The next morning they walked to Shepherd Market huddled together under an umbrella and ate breakfast at da Corradi, where the bacon and eggs were done to Strand’s liking. Afterward they both ordered cappuccinos before going back out into the rain.
“About Carrington,” he said, leaning toward Mara slightly on his forearms. “There’s a timing concern.”
She didn’t look at him. She concentrated on her coffee.
“You’ll need to retrieve the drawings. We don’t want them left there. It doesn’t take much imagination to know that there’s going to be a hell of an investigation. We need a smokescreen, something to create confusion, obscure the inquiry. I’m going to use my Geneva files.”
Mara looked up. “Harry . . .”
“I can do it without making the source an obvious intelligence leak. It can be done. When that stuff gets out, the potential suspects for the killing will be so enormous it’ll swamp the investigation. It’ll get murky with spies and criminal organizations. There’ll be a frenzy of denials and finger-pointing. They’ll never sort it out. It’ll go unsolved.”
Mara allowed a small smile. She had to; she saw the genius of it, too. It offered a glimmer of hope that this might work after all.
“There’s a problem,” Strand went on. “When that stuff hits the media it’ll be sensational. Schrade’s going to be yanked out of obscurity and thrust into the headlines.” He paused. “The problem is, it’ll heat up the investigation.” He paused again. “You know how it works. Where was he going? Why was he going there? Was he being lured? How was it set up? You’re going to be caught in the net, Mara. Carrington and his security man are going to bring you right into the middle of it.”
The look on Mara’s face was not fear. It was calculation.
“The FIS isn’t going to acknowledge me,” she said. “They’re not going to identify any photographs.”
Strand agreed.
“I’m not in any police files. But they can trace me through the drawings. I own them legitimately, apart from any work for the FIS.”
“That’s right. So you’ve got to get them out of there before Schrade’s death is understood to be what it actually is.”
She hadn’t drunk a drop of the cappuccino, and she was no longer interested in it.
“Let me think,” she said, her voice dying away as her imagination shuttled in another direction.
• • •
“This is Lenor Paille.”
“Oh . . . Ms. Paille. Lenor. I don’t think you told me your first name.” Carrington Knight paused, his voice inquisitive. “Are you on a speakerphone, Ms. Paille? It sounds like it.”
“Yes,” she said, “I’m sorting papers.” She and Strand were sitting on the paint buckets, cups of coffee in front of them on the scaffolding table. “Listen, I need to ask you if you’ve got any news on a possible time for showing the drawings to the first client.”
“Oh, indeed. You’re in luck, Ms. Paille. You’re in luck.”
“Really? What do you mean?”
“Mr. Schrade will be here tomorrow.”
Mara flashed her eyes at Strand.
“The fact is, your suggestion that I contact Mr. Schrade was overlapping another item that I had in the works for him.”
“You already knew he was coming tomorrow when I spoke with you?”
“No, no, no. Well, I had contacted him about coming to see another set of drawings, but I had not yet heard from him. I had no idea when he was coming. That’s why I really couldn’t say anything to you yesterday. He called after you left.”
“Did you tell him about the Cao drawings?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Why?”
“Well, he had called about the other pieces, and since you had just left, I didn’t want to be overeager. Besides, I hadn’t yet actually examined your drawings. I do have a responsibility, Ms. Paille. I have to be judicious.”
“Of course, I understand.”
“Nevertheless,” Knight said, “I have, since then, examined your collection, and they are stunning. Mr. Cao is either a very knowledgeable man or a very lucky one—not being a collector—to have come upon these beauties.”
“Well, it’s about their documentation that I’m calling.”
A slight hesitation on Knight’s end of the line indicated startled suspicion. “Yes?”
“I’m afraid I can’t bring them round today. I have other obligations that have come in the way.”
“But you have the documentation?”
“Oh, certainly. It’s right here. I’ll try to get it to you as quickly as possible tomorrow, before Mr. Schrade arrives. What time is your appointment with him?”
“Ten o’clock.”
“Then why don’t I come around at nine o’clock?”
“Oh, yes, yes, indeed. Nine o’clock would be perfect.”
While Mara went to Soho to get the material needed for Strand’s disguise, he began calling the three hotels where Schrade was likely to stay. As it was absolutely essential that Schrade not know of any inquiries about his arrival, Strand tried to think of a pretense for calling innocuous enough that an eager desk clerk would not think it worth mentioning to Schrade upon his arrival. The problem was that Schrade’s generosity at these hotels, a result of his wanting to be treated with an almost sybaritic attentiveness, meant that everyone from the doorman to the manager strained themselves mightily to accommodate, and even anticipate, his every wish. If Strand were to pretend to be a business acquaintance wanting to confirm Schrade’s arrival, the desk clerk, wishing to be of service to Schrade as he was checking in, would very likely mention it. If Strand called anonymously to confirm the arrival, the clerk would likely report that as well. He could think of no reason so trivial that an eager-to-please clerk would not mention it.
So Strand decided to try a completely different direction. He began calling the hotels, introducing himself as Dr. Morris, and asking if Wolfram Schrade had checked in yet. When he finally located a reservation for Schrade, at Claridge’s, the closest of the three hotels to Carlos Place, he explained to the registration clerk that he was a cardiac specialist and his secretary, who was out of the office owing to illness, had apparently confused Mr. Schrade’s appointment. Therefore Dr. Morris himself was calling to confirm whether Mr. Schrade had arrived from Berlin.
Mr. Schrade was not there yet, the clerk said, but he did have reservations, and there was a note about an afternoon arrival. Did Dr. Morris want to leave a message?
No, thank you, that was really all he needed to know to clear up the discrepancy. Oh, by the way, Mr. Schrade’s appointment with him was, of course, a medical matter and, as such, was of the utmost confidentiality. He would not want it known by the hotel staff that he was consulting Dr. Morris.
The clerk understood perfectly.
Dr. Morris thought he would. Might he have the clerk’s name?
The clerk gave it, the changing tone in his voice making it obvious that he knew he was being put on notice.
Dr. Morris thanked him politely. He very much appreciated the clerk’s understanding.
Locating a restaurant where Schrade might dine posed a different kind of problem. While one tended not to deviate from a long-trusted hotel, a restaurant was another matter. A person at the reservation desk of a restaurant would be unlikely to report an inquiry, but finding the right restaurant was problematic. Schrade might decide to dine at a new restaurant on a whim. He might dine in the hotel. He might dine with someone else at a restaurant of their choice. The possibilities were endless.
In addition to all that, Strand was working from his memory of a dining routine Schrade had kept four years earlier. Things changed, restaurants came in and out of vogue. Happily, middle-aged men had a great fondness for routine, and Schrade had a penchant for allowing himself the very best of everything. It was not unreasonable that Strand might indeed be able to track down Schrade’s dinner reservations.
He was not quickly rewarded. His question to the reservations desk at each of the six restaurants he remembered as Schrade’s favorites—“Just calling to see if Mr. Schrade has made his reservations yet”—was answered in the negative.
He checked with the concierge at the three hotels he had just called and asked them the names of the three restaurants currently considered the finest in the city. All three of them named the same two, and each named one that the other two didn’t. That gave Strand only three more restaurants to call, since of the five named two were on Strand’s original list. He hit on the second call.
Wolfram Schrade had reservations for two at eight-thirty that evening at Ma Micheline, a trendy and expensive French restaurant near Park Lane. He would surely be driven. Strand called back and made reservations for one at the same hour. Schrade’s reservation for two was interesting.
Strand looked at his watch. He had one other thing to do before Mara returned. He went down to the entry hall closet and retrieved the paper sack with the pistol he had gotten from Hodge. He took the pistol and went up to the bathroom in one of the empty bedrooms and turned on the faucet in the bathtub. The lever that closed the drain in the tub was above the faucet, so he wouldn’t have to reach into the water to drain it.
When the tub was full, Strand turned off the water and stepped back. He removed the clip from the pistol, looked at it, and then slowly pushed it back into the handle. He raised his hand, extended his arm, and then, taking special note of the tension in the trigger, slowly squeezed it and fired into the water.
The slap was not as loud as he had expected, the recoil nonexistent. It took a moment before he located the small plastic pellet at the bottom, ruptured. The clear saxitoxin was dispersed into the clear water. He reached down and flipped the drain toggle.
After removing the clip from the handle, he smelled the end of the barrel. Very little odor from the firing mechanism. If people gathered around the slumping Schrade, there would be no suspicious whiff of cordite in the air.
When the water had drained out of the tub, the ruptured pellet was stuck in the drain. Using a tissue, he picked it up and examined it closely. Then he put the tissue and pellet into the toilet and flushed it.
He left the pistol and clip in his coat pocket and hung the coat in the closet with his other clothes. He walked to the windows and looked out at the rain. This time the next day it would be done. He was tempted to imagine what it would be like for him and Mara after it was all over, but he knew better than to indulge himself in bright hopes. It was too easy to slip into an unjustified optimism, deceiving oneself into believing that the nearest evil was the only evil between oneself and happiness. There was even more of an inclination to do that with an evil like Schrade’s, because it so thoroughly dominated the present moment to the exclusion of all others that it was tempting to discount the more subtle demons waiting their turn behind him.
The rain was falling steadily again, running down Chesterfield Hill toward the gutters of Mayfair, on its way to the storm sewers and the Thames.
Strand’s thoughts drifted away, distracted by the random pace of the rain as it alternately surged and slacked. He lost track of time until he saw a black cab pull up and stop in front of the town house. The driver got out with an umbrella and opened the back door for Mara, holding the umbrella for her as she gathered up her things.
• • •
While they ate the sandwiches that Mara had brought back with her, she laid out on the scaffolding table the items she had purchased for his disguise. She explained why she had bought each item: the three styles of mustaches were of a certain kind of bristle; the wigs were actual human hair, specially woven to more accurately approximate the real thing. This wig could be custom colored, grayed at the temples, or streaked—she had a kit of colors—all colorfast. This adhesive would withstand rain; that adhesive did not require a special solvent to remove. This face latex would remain pliable and would withstand the rain. That face latex was less comfortable, but it had a more accurate color scale and could be shaded. A prosthesis for the mouth changed the shape of his jaw. This sheet of padding could be cut to fit and worn under his clothes to change the shape of his shoulders or to thicken his chest.
“I thought maybe comfort was a big factor,” she said after explaining the pros and cons of each item and the possibilities in which each might be used to best effect. As always, she was thorough, never doing anything by halves. “You don’t want to have to think about it, about something going wrong. You put it on, it stays on. The better stuff takes longer to apply.”
She was trying to cover up her anxiety by being well informed and businesslike. Again, thorough, she turned a natural tendency to her advantage.
“I found him,” Strand said.
Mara stopped talking, her eyes remaining on the plastic packet of latex she was holding in her lap. “Where?”
“Claridge’s.”
She nodded but didn’t say anything, still looking at the packet, her fingers kneading it.
“How long will it take to do this?” he asked, gesturing at the items scattered on the table.
“I don’t know. A couple of hours.”
“Schrade has reservations at a restaurant at eight-thirty. It’s a place near his hotel. I’d like to be ready by six o’clock at the very latest.”
Mara nodded again.
“If I don’t get a chance at him tonight, I won’t be coming back here. I’ll have to get ready for another chance in the morning, on his way to Carrington’s.”
“You’ll call me tonight.”
“Yeah, I will.”
“If I don’t hear from you, what about tomorrow morning?”
“You’re going to have to go to Carrington’s tomorrow morning no matter what happens, whether I get Schrade tonight or in the morning. Be there at nine o’clock as you agreed, with the documentation you promised. The timing won’t be crucial because Schrade will never make his appointment. Still, it’s important that you show up.”
“Why? I don’t understand.”
“Two reasons. When this is all over, after the investigation into Schrade’s death begins, they’re going to question Carrington, because that’s where Schrade was going when he was killed. They’ll be looking for a setup, something out of the ordinary, something unusual. It won’t be so much of a red flag if you simply show up for your appointment as arranged, an everyday occurrence for Carrington. But if you make an appointment and don’t show up for it, it’s going to stand out. He’s going to make note of it.”
He wadded up a napkin and tossed it into a paper bag. “And, just as important, you’ve got to get those drawings out of there.”
“Okay.” Mara was still kneading the face latex.
