything at all from her, it was that if he was ever going to redeem himself from the years of lies, he was going to have to learn how to forgive. It was really the only way. If he was going to manage to stagger toward something better than what he was now, he was going to have to do it with damaged people like himself who were also looking for a way out. If they wanted to climb out of the darkness, if they genuinely desired it, he would gladly extend a hand. No one would be required to have a clean conscience. That kind of hypocrisy was no longer good enough.

 

 

CHAPTER 34

She didn’t understand, and he really couldn’t have expected her to. As they talked into the afternoon, he watched her closely. Sometimes her eyes would slide away from him, slippery, lubricated by guilt. Deception was so insidiously destructive; and the first rule of survival for those who made it a profession was that you must never care about the people you deceived. It was the difference between dropping bombs on people from twenty thousand feet and going into their bedrooms at night and cutting their throats. The closer you were to them, the harder it was to live with what you did to them.

When you worked undercover, you had to learn not only how to wear a mask successfully, but also how to put a mask on whomever you were lying to. If they became real to you, if they became human, deserving of compassion or of any kind of consideration, you were ruined. So you had to lie to yourself in order to live with the lies you were living. It got to be tricky, and not everyone was made to live in that kind of labyrinth. It took its toll on everyone, but some people were completely destroyed by it. If you wanted to endure, you had to learn how to keep your deceit from becoming a vortex and sucking you down into its darkness.

The strangest part of it was that the damage that was done, the hurt that was inflicted, all happened within. Within the mind. Within the psyche. And, most grievous of all, within the heart.

• • •

“Are you nervous?” she asked.

Mara was standing at the windows, looking down at the street. She was sipping a glass of water, shifting her weight from one hip to the other.

They had gone out for a late lunch at a café not far from the Bibliothèque Nationale and had returned to the hotel arm in arm among the crowds on the sidewalks.

“Not nervous,” he said. “Anxious.”

He was sitting on the edge of the armchair, examining the documents he was about to put into his briefcase.

“That’s a distinction lost on me.”

“Obando is a far different man from Lu,” Strand said. “I’ll have to play him differently. I’m just trying to work it out.”

“I’m nervous about it,” she said.

Strand slouched back in the chair and put his hands together, elbows on the fat upholstered arms of the chair.

“I’d like you to do something for me.”

She hesitated a moment, then turned to him, her back against the edge of the window frame.

“I can’t imagine how you could possibly justify my presence at that meeting,” she said.

“No, it’s not that.”

She waited.

• • •

Strand approached the Cafe Martineau from the opposite side of the Boulevard des Capucines. He walked past it several times, glancing across to assess its location, to get a feel for the kind of place it was. In the short time he watched the café, he saw no one enter or leave. Its name was written on the front window in gold letters against a black band, and a black border with gold trim framed the window itself. A black awning with a dark beige trim protected the entrance. It was a very smart address.

Finally, moving with the pedestrian flow, he crossed to the other side and approached the café from the direction of the Boulevard de la Madeleine. He saw nothing amiss. He opened the front door and went in.

“Yes, sir. May I help you?”

A young woman met him immediately, speaking in English. But her accent was not French. She had short dark hair that implied a businesslike mind underneath it. She wore a mandarin red suit and a black, open-necked blouse tucked in firmly to a thin waist. She was not the hostess, but she was working; it was no mistake that she allowed Strand to see the automatic pistol tucked slightly to one side into the waistband of her short skirt.

“I have an appointment with Mr. Obando.”

“Okay,” she said. “This is the right place.” Two men came up behind her. “Put the briefcase down there,” she said, indicating a small marble-topped bistro table next to the reception podium.

Strand did as he was told and raised his arms as the two men checked him for whatever they didn’t want to find. Strand took the opportunity to glance farther into the café, empty except for a few more of Obando’s assistants scattered here and there. He thought he saw Obando halfway back, sitting alone at a table. Apparently the Colombian had bought the exclusive use of the café for a few hours.

After the men were finished the woman approached him again with an electronic wand with a digital readout and began going over him. Up and down his sides, between his legs—strictly efficient, nothing cute—over his back. She asked him to take off his suit coat. He did, and she went through the arms, through the pockets, over the seams.

“You’re very thorough,” he said.

“Yes,” she said. The two men were busy doing the same thing to the briefcase.

When she was finished, she held his suit coat for him and helped him put it on. She smiled.

“Thank you for being so patient,” she said. As if on cue, the two men finished with his briefcase. “Please”—she tilted her head for him to follow her—“Mr. Obando is waiting.”

It was odd to see the café empty. The staff was nowhere in sight. Only Obando’s silent bodyguards stood politely against the walls of the long, narrow establishment. Each of them looked as if he could have been the café’s owner or a very subtle maître d’.

As Strand and the woman approached Obando’s table, she stopped and Strand stepped past her. Obando had been watching him approach, but he did not get up or offer his hand. He motioned to the only other seat at the table. Strand sat down.

“Harry Strand,” he said, introducing himself.

Obando nodded. “Harry Strand,” he repeated. His hair was a natural light caramel, parted on the left, wavy, beautifully barbered. He was forty-two years old but looked younger. “Well, Harry, lay it all out for me.”

Strand had heard recordings of Mario Obando that had been made in Tel Aviv while he was doing business with an Israeli drug dealer. The dealer was the one who sounded like the foreigner. Obando sounded as though he’d been born and raised in the San Fernando Valley. You could have spent an evening with him and never known he was Colombian. Obando’s files recorded how he had hated to be pegged by his accent. He hated the stereotype. So he had worked on it. It had disappeared.

So Strand laid it all out for him. From his briefcase he withdrew all the material he had copied from the Geneva bank vault on the two Obando operations—an arms smuggling conduit and a European drug distribution channel—that had been closed down because of Schrade’s information. He placed a packet of photographs on the table along with a CD, several cassettes, and fifty-seven pages of documentation. He laid them out like a fortune-teller with a deck of cards. He outlined the two failed operations, told him how they had failed, then told him why they had failed.

Obando kept his eyes on Strand. At his elbow was an empty glass with a last sip of a grenadine sirop à l’eau remaining in the bottom, an ashtray with one butt in it, an opened pack of cigarettes, and a gold Dunhill lighter.

As he had done with Lu, Strand told Obando who he was and gave him some background on his career in the intelligence profession. By the time he had finished, Obando understood that Strand knew things about his organization that Obando had thought were secure. He also understood that the information inside the material on the table before him would confirm everything that Strand had said. As with Lu, when Strand finally stopped he had not yet given Obando the name of the traitor who had been responsible for creating so much havoc for Obando’s enterprises.

Obando stared at him. His face portrayed no tics, no indication of what he was thinking or how he was feeling about what he had heard. He was simply a businessman listening to business talk.

He took his eyes off Strand and raised a hand. One of his men came over.

“Harry, would you like something to drink?”

He ordered Scotch and ice.

“I’ll have the same damn thing,” Obando said. As the man turned away Obando picked up the cigarettes, offered one to Strand. Strand shook his head, and Obando lighted one for himself and sat back.

“You know, I’m still pissed about that business in Amsterdam,” he said, blowing smoke to one side. “On that one deal, that one deal alone, I lost—” He stopped himself. “I took a very big hit. Not just the money. It destroyed an arms conduit that I’d invested more than a year putting together.” He paused. “You worked on that?”

“I was in charge of the intelligence on it. I was the one who finally took it to the Netherlands’ Centrale Recherche Informatiedienst and worked with them until they closed you down.”

Obando grinned and shook his head. “Goddamn.”

The two drinks appeared. Obando raised his, said, “Prosit,” and took a sip.

He pointed at the material Strand had put on the table. “This is my man, huh?”

“That’s right.”

Obando looked at Strand, saying nothing. Strand’s back was to the light that came in through the front window. Being oblique, the light diminished quickly inside the café, so that Obando was softly illuminated, but the surrounding furnishings were quickly lost in a dusky haze. Here and there the edge of a picture frame or the corner of a gilt-framed mirror glinted from the shadows.

“Why?”

“I worked with this man a long time,” Strand said. “There are personal reasons. . . .”

“Like what?”

Strand waited a beat. “The reasons are personal,” he said. “I won’t discuss them with you.”

Obando was very good at keeping his thoughts to himself; neither his body language nor his face gave a hint of what was going on in his mind.

While keeping his eyes on Strand, he drank from his Scotch and took a last drag on his cigarette before mashing it out in the ashtray. Strand noticed that although Obando was a stocky man, not heavy but thick chested, his hands were the hands of a thin man, with long, narrow fingers.

Obando finished putting out the cigarette and opened the manila envelope of photographs. He looked at them one at a time. After he had finished looking at the last one, he reached for his cigarettes again. He lighted one.

“Wolfram Schrade,” he said. He swallowed a mouthful of Scotch, then another. “Life is full of surprises,” he said.

Strand said nothing.

“I didn’t expect it to be him. Never would have.”

“That’s why I’ve provided so much documentation.”

“You worked with him closely, then.”

“I did.”

“How long?”

“Almost a decade.”

“That’s fascinating.” He studied Strand. “But that’s over. You’re out. And Schrade broke off with FIS . . .”

“Right.”

“Okay. What about now? Anything else along those lines?”

