The Color Of Night (19 page)

He turned her over and with the tips of his fingers separated her hair away from her face. She had been all night in her own blood, which had long since begun to curdle. When he had rolled her over the sheet around her legs had wrapped with her and covered her pubic hair. Her exposed navel seemed so… risqué. With her wild hair swirling around her head, her body cocked oddly at the waist, she looked like a Greek belly dancer closing her eyes, caught up in the dance.
Danseuse du ventre.
One night in Salonika they had been going to bars, drinking. At a crazy place, almost out of control, she had made a joke.
Danseuse du ventre.

He thought of Romy. And Meret.

And Mara.

Strand did what he could to cut himself off from Geneva. With his stomach churning, he turned away from Ariana’s body and went back into the living room, where he sat at a writing desk and plugged in his laptop. He sent an e-mail to Mara:

Bad luck here—but I’m fine. I’ll be home tonight. Be careful.

For just a moment he stared at the computer screen and thought about e-mailing Bill Howard. Then he decided to hell with it. Let them find out about it when they find out about it.

He logged off, folded up the laptop, put it in the briefcase with the papers from the bank, and walked out of the suite. He took the “Do Not Disturb” sign off the door handle. Goddamn it, she didn’t need to lie there all day. He did not go back to the Beau-Rivage. There was nothing of him there. The only traces of his existence—the bogus passports and papers—he always carried with him.

Once again he chartered a private plane, leaving Cointrin in Geneva in midafternoon and arriving at Malpensa outside Milan a couple of hours later. He rented a car at the airport and drove to Bellagio, arriving there around dusk. By the time he pulled into the courtyard of Hotel Villa Cosima his back was aching and his neck was taut with the beginnings of a headache.

When he walked through the door of their suite, Mara was there instantly, embracing him. She held him a long time without speaking, and he could feel the worry in her body and in her breath at his neck as they held each other.

She had been sitting with a drink in the main room of the suite. She had not turned on the lamps, letting a pale dusk deepen to the blue of evening as she watched the lights come on along the steep slopes of the opposite shore. He mixed a strong drink and joined her on the sofa, and for a little while they sat together in silence, looking out across the lake. Strand was grateful to her for not speaking right away, for allowing him to gather his thoughts. He knew she must have a swarm of questions, yet she didn’t press him. That was gutsy. As soon as he had hit the “send” key on the e-mail from Ariana’s suite, he was sorry he had mentioned “bad luck.” He shouldn’t have done that. Mara probably had imagined a thousand scenarios, created a thousand ghosts, feared a thousand harms.

He told her everything. As far as he was concerned, now they were inseparable. Their survival would depend on a symbiotic reliance. He hoped she would agree. If she left him now, there would be no way that he could protect her.

“How long had you known her?” Mara asked.

“Twelve years,” Strand said. “But it was longer than that. The kind of work we did… it alters time. Sometimes stretches it out, sometimes compresses it. It drains you and changes you in countless sad ways. And you’re aware of it, even while it’s happening.”

“She must’ve been good at it.”

“Yes.” He raised the Scotch to his lips. “She was.”

Mara waited a couple of beats. “That’s what’s happening now, isn’t it? You’re slipping back into that old life.”

“I don’t know,” he lied.

“You do know, Harry. Don’t do this. I’ve got to be able to believe you.”

Strand turned his eyes away from the tiny sequins of light across the lake. He looked at her. It wasn’t dark in the room; there was an ambient glow from the lights below on the promenade at the water’s edge. They provided her with a small luminant speck just near the center of each eye.

“When Schrade changed his focus to global organized crime,” Strand said, his voice almost husky, “he stepped into a far more dangerous world than the Russian spy game. It was one thing to spy on a derelict state, but it was quite another to inform against growing criminal enterprises. They were strong and fast and vicious.

