The Color of Night

CHAPTER 37

PARIS

Strand walked to the end of the Boulevard des Capucines, continued on to the Boulevard des Italiens and then to Boulevard Montmartre. The sidewalks were crowded, and the end-of-the-day traffic was heavy, which was good. He went into the Passage des Panoramas and stayed in its narrow corridors for some time, wandering, waiting, watching, before he was back on the streets, following Rue St. Marc to Richelieu and then on to the Metro station at Rue Drouot, where he descended, allowing himself to be caught up and swept along with the crowds. He got onto a train and then got off again just before it pulled away.

With his mind replaying Obando’s revelations, he watched the faces closely, monitoring the pedestrian flow, looking for another body that might suddenly turn against the grain as he did. The cynical Colombian had inadvertently confirmed Lu’s report of Howard’s treachery. Strand wondered how long it had been going on, if it had been going on when Strand was still with the FIS.

As he moved through the crowds, dawdling and reversing, his thoughts never left the conversation he had just had with Mario Obando. It was time to face up to the fact that his scheme was failing miserably.

Finally, satisfied that he was not being followed, he headed back to the Quatre Septembre.

There was a brasserie near the hotel, a medium-size, bustling place a few steps below street level. Large windows across the front afforded a view through a wrought-iron grille on the sidewalk. After dark, the lights from the street played crazily upon the murky panes of the windows like sparks flying up from a fire.

They went there immediately, in the dusk. There was an early crowd, young people from the couture shops and studios not far away, but they were not loud.

After the waiter came and took their orders, Strand looked at Mara and took a deep breath.

“Damn,” he said, shaking his head slowly.

“You want to go first?” she asked. She was wearing a one-piece cotton knit dress of navy blue. With her black hair and carmine lips she was a striking figure.

He told her everything, even of Romy’s relationship to Schrade. She was shocked and several times looked away as if trying to comprehend it all.

“I don’t know why I didn’t tell you before,” he said. “It doesn’t make any difference, except that it makes everything even more horrible.”

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

“That was another reason she was able to pull off the embezzlement so well. He trusted her more than the other money managers he had working for him. She stretched his confidence in her to the limit. It bought us a lot of time, gave us more room to maneuver.”

Mara stared at him. He knew what she was going to say.

“She must have hated him,” she said. “I know she loved you, that she would have done anything for you, but… she must have hated him so much.”

Strand looked away. Even getting close to that subject made him suddenly empty, as if the marrow were being withdrawn from his bones by the sheer gravity of the sadness of that story.

Mara reached out and put her hand on his. “Harry”-she squeezed his hand until he turned and looked at her-“thank you for telling me. I’m grateful that you felt you could tell me.”

For a moment they said nothing as they looked at each other, then Mara took her hand away from his.

“You want to hear about Howard?”

Strand nodded.

“I got him on the Internet,” she said, swallowing. “I told him I was confused, scared, didn’t know what to do. I confessed that I’d fallen in love with you, but I didn’t know if I could just turn my back on the FIS, the U.S., all that. I didn’t want to be a traitor. If that was the logical extension of what I was doing, if that was the way it was going to be interpreted, I didn’t know if I could handle it.”

“How did he take it?”

“I don’t think he was buying it at first. I couldn’t get a real good feel for nuance on the Internet.”

“How did you leave it?”

“He wants to meet. I said I’d get back to him. I kept it open, just as you said.” She hesitated. “But Harry, how in the hell could you ever do anything with him again?”

Strand knew what she was thinking.

“We just don’t want to cut him off, that’s all,” he said. “We don’t want to cut off anybody. We need as much flexibility as possible.”

Their sandwiches came, and they stopped talking for a few minutes while they ate, each of them pursuing separate thoughts. The sounds of the brasserie returned to Strand’s consciousness: the low gabble of the couture crowd, the clink of china and flatware, the hum of indistinguishable conversations.

After a while Mara wiped her mouth, took a drink of her coffee, and looked at him.

“Then who’s next? Lodato or Grachev?”

Strand thought a moment. He might as well tell her straight out.

“I’m not going to waste my time with either one of them,” he said. “They’re going to give me the same reasons for not going after Schrade as the other two did. Schrade’s way out ahead of me on this. He’s made sure that all of them are finding him to be very useful right now. I’ve told you, he understands the psychology of revenge. Money, enough of it, will even buy off hate. As long as it keeps coming in.”

Mara leaned toward him. “Harry, go to the FIS. They can get between you and Schrade. I know they can.”

“It would never happen.”

“You can hand them a mole, for God’s sake!”

“And I worked for that mole for a dozen years. What kinds of questions does that raise, Mara? After stealing millions from Schrade, what kind of credibility do I have? You want to know the truth? They’d rather have the money I took from Schrade than the mole. Exposing Howard would mean tons of bad publicity for them. Getting the money would mean tons of good publicity. They can retire Howard and sweep him under the carpet. He can be made to go away very easily.”

“Then you expose him. Threaten to go public if they don’t give you-us-protection.”

“Going public is character suicide. It wouldn’t take much at all for the FIS to provide ‘proof ’ to the media that I was part of Howard’s rogue operations. Don’t forget, I was already one step in that direction by agreeing to run Schrade in the first place.”

She looked at him steadily across the table. “You’re making a lot of assumptions again,” she said.

“I worked for them for twenty years.”

She paused. “Then… what, Harry?”

“I’m working on a couple of ideas.”

“Like what?”

“Mara, I’ve really got to sort some things out in my mind, okay? Give me some breathing room.”

Her dark eyes searched his. As they looked at each other he had the feeling that she knew exactly where he was going with this. She knew, but she didn’t press him on it. She was giving him room, giving him time to get his mind around an unthinkable alternative. She knew what he was dealing with, and he guessed that it frightened her as much as it did him. It had to. But she waited.

“I love you, Harry.”

It wasn’t what he had expected.

They lay together, awake, in the dark, listening to the sounds of the Quatre Septembre. They each drifted off to sleep at different times and then stirred again, reassuring each other that they were there.

Once during the night he awoke and heard her whispering to him. He missed what she was saying, except the last part, “I love you.” He thought he answered her with the same words, or maybe he dreamed it.