The Color of Night

CHAPTER 52

Just after nightfall Claude Corsier hung up the telephone from talking to Carrington Knight, who had at just that moment received a message from Wolfram Schrade. He would arrive at Knight’s at ten o’clock the next morning. Corsier looked at the two drawings sitting on the floor of his hotel room in South Kensington. Good God. These Schieles, more Schieles than Schieles themselves now that Carrington Knight believed in them as if they were two Holy Grails, would soon attract yet another knight to his death in his quest for them. Corsier shook his head pensively. It was unbelievable, really, that Wolfram Schrade was coming like this, to two worthless drawings, like a rat to carrion. Corsier had planned it and imagined it, but now that it was really about to happen, well, it was rather a triumph. So, the mighty and powerful could be deceived, too. It was no special thing to be made a fool. And no one was so special that he couldn’t be. But it did feel rather special having done it twice to a man like Schrade. To be rid of the murderous freak in the process… it was a triumph.

Corsier wished he had tried to get in touch with Harry Strand. He would like Strand to know what he had done and how he had done it. After his close call in Schrade’s private launch in Venice, Corsier had been convinced that his only hope for salvation lay in cutting himself off from everyone he knew, making it impossible for Schrade to use anyone to find him. With the exception of Edie Vernon, and Carrington Knight just two days ago, Corsier had not spoken to a single soul he knew since the Venetian nightmare. He had diminished into a shadow and floated unnoticed from country to country. Strand had done something like that four years ago, and as far as Corsier knew, the transformation had served him very well.

Corsier’s niece, who ran his gallery in Geneva, had eventually reported him missing to the police. He had seen it in the papers and once on the television news. He was sorry he’d had to put her through that, but if he had sent her any note of reassurance, she would never have been convincing to the police or, more important, to Schrade’s intelligence creatures.

He had not found it especially difficult to disappear. Of course, he was highly motivated. As had been often observed, nothing was so galvanizing as brushing against the cold shoulder of one’s own mortality. Even now just the mere thought of Venice accelerated his heartbeat.

The incident had wrenched a new crease in the folds of Corsier’s brain and was now a permanent feature of his psyche. His escape had been born of blind chance, which haunted him. As Schrade’s launch pounded the waves and Corsier swore to himself over and over and over in prayerful chant that if he ever got away from this situation he would become as invisible as a breath, the driver of the launch changed course abruptly, leaving the lane to Marco Polo Airport and angling in a traverse course. Corsier was horrified. This was it.

In the quick maneuver of changing course, their launch cut across the wake of one of the public vaporettos filled with tourists heading for the airport. The hull of the launch slapped roughly against the large wake at the precise instant that the second of the two men in the launch was turning to reach for something on the dash. Thrown off balance by the sudden slam of the hull, he flailed out reflexively for something to save himself from falling. It was the steering wheel. The launch pitched violently as it turned against the second part of the vaporetto ’s V-shaped wake, flinging the off-balance man against the side of the launch.

Corsier grabbed a heavy black flashlight from a bin in the hull beside him, leaped at the man, and in a frenzy of panic bashed his head repeatedly. An automatic pistol skittered across the fiberglass floor from the man’s jacket. Corsier grabbed it without thinking and fired repeatedly at the driver, who was fighting to regain the steering wheel as he pushed down the throttle to cut the power. The pistol was equipped with a silencer, and the lethal hush of each shot gave an even more surreal character to the frantic sequence. The launch spun around, dead in the water, as the driver was hammered to the floor with each quiet burst from the pistol. Then Corsier shot the second man as well.

He had never fired a gun in his life.

He dragged both men into the cabin, then managed to muddle about with the launch engine until he got the boat started again and followed the distant and diminishing wake of the vaporetto to the docks surrounding the airport. There he maneuvered the launch to an isolated branch of the public dock, pulled into a slip, cut the motor, and climbed out of the launch onto the dock, not even thinking to tie it.

He walked away in a daze.

For nearly three weeks he had a nightmare about it every night. More than a few times it drove sleep away altogether, and he lay awake in the dark, hearing imminent death in the creaking walls of old hotels or in the opening or closing of a distant door.

Then one night in a cramped monk’s cell at the Great Lavra monastery on Mount Athos, where he had fled to hide and gather his thoughts and nerves among ornate religious art and quiet men, he stared at the blue moonlight on the stone of the deep windowsill and realized Schrade’s demonic audacity: ursurping God’s role, he took it upon himself to grant life or death. If he turned his eyes this way, a man was made to die; with a subtle nod of his head, another was allowed to live. Allowed to live! The magisterial insolence of it hit Corsier like a thunderbolt.