“Probably.”

Obando jerked his head. “Ah.”

“I suspect he’s working with either the British or the French now. Maybe even the Germans.”

“You suspect.”

“I no longer have the ability to get proof of that. But I’d bet money on it.”

“Would you bet your life on it, Harry?”

Strand didn’t hesitate. “There’s nothing in this world that I’d bet my life on, Mr. Obando. Certainly not anything having to do with Wolfram Schrade.”

Obando picked up the last photograph and looked at it again, considering it.

“This is a far from perfect world, Harry.” Pause. “What if I told you this piece of shit lives a charmed life?”

“Which means,” Strand said, “that Wolf Schrade is making himself so valuable to you at this time that, for now, you are obliged to overlook his past injuries.”

“That’s pretty good, Harry. Bottom line: I can’t be your dark angel.”

“Can you expand on that a little?” Strand asked.

Obando shook his head slowly. “It’s personal,” he said soberly and without a hint of irony. “I won’t discuss it with you.”

 

 

CHAPTER 35

It was a fine piece of one-upmanship, the sort of thing that was second nature to men in Mario Obando’s line of work. The world of legitimate business provided a warm and fertile environment for male strutting, but it was nothing compared to the showy displays of male ego that occurred in the crime world. In Obando’s milieu, no available opportunity to squirt a few cc’s of testosterone in your adversary’s direction was allowed to pass. For the younger ones, like Obando, a smart mouth was the extra edge that made them feel just that much more clever than their opponents. They had to be smart, look smart, and sound smart. And, of course, they had to be brutal.

“Even if I can’t help you directly,” Obando went on, having made his point, “perhaps I can give you something in return. I know you didn’t do this from the impulse of a warm heart, Harry, but regardless, you did me a favor.”

He dropped his eyes to Strand’s glass. The Scotch was gone, the ice was melting. He looked toward one of his men and held up two fingers and then flicked his wrist downward, pointing at the empty glasses. He dropped his arm and looked again at Strand. He put out his cigarette, turned slightly to one side, and crossed one leg over the other.

“As for the other business, even though Schrade is being very useful to me right now, eventually the crows will return from Amsterdam and Naples. They’ll come home to Berlin to roost.”

Obando was not being clever. He was pissed. Cool, but pissed.

“Aside from that, it galls me—a lot—that Schrade’s been able to play both sides of the game for so long. I have to admit, he’s got huge balls. I’ve got to admire that. As far as it goes.”

The two drinks arrived. Obando picked up his glass, raised it to Strand, said, “Prosit,” and drank his first sip.

“But I think it’s gone far enough,” he said. “Obviously, so do you.”

Strand had no idea where this was going.

“You want him killed,” Obando said matter-of-factly, dismissing Schrade with a wave of his hand. For an instant the gold oval of his cuff link caught the light coming from behind Strand’s back and made it glint far brighter than anything else in the room.

“What happened, Harry?” Obando went on, “You’re a government man, were. You’ve been out of it several years now. By this time Schrade should have been just so much past business. An old war story. Yet here you are, right back in the middle of it. You’ve kept these files—” He nodded at the table. “Schrade was never past business with you, was he? And you never expected him to be.” Obando tilted his head a little. “That’s interesting to me.”

He stopped and regarded Strand.

“Listen,” he said, “I was raised in a religious family. Went to Catholic schools in Bogotá. Elementary and then high school. Two years in a Catholic college before I went to UCLA. I’ve read lots of Bible. Lots of it.”

Obando lounged in his chair, one arm resting on the table, enjoying the conversation now. “You’ve heard the story of King David.”

Strand just looked at him.

“I’ll take that as a yes. And the story of Bathsheba.”

Strand was silent.

“Another yes. And the story of Uriah.”

Strand waited.

“Well, you get the point, Harry.” Without looking at it, his long fingers found the gold cigarette lighter. He set it on its edge. “Actually, it was something of an understatement when you said this was personal, wasn’t it?”

Obando smiled knowingly. Strand had the queasy feeling that he was about to encounter something he had not anticipated.

“I’ll have to tell you a story,” Obando said, shifting in his chair. “I know a little bit about you, but I didn’t know it was you until today.” He touched the lighter as if adjusting its position. “A couple of years ago Schrade came to me with a new proposition. I’d had these two big failures in Europe—which, thanks to you, I now know that son of a bitch caused—and he came to me and said, ‘Look, I know we’ve had these setbacks, terrible luck, but I’ve got a connection in a certain place that’ll allow us to develop some Mexican operations with almost zero risk.’ I was listening.

“‘I’ve got a brother-in-law,’ Schrade said, ‘who is an officer in the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Service. The guy’s in a position to open and shut doors. He can offer us a conduit for heroin and designer product and laundered money—through Mexico, in and out of the States.’ I told him to give my people a proposal. We’d study it, get back to him. He did. We made some preliminary inquiries. We went over it in detail. Everything was good. I got back to Schrade, and we made a deal.

“I was cautious at first. Gave him small projects while we continued to do background. Then larger and larger commitments as all of this has proved to be sound and lucrative. It’s been very nice, Harry. When the FIS stationed you to Houston the timing couldn’t have been better. Mexico was just coming into its own in a very big way. Shit, the money I’ve made through you has already offset what that son of a bitch Schrade made me lose on those other two projects.”

Obando closed his eyes halfway.

“So you see, Harry, after this long collaboration—even though we’d never met—I was already curious about you. And then you contact my people. You come here, give me this documentation on Wolf, and you want me to kill your own brother-in-law.” Obando raised his eyebrows. “See what I mean? You say, ‘It’s personal, I won’t talk about it.’ I’m wondering, What the fuck’s going on here?”

Strand was almost dizzy. What did he expect? Why was he surprised? Did he not think that Schrade’s obsession with him was everything that defined an obsession? Did he think that Schrade’s attention to revenge would be anything less than excessive? For two years this man sitting across the table from him had thought that Strand was still an FIS officer and the éminence grise behind a very successful money laundering and drug smuggling operation in which Obando was a participant and major beneficiary. He had believed this because his own intelligence people had “verified” Schrade’s information through “independent” information brokers.

Strand hardly knew where to begin. The same senseless technology that had enabled him to steal millions from Schrade had allowed Schrade to steal his identity from him. In certain parts of the world, at least, Strand was a garbled concoction of Schrade’s devising. Strand was appalled that when he had been gathering files on Mara and Ariana and Claude and Schrade, he had not had the foresight to have Alain Darras pull a file on himself as well. He guessed that Darras had done that to satisfy his own curiosity, and he guessed that Darras had wondered why Strand had “lied” to him about still being in the intelligence business.

“Harry.” Mario Obando’s voice brought Strand back to the moment. “Harry, you have been listening to me for a long time. I would like very much to hear a word from you now.”

Strand decided simply to tell the truth to this most unlikely of men, who, having been raised a good Catholic, could still remember Bible stories though he had decided long ago not to believe them.

“I’m afraid Schrade’s deceived you again,” Strand said. He circled the ice around in his glass with his forefinger, chilling the amber Scotch.

Obando waited.

“Almost all of it is a lie.”

“Tell me.”

“I’ve been retired for four years. I wasn’t your Mexico man. Couldn’t have been. I’ve been living in Houston, but I’ve been an art dealer there. Not an FIS officer. It’s that simple.”

Obando nodded.

“I can give you the names of people with the Foreign Intelligence Service in Washington who can confirm that.”

“I’ve already confirmed it with the FIS.”

“In Washington?”

Obando’s hesitation was almost imperceptible. “No. Here in Europe. It was confirmed at a very high level.”

“High level,” Strand said. “Let me guess: you talked to Bill Howard.”

Obando’s expression lost its composed confidence, a subtlety toward qualmish uncertainty.

“How did you know to talk to him?” Strand pressed. “Who gave you his name?”

Obando stared back at Strand in smoldering silence. Though he was far too sophisticated to let his embarrassment show, he could not so easily hide his aggravation. He seemed to be receding farther into the margins of the shadows as the light coming in from the Boulevard des Capucines grew more oblique and wan.

Strand broke the silence, “Don’t feel bad about it, Mario. I’ve only recently learned about Howard myself.”

“I don’t know why Schrade lied to me about this, Harry,” Obando said, “but I’m inclined not to give a fuck. Whatever’s going on between you and him is your business. I’m still making a fortune from him, and I don’t want anything to happen to that situation.”

“I’m sure you don’t,” Strand said.

Obando’s eyes were fixed on Strand, but his fingers again found the gold lighter and he began spinning it absently on the surface of the table, suddenly stopping it with his fingers. Spin . . . stop. Spin . . . stop. Spin . . . The lighter caught the dull light in its whirling, throwing off soft, rhythmic glimmers.

“Of course, I understand your own thinking, Harry. . . .”

“No,” Strand interjected, “you don’t.”

“Well, not exactly, maybe, but I understand revenge. I recognize it when I see it, even if the man who seeks it doesn’t recognize it himself. Some men don’t want to admit to it. They’re embarrassed by feeling such a primitive emotion. They call it something else.”

Strand closed his briefcase, leaving the documents on the table. He no longer had any use for them.

“One question,” Obando said, still twirling the gold lighter. “You said almost everything Schrade had told me about you was a lie. What about that ‘almost’?”

