The Color of Night

CHAPTER 15

By the time Strand returned to Sallustiano noon was approaching. He had replayed the explosion over and over and over in his mind until he was sick of it. Then he had concentrated on bringing his blood pressure and emotions under control.

Schrade wanted two things: revenge and the money. He was getting his revenge. Romy. Corsier. Probably Ariana. Clymer. Meret. Eventually he would get around to Strand himself. But first, the money.

By now, Schrade’s accountants had discovered that his millions were not going to be easy to retrieve. That, Strand reasoned, was why he was still alive. Schrade wasn’t sure he could get to it without him. Romy and Dennis Clymer had done an incredible job with those millions. Schrade had already made a tactical error by having killed them. He was giving too much of the credit to Strand, thinking that Strand was the only one he needed to gain access to his money. How in God’s name had Schrade discovered the embezzlement, anyway? Maybe he shouldn’t be surprised, but he was. He honest to God thought they had covered everything. All of them thought that. All of them had done their damnedest to ensure that not a single speck of a loose end remained after they closed down the operation.

When he arrived at the house in Sallustiano he went straight upstairs. Mara was just getting out of the shower when Strand walked into her bedroom. He startled her.

“Whoa,” she said, “you scared me.” She had stopped in the doorway of the large, white-tiled bathroom, still naked, drying her hair with a towel.

Smiling, she came over to him and gave him a wet kiss. Her mouth was cool. She smelled of shampoo.

“Now I feel better,” she said.

Strand just stood there. On the way back from Testaccio his mind had been flying in every direction but this one. Until he’d climbed the stairs just now he hadn’t given any thought to the way he was going to break this to Mara.

She saw instantly that something was wrong.

“What’s the matter?” she asked, daubing her face as the water dripped off her hair.

“We’ve got to talk,” Strand said.

She said nothing, but his manner and tone of voice caused her face to go rigid. Holding the towel bunched up at her waist in front of her, she braced herself, her eyes fixed on him.

Strand turned and walked to the windows. He sat in a chair and looked out over the rooftops of Rome toward the Palatine. The summer sky was cerulescent and flung with tufts of white clouds floating in from the Tyrrhenian Sea.

He turned to her. “Some terrible things have happened, Mara, things that have to do with my past. A past that’s going to require some explanation. Right now I’m going to try to tell you as much as I can as quickly as I can, because what has happened is going to turn my life inside out… starting now.” He paused. “I don’t know how much this will affect you. We have to talk about that. And we have some decisions to make. Fast.”

She was stone.

“Everything you know about me, Mara, is the truth,” he began. “It’s just that you don’t know all the truth there is.” He paused. “For nearly twenty years I was an intelligence officer with the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Intelligence Service. I ran agents in Eastern and Western Europe using my art business as a cover occupation. I bought and sold art under several different business names over the years and used several different names myself whenever the circumstances called for it. I retired four years ago, when I married Romy, moved to Houston, and bought out Paul Davies’s business, keeping his name for obvious reasons.”

Mara swallowed.

“All of that about how I got started, that’s true, that’s the way it happened. After I was recruited into the FIS I continued dealing in art, only now my profession became my operational cover. I ran businesses out of London, here in Rome, Vienna, Zurich… a number of places.

“I met my first wife while on assignment in London. She knew nothing about my intelligence work. The marriage failed largely because I hadn’t yet learned how to handle the stresses of a secret profession. She was the type of person who needed a lot of attention, which I wasn’t able to give her. I really do feel responsible for much of the sadness that marked her life.”

Mara was still holding the towel at her waist. She was beautiful like that, unaware of herself, totally disarmed by what she was hearing.

Strand turned away from her and looked back outside, letting his eyes settle on the horizon.

“My particular cell of agents relied mainly on two key people: Claude Corsier, an art dealer like myself, based in Geneva; and Ariana Kiriasis, a specialist in Hellenistic antiquities whom I’d met in Athens. From the mid-seventies through most of the eighties we were working the Soviet picture.

“In the late eighties the FIS decided to get serious about gathering information on a developing phenomenon: the increasing cooperation among the major players in international organized crime. Throughout the eighties we’d seen mounting evidence that these new collaborations were going to become a serious problem. It was like watching storm clouds building over the sea.

“In 1989 the FIS pulled my cell off of Soviet affairs just four months before the Berlin Wall came down. They put us on international crime; we spent the next year or so assessing the difficulties involved in launching an intelligence operation of this sort. One of our main sources in the Soviet operations was a German businessman named Wolfram Schrade, whose many commercial interests were spread widely over an international market.

“Because we worked so closely with Schrade we knew a lot about him, more than he thought we knew. We knew he was getting in on the front end of a variety of international crime operations through contacts he was making during his travels to foreign countries on legitimate business. Borders to people like Schrade were incidental, if not irrelevant. He knew that profits from illegal activities were as big in one country as in the next. He understood the potential.

“Soon, like all the big players, he had a cash problem. His money managers were scrambling for new ways to wash the stuff.”

