Howard walked away toward the Audley gates. From years of experience, Strand knew that he wouldn’t look back. The meeting had left Strand drained and anxious. He couldn’t decide whether Howard had been entirely satisfied with Strand’s story or whether he harbored a lingering suspicion that Strand was setting him up.
Leaving Mount Street Gardens, Strand made his way through Mayfair to Piccadilly, emerging on Berkeley Street just down from the Green Park underground station.
He rode the underground all the way to Knightsbridge and then all the way back to Piccadilly Circus. He spent some time milling in the crowds there and then walked up the Burlington Arcade, where he drifted in and out of the shops. He worked his way back to Half Moon Street, which he followed to Curzon, stopping in at George Trumper to buy a tube of sandalwood shaving cream.
He turned up Curzon, stopping to look at the film posters on the front of the Curzon Cinema before turning back and following Curzon to Fitzmaurice Place. Half a dozen telephone booths lined the sidewalk just at the Charles Street corner. He stepped into the second one from the right, closed the door, and checked his watch. For seven minutes he stared at the poster advertisements that prostitutes had stuck to the walls of the booth, exposing their wares in black-and-white photographs of steamy vamping.
At precisely five o’clock, the telephone rang. He picked up the receiver.
“You’re going to like this place, Harry,” Mara said, giving him the address. “I’ll leave the front door open.”
The town house was close. He turned into Charles Street and started up the hill. Just past Queen Street he turned into Chesterfield Hill, and there, nearly halfway up the first block and across the street, was the red-brick Edwardian town house, newly refurbished, that Mara had leased.
He crossed the street and was pleased to see the “Available” sign still attached to the wrought-iron fence that enclosed the front garden. Upon entering the gate, he walked up the steps and let himself in through the moss green front door, shiny with layers of paint.
When he closed the door behind him the hollow sound echoed through the unfurnished rooms, which smelled of fresh paint and wallpaper paste. On the second floor a large reception fronted the street. To the left was a broad bay window overlooking Chesterfield Hill. Centered between the arms of the windows was a box spring and mattress on the floor, scattered with plastic packets of new linen. Mara walked in from the kitchen, drying her hands on a dish towel.
“Welcome home,” she said.
At the other end of the long room, on the wall opposite the bay window, were stacked painters’ supplies, five-gallon paint buckets and painters’ canvases and scaffolding boards and ladders.
“I convinced the estate agent to leave everything as it was,” Mara explained.
“The ‘Available’ sign is a good touch.”
“Yeah, I asked him to leave it for another week. He thought it was an odd request but shrugged it off.”
Mara had scavenged together the rough scaffolding boards and paint buckets to make a long table, which she covered with the paint-flecked canvas dropcloths. There was a telephone on the table and books stacked beside it, and a little farther over sat one of the laptops, the screen already lighted. A cobalt blue vase with fresh flowers in it sat on the far end of the table.
“The telephone was a lucky stroke,” she said. “The estate agency had it installed to communicate with the workers who were doing the refurbishing work. We just transferred over the names.”
Strand looked at her and smiled. “You’re right, this is perfect. It’s close to everything.”
“I got it fairly early this morning,” she said, walking over to him, folding her arms, the dish towel dangling from her hands. “It was the third place they showed me. I really had to fork over the money to speed up the paperwork”—she turned and gestured to the bed—“paid extra to get the furniture store to have the bedding delivered within a few hours. It’s taken all day.”
Strand walked over to the bed and tossed the shaving cream on the new mattress, then took off his coat and tossed it down, too.
Mara waited, her arms folded, her weight shifted to one leg. “Well, how did it go?” she asked.
“I think it’s going to work. He’s taking it to Schrade. He’s supposed to get back to me as soon as possible.”
“Then you feel good about it?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
Mara thought a moment. “God, it’s just so hard to believe what Howard’s doing. You’d think the FIS would have some suspicions about him.”
“I just hope he’s swallowing this, that they both swallow it. Of course, Schrade’s psychology is in our favor. He wants to believe. Greed’s giving us a leg up here. None of them can stand the thought that the money’s really out of reach. The longer we can make them believe it isn’t, the longer Schrade’s going to put off coming after us.”
Strand looked around. “We’re going to need something for the windows.” He rolled his head from side to side, trying to limber up his stiff neck as he unbuttoned his collar and loosened his tie.
“I’ve got extra sheets for that. Do you think Howard believed you when you told him you’d sent me away?”
“I didn’t get a feeling that he was suspicious,” Strand said.
Mara went over to the bed and began taking everything off it.
“I was just as concerned that he not get the impression I was staying in London,” Strand said. “I tried to make him think this was just a stopover for me. But I don’t know. . . .”
Mara opened the packets of new sheets and shook them out. Strand went over to help her.
“While the estate agent was drawing up the papers for me to sign,” Mara said, putting down the first sheet, “I took a cab to a Grosvenor Square. The agent recommended a solicitor there. I got the papers authorized that the Houston bank wanted in order to release the drawings and faxed them to Houston. About an hour ago I called them and they said everything was in order. They’d already called in the fine arts museum conservator to do the packing. I gave them Léon Gautier’s name and address on the Rue des Saints-Pères. They’ll get the drawings on a flight tonight. I’m to call him tomorrow for the flight number and arrival time in Paris.”
They tucked in the last sheet, and Mara threw a bedspread over the bed. Strand straightened it from his side and then sat on the bed while Mara put pillowcases on the pillows.
“When is Bill going to get back to you?” she asked.
Strand shook his head. “I don’t know. I told him I was leaving London tonight. After that it would be more difficult to arrange a meeting.”
“So we just wait.”
“That’s right.”
Mara looked out the window. It was near dusk, and street lamps were coming on all over Mayfair. The room was growing gloomy as the light outside slipped away.
“Come on,” she said, “we’ve got to put up one of these sheets before we turn on the lights.”
Using the painters’ ladder and thumbtacks—Mara had overlooked nothing—they tacked the top of one of the sheets to the ceiling, following the angle of the bay window, hanging the sheet a couple of feet away from the windows themselves. This created a luminous effect, softening and expanding the glow from the street lamps.
“I hate to say this,” Mara said as Strand was putting away the ladder, “but I’m starving. My day was frantic, and I skipped lunch. I’ve got to have something to eat.”
They went around the corner to Charles Street and walked to the top of the hill to a little pub that served meals in two rooms in the back. The rooms were small and intimate, and most of the other tables were occupied, which meant that they had no opportunity to talk about their plans. So the dinner was perfunctory, and by the time they had finished and pushed their way through the pub crowd to the front door and the yard outside, it was well after dark.
As Mara took his arm and they started down the hill, Strand realized the weather was beginning to change. Though it was still warm, the air was growing heavy, and the night sky was gauzy with humidity, hazing the street lamps in the distance.
“I’ve got to leave for a couple of hours,” Strand said.
“Really? To do what?”
“I’d rather explain it to you after I get back,” he demurred. “It’ll be easier that way.”
She said nothing for a moment, then she stopped and turned to him.
“Look, Harry,” she said, “I want to remind you of something: You are not running an intelligence operation here. We’re dealing with our lives now, and conceivably, mine is more at risk than yours at this point. So quit acting like you’re a case officer. Stop compartmentalizing. If you don’t think I have every right to all the information you have, to all the planning you’re doing, to all the possibilities that affect me directly, then you’d better explain to me why that is. Either you trust me all the way on this, Harry, or you don’t. If you don’t, I may want to rethink what the hell I’m taking all these risks for.”
She was standing with her back to the brick row houses along the sidewalk, the spill of a street lamp softly lighting her stern expression.
“It’s not a matter of trust, Mara. Not trust.” He hesitated. “You’re right about my reserve, and I know it. Old habits. I’m sorry. But give me a couple of hours here . . . just a couple of hours.”
He gazed out the cab window at the London streets. A light fog encircled the street lamps with bright halos.
Knightsbridge.
Mara had been right to call his hand. He couldn’t do that to her anymore, even though all of his years of experience running agents made him resist revealing his plans to her. Under the circumstances, however, it actually would be foolish of him to continue to keep his intentions from her. But in this present instance, what he was about to do definitely took their conspiracy to another level. It would provoke some serious discussion, and Strand knew they hadn’t had time for that before he left.
Hammersmith.
He had to admit that he found making decisions far more complex now that he was making them for the two of them rather than for himself alone. He found himself second-guessing his instincts, double-checking his gut reactions. His responses to developments were slower. Worst of all, his doubts were more profound. He actually began to fear them.
King Street.
In all the years he had been involved in intelligence operations, never had so much been at stake. If an operation went to hell, seldom did his own life risk a mortal wound. Failures were disappointments, not tragedies. Not for him personally. For others? Yes, but he dealt with that. Perhaps what he was going through now was retribution for all those tragedies in other people’s lives that he had managed to “deal with.” It wasn’t the same at all now. In those days he told himself that if he suffered with everyone who suffered, he wouldn’t be able to go on. And that was true, of course. But he wasn’t sure it was moral to have been so stoic, to have repressed so much compassion in the name of emotional self-preservation.
Chiswick High Road.
The Terrier pub was on a street of darkness. Chiswick was littered with pockets of urban moribundity, and the Terrier, it seemed, was the last living thing on this street. Brick row houses on either side disappeared into the fog. The inhabitants seemed to be gone, swallowed up by the maw of Disappointment, the last mythical creature of the modern age in which people still actually believed.
He asked the cab to wait for him, and he got out on a wet, gritty sidewalk in front of the pub. The front door of the pub was open, but there was no rollicking on the inside, none of the gay, unruly laughter that he had seen in Mayfair. Here it was silent and grim and smelled of stale lager and piss.
Strand stepped through the door but did not have time to adjust his vision to the darkness before he heard a scratchy voice wheeze his name.
“Harry. Over here.”
He turned toward the booths along the wall and made out a solitary, sallow face looking at him through the smutty gloom. Strand moved to the booth and sat down.
“Jeeeezz-us.” The word came from a raw, wounded throat. “Here you are, the real fuckin’ thing.”
Strand reached across the sticky table and shook hands with the man whose head hunkered down between his bony shoulders. Even in the twilight of the pub Strand could see a wasted man.
“You have a real knack for ‘out of the way,’ Hodge,” Strand said.
The laugh was raspy and without strength.
“Hell, this isn’t out of the way, Harry. This is where I live. My part of town.”
Strand was embarrassed.
“Well, I appreciate your help, Mack. I didn’t even know you were still here.”
“Till I die,” Mack Hodge said.
It was a deliberate reference to his situation. Strand had already realized that the man was in serious trouble. As his eyes adjusted to the low light, Hodge’s face emerged as unrecognizable. Strand was appalled. The flush, boisterous face of memory was gone. The old familiar voice, spookily altered, issued from a papier-mâché visage.
“You’re sick, Mack?” Strand asked. He had to. The man wanted him to.
“Dying.”
Strand hesitated. “How long has this been going on?”
“Too fuckin’ long.”
Strand was shocked to see him lift a cigarette and puff on it, the end glowing mean and red between them.
“But not much longer,” Hodge added.
“I’m sorry,” Strand said.
“Shit.” Hodge shook his knobby and emaciated head dismissively, the few remaining wisps of hair on top of it floating aimlessly. “It comes to all of us.”
