Strand sat back with his glass of wine and looked once again at Schrade. He stared at him, his eyes exploring every minute aspect of his face and dress and demeanor in the same way a sightless man’s fingers lightly probed a person’s body to gain a sense of understanding. In Strand’s case he knew the man all too well. What he was doing as he watched Schrade was more akin to picking at a scab. Everything about the man inspired a disgust that Strand did not want to let go. He worried it and studied it, using it to justify a moment that he felt in his viscera was not long away.
CHAPTER 58
Strand watched them, tantalized by their facial expressions, their gestures, the angle of their bodies, the cant of their shoulders. Bill Howard seemed quite comfortable with Schrade, as much as anyone could be. Their conversation was constant and apparently to the point, since neither of them ever took the time to look around the restaurant, either out of idle curiosity or out of concern for surveillance. Strand took that as a good sign, an indication that he had successfully convinced Howard that he had departed London the previous night.
He watched carefully as they progressed through their meal. He guessed that both men would have dessert. When the time came, they did, accompanied by coffee for Howard and espresso for Schrade. Strand asked for his bill. He wanted to leave just in front of them. They lingered over their drinks. Strand’s bill came promptly, too promptly. He perused it. They called for their bill also. Strand caught the eye of the young woman in the black dress, who took his credit card. Schrade did the same. Strand felt as though he were engaged in an intricate dance in which the partners never touched.
His young woman returned. Schrade’s returned. Bill Howard now looked around idly for the first time. He looked straight at Strand, who had glanced up from signing his credit card slip. Their eyes met, and Howard’s eyes moved on. That was bad luck. Howard did not recognize him, but ideally Strand should never have allowed himself to be noticed at all, not even in passing. Strand tore off his copy of the credit slip and got up from his table. Neither Schrade nor Howard noticed he was leaving.
He had to wait in the reception foyer for his raincoat and umbrella. If they separated here, at the restaurant, Strand had a chance at Claridge’s as Schrade went inside. Or in the lobby, if it was still busy. Or in the elevator, if he could get him alone.
Just as his coat and umbrella arrived, Schrade and Howard appeared at the desk, asking for theirs. One of the blue-eyed women helped Strand on with his raincoat while Schrade and Howard chatted a moment, waiting for their coats to be retrieved from the cloakroom. Strand could hear their voices clearly, but he understood nothing. The blood was driving through his head so violently, his ears heard only the rushing.
As Strand was buttoning his coat he realized the foyer was full of people. Two couples had arrived. There was the noise of conversation. Three young women in black were now among them. The one who had helped Strand turned to the arriving couples to ask their names. A second one was approaching with Schrade’s and Howard’s raincoats, and a third was talking to the maître d’ about something happening in the dining room. Howard turned away, momentarily distracted. Schrade was being helped with his coat.
This was it. Strand thrust his hand into his pocket and gripped the pistol. He put his finger into the trigger guard and took one step toward Schrade as Howard turned around and looked at him, their faces an arm’s length away.
What in the hell was he doing? Hadn’t he just told himself at the table that it wouldn’t work as long as Howard was with him? The pistol felt like a brick in his hand.
“How are you?” Howard said reflexively in his American drawl, with his American familiarity, like saying “Excuse me” when one found oneself face-to-face with someone in a sudden crowded situation, shoulders touching, hips brushing. Did Howard’s eyes linger a moment? Did something catch his notice?
Strand grunted, nodded, turned, the small crowd shifting naturally, never maintaining the same configuration, the new arrivals moving up.
Strand made it to the door and was suddenly outside. He was perspiring profusely and was suddenly worried about the latex. He took the first cab available, got inside, and leaned forward.
“Just pull up a little way and wait, please.”
Schrade and Howard emerged and talked on the sidewalk. They were not interested in a cab, and Howard showed no signs of leaving. A dark Mercedes turned on its lights down the street and moved toward them slowly. As it approached the restaurant’s awning, the doorman stepped out and opened the door. Schrade and Howard got inside.
“Christ,” Strand said. He leaned forward and told the cabdriver, “I need you to follow this Mercedes coming around us here. I think it’s going to Claridge’s, but if it’s not, I just need to know where it’s going.” He took two fifty-pound notes out of his wallet and handed one through the window. “The Mercedes driver is trained to spot a tail.”
“Right, sir. I understand.”
He may have understood, but he didn’t know what he was doing. He glommed on to the Mercedes, which luckily went straight up the street and around Grosvenor Square to Claridge’s. If he had been going anywhere else, the Mercedes driver would have spotted him in five minutes.
“Keep going,” Strand said quickly. They passed the Mercedes, which had pulled up to the Claridge’s awning, and turned into Avery Row, which turned quickly into Brook’s Mews, which brought them around to Davies Street.
“Okay,” Strand said, unable to hide his frustration and anger. “Back to Claridge’s.”
