The Color of Night

CHAPTER 20

PRAGUE

The two men dawdled along the center aisle of St. Vitus’s Cathedral. They were dwarfed by the immense, soaring height of the cathedral ceiling, a vaulted work of intricately webbed Gothic tracery as high above them as heaven itself. Tourists walked quietly all about them in the massive nave, the hissing of whispers and the murmuring of lowered voices creating an aural undercurrent befitting the respect due hallowed stones.

The taller man was middle-aged and dressed impeccably in a dove gray suit. He wore a stiffly starched white shirt with a high, spread collar, cobalt blue striped tie knotted in a firm Windsor. There was a sparkling white pocket handkerchief in the breast pocket of his suit coat. He walked with his hands clasped behind his back in a dignified way that seemed befitting of another era when correctness of carriage in public places was a matter of manners. He was broad shouldered and wore a mustache and goatee, very neatly trimmed and peppered with gray.

As they strolled, he stooped slightly toward his companion in order to hear better what he was saying. The companion was a man perhaps twenty years younger, dressed casually in dark trousers, a faded striped dress shirt, olive sweater vest, and a flea market sport coat. The shorter man was stocky, with a round florid face, his tight cheeks beginning to show outcroppings of scarlet spider veins. He had pale eyes and a button nose, and though he might have been a little heavier than a doctor would have advised, he exuded an air of military efficiency and capability.

The taller man was concentrating on the remarks the shorter man was making about a document the latter was reading and which he held in his right hand.

Suddenly the shorter man stopped squarely in the center of the nave and closed the document and rolled it up in a tube. Holding it in his right hand, he turned and gestured with it toward the other man.

“This… this is very serious business,” he said.

“Oh, without a doubt, Mr. Skerlic,” an obviously bogus name, but since Claude Corsier was using the equally bogus name of Charles Rousset, he felt compelled to refer to him in some appropriate way.

Someone dropped one of the hinged prayer benches on the backs of the pews, and the slap of heavy wood against stone echoed throughout the enormous nave.

“He’s not just any man,” Skerlic said, beginning to construct the scaffolding of reasons that would support the high price he planned to quote.

“No.”

“He has his own intelligence… his own agents…”

“Yes.”

“Very difficult.”

“Surely that, but a man can always be killed, can’t he?”

Mr. Skerlic looked at Rousset with his most sober expression, and then a faint, almost cunning smile flickered across his mouth and then passed away.

Rousset moved to walk on, and Skerlic followed. Neither of them spoke for a while as they idled toward the side aisles of the cathedral and passed under the long enfilade of Gothic arches where a succession of chapels lined the walls on either side of the nave. The older man stopped in front of one of them and gazed up at the stained-glass window above it and with one hand stroked his mustache and goatee. He was silent. “A lovely thing, this window,” he said.

“When do you want this done?” Skerlic was standing slightly behind his companion, not even interested enough in the window to approach the chapel railing.

Rousset did not answer immediately but continued gazing up at the brilliant Gothic illuminations of the window made all the more striking by its setting in the gloomy chapel.

Sighing, and allowing a small shake of his head, the gentlemanly Rousset turned with resignation to his impatient acquaintance. Clasping his hands once more behind him as he faced the brighter nave from the shadows of the side aisle, he said, “As soon as you can do it with certainty. Every hour we can add to his sentence in hell the better.”

Skerlic nodded. He was tapping his right leg with the rolled-up papers. Maybe he should just go back to Belgrade. This didn’t feel right. After all, the target was a man of some significance. And who was this guy?

“No, I don’t care when, Mr. Skerlic. That is, the date is not critical, if that is what you mean. Though if it happened within the next instant it would not be soon enough.”

He stopped. They were standing in front of the chapel, looking out at the milling, pacific wanderers in the dusk light of the cathedral. They might have been two husbands waiting for their tardy wives to read every last word of yet another inscription or to ogle the munificence of silver and gold in yet another chapel.

“As to how it’s done,” Rousset said, “I do have some insight into that. That is, I have some essential ideas about how this man is to be approached. Crucial ideas.”

