The Color of Night

CHAPTER 11

“Ghosts,” Darras said, looking at Strand across the table. “I never thought I would see ‘Lawrence Vane’ again.” He spoke with the same indifference with which he expressed all emotions, from shock to boredom.

They were sitting in a trattoria on Via Famagosta in a working-class neighborhood north of the Vatican. Alain Darras was being predictably unpredictable. He did not eat in the same part of the city where he slept. He did not sleep in the same part of the city where he worked. Sleeping, eating, and working were the three habits of life. Habits were patterns. Patterns were reliable. Reliability enabled “others” to anticipate you. A bad thing.

Strand himself was still trying to staunch his adrenaline hemorrhage. He was forcibly making himself appear calm, but the stunning impact of discovering the video could not be diminished by will or wish.

“It took me an hour to find you,” Strand said.

“Good.” Darras’s life was so outre that there was no intended irony in his response. He was drinking the cheapest wine in the trattoria, a light grape-juicy red that came in a bottle with a local label. He was eating olives, the slick, denuded pits lying beside the bottle like legless beige beetles. The doors of the trattoria were open to the street, where people from the neighborhood were coming out to linger in the cool Roman evening, young men lounging around the parked cars, children playing sidewalk games, old women watching life from the kitchen chairs they had brought outside where life was happening.

“You haven’t been in Rome,” Darras said.

Strand shook his head.

Darras slid a small glass toward Strand with the back of one hand in which he was holding a half-eaten olive, and with the other hand he poured some of the rosy wine into the glass.

Strand nodded thanks.

Alain Darras was in his late fifties. He was French, which was all that Strand knew about his past. Though his straight black hair was thinning, he still kept it combed back from his forehead with a high part. He was a little more jowly now, but the mustache on his long upper lip was still neatly trimmed, though grayer, and his handsome, sad eyes were still handsome, though sadder.

“This is something of an emergency,” Darras said. He had an olive in his mouth, and he was worrying the meat off of the pit. He always asked questions as though they were statements. They were more like assessments that he threw out for confirmation.

“I have a few names,” Strand said.

“And you are in a very big hurry.”

“I’m no longer in the business,” Strand said.

Darras took the clean pit out of his mouth and placed it on the table with the others.

“Photographs.”

“No.”

“Photographs are a big thing these days,” Darras said. “Digital capabilities. My business has changed more in the last four years than it changed in the entire twenty years before. With the computers it is getting pretty damn close to magic. Half the people working for me now are children. I want more children. They come out of the universities with brains like alchemists. They know chips and digital. They don’t know shit about life, but they know ‘virtual.’ They think virtual is life. Damn, sometimes they can almost convince me that it’s real, too.” He shrugged. “We’re raising a generation of completely fucked-up kids, you know.” He dropped his eyes to his wineglass. “I like them.” He picked up another olive.

“I need this tomorrow,” Strand said. He knew he was being curt, but he didn’t have the strength to finesse it.

“That is enormously expensive.”

“If I thought it was physically possible, I would ask for it tonight.”

Darras nodded slowly. “I see.”

A few more people wandered into the trattoria. Romans ate late. A little girl about five or six years old came from the kitchen in the back and dawdled past their table, chewing on a crusty piece of bread, carrying half a hard loaf under her chubby arm. When she got out the front door, she broke off pieces for two little friends who were waiting for her on the sidewalk.

“Odd, isn’t it, that it’s like the Mafia,” Darras said, “intelligence work. You never really get to leave it. It follows you to the last place you lie down.” He regarded Strand with melancholy reserve. “I see it all the time.”

Strand took a piece of paper out of his coat pocket and placed it on the table. With a flick of his fingers he spun it around so Darras could read the names written there. Darras dropped his eyes to the paper.

“Oh.”

“I want to know how to get in touch with these four men. I need to get to them personally, without some ambitious lieutenant trying to get between us. I have to speak to these men themselves… no one else.”

“I see. So you actually have been out of touch after all. And the lady?”

“Everything.” Strand jabbed the end of a forefinger on the table. “Everything.”

Darras bit into the olive. “The names below. She uses these, too.”

“Yes, she might.”