When the cab approached the awning, he gave the second fifty-pound note to the driver and hurried through the vestibule to the front hall. He was just in time to see Schrade’s back rounding the corner to the elevators. Where was Howard? Was he ahead of him? Was he now behind Strand, watching Schrade’s back? Strand had no time to speculate further. He hurried to follow and got to the elevators just in time to wait a moment with Schrade. Howard was not there, nor was anyone else other than Schrade. Perfect. Strand’s heart was slamming against his chest. One hand was holding the umbrella, the other was in his raincoat pocket, gripping the pistol.
The elevator opened, three men got off, and he and Schrade stepped inside. Schrade punched the button for the fifth floor. Strand reached across and punched the button for the sixth. He stepped back. He rehearsed the coming moments. When the doors closed he would shoot Schrade immediately. When they stopped on the fifth floor and the doors opened, he would grab Schrade and pretend to be ministering to him. If someone was waiting there, he would call for help. If no one was waiting, he would shove Schrade out into the hall and go on up to the next floor, then down and out of the hotel.
All of this burst into his mind as an instant template for the next three minutes. He felt for the safety on the pistol. The doors were closing. He flicked off the safety.
Then a bell chimed and the doors jerked back. A man and a woman were waiting apologetically.
“Sorry,” the man said. The two of them stepped in, between Schrade and Strand, and the man punched the seventh floor. The woman was wearing a gardenia fragrance that instantly permeated the elevator, a saccharine epitaph for the demise of another opportunity.
Strand was trembling inside when Schrade stepped off the elevator on the fifth floor. That was the end of it for the evening. He got off the elevator on the sixth and then waited in the hall until he could descend again to his own room on the fourth floor.
Once inside, he stood still a moment, panting as if he had run the whole distance from Ma Micheline. Jesus Christ, how could he have been that close without . . . He stopped. He reminded himself again of the reality of what he was doing. It was no different from surveillance work, until the last moment. Up to then it required the same patience, was subject to the same frustrations, required the same instantaneous adjustments in plan to accommodate unforeseen intrusions. One always expected the inevitable unexpected event. Changing course was routine. Adapting to sudden reversals was the norm.
“It’s me,” he said when Mara answered.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. Drained. No luck.” He told her about the events of the evening. She listened without comment.
“So that leaves the morning,” he said.
She waited a second. “Listen, Harry. Don’t . . . don’t . . .”
“Don’t get desperate. Don’t do anything rash,” he said.
“Yeah, that’s what I meant.”
They both seemed to realize how bizarre that sounded, in light of what he was trying to do.
“I was, uh, surprised at how I felt, seeing him after all this time,” Strand said. He was speaking softly, as though the telephone were the walls of a confessional. “I was very surprised.”
“What do you mean?”
He hesitated. “I wanted to kill him. It wasn’t dispassionate.”
“Did you think it would be?”
“I’d imagined it would be.”
They did not speak for a moment, and then she said, “Harry . . .” The tone of her voice hinted at a conversation he did not want to have. “Maybe . . . maybe . . .”
“Don’t say it.”
“Harry, neither of us is sure we’re doing the right thing here.”
“I am.”
“No, you’re not. Where’s the wisdom in being blind about this?”
“I’m not looking for wisdom, Mara.”
She said nothing else. They stayed on the telephone together, but neither of them spoke for a long time. Then Mara said:
“It’s raining again here. And it’s lonely.”
Strand struggled a moment with the lump in his throat. He thought she must know what was happening.
“I love you,” he said.
“And I love you, Harry Strand.”
CHAPTER 59
The morning was so overcast and dark that the street lamps were still on as Strand sat in Claridge’s plush robe and ate the light breakfast he had ordered. The night had been a grim phantasmagoric passage from one day to the next, during which he had tried to stay flat on his back to avoid inadvertently damaging the face of the stranger who slept with him. He tried to think of anything other than Wolfram Schrade: he succeeded in thinking of nothing else.
He had ordered an extra pot of coffee and already had begun drinking from the second one when he looked at his watch. It was seven-thirty.
He had known two professional hit men during his years in the intelligence business. They were, seemingly, unremarkable men, a little remote, perhaps, but one of them in particular he quite liked. The man was forty-three years old, Strand remembered, and he had grown up in the midwestern United States. He had been trained to kill when he had served in Vietnam, and when he’d finished his second tour in Southeast Asia, his superior officer had recommended his services to the Metsada. It was as though he had simply accepted another assignment. There was a military angle to it, being an Israeli operation, so it had seemed like an extension of his last Saigon assignment. After that the Israelis referred him to someone else, and very gradually the military aspect of it faded away. One day he woke up and realized he was making a very good living being paid to kill people; he was a professional assassin.
At the time Strand had known him, they were staying in a very shabby hotel in Algiers. They spent a lot of time talking, sometimes in their rooms, sometimes wandering in the narrow, alleylike streets of the city. He confided to Strand one hot night as they sat in the dark beside a window in Strand’s room, smoking and looking down into the crowded street, that he vomited every time he killed someone. Sometimes before, sometimes after. It was odd, he said, because he was not repulsed by the killing, so he didn’t know why it happened. But when it was time, he didn’t fight it. He just accepted it as part of the business. It used to bother him, he said, but now he didn’t worry about it anymore.