Strand studied Obando’s face in the bruised light, studied the effect the swelling shadows had on the Colombian’s coloring, on his features, on, it seemed, the very nature of the man himself.

“I married his sister,” Strand said. “A year ago, in Houston, Schrade had her killed.”

 

 

CHAPTER 36

LONDON, BAYSWATER

Claude Corsier sat in the rental car at the entrance to Harley Mews and craned his head over the steering wheel, watching for the light to come on in the garage at the end of the turn. He was uncomfortable sitting in the dark, a rather obvious, curiosity-provoking behavior, he thought. People walked by on their way to evening dinners in the cafés and pubs a few streets over, or just coming and going to God knew where. Sometimes they would spot him in the dark interior, and after they had passed they would turn and look back at him. Besides, he wasn’t a lurk-about sort of man. Not that he hadn’t done it before, but he never thought he did it particularly well.

The lights suddenly came on, clearly visible through the windows at the top of the wide doors that swung open to give access to the double-car interior. As he started his car, a curtain or some kind of drape was pulled across the windows, creating a glow through the cloth.

Having put the car in gear, Corsier turned on the parking lights and idled around the corner and into the mews, moving past the other garages and doorways before pulling to a stop outside the address at which he had an appointment.

He cut the car’s motor, reached over into the rear seat, and picked up the two Schiele forgeries, which were carefully wrapped for protection. He locked the car and walked around to the doorway slightly recessed into the wall beside the garage doors and rang the bell. The door was poorly lighted by a single lamp on a curved bar coming down from the wall above, and Corsier could see vines of some sort growing all around the doorway and over his head.

Waiting for an answer, he looked around the mews. It was not exactly an upscale neighborhood, not ratty, but solidly lower middle class. He smelled curry cooking and tried to identify from which of the open second-story windows it might be wafting. His heart began tripping rapidly when a motor scooter entered the opposite end of the L-shaped mews and pulled up to a doorway several removed from where he was standing. He turned away, took a firmer grip on the forgeries, and then flinched when the door opened suddenly.

“Okay, come in,” Skerlic said, backing away, opening the door wider. He was wearing an undershirt and a pair of baggy trousers. He smelled of gin and cigarettes.

They immediately turned into the garage area, but not before the curious Corsier got a glimpse into the kitchen, where an old woman with her head covered Islamic fashion sat spraddle legged in a plastic chair, watching a tiny television that flickered pale light into her face.

“In here,” Skerlic said, gripping his arm, hurrying him on.

Inside the garage a workbench made of a thick piece of plywood placed across sawhorses sat in the center of the space, lighted by two light bulbs partially covered with improvised pasteboard shades. Woodworking tools were scattered about on the bench, which was littered with wood shavings, an electric drill, and various gadgets that Corsier did not recognize. In the middle of all this, resting front down on a ragged towel to protect their surfaces, were the two picture frames that Corsier had sent from France to an address other than this one.

Standing on the other side of the bench was a very pregnant woman who appeared to be somewhere in her middle thirties. She also was wearing the traditional Islamic women’s headscarf, but her misshapen dress was Western and clearly not designed as a maternity garment. Its hem was hiked up in front to compensate for the additional volume it was so awkwardly covering. She had dusky, Middle Eastern coloring and features. Her left hand, which was gripping some sort of wood-carving tool, rested on the rounded shelf of her protruding stomach. Her right hand, holding a smoldering cigarette, rested on the edge of the bench. She was staring at Corsier as though she could pierce his mind and discern any disingenuity he might utter in the next few moments. It was an oddly tense situation, almost a confrontation.

Skerlic said, “Those are the pictures?”

“Yes . . . yes,” Corsier said quickly, pulling his eyes away from the woman.

Skerlic held out a thick hand, and Corsier gave him the drawings.

“Be careful with them,” Corsier managed to say. He felt as if he had risked the dark woman’s wrath, but the drawings were invaluable.

Skerlic nodded, unimpressed, and turned and leaned the drawings up against the garage wall. He gestured to the woman.

“Tell him how it works.”

The woman flicked her hot eyes at Skerlic, then turned them on Corsier.

“Move up to the table,” she said. “I’ll go over it step by step.”

Corsier was astonished. Her English had no Mediterranean accent. It was American.

She turned slightly and leaned the side of her tight belly against the edge of the plywood. She gestured with the hand that held the cigarette, strewing ashes among the wood shavings. Huge damp splotches of perspiration stained the underarms of her dress and the material between her distended breasts.

“Your two frames,” she said. “They’re good, thick and heavy like we needed. In each of them I’ve routed out a groove an inch wide, an inch deep.” She ran the middle finger of the hand holding the cigarette around the edges of the nearest frame. “It’s cut to within a half a centimeter of the carved surface on the front of the frame.”

She reached into the junk on the table and picked up a scrap of metal channeling as shiny as chrome.

“I made a frame of this stuff,” she said, holding up the piece of metal to one eye and looking at him through the U-shaped channeling, “just slightly smaller than the groove so that it would fit snugly inside. Okay?” She tossed the scrap into a pile of shavings. “That shit right there,” she said, pointing to the channeling, “has special properties. The little bit that we got cost us more than anything else in this operation. That special.”

With her middle finger, the remaining stump of cigarette smoldering next to it, she scratched her belly at the point where Corsier imagined her navel must be, taking into consideration its substantial displacement due to her condition.

“Then I took the plastic explosive and rolled it into a fat noodle,” the woman went on. “I laid it into the channeling and smoothed it out, pressing it in, packing it in until the metal groove was completely full, no air pockets, just metal to plastic contact, hundred percent. Then I laid the packed channeling into the groove, facedown, so that the explosive is jammed up to the wood just under the gilded surface of the front of the frame. Okay?”

Without even paying attention to what she was doing, out of habit, she field stripped the cigarette, rolling it between her fingers until the ash, the few remaining grains of tobacco, and the bit of paper were all disintegrated. All the while she was looking at the picture frames.

“This is a cool deal,” she said. She straightened and pressed her fists into her lower back as she leaned forward and backward. She looked at Corsier, and with her right hand she pressed the material of her dress down between her breasts, daubing the perspiration. “Ever been pregnant?” She didn’t grin. She asked it as though it were a straight, legitimate question. Her dark eyes waited for an answer.

Corsier felt the beginnings of a nervous smile, but her somber expression stopped him.

“Uh . . . no.”

“Don’t ever do it,” she said. “That little shiver you get from the sex is a good thing, but it’s definitely not worth nine months of complete biological upheaval.”

Corsier glanced at Skerlic. The little Serb was perspiring also. He lifted a fat hand and drank some gin from an absurdly filthy glass.

The woman leaned against the table again, this time gesturing with the wood-carving tool.

“Here and here,” she said, getting back to her explanation, “detonators. Radio operated. Okay? And here”—she jabbed at two points on either side of the center of the frame—“little mikes. They’re going to look like some kind of bracket pieces when I get through with them. From the front they’re just going to be a deep groove in the ornate carving. That’s why I had to have this kind of frame.”

“Microphones?”

She raised her eyebrows. “Got to know when to detonate,” she explained. “I was under the impression that this is a no-margin-for-error, no-fuck-up situation here. Very serious.”

Corsier nodded.

“Well, then, you want to be able to identify your target. The way this is designed, when you hear his voice in focus, at a particular decibel level”—she flicked her eyes at Skerlic—“he’ll have the audio equipment to determine when that happens—then your target’s head is right in the center of the frame, the right distance, presenting you with maximum exposure. He’s up close, examining the drawing . . . asking for it.” She jerked her head at Skerlic. “He presses the button. The explosion’s going to take the guy’s head clean off his shoulders.”

She straightened up, obviously miserable.

“What you’ve got here is a humane hit,” she said, groping around in the wood shavings for her cigarettes. She took one out of the pack and lighted it with a plastic turquoise lighter, which she then tossed back into the wood shavings. “The channeling, like I said, is special shit, a metal alloy that will control the direction of the blast out the front of the frame in a concentrated pattern. Minimal, if any, collateral damage. However, woe to the target.” She raised a flattened hand and kissed it front and back. “Praise be to Allah.”

Claude Corsier stared at the woman. The accumulative effect of her manner and her lethal monologue froze his spine. This woman was a living, waking nightmare.

She leaned against the garage wall and looked at Corsier with the same dark expression she had turned on him when he had walked into the room. She was through.

Corsier looked at the perspiring Skerlic. “What next?” he asked.

“We will finish the frames—the microphones will take some fine tuning. The radio frequencies are very precise, very important. Then we will put in the drawings.”

“They are easily damaged,” Corsier reminded. “I can’t stress that enough.”

“I know this,” Skerlic said impatiently. “I know this.” He took another drink of gin.

Corsier wondered how well the gin and explosives mixed. For a jarring second he had the irrational fear that the garage might explode spontaneously, ignited by the fumes on Skerlic’s breath.

“What next?” Corsier repeated.

“You will have to set a date with the dealer,” Skerlic said. “I want you to get a room at the Connaught Hotel. I want to work from there. It’s a perfect location. Perfect.”

