The Color of Night

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 1960s, 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.

After he had finished the week-long process of acquiring the Fuseli drawings, he and Mara began showing each other “their” Rome. They were surprised to learn that in the past they had spent many months in Rome at the same time, and Mara found it intriguing to speculate that with their common interests they might very well have been in some of the same galleries or museums or restaurants at the same time. In reality, however, Strand knew that his Rome and Mara’s Rome, despite all their common interests, had never had the remotest chance of overlapping. They had been, in fact, worlds apart.

None of that mattered, for in the Rome of the present they stopped pretending that the very thing each of them had desired, and each had believed was inevitable from their first meeting, was not going to happen.

They had been dining late at Toula, which had become their favorite restaurant, an understated place at the throat of the tiny Via della Lupa in the center of the city. They lingered long over desserts and more wine, then walked awhile in the narrow streets near the Pantheon in the cool of an evening so rare that it seemed to have been conjured for them from antiquity. She leaned against him in the taxi, and he could smell her, not her perfume, but the fragrance of her skin, and the ride to Sallustiano took them through a Rome that had never seemed to Strand more beautiful or ancient.

There was no decision, no word spoken, as they climbed the stairs together. With Mara still holding to his arm, he simply walked past his own bedroom and followed her into hers.

He undressed her by the opened balcony doors above the palms, the late Roman breeze moving all about them like a vague memory he could never quite remember. She waited for his hands, head bowed, leaning into him slightly with a grace of controlled desire that he had never before experienced with a woman. When her dress fell away to the floor, she was naked. As he touched her waist, traced his fingers over the rise of her hips, and gently moved his hands up to cup her breasts, she leaned her head forward and put her lips lightly upon his neck. The feel of her was as new and erotic to him as the first moment he had ever felt a woman’s naked breasts, that long lifetime ago as an astonished boy.

“I just got a call from an old friend,” Mara said, approaching the door to the room where Strand had been spending the afternoon poring over half a dozen art books he had bought that afternoon in the Largo Chigi. “A woman I’ve known for years. We’re going to have drinks at a little cafe near the bottom of Veneto. Want to go along?”

Strand looked at his watch and then outside to the courtyard, where the light was already softening in the late afternoon.

“You still want to have dinner at Toula’s at nine?” he asked.

“Sure.”

“Then I think I’ll pass.”

“She’s going to be disappointed.”

Strand shrugged. “I’ll open a bottle of something here and think about you at dusk.”

She came across the room to the sofa, where he sat among books and papers scattered about him, and leaned over the back of the sofa, put her arms around his neck, and kissed him.

“She’s pretty,” she whispered. “You’ll be missing something.”

“Well, that’s enticing”-Strand scratched his temple with his pencil-“but I really don’t want to stop in the middle of this. Tell her… it pained me to forgo the pleasure of her company.”

“Yeah,” Mara said, straightening up, “she’ll swoon.” She turned and headed for the door, grabbing her shoulder bag from a chair on the way out. “See you later.”

Strand worked for nearly an hour more before he stopped, laid aside a folio volume of early Renaissance architectural drawings, and rubbed his eyes. He hadn’t even gotten up from the sofa since Mara left, and he needed to stretch his legs and go to the bathroom. First he turned on a few lamps, giving the room a soft amber glow.

This generous room had become Strand’s favorite place in the house because of its antique furniture and broad doorways opening to the loggia and courtyard. Pictures hung everywhere here, covering the high walls, hanging over the fireplace and over the doors. There were tall narrow paintings and horizontal drawings, some with elaborate frames, some with simple ones, square pictures, small oval ones; oils, pastels, pencil, charcoal, and metal point. One of Mara’s rare large nudes hung on the north wall, a dominant piece that Strand liked very much. In one corner of the room was an easel and a small table cluttered with pencil and charcoal boxes with colorful French and Italian labels.

He went down the corridor to the bathroom, and when he returned he opened the French doors to the evening air, standing and looking out with his hands in his pockets. Somewhere in another concealed garden a peacock cried. The city was all around him, yet the only evidence of it was a faraway and almost imperceptible hum of traffic.

Leaving the French doors open, he stepped outside and stood for a moment in the loggia. The east wall in the courtyard was rosy and deepening quickly as the sun fell behind the Janiculum across the Tiber. He stepped out onto the cinder path that followed the wall and began walking, his shoes making a crunching sound on the cinder. At the far end of the garden he stopped and listened to the peacock again and took a deep breath of the air. The air of Rome changed at dusk and acquired a special quality in the same way that the city’s famous light took on a unique character of its own at certain times of the year. At night the air was nearer to antiquity than in the day, and one could imagine with greater clarity the men and women of former ages.

He moved on, rounding the garden on his way back to the loggia. When he was nearly there he looked toward the French doors, anticipating that the amber glow from the few lamps in the room would be even richer in color now with the greater darkness. Instead he saw a jarring, pale light, flickering against the panes of the French doors.

