The Color of Night

CHAPTER 51

Mara started talking as soon as they pulled away from Carlos Place. She told Strand everything, speaking hurriedly as he drove through the pelting rain to a nearby hotel on Park Lane. He entered the parking garage and wound upward through the lanes until he found a parking place and pulled in.

He took off his chauffeur’s jacket and removed the bow tie and left them both in the car. Together they left the garage and entered the hotel, going up to the room that Strand had taken under the name of one of his passports. There he changed into a suit as Mara continued telling him about the particulars of her conversation with Knight. When he was finished dressing, they left the hotel and took a cab to an Indian restaurant in Knightsbridge, just off Cromwell Road.

After they were seated Mara picked up where she had left off and finished her account of her meeting with Carrington Knight.

“So essentially, you accomplished everything.”

“Almost.”

“Well, the time. But I don’t know how you could have done anything about that. Carrington’s got to talk to Schrade. There’s no way he could know otherwise.”

“But I’ve got to call him tomorrow, make arrangements to take him the documentation. I could start then. Did he reach Mr. Schrade? What was his reaction? Is he coming? And so on like that.”

“Sure, whatever feels right. The timing of Schrade’s arrival is crucial; we’ll have to nail it down. That’s the whole point of it.”

After their drinks came and they ordered dinner, Mara studied him.

“How are you going to do this, Harry?”

“I’ll take care of it,” he said.

“No.” She shook her head firmly. “I want to know how you’re going to do this.”

He swallowed a sip of his Scotch. “It really would be best if you didn’t know,” he said.

Her eyes flashed. “I’m not impressed by someone wanting to ‘protect’ me, Harry,” she went on. “You know me better than that. This has more to do with you. You’re not doing me any favors. I thought we had this settled.”

She was glaring at him, her anger controlled, but just barely.

He nodded. “Okay,” he said, “you’re right.” He took another drink of his Scotch and deliberately tried to taste every possible element of its savor before he swallowed. Then he went on. “When Schrade comes to London, he stays at one of three places. They’re obvious places for a man like him: Brown’s, Claridge’s, the Ritz. But there will be few opportunities to approach him at any of them.”

“Approach him?”

Strand took a mental deep breath and told her how he planned to kill Schrade. He watched her face as he explained about the saxitoxin, explained the gun, explained the necessity of having to get close to him. She did very well, no shock, no stunned expression, no exclamations. She swallowed once, that was all.

“How… did you decide to do it this way?” she asked. “Why not use something that would give you some distance?”

“A high-powered rifle, a bomb?”

She nodded.

“There’s less risk for me with those devices, but both of them require detailed long-term planning. I knew I wouldn’t have that kind of time.”

“But this way the risk is greater that you’ll…”

“Be killed or caught.”

She had to swallow again and covered it by taking a sip of her Scotch.

He smiled at her. “But I plan to avoid that.”

She couldn’t manage a response.

“Schrade also has favorite restaurants,” Strand went on. He named half a dozen. “I think it’s a good possibility that I can catch him coming in or out of one of these.”

“You said it would make a sound.”

“About like a slap.”

“That’s loud.”

“In a quiet place, yes. But outside in the street it could be done without attracting attention.”

“What about his bodyguard?”

“Schrade uses them in different ways, and I’m lucky there. When he goes to business meetings, legitimate business meetings, there’s only one guard, who accompanies him like a secretary. He’s very understated, in the background. Everybody knows what he is, but it’s no big deal. Important men, at least important men in Schrade’s orbit, are accustomed to seeing their peers with ‘assistants.’ If you didn’t know who Schrade was, you’d think two businessmen.

“When he meets with his illegitimate associates, always in environments quite different from those I’ve just mentioned, he travels with two bodyguards who look like bodyguards, and no one would mistake them for anything else. They’re there to intimidate as well as protect.”

Strand removed his hands from the sweaty Scotch glass and touched his face with his cool fingers. He sighed.

“But when he’s on art business, the bodyguard is little more than a chauffeur. He doesn’t follow Schrade into restaurants, doesn’t follow him around in the hotels, doesn’t go into the galleries. Schrade is in a different world when he’s looking at art. He almost-almost-becomes a different man. He doesn’t want the trappings of his other life to interfere.”

Mara nodded. “So, you think you’d…”

“Catch him in a noisy restaurant. Catch him coming or going to the restaurant, in the street. Catch him in the men’s room. In the bar.”

Strand went straight into the specifics. He was going to give her everything.

“My feeling is that in any of these situations I can do a ‘brush-by.’ To muffle the sound of the ‘slap,’ and to make sure the pellet penetrates his clothes, I’ll jam the pistol into his side, just under his rib cage, and fire. He’ll flinch, slump. I’ll grab him and hold him up. This will do two things: give me a chance to hide the pistol somewhere in my clothes, and prevent him from reflexively recoiling from me or gesturing at me and attracting attention to me. I’ll act surprised, confused, then shocked: ‘What’s the matter! Are you all right?’ I’ll appear to come to his assistance, call for help, bring people to us. Since I’ll be catching him away from his bodyguard, no one will suspect a menacing situation. I think most people will immediately conclude that I just happened to be standing next to the guy when he had a stroke or heart attack.”

He stopped, his forearms leaning on the table.

“That’s my thinking right now. That’s what I’d like. In the confusion I’ll manage to slip away. I’ll want to be gone before the bodyguard gets there. But even if I’m not, Schrade will be past any ability to communicate. The saxitoxin takes only moments.”

“God, Harry… you can do that?”

“I have to do it.”

She had gone right to the heart of it. He was by no means as confident as he wanted to sound. The risk was the least of it. It was killing the man that he tried not to think about. He had rehearsed over and over everything right up to the instant of squeezing the trigger, then his mind derailed. He couldn’t imagine what he would feel like as he walked away, leaving behind him the confused crowd and the dead, or dying, Schrade. How in God’s name would that feel?

“How are you going to get that close to him without him recognizing you?”

Strand nodded. “There’s a shop in Soho where West End actors buy their makeup and wigs and things. I’ll need you to go there and get something for a disguise. A mustache. Maybe a wig. The most expensive ones they have. Very good ones. Subtle. Then we’re going to have to change the way I look.”

Mara had been listening to him with an expressionless concentration, hearing things, he knew, that she could hardly believe. Everything he said was being absorbed, being made over in her mind to fit into reality as she had always understood it. He guessed it was as difficult a task as she had ever encountered. A leap beyond, way beyond, what she had been taught in the FIS training course in Virginia.

Her eyes glittered with the impact of the accumulative brutality of the details. All the concern, all the fear, the nearly panicked imagination, gathered in a single crease between her eyebrows. As Strand watched, she gradually composed herself. She took a long, deep breath and slowly straightened her back and set her shoulders.

Strand felt sick doing this to her. Then he thought about Romy and Meret and Ariana. It was too late to get weak in the stomach.