The Color of Night

by David Lindsey

  “You’re very thorough,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. The two men were busy doing the same thing to the briefcase.

  When she was finished, she held his suit coat for him and helped him put it on. She smiled.

  “Thank you for being so patient,” she said. As if on cue, the two men finished with his briefcase. “Please”—she tilted her head for him to follow her—“Mr. Obando is waiting.”

  It was odd to see the café empty. The staff was nowhere in sight. Only Obando’s silent bodyguards stood politely against the walls of the long, narrow establishment. Each of them looked as if he could have been the café’s owner or a very subtle maître d’.

  As Strand and the woman approached Obando’s table, she stopped and Strand stepped past her. Obando had been watching him approach, but he did not get up or offer his hand. He motioned to the only other seat at the table. Strand sat down.

  “Harry Strand,” he said, introducing himself.

  Obando nodded. “Harry Strand,” he repeated. His hair was a natural light caramel, parted on the left, wavy, beautifully barbered. He was forty-two years old but looked younger. “Well, Harry, lay it all out for me.”

  Strand had heard recordings of Mario Obando that had been made in Tel Aviv while he was doing business with an Israeli drug dealer. The dealer was the one who sounded like the foreigner. Obando sounded as though he’d been born and raised in the San Fernando Valley. You could have spent an evening with him and never known he was Colombian. Obando’s files recorded how he had hated to be pegged by his accent. He hated the stereotype. So he had worked on it. It had disappeared.

  So Strand laid it all out for him. From his briefcase he withdrew all the material he had copied from the Geneva bank vault on the two Obando operations—an arms smuggling conduit and a European drug distribution channel—that had been closed down because of Schrade’s information. He placed a packet of photographs on the table along with a CD, several cassettes, and fifty-seven pages of documentation. He laid them out like a fortune-teller with a deck of cards. He outlined the two failed operations, told him how they had failed, then told him why they had failed.

  Obando kept his eyes on Strand. At his elbow was an empty glass with a last sip of a grenadine sirop à l’eau remaining in the bottom, an ashtray with one butt in it, an opened pack of cigarettes, and a gold Dunhill lighter.

  As he had done with Lu, Strand told Obando who he was and gave him some background on his career in the intelligence profession. By the time he had finished, Obando understood that Strand knew things about his organization that Obando had thought were secure. He also understood that the information inside the material on the table before him would confirm everything that Strand had said. As with Lu, when Strand finally stopped he had not yet given Obando the name of the traitor who had been responsible for creating so much havoc for Obando’s enterprises.

  Obando stared at him. His face portrayed no tics, no indication of what he was thinking or how he was feeling about what he had heard. He was simply a businessman listening to business talk.

  He took his eyes off Strand and raised a hand. One of his men came over.

  “Harry, would you like something to drink?”

  He ordered Scotch and ice.

  “I’ll have the same damn thing,” Obando said. As the man turned away Obando picked up the cigarettes, offered one to Strand. Strand shook his head, and Obando lighted one for himself and sat back.

  “You know, I’m still pissed about that business in Amsterdam,” he said, blowing smoke to one side. “On that one deal, that one deal alone, I lost—” He stopped himself. “I took a very big hit. Not just the money. It destroyed an arms conduit that I’d invested more than a year putting together.” He paused. “You worked on that?”

  “I was in charge of the intelligence on it. I was the one who finally took it to the Netherlands’ Centrale Recherche Informatiedienst and worked with them until they closed you down.”

  Obando grinned and shook his head. “Goddamn.”

  The two drinks appeared. Obando raised his, said, “Prosit,” and took a sip.

  He pointed at the material Strand had put on the table. “This is my man, huh?”

  “That’s right.”

  Obando looked at Strand, saying nothing. Strand’s back was to the light that came in through the front window. Being oblique, the light diminished quickly inside the café, so that Obando was softly illuminated, but the surrounding furnishings were quickly lost in a dusky haze. Here and there the edge of a picture frame or the corner of a gilt-framed mirror glinted from the shadows.