Darras sighed as he picked up the list and put it in his inside coat pocket. He regarded Strand as he ate the olive. Strand wanted to leave. He wanted to get the hell out of there and just be alone until he met Mara at Toula’s. He needed to get his mind organized so he could make his body behave the way his mind knew it should. But Darras wanted to talk, and Darras was doing him a favor, even if it was a favor that Strand would have to pay for.

“You were always honest with me, Harry.” Darras almost smiled. “If that word doesn’t completely lose its meaning in this context. I’ll have my kids go the extra mile for you.” He minced the olive with his front teeth. “Why did you tell me you weren’t in the business anymore?”

“So you’d know.”

“Do I need to know?”

“I feel better that you know.”

Darras was very still. He took the smooth pit out of his mouth and without even looking down added it to the pile of beetles.

“See. That’s what I mean,” he said. He drank his wine. When he put his glass on the table he shoved it around in a tight, idle circle, moving only his fingers, watching the wet snail smear of the glass on the tabletop. Then he looked up at Strand.

“When the Wall came down, when communism died its ignominious death, I thought I would starve for lack of work,” he said. “In fact, just the opposite has happened. All of those intelligence services collapsed and disbanded and closed shop and shut down networks. The Eastern bloc, Soviets, you people. Suddenly Europe was drowning in unemployed secret service hacks and spies. Now they are all working again, much busier than ever, except this time they’re working for criminals. I’m making a fortune, Harry. From criminals. Drug smugglers, counterfeiters, embezzlers, money launderers, car thieves, gunrunners, smugglers of illegal aliens. Assassins. They all need information. Reliable information.”

He drank some more wine.

“I bought a ton of Stasi and KGB records-there are millions of tons of them, but I was specific about what I wanted-and my kids scanned them into the computers. I made so much money off the Russian Mafia in the early years after communism collapsed that I could afford to buy records from all the Eastern-bloc secret services. I bought Asian files. I bought South American files. Middle East. I have to admit, I was surprised that I could buy so much. Nobody has any loyalty anymore. The American dollar is more coveted than peace of mind. Anyway, for the last four years I have had nearly fifty people working day and night on computers I keep on two full floors of an office building here.”

He sighed hugely.

“Only God has more names in His files than I do.”

Strand was adept at the ruse of seeming to listen while letting his mind go elsewhere. It was not an easy thing to learn. Vacuity has a way of registering on a person’s face the moment the mind begins to wander. But Strand had learned to do it well. It was a valuable deception, like hiding fear and panic.

“… state of the art, of course,” Darras droned on. “They’re piranhas, these computers. So small, yet so voracious. You feed them and feed them and feed them. They digest everything you feed them.”

Strand listened with his eyes, but his chest was tightening. It was the worst feeling in the world, and he had hoped never to experience it again. It was what the fleeing springbok felt when the pursuing cheetah seemed to read its mind-every feint was anticipated, with every dodge the cat was there… and there… and there.

Suddenly he said, “Alain, I need a couple of forged passports.

U.S.”

Darras regarded him. “I need a photograph.”

“Use one of yours. I know you’ve got one.”

“This is costly.”

“I don’t have any choice. And I need dossiers on two other names.”

He took a notepad from his coat pocket and wrote down “Ariana Kiriasis” and “Claude Corsier.” He tore out the piece of paper and put it on the table and again spun it around with his finger for Darras to read.

Darras dropped his eyes to the paper and then looked up.

“You decided to cut yourself off from them.”

“Yes.”

“They don’t know where to find you.”

“No.”

“That was your idea.”

“Yes.”

Darras was almost amused but conquered the impulse.

“You tried to slip away from your own shadow.” Without looking he reached for an olive, but they were all gone. “That’s what I was talking about,” he said, wiping his fingers on a napkin. “The shadow of intelligence work. Once it attaches itself to you, it follows you around on the ground, on the water, up the sides of walls. You try to get rid of it at your own peril.”

“Any problem with the other names?” Strand asked. He looked at his watch, just to let Darras know he had to leave.

“No.”

“By tomorrow.”

“If at all possible. Certainly as soon as possible.”

Strand nodded. “Thank you.”

He pushed back his chair to leave. Darras didn’t move; he was staying. Strand stood, and Darras looked up at him.

“I like you, Strand,” Darras said. “I always thought you were a decent fellow, which is a curse in this business.”