The Color of Night

by David Lindsey

  She smiled. “The same way I arrived at yours. It is my job to research well whatever Mr. Cao asks me to research. Mr. Cao does not tolerate mistakes. Would you disagree with the list?”

  “I should say not.”

  “Not even the order?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “Then that is what you will do?”

  He hesitated, though he didn’t know why. She was absolutely right. For some reason he could not fully put his finger on, she seemed suddenly more astute. He felt a little odd about it.

  “Yes,” he said, “I will.”

  “Good. Mr. Cao has one stipulation.”

  A stipulation? What would an eccentric collector be without a stipulation? In this rarefied business prerequisites were a common expression of a special clientele.

  “Mr. Cao wishes to remain anonymous in this sale.”

  “Very well.” This was not out of the ordinary.

  “Nor does he want you to reveal the seller’s ethnic identity. Or mine, his representative.”

  This was out of the ordinary. But not a problem, just odd. “Very well,” he said. He loved it.

  “Then we have an agreement?”

  “Yes, indeed, we have.”

  CHAPTER 50

  Carrington Knight stood at the window and looked down at the street. In a moment she emerged with her chauffeur, the black umbrella hiding her head and shoulders, and quickly disappeared into the back of the black Jaguar. Silently the car pulled into the traffic of Carlos Place and disappeared into the rain.

  He smiled. She was a very shrewd woman. A lovely woman. A woman who might even be dangerous to know. Dangerous in a nonlethal sense. Dangerous in the sense that she was capable of enthralling. He did not have the impression that she would take a man places he did not want to go, but, rather, that she could seduce a man into wanting to go places he normally would have the common sense to avoid. In fact, she had just taken Knight there.

  It was his policy to be scrupulous about not identifying his clients. Especially those clients like Schrade who were reclusive—and big spenders.

  He was also scrupulous about veiling his methods of selling expensive works. He had learned long, long ago that however colorful he himself might enjoy being, when it came to money, and to the buying and selling of fine art, far more profit was to be made from discretion than from flamboyance. He actually bought most of the artwork he sold, but when he did agree to broker something, he never revealed to a seller the potential buyers he might approach.

  Ms. Paille had smoothly relieved him of these two long-standing rules of operation. She had done it in such a way that he had relinquished these long-established principles without protest. He had even enjoyed it.

  He looked at the portfolio still open on the library table. It hardly mattered in this instance. Besides, the end result was that he was going to broker one of the sweetest little collections of drawings that he had come across in a long while.

  She would bring round the documentation later. Jeffrey had quickly typed up a brief description of the seven drawings, which they all had signed, affirming that she was leaving such items in his safekeeping.

  She had been most insistent that the sale take place as quickly as possible. She had given reasons, all having to do with her eccentric employer, Mr. Cao. They had agreed that she would call the next day to make an appointment to bring by the documentation.

  All in all a very exciting hour.

  He turned back to the library table, relishing the idea of a leisurely examination of the drawings.

  The telephone rang.

  Knight flinched. He’d forgotten. Quickly he walked to the telephone. He let it ring one more time, then lifted the receiver.

  “Carrington.”

  “This is Wolf.”

  “Yes, Wolf, good of you to call.” Knight was alert, ready, suddenly onstage.

  “Helene told me about the Schieles.” Schrade’s baritone conveyed a languid self-confidence that was entirely peculiar to this man. “What do you think?”

  “It would be easy to rhapsodize about them, Wolf, but just let me say this: They are first-rate. They are solid. I have never felt more sure of the quality of a Schiele. They’re stunning.”

  “Mmmmmm. Good. They are genuine Schieles?”

  “As I told Helene, I don’t have any doubts about them being Schieles, but I’ve still got to open them up.”

  “When can I see them?”

  “The sooner the better. I’ve been retained by the owner to authenticate them.”

  “Who is the seller?”

  “I’m afraid they wish to remain anonymous. I can tell you this, the drawings are not coming from a collector’s holdings. They were actually unearthed in the estate of a recently deceased family member.”

  “Where?”

  “Where? Here, in Britain. They didn’t even know what they had. That’s why I was retained. I called you when I realized what we were dealing with. You and I would be the first ones to verify this discovery. Essentially it would be our discovery. A truly significant moment in modern art. To unearth new Schieles, never seen before. That’s why I thought you would want to be here.”

  “This time, Carrington,” Schrade said bluntly, cutting through the confection of Knight’s verbal enticements, “I must know the seller, or I won’t consider the purchase.”

  Knight was stunned. Good Lord, Claude had been prescient. How freakish.

  “But, Wolf, you know that we never—”

  “This time, Carrington, I must know.”

  “But this just isn’t . . .”

  Silence.

  Knight sensed he was pushing his position to the point of effrontery. He thought of the money. The prestige. The deal.

  “Very well,” he said. “I have the name and address of the barrister who is representing the seller.”

  “Let me have them,” Schrade said.

  Knight gave them to him.

  “I will call you back,” Schrade said. “Good-bye, Carrington.”

  “Wait—” Schrade was gone.

