The Color of Night

CHAPTER 33

PARIS

The hotel was small. Another of Strand’s former haunts, it opened onto one of the narrow streets in the Quatre Septembre, a short walk from the Boulevard des Capucines.

“Harry.” Mara’s voice intruded into his dream, the illogical plot of which quickly began rearranging itself to accommodate her. “Harry.” The second time she spoke, the sound was different, and he began to wake. “Harry, wake up.”

When he finally roused himself, he saw her standing at the foot of the bed. She reached down and put a hand on his foot. Behind her the windows of their room were open, the curtains pulled aside to let in the morning sounds of the neighborhood. He could see the sun on the buildings across the street.

Whenever it was possible, Strand always insisted on a room that faced out from the front of the hotel. It was usually louder, but the sound of the city provided him with an aural orientation to the rhythm of his surroundings. Because he had traveled a great deal, crossing time zones as readily as he crossed the street, and because he more often than not stayed in small, neighborhood hotels, such a synchronization helped him adjust his body clock to the meter of his new environment. Mara didn’t seem to mind.

“Is something wrong?” The attitude of her body told him there was.

“I just didn’t want you to sleep late. I’m nervous about this afternoon.”

“Go ahead and bathe,” he said. “I’ll order some coffee.”

“I’ve already bathed,” she said. “You slept right through it. The coffee’s on its way.”

Something was wrong.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I just couldn’t sleep. I want to talk to you.”

“Okay,” he said. He threw back the covers. “Let me shower, wake up.” He got out of bed, stiff from the long hours behind the steering wheel. His stomach was already tightening as he went into the bathroom to bathe.

“Harry,” she said, leaning forward, her elbows on her thighs, her hands twisting a napkin. “This… is very hard for me. It’s almost impossible for me…”

Mara was sitting on a small sofa, he was in an armchair. The coffee and pastries were between them. He had managed to quickly choke down a croissant while she was making some preliminary remarks, circling around to get to the real substance of her concern, which was not, he soon realized, the afternoon meeting with Obando.

This was going to be bad. Stepping back mentally, he tried to gain some distance from the condensed emotion that was building between them. He watched himself in the armchair; it was as if he already knew the change of direction that the plot was going to take, as if he could see what the duped protagonist-Strand himself-could not yet see, that his world was about to encounter yet another upheaval.

“Harry, I love you,” she blurted suddenly, “I didn’t know that I was going to. I… it… Harry, it caught me off guard. How the hell could I have known?”

She looked at him, her head tilted to one side in suppliance. There were no tears, but he was jarred by the expression in her eyes. In a breath he understood that her emotion came from those arid places that waited inside everyone, places to which one was driven unwillingly, when there were no alternatives, and from which no one returned without a translation of the heart.

“God,” he heard himself say. “Not Schrade.”

“No, Harry, no, no. It’s Bill Howard. I work for the FIS. Harry, I didn’t know you. How could I have known that this would happen to me… to us?”

She stopped, searching for the right words, unable to find them.

“Harry… my God, you’ve got to understand how this is killing me, how wrong it all has become for me. Everything changed after I got to know you, everything turned inside out, it all went wrong.”

When she stopped again, beside herself with inexpressible feelings, she quickly turned away, and Strand had a few heartbeats in which to become aware of his own emotions. He was numb. How incredibly stupid he had been, how completely he had misread her. How wrong he had been about Romy’s death. How irresponsible he had been about Meret. If he could be so thoroughly deceived in these matters, what other delusions lay behind him? What other failures of discernment lay ahead? He thought of how much he hated Bill Howard for doing this. He thought of how much he loved Mara in spite of it.

He stood and walked around the coffee table and sat beside her on the sofa. He put his arms around her and pulled her to him as she bowed her face against his chest. He felt like a fool, but he was too old, and not fool enough, to believe that he should walk away from her. Christ, this was a savage business.

“Mara, listen to me,” he said. “Listen to me. We’ve got to talk this out. We’ve got to figure out where we stand, how we feel, what we’re going to do.”

He felt her shudder, but he didn’t think she was crying. Neither of them spoke. Outside, the Quatre Septembre had worked its way to midday.

Finally Mara pulled away from him, averting her face, and stood. “Let me wash up,” she said, and walked out of the room.

He waited, stunned, listening to the running water. She could have been sent by Schrade, and he would have behaved the same way. He would have fallen in love with her anyway. It could have been tragic. That it hadn’t been was no credit to him. It took his breath away.

When she returned, her eyes swollen and red-she had not allowed him to see even a single tear-she was still composing herself. She didn’t come back to him on the sofa, but rather walked to the armchair where he had been sitting before and sat down. Holding a damp washcloth, she stared at it, kneading it as she gathered her thoughts. She was in control again and determined to stay that way.

