The Color Of Night (47 page)

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…”