  Good Lord! Knight’s hand was trembling as he put down the telephone. Oh, hell, it didn’t matter. Simply to have the seven drawings in his possession when Schrade arrived would be remarkable enough. Knight would relish working up to the surprise.

  BROMPTON

  He sat at his desk and gazed out at the park across the road from his office, waiting. The telephone call had come just an hour earlier. The caller, who identified himself as a lawyer named Kevin Drenner, had been urgent in his request: to meet with him immediately regarding the anonymous offering for sale of two unauthenticated works reputed to have been done by the artist Egon Schiele. The man had an American accent. Fain, using the name Edward Purchas, told him to come immediately.

  So here he was arriving by cab, pausing to pay in the late afternoon drizzle, turning and looking at the facade of Fain’s office, then ducking his head and coming across the broad sidewalk to the front door.

  “I’m sorry to be in so much of a hurry,” Drenner said, sitting down with a wheeze in a banker’s chair in Purchas’s office, “but my client—”

  “Who is?”

  “Gerhard Stoltz. A German citizen of Berlin.”

  Purchas nodded.

  “Generally does not buy art from anonymous sellers,” Drenner continued. “He understands the drawings in question are excellent, though they have to be authenticated, so he is quite interested. But . . .”

  “He does not buy from anonymous sellers.”

  “That’s right.”

  “What do you want?”

  “The identity of the seller.”

  “Just not possible,” Purchas said, leaning his long frame back in his chair. “Sorry.”

  “Why?”

  “The seller has rules as well. Perhaps these two were simply not meant to do business. I understand there is no dearth of potential buyers, and to eliminate one so early is not a discouragement to my client.”

 
Drenner looked at him. The pressure he was under was evident. His face was remarkable for its extraordinarily stout jaw structure and for its unpleasant complexion, which was very nearly jaundiced, with putty gray shadows under the cheeks and around the eyes.

  “Why does your client insist upon anonymity?”

  “Why does your client insist upon knowing?”

  “Security reasons.”

  “The same.”

  “Do you have authority to decide this without consulting with your client?”

  “Of course.”

  Drenner’s prodigious jaw structure rippled with tested patience. “My client,” he said, “is willing to offer, through Mr. Knight, an agreement to buy the drawings at a price of twenty percent above their appraisal value, if they are proven to be genuine Schieles . . . and if the seller will forgo anonymity.”

  Purchas held his tongue, regarding Drenner from under the bushy outcroppings of his eyebrows. The pause was meant to convey an immediate weakening of resolve.

  “That would be done in writing?” Purchas asked.

  “Yes. I have the authority to do that.”

  Purchas looked out at the park across the road, dreary in the rain. He thought long and with gravity. “Would your client,” he said, turning back to Drenner, “be willing to keep the transaction totally confidential, between the two parties? Save Mr. Knight, of course. That would be the next best thing to anonymity for both of them, would it not?”

  “Yes.”

  “What kind of identification do you require?”

  “I’d like to meet the seller, talk with him about how he came in possession of the drawings.”

  Purchas was shocked. “Good God, sir. That is impossible.”

  “Why?”

  Purchas shook his head busily and looked away as if in distaste. “No, no, no. A twenty percent increase in sale price doesn’t buy that sort of thing. My client is not a common ‘celebrity’ who haggles away familiarity with himself to the highest bidder. I am sorry, sir, but that is out of the question.”

  Again Drenner, who thought he had been making some headway, showed such frustration at this setback that his jaundiced face flushed, ruddy patches appearing on his cheeks and at the corners of his mouth. It was unpleasant to see.

  Purchas thought he had better release some of the pressure before Drenner exploded.

  “Mr. Drenner, please, you have to appreciate my position,” he said. “The fact is, the ‘gentleman’ in question here, the seller, is actually a woman.”

  Drenner’s eyes bulged slightly, then relaxed. “Really.”

  “Yes, really,” Purchas said. “So you see why she is cautious. I’ve represented her family in legal matters for over twenty-two years, and I can assure you your client has nothing to fear from her regarding security. She inherited these drawings from her aunt, an eccentric, a Bohemian, who recently died. She is a widow, in her mid-sixties, a taciturn woman.”

  Purchas frowned heavily, his eyebrows lowering like dark clouds over his eyes. “I can assure you,” he concluded, “if your client insists on your ‘interviewing’ her, he should count himself out of the running. A woman of her nature would rather forgo a twenty percent profit than to be dragged into that sort of . . . merchandising.”

  Purchas paused, sighed, and grew grimly sympathetic. “I know that may be difficult for your client, Mr. Stoltz, to understand. But really, sir, this is quite another matter to a woman like that. She simply doesn’t see it the same way as Mr. Stoltz.”

  CHAPTER 51

  Mara started talking as soon as they pulled away from Carlos Place. She told Strand everything, speaking hurriedly as he drove through the pelting rain to a nearby hotel on Park Lane. He entered the parking garage and wound upward through the lanes until he found a parking place and pulled in.

  He took off his chauffeur’s jacket and removed the bow tie and left them both in the car. Together they left the garage and entered the hotel, going up to the room that Strand had taken under the name of one of his passports. There he changed into a suit as Mara continued telling him about the particulars of her conversation with Knight. When he was finished dressing, they left the hotel and took a cab to an Indian restaurant in Knightsbridge, just off Cromwell Road.

