David Lindsey - The Color of Night v5

by The Color of Night (mobi)

  Ariana had been through every page of it. She had been through every column… several times. She did not find, she could not find, the item that she had depended upon seeing every first week of the month for the past four years. It was usually in the form of an advertisement, and usually the smallest one the newspaper would sell. The word “art” or “drawing” always appeared in the advertisement, which might address anything having to do with art, the sale of art supplies, an art auction, an estate sale, an exhibition. Sometimes they were fanciful. Corsier was like that. He could be droll. Within the brief advertisement were two things meant for Ariana to read: first, there was the name “Claude Corsier” in a coded form and in one of five languages; and second, there was a coded date on which the next month’s advertisement would appear.

  Her own advertisement, meeting similar criteria and intended for Corsier’s eyes, had appeared two days earlier in the same newspaper.

  She had already gotten up and gone to the writing desk in her bedroom to check Corsier’s previous month’s advertisement and to confirm today’s date. She had already spent a lot of time staring at the crumpled newspaper, leaning forward on the sofa, her elbows on her thighs, the fingers of both hands embedded deep into her wiry hair as her mind raced over the possibilities for the advertisement’s conspicuous absence. None of the possibilities made any sense except the worst one. She felt distinctly as she imagined a woman might feel who one morning found that dreaded lump in her breast after a lifetime of knowing that her family medical history and her own habits had predisposed her to that inevitable discovery. It had finally happened. Still, it was a shock.

  Suddenly she dropped her gaze from the white dome of Saint Peter’s to the newspaper on the worn and faded Persian carpet. The sudden change from bright to dark blinded her momentarily. She waited. Her sight returned from the edges inward. As the newspaper reappeared it struck her as really quite odd that she and Claude Corsier had never discussed exactly what they would do in this situation. They had created a system for mutual notification, but beyond that… Well, there was nothing beyond that, and she was dumbfounded by the shroud of isolation that had dropped over her in the last twenty minutes. Before coffee she had a place in life. Friends. Lovers. Companions. After a few bites of her torta di mele and a demitasse of espresso, she was suddenly an alien in that same world.

  Actually, that wasn’t quite right, either. She was no longer in the same world that she had lived in before the torte and espresso. She had been dragged backward in time into a former life. When she thought about it now, it seemed so far removed from her present life that it was as though it had all happened to another person. Yet, strangely, certain events, certain moments, faces, bits of conversation, the sound of a voice, a betrayal, the touch of a lover, a death, a fragrance, all of it was as immediate to her as the events of last night.

  And that was what petrified her.

  Ariana picked up the telephone.

  VIENNA

  FIVE DAYS LATER

  The second-floor flat was in an old apartment building in a residential street in Wieden, the fourth district. The little street was shrouded by fat chestnut trees whose broad boughs reached all the way to the window where Ariana sat watching and waiting for him, a cool Austrian breeze carrying the smoke from her cigarette out into the dappled light of late afternoon. She could hear people passing by on the sidewalk below, and she could catch glimpses of them through leaves.

  Even though she had never been to these rooms before, they were already familiar to her. For the better part of two decades she had met Harry Strand and others in countless rooms like these in Prague and Rome and Athens, in Budapest, Berlin, and Trieste, all over Europe. For security reasons they moved regularly to different streets in different cities, but eventually all the safe houses in all the cities became the same. Their differences were completely obscured because they were all used in the same way for the same reasons—a place to plot, a place to escape to, a place to tryst and to share secrets, a place to wait for the inevitable encrypted message to move on. This one reeked with the stale odors of former meetings. It was an odor she would forever associate with the taut business of bringing one’s fears under control.

  She heard the key working at the lock in the door, and she turned in her chair and watched as the door swung open and he walked into the room.

  “Ariana,” he said.

  “Hello, Bill.”

  He closed the door and flipped the deadlock. When he turned around again he stood still a moment, looking at her from the denser shadows away from the windows. She couldn’t see his face, but she knew he could see hers.

  She mashed out the last of her cigarette and stood up. He moved away from the door, taking off his suit coat as he came into the center of the room. After taking a pack of cigarettes from the inner breast pocket of the coat, he folded the coat and draped it over the back of a chair. He tossed the cigarettes onto the sofa.

  “What’s it been?” he asked as she approached him. “Nearly five years?” He made no gesture of greeting. The intervening years were nothing.

  She said, “Something like that.”

  They regarded each other awkwardly, and then Bill Howard sat on the sofa and crossed his legs. He picked up the cigarettes, took one for himself and then offered one to her. She took it from him and bent down for the tiny flame he held up to her. He had a handsome, old-fashioned gold lighter, heavily engraved and much worn. It was the only elegant thing about the man, and it didn’t seem to fit him at all. She had always wondered how he came to have it. She wasn’t surprised to see he was still using it.

  Howard smelled of an American shaving lotion, the same lotion she remembered from the years before. She had seen a bottle of it once in his bathroom in a hotel in Salonika. It was emerald green. Nothing exotic, a cheap aftershave that could be purchased in any pharmacy.

