The Color of Night

CHAPTER 38

BERLIN, SCHWANENWERDER

Howard was summoned to Schrade’s villa just after nightfall, and he already knew that it was going to be a tense meeting. A lot had happened during the day and not much of it any good.

When he arrived, chauffeured as always, in one of Schrade’s Mercedes, he was not surprised to see a number of cars in the motor court. Schrade’s surveillance and intelligence apparatus was good everywhere, but in Berlin it was an absolute ghost machine. Howard never had to worry that any other intelligence operatives-even the FIS-would detect him doing business with Schrade.

Howard had been at the villa at night before, and he did not find it a pleasant experience. Mainly because Schrade, for all his self-restraint and detachment and understatement, treated his nighttime villa with a good deal more drama than Howard could stand. Tonight, as in times before, the place was not lighted in the normal way, in which rooms were provided a generalized lighting with visibility being pretty much consistent throughout. In Schrade’s villa every room and corridor and stairway was lighted by dappled luminescence. There were only pockets of light, and one moved through the large spaces of the villa as through pervasive shadow, negotiating one’s way to random areas of soft illumination. And these islands of light were not static, for Howard had seen them shift slowly, rearranging the mottled patterns of glow and murk.

And there was another attribute in the villa at night that Howard disliked: There was constant movement, though Howard rarely saw anyone. As evidenced by the cars in the motor court, there were always more people here at night than during the day. But he never saw anyone. He heard doors open and close. He heard voices, sometimes murmurs, sometimes sharp ejaculations. He heard footsteps. He heard movement. And sometimes, as the snappily dressed young man ushered him through this dim netherworld, he thought he sensed activity suddenly stop, waiting until he had passed.

Tonight was no different, and by the time Howard was shown into the long salon of Schrade’s work space, he felt as though he had journeyed through a landscape of secrets and had arrived in a sorcerer’s castle.

Schrade was at his desk and did not get up. The large hall was dark except for the pools of glow that hung over each lime wood cabinet and lighted the way down the long approach to Schrade’s presence. The seating area was not lighted, which meant Howard was supposed to go to one of the large chairs anchored in front of Schrade’s heavily carved baroque desk, which seemed to levitate in a slightly brighter spill of incandescence. He sat down and waited for Schrade to acknowledge him.

Schrade, dressed in a dark, formal suit with a sparkling white shirt and a dark tie that seemed to have been finely embroidered with gold threads, was reading. Stacked on either side of him were red leather folders bulging with documents that protruded from them, each folder tied closed with a broad crimson ribbon. Computer screens winked and glowed behind him. Beyond, through the wide window, the Havel River, bathed in the blue of night, stretched away, flanked by glittering cinders of light that receded into invisibility.

Schrade closed the red leather folder from which he had been reading.

“It is difficult to articulate how stupid the United States Foreign Intelligence Service can be,” he said placidly, removing his reading glasses and clasping his hands together, his forearms resting on his desk, white French cuffs extending precisely from beneath the dark coat sleeves. The light sifting down from above him made his pale hair appear to iridesce. Howard had the horrible sense of being able to actually see through Schrade’s clear eyes into the abyss of his head.

“But we know damn well your people have been looking over our shoulders this whole time,” Howard said. “We’ve picked them up. I wouldn’t feel too superior. When Mara left the homing device in Bellagio, why didn’t your elite cadre of operatives intercept them? I’ve always had enough sense not to let another intelligence group do my work for me. They might not do it right.”

“Obviously. They are lost?”

“We don’t know where they are,” Howard admitted, “but I’m in communication with Mara Song.” He told Schrade about the Internet exchanges, of Mara’s ambivalence, her desire to stay in touch.

Schrade was motionless. This interested him.

“The e-mail’s encrypted, so there’s no way to trace it, but if I keep talking to her, if I can keep it up, we’ll find them. You know Harry, he’ll keep moving, moving, moving. I think he’s very worried. I think you can expect to hear from him pretty soon.”

Schrade waited.

“Song is completely lost to us as an agent. Despite her communication she has no intention of leaving him, she has no angst or ambivalence. This is Strand. He’s using her to keep the FIS on hold. He doesn’t want to be cut off from us. He’s up to something.”

“Washington knows of Song’s desertion?”

“Of course.”

“And this theory of yours?”

“Yeah.”

Schrade was thinking.

