The Color of Night

by David Lindsey

  In the distance thunder rolled from one side of the horizon to the other. They all looked up at the overcast sky.

  “Goddamn it,” the older brother said, and took his foot down from the trough to follow the little Serb to his car.

  GENEVA

  The next morning Strand sent an e-mail to Mara. It was early, because he wanted to have breakfast and be at the bank as soon as it opened. He had a lot to do. He told her the trip was uneventful, that he was fine, and that he would let her know when he started “home.” He also asked her to let him know how she was doing.

  After breakfast he walked down to the Quai du Mont-Blanc and in a few moments entered a leather goods shop, where he bought a briefcase. Outside he hailed a taxi and rode the short distance down the stylish Quai des Bergues and across the Rhône to Place Bel-Air, the heart of the business and banking district. The Suisse Crédit Internationale was huge and modern, with sparkling bright interior architecture and an abundance of brushed chrome and glass and marble. Strand had not been in the bank in three years.

  He presented the passport and identification papers for Georges Fouchet, requested access to his security box. After the usual paperwork and subdued formality involving several officers, he was led to a large room laid out in aisles and corridors. The walls of the aisles and corridors contained row upon row of brushed chrome drawers, each with a number, a recessed handle, and a keyhole.

  They went through the ritual of the keys, Strand retrieved two chrome boxes, and the officer locked him in a small private room and left.

  For the next fifty minutes Strand carefully searched through the two metal boxes, selecting the documents he had been thinking about ever since he’d left Rome. There were files of photographs and several dozen plastic cases of CDs, all labeled with dates and number codes he checked against a list in a notebook.

  When Strand was escorted back to the main bank floor again, he asked one of the officers where he could go to duplicate documents, photographs, and CDs. The man reached into his desk and gave Strand a piece of paper with the names of two establishments.

  Another short taxi ride, and he was there. It took an hour and a half to duplicate everything he wanted, and they were completely understanding that he wanted to watch every step in the process of duplicating each of the three formats.

  He returned to the bank, replaced the original documents, photographs, and CDs in the deposit box, and left with two copies of everything.

  It all had happened much more quickly than he had anticipated. It was almost noon, so he walked around the corner from the bank and ate lunch at a quiet restaurant that he remembered on the Quai de la Poste.

  He finished earlier than he had expected and walked to Ariana’s hotel. She was staying on the left bank in the old Metropole on Quai Général-Guisan. It looked across the narrow end of the lake near Pont du Mont-Blanc, where the lake squeezed down to become the Rhône. It had an old-world feel about it, something Ariana would seek out. A sophisticated traveler, she abhorred what she called the clinical modernity of anything built after the close of the nineteenth century.

  As he entered the lobby he remembered that he hadn’t called Ariana as he had promised. It didn’t matter. She was expecting him, and if she had gone out to lunch, he would wait there for her.

  He took the elevator to the fourth floor. As he followed the numbers on the doors he was not surprised to see that she had gotten a room with a lakeside view. Approaching her door, he saw her “Do Not Disturb” sign and rang the doorbell. He waited. No answer. He rang again. She must have gone out, as he had expected. He thought about going downstairs to the hotel’s dining room to see if she was there, then changed his mind, thinking he would use the time to go over his plan once more before explaining it to her.

  He let himself in. Of course, it was a suite, even though she was alone. A small foyer opened up into a sitting room, and from the door you could look through the sitting room to French doors that opened up to the Quai Général-Guisan and the glittering water of Lake Geneva. Strand closed the door and called her name, but there was no answer.

  After throwing the deadbolt behind him, he walked into the sitting room and put the briefcase down beside a sofa and then walked to the French doors. It was a beautiful view of the promenades on the quayside, the lake, and the right bank just across the narrow neck of water. The French doors were open, and though the balcony was almost too small, Ariana had pulled an armchair onto it, as well as a small table. On the table was an ashtray filled with lipstick-marked butts and a hotel glass with a little melted ice in the bottom.

  Strand walked back and stepped into the bedroom doorway. The bed was unmade. The bathroom door was open, and he walked over to it and looked in. Ariana was messy. The place was littered with cosmetics, nylons drying over the shower rod, a pair of shoes kicked to one side. On the marble countertop over the sink below the mirror, a toothbrush, earrings, half a pack of cigarettes, and her cigarette lighter. Damp towels in a pile by the toilet. The smell of perfume and soap and cigarettes.

  On the other side of the unmade bed another set of French doors was open, the source of a nippy breeze during the night.

  He turned and walked back into the sitting room, found a cart with bottles of liquor on it and some clean glasses. He poured himself a splash of cognac, went back to the sofa, and sat down, put the cognac on the table in front of him, and pulled the leather briefcase over to him. He snapped open the clasp and, in the same instant, looked up.

  What he saw in his mind he saw in his eyes. He did not see the other side of the room. He saw the half pack of Ariana’s cigarettes and the cigarette lighter on the marble shelf over the sink.

  He could hardly breathe, and instantly he felt damp around his mouth and forehead. His hands were still on the briefcase. He snapped the clasp closed.

  He stood, aware of the weakness in his legs. He wiped his forehead and walked back to the bedroom door. His eyes crawled over every object in the room. Nothing was disturbed. No struggle here. But he had missed something. He must have. He stared at the unmade bed. It was just an unmade bed. Nothing.

  He stared at the rumpled sheets. Like the patterns of sand in an estuary, washed into drifts that belied the flow of the water that had moved it, the sheets, too, had a pattern. The folds all drifted to one side, the side of the bed opposite him, next to the opened French doors.

  Strand walked around the end of the bed with a sense of dread so heavy that it almost prevented him from moving at all.

  She was there, on her stomach, her head and upper torso stuffed under the bed, her naked buttocks exposed, her bare legs partly wrapped in the sheets that had been dragged off with her. And here was the blood. A lot of it, sneaking out from under the bed as though it had tried to escape the horrible moment.

  Strand had to see her face. Trembling, he stepped over and knelt down and grabbed her waist above her hips. She had the remarkable weight of death, a phenomenon he hated, the oddness of how death seemed to add tens of pounds to a body that would have been so much lighter in life.

  She was difficult to get out from under the bed, and he heard himself apologizing to her for the rough treatment, for the way he wrenched her body to free her from where they had wedged her. When she came free, her wonderful mane of wavy black hair was all around her head, gummy and caked with the grume of the end of her life.

  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.

  CHAPTER 24

  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.