A mug of some kind of beer was clunked down in front of Strand. He sipped it. It was the last thing he wanted to do. And then he sipped again. Smoke floated up from the drawn and sunken mouth across from him and hung in the fetid air between them.
“Even in this dark, godforsaken place I can see you’re still handsome, Harry.”
It was the strangest remark that Strand could imagine. It was not a Mack Hodge remark. Strand didn’t say anything. Nothing, nothing at all seemed appropriate.
Hodge’s laugh squeezed from his throat in intermittent gasps.
“Some kind of thing to say, huh, Harry?” Hodge’s bony head smoked. “You know what, Harry? It is absolutely true that imminent death gives the lie to life’s stupidities. I always thought you were a handsome man. But would I have ever told you that? Hell, I hardly even wanted to think it.”
Raspy grunts.
Strand had to summon all of his willpower not to break and run from this sepulchral pub. He could get what he needed elsewhere, surely.
“Quit squirming, Harry. I was just trying to convey to you a little of what it’s like. . . .” His voice gave out in a prolonged whiffle.
“You caught me off guard, Mack.”
“Well, that’s something. You always being so goddamn controlled. Macky scores a point, huh?”
Strand could only nod. He drank the warm beer and fought the gagging reflex. He wouldn’t be able to take another sip.
“Speaking of death,” Hodge whispered, and his scrawny hand floated out of the murk, holding a wadded paper sack. He placed it on the table between them. “I believe you have need of this.”
Strand didn’t move to pick it up.
“It’s exactly what you asked for. Only better. You were never much on keeping up with the latest technology. Every ninety days there are improvements in the application of scientific knowledge to practical purposes. It’s a natural law of some sort.”
Hodge’s mug rose up to his hollow face, and he drank some beer. The cigarette followed. Glowed. Smoke leaked up through the wisps of hair.
“Do I have to know anything particular?”
“You?” Hodge paused. “This is for you personally?”
Strand didn’t respond.
Hodge didn’t speak for a moment, but Strand could hear him breathing.
“Shit, Harry. . . .” His tone was sympathetic, even compassionate. “Shit.” There was another awkward hesitation, and then he went on with the business. “Nothing special to know, buddy. It’s a disposable weapon. Will not be detected by X ray or metal detectors—there’s no metal in it. I wouldn’t rely on its accuracy past thirty feet. It’s basically a contact delivery device. The ammunition is special, though. When you’re through with it, throw the crap into the sea. For the hit, just break the skin with the bullet. The saxitoxin will do the rest.”
He tried to cough but didn’t seem to have the energy for it. His hard-drawn breath clattered in his throat, forcing its way past the phlegm. Hodge seemed not to have anything to do with it, as if he just had to wait passively while his body did what it had to do.
“About the pellets—they’re a neurotoxin, will drop him on the spot, so you have to give some thought to that. Might make it a brush-by. Could have used ricin, but the target would’ve had time to run around awhile, call for help, go to the hospital, whatever. Doesn’t matter, no antidote for either one of these. It’s a can’t miss weapon. Only downside is you’ve got to get in close to deliver it.”
“The ammunition?”
“The bullets—pellets—are hard-cast plastic, like the gun. They come in a clip of six, the casings linked, inseparable. They’re not delicate, but I’d treat them with the utmost respect.”
“The sound?”
“About like slapping the side of your face.”
“Will it penetrate clothing?”
“A business suit, probably not much more.”
“It’s automatic?”
“You bet. That’s a recent improvement. Didn’t used to be. Made the thing a little bulkier, but it’s a welcome improvement.”
Hodge smoked and drank.
Strand withdrew an envelope from the inside pocket of his suit and laid it in front of Hodge.
“Thanks,” Strand said.
“Lot of money for a dying man,” Hodge said. “But I’ve got expenses.” He paused. “And, like everybody else, I know people who can use it.”
Strand reached across and shook Mack Hodge’s hand. The first time he had not noticed how the hand felt, but now he was aware of the brittle, parchment texture of the skin and of the sharp ridges of the individual bones.
“It was good to see you, Harry,” Hodge said. “I hope this ends well for you.”
“I appreciate it, Mack.” Strand tried to think of something promising to say, a positive good-bye, but it didn’t come to him. Hodge sensed his struggle.
“It’s supposed to rain tonight,” he said, and Strand was stricken to hear his frail voice crack with unexpected emotion.
“I’ve got to go,” Strand said.
The skull nodded, and the hand came up and the mean glare of the cigarette flared dully one last time on the wasted face.
The rain hammered down on the car in the darkness of Harley Mews. Claude Corsier sat behind the steering wheel of his rental car and looked at Skerlic. The way the Serb’s hair was plastered to his forehead reminded Corsier of a dead dog he had once seen in the rain. Skerlic’s face was wet, and his raincoat crackled as it worked against the leather seats. He smelled rancid, of cigarettes and sweat.
Corsier looked over into the rear seat. The cumbersome picture frames were wrapped in plastic bubble-wrap. He cringed to see the rain droplets on the plastic, the dry forgeries barely visible through the thick layers of clear wrapping.
“You mounted them as I instructed?” Corsier asked, worried.
“Exactly as you said.”
“They weren’t damaged? Even a scratch?”
“I’ll keep the radio equipment with me,” Skerlic said, again ignoring Corsier’s fretting. “Give them to the dealer, work out a time for Schrade to come look at them. Contact me. Then we can work out the rest of it.”
“Okay.” Corsier couldn’t take his eyes off the pictures.
“The moment you put them in the agent’s possession, I want to be in the hotel,” Skerlic said.
Corsier had worried about that. He could not imagine how this odoriferous and coarse creature could stay in the Connaught even for two days without attracting more attention than anyone would want, even if they weren’t planning an assassination.
“Is there a problem with the rooms?” Skerlic asked, his glistening forehead wrinkling in suspicion at Corsier’s silence. Water beaded on his upper lip.
“No . . . no, I’ve already reserved the suite. It’s ready. . . . You know, collectors, especially someone who is presented with a discovery such as this, will examine the frames closely. Curiosity. Everything about these drawings, even the frame in which they are set, will receive careful scrutiny.”
“Yes, we thought so.” Skerlic nodded quickly. “The job is very well hidden. As a matter of fact, after some concern, we decided to laminate the back of the frame, the part under the paper. We stained it with tea. The paper, too. Damp stain. He would actually have to lift off a rather good layer of laminate—which looks like solid wood—to discover the explosives and the microphones. He would have to take tools to it. It would not be easy.”
Corsier felt a little better.
“But,” Skerlic added, “you must not leave them with him the whole time. He will prowl. He will prod at it. I agree about the curiosity.”
“I won’t leave it,” Corsier said, “but I will have to let him see the drawings, and give him time to peruse them, before he will agree to call Schrade. And, of course, he will have to have them the day before Schrade arrives. Twenty-four hours.”
“That is not a problem. The frames will stand up to that.”
“How . . . uh, how stable . . . ?” Corsier glanced over into the rear seat again.
“You have to have the electronics.”
“And how easy is it to detonate?”
“Turn a switch. Push a button.”
Corsier nodded. It occurred to him that the pictures were facing out, now, in the rear seat. He made a note to turn them the other way as soon as he got around the corner out of Skerlic’s sight.
“Okay,” Corsier said, turning back to the Serb. “Then that’s it. I will call you about the hotel, about the date.”
“You, of course, will be with me,” Skerlic reminded him. “You have to identify the voice. Once you do that, then it will be up to me to pick the right moment.”
“Then that is that,” Corsier said.
“Yes,” Skerlic said. He was studying Corsier. “Okay.”
He turned quickly, his raincoat creaking loudly against the seats, and opened the car door and got out. The sound of rain swelled, and then the car door slammed. The Serb ran around in front of the car and ducked into the vine-covered doorway.
Corsier started the car and eased around the corner of the mews. He stopped and reached into the back and turned the two pictures facing away from him. God. He released the brake and drove out of the mews.
• • •
He drove through the rain with single-minded preoccupation until he arrived at a large house on a small street in South Kensington. He stopped at the curb, cut the motor, and looked at the white Georgian facade elevated several steps above the street and flanked by two great beech trees, whose broad leaves were shedding a thousand steady streamlets onto the stone-paved front garden. The windows of the lower floor glowed cheerily in the gloomy darkness, and Corsier could see someone moving about on the other side of the rain-spattered windows. No London residence ever looked cozier.
He got out of the car, locked it, and went to the door and rang the shiny black bell. It was opened immediately, and Corsier was let into a small foyer and then into the front room he had seen from the street. A tall, thin man was waiting for him.
“Ah, Claude, you’ve grown whiskers,” the man said, reaching out to shake Corsier’s hand.
Cory Fain was six and a half feet tall, with narrow shoulders, a long face with deep-set eyes, bushy eyebrows, a hawk nose, and a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper mustache. He was a handsome man in a severe kind of way, with a distinguished bearing and a manner of moving and speaking that conveyed a genuine kindness of character. He was, and had been for the twenty-six years Corsier had known him, an actor, though he had never appeared an hour on a stage or a minute in front of a camera. He was completely unknown in the world of actors and directors, but he enjoyed a fame of another kind in a much smaller arena, where obscurity was held in far greater esteem than celebrity.
They sat in comfortably worn armchairs in slight need of cleaning and exchanged a few minutes of polite conversation, each carefully taking the other’s measure to make sure there had been no dramatic changes in profession or position or loyalties.
Corsier paused and asked, “Cory, do you still have an office?”
Fain nodded. “Several, actually. Whatever suits.”
“I find myself in need of a barrister.”
Fain listened carefully with sober concern, as if Corsier were consulting, well, a barrister.
“This barrister represents a client who is selling several pieces of art anonymously, ‘the Property of a Gentleman.’ Normally, this is not a problem in the art world, as you may remember. This time, however, I suspect that the buyer will want to verify the identity of the seller. Just to make sure that someone other, namely myself, is not behind the sale.”
Fain understood.
“Though you would be representing the gentleman in question, when pushed for an identity—I suspect the buyer will not buy unless he ‘knows’ that I am not behind the sale—you will be forced to reveal that the seller is, in fact, a woman, not a man. You know her personally, have been representing her family for twenty years or more, and you most certainly will not reveal her identity. Damn the sale. These are discreet people. The tradition of anonymity in art dealings is a long tradition and a tradition you and the lady in question take seriously and honor.”
“I see,” Fain said. “Exactly.”
“Along those lines,” Corsier said, “this buyer knows as well as we do that none of this can be ascertained without a reasonable doubt, but what he will be doing is sending a representative to get a feel for the authenticity of the situation. To assess the genuineness of the enterprise.”
“Yes,” Fain said.
“I would think,” Corsier went on, “that the whole exchange would take less than an hour, but it has to be convincing. You’ll need to read the reaction. They must be convinced. I would think that an adamant refusal at first, followed by the revelation that the seller is a lady rather than a gentleman, followed by a grudging capitulation, would do the job. And, of course, the agreement to draw up any legal documents required.”
“Of course.”
“Do you think this could be of interest to you?”
Fain studied the pattern in the rug for a moment, his bushy, brooding eyebrows obscuring the exact direction of his gaze. He looked up. “Is this government related?”
“No.”
“Ah, private.”
“Yes.”
