The Color of Night

CHAPTER 23

BANJA LUKA, BRITISH SECTOR, BOSNIA

The short, stocky Serb sat on an upturned gas tin under a thick poplar tree at a farmhouse on the southern edge of the city. A spring rain had soaked the countryside for the past week, and the Serb’s shoes were caked with dark, gummy mud. So were the boots of his two companions, one of whom sat on the rim of a huge, cracking tractor tire while the other, standing, had propped one foot on the edge of a wooden trough as he leaned forward, his forearms crossed on his raised knee. Gnats hovered around them in humid air that was rich with the odors of damp earth and weeds.

The Serb’s two companions were brothers in their late thirties, farmers who seemed to be making only a scrabbly living off their small acreage. Around them was a mud-spattered stucco farmhouse with tiles missing from its roof, a derelict barn that had not seen meaningful use in nearly five years, a rusted-out flatbed Soviet-era truck, a twenty-year-old Russian tractor that had not been able to run for seven years.

“It’s the same stuff we used on the general in Bihac,” the Serb said. “Almost the same. Treat it the same way. I want you to get it out of the British sector, into Croatia, to Split.”

“Just the explosives. Not the detonators?” the standing man asked.

“Just the explosives.”

“And how much of it?”

“It would fit in a lunch pail.”

“Can we take it apart?”

“I don’t care how you do it, so long as you deliver to the address in Split the exact amount that I give you here.”

Both men nodded.

The short man reached into his shirt pocket and took out a piece of paper and handed it to the brother sitting on the tractor tire.

“That’s the address in Split,” he said. “Go there between two and three o’clock in the afternoon. Any even-numbered day. But only that hour. The woman there will take your package. She will open it and verify the amount. If all is fine, she will tell you where to go to get your money.”

“That day? Then?”

“Yes, that very moment.”

The two brothers exchanged looks. They had fought with the short man in Bihac and Mostar in 1992 and 1993 and had learned to trust him in a soldierly way before they were shipped to another front of the war. After they had all left the army, he had looked them up. This was the fourth smuggling job he had brought to them. So far, it was the most simple. And the most lucrative. And the most risky.

The brother standing with his leg on the trough turned to the short man.

“All right. When do we get the explosive?”

“Right now. I have it in the car.” He stood up. “But I have to know when you think you can deliver it. The woman has to know within one or two days.”

“Three days. We can get it to Split in three days.”

“Fine.”

In the distance thunder rolled from one side of the horizon to the other. They all looked up at the overcast sky.

“Goddamn it,” the older brother said, and took his foot down from the trough to follow the little Serb to his car.

GENEVA

The next morning Strand sent an e-mail to Mara. It was early, because he wanted to have breakfast and be at the bank as soon as it opened. He had a lot to do. He told her the trip was uneventful, that he was fine, and that he would let her know when he started “home.” He also asked her to let him know how she was doing.

After breakfast he walked down to the Quai du Mont-Blanc and in a few moments entered a leather goods shop, where he bought a briefcase. Outside he hailed a taxi and rode the short distance down the stylish Quai des Bergues and across the Rhone to Place Bel-Air, the heart of the business and banking district. The Suisse Credit Internationale was huge and modern, with sparkling bright interior architecture and an abundance of brushed chrome and glass and marble. Strand had not been in the bank in three years.

He presented the passport and identification papers for Georges Fouchet, requested access to his security box. After the usual paperwork and subdued formality involving several officers, he was led to a large room laid out in aisles and corridors. The walls of the aisles and corridors contained row upon row of brushed chrome drawers, each with a number, a recessed handle, and a keyhole.

They went through the ritual of the keys, Strand retrieved two chrome boxes, and the officer locked him in a small private room and left.

For the next fifty minutes Strand carefully searched through the two metal boxes, selecting the documents he had been thinking about ever since he’d left Rome. There were files of photographs and several dozen plastic cases of CDs, all labeled with dates and number codes he checked against a list in a notebook.

When Strand was escorted back to the main bank floor again, he asked one of the officers where he could go to duplicate documents, photographs, and CDs. The man reached into his desk and gave Strand a piece of paper with the names of two establishments.

Another short taxi ride, and he was there. It took an hour and a half to duplicate everything he wanted, and they were completely understanding that he wanted to watch every step in the process of duplicating each of the three formats.

He returned to the bank, replaced the original documents, photographs, and CDs in the deposit box, and left with two copies of everything.

It all had happened much more quickly than he had anticipated. It was almost noon, so he walked around the corner from the bank and ate lunch at a quiet restaurant that he remembered on the Quai de la Poste.