  “Why?”

  “I worked with this man a long time,” Strand said. “There are personal reasons. . . .”

  “Like what?”

  Strand waited a beat. “The reasons are personal,” he said. “I won’t discuss them with you.”

  Obando was very good at keeping his thoughts to himself; neither his body language nor his face gave a hint of what was going on in his mind.

  While keeping his eyes on Strand, he drank from his Scotch and took a last drag on his cigarette before mashing it out in the ashtray. Strand noticed that although Obando was a stocky man, not heavy but thick chested, his hands were the hands of a thin man, with long, narrow fingers.

  Obando finished putting out the cigarette and opened the manila envelope of photographs. He looked at them one at a time. After he had finished looking at the last one, he reached for his cigarettes again. He lighted one.

  “Wolfram Schrade,” he said. He swallowed a mouthful of Scotch, then another. “Life is full of surprises,” he said.

  Strand said nothing.

  “I didn’t expect it to be him. Never would have.”

  “That’s why I’ve provided so much documentation.”

  “You worked with him closely, then.”

  “I did.”

  “How long?”

  “Almost a decade.”

  “That’s fascinating.” He studied Strand. “But that’s over. You’re out. And Schrade broke off with FIS . . .”

  “Right.”

  “Okay. What about now? Anything else along those lines?”

  “Probably.”

  Obando jerked his head. “Ah.”

  “I suspect he’s working with either the British or the French now. Maybe even the Germans.”

  “You suspect.”

  “I no longer have the ability to get proof of that. But I’d bet money on it.”

  “Would you bet your life on it, Harry?”

  Strand didn’t hesitate. “There’s nothing in this world that I’d bet my life on, Mr. Obando. Certainly not anything having to do with Wolfram Schrade.”

  Obando picked up the last photograph and looked at it again, considering it.

  “This is a far from perfect world, Harry.” Pause. “What if I told you this piece of shit lives a charmed life?”

  “Which means,” Strand said, “that Wolf Schrade is making himself so valuable to you at this time that, for now, you are obliged to overlook his past injuries.”

  “That’s pretty good, Harry. Bottom line: I can’t be your dark angel.”

  “Can you expand on that a little?” Strand asked.

  Obando shook his head slowly. “It’s personal,” he said soberly and without a hint of irony. “I won’t discuss it with you.”

  CHAPTER 35

  It was a fine piece of one-upmanship, the sort of thing that was second nature to men in Mario Obando’s line of work. The world of legitimate business provided a warm and fertile environment for male strutting, but it was nothing compared to the showy displays of male ego that occurred in the crime world. In Obando’s milieu, no available opportunity to squirt a few cc’s of testosterone in your adversary’s direction was allowed to pass. For the younger ones, like Obando, a smart mouth was the extra edge that made them feel just that much more clever than their opponents. They had to be smart, look smart, and sound smart. And, of course, they had t
o be brutal.

  “Even if I can’t help you directly,” Obando went on, having made his point, “perhaps I can give you something in return. I know you didn’t do this from the impulse of a warm heart, Harry, but regardless, you did me a favor.”

  He dropped his eyes to Strand’s glass. The Scotch was gone, the ice was melting. He looked toward one of his men and held up two fingers and then flicked his wrist downward, pointing at the empty glasses. He dropped his arm and looked again at Strand. He put out his cigarette, turned slightly to one side, and crossed one leg over the other.

  “As for the other business, even though Schrade is being very useful to me right now, eventually the crows will return from Amsterdam and Naples. They’ll come home to Berlin to roost.”

  Obando was not being clever. He was pissed. Cool, but pissed.

  “Aside from that, it galls me—a lot—that Schrade’s been able to play both sides of the game for so long. I have to admit, he’s got huge balls. I’ve got to admire that. As far as it goes.”

  The two drinks arrived. Obando picked up his glass, raised it to Strand, said, “Prosit,” and drank his first sip.