“Well, a barrister . . . that’s a serious role, a criminal offense if this isn’t government related.”
“I understand.”
“Expensive.”
Corsier did not comment.
“Because . . . well, you know.”
“I do.”
Cory Fain brooded on the carpet design a little longer. “Would I be expected to produce the woman?” he asked.
“The buyer, or more probably his representative, has to be convinced, so whatever it takes . . .”
Fain raised his head slowly, looking at Corsier down the bridge of his nose. “I’ll give you an estimate,” he said at last. “Then you give me the details, your exact expectations. Then I’ll give you a specific price. Then you decide.”
“Very well,” Corsier said.
They sat in the cozy front room of Fain’s home and talked for another hour. Outside, the rain continued to drench the beeches, whose leaves spilled onto the old paving stones countless rivulets that disappeared into their aging joints.
Hodge was right. It was already raining when Strand came out of the Terrier, and he rode back to Mayfair through a wet, sad London. He felt guilty for being glad to be away from the dying man. Hodge had made a career of selling clever devices for delivering death in a businesslike way to anonymous others. Now the time had come to Hodge himself. Death did not care so much about clever devices and used whatever lay close at hand. In Hodge’s case it was nothing fancy, but it was brutally personal.
Strand had the cab drop him off on Queen Street and then hurried through the drizzle the short distance to Chesterfield Hill.
“You hadn’t been gone five minutes when an e-mail from Howard came in,” Mara said as he walked into the room. “He wants a meeting as soon as possible.”
Strand went straight to the computer, sat on a paint bucket, tapped out Howard’s address, and then the question:
Strand stared at the screen. He could feel rain on the sleeves of his jacket, on the legs of his trousers. Mara was behind him, silent. Then suddenly the words were there.
Okay. Tonight. When? Where?
The Running Footman pub on Charles Street, near Berkeley Square. 10 o’clock. Wait at the bar.
I’ll be there.
When he got downstairs he put the pistol on the shelf in the coat closet, all the way to the back, out of sight.
• • •
Strand sat in a black cab on Charles Street, watching the doors of the Running Footman. Though the rain was keeping the customers inside, he could see from the movement behind the windows, and from the people coming and going, that the pub was busy. He knew Howard would not come by cab, rain or no rain, and since most of the people came in pairs or groups, the solitary figure would be easier to identify. There was no reason for Howard to wait on Strand. In other circumstances he might have been wary, but in this case he had nothing to fear. Rather, it was the other way around. So Strand would let Howard arrive first. Besides, his e-mail had told Howard where to wait. The assumption was that Howard would precede him.
Eight minutes after nine o’clock Howard emerged from around the corner on Fitzmaurice Place, his umbrella held low over his head. Strand recognized his walk. Howard immediately crossed the street and made his way to the pub.
He had to wait at the door for a couple who were coming out, fumbled momentarily with his umbrella, then disappeared inside.
“Okay,” Strand said, sitting forward in his seat, talking through the window to the cabdriver, “that’s him.”
The cabdriver held a flashlight in his lap and turned it on a photograph he was holding in his hand.
“Right. I’ll recognize him.”
“The photograph,” Strand said.
The driver handed it back through the window.
“His name is Howard,” the driver rehearsed. “I say to him, ‘Mr. Strand would like you to come with me, please.’” He looked back over his shoulder. “That’s it? He’ll come along?”
“He knows the routine.”
“But he’s not expecting it?”
“No. But when you say that to him he’ll know what’s up.”
“Right.”
The cabdriver didn’t sound convinced, but he sounded game. The money was more than he was going to earn in the next five nights.
“You have the route down?” Strand asked.
“Right. I do.”
“Fine.” Strand got out and hurried back to another cab waiting at the curb a few cars back and got inside.
The cab in front crossed into Hays Mews and stopped at the curb. The driver got out and went into the side door of the Running Footman.
Strand concentrated on the door. The rain suddenly became heavier, drumming loudly on the roof of the cab.
The cabdriver emerged from the side door of the pub and ran to his cab, jerking open the rear door. Howard darted out of the pub and quickly crawled into the back of the cab. The driver slammed the door, got into the front, and turned on the headlights, and the cab lurched and disappeared around the corner.
Knowing the route, Strand’s driver was able to lag behind several blocks, sometimes passing the first cab, covering the route like a net. They went as far north as Oxford Street and over to Regent Street and Piccadilly before working their way back to Berkeley Square, where the two cabs pulled into a tiny, dark lane on the northeast corner of the square and stopped in front of a place called the Guinea Grill.
The two men got out of the cabs at the same time and quickly ducked through the door in the vine-laden facade of the pub.
“That was a goddamn waste of time,” Howard complained, folding his umbrella impatiently and tossing it toward a corner.
“Not for me.” Strand wiped his face with a handkerchief and leaned his umbrella against the wall. The Guinea Grill was a restaurant with a small pub proper at the very front of the establishment set off from the entry by a wood screen with a narrow door in it. The screen was open at the top, and the conversation from the tiny pub was audible as one waited to be seated in the restaurant.
Strand gave his name, and they were quickly taken to a table in an oddly shaped alcove that comfortably contained three tables. All three of the tables had “Reserved” signs on them. Strand and Howard were seated at the center one, farthest from the entry.
“You bought the other two,” Howard said.
“Yes.”
“Hang the expense.”
Strand ignored the sarcasm. They ordered drinks, and Howard wiped his hair and brushed at the sleeves of his coat, pissed at having gotten wet and pissed at having been wheeled around Mayfair because of Strand’s scrupulosity.
“What did he say?” Strand asked.
“Shit . . .” Howard fussed, flexing his arm to straighten out his coat. Using his linen napkin, he wiped his face again, dried his hands. “He says, Okay. Get everything together, bring it to Berlin. He’s willing to—”
“No.”
Howard stopped. He gave Strand a cold, tight-lipped stare.
“None of this will be done according to anything he says. I’ll spell it all out. How it’s done, when it’s done, all of it.”
“Bullshit.”
“I don’t trust him, Bill. Everything having to do with this exchange is predicated on that.”
“You think you’re in a position to dictate this?”
“If he wants the money, yes. If he doesn’t, then I guess not, and none of it matters anyway.”
They sat in silence, looking at each other. Strand had nothing else to say, and if Schrade really wasn’t going to cooperate, then the conversation was over and Howard could go back out into the rain. He suspected that Howard’s instructions were far more flexible than this. He was just engaging in his own little pleasures of prologue.
Their drinks arrived, gin and tonic for Howard, Scotch for Strand. They each drank.
“Okay,” Howard said, “what’s for openers?”
“Is he going to meet with me or not?”
“Yes.”
“Fine. Then I’ll arrange a meeting place where he’ll be safe.”
“What does that mean?”
“He’ll be familiar with it. He’ll be comfortable with it.”
“Okay, where?”
“My main concern is meeting with him alone, without his security. And I have to know we’re alone.”
“Okay, okay, okay.” Howard wasn’t interested in finessing his irritation. “Where?”
“I’ll e-mail you a date and an e-mail address. On that date Schrade has to be ready to travel.”
“Ohhh, bullshit, Harry. He’s not going to—”
“I’ll let him know where to go. He plugs in there and gets another e-mail message.”
“This is stupid.”
“It’s the only way I’ll do it.”
“Okay, so you do a treasure hunt. Then what?”
“When I know he’s clean, I’ll give him the meeting place.”
“Then?”
“I’ll bring everything in a briefcase. The CDs with all the accounts, detailed instructions about transferring them . . .”
Howard started to laugh. “Jeee-zus. He said you’d do that, that you’d say you’d give him the instructions. Wow.” He took a drink. “Well, Schrade says go fuck yourself.”
Strand waited.
“You told me this morning that the transactions could be done in minutes. Schrade says, fine, then you do them in minutes, right there. The two of you. When his people tell him he’s got the money, then he’s got the money.”
Strand waited again. He couldn’t relent too easily, he couldn’t say, “Fine, it’s a deal,” just like that.
“I don’t know. . . .”
“Okay, you’re so damn fond of giving ultimatums, here’s one for you to deal with: You do it right there, in front of Schrade, or you forget it. Period.”
Silence. Finally Strand said, “Okay. We’ll do it right there.”
Howard laughed again. “You really did a hard ass negotiation on that one, Harry. You drove me right down to the wire, up against the wall, made me sweat.”
Howard was feeling cocky.
“But this is going to cause a delay.”
Howard tried to hold his grin, as if Strand’s last remark were of no consequence. “Oh, a delay. Why’s that?”
“If I’m going to move that kind of money electronically, in just a few minutes, I’ll have to give written notification signed in the presence of a designated bank officer that on a certain date, at a certain hour, I’ll be making these transfers by wire. They’re not going to do it just because they get a computer message that says I want them to do it. Even if I give authorized code numbers. I’ll have to make arrangements ahead of time, and I’ll have to do it in person, face-to-face.”
“You told me minutes.”
“That was if I handed over everything to Schrade. I would’ve had time to do that. But if you want it done this way, you’ve got to give me time to arrange it.”
Howard studied him. He was trying hard not to let his exasperation show. “How long?”
“The money’s in six banks in six different countries. It’s going to take me a day and a half—minimum—to fly to each of them, get the authorization, and move on to the next. That’s nine days. Banks are closed weekends.” He fixed his eyes on Howard. “Two weeks.”
Howard couldn’t argue. He really had no choice. “I’ve got to go back to Schrade with this.”
“Fine.”
“Let’s agree, right now, when and where.”
Strand nodded. He let his eyes slip to the side as if making mental calculations.
“Okay. Zurich. Two weeks from today. I’ll use your e-mail address to notify you of the exact time and location.”
“That’s it, then,” Howard said.
“That’s it.”
Howard downed the last of his gin. He had to recover. Strand could see his mind working. Howard was over the hill, even worse than Strand. He screwed up as much testosterone as he could muster for one closing gesture of bravado. He smiled thinly.
“You know what, Harry?” Howard said, his voice low, his tone almost pensive. “All these years, I thought you were better than average as an officer. Not the best by a long shot, but a good bit better than average.” He pursed his lips thoughtfully. “But I would never have guessed that you had the brains—or the stomach—for something like this. Never.”
Strand had nothing to say to that. What Howard had or had not thought about him all those years was of no interest to him in the least. Everything he cared about now was in front of him. Everything behind him was dead and gone.
Strand looked at his watch. “I’ve got to go,” he said, and raised his hand to get the waiter’s attention.
As Strand rounded the corner to Chesterfield Hill the drizzle had turned to a drenching mist intermingled with a light fog, a concoction so thick you could almost reach out and grab a handful of it. He had walked all the way from the Guinea Grill, his collar turned up uselessly against the moisture. Leaning into the incline, he looked toward their town house. There was a soft glow behind the sheets over the bay window.
By the time he had climbed the stairs to the reception, Mara had heard him and was standing in the middle of the room, waiting. She had been sitting on the bed, drawing: she had left her sketchpad there, and a lamp was sitting on the floor beside the mattress.
Strand had taken off his raincoat as he came up, and without speaking she came over and took it from him and laid it over one end of the scaffolding. Then she turned around and faced him.
“Well?”
“It looks like Schrade’s willing to deal,” he said.
Mara gasped as if she had been holding her breath.
“But I had to make a quick decision that I hope will look as good tomorrow as it did tonight.”