“I won’t leave you hanging,” Strand said. “I’ll keep you informed. But don’t panic if you don’t hear from me. I’m not going to be in any danger. I’ll probably just be in a position that won’t allow me to communicate.”
“What do I do in the meantime?”
“Clean up this place.”
“Anything that can identify us.”
“That’s right. Don’t worry about the mess. Just put anything that might point to us into plastic bags. We’ll get rid of them later. After I leave here this afternoon just get ready to go, and stay ready. I might call you from somewhere and tell you to meet me in another country. Be flexible. Don’t be surprised at any message from me. Whatever I ask of you will have to do with maintaining our anonymity, not with any dire circumstances. Don’t worry about that.”
“Fine.”
“Don’t use the Jaguar again. Take a cab to Carrington’s in the morning.”
“Right.”
“If you don’t hear from me at all, leave London. Go back to Bellagio, get a room at the same hotel, and wait for me. Watch your e-mail. That’s how I’ll get in touch with you.”
“Fine.”
He looked at her. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah. I’ve got it.”
“I’m comfortable with this. How about you?”
“Yes, it’s good. It’s clear. I’m okay with it.”
They were lying to each other. They both knew it. Neither of them knew how to deal with it any other way.
It took Mara nearly three hours to make Strand into someone else. Monitoring the process in a hand mirror, he watched as his features disappeared one by one until, slowly, a stranger’s face emerged and he no longer recognized himself. It was oddly like being invisible. He watched the man in the mirror as though he were seeing him on a small movie screen. The sensations he felt in his own body did not belong to the man he saw. His thoughts did not belong to the man he saw. There was nothing in that man’s eyes that Strand recognized, and there was nothing in that man’s eyes that he could read.
Mara had had the unfailing good sense to make Strand’s new self unremarkable; he was neither handsome nor striking in any sense. He had no identifying mole or coloring or manner of grooming. He was not interesting to look at, and it was highly unlikely that anyone would remember him or be able to describe him after having shared an elevator with him. He had become every man and no man. Harry Strand had disappeared.
“Okay,” she said, sitting back, looking at him as though he were a drawing she had just finished. She smiled softly, leaned toward him, and whispered, “I liked the other guy a lot better, mister. A hell of a lot better.” She kissed him lightly on the lips. “No offense.”
“I’m relieved to hear it,” Strand said. He looked at his watch: it was nearly four-thirty. “I’m going to forget the padding. I don’t want to fool with it, don’t want to have to worry about it.”
He checked the mirror one more time. She had done a remarkable job. Not too much latex. It wasn’t like a mask, but his nose was broader, brow heavier, jaws rounder, neck thicker. The stuff was sticking to him like a second skin. He did not have to be apprehensive about it coming off accidentally. In fact, he was just a little concerned that it might not come off at all.
“How does it feel? Any problems?”
“No, not at all,” he said. “It’s good. It looks great.” He stood and removed the paper from around his collar.
Mara didn’t say anything. She busied herself with cleaning up and putting away the cosmetics and little bottles and tubes and aerosol cans that were scattered out on the scaffolding table.
Strand walked over to the windows and looked out. A misty fog had rolled in, and the evening was growing dim and gloomy. He stretched his neck, twisted his head. Again he took a deep breath, couldn’t seem to get enough air in his lungs. Turning, he looked at Mara. She had stopped what she was doing and was sitting there, a tube of something in her hands, watching him. The expression on her face told him volumes about the complex of emotions that churned within her.
Strand came over to her, and she put down the tube of makeup and stood. He raised her hands to his lips and kissed them. He kissed her palms and folded her fingers and kissed them. Her eyes were wide, unblinking, brimming with tears.
“I love you,” he said. “Thank you for everything. For everything from the first moment.”
He kissed her eyes softly, first one, then the other. He felt the moist salt of her fear and affection against his lips, tasted it on his tongue. This one tender moment was all he would allow. It was all he dared allow.
Turning away from her, he went to the closet and put on his coat. He took out his raincoat and pulled it on, too, and then reached in and got his umbrella and closed the door. When he turned to look at her she had wiped her eyes and was standing with her arms crossed, one hip cocked. She managed a smile.
“Take care of yourself, Harry,” she said.
He nodded at her and walked out the room.
At the front door he stepped outside and paused to put up the umbrella. Then he pulled the door closed behind him. It was quiet outside except for the light rain. He went down the steps, through the wrought-iron grille, and across the street. At the corner of Charles Street he turned and looked back. She had turned out the lights. He knew she was standing at the window in the darkness, watching him. He turned again and started down the street toward Berkeley Square.
• • •
The light rain had slackened to a mizzle by the time Strand got to Berkeley Square, where he had intended to hail a cab. Now he changed his mind. The weather was not so bad that he couldn’t walk, and the walking helped him think. The street lamps came on as he turned north on the west side of the square. The plane trees in the park sagged under the moisture of the last several days, and the pathways that traversed the lawn were empty and dreary. The wet summer evening had settled over the city like a soughing breath that was at one moment too warm and then almost chill.
He tried to stop thinking about Mara. He knew his lack of concentration was dangerous, but he could hardly get the image of the darkened windows of their rooms out of his mind. Gradually over the last month, everything he was and did had become wrapped up in that woman. She had become his rationale for everything. When he planned and when he dreamed, he had their future in mind. He did not think of himself; he thought of them.
He peered ahead, through the mist, up the hill toward Davies Street. He listened to his footsteps on the wet cement and to the footsteps of the people he passed: the long strides and plodding steps of men; the quick, rapid-fire steps of young women in smart clothes hurrying to their futures. All of them, shrouded beneath their umbrellas, moved along in the late day gloaming, microcosms of human hopes and disappointments.
Never, throughout the years of this deception, had it seemed more like an outrageous adventure than it did now. What had changed? Quite a lot, actually, not the least of which was the objective. Up until the last few days he’d had nothing more in mind than stealing stolen money, taking something that didn’t belong to the person who had it and returning it, not to those from whom it had been taken originally—which would be an impossibility, like trying to return a cup of water dipped out of the sea to the exact same place from which it was taken—but to others in need, to the kind of people from whom it had been stolen in the first place. The method had been complex, the scheme convoluted, the technology sophisticated, but at bottom he was only running away with a gangster’s ill-gotten profits. Stealing stolen money.
Now he was only hours away from killing a man. Did he really believe that Schrade would kill Mara—and himself—if he didn’t kill Schrade first? Yes . . . he knew Schrade would do that. Did he call it self-defense? Yes. Had he argued it ad nauseam in his own mind? Yes. Then why did he still agonize over it?
He didn’t know. But he did know that if he didn’t gain control of his thoughts right now, he might as well turn around this very moment, go back and get Mara . . . and start running.
He had stopped at the upper end of Berkeley Square. There was a spattering of cars careening off Mount Street and tilting into the turn that would take them down on the other side of the park, while traffic from behind him came up the near side of the square and headed into Davies Street. When the light changed he followed the dribbling traffic upward in the direction of Grosvenor.
In another ten minutes he was passing the lighted windows of Claridge’s dining room, which looked out onto Davies Street toward the Italian embassy. A few more steps and he turned into Brook Street and walked under the inviting awning of Claridge’s.
Accepting the doorman’s assistance, he folded his umbrella and entered the vestibule, removed his raincoat, and proceeded to the front hall, where he approached the reception desk.
“Good evening.” The reception clerk was quick and smiling.
“Good evening,” Strand said. “I just came in from Paris early this morning for a business meeting, thinking I would be returning to Paris this evening. Unfortunately my business is carrying over to tomorrow. Might you possibly have something available for me on such short notice?”
“Let me see, sir.” The clerk tipped his head and immediately consulted his computer, typing quietly in quick bursts, studying the screen. While he waited Strand allowed his eyes to follow the extension of the front hall toward three tall arches through which one passed to the more formal foyer famous for Claridge’s afternoon teas. A good number of people still lingered around the small tables, chatting quietly, the epitome of decorum in the most decorous of places.
“Nothing available, sir,” the clerk said, and Strand turned around.
“Not anything?”
“No singles or doubles, sir. We have only suites.”
“One of those will be fine.”
The clerk accepted this quiet extravagance with smooth alacrity.
Strand quickly produced one of his forged passports and credit cards, and the clerk got busy putting together the necessary paperwork for the accommodation.
Claude Corsier had an extended argument with the murderous Skerlic that was immensely frustrating and even, at times, comical in its absurdity, over Corsier’s insistence that he buy a proper suit and go to a barber. There were surveillance cameras, for God’s sake, Corsier had argued—he had no idea if there were—and if the Serb did not want to be conspicuous, he would bloody well dress like everyone else whether he liked it or not. He could not go into the Connaught Hotel in Mayfair looking like a refugee and expect not to be noticed. Skerlic was insulted, and as Corsier argued with him, he actually turned his head away like a child refusing another spoon of green peas.
In the end he relented, and when he arrived at the Connaught carrying an oxblood leather satchel that Corsier had bought for him at Asprey, he did not turn a head. Corsier knew because he was watching from an armchair in the lobby.
He waited nearly ten minutes before folding his London Times and following Skerlic up to his rooms. When he got there the Serb had peeled off his suit coat and had thrown it, turned inside out, onto one of the sofas in the reception area. He was standing at the windows, looking at the tripods and the binoculars.
“What’s this?” he asked.
“I don’t want to depend on the audio alone. I want to see who’s there, and I want to know what they’re doing.”
Skerlic looked across Carlos Place. “He leaves the curtains open?”
“In the second-floor room, yes. It’s a library, a space for viewing paintings and drawings. There’s good natural light.”
“You can see everything over there?”
“Very nearly.”
“No privacy.”
“It’s a place of business, and it’s far enough away that, without something like these”—he gestured to the binoculars—“you really can’t see much of anything.”
Skerlic looked across as if to double-check that assertion, but the lights were out.
“We still have to rely on the mike,” he said. “The mike is how I will know if his face is in the right place.”
“I can see if that’s the case.”
“You cannot rely on what you see. The perspective might be confusing. You could be wrong.”
“Of course. I intend to watch nevertheless.”
Skerlic regarded him as if he were a simpleton and shrugged. “Where are the pictures?”
“In my bedroom.” Corsier nodded to the doorway on the right. “Your bedroom is over there,” he added, tilting his head the other way.
“Get them.”
Corsier went to his bedroom and returned with one picture, then went back for the other. Skerlic lifted each onto one of the sofas and began examining it, going over the elaborate moldings with his face close to the gilding. Then he turned them over and examined the backs.
“Okay,” he said. He carried each of them across the room and leaned them against the wall, facing out. He looked around the room. “Okay. We pull that over there to over here.”
Corsier helped him move a writing desk over to the windows so that it sat at an angle to the street. Skerlic removed all the hotel information from the desk, removed the lamp, then carried over the satchel and set it beside the desk. He opened the satchel and began taking out his electronic equipment, putting the pieces on the writing desk like a surgeon laying out his instruments.
Corsier stood by uneasily. The equipment made him uncomfortable. Naturally he was entirely ignorant about it, but he had always had the impression that electronically activated explosives were highly unstable, even precarious. Not reliable. Touchy. He was aware that he was beginning to perspire as he watched Skerlic deal with the wires and the little plastic boxes with toggle switches and readout dials, both analogue and digital. Why was so much electronic equipment always black? He could smell the electrical wiring and the plastic. He noted with surprise that Skerlic was precise in the way he handled the equipment. He didn’t remember seeing any of that kind of deftness a few nights ago in the Harley Mews garage.
Half an hour later Skerlic pulled two sets of headphones out of the leather satchel and plugged them into the side of one of the boxes. One set had very long wires attached to it.
“These are yours,” Skerlic said, extending them to Corsier. “Put them on and sit over there.” He motioned to another chair.
Corsier moved the chair over, sat down, and held the headphones in his hands as Skerlic looked around the reception area and spotted a radio on a lamp table. He unplugged it and put it on the floor about five feet away from the paintings. He turned it on and reduced the volume to a near whisper. Corsier could barely hear it. Skerlic put on his set of headphones, gesturing for Corsier to do the same, and turned on the dials of the two black boxes. Needles moved on the analogue dials. Red numbers flew by rapidly on the digital one. In moments Corsier heard the radio, classical music, at first low, then louder and quite clear. For the first time since Corsier had known him, Skerlic managed a tight-lipped smile.