  “But I think it’s gone far enough,” he said. “Obviously, so do you.”

  Strand had no idea where this was going.

  “You want him killed,” Obando said matter-of-factly, dismissing Schrade with a wave of his hand. For an instant the gold oval of his cuff link caught the light coming from behind Strand’s back and made it glint far brighter than anything else in the room.

  “What happened, Harry?” Obando went on, “You’re a government man, were. You’ve been out of it several years now. By this time Schrade should have been just so much past business. An old war story. Yet here you are, right back in the middle of it. You’ve kept these files—” He nodded at the table. “Schrade was never past business with you, was he? And you never expected him to be.” Obando tilted his head a little. “That’s interesting to me.”

  He stopped and regarded Strand.

  “Listen,” he said, “I was raised in a religious family. Went to Catholic schools in Bogotá. Elementary and then high school. Two years in a Catholic college before I went to UCLA. I’ve read lots of Bible. Lots of it.”

  Obando lounged in his chair, one arm resting on the table, enjoying the conversation now. “You’ve heard the story of King David.”

  Strand just looked at him.

  “I’ll take that as a yes. And the story of Bathsheba.”

  Strand was silent.

  “Another yes. And the story of Uriah.”

  Strand waited.

  “Well, you get the point, Harry.” Without looking at it, his long fingers found the gold cigarette lighter. He set it on its edge. “Actually, it was something of an understatement when you said this was personal, wasn’t it?”

  Obando smiled knowingly. Strand had the queasy feeling that he was about to encounter something he had not anticipated.

  “I’ll have to tell you a story,” Obando said, shifting in his chair. “I know a little bit about you, but I didn’t know it was you until today.” He touched the lighter as if adjusting its position. “A couple of years ago Schrade came to me with a new proposition. I’d had these two big failures in Europe—which, thanks to you, I now know that son of a bitch caused—and he came to me and said, ‘Look, I know we’ve had these setbacks, terrible luck, but I’ve got a connection in a certain place that’ll allow us to develop some Mexican operations with almost zero risk.’ I was listening.

  “‘I’ve got a brother-in-law,’ Schrade said, ‘who is an officer in the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Service. The guy’s in a position to open and shut doors. He can offer us a conduit for heroin and designer product and laundered money—through Mexico, in and out of the States.’ I told him to give my people a proposal. We’d study it, get back to him. He did. We made some preliminary inquiries. We went over it in detail. Everything was good. I got back to Schrade, and we made a deal.

  “I was cautious at first. Gave him small projects while we continued to do background. Then larger and larger commitments as all of this has proved to be sound and lucrative. It’s been very nice, Harry. When the FIS stationed you to Houston the timing couldn’t have been better. Mexico was just coming into its own in a very big way. Shit, the money I’ve made through you has already offset what that son of a bitch Schrade made me lose on those other two projects.”

  Obando closed his eyes halfway.

  “So you see, Harry, after this long collaboration—even though we’d never met—I was already curious about you. And then you contact my people. You come here, give me this documentation on Wolf, and you want me to kill your own brother-in-law.” Obando raised his eyebrows. “See what I mean? You say, ‘It’s personal, I won’t talk about it.’ I’m wondering, What the fuck’s going on here?”

  Strand was almost dizzy. What did he expect? Why was he surprised? Did he not think that Schrade’s obsession with him was everything that defined an obsession? Did he think that Schrade’s attention to revenge would be anything less than excessive? For two years this man sitting across the table from him had thought that Strand was still an FIS officer and the éminence grise behind a very successful money laundering and drug smuggling operation in which Obando was a participant and major beneficiary. He had believed this because his own intelligence people had “verified” Schrade’s information through “independent” information brokers.