  Bill Howard had put on weight, but other than that he had not changed. He was still wearing suits in tones of brown, the same unremarkable hue as his thinning hair. He wore a white shirt and a tie—geometric patterns in burgundy and beige—that could have been one from those earlier years. As always he looked as if he had dressed without paying attention to what he was doing, as if he had had something else on his mind.

  She pulled heavily on her cigarette and crossed her arms again. None of the lamps in the room were turned on, and the only light came from the window, tinted with green reflected off the broad leaves of the chestnuts. The apartment was dowdy with forty-year-old furniture that needed reupholstering. The place made her terribly sad.

  “Still beautiful,” Howard said, appraising her in the pale light. “Greek women, I remember, have a way of ignoring the passing years.”

  “I thought you weren’t going to come,” she said, disregarding his remark.

  “I’m sorry it took so long.” He looked around.

  “I’ve been waiting in these damn rooms for five days,” she said.

  “I was traveling.”

  “They might have told me that.”

  “You’ve forgotten how it is.”

  “I haven’t forgotten a single moment,” she said.

  Howard said nothing.

  “Claude Corsier has disappeared,” she said.

  He didn’t have much of a reaction, only a fleeting frown.

  “What do you mean?”

  She looked at him, tense, restless. “Which of those words don’t you understand?”

  “You’ve been keeping in touch with him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Really. And with Strand, too?”

  “No.”

  “Okay,” he said, shifting his shoulders on the sofa, settling in, “go ahead and tell me what’s going on.”

  Ariana nodded and took a long drag on her cigarette for support. She collected herself.

  “After the FIS changed our mission to criminal intelligence, everything changed for us… who worked with Harry. Even before that we knew things were going to be different
after the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union disintegrated. The cold war was over. We knew we were living through the end of an era. Harry said the FIS was being forced to… you say, downsize. Even though we had been redirected”—she shrugged—“we saw how easily we could be thrown away when we were no longer useful in a certain way.

  “Harry… well, all of us… the three of us made certain plans to, uh, ‘improve’ our retirement situation. It was late in the day for me,” she continued. “I was approaching middle age, had no money to speak of and no pension waiting for me. No husband and no prospects of getting one—that’s too high a price to pay for security. I decided to look after myself.”

  Howard’s expression changed slightly, taking on the impassive rigidity one often saw in people who suddenly realized they were about to hear news that they expected would shock them. They reflexively prepared themselves with a kind of facial fortification.

  “We developed a strategy to get away with some money, a scheme. It went on for exactly six months, until Harry closed it down nearly six months before he retired.”

  Howard’s face fell. “Jesus… Christ… Wolf Schrade?”

  She nodded. “Of course, everyone scattered after that. We never saw each other again. None of us.”

  Howard had forgotten to smoke his cigarette. It smoldered between his fingers.

  “But Claude and I decided we wanted to stay in touch with each other. We agreed on a secret way to communicate, a way to make sure that each of us knew the other was still alive. A warning system.”

  “He’s missed his turn.”

  “Exactly.” She smoked, her stomach aching from the tension.

  Howard wasn’t interested so much in Claude Corsier’s disappearance. “How much did Schrade lose?” His voice betrayed a forced stoicism.

  She hesitated. “Millions.”

  “How many?”

  “I don’t know. Quite a few.”

  Howard didn’t react.

  “The way it was set up,” Ariana went on, “he didn’t know. It was a very good operation. Very good. Extensive planning.” She paused. “I think he has finally puzzled out what happened. And who did it.”

  “Shit.” Howard remembered his cigarette, which had burned down to the filter and was stinking. He put it in the ashtray.

  “The point is,” she said, “I think this is going to get dirty. This is very complex.”

  “God… damn.” Howard swallowed. “This was Harry’s idea, wasn’t it?”

  Ariana looked at him. “We were all involved…”

  “But it was Harry’s idea.”

  “You’ve got to understand—”

  Howard held up one hand to stop her. His face had grown red. He was furious. She knew the reality here. Bill Howard didn’t give a damn that Ariana was afraid, that she believed she was going to be killed, and that she was desperate for protection. What was coursing through his thoughts like a fever was that his twenty-three-year career in the Foreign Intelligence Service, a carefully shepherded career, was suddenly as unstable as the smoke wisping up from the end of her cigarette.

  She smelled food cooking, a thick odor that she couldn’t identify. It lacked the tangy sharpness she would have smelled in Salonika or Athens, or even Rome. She turned away from Howard’s silence and moved back to the window. Below, a car purred by slowly in the street.

  She wasn’t sure where she stood legally on this, but the game was intricate from the point of view of international law. It had all taken place in the gray areas of the spying game, and it was her guess that it would unravel in the same sphere. Behind her she heard the flick and scratch of Howard’s lighter. A pause while he inhaled.

  “I can’t believe you people thought you’d get by with this,” he said, his voice husky with smoke. “Screw a guy like Schrade and just get slick away with it.”