“What?”
Strand sat on one of the paint buckets and started untying the laces of his waterlogged shoes.
“Schrade’s totally focused on getting this money back,” Strand said, tugging at one of the shoes. “Maybe it’s the most important thing in his life right now. And that’s the problem. We’ve got two parallel plans going here, and the first one was getting in the way of the second. First, we’re holding out the prospect of giving him the money to keep him at arm’s length, to keep him from coming after us. On the other hand, we’re trying to lure him to London. With the money exchange imminent, I was afraid Schrade wasn’t going to give a damn about the drawings. They can’t compete with six hundred million dollars. So I changed the date when I said I could deliver the money—two weeks.”
He tossed one shoe on the floor and started on the second one as he told Mara about the proposition he had given Howard.
“And Howard seemed to have the authority to accept it,” he concluded, “which he did.” He tossed the second shoe on the floor, took out his handkerchief, and began wiping the rain off his face.
Mara had sat on the scaffolding. “So,” she said, “the idea is that with the money transfer not a possibility for another two weeks, if Schrade gets a call from Knight in a few days saying he’s got this spectacular small collection he needs to look at, he’s more likely to fly over and look at it.”
“That’s the idea.”
Mara thought a moment. “Then as soon as the drawings get to Paris, we’ve got to pick them up immediately and get to Carrington Knight.”
“That’s right. And I’ve got some ideas about that, too. We’re going to have to be very good at approaching Knight.”
Strand looked at the lower legs of his soaked trousers. “Damn.”
“Where did you go the first time, Harry?”
There was no use pretending about this any longer. He waited a second and then looked at her.
“I went to buy a gun,” he said. “A special kind of gun, to kill Schrade.”
They stared at each other.
“Well,” Mara said, her voice flat, without inflection, “it’s a relief not to have to call it ‘the meeting’ any longer. Lying about it to each other, talking around it with euphemisms, made it even nastier.”
He looked at her. With the pale light coming from behind her, he knew she could see his eyes. But for him, her face was shadowed in the lee side of the light, and he could see nothing of her expression. He didn’t need to see her eyes to know she was disturbed.
“Harry, unless you’re withholding something very serious from me,” Mara said, and he could tell she was trying to control her voice, “you don’t have any training in this stuff, in operations.”
“I’ve never murdered anyone, if that’s what you mean.”
“Well . . . God . . . what are you thinking, Harry?”
“What would you do, Mara?”
“Run. Run like hell.”
“For the rest of your life?”
“If that’s what it took.”
Strand was weary, and he spoke slowly. “What do you think that would be like? Every time you bought a tube of oils or a sketchpad or a box of pastels in some art supply store—anywhere in the world—you’d have to wonder if someday someone’s going to walk into that store and show a photograph of you to the clerks and ask, ‘Have you ever seen this woman?’” He looked at her silhouette. “You’re not an easy woman to forget, Mara.”
“I don’t know, Harry. But it’s got to be bearable. Everything is.”
“Yeah, it would be bearable right up to the moment our car or our house blew up, or until we woke up in the middle of the night with a gun in our faces or a knife at our throats, or—”
“Harry—”
“Listen,” he said, “why is running and living in constant fear the only moral response we have here?”
Again she was silent, but this time he felt terrible about it. Not only for Mara, but for himself. These were questions he had dwelled on endlessly. They were questions he had lain awake at night trying to answer in a new and different way, trying to find some light in a nuanced reply that, in its devising, he hoped would give him a little room to maneuver around either his conscience or the inflexible parameters of reality. Had he thought of all the possible answers to these questions? Were there no other answers than the ones he had already turned away from?
“So we murder him, Harry? That’s the best answer that two intelligent people can come up with?”
“Give me some alternatives. Realistic alternatives.”
She was silent.
“Self-defense,” he said. “That’s the way I think of it. I have to.” He paused. “It’s ironic, really, that in a world where everything is instantaneous, it is the absence of immediacy that puts us on the wrong side of this dilemma. If Schrade were to burst into this room right now, intent on killing us, we could kill him in self-defense free of moral taint. But if he takes longer than that, if he drags it out for days or weeks or months, even though we know he’s trying to kill us, then we have to run and hide for the rest of our lives to sustain a moral position. We’re only justified in defending ourselves when we do it just before the moment of death. If we can. If we don’t see it coming . . . well . . .”
“I thought self-defense was only justified if you didn’t have time to call someone else for help, or to ask for the protection of the law,” she said.
Strand shook his head. “Look, the only people who know that Schrade is capable of this kind of stalking are the criminals he works with and the intelligence agencies who use him. How the hell are we going to justify a request for protection from him? To the business world he’s a very successful international businessman. We’d sound like the worst kind of conspiracy nuts. Even if they took us seriously, think of the legal struggle we’d be facing trying to pull classified information from intelligence agencies to back up our claim. You know how effective that’s been in the past. That would initiate a complex of legal maneuverings that would consume all of our energy for the rest of our lives.”
“But we’d be alive, wouldn’t we? He wouldn’t dare kill us with that kind of media attention on us.”
“That’s right, Mara. But we’d die of natural causes. An inexplicable car wreck . . . it happens. One of us would contract a rare virus, a seldom seen bacteria . . . those are not so unusual anymore. A heart attack, even though the autopsy would show no signs of heart disease . . . it could happen to anyone. Or we’d be found dead in our bedroom, needles and drug paraphernalia scattered around us . . . you never really know about people, what they’re really like in the privacy of their own homes.”
Mara didn’t respond. Suddenly Strand couldn’t stand the wet clothes any longer.
“Look, I’m going to shower. We can finish this later.”
She nodded. “Sure,” she said.
When he got out of the shower, he wrapped a towel around his waist and took another to dry his hair and walked back into the reception. Mara had turned out the lights and had moved aside the sheets covering the bay windows. The city lights reflecting off the overcast sky threw a glow through the windows as bright as a full moon. She had taken off her clothes and was lying on the mattress in her underwear. She was on her stomach, propped up on her elbows, watching him, waiting. He went over and sat on the bed, the towel he was drying his hair with draped around his neck. He was weary.
It began raining again. He was dissatisfied. He should have defended himself better, in a more thoughtful way, less stridently. The truth was, not only was he operating out of fear—and was unable to find a satisfactory way to rid himself of it—but also he was wrestling with the discovery that at the back of his heart there was a wound that had begun to fester. He had tried to ignore it, but it was no longer possible to do so. It ached for a healing remedy that was as disturbing to him as the discovery of the wound itself: it ached for the balm of revenge.
“What’s on your mind?” she asked, looking up at him.
“Just about everything.”
“Yeah, I know. But we can work this out,” she said. “I’m not pessimistic about it.”
“Everything’s going to have to click. The timing. Everybody has to buy into the story. We have to be good, and we have to be lucky.”
For a moment they thought their own thoughts, and then Mara reached over and put her hand on his bare leg.
“It’s strange,” she said softly, breaking the silence, “that we met like this, isn’t it, Harry?”
“I don’t know,” he said. He really didn’t. They had met, discovered something in common, fallen in love.
“It is,” she said, “because this is a strange business, and we’re strange people to be in it.”
He ran his fingers through his hair. Jesus, what a world of confusion. How could he have been through so much and learned so little? How could he be where he was and be at a loss for what to do? Mara was right. For all their sophistication, for all the complexity of their situation, the solution he had arrived at was shockingly primitive.
“Harry, come on. Lie down.” She moved over as Strand took off the damp towels and put them aside on the floor. He lay down, and she moved over to him and curled her back into him. He turned to accommodate the shape of her, and then both of them were facing the rain. He put his arm around her, and she took it and pulled it to her breasts, drawing him closer still. They watched the rain, listened to the sound of it streaking the windows, like no other sound in the world.
Strand was comforted by the motion of her breathing within his embrace, with the way she felt. He wanted to be able to touch more of her than was physically possible. He wanted to be absorbed into her.
When Strand woke to the gray morning light, his limbs were leaden, his mind unrested. He had awakened repeatedly during the night and had lain awake, staring at the luminous London night sky. He had worried about everything all at once, each concern leading into the next one, forming a long chain of solicitude. He had resolved nothing.
Outside the bay window the rain had stopped, but the day was thick with mist. He looked at Mara. She was sleeping on her stomach, the covers pulled down to her hips, her long hair fanned out across her bare skin in a filigree of black.
Carefully laying back the covers, he got up stiffly from the bed. He picked up the two towels and walked out of the room, past the kitchen to the next room, where Mara had put their clothes in a closet. He dressed and went into the bathroom and washed up, deciding not to shave just then. Then he went into the kitchen and started the coffee.
Folding his arms, he leaned against the countertop and watched the nut brown coffee dribbling into the glass pot. The town house was quiet, but in an odd auditory deceit its empty rooms seemed to echo the silence.
“How much do you think you slept?” Mara was in the doorway, still in her underwear, holding her dress.
“Did I keep you awake?”
“You helped, but I managed to be restless all on my own. I’m going to bathe. There are pastries in that paper bag over there,” she said, and went into the bathroom to shower.
Strand walked back into the main room and got the two tea mugs off the floor, then took them back to the kitchen and washed them. When the coffee was finished, he poured a cup and went over to the scaffold table. He sat on a paint bucket in front of the computer and clicked it on. There was e-mail from Howard.
HS . . . FYI
The new arrangements are acceptable. And firm. No changes. He said: “Impress upon him the gravity of the consequences that will quickly follow should he fail to make this meeting.”
There it is. Take it seriously.
BH
Strand stared at the monitor: “the gravity of the consequences that will quickly follow.” He had no doubt in his mind that the grave consequences were his ineluctable future regardless of whether or not Schrade got his money. If Schrade thought for a second that Strand believed he could avoid Schrade’s wrath by handing over the money, there was no end to the self-delusion that plagued all of them. Schrade’s menace blurred all other influences affecting Strand’s motivation.
He flipped off the switch and stood up.
It was difficult not to feel paralyzed by the knowledge that Schrade’s intelligence apparatus was as good as those of most governments. On the other hand, Strand had been in intelligence work all his life, and he knew that no intelligence organization was ever as good as it needed to be. He reminded himself of all the times he had not been able to find his targets, of all the times they had evaporated when he was most sure of their whereabouts, of all the times they had maneuvered themselves away from his agents and disappeared into an oblivion from which they had never again returned.
Remembering these old failures brought back into realistic focus the truth of Schrade’s reach, a truth that was all too easily thrown out of focus by the swelling fear that one felt in the face of his rampant violence. No one, however, not even Wolfram Schrade, was omniscient. If you had enough money and reasonable good luck, you could evade the surveillance of even the best organizations. Sometimes for a long time. Strand’s professional experience gave him an edge. He just had to keep reminding himself.
He took a sip of coffee. It was time to start working out the procedures that would propel them into Schrade’s orbit.
• • •
“You’re going to have to take the drawings to Carrington Knight yourself,” Strand said. They were sitting on paint buckets, facing each other from either side of the makeshift table. Mara had finished bathing and was still wearing a white dressing gown, her wet hair wrapped tightly in a towel. Her coffee mug sat next to her half-eaten croissant.
“I obviously can’t do it,” he said. “You can use the identity on one of the passports I got from Darras. Carrington will be thrilled with the collection. And with you.”