“Look,” Howard said, “you’ve waited this long. Let me play this out. I’ll concede your goddamn siege technique against Strand is probably working. He’s not going to want to lose this woman. You can’t kill her, Wolf,” he added quickly. “Okay? You’ve applied just the right amount of mayhem, just the right amount of madness. Don’t overplay it. He’s got nothing left he cares about except her. So, we stop. Right here. He’ll come around. He’ll negotiate. You’re going to hear from him.”

“When?”

“Goddamn, I don’t know when. But Strand’s running. Running’s exhausting. Covering your ass all the time’s exhausting. You’re after him. We’re after him. He’s afraid for her. Pressure. Pressure.” Howard paused. “Soon. The running, the constant moving’s going to wear him out.”

“How much time? Days? Weeks?…”

“No, no. Days.”

Schrade regarded Howard with opaque dispassion. Really, the only thing that seriously bothered Howard about the man, despite his shitload of psychopathologies, was his clear eyes. Sometimes Howard found himself wondering-irrationally, he knew, but wondering anyway-whether Schrade could see things other people couldn’t see because of those damn eyes.

“I want to find Claude Corsier,” Schrade said.

Done. They would do the Strand thing Howard’s way. Schrade was moving on to other things.

“We don’t have a clue,” Howard said. “We’ve tried to find him. The thing is, we’re dealing here with very well-trained operatives. They know the tricks of the trade…”

“I found Clymer. I found Kiriasis.”

Howard noted that he left out Marie, the sick son of a bitch. He couldn’t resist asking, “How the hell did that happen, anyway? The thing with Claude?”

Schrade ignored him. “Just be aware that I would make it financially worthwhile for the man who finds him.”

Schrade was going to get them all, sooner or later.

“You are returning to Vienna tomorrow, then?”

“That’s right.”

Schrade turned to one side and selected one of the red leather folders from the stacks of them at his elbow. He placed the folder in front of him, untied its crimson ribbon, and opened it. He looked at some of the documents, perusing them carefully. Howard guessed that they were about to move on to another subject. Schrade sat in the pool of pale light like a medieval alchemist, dealing in mysteries and arcana, comfortable with secrets and fog and the realm of mottled shadows. It was true that Howard himself and Harry Strand and all of them in this quickly moving story were creatures in that realm of shifting realities, too. That was true. But Schrade was different from them in that he was not simply a sojourner in the mist; he was not merely passing through. Rather, he was a part of it. It was his milieu, yes, but more than that, he was of its very nature and substance.

Schrade laid down the piece of paper from which he was reading and again folded his hands on top of the desk, covering the opened red folder.

Looking at Bill Howard, he began to talk, his voice modulated, his manner quiet, his wretched limpid eyes holding Howard’s attention despite their unnerving effect. For ten minutes, then fifteen, then twenty, he outlined intelligence he wanted Howard to glean from the records available to him in the FIS computers.

It was always this way. Schrade provided him with no documents of any kind, and Howard took no notes. Neither of them ever forgot even the smallest detail of what was said at these sessions, even if the intelligence was difficult to come by and months passed before Howard made another secret trip to Schwanenwerder to deliver what Schrade had requested. Within twenty-four hours of his report, Howard’s numbered account in Liechtenstein received another deposit.

“So, that is the sum of it,” Schrade concluded, regarding Howard from across the surface of his desk. “Do you have any questions?”

“None.”

Schrade gave a single nod. Done. He closed the red leather folder and tied the ribbon. He set it aside. He picked up his reading glasses and put them on and opened the red leather folder from which he had been reading when Howard arrived. He began to read.

Howard watched him. This was always an intriguing moment. He often wondered what would happen if he just sat there and didn’t leave. How long would it take before Schrade looked up? When he did, how would he react? What would happen if someone actually called this man’s inflexible hand? Howard’s imagination answered his own question. He saw the face of Marie Bienert. Of Dennis Clymer. Of Ariana Kiriasis. Of Claude Corsier. Mara Song. Harry Strand. He saw the faceless silhouettes of dozens, of countless, unknown others.

Howard had managed thus far to work with this one-man pestilence and not succumb to his indiscriminate fever. He wanted to keep it that way, and no amount of idle curiosity would make him risk losing what he had managed to extract from the very heart of the plague.

He rose from his chair, turned away from the massive desk, and started to the door at the other end of the salon. As he passed through pools of dusty light hanging over the cabinets, he thought he could feel the intermittent shadows brushing at his clothes like spiders’ webs, each web stronger, each dragging at him with more resistance than the previous one. The very fact that he was imagining this gave him the creeps, and it took all the nerve he had not to quicken his pace. He did not look back.