Suddenly he flipped off the switches, removed his headphones, and turned to Corsier.
“Now, the schedule tomorrow . . .”
“I take the pictures to Knight between eight and eight-thirty. We’ll chat awhile in his library so that you will have time to modulate the reception or frequency or whatever you do. Then I come back over here. Schrade is supposed to be there around ten o’clock.”
“What if something happens and he comes earlier?”
“Even so, I don’t think he would come earlier than eight-thirty.” He paused. “What about the second frame?”
“The second frame?”
“If you get Schrade with one, what about the second one?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing? You just leave it? You will be giving investigators a guidebook of evidence, wiring signatures, explosive source . . .”
Skerlic snorted. “You have been watching too many spy programs on television. Bomb makers know all about signatures. Besides, they have never seen this woman’s work before.” He scratched his head, uninterested. “Now, after the detonation I will pack everything and leave. Within forty-eight hours I will message your e-mail address with instructions for the final deposit.”
“Fine.” The maneuvering was just about at an end. It had taken him a long time to get to this point.
“There is nothing else to do until tomorrow, then,” Skerlic said, standing. “Don’t touch any of this shit.”
He turned and walked out of the reception and into his bedroom. He left the door open. Corsier heard the television come on, and that was that for the evening.
Corsier turned off the lights. He stood at the windows and looked down into the intersection that circled the small island of plane trees. The bronze statue of the nude woman glistened in the rain. No one sat on the benches beneath the trees. A few black cabs were parked at the curb across the street, and occasionally a car came and went along Carlos Place, going into or coming out of Mount Street.
It was a very strange evening for Claude Corsier. For the past several months, during his methodical planning of Schrade’s assassination, it was an abstract, an academic exercise. It had become a little more real with each passing week, and then with each passing day. Now it was down to hours. An imaginary act was about to become a reality, an irreversible one with critical consequences. He felt at once oddly powerful, almost euphoric, and at the same time trepidant. Despite all his planning, a great deal still could go wrong. He would spend the night worrying.
Left alone in his suite, Strand turned off the lights and threw back the curtains. The suite looked out to the Italian embassy on Davies Street, along which he had just walked. He could see the trees in Grosvenor Square. On the other side of that, a few streets away, was Ma Micheline.
Looking into the hazy London night, he double-checked his perspective. Other than Mara, not a soul on earth knew what he was doing. Even professional assassins had to share their secrets with one other person—the one who hired them. It couldn’t get any tighter than that.
Yet it really wasn’t tight at all. Mara’s contact with Carrington was a gaping hole. However, only the intelligence services were likely to see it, and even that would be obscured once Strand unleashed his files on the media. It was highly unlikely that any of the agencies would pursue what they knew. After all, they were among the few entities on earth that feared light more than darkness. There was no turning back on this.
If Schrade’s reservation was for eight-thirty, Strand would do well to be in the foyer by seven, an hour and a half from now. Schrade might go to the restaurant from the hotel, or he might fly in from Berlin, go to the restaurant, and then to the hotel. Strand couldn’t do anything about that. But if Schrade left from Claridge’s, Strand wanted to see if he was accompanied by a chauffeur, if he was accompanied by the second person, if he took a cab. It would even help to know how he was dressed. He had test fired the pistol into the bathtub, but he was still apprehensive about the pellet’s ability to penetrate the amount of clothing Hodge had assured him it would.
He had a sharp pain in his stomach, just below his sternum. Disappointed, he pressed his fingers into it. He had thought he was handling the tension better than this. It scared him. How the hell could he be sure of his judgment?
Turning away from the windows, he removed his coat and maneuvered around the furniture to the bed. He tossed his coat on the foot of the bed, untied his shoes, and lay down. He tried to relieve the tension in his stomach by breathing deeply. The shadows in the suite were murky, no sharp distinctions, no clear margins or boundaries. From the window across the room a blue gray light washed over the furniture, the color of night. Christ, he wanted this to be over.
For the next hour—he kept looking over at the face of a clock on the table at the side of the bed—he concentrated on rehearsing several variations of the same scenario. He approached Schrade coming out of the restaurant, jammed the pistol into his side, and fired, catching the slumping figure. He approached Schrade in the lobby of Claridge’s, jammed the pistol into his side, and fired, catching the slumping figure. He approached Schrade on the street, jammed the pistol into his side, and fired, catching the slumping figure. He approached Schrade . . .
He began to worry about how many opportunities he would have before ten o’clock the next morning. Obviously it would be best to finish it tonight. Even if it didn’t work out as he imagined it, if the pellet didn’t penetrate, if he fumbled the pistol, if Schrade screamed, if . . . if . . . it would be a hell of a lot easier to flee into the darkness. Another reason why a street-side approach was best. If something went wrong inside, getting away would be much more difficult.
He began to worry about Schrade’s dinner guest. Was it a woman, and would she accompany him back to Claridge’s? That would make it more difficult. If she was with him, she would be close enough to see that Strand’s brush-by was more than that. The milliseconds between the contact, the muffled slap, Schrade’s reaction, and Strand’s own response could say volumes to her. Her impressions would be instantaneous and would be largely formed by Strand’s own behavior in those seconds after Schrade’s reaction to being shot. If the saxitoxin didn’t work fast enough . . .
The next time he glanced at the clock he was startled to see that it was eight o’clock. He swung his feet off the bed and flipped on the light. Eight o’clock. God. What had gone on in his mind to make an hour pass so quickly? Immediately his stomach clenched. He swore, put on his shoes, and stood. He undid his trousers and smoothed down the tail of his shirt, then fastened his belt again.
Walking into the bathroom, he turned on the light and then looked in the mirror. He had the sensation of being a voyeur, as though he were behind a two-way mirror. The latex was holding up well. Nothing had changed. He smiled. The man smiled. There was no hint of resistant tissue. Everything moved naturally, as it was supposed to. He firmed up the knot in his tie. He wanted to wash his face. He turned out the light.
In the dimly lighted suite he put on his suit coat, grabbed his raincoat and umbrella, and left.
Strand was relieved to find that the foyer and the front hall were fairly busy, more generally active than he ever remembered them being, with people milling about the marble floors, moving in and out through the arches that led to the foyer. There was no bustle, no sense of collegial acquaintance among any of the guests.
He took a seat as out of the way as he could manage and still see the vestibule. He put his hands on the curved handle of his umbrella and sat back to wait and watch. Senior employees of the hotel stood about usefully but unobtrusively in dark suits while liveried staff glided to and fro across the polished marble floors in their scarlet tailcoats and white stockings.
Strand had no luck. At eight-twenty Schrade had not appeared. He was nothing if not punctual, so Strand could only assume that he was going to the restaurant from somewhere else. He walked out of the vestibule and got a cab in front of the hotel.
• • •
Ma Micheline was something new for sedate Mayfair, a result, perhaps, of Tony Blair’s insistence that Great Britain should begin thinking positively, reminding itself and the world that it was a modern, progressive, twenty-first-century commonwealth, a place of possibilities and bright futures.
In that vein, Ma Micheline was a wonderful mixture of sophistication and understated adventure. It was located on a quiet street of Edwardian architecture near Park Place, and as Strand approached he saw its softly lighted interior through large plate-glass windows, the pale ice blue linen tablecloths shimmering as though floating freely in the receding, tenebrous expanse of the large dining room. Once inside, Strand entered the warm, polished world of belle epoque decor, subdued lighting, smartly dressed diners, huge paintings along the walls above the wainscoting reminiscent of Picasso’s blue period.
There was an abundance of serving persons of two kinds. The first were waiters in tuxedos and glittering white shirts with wing-tip collars who did most of the work; and the second were a generous number of young women dressed identically in black, water-thin cocktail dresses, a single strand of pearls, their hair identically bobbed, with straight bangs. They all had blue eyes. They were the only introduction of eccentricity, but they were striking, and they waited on the tables with a somber, detached efficiency.
While the maître d’ located his reservation, Strand quickly scanned the dining room. Schrade was not there, but something caught his eye; he came back to a table and looked at a man sitting alone, in three-quarter profile. Strand tensed. Bill Howard was buttering a piece of bread.
Strand almost wheeled around, then caught himself. It took every bit of his self-control to allow the maître d’ to lead him through the aisles of tables to one five or six tables away. It was in a good location. Howard would have had to turn his head to see Strand’s table.
With his heart working hard to maintain some semblance of a rhythm, Strand ordered a bottle of wine, which arrived instantly. As one of the young women began opening it for him, Wolfram Schrade made his entrance.
Strand had not seen him in nearly five years, but Schrade had not changed. He was neither older nor heavier nor thinner. Even from where he sat, Strand could see Schrade’s strange clear eyes, and as he approached, following the maître d’, Strand reacquainted himself with the straight, narrow nose, the wide mouth with its thin upper lip and full lower lip, the thick, coarse hair the color of the vellum pages of old books. Schrade carried himself with an erect, straight-backed posture that was saved from being military by his abundant self-assurance, evident in the way he moved with a loose elegance that Strand had never seen matched anywhere.
Strand was not prepared for the rush of emotions that flooded over him as he heard Schrade’s deep voice, his heavily accented English. Strand bent his head to his menu and shifted his eyes to one side to watch them. He was suddenly seized by a loathing for Schrade that surpassed any animus he had felt in the past. He watched as one of the black-draped young women poured Schrade’s wine; he picked up the glass and drank without even looking at her. He portrayed no expression whatsoever as he talked to Howard. Strand remembered the arrogance he had always thought Schrade’s lack of expression conveyed. Schrade picked up his menu, glanced over it once, and then tossed it down, knowing what he wanted from the complicated entries without giving it a second thought, a dismissive gesture that demonstrated his world-weary hauteur in a way that Strand detested.
Watching Schrade, Strand slowly, deliberately dredged up the painful images he had carried with him like secret reliquaries: the harsh light on Romy’s wild face as she looked back over her shoulder, horrified, desperate, the rear of her Land Rover sinking slowly into the cold tidewater; Ariana’s naked, bloody body stuffed under the bed in the Metropole Hotel in Geneva; Dennis Clymer’s headless, limbless corpse being fished out of the Canal de Charleroi in Brussels; Meret’s charred skull amid the smoldering rubble of his home in Houston; Claude Corsier.
“Monsieur?”
Strand ordered the first thing that caught his eye.
Goddamn Bill Howard. Had Schrade been dining with a woman, or any person other than Howard, Strand would have had a chance on the sidewalk after dinner. But Howard would see right through Strand’s clumsy procedure. It would work only among the unsuspecting, the uninitiated. Howard’s world of betrayals and dirty business was far too cynical for him to witness such an act and be fooled by it.
Strand sat back with his glass of wine and looked once again at Schrade. He stared at him, his eyes exploring every minute aspect of his face and dress and demeanor in the same way a sightless man’s fingers lightly probed a person’s body to gain a sense of understanding. In Strand’s case he knew the man all too well. What he was doing as he watched Schrade was more akin to picking at a scab. Everything about the man inspired a disgust that Strand did not want to let go. He worried it and studied it, using it to justify a moment that he felt in his viscera was not long away.
Strand watched them, tantalized by their facial expressions, their gestures, the angle of their bodies, the cant of their shoulders. Bill Howard seemed quite comfortable with Schrade, as much as anyone could be. Their conversation was constant and apparently to the point, since neither of them ever took the time to look around the restaurant, either out of idle curiosity or out of concern for surveillance. Strand took that as a good sign, an indication that he had successfully convinced Howard that he had departed London the previous night.
He watched carefully as they progressed through their meal. He guessed that both men would have dessert. When the time came, they did, accompanied by coffee for Howard and espresso for Schrade. Strand asked for his bill. He wanted to leave just in front of them. They lingered over their drinks. Strand’s bill came promptly, too promptly. He perused it. They called for their bill also. Strand caught the eye of the young woman in the black dress, who took his credit card. Schrade did the same. Strand felt as though he were engaged in an intricate dance in which the partners never touched.
His young woman returned. Schrade’s returned. Bill Howard now looked around idly for the first time. He looked straight at Strand, who had glanced up from signing his credit card slip. Their eyes met, and Howard’s eyes moved on. That was bad luck. Howard did not recognize him, but ideally Strand should never have allowed himself to be noticed at all, not even in passing. Strand tore off his copy of the credit slip and got up from his table. Neither Schrade nor Howard noticed he was leaving.