Mara flicked her eyes at him.
“There won’t be any problem with Carrington,” Strand added. “He can smell the real thing all the way across Mayfair.”
“And what’s the odor of the real thing?”
“Carrington knows. It’s as distinctive as a pheromone to him.”
“A pheromone.”
“Do you have any problem with this?” Strand asked. “We could think of other ways to do it. But this would be best.”
“No, I don’t think I have any problem. It’s just a straightforward offer to sell, right?”
“More or less.”
“Oh. Well, let’s talk about that.”
“There will be two difficulties,” Strand said. “One, to make sure that the offer for the drawings will be made first to Wolf Schrade. We want Schrade to come to London to look at them. Period. Other collectors would quickly buy them as a lot. We don’t want Carrington to do the easy thing and offer them to the first available client. The second thing: You have to convince Carrington to keep you, the seller, anonymous. If he makes the mistake of describing you to Schrade . . .”
Mara nodded. “Okay.” She thought a moment. “Maybe we can resolve both of these problems by the way I present myself to Knight.” She stared off toward the bay window, toward the ashen light. Then she turned back to him. “Let me think about it. We don’t have to decide right this moment, do we?”
“No, of course not. But there’s another problem. All your documentation for the provenance of the drawings was still at my place.”
“Oh, God.”
“Yeah. I’ve got to come up with some forgeries to replace them. Carrington’s not going to offer these to Schrade without documentation. I would’ve had to do this anyway, even if they hadn’t been destroyed, because we’ve got to make sure the paper trail is obscure enough that Carrington can’t easily confirm any of it. If the time is short, if the sale is dependent on a quick negotiation, he’ll forgo his own provenance check and just rely on the documentation rather than risk losing the sale. Also, this way it won’t lead back to you. We have to come up with a new owner for the drawings.”
Mara sipped her coffee. Then she put down the mug and stood and took the towel off her head. Bending over, she fluffed her hair with the towel, then quickly straightened up, flinging her hair back out of her face. Preoccupied, she walked toward the bed, folding the damp towel, matching the corners precisely.
Strand said nothing. She had a lot to think about. He had no doubt she could play the role, run the scam. After all, she had already proven her abilities in that regard. Nearly their entire relationship had revolved around a scenario in which she had expertly demonstrated how capable she was at deception. Her thoughtfulness now was interesting. He guessed that after Mara had been pressed into service by the FIS, she’d been surprised to discover that she had a considerable ability—and liking—for undercover work. He also guessed that, in her innermost being, she must be confused by this. Maybe she had been more insightful than either of them had realized last night when she’d said that this was a strange business and they were strange people to be in it.
She came back to the scaffolding table and sat down. “We have a lot to do and not much time,” she said.
“That’s right.”
“Can you get the forgeries done, if we come up with the right background? I mean, do you have time?”
“Yes. I know the people here in London who can do it. If I pay enough money, I can probably get it done in two days.”
“Okay, then I have some ideas for the woman who’s going to see Carrington Knight. If we get that settled this morning, can you get started?”
Strand nodded.
“I’ll go to Paris for the drawings,” she said. “Is that what you’re thinking?”
“It is, yes.”
“There’s not going to be a problem with Léon Gautier releasing them to me?”
“None.”
“Okay. While I’m there I’m going to have to buy some clothes. I don’t have the kind of clothes in my suitcase that this woman wears.”
“There’s another consideration that we might as well address right now,” Strand said. “We want all of this to happen as quickly as possible. I think we ought to put that kind of constraint on the sale if we can, press Carrington to make this happen fast. The point being to get Schrade to London immediately.”
“Knight’s going to want to keep the drawings.”
“That’s right. I would too in his situation. Any dealer at this level would. He’s going to have to examine them closely. He can’t offer them to Schrade—arguably his best client—on a cursory examination. They’ll be safe there. He has the best facilities.”
Mara nodded.
“But,” Strand went on, “we don’t want to leave the forged documentation with him. We can’t risk the possibility that he’ll discover they’re not authentic.”
“Then why have the forgeries worked up?”
“If he asks to see them, you’d better have them. You just can’t leave them with him.” He paused. “You’ll have to play it by ear. See what feels right and play it out.”
The rain roared outside. Corsier stood at the windows and looked across at the Connaught Hotel through the downpour and the dull afternoon light. He saw the windows that he thought were in the suite from which he would identify Schrade’s voice and then watch the explosion. The afternoon was so dark, the street lamps had come on and the street below was glistening with rain and glitter from the lamps, the rain running along the curbs like liquid light.
“All right all right all right,” Carrington Knight chirruped, hustling back into the viewing room with a bottle of champagne and two tall, thin glasses.
Corsier turned around, his heart slamming against his ribs. Knight, dressed in black, was wearing a Tyrian purple necktie and a simpering smile that had a hint of collusion about it. He set the champagne and the two glasses on the library table on a Victorian silver tray. Then he grinned at Corsier, a gray ferret’s grin, and opened his hands to Corsier, inviting him to proceed.
Corsier turned to the table and began undoing the first of two leather carrying cases he had had made in France when this moment was only a glorious anticipation in his mind’s eye. He had ordered the cases the same day he’d bought the frames, measuring them right there and then. They were lined with a chocolate velvet that complemented the leather cases. He knew Knight would notice this. He knew Knight would appreciate it.
Asking Knight to hold the leather case, Corsier reached inside and slowly withdrew the first frame, face up, turning it so that Knight could see it upright from the other side of the table. It was the drawing of the two reclining women.
Corsier’s eyes were fixed on Knight’s face. Knight’s mouth was slack. His eyes darted all over the picture, tonguelike, tasting every line, every stroke of the pencil, every blush of lilac, the slanted glance, the proud pudenda, his eyes greedy and glittering.
“Ohhhh . . . hhhhhh . . . Claude! Oh! My! God!”
Corsier let him revel.
“Schiele! Can you believe this?? Look at this. . . .”
Knight raised his round black eyeglasses, resting them on his forehead, and stepped back. He shook his head. He came forward, picked up the heavy frame, and took it to the countertop, where he leaned it against the bookshelves.
Even Corsier’s breast thrilled. In the special lighting in which Carrington placed the drawing, the very soul of Egon Schiele burst into view. The goddamn thing looked—authentic!
Knight whirled around. “The other one!” he said quickly.
They went through the same procedures to remove the second drawing from its leather case, and Knight immediately marched it over to the countertop and leaned it against the bookcases beside the other.
He put one arm across his stomach, rested the elbow of the other on top of its wrist, and put his chin in his hand as he studied them both. He stepped forward, leaned in close, his eyes vacuuming the surface of first one drawing and then the other. He reached up and lowered his eyeglasses to the bridge of his small nose and stepped back, pacing from side to side in front of the pictures, viewing them from different angles. He struck a pose, one leg stretched in front of the other, arms crossed, shaking his head slowly as he marveled, a silver lock of hair falling down over his forehead.
“Well,” he said finally, raising his eyebrows and turning to Corsier with a look of theatrical amazement, “these are really quite beautiful. Convincing. I certainly have no hesitation to bring Wolf into this. The things just look like Schiele. I mean, it’s a hell of a thing to discover Schieles, for God’s sake, isn’t it?”
“I could hardly believe my eyes,” Corsier said.
He decided to grow serious instead of joyous. Knight had always to be tempered. If he were morose or skeptical, one had to pick him up. If he were ebullient, one had to portray studious sagacity. Knight appreciated a certain amount of tension, a certain équilibre.
“To be honest, Carrington, I find I’m a bit humbled by this discovery,” Corsier said. He walked around to join his flamboyant associate. “Can you imagine these things hanging in obscurity for something like eighty years? Can you imagine how easily they might have disappeared?” He put his hands behind his back, a big, studious bear of a man, and stood before the drawings. “This hausfrau brings them in the back of her Volvo, and she knows nothing of what she has.”
Knight said nothing. He turned and stepped to the table, uncorked the champagne, and filled the two flutes. He handed one to Corsier, and the two men faced each other.
“To Schiele.”
They clinked their glasses and drank, then simultaneously turned to the drawings. They looked at them.
“They haven’t names?” Knight asked.
“Not that I know.” Corsier stroked his goatee.
“They must.”
“What do you suggest?”
“This one,” Knight said, gesturing with his glass to the two girls, “should be Two Lovers Reclining.” He was emphatic. He stepped to the second drawing. “God, I love the way he’s done the bottom of the buttocks here. And the reflection of that dark pudenda.” He was pensive. “This one should be Model Regarding Herself in a Mirror.” He raised his eyebrows quizzically.
“Oh, I wouldn’t change either name,” Corsier said. “They are perfect. Schielean titles.”
“Then there we have it.” Knight drank. “You’ll need to prepare a statement of provenance. You’ve got to get them from Schiele’s studio to here.”
“Easily.”
“I’ll need a letter from a lawyer stating that he is representing an anonymous owner and that the drawings, ‘the Property of a Gentleman,’ can be legally represented by him.”
“Yes,” Corsier said. “Here is the name of the barrister who will issue the letter.” He handed Knight a card. “If by some off chance Schrade should balk at the proposition of anonymity, you may tell him that he is welcome to contact this man. He will keep my identity completely secure and at the same time be able to allay any doubts Schrade may have about provenance. I urge you to give the barrister’s name only as a last resort.”
“I doubt this will be necessary,” Knight said, glancing at the card and putting it aside. “Schrade has bought anonymously from me before. Never was a problem.”
“That would be the best possible situation.”
“Now”—Knight continued looking at the drawings as he spoke—“it seems to me that the energy of discovery can best be sustained if I call Schrade immediately, announce the discovery, and urge him to act quickly. This is a momentous event, after all, and he can’t expect me to linger with these. He will get first look, but he will not have a lot of time.” He turned to Corsier. “When do you place them?”
“As you mentioned before, early. I’m going to think . . . 1911. His sister Gertrude was still posing nude for him then. I rather think the mirror one looks like Gertrude in the mouth and the eyes.”
“Damned if I don’t agree with you, Claude. Exactly.”
They stood, regarding the drawings.
“When did you say you were going to call Schrade?” Corsier asked.
“Tomorrow.”
TWO DAYS LATER
The woman had called the day before and wanted an appointment to see him. Carrington Knight had no openings in his calendar for that day. She persisted. She said that she understood he was one of the leading authorities on the drawings of these five particular artists. She named them. Was this true?
Knight modestly agreed. He detected an American accent.
Well then, she had drawings by these artists. Seven drawings, which she wanted to sell for a client.
Knight was suddenly alert. These artists did not come on the market every day. In fact, they were rare. Highly collectible. She had seven of them?
These were actual drawings? Documented?
Oh, yes. Every one. Documented.
Maybe they should meet after all. What about tomorrow? he asked. That would be fine, she said, and they arranged a meeting late in the afternoon.
So here he was now, balancing a cup of Lapsang souchong and looking out the windows at the brooding day. On the countertop nearby he had propped up the two photographs of the Schiele drawings. For the past two hours he had paced his second-floor showroom, casting a bright eye at the rain one moment and an avaricious eye at the Schieles the next. The previous day he had e-mailed his news of the Schiele discoveries to Wolfram Schrade at a special number reserved for his art business in Berlin. The woman who handled the paperwork for his acquisitions had responded immediately. She was quite excited at his news, but, she said, Mr. Schrade could not be contacted until that evening. She would communicate the news to him as soon as possible. She was sure she could get back to him the next day.
