The Color of Night

CHAPTER 46

As Strand rounded the corner to Chesterfield Hill the drizzle had turned to a drenching mist intermingled with a light fog, a concoction so thick you could almost reach out and grab a handful of it. He had walked all the way from the Guinea Grill, his collar turned up uselessly against the moisture. Leaning into the incline, he looked toward their town house. There was a soft glow behind the sheets over the bay window.

By the time he had climbed the stairs to the reception, Mara had heard him and was standing in the middle of the room, waiting. She had been sitting on the bed, drawing: she had left her sketchpad there, and a lamp was sitting on the floor beside the mattress.

Strand had taken off his raincoat as he came up, and without speaking she came over and took it from him and laid it over one end of the scaffolding. Then she turned around and faced him.

“Well?”

“It looks like Schrade’s willing to deal,” he said.

Mara gasped as if she had been holding her breath.

“But I had to make a quick decision that I hope will look as good tomorrow as it did tonight.”

“What?”

Strand sat on one of the paint buckets and started untying the laces of his waterlogged shoes.

“Schrade’s totally focused on getting this money back,” Strand said, tugging at one of the shoes. “Maybe it’s the most important thing in his life right now. And that’s the problem. We’ve got two parallel plans going here, and the first one was getting in the way of the second. First, we’re holding out the prospect of giving him the money to keep him at arm’s length, to keep him from coming after us. On the other hand, we’re trying to lure him to London. With the money exchange imminent, I was afraid Schrade wasn’t going to give a damn about the drawings. They can’t compete with six hundred million dollars. So I changed the date when I said I could deliver the money-two weeks.”

He tossed one shoe on the floor and started on the second one as he told Mara about the proposition he had given Howard.

“And Howard seemed to have the authority to accept it,” he concluded, “which he did.” He tossed the second shoe on the floor, took out his handkerchief, and began wiping the rain off his face.

Mara had sat on the scaffolding. “So,” she said, “the idea is that with the money transfer not a possibility for another two weeks, if Schrade gets a call from Knight in a few days saying he’s got this spectacular small collection he needs to look at, he’s more likely to fly over and look at it.”

“That’s the idea.”

Mara thought a moment. “Then as soon as the drawings get to Paris, we’ve got to pick them up immediately and get to Carrington Knight.”

“That’s right. And I’ve got some ideas about that, too. We’re going to have to be very good at approaching Knight.”

Strand looked at the lower legs of his soaked trousers. “Damn.”

“Where did you go the first time, Harry?”

There was no use pretending about this any longer. He waited a second and then looked at her.

“I went to buy a gun,” he said. “A special kind of gun, to kill Schrade.”

They stared at each other.

“Well,” Mara said, her voice flat, without inflection, “it’s a relief not to have to call it ‘the meeting’ any longer. Lying about it to each other, talking around it with euphemisms, made it even nastier.”

He looked at her. With the pale light coming from behind her, he knew she could see his eyes. But for him, her face was shadowed in the lee side of the light, and he could see nothing of her expression. He didn’t need to see her eyes to know she was disturbed.

“Harry, unless you’re withholding something very serious from me,” Mara said, and he could tell she was trying to control her voice, “you don’t have any training in this stuff, in operations.”

“I’ve never murdered anyone, if that’s what you mean.”

“Well… God… what are you thinking, Harry?”

“What would you do, Mara?”

“Run. Run like hell.”

“For the rest of your life?”

“If that’s what it took.”

Strand was weary, and he spoke slowly. “What do you think that would be like? Every time you bought a tube of oils or a sketchpad or a box of pastels in some art supply store-anywhere in the world-you’d have to wonder if someday someone’s going to walk into that store and show a photograph of you to the clerks and ask, ‘Have you ever seen this woman?’” He looked at her silhouette. “You’re not an easy woman to forget, Mara.”

“I don’t know, Harry. But it’s got to be bearable. Everything is.”

“Yeah, it would be bearable right up to the moment our car or our house blew up, or until we woke up in the middle of the night with a gun in our faces or a knife at our throats, or-”

“Harry-”

“Listen,” he said, “why is running and living in constant fear the only moral response we have here?”

Again she was silent, but this time he felt terrible about it. Not only for Mara, but for himself. These were questions he had dwelled on endlessly. They were questions he had lain awake at night trying to answer in a new and different way, trying to find some light in a nuanced reply that, in its devising, he hoped would give him a little room to maneuver around either his conscience or the inflexible parameters of reality. Had he thought of all the possible answers to these questions? Were there no other answers than the ones he had already turned away from?