He had to wait in the reception foyer for his raincoat and umbrella. If they separated here, at the restaurant, Strand had a chance at Claridge’s as Schrade went inside. Or in the lobby, if it was still busy. Or in the elevator, if he could get him alone.
Just as his coat and umbrella arrived, Schrade and Howard appeared at the desk, asking for theirs. One of the blue-eyed women helped Strand on with his raincoat while Schrade and Howard chatted a moment, waiting for their coats to be retrieved from the cloakroom. Strand could hear their voices clearly, but he understood nothing. The blood was driving through his head so violently, his ears heard only the rushing.
As Strand was buttoning his coat he realized the foyer was full of people. Two couples had arrived. There was the noise of conversation. Three young women in black were now among them. The one who had helped Strand turned to the arriving couples to ask their names. A second one was approaching with Schrade’s and Howard’s raincoats, and a third was talking to the maître d’ about something happening in the dining room. Howard turned away, momentarily distracted. Schrade was being helped with his coat.
This was it. Strand thrust his hand into his pocket and gripped the pistol. He put his finger into the trigger guard and took one step toward Schrade as Howard turned around and looked at him, their faces an arm’s length away.
What in the hell was he doing? Hadn’t he just told himself at the table that it wouldn’t work as long as Howard was with him? The pistol felt like a brick in his hand.
“How are you?” Howard said reflexively in his American drawl, with his American familiarity, like saying “Excuse me” when one found oneself face-to-face with someone in a sudden crowded situation, shoulders touching, hips brushing. Did Howard’s eyes linger a moment? Did something catch his notice?
Strand grunted, nodded, turned, the small crowd shifting naturally, never maintaining the same configuration, the new arrivals moving up.
Strand made it to the door and was suddenly outside. He was perspiring profusely and was suddenly worried about the latex. He took the first cab available, got inside, and leaned forward.
“Just pull up a little way and wait, please.”
Schrade and Howard emerged and talked on the sidewalk. They were not interested in a cab, and Howard showed no signs of leaving. A dark Mercedes turned on its lights down the street and moved toward them slowly. As it approached the restaurant’s awning, the doorman stepped out and opened the door. Schrade and Howard got inside.
“Christ,” Strand said. He leaned forward and told the cabdriver, “I need you to follow this Mercedes coming around us here. I think it’s going to Claridge’s, but if it’s not, I just need to know where it’s going.” He took two fifty-pound notes out of his wallet and handed one through the window. “The Mercedes driver is trained to spot a tail.”
“Right, sir. I understand.”
He may have understood, but he didn’t know what he was doing. He glommed on to the Mercedes, which luckily went straight up the street and around Grosvenor Square to Claridge’s. If he had been going anywhere else, the Mercedes driver would have spotted him in five minutes.
“Keep going,” Strand said quickly. They passed the Mercedes, which had pulled up to the Claridge’s awning, and turned into Avery Row, which turned quickly into Brook’s Mews, which brought them around to Davies Street.
“Okay,” Strand said, unable to hide his frustration and anger. “Back to Claridge’s.”
When the cab approached the awning, he gave the second fifty-pound note to the driver and hurried through the vestibule to the front hall. He was just in time to see Schrade’s back rounding the corner to the elevators. Where was Howard? Was he ahead of him? Was he now behind Strand, watching Schrade’s back? Strand had no time to speculate further. He hurried to follow and got to the elevators just in time to wait a moment with Schrade. Howard was not there, nor was anyone else other than Schrade. Perfect. Strand’s heart was slamming against his chest. One hand was holding the umbrella, the other was in his raincoat pocket, gripping the pistol.
The elevator opened, three men got off, and he and Schrade stepped inside. Schrade punched the button for the fifth floor. Strand reached across and punched the button for the sixth. He stepped back. He rehearsed the coming moments. When the doors closed he would shoot Schrade immediately. When they stopped on the fifth floor and the doors opened, he would grab Schrade and pretend to be ministering to him. If someone was waiting there, he would call for help. If no one was waiting, he would shove Schrade out into the hall and go on up to the next floor, then down and out of the hotel.
All of this burst into his mind as an instant template for the next three minutes. He felt for the safety on the pistol. The doors were closing. He flicked off the safety.
Then a bell chimed and the doors jerked back. A man and a woman were waiting apologetically.
“Sorry,” the man said. The two of them stepped in, between Schrade and Strand, and the man punched the seventh floor. The woman was wearing a gardenia fragrance that instantly permeated the elevator, a saccharine epitaph for the demise of another opportunity.
Strand was trembling inside when Schrade stepped off the elevator on the fifth floor. That was the end of it for the evening. He got off the elevator on the sixth and then waited in the hall until he could descend again to his own room on the fourth floor.
Once inside, he stood still a moment, panting as if he had run the whole distance from Ma Micheline. Jesus Christ, how could he have been that close without . . . He stopped. He reminded himself again of the reality of what he was doing. It was no different from surveillance work, until the last moment. Up to then it required the same patience, was subject to the same frustrations, required the same instantaneous adjustments in plan to accommodate unforeseen intrusions. One always expected the inevitable unexpected event. Changing course was routine. Adapting to sudden reversals was the norm.
Back in his suite, he pulled off his raincoat and hung it in the closet, then his suit coat. He laid the pistol on the coffee table. He kicked off his shoes and slumped down on the sofa, looking out toward the Italian embassy. He stared out to the London night for a moment and then picked up the telephone.
“It’s me,” he said when Mara answered.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. Drained. No luck.” He told her about the events of the evening. She listened without comment.
“So that leaves the morning,” he said.
She waited a second. “Listen, Harry. Don’t . . . don’t . . .”
“Don’t get desperate. Don’t do anything rash,” he said.
“Yeah, that’s what I meant.”
They both seemed to realize how bizarre that sounded, in light of what he was trying to do.
“I was, uh, surprised at how I felt, seeing him after all this time,” Strand said. He was speaking softly, as though the telephone were the walls of a confessional. “I was very surprised.”
“What do you mean?”
He hesitated. “I wanted to kill him. It wasn’t dispassionate.”
“Did you think it would be?”
“I’d imagined it would be.”
They did not speak for a moment, and then she said, “Harry . . .” The tone of her voice hinted at a conversation he did not want to have. “Maybe . . . maybe . . .”
“Don’t say it.”
“Harry, neither of us is sure we’re doing the right thing here.”
“I am.”
“No, you’re not. Where’s the wisdom in being blind about this?”
“I’m not looking for wisdom, Mara.”
She said nothing else. They stayed on the telephone together, but neither of them spoke for a long time. Then Mara said:
“It’s raining again here. And it’s lonely.”
Strand struggled a moment with the lump in his throat. He thought she must know what was happening.
“I love you,” he said.
“And I love you, Harry Strand.”
The morning was so overcast and dark that the street lamps were still on as Strand sat in Claridge’s plush robe and ate the light breakfast he had ordered. The night had been a grim phantasmagoric passage from one day to the next, during which he had tried to stay flat on his back to avoid inadvertently damaging the face of the stranger who slept with him. He tried to think of anything other than Wolfram Schrade: he succeeded in thinking of nothing else.
He had ordered an extra pot of coffee and already had begun drinking from the second one when he looked at his watch. It was seven-thirty.
He had known two professional hit men during his years in the intelligence business. They were, seemingly, unremarkable men, a little remote, perhaps, but one of them in particular he quite liked. The man was forty-three years old, Strand remembered, and he had grown up in the midwestern United States. He had been trained to kill when he had served in Vietnam, and when he’d finished his second tour in Southeast Asia, his superior officer had recommended his services to the Metsada. It was as though he had simply accepted another assignment. There was a military angle to it, being an Israeli operation, so it had seemed like an extension of his last Saigon assignment. After that the Israelis referred him to someone else, and very gradually the military aspect of it faded away. One day he woke up and realized he was making a very good living being paid to kill people; he was a professional assassin.
At the time Strand had known him, they were staying in a very shabby hotel in Algiers. They spent a lot of time talking, sometimes in their rooms, sometimes wandering in the narrow, alleylike streets of the city. He confided to Strand one hot night as they sat in the dark beside a window in Strand’s room, smoking and looking down into the crowded street, that he vomited every time he killed someone. Sometimes before, sometimes after. It was odd, he said, because he was not repulsed by the killing, so he didn’t know why it happened. But when it was time, he didn’t fight it. He just accepted it as part of the business. It used to bother him, he said, but now he didn’t worry about it anymore.
But Strand had always wondered why the man had told the story.
He picked up his cup and saucer and walked to the window with it. He had not turned on the lights in the room, so the suite was washed in a gray luminescence in which the burnished surfaces glistened with a pearlish haze. The light died away kindly into the corners, and colors were reduced to pallid values. It was an effect that he especially liked, though he felt odd about being able to enjoy it at this particular moment.
He had thought of Schrade until he was sick of him. He doubted that he had had a single heartbeat during the night that Schrade had not shared with him. He was saturated with the man. Killing him would be a sweet liberation. He knew it would be a scarifying act, too, like that of a fox that chewed off its own paw and left it behind in the jaws of the trap as it limped away on a bloody stump to freedom.
• • •
Mara was sitting on the edge of their bed, fastening the buckle on her shoes, when she decided to go on to Knight’s immediately even though she would be a little early. The decision was a result partly of a nagging sixth sense and partly of anxiety. She was worried sick about Strand, her mind generating an endless chain of scenarios about what he was doing and what was happening to him, none of them good. She couldn’t help it. That none of these scenarios was hopeful was depressing, which she feared would adversely affect the way she had to handle herself within the next hour.
The sixth sense was, naturally, more difficult to deal with. It was, simply, a discomfiting tug at the back of her mind that was so persistent, it seemed foolish to ignore it.
She stood up and smoothed her dress, a dove gray wool knit that fell to her ankles. She stepped to the windows and regarded her faint reflection. There was no full-length mirror in the bare town house. She entertained the idea of wearing a belt and finally decided against it, preferring a sleeker look. Her stockings were bone, her shoes matched the dove gray of the dress. She had taken the single braid of her hair and coiled it in a complicated chignon. A single black pearl drop dangled from each ear.
After calling for the cab and slipping on her long black raincoat, she stood at the windows and looked down at the street. Whatever was going to happen to them was already in motion and couldn’t be stopped or turned back or undone. She did not feel good about it, and the fact that she was not optimistic filled her with an enormous sadness.
The black cab came down Chesterfield Hill, emerging slowly from the fog and the drizzle. Suddenly she was angry, furious at herself and at the weakness of her feelings. She wheeled around from the windows and started down the stairs.
• • •
When the doorbell rang, Carrington Knight was surprised. He glanced at his watch and stepped to the windows to look down.
“A cab?” He turned with a puzzled frown to Claude Corsier, who was sitting in one of the armchairs, balancing a cup of tea on a saucer. “I don’t have any idea who that is. Excuse me a moment.”
At the landing he pushed a button to unlock the front door and started down the curving staircase.
Upon reaching the ground floor, he crossed the foyer and opened the front door.
“Oh, good Lord, Ms. Paille.”
“I’m sorry I’m early,” she said, stepping inside. “I hope this isn’t inconveniencing you.”
“Oh, my goodness, no, no, no, not at all,” he said, ushering her inside. “Let me take your coat.” He relished looking at her as she turned her back to him and let the raincoat slip off her shoulders. What an exquisite neck, Knight thought, the little wisp of dark hair there at the nape. The supple wool knit fit the woman like a kiss.
“Listen,” Knight said, his mind jittering with a way to handle this awkward circumstance as he hung her coat in the closet, “there’s a gentleman upstairs, another collector and dealer. He’s actually just on his way out, but if you don’t mind, I’d like him to meet you, and to quickly look at your collection.” He could not, on the spur of the moment, think of any other way to get them around each other now that Corsier had stayed a little too long and she had come a little too early.
“Certainly,” she said, “I’d love to meet him.”
Corsier was waiting for them when they topped the last step on the landing. Knight introduced her to Corsier, whom he presented as Mr. Blanchard, an impromptu fabrication that Corsier accepted as smoothly as if they had rehearsed it.
Corsier, regal as always, bowed slightly from the waist and took her hand. He did not kiss it, although he looked as if he wanted to. Like Knight, Corsier was a connoisseur of beauty in its endless variations. Everything, even beauty, existed within a continuum, and a beautiful woman was certainly at the highest end of the scale. Ms. Paille was no less stunning today than she had been two days before.