Today. But she hadn’t. Yet.
Knight looked at his watch. Urgency was very important in these situations. It created a fire in the clients. Urgency begat urgency, and the greater the urgency about a particular piece of art, the greater its importance. Therefore urgency was a valuable psychological tool, and once urgency had been introduced, it was a terrible thing to let it subside. It was like an erotic moment. One did not want to be distracted by the plumber or by a delivery from the grocer. Sustained urgency usually could be stoked up to a really satisfying financial climax.
So Knight looked at his watch again. He sipped the smoky tea, which he particularly enjoyed on rainy days. A rich tea for a rich moment.
He was thinking of this as his eyes made regular sweeps from the photographs of the Schiele drawings to the telephone at the end of the library table and down to the rainy street—unlike most Londoners, he relished the rain, liked watching it, always had, and summer rain was the best—when the black Jaguar Vanden Plas pulled up to the curb in Carlos Place and stopped.
After a moment a uniformed driver got out of the front door, put up an umbrella, and opened the back door of the car. For a flicker of a moment two long legs, almost entirely exposed beneath a short black dress, swung out of the car and onto the sidewalk; the chauffeur’s umbrella blocked his line of sight and hid the woman’s face. As she was helped out of the car, Knight saw the drape of an ankle-length raincoat descend to cover her long legs, and then the chauffeur and the woman hurried up the steps to the front door of Carrington, Hartwell & Knight.
Knight’s preoccupation was momentarily arrested. What an elegant arrival. He loved it. It was a fine day.
He watched as the chauffeur returned to the car with Jeffrey, Knight’s receptionist/security guard. While the chauffeur held the umbrella, Jeffrey removed a package from the rear seat, and the two of them hurried up the steps and out of the rain. Ms. Paille and her seven drawings had arrived.
• • •
Jeffrey had been given instructions to show her up straightaway upon her arrival, so Knight stood beside his library table and waited for the woman who belonged to the long legs to ascend the staircase, her high heels silent on the Persian-carpeted treads.
As she made the last graceful turn of the staircase, she arose slowly from within the winding tracery of the mahogany balustrade like Venus from the sea. Knight’s heart stalled. Ms. Paille, dressed in black, was a most exotic mixture of Asian and European: tall, trim, her beautiful proportions clothed in a short two-piece affair of snug, fine silk. Her jet hair spilled generously over her shoulders, its highlights glistening in the soft spotlights of the showroom. Her dusky eyes were deep enough to swim in—swim naked, Knight thought—and her olive complexion was stunningly set off by rich carmine lips, which, as fate would have it, were the exact color of the scarlet silk walls of the library in front of which she now stood.
“My dear Ms. Paille,” Knight said. The word of endearment surprised even him, but it just seemed so appropriate.
“Mr. Knight . . .” She extended a long arm, and he took her hand . . . and kissed it.
By God, if ever a woman wanted to have her hand kissed . . . The surprised smile she gave him was worth the extravagance of the gesture, and—should he not have guessed?—so was the fragrance of her wrist.
Jeffrey emerged from behind her and put the wrapped package on the library table, then disappeared silently down the staircase.
“I do appreciate your taking the time for this,” she said. “My pleasure, I assure you,” Knight beamed. He turned to the package. “These, apparently, are the drawings?”
“Yes.”
“And these are your own personal drawings?”
“No, I represent the owner, a gentleman from Hong Kong.”
“Hong Kong? Really?”
“I’m Chinese American,” she said, smiling. “Mr. Cao Pei is Hong Kong Chinese. I’ve worked for him for eleven years. Mr. Cao is not an art collector, but he acquired all of these drawings during the last fifteen years from a variety of sources, mostly Englishmen living in Hong Kong. Now he wants to sell them. He believes he can get better prices here than in Hong Kong. That’s my purpose for being here.”
“How interesting.” He looked at her. “Then, your background is not in art?”
“No, not at all.”
“Oh?”
“International economics.”
“Then, uh, this is just an assignment for you. Art is not particularly an interest of yours.”
“Not particularly.”
What, Knight wondered, did impassion her? He couldn’t imagine, but he would love to know. He would love to see her impassioned.
“Well, then, do you have documentation that this belongs to Mr. Cao? That’s a very important part of my business, you know, provenance. A work of art, especially an important work of art, has to have, as it were, a genealogy of ownership.”
“I have that in a bank box.”
“I see.” He looked at her breasts, their contours revealed to him in relief, black upon black, their actual shape apparent beneath the capillary attraction of the watery silk. “Then, let’s take a look at what you have.”
The double entendre was out of his mouth too quickly to stop. He smiled at her. She smiled back. Did they understand each other? He wasn’t sure.
She stepped up to the library table, undid the clasps on the case, which was bound in heavy wheat buckram, and opened it. Inside the case a cover page preceded the actual drawings and was closed with a bow of silk. She untied the bow and folded back the cover leaf.
He was silent.
He leaned over the portfolio and carefully put his fingertips on the edge of the table. The first drawing was a Balthus. A fine, a very, very fine Balthus. My God, he thought. A surprise. He turned the leaf. On both the left and the right were two Delvauxs. Rare Delvauxs. Both deliberate drawings, not studies. Knight’s stomach quivered. He turned the leaf. On the left was an Ingres. On the right, Klimt. Both impeccable. Im-pec-cable. Good God. Either alone would have been a wonderful sale. He turned the last leaf. Maillol, left and right. Mother of God. He steadied himself. He squinted as if to see better, but he saw well enough. He saw damn well. He bent closer and pushed up his eyeglasses to the top of his head.
It was extraordinary.
When you were in the art business a long time, as he had been, you experienced over the years many exciting discoveries, you lived through many exciting deals, near misses, achievements. All of these accumulated in the course of one’s career until, eventually, the best dealers were in possession of a colorful oeuvre of anecdotes, stories of art and artists, dealers and collectors, of happenstance and serendipity, of good luck and bad, stories of people who were eccentric and feckless and passionate and ignorant. By far the best stories of all were those of discovery of great works of art and of serendipity. Carrington Hartwell Knight was staring down at a portfolio that represented a second great opportunity in as many days, which together would make one of the best anecdotes of serendipity and discovery that he would ever have to tell. It was passing odd how incidents of good (and, unfortunately, sometimes bad) luck often came in clusters.
Jesus. Mary. And Joseph.
“Ms. Paille,” he said, pulling out a chair for her, “please sit down.” He held the chair for her. He pulled out another for himself and sat down, each of them turned half toward the other, the unbelievable portfolio between them on the table.
He concentrated on bringing himself under control. Ms. Paille—how the hell did she get that name?—was, it was obvious, a most sensible woman. She would not react well to flighty excitement.
“This is a very fine collection,” he began. “Really, it is superb. A singular collection.” He hesitated, but only a heartbeat or so. “Does Mr. Cao have any idea of the collection’s worth?”
She looked down at the two Maillols. Knight studied her profile, appreciating the little dimple at the corner of her mouth that gave her smile a slightly askew expression.
“I have looked into this a little,” she said. “It’s my responsibility to be somewhat informed. But I would rather you told me.”
“I would say, surely, a minimum of three million pounds.”
Slowly, ever so slowly, as slow as the minute hand, her mouth formed a soft, pensive smile.
“Well,” she said, “what do we do now?”
“If you want me to sell them for you, I shall need all the documentation you can give me about their provenance. You mentioned that you had considerable documentation.”
“Yes.”
“I’ll need some time to examine that. I will also need to spend time with the drawings themselves, outside of the portfolio. I’ll want to examine the paper, and the medium . . . whether it’s pencil, crayon, graphite, chalk, etc.”
“I understand,” she said. “But they must not leave here.”
“Oh, of course not. They remain here.”
“Now, I would like to discuss some of the business aspects of the sale.”
Knight nodded.
“What is your fee for brokering these?”
He told her.
“Will you sell them as a lot or separately?”
“I think as a lot.”
“As I understand it,” she said, “the drawings market is distinctive, quite different from, say, paintings.”
“Exactly.”
“Those collectors—individual collectors, that is, excepting institutions, who consistently pay the highest prices for the finest-quality works—are a rather small group. Some of them, those at the top, are passionate.”
“Exactly.”
“I looked into this,” she said, “and I would like you to offer Mr. Cao’s drawings to three different collectors. I understand that they are especially ardent collectors, and therefore pay the highest prices.”
She suddenly produced a small card of cream paper with deckled edges and put it on the table between them.
“I’d like you to offer the drawings to these persons, one at a time, in this order.”
What an extraordinary turn of events. Carrington Knight picked up the card and read the names. He looked at Ms. Paille.
Her eyes were fixed on his. Suddenly, unexpectedly, he realized that he had underestimated her.
“Well,” he began, momentarily at a loss for words, “you have indeed done your homework. How did you arrive at these names?”
She smiled. “The same way I arrived at yours. It is my job to research well whatever Mr. Cao asks me to research. Mr. Cao does not tolerate mistakes. Would you disagree with the list?”
“I should say not.”
“Not even the order?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Then that is what you will do?”
He hesitated, though he didn’t know why. She was absolutely right. For some reason he could not fully put his finger on, she seemed suddenly more astute. He felt a little odd about it.
“Yes,” he said, “I will.”
“Good. Mr. Cao has one stipulation.”
A stipulation? What would an eccentric collector be without a stipulation? In this rarefied business prerequisites were a common expression of a special clientele.
“Mr. Cao wishes to remain anonymous in this sale.”
“Very well.” This was not out of the ordinary.
“Nor does he want you to reveal the seller’s ethnic identity. Or mine, his representative.”
This was out of the ordinary. But not a problem, just odd. “Very well,” he said. He loved it.
“Then we have an agreement?”
“Yes, indeed, we have.”
Carrington Knight stood at the window and looked down at the street. In a moment she emerged with her chauffeur, the black umbrella hiding her head and shoulders, and quickly disappeared into the back of the black Jaguar. Silently the car pulled into the traffic of Carlos Place and disappeared into the rain.
He smiled. She was a very shrewd woman. A lovely woman. A woman who might even be dangerous to know. Dangerous in a nonlethal sense. Dangerous in the sense that she was capable of enthralling. He did not have the impression that she would take a man places he did not want to go, but, rather, that she could seduce a man into wanting to go places he normally would have the common sense to avoid. In fact, she had just taken Knight there.
It was his policy to be scrupulous about not identifying his clients. Especially those clients like Schrade who were reclusive—and big spenders.
He was also scrupulous about veiling his methods of selling expensive works. He had learned long, long ago that however colorful he himself might enjoy being, when it came to money, and to the buying and selling of fine art, far more profit was to be made from discretion than from flamboyance. He actually bought most of the artwork he sold, but when he did agree to broker something, he never revealed to a seller the potential buyers he might approach.
Ms. Paille had smoothly relieved him of these two long-standing rules of operation. She had done it in such a way that he had relinquished these long-established principles without protest. He had even enjoyed it.
He looked at the portfolio still open on the library table. It hardly mattered in this instance. Besides, the end result was that he was going to broker one of the sweetest little collections of drawings that he had come across in a long while.
