The Color of Night

CHAPTER 3

After leaving the club, Strand went slightly out of his way home to a small neighborhood bakery with a dozen tables under a rattan-covered patio surrounded by catalpa trees. Every morning Strand was the first of a loyal clientele to arrive.

He always sat at the same table in the patio, the nearest to a large and unusual outdoor aquarium watched over by a pair of small, brilliantly colored macaws that looked as though they had flown through a freshly painted rainbow. He ate breakfast-the only meal served at the bakery-and read the newspaper while the macaws scolded and cajoled the fish and each other, and anything that moved, sometimes inching to the near end of their perch to read over Strand’s shoulder.

Around nine o’clock he pulled into the porte cochere at home and went straight to the kitchen to make a pot of coffee. Harry Strand lived and worked in a two-story home in the museum district, an expensive address just a few streets off Bissonnet. The home was old, with Mediterranean influences and made of stolid, gray limestone. The minute he and Romy had seen it they had loved it and bought it within a week of arriving in Houston. They had lived in Vienna before they were married, and the warm and fertile Mexican Gulf coast was an exotic and welcome change for them.

The house was on a quiet, narrow lane that meandered among other aged and behemoth domiciles, most of them only partially visible behind a well-groomed wilderness of oaks and palms, azaleas and laurel, boxwood, quince, and bougainvillea. Encompassing stone or brick walls shrouded in vines were de rigueur, and privacy was as precious as time itself.

Built on all four sides of a central courtyard, the home sheltered a large carved stone fountain at its heart. Semitropical plants filled the courtyard, and their care and cultivation had been Romy’s abiding passion. Often Strand would watch her from the windows by his desk as she dawdled among the tiled paths, pinching a faded blossom here, monitoring a pale new shoot there, checking the progress of the long awaited efflorescence of a favorite species.

She had been content here, in this home and its environs, and Strand had frequently reminded himself that their shared happiness was uncommon good fortune. It wasn’t anything he had ever experienced before, and he had told himself that he would be a fool if he ever, even for a moment, took for granted the wonderful balance they had managed to achieve together.

He had also known that balance, by its very definition, was fragile.

Meret Spier, Strand’s assistant, had become irreplaceable after Romy’s death. She had begun working for them two years earlier, when their workload had increased to the point that they couldn’t handle it between them. Fresh out of graduate school at the University of Chicago, Meret had recently returned to Houston after failing to find a position with the museums in the Chicago area. After Romy’s death, Meret simply became indispensable. Strand paid her very well and even increased her salary significantly when she had to take over so many of Romy’s responsibilities. She was worth every dime of it. Aside from her impeccable scholarship, she was intelligent and low-key, facile at reading between the lines, and perceptive when assessing personalities, all invaluable attributes when dealing with art collectors, who could be as eccentric as the artists they collected.

The rooms that formed Strand’s offices also served as the showrooms for the drawings he owned and sold. They occupied the entire left wing of the house as seen from the front entry. Most of these rooms were accessible from the peristyle that surrounded the courtyard. The porch of the peristyle was deep, providing a buffering shade from the summer heat and reducing the glare from the sunny courtyard.

Strand’s office was the first in order from the front of the house to the back. It opened onto the broad front entry hall as well as into the courtyard, with a third door communicating with the library that separated Strand’s office from Meret’s. The walls of both offices were covered with framed drawings and a few paintings. In the library a long antique walnut table used for research sat squarely in the center of the room and was usually cluttered with recently consulted volumes, slips of paper protruding from their pages. All of these rooms were generous spaces with sitting areas and comfortable furnishings, and each of them communicated with the others through a short arched passageway with a wrought-iron gate the height of the passageway placed midway. The gates were covered on one side with plate glass to muffle sound for privacy when the gates were closed. A fourth room was for storage, where rows of thin, vertical shelving for paintings and drawings lined the walls. This was also a work area for packaging artwork to be shipped and for receiving.

Every morning at nine-thirty Meret let herself into the front entry of the house and went straight through to the peristyle. This morning, like many others, Strand saw her enter the colonnade with an armload of documents and walk around to her office door, where she let herself in. While she was settling in, he stepped out into the courtyard and crossed to the other side to the kitchen. He prepared two cups of coffee and took them back around the colonnade to Meret’s door. She was already standing there, holding it open for him.

“Perfect,” she said, taking her cup at the door. “There are a few things you ought to deal with straightaway,” she began. Meret was organized, and there were limits to the amount of time she would allow a loose end to remain loose. Strand increasingly took advantage of this, letting unessential details go unattended, knowing that if they were even potentially important, Meret would catch them and bring them to his attention.

“Such as…”

“Such as these,” she said, snatching a pink Post-it off her desk and waving it at him. She kept “to do” things on the bright adhesive squares, and sometimes the whole left side of her desk blushed with ranks of reminders.