Well aware of their tight schedule, Knight quickly retrieved Cao’s drawings from the vault and, while keeping up a rapid-fire, though oblique, explanation of Ms. Paille’s situation, placed the portfolio on the library table and opened it with a precious manner.
He stepped back. Claude Corsier silently studied the Balthus encased in the first leaf. Then he methodically went through the portfolio without hurrying, much to Knight’s increasing agitation. Occasionally Corsier leaned forward to examine a drawing more closely, his nose nearly touching it. At last he straightened and turned around.
“Ms. Paille, you are in possession of a very handsome collection here. I’m sure you know that.”
“Mr. Knight has made me aware,” she said.
Corsier elaborated on his thoughts about each of the drawings, turning to look at one of them now and again. Knight could see that the old bear found Ms. Paille to be a bright brush stroke of beauty, eliciting his most charming manner.
After consulting his watch, Corsier excused himself, pleading obligations elsewhere. He took Ms. Paille’s hand once again with a shallow bow.
Knight walked him down the stairs to the door.
“Are you going to offer those drawings to Schrade, too, Carrington?” Corsier asked softly, pausing in the foyer.
“I think I am, yes.”
“You should. What a remarkable collection.”
He walked to the cloak closet and took out his raincoat. “You know, Carrington, you should keep them in the vault until the very last moment, until the Schiele deal is completed. Bring them out just before he’s about to leave.”
“Don’t worry.” Knight smiled. “I’m going to squeeze the most out of the Schieles. I won’t let the drawings compete. They are a completely separate situation and negotiation—altogether.” He handed Corsier his umbrella.
Corsier smiled also. “Thank you, Carrington.” He turned to the door. “Oh, the woman, Ms. Paille. Is she going to stay for the meeting?”
“No, I think not. Definitely not.”
“Good,” Corsier said. He turned and walked out the door, putting up his umbrella. He descended the front steps and disappeared around the corner on Carlos Place.
9:15
He looked at his watch. He had been sitting in the foyer, with yet another cup of coffee, for more than half an hour. Mara would be getting ready to leave for Carrington’s in a cab. He guessed that Schrade would wait to come down at the last minute and go straight to his Mercedes. Still, he had come early in case Schrade had an earlier agenda.
Schrade rounded the corner from the elevators, his pace deliberate, his back straight, and headed into the front hall. He was alone, no Howard. Was Howard waiting in the restaurant for him? In the front hall out of Strand’s view? Strand quickly left some money beside his coffee cup and followed Schrade, glancing around for Howard.
Just as he got to the sidewalk, Schrade was getting into the backseat of the Mercedes. Alone. Moving without hurrying, Strand stepped across and got into one of the waiting cabs along the street.
As he had done the previous night, he leaned forward and gave the driver a large note.
“I need to follow the Mercedes discreetly,” he emphasized.
“Yes . . . yes, sir.” The driver’s eyes boggled at the size of the note as he digested the instructions. “Oh, right, sir.” He was suddenly alert, responsible, ready. He flipped on his windshield wipers and pulled out into the traffic of Brook Street.
“The driver’s going to be watching for this sort of thing.”
“Yes, sir. I understand.”
He seemed to. He allowed traffic to get between them, then quickly crowded up close as they approached Bond Street, where all the traffic had to turn right in the direction of Piccadilly. He let the Mercedes move up again several car lengths. The traffic muddled along. These few blocks were something of a bottleneck. Bond Street was not a through street at this point, being interrupted by a pedestrian court a few blocks ahead, after which it began again and went on to Piccadilly. Traffic slowed here since it was forced to turn into side streets or continue on a contorted series of turns to get back to Bond. The Mercedes remained in the left lane, then it pulled to the curb and stopped.
“Hold up, hold up,” Strand cautioned. The traffic slowed to a creep. They were still three cars behind the Mercedes. Schrade got out and hurried across the puddle-strewn sidewalk to a shop three doors back from his car: Stefan Kappe: Silver and Goldsmith. He was now directly across from Strand.
“Okay, this is good enough,” Strand said. He got out of the cab in the middle of the street and popped up his umbrella as the surprised driver thanked him profusely. At that moment the traffic began moving again, and the cab pulled forward as Strand stepped away and onto the sidewalk.
He stood in the drizzling rain and hesitated. He didn’t dare go into the shop. It was too small. The slap of the pistol firing would be obvious. The sidewalks of Bond Street were perfect. Because of the rain everyone was hurrying, umbrellas up. The abundance of smart shops along the way assured that the pedestrian traffic was ample, in spite of the rain, and the streets themselves were full of cars, cabs, and delivery vans. The slap would easily be swallowed by the sounds of the city.
Strand moved closer to the shops to get out of the line of sight of the Mercedes’s rearview mirror. He made a quick calculation. Schrade was about twenty to thirty steps from the Mercedes. He was not carrying an umbrella, so he would be in a hurry when he started back to the car. If Strand were close enough, he could easily engineer a collision. If other pedestrians were around them at that moment, all the better.
He walked to a shop window one door over from Kappe’s. He peered inside, oblivious of what he was seeing. The rain was steady, splashing his trousers legs. He was so aware of the blood hammering in his ears that the noise of the traffic was distant. How long could he wait? How long dared he wait before he risked having the chauffeur—who, of course, was more than a chauffeur—notice him? He couldn’t walk any farther because Schrade might come out any moment, and Strand would be too far away to make it to him before he reached the Mercedes. He looked at his watch. Schrade was due at Carrington’s in twenty minutes. He was now ten minutes away from Carlos Place. Could Strand remain inconspicuous for ten minutes, standing still in the rain, pacing in the rain, dawdling in the rain?
He had to admit the situation was perfect. Schrade would come out. Strand would bump into him and fire into his stomach. Schrade would slump. Strand would act confused, then yell for help. He would yell loudly enough for the chauffeur to hear him, and then he would stay with Schrade, holding him in the rain, holding the umbrella over him . . .
The door to Kappe’s opened and Schrade paused in the open doorway. He looked up at the rain, turned inside, and spoke to someone.
Strand looked both ways. Pedestrians were converging, God sent as if he had prayed for them: a young woman who looked as though she were an art student—Cork Street and the Royal Academy of Arts were nearby—carrying a large portfolio and coming from the direction of Clifford Street, followed closely by a preoccupied businessman; from the other direction a second businessman, head down, plowed through the rain; while a painter who was involved in remodeling a nearby shop slammed closed the rear door of his parked van and, clutching an armload of wadded tarpaulin, started running diagonally toward Strand.
At the same instant, the door to an expensive luggage shop behind Strand opened and a woman emerged with a plastic-covered bag nearly too large for her to carry.
Schrade said one last thing over his shoulder and bounded out into the rain.
Strand moved toward him.
The art student twisted to miss Schrade, who had burst out in front of her.
The businessman behind the student swerved to miss her and stepped right into Schrade’s path.
The woman with the luggage never saw any of them as she dashed to the curb where her car was parked behind Schrade’s Mercedes.
The painter and the preoccupied businessman from the other direction both twisted in midstride to miss the woman with the luggage.
Strand intercepted Schrade, who had lunged ahead at the last instant to try to avoid the businessman.
The three men collided.
Strand grasped Schrade’s arm as if to catch his balance, jammed the pistol into Schrade’s stomach, and pulled the trigger. Once. Twice. Three times. He heard nothing, felt nothing. The painter and the woman with the luggage both dropped what they were carrying as the art student flailed at her oversize portfolio, trying to keep from dropping it. The businessman blurted an apology as Schrade swore in German and wrenched away from Strand’s grip.
The second businessman went around all of it and never stopped.
As Schrade pulled away, Strand staggered into the first businessman, who reflexively caught him, steadied him, and apologized again.
Strand was dumbfounded. After twisting away from the businessman, he wheeled around to orient himself. Everyone was recovering: the woman quickly had picked up her luggage; the painter had snatched up his tarpaulin; the art student was well down the sidewalk. The businessmen were gone.
Strand wheeled around again, just in time to see Schrade slam the door of the Mercedes, casting an angry scowl at Strand through the window. The Mercedes pulled away from the curb and turned smoothly into Conduit Street.
Strand stood with his mouth open in astonishment, his umbrella open and upside-down on the sidewalk. He looked down at the gun in his trembling hand. Desperately he snatched up the umbrella and ran to the curb. Stepping between two cars to hide what he was doing, he pointed the pistol into the gutter and jerked the trigger. Once: slap! Twice: slap! Three times: slap!
He was stunned. What in God’s name . . . ?
Fumbling with the umbrella and the pistol, he removed the clip from the handle. Two shots were left. He hadn’t fired a single pellet at Schrade.
• • •
Corsier sat on the edge of his chair, headphones in place, his eyes glued to the binoculars on the tripod. He had said nothing to Skerlic about the gorgeous woman at Carrington’s. He was exceptionally uneasy about her. Despite Knight’s assurances, Corsier was afraid she would remain for the meeting with Schrade. Ever the opportunist, Knight was probably going to take full advantage of Corsier’s carefully planned scheme. Corsier only hoped that this already baroque enterprise did not collapse under the stress of Knight’s ratcheting up the complexity to a full rococo encounter.
How extraordinary that this Ms. Paille had brought her client’s drawings at this time. It was a bothersome interference. Might it even be suspicious? Corsier could not for the life of him imagine any possible connection here between Ms. Paille and his own endeavor. He had planned this in as near a vacuum as he had been able to manage. He was afraid that what he was seeing here was the appearance of that dreaded poltergeist of every covert operation: the unforeseen intrusion.
The microphones in the frames were working fabulously, and although Corsier was nearly weak from an unsettled nervous stomach, he was mesmerized by his ability to overhear Knight and Ms. Paille.
• • •
When Strand finally came to his senses, standing in the gutter between the two cars in Bond Street, all the confusion and uncertainty that had clouded the previous fifteen minutes turned to an instant understanding and clarity of what had to happen in the next fifteen minutes. He had to get to Carlos Place before Schrade.
The one-way streets pretty much dictated Schrade’s route once he had turned left on Conduit Street. Strand had just about the same distance if he ran into Bruton Street and caught a cab that would take him by a different route around Berkeley Square. Neither course had much of an advantage over the other. He broke into a dead run for the Bruton Street entrance directly across from Conduit Street.
Mara stood before the two Schiele drawings, waiting for Carrington Knight to make his way back up the curving stairway. She was struggling with a peculiar sense of disorientation that had hit her the moment she’d seen Claude Corsier. Though his mustache and goatee had prevented instant recognition, within moments his face had reassembled itself in her memory from the Camp Peary files of six months earlier. She was caught completely off guard.
What was happening here? Newly discovered Schieles? Corsier’s Schieles? Brought to Knight only a few days ago? Was she supposed to believe all of this was coincidence? She would not believe it. She could not. Why was Corsier being introduced as Blanchard? Her mind fumbled for explanations, but nothing even remotely satisfactory came into focus.
“Can I get you anything to drink?” Knight asked. She was still standing with her back to him, facing the two Schieles.
“No, thank you,” she said without turning around.
“Do you know this artist?” he asked, approaching her.
“I recognize the style, but I can’t really say I ‘know’ his work.”
Knight smiled with affectionate indulgence. “Egon Schiele. A contemporary and friend of Mr. Klimt in your collection. He is a much coveted artist these days. Very popular.” He paused. “Mr. Schrade is an ardent collector of this man’s work, just as he is of Klimt’s.”
She turned and squared herself to Knight. “This was planned, then, having my drawings here with the Schieles?”
“Yes and no. It’s the damnedest coincidence I’ve ever experienced in all my years in the business.” Knight’s eyes widened theatrically. He told her briefly of how he had come by the Schieles, skimming over the facts.
“So, this Mr. Schrade was coming to London anyway, then, to see Mr. Blanchard’s drawings?”
“Indeed. Only . . .” Knight shrugged his shoulders in a way to indicate a delicate matter. “Only Mr. Blanchard is offering these drawings anonymously, as you are. I can’t say that happens too often, either—back to back, that is.”
Mara nodded. Claude Corsier was selling drawings to Schrade? Incredible. Actually, it seemed too incredible. She couldn’t understand what was going on here, nor could she possibly imagine why something was going on here. She couldn’t gather together enough logical pieces of the puzzle to propose any scenarios at all.