She would bring round the documentation later. Jeffrey had quickly typed up a brief description of the seven drawings, which they all had signed, affirming that she was leaving such items in his safekeeping.
She had been most insistent that the sale take place as quickly as possible. She had given reasons, all having to do with her eccentric employer, Mr. Cao. They had agreed that she would call the next day to make an appointment to bring by the documentation.
All in all a very exciting hour.
He turned back to the library table, relishing the idea of a leisurely examination of the drawings.
The telephone rang.
Knight flinched. He’d forgotten. Quickly he walked to the telephone. He let it ring one more time, then lifted the receiver.
“Carrington.”
“This is Wolf.”
“Yes, Wolf, good of you to call.” Knight was alert, ready, suddenly onstage.
“Helene told me about the Schieles.” Schrade’s baritone conveyed a languid self-confidence that was entirely peculiar to this man. “What do you think?”
“It would be easy to rhapsodize about them, Wolf, but just let me say this: They are first-rate. They are solid. I have never felt more sure of the quality of a Schiele. They’re stunning.”
“Mmmmmm. Good. They are genuine Schieles?”
“As I told Helene, I don’t have any doubts about them being Schieles, but I’ve still got to open them up.”
“When can I see them?”
“The sooner the better. I’ve been retained by the owner to authenticate them.”
“Who is the seller?”
“I’m afraid they wish to remain anonymous. I can tell you this, the drawings are not coming from a collector’s holdings. They were actually unearthed in the estate of a recently deceased family member.”
“Where?”
“Where? Here, in Britain. They didn’t even know what they had. That’s why I was retained. I called you when I realized what we were dealing with. You and I would be the first ones to verify this discovery. Essentially it would be our discovery. A truly significant moment in modern art. To unearth new Schieles, never seen before. That’s why I thought you would want to be here.”
“This time, Carrington,” Schrade said bluntly, cutting through the confection of Knight’s verbal enticements, “I must know the seller, or I won’t consider the purchase.”
Knight was stunned. Good Lord, Claude had been prescient. How freakish.
“But, Wolf, you know that we never—”
“This time, Carrington, I must know.”
“But this just isn’t . . .”
Silence.
Knight sensed he was pushing his position to the point of effrontery. He thought of the money. The prestige. The deal.
“Very well,” he said. “I have the name and address of the barrister who is representing the seller.”
“Let me have them,” Schrade said.
Knight gave them to him.
“I will call you back,” Schrade said. “Good-bye, Carrington.”
“Wait—” Schrade was gone.
Good Lord! Knight’s hand was trembling as he put down the telephone. Oh, hell, it didn’t matter. Simply to have the seven drawings in his possession when Schrade arrived would be remarkable enough. Knight would relish working up to the surprise.
BROMPTON
He sat at his desk and gazed out at the park across the road from his office, waiting. The telephone call had come just an hour earlier. The caller, who identified himself as a lawyer named Kevin Drenner, had been urgent in his request: to meet with him immediately regarding the anonymous offering for sale of two unauthenticated works reputed to have been done by the artist Egon Schiele. The man had an American accent. Fain, using the name Edward Purchas, told him to come immediately.
So here he was arriving by cab, pausing to pay in the late afternoon drizzle, turning and looking at the facade of Fain’s office, then ducking his head and coming across the broad sidewalk to the front door.
“I’m sorry to be in so much of a hurry,” Drenner said, sitting down with a wheeze in a banker’s chair in Purchas’s office, “but my client—”
“Who is?”
“Gerhard Stoltz. A German citizen of Berlin.”
Purchas nodded.
“Generally does not buy art from anonymous sellers,” Drenner continued. “He understands the drawings in question are excellent, though they have to be authenticated, so he is quite interested. But . . .”
“He does not buy from anonymous sellers.”
“That’s right.”
“What do you want?”
“The identity of the seller.”
“Just not possible,” Purchas said, leaning his long frame back in his chair. “Sorry.”
“Why?”
“The seller has rules as well. Perhaps these two were simply not meant to do business. I understand there is no dearth of potential buyers, and to eliminate one so early is not a discouragement to my client.”
Drenner looked at him. The pressure he was under was evident. His face was remarkable for its extraordinarily stout jaw structure and for its unpleasant complexion, which was very nearly jaundiced, with putty gray shadows under the cheeks and around the eyes.
“Why does your client insist upon anonymity?”
“Why does your client insist upon knowing?”
“Security reasons.”
“The same.”
“Do you have authority to decide this without consulting with your client?”
“Of course.”
Drenner’s prodigious jaw structure rippled with tested patience. “My client,” he said, “is willing to offer, through Mr. Knight, an agreement to buy the drawings at a price of twenty percent above their appraisal value, if they are proven to be genuine Schieles . . . and if the seller will forgo anonymity.”
Purchas held his tongue, regarding Drenner from under the bushy outcroppings of his eyebrows. The pause was meant to convey an immediate weakening of resolve.
“That would be done in writing?” Purchas asked.
“Yes. I have the authority to do that.”
Purchas looked out at the park across the road, dreary in the rain. He thought long and with gravity. “Would your client,” he said, turning back to Drenner, “be willing to keep the transaction totally confidential, between the two parties? Save Mr. Knight, of course. That would be the next best thing to anonymity for both of them, would it not?”
“Yes.”
“What kind of identification do you require?”
“I’d like to meet the seller, talk with him about how he came in possession of the drawings.”
Purchas was shocked. “Good God, sir. That is impossible.”
“Why?”
Purchas shook his head busily and looked away as if in distaste. “No, no, no. A twenty percent increase in sale price doesn’t buy that sort of thing. My client is not a common ‘celebrity’ who haggles away familiarity with himself to the highest bidder. I am sorry, sir, but that is out of the question.”
Again Drenner, who thought he had been making some headway, showed such frustration at this setback that his jaundiced face flushed, ruddy patches appearing on his cheeks and at the corners of his mouth. It was unpleasant to see.
Purchas thought he had better release some of the pressure before Drenner exploded.
“Mr. Drenner, please, you have to appreciate my position,” he said. “The fact is, the ‘gentleman’ in question here, the seller, is actually a woman.”
Drenner’s eyes bulged slightly, then relaxed. “Really.”
“Yes, really,” Purchas said. “So you see why she is cautious. I’ve represented her family in legal matters for over twenty-two years, and I can assure you your client has nothing to fear from her regarding security. She inherited these drawings from her aunt, an eccentric, a Bohemian, who recently died. She is a widow, in her mid-sixties, a taciturn woman.”
Purchas frowned heavily, his eyebrows lowering like dark clouds over his eyes. “I can assure you,” he concluded, “if your client insists on your ‘interviewing’ her, he should count himself out of the running. A woman of her nature would rather forgo a twenty percent profit than to be dragged into that sort of . . . merchandising.”
Purchas paused, sighed, and grew grimly sympathetic. “I know that may be difficult for your client, Mr. Stoltz, to understand. But really, sir, this is quite another matter to a woman like that. She simply doesn’t see it the same way as Mr. Stoltz.”
Mara started talking as soon as they pulled away from Carlos Place. She told Strand everything, speaking hurriedly as he drove through the pelting rain to a nearby hotel on Park Lane. He entered the parking garage and wound upward through the lanes until he found a parking place and pulled in.
He took off his chauffeur’s jacket and removed the bow tie and left them both in the car. Together they left the garage and entered the hotel, going up to the room that Strand had taken under the name of one of his passports. There he changed into a suit as Mara continued telling him about the particulars of her conversation with Knight. When he was finished dressing, they left the hotel and took a cab to an Indian restaurant in Knightsbridge, just off Cromwell Road.
After they were seated Mara picked up where she had left off and finished her account of her meeting with Carrington Knight.
“So essentially, you accomplished everything.”
“Almost.”
“Well, the time. But I don’t know how you could have done anything about that. Carrington’s got to talk to Schrade. There’s no way he could know otherwise.”
“But I’ve got to call him tomorrow, make arrangements to take him the documentation. I could start then. Did he reach Mr. Schrade? What was his reaction? Is he coming? And so on like that.”
“Sure, whatever feels right. The timing of Schrade’s arrival is crucial; we’ll have to nail it down. That’s the whole point of it.”
After their drinks came and they ordered dinner, Mara studied him.
“How are you going to do this, Harry?”
“I’ll take care of it,” he said.
“No.” She shook her head firmly. “I want to know how you’re going to do this.”
He swallowed a sip of his Scotch. “It really would be best if you didn’t know,” he said.
Her eyes flashed. “I’m not impressed by someone wanting to ‘protect’ me, Harry,” she went on. “You know me better than that. This has more to do with you. You’re not doing me any favors. I thought we had this settled.”
She was glaring at him, her anger controlled, but just barely.
He nodded. “Okay,” he said, “you’re right.” He took another drink of his Scotch and deliberately tried to taste every possible element of its savor before he swallowed. Then he went on. “When Schrade comes to London, he stays at one of three places. They’re obvious places for a man like him: Brown’s, Claridge’s, the Ritz. But there will be few opportunities to approach him at any of them.”
“Approach him?”
Strand took a mental deep breath and told her how he planned to kill Schrade. He watched her face as he explained about the saxitoxin, explained the gun, explained the necessity of having to get close to him. She did very well, no shock, no stunned expression, no exclamations. She swallowed once, that was all.
“How . . . did you decide to do it this way?” she asked. “Why not use something that would give you some distance?”
“A high-powered rifle, a bomb?”
She nodded.
“There’s less risk for me with those devices, but both of them require detailed long-term planning. I knew I wouldn’t have that kind of time.”
“But this way the risk is greater that you’ll . . .”
“Be killed or caught.”
She had to swallow again and covered it by taking a sip of her Scotch.
He smiled at her. “But I plan to avoid that.”
She couldn’t manage a response.
“Schrade also has favorite restaurants,” Strand went on. He named half a dozen. “I think it’s a good possibility that I can catch him coming in or out of one of these.”
“You said it would make a sound.”
“About like a slap.”
“That’s loud.”
“In a quiet place, yes. But outside in the street it could be done without attracting attention.”
“What about his bodyguard?”
“Schrade uses them in different ways, and I’m lucky there. When he goes to business meetings, legitimate business meetings, there’s only one guard, who accompanies him like a secretary. He’s very understated, in the background. Everybody knows what he is, but it’s no big deal. Important men, at least important men in Schrade’s orbit, are accustomed to seeing their peers with ‘assistants.’ If you didn’t know who Schrade was, you’d think two businessmen.
“When he meets with his illegitimate associates, always in environments quite different from those I’ve just mentioned, he travels with two bodyguards who look like bodyguards, and no one would mistake them for anything else. They’re there to intimidate as well as protect.”
Strand removed his hands from the sweaty Scotch glass and touched his face with his cool fingers. He sighed.
“But when he’s on art business, the bodyguard is little more than a chauffeur. He doesn’t follow Schrade into restaurants, doesn’t follow him around in the hotels, doesn’t go into the galleries. Schrade is in a different world when he’s looking at art. He almost—almost—becomes a different man. He doesn’t want the trappings of his other life to interfere.”
Mara nodded. “So, you think you’d . . .”
“Catch him in a noisy restaurant. Catch him coming or going to the restaurant, in the street. Catch him in the men’s room. In the bar.”
Strand went straight into the specifics. He was going to give her everything.