“So we murder him, Harry? That’s the best answer that two intelligent people can come up with?”

“Give me some alternatives. Realistic alternatives.”

She was silent.

“Self-defense,” he said. “That’s the way I think of it. I have to.” He paused. “It’s ironic, really, that in a world where everything is instantaneous, it is the absence of immediacy that puts us on the wrong side of this dilemma. If Schrade were to burst into this room right now, intent on killing us, we could kill him in self-defense free of moral taint. But if he takes longer than that, if he drags it out for days or weeks or months, even though we know he’s trying to kill us, then we have to run and hide for the rest of our lives to sustain a moral position. We’re only justified in defending ourselves when we do it just before the moment of death. If we can. If we don’t see it coming… well…”

“I thought self-defense was only justified if you didn’t have time to call someone else for help, or to ask for the protection of the law,” she said.

Strand shook his head. “Look, the only people who know that Schrade is capable of this kind of stalking are the criminals he works with and the intelligence agencies who use him. How the hell are we going to justify a request for protection from him? To the business world he’s a very successful international businessman. We’d sound like the worst kind of conspiracy nuts. Even if they took us seriously, think of the legal struggle we’d be facing trying to pull classified information from intelligence agencies to back up our claim. You know how effective that’s been in the past. That would initiate a complex of legal maneuverings that would consume all of our energy for the rest of our lives.”

“But we’d be alive, wouldn’t we? He wouldn’t dare kill us with that kind of media attention on us.”

“That’s right, Mara. But we’d die of natural causes. An inexplicable car wreck… it happens. One of us would contract a rare virus, a seldom seen bacteria… those are not so unusual anymore. A heart attack, even though the autopsy would show no signs of heart disease… it could happen to anyone. Or we’d be found dead in our bedroom, needles and drug paraphernalia scattered around us… you never really know about people, what they’re really like in the privacy of their own homes.”

Mara didn’t respond. Suddenly Strand couldn’t stand the wet clothes any longer.

“Look, I’m going to shower. We can finish this later.”

She nodded. “Sure,” she said.

When he got out of the shower, he wrapped a towel around his waist and took another to dry his hair and walked back into the reception. Mara had turned out the lights and had moved aside the sheets covering the bay windows. The city lights reflecting off the overcast sky threw a glow through the windows as bright as a full moon. She had taken off her clothes and was lying on the mattress in her underwear. She was on her stomach, propped up on her elbows, watching him, waiting. He went over and sat on the bed, the towel he was drying his hair with draped around his neck. He was weary.

It began raining again. He was dissatisfied. He should have defended himself better, in a more thoughtful way, less stridently. The truth was, not only was he operating out of fear-and was unable to find a satisfactory way to rid himself of it-but also he was wrestling with the discovery that at the back of his heart there was a wound that had begun to fester. He had tried to ignore it, but it was no longer possible to do so. It ached for a healing remedy that was as disturbing to him as the discovery of the wound itself: it ached for the balm of revenge.

“What’s on your mind?” she asked, looking up at him.

“Just about everything.”

“Yeah, I know. But we can work this out,” she said. “I’m not pessimistic about it.”

“Everything’s going to have to click. The timing. Everybody has to buy into the story. We have to be good, and we have to be lucky.”

For a moment they thought their own thoughts, and then Mara reached over and put her hand on his bare leg.

“It’s strange,” she said softly, breaking the silence, “that we met like this, isn’t it, Harry?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He really didn’t. They had met, discovered something in common, fallen in love.

“It is,” she said, “because this is a strange business, and we’re strange people to be in it.”

He ran his fingers through his hair. Jesus, what a world of confusion. How could he have been through so much and learned so little? How could he be where he was and be at a loss for what to do? Mara was right. For all their sophistication, for all the complexity of their situation, the solution he had arrived at was shockingly primitive.

“Harry, come on. Lie down.” She moved over as Strand took off the damp towels and put them aside on the floor. He lay down, and she moved over to him and curled her back into him. He turned to accommodate the shape of her, and then both of them were facing the rain. He put his arm around her, and she took it and pulled it to her breasts, drawing him closer still. They watched the rain, listened to the sound of it streaking the windows, like no other sound in the world.

Strand was comforted by the motion of her breathing within his embrace, with the way she felt. He wanted to be able to touch more of her than was physically possible. He wanted to be absorbed into her.