“You know how it works,” she said, finally looking up at him. “They recruit for something like this. I’m not FIS. In Rome, after my husband died, we had a friend who worked at the American embassy. He and his wife were very kind to me. At a party at their house one night I met one of the FBI’s legats. When he found out I had lived in Rome for so many years, he was very interested. I got to know him. One night I got a call from him. He asked if I was familiar with a certain part of the city. I was. He said he was looking for someone in that area, and would I mind riding along with him as a kind of neighborhood guide. We spent most of the afternoon together, and I know now, after some experience, that he was evaluating me.

“Little by little over the next six months, he exposed me to more and more of the FBI’s responsibilities, the kinds of things they were involved in. Never anything really confidential, just overview stuff. All the while they were doing background checks on me.

“Anyway, a little surveillance situation here, a stakeout there… I liked it. I liked it a lot. And they liked what I did. After a year or so I became, essentially, the equivalent of a special support group member, a civilian used as support personnel in surveillance operations.”

She sighed heavily, still recovering, catching her breath. She looked toward the windows, kneading the washcloth. Her eyes began to redden again, but she cleared her throat and looked directly at him.

“When the FIS initiated this operation, they created a profile of the kind of woman they wanted. They went to the FBI first because of their large SSG pool. Not being FBI agents, SSGs weren’t in any of the computer files, wouldn’t be picked up by the private international clearinghouses. That’s why Darras didn’t find me. They knew you’d check me out. Everything else is true that you know about me. The screwed-up marriage. All of it. All of that was perfect background as far as they were concerned.

“They sent me through a crash course at the training center at Camp Peary, and when they thought I was ready they put me out there on a very long tether. They had a high respect for your counterintelligence abilities. For your sixth sense. The ‘dangle’ was a very cautious one. I showed up at the pool, then disappeared for a month. They were willing to take it very slowly, very carefully.” She looked down at her coffee. “They wanted to make sure that the hook set when you took it.”

Strand felt his face flush.

“I wasn’t any good at it, Harry,” she said. “They didn’t want me to make any contact with them while we were getting to know each other. They were afraid of you. So I was just let go. On my own. I was completely separated from them, as if I’d never known them.”

Again she sighed, a kind of jerky catch of breath.

“I didn’t hear from them at all until you went to San Francisco. A guy named Richard Nathan was my handler as long as we stayed in the States. If the situation moved to Europe, as they expected it would, I would work with Bill Howard.”

“So what were you supposed to do?”

“The money.” She was trying to be dispassionate, trying to be succinct, professional. “I was supposed to find out how much, where it was. How you had taken care of it. Once they had some basic information they were confident they could move on it. Seize it. There was so much, they were willing to go to great lengths.”

“What about me?”

“They just wanted the money.”

Strand looked at her. Did she really believe that? Was she lying to him, or was she kidding herself? She must have seen something in his face.

“I know,” she said. “Yeah, I did believe it. I had no reason not to. Of course, as I learned more as I got into it…” She let her voice trail off.

“So they’ve always known where we were?”

She nodded.

“Now, too?”

“No. Not now. I had a tag. A fountain pen I kept in my purse. I left it in the hotel in Bellagio. They don’t even know that we crossed over the lake to see Lu. As far as I know, the pen’s still in the hotel.”

“Then they know what I’m doing.”

“No. They don’t know that, either. I’ve been holding out on them for a long time, Harry. There’s so much I haven’t told them. Almost everything. Howard’s all over me now. I’m sure he knows what I’m doing. He’s furious.”

Strand tried to regain his balance, trying to factor in and absorb all the readjustments to the reality of his situation.

“What about the tape of Romy?” he asked suddenly, almost without thinking.

“No, Harry. I didn’t know anything about that. I don’t think they did, either, to tell you the truth.”

“When did you last speak to Bill Howard?”

She told him everything about their conversation in Bellagio two days earlier.

“I don’t believe him,” Strand said when she was through. “You’re right about him being suspicious of you. Howard’s been around too long not to recognize a miscarriage. He knows you’re not going to stay with it. He knows this conversation we’re having right now is inevitable. He knew it before you did. And if he knew it, and if he was telling the truth about Washington going after me, he should have brought you in and had me picked up. But he hasn’t done that.” Strand looked toward the windows. “I don’t think he’s gone back to Washington with this. Something’s wrong with this.”

Mara cleared her throat. He watched her as she held the cool, damp washcloth to her eyes for a moment. His mind was flying over the possibilities. There was so much to think about, it made him queasy. It occurred to him-shot into his mind like a bright spark-that she might be lying. Just as quickly he decided that if she was, if all of this doubled back on him again, they could have him. If she wasn’t who he thought she was, whatever was left was nothing he wanted. He could understand what she had done. God help him, it wasn’t all that different from what had happened with Romy. If he had learned anything at all from her, it was that if he was ever going to redeem himself from the years of lies, he was going to have to learn how to forgive. It was really the only way. If he was going to manage to stagger toward something better than what he was now, he was going to have to do it with damaged people like himself who were also looking for a way out. If they wanted to climb out of the darkness, if they genuinely desired it, he would gladly extend a hand. No one would be required to have a clean conscience. That kind of hypocrisy was no longer good enough.