  Strand hardly knew where to begin. The same senseless technology that had enabled him to steal millions from Schrade had allowed Schrade to steal his identity from him. In certain parts of the world, at least, Strand was a garbled concoction of Schrade’s devising. Strand was appalled that when he had been gathering files on Mara and Ariana and Claude and Schrade, he had not had the foresight to have Alain Darras pull a file on himself as well. He guessed that Darras had done that to satisfy his own curiosity, and he guessed that Darras had wondered why Strand had “lied” to him about still being in the intelligence business.

  “Harry.” Mario Obando’s voice brought Strand back to the moment. “Harry, you have been listening to me for a long time. I would like very much to hear a word from you now.”

  Strand decided simply to tell the truth to this most unlikely of men, who, having been raised a good Catholic, could still remember Bible stories though he had decided long ago not to believe them.

  “I’m afraid Schrade’s deceived you again,” Strand said. He circled the ice around in his glass with his forefinger, chilling the amber Scotch.

  Obando waited.

  “Almost all of it is a lie.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I’ve been retired for four years. I wasn’t your Mexico man. Couldn’t have been. I’ve been living in Houston, but I’ve been an art dealer there. Not an FIS officer. It’s that simple.”

  Obando nodded.

  “I can give you the names of people with the Foreign Intelligence Service in Washington who can confirm that.”

  “I’ve already confirmed it with the FIS.”

  “In Washington?”

  Obando’s hesitation was almost imperceptible. “No. Here in Europe. It was confirmed at a very high level.”

  “High level,” Strand said. “Let me guess: you talked to Bill Howard.”

  Obando’s expression lost its composed confidence, a subtlety toward qualmish uncertainty.

  “How did you know to talk to him?” Strand pressed. “Who gave you his name?”

  Obando stared back at Strand in smoldering silence. Though he was far too sophisticated to let his embarrassment show, he could not so easily hide his aggravation. He seemed to be receding farther into the margins of the shadows as the light coming in from the Boulevard des Capucines grew more oblique and wan.

  Strand broke the silence, “Don’t feel bad about it, Mario. I’ve only recently learned about Howard myself.”

  “I don’t know why Schrade lied to me about this, Harry,” Obando said, “but I’m
inclined not to give a fuck. Whatever’s going on between you and him is your business. I’m still making a fortune from him, and I don’t want anything to happen to that situation.”

  “I’m sure you don’t,” Strand said.

  Obando’s eyes were fixed on Strand, but his fingers again found the gold lighter and he began spinning it absently on the surface of the table, suddenly stopping it with his fingers. Spin . . . stop. Spin . . . stop. Spin . . . The lighter caught the dull light in its whirling, throwing off soft, rhythmic glimmers.

  “Of course, I understand your own thinking, Harry. . . .”

  “No,” Strand interjected, “you don’t.”

  “Well, not exactly, maybe, but I understand revenge. I recognize it when I see it, even if the man who seeks it doesn’t recognize it himself. Some men don’t want to admit to it. They’re embarrassed by feeling such a primitive emotion. They call it something else.”

  Strand closed his briefcase, leaving the documents on the table. He no longer had any use for them.

  “One question,” Obando said, still twirling the gold lighter. “You said almost everything Schrade had told me about you was a lie. What about that ‘almost’?”

  Strand studied Obando’s face in the bruised light, studied the effect the swelling shadows had on the Colombian’s coloring, on his features, on, it seemed, the very nature of the man himself.

  “I married his sister,” Strand said. “A year ago, in Houston, Schrade had her killed.”

  CHAPTER 36

  LONDON, BAYSWATER

  Claude Corsier sat in the rental car at the entrance to Harley Mews and craned his head over the steering wheel, watching for the light to come on in the garage at the end of the turn. He was uncomfortable sitting in the dark, a rather obvious, curiosity-provoking behavior, he thought. People walked by on their way to evening dinners in the cafés and pubs a few streets over, or just coming and going to God knew where. Sometimes they would spot him in the dark interior, and after they had passed they would turn and look back at him. Besides, he wasn’t a lurk-about sort of man. Not that he hadn’t done it before, but he never thought he did it particularly well.