Strand settled into an armchair beside the sofa where Meret presided during their morning conversations. She sat down, her legs and feet together, and stuck the pink note on the hem of her skirt, which left more than half her leg exposed. Meret was not a petite young woman, but she knew instinctively how to dress to her best advantage. The stylish short skirts and revealing blouses that she favored were worn with a sexy intelligence that told you immediately that she knew what she was doing. Degas or Maillol would have asked her to take off her clothes in a minute. She would have done it, relishing the adventure and the humor of it, though she would have charged them by the quarter hour and wanted her payment in cash. On top of that, she would have had a highly educated opinion of the artist’s efforts.

“Leaman Stannish,” she began, holding her cup and saucer like a duchess. “The matter of his Gerome studies.”

“What do you think?”

“I thought we’d agreed they were too weak.”

“That’s what I remembered.”

“Then you have to let him know we’re passing.”

“I’ve been putting that off…”

Meret looked at him with her best “that’s the point of this conversation” expression.

“… but he’s got those fine, those very fine, Carpeaux drawings, the sculpture studies…”

“And you don’t want to piss him off,” she said.

“Right.”

“What he’s saying is, You want my Carpeaux? Take my Gerome first.”

“That’s right.”

“You shouldn’t play that game.”

Strand sipped his coffee. “I know. Write him and tell him we can’t do it.”

Meret stiffened. “ You’ve got to write him, Harry. Stannish is a pain in the ass, but you can’t afford to alienate the guy. He knows he’s being unfair, and he’s also very much aware of your reputation as an ethical dealer. He’d much rather operate under that cloak of respectability than work in the market without it. He’ll come around.”

Strand nodded. “I’ll let him know.” He had already decided what to do, but it was good to hear Meret’s opinions coinciding with his. It had gotten to the point that he was no longer testing her to see how her judgment and instincts were maturing; now he was actually relying on her counsel to confirm his own instincts.

“I’ll mail it this afternoon,” Meret said pointedly, putting him on notice that he was expected to do it today.

Strand nodded again.

Meret glanced at her lap. “You got another fax late yesterday from Denise Yarrow in San Francisco. She wants to add the Eakins collection to her ‘reconsider’ list.”

“She’s going to wear me out.”

“She always does this, but… she always comes through, too.” Meret was consistently optimistic. She was upbeat. She did not believe in fate’s negative side, and Strand found it surprising how many times she was rewarded for her bright expectations.

“First,” she said, “Aldo Chiappini called yesterday and wants to know when you’ll be coming to Rome. He wants a specific date. I think he’s got someone else interested in the Fuselis.” She raised her eyes at him expectantly. “They’re worth the trip. That many together… fine quality.”

“You’re right. I don’t want to lose those. I’ll check my calendar later this morning and give you a date. I’ll call Aldo, too. Smooth his feathers.”

“Next, this,” Meret said, holding up the pink note by the tips of her tapered fingers. “A woman called yesterday who said she had a collection of drawings she wants to sell and wants to know if you would handle it. Said you were recommended to her by Reynolds Truscott in New York.”

“Good old Reynolds.”

“Says she has Maillol, Klimt, Delvaux, Ingres, Balthus.”

Strand gave her a skeptical look.

Meret raised a testimonial hand, an eager expression on her face.

“That’s an odd grouping. What’s her name?”

“Mrs. Mitchell Reinhardt.”

“First name?”

Meret shrugged, sipping her coffee.

“Did you look her up in the collector’s catalog?”

Meret nodded. “Not listed.”

“Did she say anything else?”

“Uh… as soon as possible.” She leaned over and handed Strand a second piece of pink paper with the address on it.

“I’m going to call Reynolds first,” he said. “Get some idea of what I’m getting into.”

The prospect of seeing drawings by these artists whose works seldom came available on the market anymore prompted Strand to call Reynolds Truscott within the hour. But Truscott was of little help. He did not know the woman personally, he said, he had gotten her name from a dealer friend of his in London who specialized in twentieth-century British paintings. This man had mentioned her almost incidentally in a conversation, said he knew a woman who had recently moved to the United States, to Texas, who had an interesting little collection of drawings. Then one day Mrs. Reinhardt herself had called Truscott, using the British dealer as a reference, and asked if he knew any reputable dealers in her area. Thus Strand. That’s all Truscott knew about her.

“There aren’t that many of you concentrating on drawings,” Truscott said. “She was surprised to find someone in Houston.”

“If she’s a collector, she should have known about me.”

“Hello-modesty? Well, the fact is I don’t think she is a collector,” Truscott said, lowering his voice in a tone of confidentiality. “I think this is a divorce thing.”