The Color of Night

CHAPTER 35

It was a fine piece of one-upmanship, the sort of thing that was second nature to men in Mario Obando’s line of work. The world of legitimate business provided a warm and fertile environment for male strutting, but it was nothing compared to the showy displays of male ego that occurred in the crime world. In Obando’s milieu, no available opportunity to squirt a few cc’s of testosterone in your adversary’s direction was allowed to pass. For the younger ones, like Obando, a smart mouth was the extra edge that made them feel just that much more clever than their opponents. They had to be smart, look smart, and sound smart. And, of course, they had to be brutal.

“Even if I can’t help you directly,” Obando went on, having made his point, “perhaps I can give you something in return. I know you didn’t do this from the impulse of a warm heart, Harry, but regardless, you did me a favor.”

He dropped his eyes to Strand’s glass. The Scotch was gone, the ice was melting. He looked toward one of his men and held up two fingers and then flicked his wrist downward, pointing at the empty glasses. He dropped his arm and looked again at Strand. He put out his cigarette, turned slightly to one side, and crossed one leg over the other.

“As for the other business, even though Schrade is being very useful to me right now, eventually the crows will return from Amsterdam and Naples. They’ll come home to Berlin to roost.”

Obando was not being clever. He was pissed. Cool, but pissed.

“Aside from that, it galls me-a lot-that Schrade’s been able to play both sides of the game for so long. I have to admit, he’s got huge balls. I’ve got to admire that. As far as it goes.”

The two drinks arrived. Obando picked up his glass, raised it to Strand, said, “Prosit,” and drank his first sip.

“But I think it’s gone far enough,” he said. “Obviously, so do you.”

Strand had no idea where this was going.

“You want him killed,” Obando said matter-of-factly, dismissing Schrade with a wave of his hand. For an instant the gold oval of his cuff link caught the light coming from behind Strand’s back and made it glint far brighter than anything else in the room.

“What happened, Harry?” Obando went on, “You’re a government man, were. You’ve been out of it several years now. By this time Schrade should have been just so much past business. An old war story. Yet here you are, right back in the middle of it. You’ve kept these files-” He nodded at the table. “Schrade was never past business with you, was he? And you never expected him to be.” Obando tilted his head a little. “That’s interesting to me.”

He stopped and regarded Strand.

“Listen,” he said, “I was raised in a religious family. Went to Catholic schools in Bogota. Elementary and then high school. Two years in a Catholic college before I went to UCLA. I’ve read lots of Bible. Lots of it.”

Obando lounged in his chair, one arm resting on the table, enjoying the conversation now. “You’ve heard the story of King David.”

Strand just looked at him.

“I’ll take that as a yes. And the story of Bathsheba.”

Strand was silent.

“Another yes. And the story of Uriah.”

Strand waited.

“Well, you get the point, Harry.” Without looking at it, his long fingers found the gold cigarette lighter. He set it on its edge. “Actually, it was something of an understatement when you said this was personal, wasn’t it?”

Obando smiled knowingly. Strand had the queasy feeling that he was about to encounter something he had not anticipated.

“I’ll have to tell you a story,” Obando said, shifting in his chair. “I know a little bit about you, but I didn’t know it was you until today.” He touched the lighter as if adjusting its position. “A couple of years ago Schrade came to me with a new proposition. I’d had these two big failures in Europe-which, thanks to you, I now know that son of a bitch caused-and he came to me and said, ‘Look, I know we’ve had these setbacks, terrible luck, but I’ve got a connection in a certain place that’ll allow us to develop some Mexican operations with almost zero risk.’ I was listening.

“‘I’ve got a brother-in-law,’ Schrade said, ‘who is an officer in the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Service. The guy’s in a position to open and shut doors. He can offer us a conduit for heroin and designer product and laundered money-through Mexico, in and out of the States.’ I told him to give my people a proposal. We’d study it, get back to him. He did. We made some preliminary inquiries. We went over it in detail. Everything was good. I got back to Schrade, and we made a deal.

“I was cautious at first. Gave him small projects while we continued to do background. Then larger and larger commitments as all of this has proved to be sound and lucrative. It’s been very nice, Harry. When the FIS stationed you to Houston the timing couldn’t have been better. Mexico was just coming into its own in a very big way. Shit, the money I’ve made through you has already offset what that son of a bitch Schrade made me lose on those other two projects.”