“Christ. The Connaught.” Because of its convenient location, Corsier had stayed there many times before when dealing with Carrington Knight. It struck him as bizarre to use this grand old place as a staging point for Schrade’s assassination. But if that was what it took . . . At least the hotel staff were well acquainted with him. It was not always easy to get a room at the Connaught. Prior familiarity was always an advantage, and an absolute necessity if one wanted a room on short notice.

“You have to go,” Skerlic said. “We have to finish.”

“Yes . . . yes,” Corsier said. He looked at the woman. It seemed grotesque to thank her, but he felt compelled to say something. “Good . . . good,” he said, nodding. “Good,” he repeated as he turned to go. She was staring at him out of floating coils of smoke, a dark Medusa.

 

 

CHAPTER 37

PARIS

Strand walked to the end of the Boulevard des Capucines, continued on to the Boulevard des Italiens and then to Boulevard Montmartre. The sidewalks were crowded, and the end-of-the-day traffic was heavy, which was good. He went into the Passage des Panoramas and stayed in its narrow corridors for some time, wandering, waiting, watching, before he was back on the streets, following Rue St. Marc to Richelieu and then on to the Métro station at Rue Drouot, where he descended, allowing himself to be caught up and swept along with the crowds. He got onto a train and then got off again just before it pulled away.

With his mind replaying Obando’s revelations, he watched the faces closely, monitoring the pedestrian flow, looking for another body that might suddenly turn against the grain as he did. The cynical Colombian had inadvertently confirmed Lu’s report of Howard’s treachery. Strand wondered how long it had been going on, if it had been going on when Strand was still with the FIS.

As he moved through the crowds, dawdling and reversing, his thoughts never left the conversation he had just had with Mario Obando. It was time to face up to the fact that his scheme was failing miserably.

Finally, satisfied that he was not being followed, he headed back to the Quatre Septembre.

There was a brasserie near the hotel, a medium-size, bustling place a few steps below street level. Large windows across the front afforded a view through a wrought-iron grille on the sidewalk. After dark, the lights from the street played crazily upon the murky panes of the windows like sparks flying up from a fire.

They went there immediately, in the dusk. There was an early crowd, young people from the couture shops and studios not far away, but they were not loud.

After the waiter came and took their orders, Strand looked at Mara and took a deep breath.

“Damn,” he said, shaking his head slowly.

“You want to go first?” she asked. She was wearing a one-piece cotton knit dress of navy blue. With her black hair and carmine lips she was a striking figure.

He told her everything, even of Romy’s relationship to Schrade. She was shocked and several times looked away as if trying to comprehend it all.

“I don’t know why I didn’t tell you before,” he said. “It doesn’t make any difference, except that it makes everything even more horrible.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

“That was another reason she was able to pull off the embezzlement so well. He trusted her more than the other money managers he had working for him. She stretched his confidence in her to the limit. It bought us a lot of time, gave us more room to maneuver.”

Mara stared at him. He knew what she was going to say.

“She must have hated him,” she said. “I know she loved you, that she would have done anything for you, but . . . she must have hated him so much.”

Strand looked away. Even getting close to that subject made him suddenly empty, as if the marrow were being withdrawn from his bones by the sheer gravity of the sadness of that story.

Mara reached out and put her hand on his. “Harry”—she squeezed his hand until he turned and looked at her—“thank you for telling me. I’m grateful that you felt you could tell me.”

For a moment they said nothing as they looked at each other, then Mara took her hand away from his.

“You want to hear about Howard?”

Strand nodded.

“I got him on the Internet,” she said, swallowing. “I told him I was confused, scared, didn’t know what to do. I confessed that I’d fallen in love with you, but I didn’t know if I could just turn my back on the FIS, the U.S., all that. I didn’t want to be a traitor. If that was the logical extension of what I was doing, if that was the way it was going to be interpreted, I didn’t know if I could handle it.”

“How did he take it?”

“I don’t think he was buying it at first. I couldn’t get a real good feel for nuance on the Internet.”

“How did you leave it?”

“He wants to meet. I said I’d get back to him. I kept it open, just as you said.” She hesitated. “But Harry, how in the hell could you ever do anything with him again?”

Strand knew what she was thinking.

“We just don’t want to cut him off, that’s all,” he said. “We don’t want to cut off anybody. We need as much flexibility as possible.”

Their sandwiches came, and they stopped talking for a few minutes while they ate, each of them pursuing separate thoughts. The sounds of the brasserie returned to Strand’s consciousness: the low gabble of the couture crowd, the clink of china and flatware, the hum of indistinguishable conversations.

After a while Mara wiped her mouth, took a drink of her coffee, and looked at him.

“Then who’s next? Lodato or Grachev?”

Strand thought a moment. He might as well tell her straight out.

“I’m not going to waste my time with either one of them,” he said. “They’re going to give me the same reasons for not going after Schrade as the other two did. Schrade’s way out ahead of me on this. He’s made sure that all of them are finding him to be very useful right now. I’ve told you, he understands the psychology of revenge. Money, enough of it, will even buy off hate. As long as it keeps coming in.”

Mara leaned toward him. “Harry, go to the FIS. They can get between you and Schrade. I know they can.”

“It would never happen.”

“You can hand them a mole, for God’s sake!”

“And I worked for that mole for a dozen years. What kinds of questions does that raise, Mara? After stealing millions from Schrade, what kind of credibility do I have? You want to know the truth? They’d rather have the money I took from Schrade than the mole. Exposing Howard would mean tons of bad publicity for them. Getting the money would mean tons of good publicity. They can retire Howard and sweep him under the carpet. He can be made to go away very easily.”

“Then you expose him. Threaten to go public if they don’t give you—us—protection.”

“Going public is character suicide. It wouldn’t take much at all for the FIS to provide ‘proof ’ to the media that I was part of Howard’s rogue operations. Don’t forget, I was already one step in that direction by agreeing to run Schrade in the first place.”

She looked at him steadily across the table. “You’re making a lot of assumptions again,” she said.

“I worked for them for twenty years.”

She paused. “Then . . . what, Harry?”

“I’m working on a couple of ideas.”

“Like what?”

“Mara, I’ve really got to sort some things out in my mind, okay? Give me some breathing room.”

Her dark eyes searched his. As they looked at each other he had the feeling that she knew exactly where he was going with this. She knew, but she didn’t press him on it. She was giving him room, giving him time to get his mind around an unthinkable alternative. She knew what he was dealing with, and he guessed that it frightened her as much as it did him. It had to. But she waited.

“I love you, Harry.”

It wasn’t what he had expected.

• • •

They lay together, awake, in the dark, listening to the sounds of the Quatre Septembre. They each drifted off to sleep at different times and then stirred again, reassuring each other that they were there.

Once during the night he awoke and heard her whispering to him. He missed what she was saying, except the last part, “I love you.” He thought he answered her with the same words, or maybe he dreamed it.

 

 

CHAPTER 38

BERLIN, SCHWANENWERDER

Howard was summoned to Schrade’s villa just after nightfall, and he already knew that it was going to be a tense meeting. A lot had happened during the day and not much of it any good.

When he arrived, chauffeured as always, in one of Schrade’s Mercedes, he was not surprised to see a number of cars in the motor court. Schrade’s surveillance and intelligence apparatus was good everywhere, but in Berlin it was an absolute ghost machine. Howard never had to worry that any other intelligence operatives—even the FIS—would detect him doing business with Schrade.

Howard had been at the villa at night before, and he did not find it a pleasant experience. Mainly because Schrade, for all his self-restraint and detachment and understatement, treated his nighttime villa with a good deal more drama than Howard could stand. Tonight, as in times before, the place was not lighted in the normal way, in which rooms were provided a generalized lighting with visibility being pretty much consistent throughout. In Schrade’s villa every room and corridor and stairway was lighted by dappled luminescence. There were only pockets of light, and one moved through the large spaces of the villa as through pervasive shadow, negotiating one’s way to random areas of soft illumination. And these islands of light were not static, for Howard had seen them shift slowly, rearranging the mottled patterns of glow and murk.

And there was another attribute in the villa at night that Howard disliked: There was constant movement, though Howard rarely saw anyone. As evidenced by the cars in the motor court, there were always more people here at night than during the day. But he never saw anyone. He heard doors open and close. He heard voices, sometimes murmurs, sometimes sharp ejaculations. He heard footsteps. He heard movement. And sometimes, as the snappily dressed young man ushered him through this dim netherworld, he thought he sensed activity suddenly stop, waiting until he had passed.

Tonight was no different, and by the time Howard was shown into the long salon of Schrade’s work space, he felt as though he had journeyed through a landscape of secrets and had arrived in a sorcerer’s castle.

Schrade was at his desk and did not get up. The large hall was dark except for the pools of glow that hung over each lime wood cabinet and lighted the way down the long approach to Schrade’s presence. The seating area was not lighted, which meant Howard was supposed to go to one of the large chairs anchored in front of Schrade’s heavily carved baroque desk, which seemed to levitate in a slightly brighter spill of incandescence. He sat down and waited for Schrade to acknowledge him.

Schrade, dressed in a dark, formal suit with a sparkling white shirt and a dark tie that seemed to have been finely embroidered with gold threads, was reading. Stacked on either side of him were red leather folders bulging with documents that protruded from them, each folder tied closed with a broad crimson ribbon. Computer screens winked and glowed behind him. Beyond, through the wide window, the Havel River, bathed in the blue of night, stretched away, flanked by glittering cinders of light that receded into invisibility.