  After they were seated Mara picked up where she had left off and finished her account of her meeting with Carrington Knight.

  “So essentially, you accomplished everything.”

  “Almost.”

  “Well, the time. But I don’t know how you could have done anything about that. Carrington’s got to talk to Schrade. There’s no way he could know otherwise.”

  “But I’ve got to call him tomorrow, make arrangements to take him the documentation. I could start then. Did he reach Mr. Schrade? What was his reaction? Is he coming? And so on like that.”

  “Sure, whatever feels right. The timing of Schrade’s arrival is crucial; we’ll have to nail it down. That’s the whole point of it.”

  After their drinks came and they ordered dinner, Mara studied him.

  “How are you going to do this, Harry?”

  “I’ll take care of it,” he said.

  “No.” She shook her head firmly. “I want to know how you’re going to do this.”

  He swallowed a sip of his Scotch. “It really would be best if you didn’t know,” he said.

  Her eyes flashed. “I’m not impressed by someone wanting to ‘protect’ me, Harry,” she went on. “You know me better than that. This has more to do with you. You’re not doing me any favors. I thought we had this settled.”

  She was glaring at him, her anger controlled, but just barely.

  He nodded. “Okay,” he said, “you’re right.” He took another drink of his Scotch and deliberately tried to taste every possible element of its savor before he swallowed. Then he went on. “When Schrade comes to London, he stays at one of three places. They’re obvious places for a man like him: Brown’s, Claridge’s, the Ritz. But there will be few opportunities to approach him at any of them.”

  “Approach him?”

  Strand took a mental deep breath and told her how he planned to kill Schrade. He watched her face as he explained about the saxitoxin, explained the gun, explained the necessity of having to get close to him. She did very well, no shock, no stunned expression, no exclamations. She swallowed once, that was all.

  “How . . . did you decide to do it this way?” she asked. “Why not use something that would give you some distance?”

  “A high-powered rifle, a bomb?”

  She nodded.

  “There’s less risk for me with those devices, but both of them require detailed long-term planning. I knew I wouldn’t have that kind of time.”

  “But this way the risk is greater that you’ll . . .”

  “Be killed or caught.”

  She had to swallow again and covered it by taking a sip of her Scotch.

  He smiled at her. “But I plan to avoid that.”

  She couldn’t manage a response.

  “Schrade also has favorite restaurants,” Strand went on. He named half a dozen. “I think it’s a good possibility that I can catch him coming in or out of one of these.”

  “You said it would make a sound.”

  “About like a slap.”

  “That’s loud.”

  “In a quiet place, yes. But outside in the street it could be done without attracting attention.”

  “What about his bodyguard?”

  “Schrade uses them in different ways, and I’m lucky there. When he goes to business meetings, legitimate business meetings, there’s only one guard, who accompanies him like a secretary. He’s very understated, in the background. Everybody knows what he is, but it’s no big deal. Important men, at least important men in Schrade’s orbit, are accustomed to seeing their peers with ‘assistants.’ If you didn’t know who Schrade was, you’d think two businessmen.

  “When he meets with his illegitimate associates, always in environments quite differen
t from those I’ve just mentioned, he travels with two bodyguards who look like bodyguards, and no one would mistake them for anything else. They’re there to intimidate as well as protect.”

  Strand removed his hands from the sweaty Scotch glass and touched his face with his cool fingers. He sighed.

  “But when he’s on art business, the bodyguard is little more than a chauffeur. He doesn’t follow Schrade into restaurants, doesn’t follow him around in the hotels, doesn’t go into the galleries. Schrade is in a different world when he’s looking at art. He almost—almost—becomes a different man. He doesn’t want the trappings of his other life to interfere.”

  Mara nodded. “So, you think you’d . . .”

  “Catch him in a noisy restaurant. Catch him coming or going to the restaurant, in the street. Catch him in the men’s room. In the bar.”

  Strand went straight into the specifics. He was going to give her everything.

  “My feeling is that in any of these situations I can do a ‘brush-by.’ To muffle the sound of the ‘slap,’ and to make sure the pellet penetrates his clothes, I’ll jam the pistol into his side, just under his rib cage, and fire. He’ll flinch, slump. I’ll grab him and hold him up. This will do two things: give me a chance to hide the pistol somewhere in my clothes, and prevent him from reflexively recoiling from me or gesturing at me and attracting attention to me. I’ll act surprised, confused, then shocked: ‘What’s the matter! Are you all right?’ I’ll appear to come to his assistance, call for help, bring people to us. Since I’ll be catching him away from his bodyguard, no one will suspect a menacing situation. I think most people will immediately conclude that I just happened to be standing next to the guy when he had a stroke or heart attack.”

  He stopped, his forearms leaning on the table.

  “That’s my thinking right now. That’s what I’d like. In the confusion I’ll manage to slip away. I’ll want to be gone before the bodyguard gets there. But even if I’m not, Schrade will be past any ability to communicate. The saxitoxin takes only moments.”

  “God, Harry . . . you can do that?”

  “I have to do it.”