At that moment a sudden and powerful resentment was ignited in Corsier’s heart, and even before he could swing his feet off the cot to sit up and look out of his window to the Aegean Sea, a fierce conviction to liberate himself from Schrade began to wrestle with his paralyzing fear and would soon overcome it.

The next day he began growing his mustache and goatee, and the day after that he departed the monastery.

He never wavered. For him there was no moral struggle. Wolfram Schrade wanted to kill him and sought to kill him. And Schrade’s life was a brutal witness to the man’s appalling turpitude. As far as Corsier was concerned, the sum of that simple equation was quite evident. He never looked back.

He checked into his rooms on the third floor of the Connaught Hotel late in the afternoon. The suite had three rooms: a reception area and two bedrooms, one on either side, each with its own bath. The reception had the largest windows and the best view of Knight’s second-floor library. Corsier chose the bedroom on the right.

He had bought a piece of ordinary luggage in which to transport the paintings so that he did not attract attention to himself. In another piece of luggage he brought in two pairs of powerful binoculars and two tripods, which he set up in the reception in front of the windows. He attached the binoculars to the tripods and looked across Carlos Place into the second floor of Knight’s library. No one was in the room, in which only a few lamps were lighted against the gray day. Good enough, though. He hoped he wouldn’t have to rely on Skerlic’s microphones alone to identify Schrade’s positioning. It was good, too, that the day would be overcast and rainy-he monitored the television weather forecasts religiously to make sure. The gloomy day would enable them to sit in their rooms with the lights out and the curtains open and not be observed from Knight’s library.

Putting the binoculars into the suitcase, he made a mental note always to lock them up before he left the suite. The maids would take note of binoculars on a tripod.

He sat on the smaller of the two sofas and stared out the windows. He would spend the night here. Tomarrow would be difficult because the only thing left to do was wait. He would install Skerlic here tomorrow night, in plenty of time for them to be ready for Schrade’s arrival the next morning.

After a final conversation with Skerlic about the order of things to come, he would deliver the drawings around eight o’clock. Knight had wanted them sooner, of course, but Corsier had presented him with creative excuses, abundant reasons. Now, at least, from his post across the street, he could see and hear whether Knight was tempted to cheat in the two hours he had between the time Corsier dropped off the drawings and Schrade’s arrival.

With only the swishing sound of the polite Mayfair traffic on the wet streets to interrupt the silence of his room, Corsier stroked his mustache and goatee and sighed heavily. It was a bittersweet time for him. Though he was about to rid himself of Meister Death, he was going to have to go into exile to do it. The ensuing investigation, by the British and German governments, would quickly identify him as the major suspect. Flight was his only alternative.

Much of the past month had been taken up with arranging his second disappearance, the passports, the shuffled bank accounts, the well-thought-out routes of escape, the detailed study of certain neighborhoods in places like Buenos Aires, Singapore, Bogota. He thought of his exile as a temporary placement. Perhaps after three years, or five, or seven, he could quietly return. Both governments would make a great flourish of looking for the assassin for a year or two, but in reality, once the media lost interest in the case, so would Scotland Yard and the Bundeskriminalamt. After all, these agencies were not ignorant. As long as the media was not urging them on, why would they go out of their way to pursue the killer of a man like Wolfram Schrade? After a time other urgent criminal matters would demand their attention, and the “Schrade task force” would be reduced to a perfunctory little office with one or two officers assigned to plod through the mounds of paper that would have been generated by the initial inquiry.

That was the way he saw it, anyway. It was not the best of situations in which to find oneself, but he would rather flee the searches of two governments, whose budgetary patience for wild goose chases was limited, than try to hide from an obsessed Schrade’s well-financed assassins.

God, but he would miss London and Geneva and Paris and Rome. He loved all these wonderful cities in all the wonderful seasons of their years. To have to say good-bye to their galleries and museums and symphony halls and operas grieved him far more than he ever would have imagined. How long might it be before he would again be able to dine at the quiet little Vecchia Roma in Piazza Campitelli or at the sublime La Tour d’Argent on Quai de la Tournelle or have a late morning coffee melange with his newspaper at the Cafe Central in Vienna?

The answer was, eventually. As opposed to never, if Schrade was left unchecked. Corsier was French enough to be capable of sentimentality, but he was also a native Genevan and had a strong sense of practicality. It would be Wolf Schrade’s great misfortune that Claude Corsier had been a lucky man that day in Venice.