Schrade closed the red leather folder from which he had been reading.

“It is difficult to articulate how stupid the United States Foreign Intelligence Service can be,” he said placidly, removing his reading glasses and clasping his hands together, his forearms resting on his desk, white French cuffs extending precisely from beneath the dark coat sleeves. The light sifting down from above him made his pale hair appear to iridesce. Howard had the horrible sense of being able to actually see through Schrade’s clear eyes into the abyss of his head.

“But we know damn well your people have been looking over our shoulders this whole time,” Howard said. “We’ve picked them up. I wouldn’t feel too superior. When Mara left the homing device in Bellagio, why didn’t your elite cadre of operatives intercept them? I’ve always had enough sense not to let another intelligence group do my work for me. They might not do it right.”

“Obviously. They are lost?”

“We don’t know where they are,” Howard admitted, “but I’m in communication with Mara Song.” He told Schrade about the Internet exchanges, of Mara’s ambivalence, her desire to stay in touch.

Schrade was motionless. This interested him.

“The e-mail’s encrypted, so there’s no way to trace it, but if I keep talking to her, if I can keep it up, we’ll find them. You know Harry, he’ll keep moving, moving, moving. I think he’s very worried. I think you can expect to hear from him pretty soon.”

Schrade waited.

“Song is completely lost to us as an agent. Despite her communication she has no intention of leaving him, she has no angst or ambivalence. This is Strand. He’s using her to keep the FIS on hold. He doesn’t want to be cut off from us. He’s up to something.”

“Washington knows of Song’s desertion?”

“Of course.”

“And this theory of yours?”

“Yeah.”

Schrade was thinking.

“Look,” Howard said, “you’ve waited this long. Let me play this out. I’ll concede your goddamn siege technique against Strand is probably working. He’s not going to want to lose this woman. You can’t kill her, Wolf,” he added quickly. “Okay? You’ve applied just the right amount of mayhem, just the right amount of madness. Don’t overplay it. He’s got nothing left he cares about except her. So, we stop. Right here. He’ll come around. He’ll negotiate. You’re going to hear from him.”

“When?”

“Goddamn, I don’t know when. But Strand’s running. Running’s exhausting. Covering your ass all the time’s exhausting. You’re after him. We’re after him. He’s afraid for her. Pressure. Pressure.” Howard paused. “Soon. The running, the constant moving’s going to wear him out.”

“How much time? Days? Weeks? . . .”

“No, no. Days.”

Schrade regarded Howard with opaque dispassion. Really, the only thing that seriously bothered Howard about the man, despite his shitload of psychopathologies, was his clear eyes. Sometimes Howard found himself wondering—irrationally, he knew, but wondering anyway—whether Schrade could see things other people couldn’t see because of those damn eyes.

“I want to find Claude Corsier,” Schrade said.

Done. They would do the Strand thing Howard’s way. Schrade was moving on to other things.

“We don’t have a clue,” Howard said. “We’ve tried to find him. The thing is, we’re dealing here with very well-trained operatives. They know the tricks of the trade. . . .”

“I found Clymer. I found Kiriasis.”

Howard noted that he left out Marie, the sick son of a bitch. He couldn’t resist asking, “How the hell did that happen, anyway? The thing with Claude?”

Schrade ignored him. “Just be aware that I would make it financially worthwhile for the man who finds him.”

Schrade was going to get them all, sooner or later.

“You are returning to Vienna tomorrow, then?”

“That’s right.”

Schrade turned to one side and selected one of the red leather folders from the stacks of them at his elbow. He placed the folder in front of him, untied its crimson ribbon, and opened it. He looked at some of the documents, perusing them carefully. Howard guessed that they were about to move on to another subject. Schrade sat in the pool of pale light like a medieval alchemist, dealing in mysteries and arcana, comfortable with secrets and fog and the realm of mottled shadows. It was true that Howard himself and Harry Strand and all of them in this quickly moving story were creatures in that realm of shifting realities, too. That was true. But Schrade was different from them in that he was not simply a sojourner in the mist; he was not merely passing through. Rather, he was a part of it. It was his milieu, yes, but more than that, he was of its very nature and substance.

Schrade laid down the piece of paper from which he was reading and again folded his hands on top of the desk, covering the opened red folder.

Looking at Bill Howard, he began to talk, his voice modulated, his manner quiet, his wretched limpid eyes holding Howard’s attention despite their unnerving effect. For ten minutes, then fifteen, then twenty, he outlined intelligence he wanted Howard to glean from the records available to him in the FIS computers.

It was always this way. Schrade provided him with no documents of any kind, and Howard took no notes. Neither of them ever forgot even the smallest detail of what was said at these sessions, even if the intelligence was difficult to come by and months passed before Howard made another secret trip to Schwanenwerder to deliver what Schrade had requested. Within twenty-four hours of his report, Howard’s numbered account in Liechtenstein received another deposit.

“So, that is the sum of it,” Schrade concluded, regarding Howard from across the surface of his desk. “Do you have any questions?”

“None.”

Schrade gave a single nod. Done. He closed the red leather folder and tied the ribbon. He set it aside. He picked up his reading glasses and put them on and opened the red leather folder from which he had been reading when Howard arrived. He began to read.

Howard watched him. This was always an intriguing moment. He often wondered what would happen if he just sat there and didn’t leave. How long would it take before Schrade looked up? When he did, how would he react? What would happen if someone actually called this man’s inflexible hand? Howard’s imagination answered his own question. He saw the face of Marie Bienert. Of Dennis Clymer. Of Ariana Kiriasis. Of Claude Corsier. Mara Song. Harry Strand. He saw the faceless silhouettes of dozens, of countless, unknown others.

Howard had managed thus far to work with this one-man pestilence and not succumb to his indiscriminate fever. He wanted to keep it that way, and no amount of idle curiosity would make him risk losing what he had managed to extract from the very heart of the plague.

He rose from his chair, turned away from the massive desk, and started to the door at the other end of the salon. As he passed through pools of dusty light hanging over the cabinets, he thought he could feel the intermittent shadows brushing at his clothes like spiders’ webs, each web stronger, each dragging at him with more resistance than the previous one. The very fact that he was imagining this gave him the creeps, and it took all the nerve he had not to quicken his pace. He did not look back.

 

 

CHAPTER 39

By midafternoon of the next day they had rented a new car and were on the road again. Picking up Autoroute A1 outside Paris, they drove three hours to Calais, where they caught one of the numerous Sealink ferries to Dover.

They could have taken the Channel tunnel train from Paris and been in London in just over three hours, but Strand had grown increasingly edgy about evading Schrade’s intelligence. Now that he knew Schrade had probably had continuous access to their whereabouts through Howard, via Mara’s signal pen, up until they left Bellagio, his determination to remain hidden from all of them was reinvigorated, and his anxiety at the absence of any signs of surveillance whatsoever was heightened. The Channel tunnel train was too popular and its traffic too easy to monitor, whereas the multiplicity of ferry routes and timetables was more in their favor.

The drive from Paris had been quiet. Once they had driven onto the ferry and started across the Channel, Strand decided to broach with Mara the subject of his plans.

They made their way up the interior stairs of the ferry and walked out on the second-level observation deck on the stern. The coast of Calais was already drifting away, and the seagulls that would follow the ferry most of the way across the Channel were shrilling and hovering above them, diving now and then into the foam and the wake created by the huge propellers. The breeze was warm and salty, but there was a feel of hopefulness in it, too.

They leaned their forearms on the railing and stood there a moment, feeling the throb of the powerful engines and the gentle buoyancy of the ferry.

“I’m going to have to talk to Schrade,” he said. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Mara’s head jerk around. She was staring at him from behind her sunglasses. “But I want to catch him off guard, and that’s important. I need to meet with him in a way that the meeting will be a surprise. I don’t want him to know he’s going to encounter me until the last moment. There’s a dealer in London who’s been selling art to Schrade for nearly fifteen years. Schrade trusts him. When Carrington Knight says he’s got something worth seeing, Schrade listens. The thing of it is, if you want to buy art from Carrington, you have to go to Carrington. He rarely buys, and never sells, except in his own gallery.”

Strand spent several minutes telling Mara about Knight’s peculiar personality and habits, making it clear how he worked with his clients and why it was important to have him making the offer to Schrade. It would mean that Schrade would come to a certain place at a certain time to see what Knight had to offer.

“So it can be done,” Strand said. “Schrade can be summoned.” He watched a seagull plunge into the ferry’s foamy wake and come up again with something churned up by the propellers. Three or four other gulls followed him into the water, with varying success.

“What I need, however, is something to offer.”

“You mean art,” Mara said.

“I had pieces he would’ve wanted, but they’re gone now. Besides, he would have known where they were coming from.”

Mara was staring straight out across the water. The ferry was fast, and France was rapidly becoming the horizon rather than the coast, the haze from the Channel turning it into a slate blue ribbon.

“Maillol. Klimt. Delvaux. Ingres. Balthus,” she said.

“They are your drawings?”

“Yes, they’re mine.”

“What about Howard?”