“International crime has no ideology. It has no parameters, no borders, no lines to cross. It’s a vast, horizonless galaxy: no rules beyond brutality, no values beyond greed. Drug profits alone—only one of many markets of international crime—exceed three hundred billion every year.
Every
year. That superabundance of money inspires a kind of madness that can be stunning in its savagery.

“When I got the idea to steal Schrade’s money after he’d laundered it, I got a safety deposit box in a Geneva bank. I immediately started filling it with documentation. Without any of our people knowing it, I wired myself and taped nearly all of my conversations with Schrade. When he gave me information about the Lu Kee group out of Taipei doing contract hits in Germany for Matvei Grachev’s Russian organization there, I got it on tape. When he told me about Sergio Lodato in Naples providing the Russians with counterfeit hundreds in exchange for armaments and Russian real estate and Russian bank ownerships, I taped it. When he told me that Mario Obando in Colombia was selling cocaine to the Chinese (who gave him heroin in return and which the Mexicans then smuggled into the U.S.) and to the Yakuza, who distributed it in Japan—and then everyone laundering their profits through the Italians in Eastern Europe—I taped it.”

Strand shook his head and took another drink. The alcohol was beginning to loosen his knotted muscles.

“I even managed to photograph him with Bill Howard on four separate occasions when Schrade demanded face-to-face meetings to reassure himself that the FIS was following through. He was constantly afraid his sweet deal was going to fall apart.”

A motor launch left the quayside below and started across the lake, the deep-throated mutter of its engines dying as it disappeared into the darkness.

“That’s your insurance,” Mara said.

Strand nodded. “Well, maybe insurance isn’t quite the right word. It’s more like having a contingency plan for a defensive maneuver. My idea was to divide the information up between myself and Ariana and take it to the concerned parties. I think the evidence would be convincing.”

“In other words, when these people saw what Schrade had been doing to them, they would kill him. You’d be serving his death warrant.”

“That’s what I was hoping.”

“Oh, Harry…” Mara shook her head but said nothing more.

“After I found Ariana’s body this morning, I knew he was all over me. If he didn’t know I was in Geneva… I don’t know… maybe she’d been careless leaving Vienna. But she was in an FIS safe house there. She should have been clean. I think if he’d known I was there, he would’ve let me know about it.”

“He did.”

“No, not like that. I mean directly. He’d want to let me know he knew, just like he did with the tape in Rome.” He drank the last of his Scotch. The ice had melted, watering down its smoky flavor. “I don’t think he knew. It was just a fluke that I wasn’t around when it happened.”

“I don’t understand this. Why wouldn’t it still work, telling them… those people?” The urgency in her voice pained him. Her situation was unbelievable. At least he had spent a lifetime getting to this point.

“It’s not that it won’t work. It will. They’ll kill him.” He paused. “I just don’t know how quickly they’ll move.”

Mara was still with him. “You mean,” she said, “if they’ll get him before he can get us.”

Strand just looked at her.

“Oh, God. What are we talking about?” Her voice was soft with dismay. “I don’t believe this is happening.”

It was an awful moment for Strand, watching and listening to Mara gradually come to the realization of her appalling position. He felt the full weight and distress of his guilt. For all his audacity, for all his planning and good intentions and moments of hubris when he thought he could do the impossible, practically nothing of it was left except Mara.

“What about the FIS?” Mara’s voice was edged with urgency. “They’re not going to do anything?”

“They can’t. Schrade thinks they’re part of the embezzlement scheme. They don’t have any leverage with the guy. I hadn’t realized what was going on with Howard and Schrade until I was driving back from Vienna. Then it occurred to me that Schrade was holding the FIS responsible for the embezzlement, too. That’s why Howard was telling me he couldn’t call off Schrade. He was telling the truth about that. I just didn’t see it at the time.”

“Oh, come on. They could
expose
him. They could tell the whole world about him.”

“It doesn’t work that way. The common bond between people like Schrade and the intelligence agencies who use them is secrecy. He needs it to do what he does, they need it to do what they do. They use each other, knowing that if there’s ever a falling-out between them, neither side will expose the other, because the relationship itself is illicit.”