Knight stepped back, pleased with himself. A lock of his white hair sagged over his forehead, and his eyes twinkled from behind his round black eyeglasses.
“So then, we should hurry. You’ve brought the documentation?”
“Actually, no,” Mara said.
Knight frowned. Worry, concern, horrible imaginings, and a little fear instantly embedded themselves in the pale flesh gathering across his broad forehead. “I beg your pardon?”
“I don’t have the documentation,” Mara said. “I received a communication from Mr. Cao early this morning. There’s been a change in plans in Hong Kong. Mr. Cao does not want to sell.”
“What? Does not want to sell?”
“That’s correct.”
Knight almost staggered. He looked at the portfolio on the table with disbelief.
“Does he want some other arrangement with me? Would he like to talk about it? I can assure you, Mr. Schrade will buy these. And he will pay the very highest price. You were absolutely correct in that, Ms. Paille.”
“It has nothing to do with anything here, Mr. Knight. Mr. Cao lives in his own world. What he does and how he does it often have nothing at all to do with anything, except what is in his head. I’ve worked for him for so long, I’ve become—almost—acclimated to these sudden reversals.”
“Why, this is appalling,” Knight said. “He, you, could hardly have asked for a more convenient, a more serendipitous circumstance than what you have here. Everything has come together absolutely without plan . . . so extraordinary.”
The telephone rang. Knight flinched and looked around at it, and Mara quickly checked her watch. God.
Knight looked at Ms. Paille, held his hand up tentatively as if to freeze the moment, started to speak but didn’t, and picked up the telephone.
“Hello, this is Carrington.” He listened, his dark brow lightening in polite ingratiation. “Oh, yes, absolutely. . . . Of course not. . . . No, no, no, not at all. . . . Absolutely. Very good, very good. . . . Yes, good-bye.”
He put down the receiver and looked at Ms. Paille, concern returning to his expression. “That was Mr. Schrade. He’s in a traffic jam. He’ll be a little late, probably another fifteen minutes.”
“Good,” she said. “Good. That just gives me time to be out of your way.” She moved to the portfolio and began closing it up.
Knight blanched. “Ms. Paille, do you suppose it would be possible for me to talk to Mr. Cao? Perhaps he doesn’t understand the extraordinary—”
“I’m afraid that would be entirely impossible,” Mara said, clasping the portfolio as she rallied every nerve in her body to remain in control. She was horrified that Schrade was still alive. What had happened to Harry? She was nearly faint with anxiety. Carrington Knight was talking urgently, but she heard nothing he was saying. She was fighting nausea. God, Schrade was so close.
Knight was coming around the opposite end of the table to meet her. He had put both hands together prayerfully, holding them in front of his chest, gesturing with them, rocking them back and forth. “These sorts of opportunities are rare, really, because Schrade is the premier individual collector of these artists. . . .”
Somehow she moved unhurriedly, gracefully, even spoke calmly, though she had no idea what she was saying, and eventually she found herself being accompanied by a loquacious Knight down the long turn in the staircase. She had entered headlong into that surreal and common dream in which quick flight in the face of peril was impossible, in which her own legs plowed with slumberous torpor through the thick surf of her panic.
How much time had elapsed? She had no idea. How long had Knight tried to persuade her before they headed for the staircase? How long had it taken them to descend to where they were now? The foyer that occupied the space between the bottom of the stairs and the front door was generous but not grand, yet in her illusory flight it seemed an encompassing sea of indigo silk.
Knight opened the cloakroom door, and she turned her back to him and felt her raincoat on her shoulders. She slipped her arms into the sleeves as Knight, she only vaguely realized, was flattering her, his oily, clever manner grasping at her, trying desperately to hold her with his words.
Where was her driver?
He was ill. She had come in a cab.
Oh, then he should call one.
No, no need to call a cab, she said. There were always those parked across the street in front of the Connaught. Oh, but he could call, he would call. She wouldn’t have to cross the street in the rain. Not at all. It was nothing. She said things, appropriate things.
There were parting words.
She took the umbrella from him and started to open it when the doorbell rang.
She did not flinch but looked up calmly.
Knight tittered. Don’t worry, don’t worry, he would pretend she was simply a client leaving, it happened all the time, there was nothing to worry about, it wasn’t necessary to introduce her, it was just business.
She was suddenly composed. The surreal passed, and the present came into focus. She faced the opening of the door with a singular clarity of mind.
She wondered how Schrade would react. He knew her face as readily as he knew his own. He knew all about her. But he wouldn’t be expecting to see her. That, at least, would be a surprise.
Knight was as oblivious as a butterfly.
He stepped in front of her and opened the door.
A man burst in, sending Knight sprawling flat on his back on the parquet floor and sliding six feet before he stopped at the foot of the Persian stairs.
Strand was dripping wet, his arm stretched out, pointing the pistol at a dumbfounded Carrington Knight.
“Wolf Schrade,” he demanded, short of breath, his lungs burning.
“Wha . . . ?” Knight scrambled up against the last tread on the stairs and gaped, trying to collect his ability to think, to speak.
“Where’s Schrade?”
“He’s not here,” Mara blurted.
Strand looked around at her. “Who the hell are you?” he snapped.
They stared at each other. Silence.
Mara said, “Schrade’s not here. . . . He called . . . he’s late, traffic . . .”
“Jeffrey?” Strand looked up the stairs.
“I haven’t seen him.”
Strand turned to Knight, who choked, “Not here. . . .”
“Who is here?” Strand’s raincoat was shedding streams of water that puddled around his feet.
“Only us,” Mara said. She was standing with her arms pressed to her chest, a gesture of holding on, of controlling at least herself in this volatile moment.
Strand turned on her. “This is no concern of yours, lady. Get out of here.”
She slowly tilted her head to one side. “No. . . .” It was a plea, not a refusal.
“Get out!” Strand yelled.
“Oh, no, please don’t do this. I can’t . . . I won’t.”
“Get out!” Strand screamed this time, furious with her, frantic to get her out of there, to get it under control before Schrade arrived. He glanced at Knight, whose eyes were darting back and forth between them. Even in his confusion he was beginning to calculate the meaning behind Mara’s surprising refusal to flee a shocking, dangerous situation.
“You go with me,” she said emphatically, “or I don’t go at all.”
Strand looked at her. She knew very well what she had just done. With that one sentence she had taken them past the turning point. When it was all over, Knight would remember those words. Knight was a witness. It was one thing to kill Schrade . . . It was over.
“Christ,” Strand said, looking at her. His shoulders sagged. God, what had he done in that fatal moment on Bond Street, when, even against his will, something in his unconscious had frozen his fingers on the trigger of the pistol? He turned to Knight.
“Get up, Carrington.”
This time Knight recognized something familiar in the voice. His eyes narrowed, then he rolled over like a large, awkward child and got to his feet, standing defensively against the newel post.
Strand turned back to Mara. “Okay,” he said, “okay, that’s it, then. It’s over.”
In that instant he could see in her face that she was relieved, that although she had committed herself to him, it had been a commitment she had made in spite of her own deepest feelings, not because of them. God, he didn’t care anymore, he just wanted to be away from it all. He wanted it to be over, and he wanted them to be together and gone and away from it all, even if only for a little while. He would worry about Schrade later. He would treat him the same way most people treated their inevitable last hour of life, by ignoring it entirely until they were unavoidably face to face with it. Why the hell did he think he should be any different?
“Let’s get out of here,” he said. He dropped his arm and turned to Knight. “It’s a long story, Carrington.”
“Harry Strand ?!”
“Yeah, it’s me.”
“Bloody hell, Harry . . . what’s . . . A mask ?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Harry.” Mara interrupted him. “There’s something else. Claude Corsier is alive, and he was just here.”
Strand turned. “He was here?”
“He left just a little while ago. He was already here when I came in. He’d brought two Schiele drawings, new ones that he’d unearthed somewhere. That’s why Schrade’s coming here, not because of my drawings. It was a coincidence, the drawings. Claude left half an hour ago.”
“Coincidence.” He knew there was no coincidence. He turned back to Knight. “What’s going on here, Carrington?”
Knight, stammering, speaking in bursts, quickly spilled out the story of Corsier and his drawings. In his agitation he confused the sequence of the story and went back to explain and then doubled back again to pick up loose ends. He could hardly speak at all. Though he could not even come close to imagining what was happening here, he knew that he had got caught up in an intrigue that was far beyond his world and his experience. And he knew that it was sinister.
“This is not a coincidence,” Strand said to Mara.
“But how could Claude know . . .”
“The timing, maybe. Probably. No one could have known about us and the drawings, our schedule. But the Schieles . . .” He looked at Knight. “The anonymity . . .” He was talking to himself, thinking out loud. “We’ve all sold to Schrade. We all know what he wanted. What he coveted. I could have chosen Schiele. Claude could have chosen the others. Either way . . .”
“God, Harry.” Mara was following him. She saw it all taking shape, too.
“Carrington,” Strand said, “Claude knew Schrade was coming this morning? He knew the time?”
“Of course. Yes, yes.”
The doorbell rang.
Everything in Strand’s mind turned inside out.
“Carrington!” he snapped, again pointing the gun at the art dealer. “Get over here.”
Knight looked as though he were going to faint, as though if he let go of the newel post, he would fall down.
“Get over here!”
Knight came over, his face pasty.
Strand looked at Mara. “Get around the corner, out of sight.”
“Harry, there’s got to be another door, a back door . . .”
“Yes, yes, there’s a back door.” Knight had stopped in the middle of the entry, suddenly hopeful that this could all be made to go away, literally, through a back door. “Oh, please, yes, the back door.”
“Get around the corner,” Strand commanded Mara, his mind suddenly jumping track, changing agendas. He waved at Knight, who cowered over to him like a threatened lapdog. Strand grabbed him, speaking hoarsely.
“Just answer the door and get him inside. If you do anything, if you try to run, I’ll step outside and blow off the back of your head. Open the door, but step back, don’t leave my sight.” He looked at the petrified Knight. “Do you understand?”
Knight nodded.
“Hold yourself together just long enough to play the part. Okay?”
The doorbell rang again.
Knight nodded vigorously.
“Just get him inside,” Strand repeated, stepping back behind the door.
Knight was massaging his hands and whispering to himself, “Shit shit shit shit.” He ran his fingers through his silver locks, shifting his weight repeatedly from one foot to the other in a little mambo. He looked at Strand nervously and punched the button for the electric lock on the door. When it clacked, he opened the door.
“Wolf ! Wolf ! Good of you . . . good of you . . . Come in, come in. . . .” He backed away from the door, stretching out his right arm in a magnanimous gesture of welcome.
Wolfram Schrade was inside.
Strand closed the door and in the same movement put the pistol to the back of Schrade’s neck before he had a chance to react.
“Be very careful,” Strand said.
Schrade froze.
“I’ll explain the gun,” Strand said, remaining out of sight behind Schrade, his left hand on top of Schrade’s left shoulder. “It contains a neurotoxin. If it breaks the skin, you’re dead. In less than a minute. There’s no ‘wounding’ with this.”
Silence.
Knight was standing between Schrade and the stairs, his mouth hanging open stupidly.
“Harry Strand,” Schrade said in his heavily accented English, recognizing the voice.
“Is your driver parked in front?” Strand asked.
“Yes.”
Strand took his left hand off Schrade’s shoulder, reached back without turning around, and punched the electric lock.
“We’re going to get away from the door,” Strand said. “Upstairs.”
They stepped forward, and Schrade caught Mara’s figure in his peripheral vision as she waited inside the gallery doorway. He turned to look at her. He stopped.
“Mara Song.” He said it as if he were ticking off the names on a list.
“Mara Song?” Knight was completely adrift.
Strand pressed the gun into Schrade’s neck again, and they all started up the winding staircase.
As they filed into the library, Strand motioned for Schrade to go into the vault, the door of which always stood open. When he did, Strand closed the door and turned the handle once. Schrade never even saw his disguise.
He told Knight to sit in one of the chairs behind the library table. And Knight sat near the two Schiele drawings, as far away from the pistol as he could get.
Strand gave the pistol to Mara and nodded at Knight. “I’ve got to get this shit off my face,” he said.
“What are you going to do, Harry?” She kept her eyes on the mortified Knight as Strand began peeling off the latex features of the man he had been hiding behind.