“He doesn’t know anything about them. I mean, the specifics of the art. I ‘had art,’ that’s all he knew.”

Strand waited.

“Would I lose them?” she asked.

“I can’t guarantee that you wouldn’t,” he said.

“I wasn’t asking for guarantees,” she said, not looking at him.

It seemed that in no time at all they were disembarking at Dover, and by early evening they had made their way into London and checked into another small hotel, this one in Mayfair, not far from Berkeley Square.

• • •

The evening was mild. Strollers drifted through the small streets of Mayfair, and the large houses that were usually closed against the chill were thrown open to summer’s tranquility. Occasionally, on a corner or in a mews, Strand and Mara came upon a pub so crowded that its patrons spilled out into the street, knots of young people sitting at wooden tables or simply standing in the street, nursing pint glasses of stout or lager or ale as they talked, laughing, smoking, their voices lingering in the evening air.

On the west side of Berkeley Square, they turned up Hill Street and continued to South Audley, where they ate a light dinner at a café before starting back to the hotel. On the way back Strand took them onto Mount Street, an elegant stretch of Georgian residences and smart shops, and headed toward the sedate Connaught Hotel. They paused at an occasional shop window to peer in a moment before moving on. Until now their conversation had, by tacit mutual avoidance, steered clear of the business at hand. It was almost as if they had agreed to pretend, for an hour, at least, that the harrowing events of the last few days hadn’t happened at all. It was Mara who brought them back to reality.

She looked at her watch. “When we get back to the hotel I’ll call the bank in Houston. They can arrange for the drawings to be shipped here.”

“Not here,” Strand said. “I know a dealer in Paris who will receive them for us. I’ll call him, make the arrangements. We can take the tunnel train to Paris to pick them up. There and back in half a day.”

“Do we have to offer all the drawings?”

“He’s more likely to come immediately to see a collection like this, rather than just one or two drawings. A collection, a jewel like this one, that comes on the market suddenly usually is sold quietly by a few well-placed telephone calls. The serious dealers and collectors know it will be sold quickly, never even come to the public’s attention. This will happen fast.”

“How do we handle the dealer?”

Strand noted the use of the plural pronoun.

Long afterward, in thinking about the whole complex affair again, as he would often do, Strand would be stunned anew at what had been decided between them that night. More precisely, he was stunned at his own behavior. Mara had decided to cast her lot with him, and she had done it calmly and deliberately. It was a decision of considerable courage. But what Strand had done in response to her commitment was far less admirable and unquestionably selfish: he did not try to talk her out of it.

“I need you to do something,” Strand said. “I need to get Bill Howard to London. I think he’s completely sold out to Schrade, keeping him abreast of everything that’s developing here. I’m guessing he’ll be a direct line to Schrade. I need you to e-mail him and tell him I want to talk. I’ll give you the details for arranging the meeting.”

“Tonight?”

“As soon as we get back to the hotel. It’s important that you make him believe that I have to have time to get to London. He’s got to believe we’re somewhere in Europe.”

“Why?”

“Axioms for countersurveillance.”

“Keep moving. Multiple identities, multiple addresses.”

“That’s what they’re going to be expecting us to do, and that’s what I want them to think we’re doing. The FIS and Schrade’s people are going to be all over the travel connections, air, train, rentals, buses. So we’re not going to travel. We’re going to become London residents. Tomorrow, first thing, I want you to go to the estate agents here in Mayfair and lease a town house. Six months, a year, two years, I don’t care. Stay in Mayfair. Keep it close to everything we’re doing. I want this to be all ‘wrong’ as far as intelligence expectations are concerned.”

Strand paused on the sidewalk across the street from the Connaught Hotel. The clean gray and black cars that seemed always to be waiting at the curb in front of the hotel and along the Mount Street side glinted in the dull glow of the street lamps, adding a luster of the modern to a famous old landmark that still maintained the staid and subdued manner of British propriety.

In front of the hotel was a triangular traffic island where Carlos Place forked and went in opposite directions onto Mount Street. The near side of the island was usually lined with black cabs quietly biding their time until a Connaught guest emerged from the old residence. There was a cluster of plane trees on the island as well as a few stone benches and, in its very center, a dark bronze statue of a nude woman in a shrugging, crouching posture.

On the other side of the island was a five-storied Victorian building of terraced row houses made of bright red orange brick and having bay window facades with white stone and wood trim. The front of the building swept in a gentle arc from Carlos Place to Mount Street.

“He lives there,” Strand said, lifting his chin toward the row houses. “Number Four.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No. A discreet brass plate beside the front door says ‘Carrington, Hartwell and Knight. Private Dealers in Fine Art.’”

“There’s a light,” Mara said. “Second floor.”

Strand took a few steps to get a better line of sight through the trees.

“That’s where he does most of his work,” he said. “There’s a large room with an ornately carved library table near the windows. Opposite that, there’s a walk-in vault with narrow vertical bays for storing canvases. The drawings are kept in stacked rows of shallow drawers. There are bookcases along the walls below which are cabinets with countertops about waist high. He uses the countertops to display his canvases and drawings. Where there are no bookcases, the walls are covered in crimson silk. There’s a sitting area furnished with rosewood and ebony antiques.”

They crossed Mount Street to the island and stood under the plane trees, looking up at Carlos Place, Number Four.

“The first floor,” Strand continued, leaning against one of the trees, “is a reception area. There’s a gallery to the right to exhibit drawings. Here the walls are done in indigo silk. Usually some small, first-rate sculpture scattered about. All the woodwork is mahogany. Down a short hall there’s a generous bathroom for clients. Marble. Linen washcloths. Complimentary flacons of cologne and perfume. There are little silver boxes with handmade tortoiseshell combs with a tissue band around them. Complimentary.”

“Good Lord,” Mara said.

“It’s intended to convey a sense of elegant wealth. A client understands that the very best art is traded here. They can expect to be treated like royalty—and to pay royal prices.” He went on with the description. “The stairs leading from this first floor to the second are wide and turn slowly back upon themselves. Mahogany banister and railing. A truly stunning Persian carpet covers the treads all the way up.”

“Why are you telling me all this?”

“Carrington is going to play a very big role in our plans,” Strand said. “You need to know what he’s like, and what to expect from him. A young man usually stays at a desk in the foyer. He’s a sort of security person, doorman, factotum. He takes care of the electric lock on the door and monitors people who come in to browse around the downstairs gallery.”

“What does Knight look like?”

“He’s just shy of six feet. Stocky, a little puffy. His hair is prematurely gray, white really. He wears it longish, like an artiste. Very stylish. He likes to wear black clothes to offset his hair. Sometimes he wears thin black wire-rimmed eyeglasses.”

“Sounds foppish.”

“Yeah, it sounds that way, but he’s thoroughly masculine. Somehow it all balances out.”

“What about his education?”

“Oxbridge.”

“Really? What else about him?” She drew closer to him, putting her arm through his, lacing their fingers together.

“He understands Wolfram Schrade.”

“Understands him?”

“The only thing that fascinates Carrington more than the art that he buys and sells are the people from whom he buys it and the people to whom he sells it. He’s a collector of psychological minutiae.”

“What do you mean?”

“Carrington believes that people who buy art, who care enough about it to want to own it, are an anomaly in the general scheme of modern life. In today’s world, which so values speed and the quick result, the immediate feedback, the quick payback, the person who turns to art—something that requires a meditative discipline to create and to appreciate—is a rower against the tide. Everything modern militates against it.” Strand paused. “Nothing fascinates Carrington more than a rower against the tide.”

“Even if he’s Wolf Schrade.”

“It doesn’t have anything to do with morality. Besides, Carrington doesn’t know anything about Schrade’s criminal side. The connection is purely an artistic one. Carrington simply recognizes a fellow rower.”

 

 

CHAPTER 40

Claude Corsier sat at a small square table with a starched linen cloth. It was set with Victorian china and sterling silver and Dutch crystal. Carrington Hartwell Knight sat across from him, each man enthroned in an elaborately carved, high-backed Spanish chair several hundred years old. Knight’s elbow rested on the damask-upholstered arm of his chair, his wan face resting in his hand, an index finger lying close to one pale eye. His longish wavy white hair was carefully coifed, a full dandy’s wave sweeping back in undulations from his temples.

The two men were eating a late brunch in Knight’s second-floor library. The food was prepared upstairs in Knight’s well-appointed kitchen by a French cook whom he retained three days a week. It was brought down in a small elevator by the chef’s niece, who also served the two men. They had begun with a modest mixed-leaf salad with small medallions of grilled goat’s cheese and then had gone on to noisettes d’agneau garnished with potato galettes. They had followed that with little plates of fresh fruit and slices of brie de meaux. Dessert and coffee were declined in favor of finishing off a very good bottle of Pouilly-Fumé.

Knight laughed richly at Corsier’s third or fourth anecdote of the meal and poured himself a full glass of the vaguely smoky white wine, adding some to Corsier’s glass. He sat back in his chair, smiling. Corsier recognized his moment.

“Carrington, the food was wonderful, as always,” he said, lifting his glass. “My compliments.”

Knight smirked pleasantly, accepting the praise.

“I told you I had something special,” Corsier went on, “and I do, something that I am sure will delight you.” He reached down beside his chair, where he had leaned a wafer-thin, royal blue leather portfolio. “I have photographs of two drawings in my possession.”