He finished earlier than he had expected and walked to Ariana’s hotel. She was staying on the left bank in the old Metropole on Quai General-Guisan. It looked across the narrow end of the lake near Pont du Mont-Blanc, where the lake squeezed down to become the Rhone. It had an old-world feel about it, something Ariana would seek out. A sophisticated traveler, she abhorred what she called the clinical modernity of anything built after the close of the nineteenth century.

As he entered the lobby he remembered that he hadn’t called Ariana as he had promised. It didn’t matter. She was expecting him, and if she had gone out to lunch, he would wait there for her.

He took the elevator to the fourth floor. As he followed the numbers on the doors he was not surprised to see that she had gotten a room with a lakeside view. Approaching her door, he saw her “Do Not Disturb” sign and rang the doorbell. He waited. No answer. He rang again. She must have gone out, as he had expected. He thought about going downstairs to the hotel’s dining room to see if she was there, then changed his mind, thinking he would use the time to go over his plan once more before explaining it to her.

He let himself in. Of course, it was a suite, even though she was alone. A small foyer opened up into a sitting room, and from the door you could look through the sitting room to French doors that opened up to the Quai General-Guisan and the glittering water of Lake Geneva. Strand closed the door and called her name, but there was no answer.

After throwing the deadbolt behind him, he walked into the sitting room and put the briefcase down beside a sofa and then walked to the French doors. It was a beautiful view of the promenades on the quayside, the lake, and the right bank just across the narrow neck of water. The French doors were open, and though the balcony was almost too small, Ariana had pulled an armchair onto it, as well as a small table. On the table was an ashtray filled with lipstick-marked butts and a hotel glass with a little melted ice in the bottom.

Strand walked back and stepped into the bedroom doorway. The bed was unmade. The bathroom door was open, and he walked over to it and looked in. Ariana was messy. The place was littered with cosmetics, nylons drying over the shower rod, a pair of shoes kicked to one side. On the marble countertop over the sink below the mirror, a toothbrush, earrings, half a pack of cigarettes, and her cigarette lighter. Damp towels in a pile by the toilet. The smell of perfume and soap and cigarettes.

On the other side of the unmade bed another set of French doors was open, the source of a nippy breeze during the night.

He turned and walked back into the sitting room, found a cart with bottles of liquor on it and some clean glasses. He poured himself a splash of cognac, went back to the sofa, and sat down, put the cognac on the table in front of him, and pulled the leather briefcase over to him. He snapped open the clasp and, in the same instant, looked up.

What he saw in his mind he saw in his eyes. He did not see the other side of the room. He saw the half pack of Ariana’s cigarettes and the cigarette lighter on the marble shelf over the sink.

He could hardly breathe, and instantly he felt damp around his mouth and forehead. His hands were still on the briefcase. He snapped the clasp closed.

He stood, aware of the weakness in his legs. He wiped his forehead and walked back to the bedroom door. His eyes crawled over every object in the room. Nothing was disturbed. No struggle here. But he had missed something. He must have. He stared at the unmade bed. It was just an unmade bed. Nothing.

He stared at the rumpled sheets. Like the patterns of sand in an estuary, washed into drifts that belied the flow of the water that had moved it, the sheets, too, had a pattern. The folds all drifted to one side, the side of the bed opposite him, next to the opened French doors.

Strand walked around the end of the bed with a sense of dread so heavy that it almost prevented him from moving at all.

She was there, on her stomach, her head and upper torso stuffed under the bed, her naked buttocks exposed, her bare legs partly wrapped in the sheets that had been dragged off with her. And here was the blood. A lot of it, sneaking out from under the bed as though it had tried to escape the horrible moment.

Strand had to see her face. Trembling, he stepped over and knelt down and grabbed her waist above her hips. She had the remarkable weight of death, a phenomenon he hated, the oddness of how death seemed to add tens of pounds to a body that would have been so much lighter in life.

She was difficult to get out from under the bed, and he heard himself apologizing to her for the rough treatment, for the way he wrenched her body to free her from where they had wedged her. When she came free, her wonderful mane of wavy black hair was all around her head, gummy and caked with the grume of the end of her life.

He turned her over and with the tips of his fingers separated her hair away from her face. She had been all night in her own blood, which had long since begun to curdle. When he had rolled her over the sheet around her legs had wrapped with her and covered her pubic hair. Her exposed navel seemed so… risque. With her wild hair swirling around her head, her body cocked oddly at the waist, she looked like a Greek belly dancer closing her eyes, caught up in the dance. Danseuse du ventre. One night in Salonika they had been going to bars, drinking. At a crazy place, almost out of control, she had made a joke. Danseuse du ventre.

He thought of Romy. And Meret.

And Mara.