He stopped. The television? Was Mara home? She hadn’t touched the television since they had arrived.

His heart began to lope, and all of his old reflexes roused themselves as he studied the pale light from the darkness where he stood. Then he walked on. He stepped up on the loggia and entered the villa through the French doors.

No one was there. He called out. Nothing. The house, his sixth sense told him, was empty.

Between the fireplace and the French doors was a small black statue, an admirable study of a Maillol nude. It sat on what must have been a narrow pedestal covered with a faded scarlet Renaissance damask with fleur-de-lis pattern in gold thread and a gold cord trim.

Next to it was a dark, heavy antique table upon which sat a black television and a VCR. On a shelf below were half a dozen cassettes, all of them labeled with Mara’s handwriting: “Master drawings, the Uffizi”; “Drawing collection, Villa Borghese”; “Modern drawing exhibit, American Academy”; “Balthus exhibit, Academia Valentino.” Strand had looked at the labels before, but he had never watched the tapes.

The VCR was on, static dancing on the fluorescing screen. A cassette was half out of the slot.

Strand walked over to it and took it out. No label, no identification. He put it back into the slot and pushed it in. The slot door closed. The gears whirred. He stood, watching, as it began to play. The Balthus exhibit. Mara’s voice narrating. The images were sharp and in color, and Mara was doing a good job, taking the exhibit slowly, coming in close on the paintings and drawings, narrating, reading the attributions on the labels below or to the side of each piece.

After fifteen or twenty seconds, Mara’s narration was abruptly interrupted and a grainy black-and-white tape began to play. A timing counter showed up in the lower left corner of the screen. A gummy, hot feeling washed over him as he immediately recognized the characteristics of a surveillance tape. He stood, riveted, in front of the screen. There was no audio track, and the only sound in the room was the slight hiss of the tape whirring slowly on the spinner heads inside the player.

The camera seemed to be mounted on the dashboard of a car. It was night, and the headlights of the car picked up traffic traveling in the same direction on what appeared to be an expressway. Headlights from approaching traffic across a median flared in bright streams as they approached and disappeared. The car moved in and out of the general stream of traffic with no discernible purpose. After a few moments it became clear that only one car had been in front of them consistently through all the lane switching and the passing and being passed.

Strand tried in vain to identify the locale: highway markers and exit signs had been manipulated and deliberately blurred. The cars were American; that was all he could tell. The camera car stayed so far back behind its target that Strand couldn’t tell anything about the driver or even how many people were in the car, and when the driver braked or switched lanes the tail and signal lights caused a halo effect that obscured its identifying marks even more.

What the hell was this?

The traffic grew thinner, then sparse. The car being taped took an exit onto an access road, then turned onto what appeared to be a country road. The nighttime conditions and the relatively narrow field of vision afforded by the headlights did not allow Strand to gain any significant information from the terrain. Once or twice he thought he saw sand dunes.

The two cars then turned off onto a smaller road, which, though it was still paved, was most likely on private land. Suddenly the speed of the cars accelerated dramatically. The camera car quickly closed on the car in front of it, and in a sickening instant Strand recognized his old Land Rover. Before he had time to make his mind work around that realization, a spotlight came on in the camera car, lighting the back of the driver’s head in the lead car just as she looked around.

It was Romy.

Strand’s legs buckled, and he dropped to one knee. His eyes stayed locked on the video screen. He had no awareness of whether he was sitting or kneeling: he was cognizant only of the mind-numbing fact that he was watching Romy’s last moments.

Romy’s car careened wildly in the turns of the narrow paved lane, the chase car’s headlights losing her just as she was sliding or skidding on the edges of the road. Marshland brush and sand dunes jumped in and out of the headlights, and then suddenly the chase car’s lights were squarely on the Land Rover. Once, twice, three times the chase car accelerated and rammed into the rear of the Land Rover, the camera shuddering violently with the impact. In the illumination of the handheld spotlight, Strand could actually see Romy’s head snap from the impact of each fierce jolt, and he could see her arms wildly fighting the steering wheel.

Abruptly the bridge railing was in front of her. The Land Rover began to fishtail out of control and careened off the road, plunging into the tidal stream. Water shot up high above the headlights of the chase car, glittering like an explosion in the bright lights; the chase car itself barely managed to stay on the pavement and clear the railing as it skidded to a stop in the middle of the bridge.

The camera was snatched from the dash, and nothing was clear for a few moments. Then the spotlight snapped on again and the camera was looking down into the tidal stream, the Land Rover’s rear end just scarcely visible out of the water, the brake lights burning steadily, then flickering out.

The camera stayed a long time on the rear end of the Rover. A long time.

When the tape finally played out and the machine clicked off, Strand fell over on his side. His face was wet. He felt partially paralyzed, as if a brain aneurysm had rendered him immobile. He coughed up bile, fought back nausea.

Romy’s pale, horror-stricken face was fixed in his mind.

God. God. How could he have been so wrong about it all?