“I don’t know,” he mumbled as he worked at the elastic bits of mask.
“The choices—”
“I know,” Strand cut her off. With trembling fingers he peeled away the layers of the stranger’s broad nose. He knew his agitation was noticeable and disturbing to her, but he could do nothing about it. His fingers scrabbled at the bulk of latex over his brow. The adrenaline that had shot through him when he’d heard the doorbell had hit him like a jolt of electricity. He clawed at the ridge along his jaw that had added weight and heft to his head. What had astonished him even more was what he had experienced the moment he’d put the gun to the back of Schrade’s neck. Suddenly he had been suffused with a feral hatred that was the most intense emotion he had ever experienced, and he had almost shot Schrade then, at that instant.
“Good God . . .” Knight was watching Strand emerge from the rubbery peelings that were gathering in front of him on the table like limp shreds of actual flesh. “Good God, man, what in bloody hell is going on here!” Knight’s voice rose wildly.
“Shut up, Carrington.” Strand’s hands were still trembling as he raked and rolled away the last bits of latex from his face. Then he took off the wig and removed the eyebrows. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his face. He was panting. He felt odd, which scared him.
He stood a moment at the far end of the table from Knight, Mara halfway between them. Across the table in front of her was the closed vault. He put his hands on the table to steady himself. The mandarin red walls shimmered, affecting his eyes.
Without saying anything, he turned and walked over to the ebony liquor cabinet near the settee and searched among the bottles for the Scotch. He found it, opened the doors and took out a glass, and poured it half-full. He stood there with his back to them and sipped it, held it in his mouth, and swallowed. He took another sip, did the same.
He returned to the table and looked at Knight.
“Get him out of the vault.”
• • •
When Claude Corsier recognized Harry Strand’s voice, he froze. He leaned into the binoculars and pressed against them until the tripod rocked and he had to steady it. He couldn’t believe his eyes. Strand was nowhere to be seen. But he did believe his ears. He knew Harry Strand’s voice. Then the unknown man, incredibly, locked Schrade into the vault, and Corsier watched, spellbound, as the stranger stood at the end of the library table and removed his face.
“Don’t touch anything,” Corsier whispered.
“He’s not even there,” Skerlic said. Despite his aloof attitude about the binoculars, he too was using them, hunched over his own tripod like a beetle.
“It doesn’t matter,” Corsier said. “Everything has changed.”
“What?” Skerlic took his eyes away from the binoculars. “What do you mean, ‘everything has changed’?”
“Everything has changed,” Corsier repeated. “That man who removed the disguise.” He finally pulled his face away from the tripod and looked at Skerlic. “You do not touch a button until I tell you,” he said, and his tone carried a clear note of threat, something totally foreign to Skerlic’s understanding of Claude Corsier.
Schrade sat across from Carrington Knight at the far end of the library table, facing the windows that looked out onto Carlos Place and the dark, rainy morning. To his left, a little over an arm’s reach away, were the Schiele drawings that had brought them all together. Mara and Strand stood at the opposite end of the table, Mara on Knight’s side, Strand on Schrade’s.
Strand held the pistol again, but he wasn’t pointing it at anyone. He sat on the edge of the table, turned toward Schrade, one leg on the floor. Mara stood next to the windows, leaning against the wall, her arms crossed, hugging herself. Since Schrade had sat down, no one had spoken. Schrade was arrogantly unimpressed by his plight. Knight was miserable with anxiety.
The silence in the room was prolonged, but not deliberately calculated by Strand to ratchet up the tension. He was trying to make decisions that he simply did not know how to make. Knowing Claude Corsier so well, he was sure Corsier had lured Schrade to Knight’s for the same reason he had.
Strand ran the fingers of one hand through his damp hair and looked at Schrade, then at the wide-eyed Knight, and back to Schrade. Strand was beyond exhaustion. The struggles in his own mind, committing himself to a course of action and then at the last minute veering off, his efforts to will himself to do what his will would not allow, his fear of what his actions would do to his relationship with Mara when, if, he finally did kill Schrade—all of it had worn him down to a weariness that he had rarely experienced. And he was finding himself unsure of just about everything, ashamed of himself for having planned an assassination and, even worse, for having dragged Mara into it and ashamed of himself for not having the fortitude to do what he had planned.
“Are we waiting for something, Harry?” Schrade asked finally, turning and looking at Strand. “Or are you simply incapable of making up your mind?” He was wearing an elegant double-breasted suit of charcoal gray with chalk stripes. He was very correct, his tie knotted tightly against his starched collar.
Strand took another drink of Scotch. He had to be very careful with that. If he was going to do something foolish, he wanted to do it because he had planned to do it, not because of the Scotch. He put down the glass.
“Well, the end has to begin somewhere, doesn’t it?” he said.
The challenge in Schrade’s eyes did not retreat.
“I think you should know a few things, Wolf,” Strand said, looking down the long table at Schrade, “before anything else happens here.”
Schrade waited.
“You were very carefully baited,” Strand began. “The two Schieles were meant to bring you here—today.”
Knight’s mouth dropped open.
“There are other drawings here that you haven’t seen that were also offered to Carrington for the same purpose. But the plot got complicated, and the other drawings were unnecessary.” He stopped, fixed his eyes squarely on Schrade.
“Then I was never supposed to have got here.”
“That’s right.”
“And the meeting in Zurich . . .”
“Fabrication.”
Schrade grew still. His clear eyes lost all sense of his personality and became as dead as the glass eyes of a mannequin.
“Then you really . . . cannot . . . get the money.”
“That’s right. Your money’s gone. I lied to Bill Howard. The money’s exactly where your accountants have been telling you it is. Scattered to the stars. It’s been completely out of my hands for years now, almost from the beginning. You could have killed me a long time ago. I was never any good to you.”
Schrade’s thoughts were buried deeply behind his clear eyes. His face was far more of a mask than the latex shreds of Harry Strand’s disguise.
“You are not giving me enough credit, Harry,” Schrade said calmly. “The truth is, I have already killed you. And I must say, it was easy.” He shook his head slowly, pulling down the corners of his mouth in a disdainful shrug. “You were never really capable of objectivity. You had ‘friends,’ Harry, the dumbest mistake in the world.”
Schrade’s hands rested calmly on the library table. He looked down at them. He betrayed no tension, no sign of stress, no anxiety. He looked at Strand again.
“I have killed you, Harry, piecemeal. Dennis Clymer. Ariana Kiriasis. That pretty young woman who worked for you in Houston.” Pause. “Marie.” He shifted his eyes to Mara. “And this one, sooner or later.”
Knight gasped. He was looking at Schrade with an expression of shock that altered the appearance of his face.
“You blame yourself for every one of those deaths,” Schrade went on, “and for the ones to come. And you should. You are right about that, at least. You used them to try to damage me, knowing very well what would happen to them, eventually, knowing they would die for it someday. And you used them anyway.”
He paused, regarding Strand with glacial disapproval.
“You should have been a philosopher or a theologian, Harry, because real life has always confused you. You would have been better off in a profession where the answer to every real-world problem is just another question. The hard answers in life, the reality of brutal solutions, always made you queasy. You had this . . . exasperating weakness for empathy.”
He paused, and again he almost smiled.
“But you were very good at deception, I’ll give you that. It isn’t much, manipulating shadows, orchestrating subtleties, subterfuge, but you did have a natural ability for it. In fact, you have proved to be altogether too good at it in the end, haven’t you, Harry? Predictably, you have finally succumbed to the single greatest risk of your profession: self-deception. Even at this very moment you are befuddled. The moral gray stretches out from you in every direction, and you have lost your way in the barrens of your own confusion.
“That business about the hospitals . . . about the schools . . . that thin, sanctimonious soup for the weak conscience. I think you actually convinced yourself that those things would absolve you from the guilt of all these deaths that you so willfully pretended would not happen.”
Outside, the summer storm intensified and leaden clouds descended over the city, pulling a shroud of gray over Carlos Place, the little island of plane trees, and the tarnished statue of the inward shrugging nude. The rain quickened and began to fall in drifting sheets. The windows now let in not light, but darkness, and the mandarin red walls of the library deepened and turned a grim, hematic hue.
Strand said nothing. Schrade was right, of course. Strand did feel guilty for all the lives lost. There were ways to rationalize their deaths, ways of escape that sounded reasonable, and he had tried them all. But the guilt remained, a stain with just enough of the truth mixed into it to make it indelible.
Strand walked halfway down the length of the table and stopped a few steps from Schrade, who, having satisfied himself momentarily with his bitter soliloquy, had turned away from Strand again and stared straight out the windows.
Strand had to acknowledge Schrade’s despicable form of bravery. He was still holding the gun, and in the face of the kind of loathing and threatened menace that Schrade had just unleashed, any man might be expected to be provoked to a sudden rash impulse.
Schrade showed no fear that such a thing might happen. Yet he remained seated. He made no effort to leave, a tacit acknowledgment of Strand’s control of the situation. Schrade was not feeling comfortable enough to offer a physical challenge. He recognized the instability of the moment and stared straight ahead, toward the muted light of the storm.
Strand sat on the table again, as before, one leg on the floor, the other one dangling from the knee. He continued to study Schrade. Then he lifted his chin, indicating the two pictures leaning on the bookcase counter behind Schrade.
“The two Schieles,” he said, “the ones you came to see. Do you know who’s offering them?”
Schrade didn’t bother to answer.
Strand looked at Knight. “Tell him, Carrington.”
Knight actually hesitated. Avarice was a strong rival to the survival instinct. Finally he said, “Claude Corsier.”
This time Schrade reacted sharply, glaring at Strand.
“I’m curious about him,” Strand said. “I noticed you didn’t list him among those I’m responsible for killing. How did you miss him, Wolf?”
Schrade was suddenly distracted, not listening closely. Conspiracy was his heart’s milieu. He was good at it, and he fell to it naturally. He understood its intimacies. Only a hint of it in other men leavened his imagination.
“Yeah,” Strand said, “I suspect the Schieles are forgeries. I wasn’t the only one who wanted you to be here.”
Schrade’s eyes turned thoughtfully to the library windows, to the gloom that had swallowed Carlos Place and obscured the buildings on either side, and to the windows of the Connaught, some of which were lighted, some of which were dark.
• • •
Corsier held his breath as he peered into the lenses of the binoculars, his back tight and aching, his headphones in place. He strained to hear more clearly, to see more clearly through the ashen dusk that had descended during the last few minutes of the storm.
“Damn! What do the dials say?”
“He is too far away to be killed outright,” Skerlic answered. “It would tear him up, he might linger . . . but he would eventually die, I think.”
“So would Harry.”
Skerlic said nothing. For a moment he studied Corsier’s sooty silhouette a short distance away, then slowly put his eyes back to his own pair of lenses.
Suddenly Corsier grabbed the telephone off a little table nearby and dialed. He cocked up the earphones on one side of his head, put the receiver to one ear, and bent again to his binoculars.
The telephone rang once, and Corsier saw everyone in the room turn to look at it. It rang a second time, a third. No one in Knight’s library moved.
“Come on, Harry,” Corsier coaxed under his breath. “Answer it . . . answer it.”
Suddenly Schrade leaped up, grabbed the telephone, and threw it, jerking its cord out of the wall.
“Oh! God . . .”
Corsier slammed down the receiver.
“I need to do it,” Skerlic said, his voice steady. “While he is standing.”
“No!”
“If he moves any farther away . . .”
“No!” Corsier had practically crawled into the room on the other side of the rain. “No one is talking.”
• • •
Schrade’s outburst brought everyone to their feet. Tension filled the room. Schrade’s attention was still focused on the windows. No one said a word.
Strand knew exactly what he was thinking.
What happened next covered a span of twelve seconds.
Schrade suddenly turned and lunged for Strand. But Strand had been expecting it, and with a full swing of his arm he hit Schrade on the side of the head with his fist, staggering him. Having missed his opportunity and dazed by the blow, Schrade thought only of getting away from the windows. He fell back away from the table to take refuge behind the column of bookcases that separated the two broad windows. Knight, seeing that Schrade perceived a threat from the windows, fell back with him, and the two of them stopped against the bookcase cabinets, their backs to Schiele’s naked women.
• • •
The two explosions were horrific.