He opened the portfolio and took out two eight-by-ten color photographs and handed them across the table to Knight, who put down his glass and sat up in his baroque chair, hand outstretched.

He looked at the first photograph. Frowned. Looked quickly at the second. Frowned. His attention still glued to the images, he moved aside the few things in front of him and laid the pictures side by side on the linen cloth. He leaned over them. Without removing his eyes from them, he reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and took from behind his gray linen handkerchief a pair of eyeglasses with perfectly round, black wire frames. He put them on, continuing to stare at the photographs. The frown disappeared. He began to shake his head slowly.

“Good God . . . extraordinary.” He closed his mouth and swallowed, his eyes squinting, his head thrust forward.

He looked up at Corsier. “Where did you get these?”

“Long story.”

“I’ve never seen them.”

“Nor have I.”

Knight tilted his head, looking at Corsier like a handsome if exotic owl. “Claude, are these cataloged?”

“No.”

Knight gasped. “They’re not authenticated?”

“Carrington”—Corsier leaned toward the flamboyant dealer—“I’ve only just discovered them!”

“How many people have seen these?”

“Only me.”

“What?”

“And, soon, you.”

Knight tucked in his chin skeptically, trying to hide his excitement at being in on the beginning of such an event.

“How the hell did you come up with these?”

Corsier relished the question.

“How many times have you heard this?” he began. “An estate discovery. But it’s true. Two weeks ago a middle-aged British woman came to my gallery in Geneva. She had been visiting friends to whom she had told the following story, and they had urged her to come to me. An elderly aunt had died. The old woman had been very much of a rounder in her day and had flounced around with artists in Berlin and other places Germanic and had lived so bohemian a life as to have made herself an outcast from the rest of the family. Or at least a thoroughgoing black sheep. She lived a hermit in Bedford. She died. Left her little cottage and its contents to this niece.

“The niece dragged herself to Bedford, girded for the chore of cleaning out this dirty little cottage and its junk. She found scores and scores of drawings of every sort, all kept in boxes, one on top of the other. She also found seven framed drawings on the walls of the old woman’s bedroom, where she spent the last four years of her life. Thinking the art might be worth something, the niece photographed it and sent the photographs to her friends in Geneva.

“When my assistant saw the photographs, she called me immediately. I was in Zurich. I flew home that night. The next day I visited the woman, saw the photographs, and made an appointment three days later to visit her home here in London.” Corsier opened his eyes wide. “I found two little Kokoschkas, a rather nice Czeschka, a very good Kubin, two Broschs, and”—he paused for effect—“two Schieles.”

“And you have the drawings?”

“I own them.”

“You bought them yourself?”

“I bought the lot.”

“You didn’t tell her what she had?”

“Well, I wasn’t sure,” Corsier said coyly. “I’m still not sure.”

Knight returned his eyes to the photographs, studying them. As he bent his head forward, a white lock dangled over his forehead rakishly. His fingers rested on the edge of the table as if he were at a piano keyboard, wrists down. He examined every line, every stroke, delved into the colors at their deepest and out to their lighter edges. He squinted at the expressions on the faces of the subjects and followed the intentions of the lines, where they broke or continued unexpectedly, where they hesitated, repeated, and confidently pressed on to unusual conclusions.

“Early ones, I’d say,” Knight murmured to himself. “Before he grew so harsh, so cruel.”

“Exactly.”

“Mmmmm . . . mmmm.” Knight was unaware of his audible voice. Suddenly he looked up. “Schiele.” He wiped his mouth with his napkin and sat back once again. “Sure as hell looks like Schiele to me.” He picked up his glass, paused. “Until I get to see the paper itself, anyway.” He drank, rather quickly now.

“What do you think of them?” Corsier asked. He stroked his mustache and goatee.

Knight sighed and savored the lingering, smoky aftertaste of the wine. He raised his white eyebrows. “Well, they’re sublime, Claude.” His eyes grew heavy lidded. “Why are you showing them to me?”

“I want you to authenticate them. Then I want you to broker them.”

“What’s the matter? Why don’t you do it?”

“I can’t.”

Knight sipped his Pouilly-Fumé. “Explain.”

“I know who will give the highest price for these two beauties,” Corsier said. “Unfortunately, he and I had a serious falling-out recently, and if he knows I’m connected with these drawings, he will not buy. And we will not get the highest possible price.”

“You’re talking about Wolfram Schrade?”

“That’s right.”

“Really?” Knight’s voice rose and fell.

“We’ve exchanged words. Angry words. Legal threats all around. So, you see . . .”

“Of course.”

“It’s imperative that I remain out of the picture here. Entirely. You mustn’t mention me at all.”

“Why should I?”

Corsier smiled to himself. Carrington Knight was already counting his crowns and pounds and guineas.

“Are you interested, then?”

“Christ. Of course.” He paused, calculating while pretending not to be as he looked at the photographs over the top of his glass. “You don’t want to be connected with the sale in any way?”

“Absolutely not.”

Knight frowned abruptly and cut his eyes at Corsier.

“All this excessive secrecy, not wanting my man Jeffrey here when you come—all that has to do with your anonymity?”

“Precisely. I don’t want anyone other than you to know who’s offering these. You know Schrade. He snoops around.”

“Oh, yes, yes.” Knight nodded, thinking. “It will be of importance to the media.”

Knight was understating it. Egon Schiele was one of the most collectible moderns. His output had not been enormous, and none of the known works could be said to be available. Everyone who had them was hanging on to them.

“You can have all the cream and all of the credit for the discovery,” Corsier said.

“You want to be mentioned after the sale?”

“No.”

“You’d just as soon the attribution remained ‘the Property of a Gentleman.’”

“Forever, as far as I’m concerned.”

“Fine. What’s the commission?”

“Standard.”

“Can’t argue with that. What are you asking for them?”

“If they’re authentic, I have an idea of what they’re worth. But you’ve sold Schrade far more art than I have. I think you’ll know best what he will put on the table.”

“Yes, yes, of course.” Knight was sitting forward in his small throne again, elbows on the arms, hands holding the wineglass. His eyes returned to the two photographs. “It’s extraordinary, really, to come up with two unknown Schieles. Extraordinary.”

“I have a suggestion about Schrade.”

Knight looked up at Corsier from under his brows.

“A greater egoist never walked,” Corsier said. “I actually think you could enhance the asking price if he were allowed to be part of the discovery.”

“Explain.”

“Tell him you think you have discovered a couple of lost Schieles. Briefly describe the background. Tell him that you are going to authenticate them. You knew he would want first look at actual Schieles. Would he be interested in being present for the ‘discovery’ itself? If they are Schieles, he will literally have first look. If they are not . . .” Corsier shrugged.

Corsier could see Carrington Knight’s mind wheeling, his imagination foreseeing the drama . . . and the value of the drama. Corsier went on.

“If Schrade could share in the thrill of discovering a Schiele,” he enthused gently, reaching out with his hand and closing it into a fist, his white French cuffs extending from the sleeves of his dark suit as he turned his fist and drew it back toward himself to connote the compelling effect of his argument. “Schiele the iconized.” His voice softened to a whisper. “Schiele the harsh magician of nervous sexuality. Schiele the disturbed light of modern concupiscence.”

He let his hand return softly to the linen tablecloth.

“I think that even the cold Mr. Schrade could be enthused, as it were, by the drama of seeing these drawings still encased in the frames that have held them since, say, the nineteen thirties, or twenties. The two frames, incidentally, are monstrosities, heavy, ornately carved, gold leaf. Who knows what one might find behind those drawings. Another sketch? A scrawled annotation in Schiele’s own hand that would shed some light into his psyche?”

Carrington Knight was motionless, his face blank. For a moment Corsier was afraid he had overdone it. But no, Knight was seeing a vision. He blinked a couple of times.

“Jesus Christ, Claude,” he said, “have you always been this calculating, and I have simply overlooked it?”

Corsier smiled kindly. “To tell you the truth,” he said, picking up his wineglass, “I think these damn drawings are authentic. I suspect they will be on the market for only the few moments following Schrade’s realization of this. Think of it. They have been lost for three generations, and then they come to light. For only a moment. Schrade will buy them and lock them away until he dies . . . another generation until his estate is sold. This, my dear Carrington, is a flickering moment of opportunity. It will not come again to either of us.”

 

 

CHAPTER 41

Harry Strand sat on one of the wooden benches in Mount Street Gardens, a small, cloistered common of irregular shape enclosed on its various sides by the Gothic Revival Church of the Immaculate Conception, St. Georges Primary School, Grosvenor Chapel, and the rear entrances to the elegant row houses that faced Mount Street.

The afternoon air was fresh as the sun filtered down through the bowers of the ponderous plane trees that dominated the gardens, their hand-size leaves rustling in the light breeze like rushing water. Pigeons sailed into the quiet close, skittering through the dappled light to land on the grass, where they strutted about in addled curiosity before finally settling into a meditative squat to warm themselves in the random puddles of sun.

Strand listened to the intermittent echoes of the voices of children playing behind the tall windows of St. Georges and to the occasional quick step of a solitary pedestrian taking a shortcut through the gardens. He liked the feel of the air on his face and the distant rumble of London traffic that was all but dampened into silence by the surrounding walls of brick and stone.