  She turned around. “It was a lot of money. Harry, well, you know, he inspired a lot of confidence. We thought we had a good chance. You know better than I do that people like Schrade steal from each other all the time.”

  “And they get killed all the time. It’s a violent vocation.”

  “Maybe, but then a lot of others get away with it, too, don’t they? It happens. We thought it could happen to us.”

  She put out her cigarette in the ashtray she had left on the windowsill. Her heart was loping erratically. Below on the sidewalk a couple paused under the trees to talk in the fading light. She could see only the lower part of the woman’s skirt and her legs.

  She turned around and came back toward the sofa. She avoided a heavy armchair with its loathsome upholstery worn bare in spots by the buttocks of spies and traitors and the women who slept with them. She pulled around a wooden dining chair and positioned it in front of him.

  “Claude Corsier,” Howard mused, “that son of a bitch would’ve picked the devil’s pocket for spare change if he thought the extra pennies would help him buy another goddamned little scratchy drawing.”

  “He took a lot of risks for you, too, Bill. And you didn’t pay him shit.”

  “I haven’t forgotten that.” He dropped his eyes to the dead cigarette butts in the ashtray beside him. He was lost in thought. Then he closed his eyes and slowly shook his head. “Jesus H. Christ,” he said. He looked up at her. “And what did your cut come to?”

  “A lot.” She wasn’t going to get into that until she knew if they were going to help her.

  Howard swore again. “Strand knows about this, that Claude’s disappeared?”

  “I don’t know.” She knew he wasn’t going to believe this. None of them had ever really understood Harry Strand.

  “Our agreement,” she said, “actually, it was Harry’s stipulation, was that we would never contact him after this was over. Never even try. Ever. And I haven’t.”

  Howard was already shaking his head. “I don’t buy that, Ariana. You worked together too long, went through too much. You were like a family. He couldn’t do that.”

  “Well, he did, Bill.” She was finding it difficult to stay calm. Both of them were barely handling the tension. “None of you ever really understood what you were dealing with in Harry Strand. The reason you find this idea so confounding is that you never could have made that kind of decision yourself. It’s too extreme, too radical. That’s why Harry was so successful for you for so many years. He never let reality get in the way of possibility. That is why he is what he is… and why you are what you are.”

  Howard said nothing for a little while, and though she couldn’t read his face, she sensed his agitation.

  “How is this going to work?” she asked. It was time for blunt questions.

  He shook his head. “I don’t know.” He sounded tired. “Anyway, it’s not for me to decide, you know. It’s them.”

  “It’s the same thing.”

  “No. Big difference. I’m out here. They’re back there. It’s not the same thing at all.”

  Ariana felt a resurging nausea. “You tell them I want to talk,” she said. “I’ll tell them everything—but I want protection from Schrade. They need to know what happened.”

  “What about Harry? This can’t be good for him.”

  She fixed her eyes on him. She felt near tears, but she fought it. “You tell me about Harry,” she said coldly.

  “What.”

  “Is he alive, Bill?”

  “How the hell do I know?” He started to say something else but stopped.

  Neither of them trusted the other, but Ariana was at a distinct disadvantage. They both knew it.

  “I need to know what I’m dealing with here, Ariana,” Howard said. “Give me some idea of where you’re going with this. I’ve got to know where this is headed before I can take it back to the guys who call the shots.”

  She really had no choice.

  CHAPTER 10

  ROME

  Mara’s home near the Piazza Sallustio was a lovely place with a garden surrounded by high walls and well-kept grounds. In the 1950s and 19
60s, when the nearby Via Veneto was the center of European la dolce vita, the home was owned by a titled family from Monaco who put it to good use entertaining the glitterati of those heady days. Today the area had slipped into genteel quietude. The real estate was still choice and expensive.

  Mara seemed most comfortable here; she had scattered throughout the house the myriad small personal items that one kept around simply because one liked something’s shape or color or had fond remembrances associated with its acquisition.

  Here, too, Harry Strand saw for the first time some of Mara’s fully developed drawings, which she had framed and hung throughout the house. She had not told him that they were hers. They had been there nearly a week before he had enough leisure time to wander unhurriedly through the large rooms and examine all the paintings and drawings she had accumulated.

  She was a far better artist than she had allowed him to see from the sketching she had been doing in Houston, having implied that her work was little more than academic. She had a very fine hand, a sound grounding in draftsmanship, and a genuinely original eye. She had a few figure studies, but most were studies of Roman architecture and city scenes.

  When Strand looked at these pictures, Mara came into a clearer focus. It is inherent in an artist’s work to be revelatory, and Mara’s drawings were no exception. In the way she expressed the attitude of a seated nude, in the way she brought the light to a church or palazzo, or chose a perspective of one of Rome’s countless small, winding streets, she revealed, incrementally, ever more of her mind and personality and gave him access to other dimensions of understanding her. He saw nothing in these works to lessen his growing affection for her. He saw everything to enhance it.