A surprising amount of detail can be absorbed by the brain and retained with remarkable clarity in the infinitesimal duration between the blast of an explosion and its effects. Strand was too close—twice as close as Mara—to retain more than a flash, but the detail of what his brain perceived was as precise as if the instant had been photographed for him to study: Schrade was lifted, disemboweled, and hurled in halves across the distance that separated him from Strand. His rib cage preceded his lower torso and legs, which followed like a whorling, unraveling ball of twine thrown whipping and twirling into the air. His head hurtled past Strand’s face, whistling like a banshee, far in front of the rest of him.
QUAI DES GRANDS AUGUSTINS, PARIS
Mara Song sat at a table by the window and watched the early autumn light soften to a pale peach on the spires of Sainte-Chapelle across the Seine. The lunch-hour crowds had long since cleared out of the restaurant and the few customers who remained were outnumbered by the waiters, who generally ignored them as they went about their business of changing tablecloths, sweeping the floors, preparing for the evening clientele.
Eugene Payton came into the restaurant and spotted her immediately, waving off a waiter who had started toward him. Mara turned her face away and listened to his footsteps on the floor, slowing as he drew near. When he stopped, she looked up.
“Well, it’s good to see you again, finally,” Payton said.
Mara nodded dismissively.
“No, honestly.” Payton grinned. “It is.” He unbuttoned his suit coat, pulled out the chair opposite her, and sat down. “We’ve talked so much by telephone and fax and e-mail during the last couple of months that it doesn’t seem as though it’s been that long since Camp Peary.”
“It seems that long to me,” she said. “And more.”
Gene Payton was second in command of the Foreign Intelligence Service. Strand had said that Payton was among the best of them. He had always been on the fast track to the top, and he understood the intelligence business in a way that very few did. He believed that the FIS was important, that it was even essential. He did not believe that it had a holy mission, which made a big difference in the way he saw the role and responsibilities of his officers.
“You’re looking good, Mara,” Payton said, clasping his hands on the table after ordering a cup of coffee from the waiter. He rigorously avoided letting his eyes go near her scars. She imagined he had rehearsed it, repeated to himself over and over not to look at them. He must have decided that he would candidly refer to her wounds right at the beginning. That would seem open and honest, without being gratuitous or unnaturally oblivious. “We were worried when we saw the photographs after your first operation.” He smiled. “But I can see those concerns were unwarranted. You look great.”
“I don’t have any complaints,” she said. Fine. She didn’t want him to say any more about it. He had something to tell her and she wanted him to get on with it. There was no need for small talk, as if their meeting was social, as if they could actually relax with each other. Cordiality seemed ill-suited to the circumstances.
Payton paused a moment as the waiter left his coffee. He poured in some cream and stirred.
“Okay,” he said, putting down his spoon. “I’ll get right to the point.” Payton was no fool. Whatever else, he was not that. “I can’t say that the final decision on all of this was unanimous, but it was a solid decision. Everyone understands that it’s the decision. Anybody who doesn’t like it can take a hike. It’s that solid.”
Mara lifted her glass and sipped the Bordeaux she had been nursing for the past twenty minutes.
“FIS is walking away from it, Mara,” he said. “Officially, unofficially, on the record, off the record, casually, formally, on the books, off the books, any way you can describe it. We’re out.”
Mara couldn’t help herself. She dropped her head and closed her eyes. She was suddenly weak, as if she had received an injection of morphine. Jesus Christ.
“I’ve got to tell you,” Payton went on, “letting the money get away from them, that killed them. Some of them couldn’t believe it. The scheme has their grudging admiration, but if it hadn’t been for the offsetting circumstances, the grudging part would have far outweighed the admiration part. For some of them, it always will.”
“What about the investigation? Where do they all stand on it?”
Payton cautiously took a sip of coffee. “Scotland Yard and the Bundeskriminalamt,” he said, “are inundated with possibilities, hundreds of leads, thousands of names, scores of new relationships and connections. They’ll be investigating Schrade’s assassination for a decade. They’ll never solve it. The German intelligence community is shut tight on this. So are the British. So are we.”
He looked out the window to the Seine, and Mara thought he was trying to decide whether or not to bring up something else.
“The wild card was that the international media got hold of the information about Schrade’s double life first. That pissed off the law enforcement agencies and the intelligence community. Rumor got way ahead of reality. The gaudy headlines made everyone cringe: ‘RECLUSIVE BILLIONAIRE TIED TO INTERNATIONAL CRIME SYNDICATES. GERMAN BILLIONAIRE LINKED TO GLOBAL CRIME LORDS.’ That kind of thing was alarming all of us. It could’ve gotten out of hand and pulled us all into a full-blown international scandal.”
Mara remained silent.
“A lot of questions had to be answered. People are still scrambling. Once the cat was out of the bag, the media wanted to know what else was in the bag and what it was doing in there.” He paused, looked down at his cup. “Whoever did that created a firestorm.”
She said nothing. He wasn’t going to get any reaction from her.
Payton took another sip of coffee. “But the mitigating factor was that the media received no information connecting Schrade to the FIS, or to any intelligence service. Just information about his crime world connections. That gave the whole intelligence community deniability when the inevitable spy rumors started flying around. No one ever definitively tied Schrade to any agency.”
“That was good.”
“Yeah”—Payton gazed at the quayside again—“that was good.”
Another couple left the café. The place was practically closed.
Payton turned back to Mara. “As far as your situation was concerned, the clincher was the information about Bill Howard.” He paused. “You know, Mara, we didn’t have a clue about him. The son of a bitch, he might’ve retired and we’d never have known.”
“Have you found him yet?” Mara asked.
Payton shook his head in disgust. “No, and with the kind of money he’s got he’ll be able to buy a hell of a lot of ghost help. This could take a long time. Plus, it’s got to be done in silence. Rules of the game.”
She nodded.
“Anyway, everyone knew you didn’t have to do that. I mean, it worked to your advantage, it was a score on your side of the ledger.”
“That’s not why—”
“I know, I know,” Payton held up his hand to stop her, “that’s what I mean. Everybody knew that, and that’s why it gave you the edge.”
He was silent a moment, looking at the buildings on the Ile de la Cité. Mara looked out to the Seine also. Her face ached, but it didn’t matter anymore. Time would pass, the scars would heal. The ones on her body, anyway. Right now was not the time to think about the others.
“One question,” Payton said, turning back to Mara. “This is for me—just me, believe it or not.”
Mara did believe it. “What’s that?”
“How did you get away from there? I know Mayfair was immobile with shock after the explosion. It’s not exactly on Scotland Yard’s hot patrol list. The weather was bad. The response time was bad. But still . . . shit, you were both blown up.”
A simple question. It seemed ingenuous enough. But within the last year her life had undergone irreversible changes. Ingenuous. The word had almost lost its meaning.
“I can’t talk about that,” she said, dropping her eyes to the last deep mulberry sips of wine left in her glass. “If it’s over, it’s over.” She hesitated, then looked up at him. “I don’t know how you people do this, how you make a life out of it. There are always more questions than answers, more tragedies than triumphs . . . and more secrets than all of it put together.”
Even for a man as circumspect as Gene Payton, even for a guy who knew the ropes and the rules as well as he did, the frustration was written all over his face. Still, he was destined to disappointment. That was the nature of his business. Almost all of the men and women in the intelligence profession died taking an entire nightful of secrets with them.
They visited a little longer, but they really had nothing to say to each other beyond the business of business. Though Mara’s connection to Payton and the FIS had been intense and indelible, it had been brief. And it had been stormy. She had breached trusts; she had abandoned loyalties. Regardless of the extenuating circumstances, the bridges lay smoldering and in ruins. There just wasn’t anything else to say.
Payton left. They would never see each other again. There would never be any need to.
• • •
Mara reached up and absently touched the side of her face, the tips of her fingers tracing the silky surfaces of the tender, helical scars. Touching them, checking them, had become a habit. She was trying to break it. She was the only patron remaining in the café nearly half an hour later when the door from the Quai des Grands-Augustins opened again and Claude Corsier walked in. He was dressed like the most correct member of the Académie Française. He walked over and stood looking down at her. She was never self-conscious about the scars with Corsier. She always had the feeling that when he looked at her they disappeared. It was a way he had.
“Sit down, Claude.”
Corsier shook his head at a questioning waiter and sat down.
“I followed him for a while,” he said. “There was no one else.” He had kept his mustache and goatee. The look suited him.
“They’re walking away from it,” Mara said. “They’re not going to come after us. Your name never came up. It’s over.”
“My God.” Corsier gasped and sat back. He had been fatalistic about the outcome. In the three months since the explosion Corsier had been glum. He had gained little peace from his deliverance from Schrade. Too much—and too many—had been lost in the process.
The Swiss turned his face away to the street, and Mara studied his profile. Corsier had been horrified that he had allowed the Serb to deceive him about the precision of the explosives. He should have known better. And he was horrified that Skerlic had detonated both bombs, slaughtering Carrington Knight for no reason at all. What he had found most difficult to live with was that he himself had benefited enormously from Knight’s death. Knight was the only person who could have tied Corsier to the assassination. He had been the only unresolved flaw in Corsier’s plan, the one reason Corsier had resigned himself to being a fugitive for the rest of his life.
He had been lucky, but the price had been steep, and he would not pay it off in a lifetime.
Though Mara had been badly hurt, none of her wounds had been life threatening. Because the Schiele forgeries had been sitting on the bookcase countertop, above the level of the library table, and because Mara had been twice the distance from the explosion as Strand, the extra millisecond had given her time to react. The top of the heavy table had shielded her from the greater force of the blast. By the time an appalled Corsier had run across Carlos Place, Mara had already dragged Strand, bleeding badly, down to the first floor, away from the fire and smoke. Corsier had gotten them out the back door, into Mount Row, and away from the building as the crowds had begun to gather in the rain in Carlos Place.
“This is quite incredible,” he said, turning back to her.
“I think so, too. There were so many other possibilities.”
Corsier thought about it for a while, absorbing it. Then he sighed heavily. “I went to Rome,” he said. “Ariana had given quite a lot of money to Santa Maria del Priorato, near her home on the Aventine. The priory allowed an urn with her ashes to be placed in those lovely gardens there. It seems it was her request.”
He drummed his fingers on the table.
“She had drawn up legal papers to have her house converted to a residence for young Greek women who come to Rome to study art. She had set aside a large endowment for it, to be administered by a private university in Athens.”
He drummed his fingers on the table.
“I went to Santa Maria. The urn, of course, is beautiful.”
For the second time he turned to look out at the Seine and the Palais de Justice. The afternoon was quickly slipping away.
“My God, Mara, look at that light.”
They watched as the softening light stained the stone architecture and the slate roofs with tea rose and pale coralline. The shadows were turning dusty blue, poised for the deeper hues of dusk.
He turned to her.
“I am back in Geneva,” he said. “Back with my niece in the gallery.” He smiled. “It’s heaven.”
“Good, Claude. That’s good.”
“Come to see us, Mara. Let us hear from you. We must never lose touch. It would be a sad mistake.”
“I promise.”
“What will you be doing?”
“Staying on here for a while.”
“In Paris?”
She nodded, but offered no clarification. Corsier studied her a few moments.
“You know,” he said, choosing his words carefully, thoughtfully, “they say that a wise man will befriend the shadows that move into his life. They say that if he will embrace them and make them his companions, they will teach him how to live with his regrets.”
Mara said nothing. Then, suddenly, inexplicably, she felt her eyes moisten. She concentrated; she didn’t blink; she managed to stop it.
Corsier reached across the table and gently put his heavy, bearish hand on hers.
“Come to see us in Geneva.”
• • •
Mara was now alone in the empty café. It was finally over, and it had ended the way such things end, with a quiet conversation, a mundane and almost feckless dismissal of the extraordinary.
She stood and made her way out of the café just as the first few dinner-hour clientele began to trickle in and evening was settling over the Seine. She crossed the Quai des Grands-Augustins and walked slowly along the quayside toward the Pont St.-Michel. The lights of Paris were aglitter in the lilac air, and in the Seine the large bateaux mouches plied the approaching darkness, their swags of tiny lights sparkling doubly bright against the water.
She walked past the Pont St.-Michel and went on to the Petit Pont where she turned and started across the Seine. She was nearly to the other side when she saw him. He was waiting at the edge of the trees, leaning on his cane against the stone ramparts. He was watching her.