But Strand had always wondered why the man had told the story.
He picked up his cup and saucer and walked to the window with it. He had not turned on the lights in the room, so the suite was washed in a gray luminescence in which the burnished surfaces glistened with a pearlish haze. The light died away kindly into the corners, and colors were reduced to pallid values. It was an effect that he especially liked, though he felt odd about being able to enjoy it at this particular moment.
He had thought of Schrade until he was sick of him. He doubted that he had had a single heartbeat during the night that Schrade had not shared with him. He was saturated with the man. Killing him would be a sweet liberation. He knew it would be a scarifying act, too, like that of a fox that chewed off its own paw and left it behind in the jaws of the trap as it limped away on a bloody stump to freedom.
• • •
Mara was sitting on the edge of their bed, fastening the buckle on her shoes, when she decided to go on to Knight’s immediately even though she would be a little early. The decision was a result partly of a nagging sixth sense and partly of anxiety. She was worried sick about Strand, her mind generating an endless chain of scenarios about what he was doing and what was happening to him, none of them good. She couldn’t help it. That none of these scenarios was hopeful was depressing, which she feared would adversely affect the way she had to handle herself within the next hour.
The sixth sense was, naturally, more difficult to deal with. It was, simply, a discomfiting tug at the back of her mind that was so persistent, it seemed foolish to ignore it.
She stood up and smoothed her dress, a dove gray wool knit that fell to her ankles. She stepped to the windows and regarded her faint reflection. There was no full-length mirror in the bare town house. She entertained the idea of wearing a belt and finally decided against it, preferring a sleeker look. Her stockings were bone, her shoes matched the dove gray of the dress. She had taken the single braid of her hair and coiled it in a complicated chignon. A single black pearl drop dangled from each ear.
After calling for the cab and slipping on her long black raincoat, she stood at the windows and looked down at the street. Whatever was going to happen to them was already in motion and couldn’t be stopped or turned back or undone. She did not feel good about it, and the fact that she was not optimistic filled her with an enormous sadness.
The black cab came down Chesterfield Hill, emerging slowly from the fog and the drizzle. Suddenly she was angry, furious at herself and at the weakness of her feelings. She wheeled around from the windows and started down the stairs.
• • •
When the doorbell rang, Carrington Knight was surprised. He glanced at his watch and stepped to the windows to look down.
“A cab?” He turned with a puzzled frown to Claude Corsier, who was sitting in one of the armchairs, balancing a cup of tea on a saucer. “I don’t have any idea who that is. Excuse me a moment.”
At the landing he pushed a button to unlock the front door and started down the curving staircase.
Upon reaching the ground floor, he crossed the foyer and opened the front door.
“Oh, good Lord, Ms. Paille.”
“I’m sorry I’m early,” she said, stepping inside. “I hope this isn’t inconveniencing you.”
“Oh, my goodness, no, no, no, not at all,” he said, ushering her inside. “Let me take your coat.” He relished looking at her as she turned her back to him and let the raincoat slip off her shoulders. What an exquisite neck, Knight thought, the little wisp of dark hair there at the nape. The supple wool knit fit the woman like a kiss.
“Listen,” Knight said, his mind jittering with a way to handle this awkward circumstance as he hung her coat in the closet, “there’s a gentleman upstairs, another collector and dealer. He’s actually just on his way out, but
if you don’t mind, I’d like him to meet you, and to quickly look at your collection.” He could not, on the spur of the moment, think of any other way to get them around each other now that Corsier had stayed a little too long and she had come a little too early.
“Certainly,” she said, “I’d love to meet him.”
Corsier was waiting for them when they topped the last step on the landing. Knight introduced her to Corsier, whom he presented as Mr. Blanchard, an impromptu fabrication that Corsier accepted as smoothly as if they had rehearsed it.
Corsier, regal as always, bowed slightly from the waist and took her hand. He did not kiss it, although he looked as if he wanted to. Like Knight, Corsier was a connoisseur of beauty in its endless variations. Everything, even beauty, existed within a continuum, and a beautiful woman was certainly at the highest end of the scale. Ms. Paille was no less stunning today than she had been two days before.
Well aware of their tight schedule, Knight quickly retrieved Cao’s drawings from the vault and, while keeping up a rapid-fire, though oblique, explanation of Ms. Paille’s situation, placed the portfolio on the library table and opened it with a precious manner.
He stepped back. Claude Corsier silently studied the Balthus encased in the first leaf. Then he methodically went through the portfolio without hurrying, much to Knight’s increasing agitation. Occasionally Corsier leaned forward to examine a drawing more closely, his nose nearly touching it. At last he straightened and turned around.
“Ms. Paille, you are in possession of a very handsome collection here. I’m sure you know that.”
“Mr. Knight has made me aware,” she said.
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