“My feeling is that in any of these situations I can do a ‘brush-by.’ To muffle the sound of the ‘slap,’ and to make sure the pellet penetrates his clothes, I’ll jam the pistol into his side, just under his rib cage, and fire. He’ll flinch, slump. I’ll grab him and hold him up. This will do two things: give me a chance to hide the pistol somewhere in my clothes, and prevent him from reflexively recoiling from me or gesturing at me and attracting attention to me. I’ll act surprised, confused, then shocked: ‘What’s the matter! Are you all right?’ I’ll appear to come to his assistance, call for help, bring people to us. Since I’ll be catching him away from his bodyguard, no one will suspect a menacing situation. I think most people will immediately conclude that I just happened to be standing next to the guy when he had a stroke or heart attack.”
He stopped, his forearms leaning on the table.
“That’s my thinking right now. That’s what I’d like. In the confusion I’ll manage to slip away. I’ll want to be gone before the bodyguard gets there. But even if I’m not, Schrade will be past any ability to communicate. The saxitoxin takes only moments.”
“God, Harry . . . you can do that?”
“I have to do it.”
She had gone right to the heart of it. He was by no means as confident as he wanted to sound. The risk was the least of it. It was killing the man that he tried not to think about. He had rehearsed over and over everything right up to the instant of squeezing the trigger, then his mind derailed. He couldn’t imagine what he would feel like as he walked away, leaving behind him the confused crowd and the dead, or dying, Schrade. How in God’s name would that feel?
“How are you going to get that close to him without him recognizing you?”
Strand nodded. “There’s a shop in Soho where West End actors buy their makeup and wigs and things. I’ll need you to go there and get something for a disguise. A mustache. Maybe a wig. The most expensive ones they have. Very good ones. Subtle. Then we’re going to have to change the way I look.”
Mara had been listening to him with an expressionless concentration, hearing things, he knew, that she could hardly believe. Everything he said was being absorbed, being made over in her mind to fit into reality as she had always understood it. He guessed it was as difficult a task as she had ever encountered. A leap beyond, way beyond, what she had been taught in the FIS training course in Virginia.
Her eyes glittered with the impact of the accumulative brutality of the details. All the concern, all the fear, the nearly panicked imagination, gathered in a single crease between her eyebrows. As Strand watched, she gradually composed herself. She took a long, deep breath and slowly straightened her back and set her shoulders.
Strand felt sick doing this to her. Then he thought about Romy and Meret and Ariana. It was too late to get weak in the stomach.
Just after nightfall Claude Corsier hung up the telephone from talking to Carrington Knight, who had at just that moment received a message from Wolfram Schrade. He would arrive at Knight’s at ten o’clock the next morning. Corsier looked at the two drawings sitting on the floor of his hotel room in South Kensington. Good God. These Schieles, more Schieles than Schieles themselves now that Carrington Knight believed in them as if they were two Holy Grails, would soon attract yet another knight to his death in his quest for them. Corsier shook his head pensively. It was unbelievable, really, that Wolfram Schrade was coming like this, to two worthless drawings, like a rat to carrion. Corsier had planned it and imagined it, but now that it was really about to happen, well, it was rather a triumph. So, the mighty and powerful could be deceived, too. It was no special thing to be made a fool. And no one was so special that he couldn’t be. But it did feel rather special having done it twice to a man like Schrade. To be rid of the murderous freak in the process . . . it was a triumph.
Corsier wished he had tried to get in touch with Harry Strand. He would like Strand to know what he had done and how he had done it. After his close call in Schrade’s private launch in Venice, Corsier had been convinced that his only hope for salvation lay in cutting himself off from everyone he knew, making it impossible for Schrade to use anyone to find him. With the exception of Edie Vernon, and Carrington Knight just two days ago, Corsier had not spoken to a single soul he knew since the Venetian nightmare. He had diminished into a shadow and floated unnoticed from country to country. Strand had done something like that four years ago, and as far as Corsier knew, the transformation had served him very well.
Corsier’s niece, who ran his gallery in Geneva, had eventually reported him missing to the police. He had seen it in the papers and once on the television news. He was sorry he’d had to put her through that, but if he had sent her any note of reassurance, she would never have been convincing to the police or, more important, to Schrade’s intelligence creatures.
He had not found it especially difficult to disappear. Of course, he was highly motivated. As had been often observed, nothing was so galvanizing as brushing against the cold shoulder of one’s own mortality. Even now just the mere thought of Venice accelerated his heartbeat.
The incident had wrenched a new crease in the folds of Corsier’s brain and was now a permanent feature of his psyche. His escape had been born of blind chance, which haunted him. As Schrade’s launch pounded the waves and Corsier swore to himself over and over and over in prayerful chant that if he ever got away from this situation he would become as invisible as a breath, the driver of the launch changed course abruptly, leaving the lane to Marco Polo Airport and angling in a traverse course. Corsier was horrified. This was it.
In the quick maneuver of changing course, their launch cut across the wake of one of the public vaporettos filled with tourists heading for the airport. The hull of the launch slapped roughly against the large wake at the precise instant that the second of the two men in the launch was turning to reach for something on the dash. Thrown off balance by the sudden slam of the hull, he flailed out reflexively for something to save himself from falling. It was the steering wheel. The launch pitched violently as it turned against the second part of the vaporetto’s V-shaped wake, flinging the off-balance man against the side of the launch.
Corsier grabbed a heavy black flashlight from a bin in the hull beside him, leaped at the man, and in a frenzy of panic bashed his head repeatedly. An automatic pistol skittered across the fiberglass floor from the man’s jacket. Corsier grabbed it without thinking and fired repeatedly at the driver, who was fighting to regain the steering wheel as he pushed down the throttle to cut the power. The pistol was equipped with a silencer, and the lethal hush of each shot gave an even more surreal character to the frantic sequence. The launch spun around, dead in the water, as the driver was hammered to the floor with each quiet burst from the pistol. Then Corsier shot the second man as well.
He had never fired a gun in his life.
He dragged both men into the cabin, then managed to muddle about with the launch engine until he got the boat started again and followed the distant and diminishing wake of the vaporetto to the docks surrounding the airport. There he maneuvered the launch to an isolated branch of the public dock, pulled into a slip, cut the motor, and climbed out of the launch onto the dock, not even thinking to tie it.
He walked away in a daze.
For nearly three weeks he had a nightmare about it every night. More than a few times it drove sleep away altogether, and he lay awake in the dark, hearing imminent death in the creaking walls of old hotels or in the opening or closing of a distant door.
Then one night in a cramped monk’s cell at the Great Lavra monastery on Mount Athos, where he had fled to hide and gather his thoughts and nerves among ornate religious art and quiet men, he stared at the blue moonlight on the stone of the deep windowsill and realized Schrade’s demonic audacity: ursurping God’s role, he took it upon himself to grant life or death. If he turned his eyes this way, a man was made to die; with a subtle nod of his head, another was allowed to live. Allowed to live! The magisterial insolence of it hit Corsier like a thunderbolt.
At that moment a sudden and powerful resentment was ignited in Corsier’s heart, and even before he could swing his feet off the cot to sit up and look out of his window to the Aegean Sea, a fierce conviction to liberate himself from Schrade began to wrestle with his paralyzing fear and would soon overcome it.
The next day he began growing his mustache and goatee, and the day after that he departed the monastery.
He never wavered. For him there was no moral struggle. Wolfram Schrade wanted to kill him and sought to kill him. And Schrade’s life was a brutal witness to the man’s appalling turpitude. As far as Corsier was concerned, the sum of that simple equation was quite evident. He never looked back.
• • •
He checked into his rooms on the third floor of the Connaught Hotel late in the afternoon. The suite had three rooms: a reception area and two bedrooms, one on either side, each with its own bath. The reception had the largest windows and the best view of Knight’s second-floor library. Corsier chose the bedroom on the right.
He had bought a piece of ordinary luggage in which to transport the paintings so that he did not attract attention to himself. In another piece of luggage he brought in two pairs of powerful binoculars and two tripods, which he set up in the reception in front of the windows. He attached the binoculars to the tripods and looked across Carlos Place into the second floor of Knight’s library. No one was in the room, in which only a few lamps were lighted against the gray day. Good enough, though. He hoped he wouldn’t have to rely on Skerlic’s microphones alone to identify Schrade’s positioning. It was good, too, that the day would be overcast and rainy—he monitored the television weather forecasts religiously to make sure. The gloomy day would enable them to sit in their rooms with the lights out and the curtains open and not be observed from Knight’s library.
Putting the binoculars into the suitcase, he made a mental note always to lock them up before he left the suite. The maids would take note of binoculars on a tripod.
He sat on the smaller of the two sofas and stared out the windows. He would spend the night here. Tomarrow would be difficult because the only thing left to do was wait. He would install Skerlic here tomorrow night, in plenty of time for them to be ready for Schrade’s arrival the next morning.
After a final conversation with Skerlic about the order of things to come, he would deliver the drawings around eight o’clock. Knight had wanted them sooner, of course, but Corsier had presented him with creative excuses, abundant reasons. Now, at least, from his post across the street, he could see and hear whether Knight was tempted to cheat in the two hours he had between the time Corsier dropped off the drawings and Schrade’s arrival.
With only the swishing sound of the polite Mayfair traffic on the wet streets to interrupt the silence of his room, Corsier stroked his mustache and goatee and sighed heavily. It was a bittersweet time for him. Though he was about to rid himself of Meister Death, he was going to have to go into exile to do it. The ensuing investigation, by the British and German governments, would quickly identify him as the major suspect. Flight was his only alternative.
Much of the past month had been taken up with arranging his second disappearance, the passports, the shuffled bank accounts, the well-thought-out routes of escape, the detailed study of certain neighborhoods in places like Buenos Aires, Singapore, Bogotá. He thought of his exile as a temporary placement. Perhaps after three years, or five, or seven, he could quietly return. Both governments would make a great flourish of looking for the assassin for a year or two, but in reality, once the media lost interest in the case, so would Scotland Yard and the Bundeskriminalamt. After all, these agencies were not ignorant. As long as the media was not urging them on, why would they go out of their way to pursue the killer of a man like Wolfram Schrade? After a time other urgent criminal matters would demand their attention, and the “Schrade task force” would be reduced to a perfunctory little office with one or two officers assigned to plod through the mounds of paper that would have been generated by the initial inquiry.
That was the way he saw it, anyway. It was not the best of situations in which to find oneself, but he would rather flee the searches of two governments, whose budgetary patience for wild goose chases was limited, than try to hide from an obsessed Schrade’s well-financed assassins.
God, but he would miss London and Geneva and Paris and Rome. He loved all these wonderful cities in all the wonderful seasons of their years. To have to say good-bye to their galleries and museums and symphony halls and operas grieved him far more than he ever would have imagined. How long might it be before he would again be able to dine at the quiet little Vecchia Roma in Piazza Campitelli or at the sublime La Tour d’Argent on Quai de la Tournelle or have a late morning coffee mélange with his newspaper at the Café Central in Vienna?
The answer was, eventually. As opposed to never, if Schrade was left unchecked. Corsier was French enough to be capable of sentimentality, but he was also a native Genevan and had a strong sense of practicality. It would be Wolf Schrade’s great misfortune that Claude Corsier had been a lucky man that day in Venice.