Bill Howard came into the gardens from the Mount Street entrance, walking through the opened wrought iron gates at a slow, deliberate pace. He stopped at the intersection of the main path and lighted a cigarette, the gesture giving him time to scan the benches along the pathways to find Strand. Without indicating that he had seen him, he turned onto the main footpath. He was wearing a suit that seemed particularly stylish for him, a double-breasted one of chocolate summer wool. He passed through several shafts of sunlight as he approached Strand’s bench. He sat down without saying a word.

They watched the pigeons in silence for a few moments and then Strand said, “Bill, I want to make a deal.”

“A deal.”

“That’s right.”

Howard shook his head slowly. “I don’t know, Harry, you may have gone too far. I don’t know if they want to deal anymore.”

Silence.

“I sent Mara away,” Strand said.

Howard just looked at him. He was trying to decide how to react.

“She told me everything,” Strand said.

Howard smoked, then, slowly, a sarcastic grin twisted his mouth, and he shook his head, looking away.

“She was pretty good,” Strand said.

“No, she wasn’t any good at all.” Howard looked around. “I knew damned well . . .”

“I know. She told me.”

Howard snorted. “It may be too late for her, too. I don’t think they’re going to—”

“I don’t want to make a deal with the FIS, Bill. I want to make a deal with Schrade.”

Howard managed to hide his surprise. He frowned and leaned back into the corner against the arm of the bench. Like Strand, he crossed one leg over the other and pulled once more on the cigarette.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

Two women pushing baby carriages entered from Archibald Mews together and sat on a bench just inside the entrance. They turned their carriages a little to take best advantage of the warming sun. One of them produced a thermos, the other a packet of biscuits.

“I’ve had it,” Strand said. “I’m not up to this anymore.”

“You’ve thought it through?” Howard’s voice was flat, his face sober with restrained emotion, like a physician whose terminally ill patient had just told him he wanted to pull the plug.

“Yeah. I’ve thought it through. I’ve pushed it as far as it’s going to go.”

Howard didn’t move. He took another drag on his cigarette and tossed the butt onto the path. It smoldered there, burning the last bit of tobacco.

“What made you change your mind?”

Strand hesitated a moment. “It’s just the accumulative toll. I don’t want to lose what little I’ve got left.”

“Why are you coming to me? I told you before, it’s all over with the FIS and this guy. There’s no communication channel.”

“I’ve been out of the business for a while, Bill, and I may be a bit rusty. But I’m willing to bet that you still have access to Schrade, some kind of access.”

Howard looked at him blankly, his best poker face. His “no comment” facade.

“I don’t give a damn how,” Strand added. “I don’t care. I just think you’re my best bet for getting this to him.”

“This what?”

“My offer. A deal.”

“Which is?”

“I’ll give it all back. The principal. The interest. Everything.”

“Bullshit. You can’t do that.”

“Why?”

“Hell, it’s tied up in charities and all that.”

“Where did you get that information?”

“Don’t forget who you’re talking to, Harry. Look, even if the FIS didn’t have the best goddamn intelligence in the world, you know damn well Schrade’s looked into it with a microscope—right up through the ass of all those foundations you set up. He came to us stomping mad, before he left us with our mouths open and our pants down. He showed us what you’d done with the money.” Howard’s neck was swelling in anger.

“He couldn’t have.”

“Okay, he showed us how it was done . . . the system, the way.”

Strand wanted desperately to know how Schrade had discovered their scheme, but he wouldn’t give Howard the satisfaction of asking. Apparently Schrade’s accountants really hadn’t found the actual charities.

“Somehow nobody really believes that money is out of their reach, do they, Bill?” Strand retorted. “I mean, why is everybody still hanging around? Why’d the FIS go to the trouble—the considerable trouble—of training Mara? Because you still think you can get the money. Why hasn’t Schrade killed me? Because, despite what he ‘showed’ you, he, too, thinks he can still get his hands on the money—through me. It hasn’t stopped him from cutting me off from everything but my arms. But I’m still alive. Everybody thinks they can still get their hands on the money somehow, some way, eventually.”

“Christ, Harry.” Howard didn’t know what to believe.

“I hid that money behind a lot of doors, Bill, but not all of them were locked. No one’s found them because they weren’t supposed to. There wouldn’t have been any point if people could find them. I think you know that already.”

Howard gave him a sour look. He was thinking. Finally he asked, “What’s the ‘deal’ you’re talking about?”

“We just want a life.”

“You want to turn back the clock.”

“No.” Strand handed Howard a piece of paper. “I just don’t want Schrade to stop it.”

“What’s this?”

“An Internet address. This is where you can get me.”

Howard looked at the address. “This is the way you want to work this out?”

“No. This is the way I want you to arrange the meeting.”

“What meeting?”

“It’s part of the deal. I want to talk with Wolf face to face.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake . . .”

“It’s a deal breaker, Bill. It’s got to be this way.”

“What the fuck do you mean it’s a deal breaker? ‘Deal breaker.’ You’re in no goddamn position to talk ‘deal breaker,’ Harry. What’re you talking about? Shit. You don’t do the deal, he kills you. There’s no deal here. I mean, even if you give him the money, all of it. The interest. The whole shitload. How’re you going to get him to hold up his end of the ‘deal’?” Howard shook his head, looking at the e-mail address. “This is insanity.”

Strand was surprised. He had thought that Howard would take his offer and run to Schrade as soon as the words were out of his mouth. Instead he was pointing out that the offer was absurd, an act of desperation. A deal in which the “deal” would surely be violated. In Howard’s mind, Strand was already a dead man.

“I’ll make sure he holds up his end of the arrangement,” Strand said.

“What, ‘anything happens to me and the New York Times will get an envelope’? Harry, you poor fucking stump.”

“I wouldn’t have come to you with this if I didn’t have it covered.”

“Sure, that’s good.” Howard rolled his head. “You’ve got it covered. Great.”

From the Audley gates an elderly couple entered the gardens with a short-haired dog, an animal of no discernible breed, on a leash. The three of them ambled along the main walk as the dog snuffled busily at the grassy margins, ferreting excitedly among the green clumps. Entrusted with the leash, the woman watched the dog with critical attention, while the man, hands behind his back, gazed about the close with a mild, bifocaled curiosity.

“Why should I do this for you, Harry?”

“Two reasons. First, I can keep the FIS from getting it. I can tie it up for decades. This was not a shoddy operation, Bill. Some very intelligent people put a lot of thought and sweat into this before we even started. Dennis Clymer was a genius. We ran it for six months, fine-tuning it as we went along, addressing potential problem areas that might crop up farther down the road. We shut it down and took another six months to stabilize what we’d done. So if the FIS wants to try to get it, fine, but my guess is, if they’re going to try to get it through the legal system, the Justice Department’s going to take a closer look at this and tell them to forget it. Everyone you know in the FIS will have retired by the time they finally realize it’s a goose hunt.

“Second, you’d want to do it for the three million dollars I’m going to put in a Belgium account for you. It’s properly sheltered, safe to access.”

“That’s goddamn blunt,” Howard said.

“If I remember, you’re impatient with finesse.”

“Yeah.”

It was a crucial moment, but Strand never doubted how it would end.

“Three million dollars . . .” Howard’s eyes were fixed on the bit of paper, which he had now folded and unfolded so many times that it was getting limp. Then, to Strand’s surprise, Bill Howard seemed to grow angry. Strand could actually see him trying to control his temper, tucking in his chin, tightening his nostrils, his face flushing.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Howard said abruptly after a little thinking. “So, when I have something, if I have something, I contact you?” He raised the piece of paper and waggled it.

“Yeah. One other thing. I’m leaving London tonight. If you want to talk to me personally after tonight, it won’t be easy. It’ll take a little time to arrange.”

“Where are you going?”

“I’m not staying anywhere very long,” Strand said.

“I’ll see what I can do. Shit.”

“It’s not something he really has to ponder, Bill.”

“Harry, for Christ’s sake . . . Okay, look, how complicated is the money end of this situation?”

“Not too complicated.”

“Well, shit, that clarifies it.”

“What do you want to know?”

“What do I tell him? A week? Days?”

“Hours.”

Howard perked up. “Hours?”

“Yeah.”

Howard studied him. “Where do you want to meet him?”

“I’ll get to that.”

“When?”

“When I see how he reacts to the offer.”

Howard folded the paper one last time and put it in the side pocket of his suit coat. As the elderly couple passed by he held his next comment, watching the dog disapprovingly. When they were out of earshot he went on.

“What’s the time frame here?”

“We’ll work it out.”

“The sooner the better?”

“That’s right.”

Howard was feeling better. He was trying to cover all the bases.

“What if he turns you down, Harry? What then?”

“Eventually he’ll get me. I know that.” He paused. “But I’ll have the satisfaction of seeing half a billion dollars of his laundered cash do some good for a change.”

“But you’d cough it all up to save your ass.”

Strand looked at him. “I tried to do what I thought would be a good thing,” he said. “I guess I’ve found out that I don’t have the guts to give my life for it. Or Mara’s. I’ve already lost everything but her. That’s what I was telling you at the beginning, Bill. None of this is very pretty, any way you slice it.”