Skerlic bridled slightly at this encroachment into his profession.

“Your man is nothing special,” he said, risking the case he had been building for a high price. “We’ve done plenty of men who thought they were untouchable. He won’t be the first in line on that score.”

“Oh, I’m not questioning your ability, Mr. Skerlic,” Rousset said reassuringly. “I’m quite familiar with your resume. No, I mean merely to hand you an advantage.”

Rousset watched Skerlic closely as the Serb’s eyes looked down the length of the cathedral toward the chancel, his attention distracted momentarily by the universe of gilded motes that hung in the light penetrating the clerestory high above them, the slanting rays plummeting a hundred feet to the stone floor below. Rousset guessed the Serb knew little of cathedrals or architecture or religion, yet was he somehow moved by being in the midst of its beauty and immensity? The Serb’s eyes fixed on one of the mote-laden rays and followed it down, down past the triforium, down through the base of heaven, down past the Gothic arches, down past the bundled stone pillars, and finally to the stone floor, where it shattered like a glittering breath.

“I have the advantage already,” Skerlic said, turning suddenly to Rousset with a sober expression, “just by virtue of setting out to do it.”

“But surely you want all the advantages you can get.”

“Of course I do. And I’ll make sure I have them, or I won’t do it.”

Rousset nodded. The little Serb was a prickly bastard. But he was the man he wanted.

“If it were, say, a bomb,” Rousset ventured again with polite persistence, “I could provide you with the place and opportunity. I have the wherewithal to do that. You would be responsible for doing it, of course, but… well, since I know him so well I could save you a great deal of time.”

The Serb pondered the gentleman’s demeanor and finicky manner of dress.

He nodded. “When the time is right, maybe we could use some of your ideas.”

“Then you’re confident,” the tall man said.

“Oh…” Skerlic nodded with conviction, pulling down the corners of his small mouth in a shrug of assurance. The Balkan bitterness, the internecine struggles, the racial hatreds, the criminal enterprises that rushed into the vacuum created by incessant war, all of it had taught him that he had a knack for killing. The more he did it, the better he got and the less it bothered him. As far as he was concerned, everyone was ripe for dying, and he might as well be around to help them along and get paid for doing it. And with modern technology, it was so easy nowadays. Confident? “Oh, yes.”

“Then you will do it?”

“Well”-Skerlic looked away smugly-“I will do it, but I’m not sure you will have me do it. It’s a matter of money.”

“What is your fee?”

“Two hundred thousand. Deutsche marks.”

Rousset stared at the Serb. He was delighted. He was prepared to pay more than that, but he didn’t want to appear as though that kind of money didn’t hurt him. He swallowed deliberately, though there was no need. It was for the Serb.

Skerlic saw the reflex and raised his eyebrows and allowed his eyelids to sink lazily in a “take it or leave it” expression.

“I will agree to that,” Rousset said, a hint of strain in his voice.

Skerlic slapped the side of his leg once with his rolled document. “I may have some need to get a message to you. Do you have an e-mail address?”

They exchanged addresses.

“That’s that, then,” Rousset said. “And the payment?”

“Don’t worry about the payment.” The little Serb looked at the older man. “When I’m ready for it, I’ll want it all.”

“Of course.” Rousset hesitated. “I’ll need proof, naturally, that you’ve done your job.”

“That won’t be a problem.”

They didn’t shake hands. Skerlic simply turned away and walked back out into the vast nave, moving through shafts of light, his own decisive and irreverent footsteps clearly distinguishable from among the shuffling soles of the tourists, until the last shadow swallowed him and he was gone, somewhere near the chapel of St. Wenceslas and the Golden Portal.

Claude Corsier, one hand behind his back, the other tugging pensively at the salt-and-pepper goatee, watched Skerlic leave. He didn’t know exactly what he had expected, but he hadn’t expected that. As a lover of art, he was naturally a little romantic as well, and the dark angel that he had imagined he would meet for this conspiracy had been quite other than this abrupt and testy little Serb with pale eyes and a deteriorating complexion. Still, he did have to admit, there was something of the smell of death about him.