The Color of Night

CHAPTER 5

BRUSSELS, BELGIUM

Dennis Clymer had been in Brussels forty-eight hours. It was his third trip to the city in as many weeks, and it was his last stop before returning home. In the past month he had spent time in most of the capitals of Europe, carrying his black Hermes briefcase to meetings in glass office towers in London, to elegant old-world restaurants in Prague, to the shady terrace of a pale ocher villa overlooking Monaco and the hazy Mediterranean, to a stolid dacha deep in a forest outside St. Petersburg that smelled of woodsmoke and shchi and was filled with objets d’art.

Clymer was at home in all of these places. Unlike the stereotypical American, he was eminently adaptable. He was fluent in German and French, but he conducted business only in English. Four times a year he made these hectic trips, usually a two- or three-week period during which he shuttled from one European country to the next, crisscrossing his own path, doubling back, retracing routes he had traveled two days or ten days before. Though he routinely stayed in small, exclusive hotels, he rarely stayed in the same hotel in succession in any city in Europe, and only recently when he was in Brussels did he ever make a predictable diversion from a schedule that was otherwise fast paced and seemingly random.

Dennis Clymer was forty-three years old, had a master’s in economics from Stanford University and a law degree from UCLA. He lived in the tony Brentwood section of Los Angeles. He and his second wife had two children, daughters from her first marriage. Clymer had a son by his first wife who lived with his mother in the San Fernando Valley. He had visiting rights with the boy but often had to cancel his visitations because of his busy schedule. He paid little attention to his family. His business took up most of his time.

As Clymer walked out of the Metropole Hotel in the center of Brussels, he had come to the end of a hammering schedule. Mentally he suddenly shifted gears. He had two nights in Brussels before he returned to Los Angeles, and he planned to spend both of them in the same place.

After returning to his own rooms in the Copthorne Stephanie on the fashionable Avenue Louise, he bathed and changed clothes. The long afternoon meeting in a suite at the Metropole was with a slow-speaking Londoner who smoked dark Honduran cigars and a woman from Lyons who favored a particularly nasty kind of cigarette. His California lungs were screaming for fresh air. Just as dusk was settling over the city, Clymer left his hotel and walked out onto the avenue.

The lights were coming on all over Brussels, and the spring air was crisp, the sky deepening from peach to amber. He turned right on Avenue Louise and headed toward a large boulevard that lay just ahead. He was in the heart of the city’s most exclusive district, which exuded luxury in its public and private residences and sparkling shops.

At the Avenue de la Toison d’Or/Guldenvlieslaan, Clymer crossed to the other side, where it became Boulevard Waterloo/Waterloolaan, and once again turned right, walking in the failing light past posh jewelry shops and art galleries and chic boutiques filled with designer clothing. Smartly dressed shoppers strolled unhurriedly along the boulevard, among them Dennis Clymer, feeling very much pleased with himself for having once again negotiated nearly a month’s worth of complex transactions for his clients. He anticipated the evening with the satisfaction of a man who was using his considerable intellect to make tons of money. To him Brussels never seemed more charming, and his place in it never seemed more deserved or appropriate. Everything was just as he wanted it.

He turned into Rue du Pepin/Kernstraat and made his way past a string of boisterous nightclubs, entirely oblivious to their allures. Beyond these he turned left to the Place du Petit Sablon, a quiet square with a beautiful formal garden in its center, and to one side, its front door illuminated by the green glow of lamplight reflected off the boughs of a sheltering chestnut, was his favorite restaurant, Chez Marius en Provence.

Clymer had made reservations in the name of Paul Franck. He was shown to his table-he had asked for a quiet corner-and immediately ordered a bottle of Bordeaux, a Premier Grand Cru Classe from St.-Emilion. He had just finished his first glass when he saw her smiling at him past the shoulder of the maitre d’ as she allowed herself to be shown to the table.

Clymer beamed and stood as she approached. The maitre d’ withdrew, and Clymer took her hand and kissed her gently on the offered cheek, catching the familiar scent of sachet.

“It has been an endless week,” she said, showing no hint of being tired as she sat down. Dennis Clymer relished every accented syllable.

She was one of over five thousand translators employed by the European Commission, which had its headquarters buildings only a few kilometers away. Clymer had met her on his last trip to Europe two months earlier. In fact, his present trip could have waited another quarter, but the memory of her had made it seem more urgent. During the past three weeks, Clymer, whom she knew only as Paul Franck, had managed to spend one night of each week with her.

The affair was a surprise to Dennis Clymer. He was not the kind of man who had a roving eye, though his travels frequently put him in situations of opportunity. He was, primarily, interested only in business, and the clients he represented used him for precisely this reason. They did not indulge miscalculations, and though Clymer was reaping stunning profits for his services, which he wisely invested and did not squander, he was cognizant of the fact that a failure to perform could very well have more serious consequences than a loss of income.

In short, he was a man who was under a good deal of stress, though it was a point of importance with him never to show it. He was on a very fast track, and for a long time now the money he was making was the only seduction to which he allowed himself to succumb.