“What about this guy Howard? What’s going to happen when he finds out Ariana is dead? Won’t that change things? Are you going to let him know she’s dead? How will this change what you were wanting him to do?”

“I’m not going to let him know anything,” Strand said. “To tell you the truth, I don’t think Ariana’s death will affect anything one way or the other. A sad fact. Right now I don’t want a goddamned thing from Bill Howard. He and I had a rocky career together. We didn’t like each other much, and I didn’t see anything in Vienna to change my opinion of him.”

Mara said nothing. Through the balcony doors they could hear the faint voices of people walking along the promenade. Strand envied them. He knew it was irrational to do so. It was a human weakness in dire times to see others’ lives as richer, more fortunate, than your own. At this moment the voices he heard were the voices of careless people, those fortunate strangers who did not have your cares, or your tragedies, or your bad luck. Strand always wondered about them. Who were they? What brought them to this village, to this promenade, at this moment? How incredible that they had no idea that only a few meters away from them a man and a woman were sitting in darkness, afraid, confused, desperate even to understand what they should do at the end of the night.

Without speaking Mara stood in the near darkness of the room and walked to the balcony doors and stepped outside. He watched her silhouette against the blue light of the night sky. He could not tell whether she was staring across to the black hills on the opposite shore of the lake or whether she was looking down toward the promenade.

He got up and followed her. She was leaning on the stone balustrade, looking out toward the dark water. He put his arm around her waist, and she took his hand.

“You can’t imagine, really, how terrified I am, Harry,” she said. Her voice quavered, and the sound of it broke his heart.

“This bears no resemblance to any reality I know,” she went on. “I’m not a stupid woman. I know what I’m involved in here. It’s bizarre, but it’s happening and… I have to deal with it.” There was a pause. “I’m going to tell you exactly the way it is, Harry. I’m on the verge of panic.”

They were both looking out into the various darkness. He waited for her to go on, and then suddenly he was aware that she was crying. He would have given ten years of his life to be able to comfort her.

“It’s going to take every bit of our concentration,” Strand said. “There’s a balance here. We have to find it, and very carefully make it work for us.”

She leaned into him, burying her face against his shoulder. He could feel the small shudders of her weeping.

“Do you understand what I’m talking about?” he asked.

There were a few moments while she gained control. Then she said, “Yes.”

She didn’t understand, of course, and they both knew it.

They went to bed late, and Strand slept the dead, dreamless sleep of exhaustion. He woke early the next morning with a start, heavy headed yet wide awake. He carefully crawled out from under the covers, dressed, and went straight to the sitting room, closing the bedroom doors behind him.

He threw open the balcony doors to the cool morning, called room service for coffee, sat down at his laptop, and flipped on the switch.

Using the information that he had gotten from Alain Darras, he began the complex series of contacts over the Internet that would eventually lead him to a face-to-face interview with the first of the four crime lords.

He had no idea how long the process would take, but the procedures he had obtained from Darras were supposed to cut through the red tape that the new, increasingly sophisticated criminal organizations put into place. As in all corporate structures, illicit or legal, the men at the top isolated themselves with multiple layers of intermediaries.

He had been working for nearly an hour when Mara came out of the bedroom.

They walked up the hill to a little café near the center of the village and had a quiet cup of coffee with pastries. When they started back through the narrow, cobbled streets that fell steeply to the waterfront, Mara laced her arm through Strand’s and they meandered down, catching glimpses of the lake through the linden trees as they turned corners on their descent.

“Okay, Harry,” she said, “why don’t you tell me what’s going on.”

He hardly knew where to begin.

“Not a lot yet,” he said. “This morning I started the process of contacting the first of the four men Schrade was betraying to the FIS. My first thought was to approach all of them at the same time, just turn them loose on Schrade all at once. But then, considering all that I don’t know about the details of Schrade’s involvements with each of them, I was afraid that I might trigger a bloodbath. That’s not the way this needs to be done.”