Obando closed his eyes halfway.

“So you see, Harry, after this long collaboration-even though we’d never met-I was already curious about you. And then you contact my people. You come here, give me this documentation on Wolf, and you want me to kill your own brother-in-law.” Obando raised his eyebrows. “See what I mean? You say, ‘It’s personal, I won’t talk about it.’ I’m wondering, What the fuck’s going on here?”

Strand was almost dizzy. What did he expect? Why was he surprised? Did he not think that Schrade’s obsession with him was everything that defined an obsession? Did he think that Schrade’s attention to revenge would be anything less than excessive? For two years this man sitting across the table from him had thought that Strand was still an FIS officer and the eminence grise behind a very successful money laundering and drug smuggling operation in which Obando was a participant and major beneficiary. He had believed this because his own intelligence people had “verified” Schrade’s information through “independent” information brokers.

Strand hardly knew where to begin. The same senseless technology that had enabled him to steal millions from Schrade had allowed Schrade to steal his identity from him. In certain parts of the world, at least, Strand was a garbled concoction of Schrade’s devising. Strand was appalled that when he had been gathering files on Mara and Ariana and Claude and Schrade, he had not had the foresight to have Alain Darras pull a file on himself as well. He guessed that Darras had done that to satisfy his own curiosity, and he guessed that Darras had wondered why Strand had “lied” to him about still being in the intelligence business.

“Harry.” Mario Obando’s voice brought Strand back to the moment. “Harry, you have been listening to me for a long time. I would like very much to hear a word from you now.”

Strand decided simply to tell the truth to this most unlikely of men, who, having been raised a good Catholic, could still remember Bible stories though he had decided long ago not to believe them.

“I’m afraid Schrade’s deceived you again,” Strand said. He circled the ice around in his glass with his forefinger, chilling the amber Scotch.

Obando waited.

“Almost all of it is a lie.”

“Tell me.”

“I’ve been retired for four years. I wasn’t your Mexico man. Couldn’t have been. I’ve been living in Houston, but I’ve been an art dealer there. Not an FIS officer. It’s that simple.”

Obando nodded.

“I can give you the names of people with the Foreign Intelligence Service in Washington who can confirm that.”

“I’ve already confirmed it with the FIS.”

“In Washington?”

Obando’s hesitation was almost imperceptible. “No. Here in Europe. It was confirmed at a very high level.”

“High level,” Strand said. “Let me guess: you talked to Bill Howard.”

Obando’s expression lost its composed confidence, a subtlety toward qualmish uncertainty.

“How did you know to talk to him?” Strand pressed. “Who gave you his name?”

Obando stared back at Strand in smoldering silence. Though he was far too sophisticated to let his embarrassment show, he could not so easily hide his aggravation. He seemed to be receding farther into the margins of the shadows as the light coming in from the Boulevard des Capucines grew more oblique and wan.

Strand broke the silence, “Don’t feel bad about it, Mario. I’ve only recently learned about Howard myself.”

“I don’t know why Schrade lied to me about this, Harry,” Obando said, “but I’m inclined not to give a fuck. Whatever’s going on between you and him is your business. I’m still making a fortune from him, and I don’t want anything to happen to that situation.”

“I’m sure you don’t,” Strand said.

Obando’s eyes were fixed on Strand, but his fingers again found the gold lighter and he began spinning it absently on the surface of the table, suddenly stopping it with his fingers. Spin… stop. Spin… stop. Spin… The lighter caught the dull light in its whirling, throwing off soft, rhythmic glimmers.

“Of course, I understand your own thinking, Harry…”

“No,” Strand interjected, “you don’t.”

“Well, not exactly, maybe, but I understand revenge. I recognize it when I see it, even if the man who seeks it doesn’t recognize it himself. Some men don’t want to admit to it. They’re embarrassed by feeling such a primitive emotion. They call it something else.”

Strand closed his briefcase, leaving the documents on the table. He no longer had any use for them.

“One question,” Obando said, still twirling the gold lighter. “You said almost everything Schrade had told me about you was a lie. What about that ‘almost’?”

Strand studied Obando’s face in the bruised light, studied the effect the swelling shadows had on the Colombian’s coloring, on his features, on, it seemed, the very nature of the man himself.

“I married his sister,” Strand said. “A year ago, in Houston, Schrade had her killed.”