She was nothing like the women he usually met when he traveled. Some of his clients always had beautiful women hovering about, and any of them happily would have indulged Dennis Clymer’s requests. But Clymer was wary. Not only did he not trust these gorgeous, tightly fleshed creatures, but he didn’t want to appear to his clients as having a weakness that possibly could be exploited. He kept his mind on his business and his hands on his black Hermes briefcase.

He had met her, however, in a situation unrelated to his business and well away from the people he represented. The absolute unpredictability of their meeting was what made him comfortable with her. He had been walking through the chic Galerie Louise, one of the several elegant shopping arcades in the center of the city, when he impulsively stepped into a leather goods shop. The place smelled richly of oiled leather, and he wandered around a corner to the briefcases where a woman was trying to decide which attache to buy for her boss, a busy man who had asked her to get one for him to replace an old one. Unable to decide among the dozens there, she saw Clymer standing nearby and asked him his opinion.

She was not a stunning beauty, though she was quite pretty in a fresh, uncalculating way. She did not have the sleek, self-aware figure of the women he studiously avoided: she was a little hippy, though pleasantly so. Her hair was butter blond, and she wore it pulled back in a practical style vaguely reminiscent of the 1940s. She wore a smart, working woman’s suit. Clymer noted that she had a quick, genuine smile and a charming way of knitting her brow when he offered a bit of sensible advice about briefcases. After a few minutes she chose one of his recommendations. As she was paying they chatted. When he told her he was from Los Angeles, she brightened with curiosity and asked if he knew any movie stars.

They ate an early dinner together at a little sidewalk cafe a few doors from the leather shop, and he told a few movie star stories, embroidering a little on his personal familiarity with a few famous names. She told him about her work as translator with the European Commission, about how she had studied languages in Paris, how she had worked for a while for IBM in Berlin before coming back to Brussels.

She had an unassuming manner, and Clymer quickly felt comfortable being with her. They lingered for a long while over their meal and then coffee, and when it seemed time to go she surprised him by asking him if he would like to join her for a drink. She knew a quiet place nearby with tables in a garden.

They drank more than either intended, so much so that Clymer forgot his habitual cautiousness when she asked him if he would like to see where she lived, perhaps have a last drink with her. They walked down Avenue Louise underneath the overhanging chestnuts that bordered the boulevard and turned into a side street in a historical residential district dating from the 1890s. She rented the top floor of an old three-story home, and it was there, his head lightened by alcohol and his mind full of the scent of sachet, that he had sexual relations with her, eventually falling asleep against the softest, palest breasts he had ever imagined.

The affair was born full-blown and unhesitating, surprising them both. Clearly they were inexperienced in such adventure, and the swift pace was inflammatory. Clymer could not stay away from her. Still, he was a man habituated to discipline, and that did not change. Having reflexively invented Paul Franck in the leather shop, he stayed with it. He did not invite her to his rooms in the Stephanie, and she never asked to go there. At night, as they lay in the quiet of her bed and talked about their lives, he discreetly re-created himself. He gave little thought to where all this was leading, and apparently, neither did she. The affair itself was its own reward. They didn’t think about the future. It was not that sort of affair. They merely were enjoying the thrill of unexpected sexual abandon. Somehow it seemed entirely benign because it was not calculated. It was as surprising as a snowfall in July.

He told her he had only tonight and the next before he had to return to Los Angeles. They had finished eating and were lingering over a second bottle of Bordeaux.

She considered this a moment, pensively.

“And tomorrow? What about tomorrow?”

“I don’t have any more business here.”

“Then stay with me. Tonight, tomorrow, tomorrow night.” She raised her eyebrows, allowed a wry smile. “I will call my office and say to them that I am ill. It won’t matter.”

Her expression was anticipatory and hopeful. Clymer hesitated at the suggestion.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“You don’t know?” She mocked surprise and leaned toward him gently, the small candle between them throwing a timid, flickering light over the tops of her breasts. “How could you not know?”

They walked arm in arm along Boulevard Waterloo/Waterloolaan, a couple lost in an outdated gesture of romance, naive characters in an old movie. The wine had made them uncaring of such a simple demonstration of affection, and they were oblivious of the chic scene through which they strolled to Avenue Louise. Yet again they walked unhurriedly under the dark, looming chestnuts and soon turned into her street and followed the slow, descending curve, the globes of the street lamps lighting a pale beaded glow in front of them.

They must have passed the parked car, but Dennis Clymer didn’t remember seeing it. Two isolated images were embedded in his consciousness in those stunning last moments: first, one of the men who grabbed him and forced the drugged cloth over his nose and mouth smelled of a sickly cologne; second, in the confusion he saw her step back, unaccosted, unafraid. In the lamplight their eyes met: she was calm.

The Belgian police judiciaire did not identify Dennis Clymer’s body for nearly three weeks, and only then because of a birthmark under his left arm. His head and hands were never found.