Strand paused and watched the shadows from the clouds move across the cityscape, an ever changing scene where light, or its absence, illuminated an ancient landmark in one moment and then plunged it into darkness the next. It was a moving metaphor for history, played out on the surviving architecture of a perished empire.

“By 1991,” he went on, “my international criminal intelligence operation was ready to go active. The Soviet Union was only months away from implosion, and the black marketeers, who had kept a corrupt Soviet system from collapsing for fifty years, were becoming the Russian Mafia right before our eyes. Russia was swallowed by criminals so fast it shocked everyone. One of the enterprises they were best at was laundering money through their financial institutions. Our man Schrade was using them and paying a high premium for the privilege. The Russians were taking twenty-five percent of everything they washed, with no guarantee that their cut wasn’t going to go even higher.

“At the time Schrade had no choice but to pay up. He was moving enormous amounts of money, and they were the only ones who could handle it. But it burned him up. Schrade hated the Russians, even though he’d made a lot of money out of corrupt Russians over the years. He never forgave them for dividing Germany after World War Two. That decision had ruined a huge family manufacturing business by splitting it in half. Spying against them was his revenge.”

Strand paused. “Wolf has a whole philosophy of revenge,” he said. “He’s a believer.”

Mara still hadn’t moved. Water was dripping from her body, from her hair, puddling on the tile floor.

“About this time my people learned that Schrade had had enough of shoveling money out to the Russians. To avoid the high laundering premiums, Schrade went to a great deal of time and expense to design and put in motion his own complex laundering operation that cut them out. We had an informant inside and followed the entire development.

“My immediate superior in the FIS at this time was a man named Bill Howard. He came up with a scheme to get Schrade to cooperate with us as a high-level informant. He drew up a secret engagement advance, proposing that we offer Schrade a negative incentive: The FIS would confront Schrade and show him that we knew all about his criminal connections with the Russians, the Chinese, Italians, the Yakuza, Uzbekistanis, Ukrainians. All of them. We’d show him we knew about his money laundering operation, inside out. We’d tell him that we’d overlook all of this-all of it-in exchange for information about his worldwide criminal associations. We would present him with a want list, and he would be expected to fill it. If he didn’t cooperate, we would arrange to have his criminal involvement exposed.

“The legality of Howard’s proposal was highly questionable, but the payoff was enticing. If Schrade was successful at fulfilling this list, we would have the most in-depth picture of global organized crime that any governmental agency had ever had. In the end someone in the FIS decided to take the risk. But it was a ‘shrouded’ operation-an FIS secret. Howard got the green light.”

Mara was now sitting on the foot of the bed, the towel tied around her chest. He was reminded of the first time he had seen her, drying herself with a towel after getting out of the pool at the River Oaks Swimming Club. He leaned a shoulder against the window frame, facing her, and went on.

“I had a problem with it. It had nothing to do with the morality of what we were doing. Intelligence services cozy up to the worst people in the world. Always have; always will. Sometimes intelligence services get what they need by making compromises that would seem abhorrent in another context. There’s no way around that. That’s just the way it is. In Schrade’s case, I was faced with other factors.

“First of all, every intelligence officer knows going into an operation like this that if it all unravels somehow, the lowest man in the pecking order is always the one who hangs. That was me. If the operation ever blew up in our faces, it would be a disaster for me personally. The legality of what we were doing would be challenged, and I would catch the full brunt of the investigation. I was very much at risk and knew it. So I had to assess that.

“Also troubling was the prospect of working with Wolfram Schrade. I detested the man. I’d learned too much about him when he was spying on the Russians for us.”

Strand stopped, thinking of Schrade. “He was internationally powerful, but wielded all of his influence from behind the scenes. Shunned publicity. Reclusive. You never saw his name in The Wall Street Journal or U.S. News amp; World Report or Fortune. You never heard his name in the news at all. If his legitimate business involvements were buried in secrecy, his illegitimate relationships were hidden even deeper. Almost even beyond rumor.

“I was assigned to work with him because he was a passionate art collector and had a scholarly hunger for knowledge about it. Read constantly. Studied. That was our connection. Much of our communication occurred in that context. It was an efficient and useful cover. Unfortunately, Schrade pursued art as ruthlessly as he pursued everything else. It wasn’t a pretty thing to see, and I hated that he was even remotely involved in something that meant so much to me.”

Strand twisted his shoulders against the window frame, trying to alleviate the growing tension.

“What troubled me the most about what we were about to do was that we were turning a blind eye on too much crime. Considering the amount-and type-of criminal enterprises Schrade was involved in, by giving him a free hand, regardless of the kind of information he was feeding to us, I thought we were dangerously close to becoming part of the problem instead of part of the solution. I didn’t like it at all.”

Mara sat straight backed as a sphinx and just as silent, watching him. He could hardly blame her. God only knew what he would say next, where this was taking him and, by extension, her too.

He shook his head and looked outside again. Her total focus on him was understandable, but it was also disconcerting.

“God help me, I went ahead with it.”