The Color of Night

CHAPTER 59

The morning was so overcast and dark that the street lamps were still on as Strand sat in Claridge’s plush robe and ate the light breakfast he had ordered. The night had been a grim phantasmagoric passage from one day to the next, during which he had tried to stay flat on his back to avoid inadvertently damaging the face of the stranger who slept with him. He tried to think of anything other than Wolfram Schrade: he succeeded in thinking of nothing else.

He had ordered an extra pot of coffee and already had begun drinking from the second one when he looked at his watch. It was seven-thirty.

He had known two professional hit men during his years in the intelligence business. They were, seemingly, unremarkable men, a little remote, perhaps, but one of them in particular he quite liked. The man was forty-three years old, Strand remembered, and he had grown up in the midwestern United States. He had been trained to kill when he had served in Vietnam, and when he’d finished his second tour in Southeast Asia, his superior officer had recommended his services to the Metsada. It was as though he had simply accepted another assignment. There was a military angle to it, being an Israeli operation, so it had seemed like an extension of his last Saigon assignment. After that the Israelis referred him to someone else, and very gradually the military aspect of it faded away. One day he woke up and realized he was making a very good living being paid to kill people; he was a professional assassin.

At the time Strand had known him, they were staying in a very shabby hotel in Algiers. They spent a lot of time talking, sometimes in their rooms, sometimes wandering in the narrow, alleylike streets of the city. He confided to Strand one hot night as they sat in the dark beside a window in Strand’s room, smoking and looking down into the crowded street, that he vomited every time he killed someone. Sometimes before, sometimes after. It was odd, he said, because he was not repulsed by the killing, so he didn’t know why it happened. But when it was time, he didn’t fight it. He just accepted it as part of the business. It used to bother him, he said, but now he didn’t worry about it anymore.

But Strand had always wondered why the man had told the story.

He picked up his cup and saucer and walked to the window with it. He had not turned on the lights in the room, so the suite was washed in a gray luminescence in which the burnished surfaces glistened with a pearlish haze. The light died away kindly into the corners, and colors were reduced to pallid values. It was an effect that he especially liked, though he felt odd about being able to enjoy it at this particular moment.

He had thought of Schrade until he was sick of him. He doubted that he had had a single heartbeat during the night that Schrade had not shared with him. He was saturated with the man. Killing him would be a sweet liberation. He knew it would be a scarifying act, too, like that of a fox that chewed off its own paw and left it behind in the jaws of the trap as it limped away on a bloody stump to freedom.

Mara was sitting on the edge of their bed, fastening the buckle on her shoes, when she decided to go on to Knight’s immediately even though she would be a little early. The decision was a result partly of a nagging sixth sense and partly of anxiety. She was worried sick about Strand, her mind generating an endless chain of scenarios about what he was doing and what was happening to him, none of them good. She couldn’t help it. That none of these scenarios was hopeful was depressing, which she feared would adversely affect the way she had to handle herself within the next hour.

The sixth sense was, naturally, more difficult to deal with. It was, simply, a discomfiting tug at the back of her mind that was so persistent, it seemed foolish to ignore it.

She stood up and smoothed her dress, a dove gray wool knit that fell to her ankles. She stepped to the windows and regarded her faint reflection. There was no full-length mirror in the bare town house. She entertained the idea of wearing a belt and finally decided against it, preferring a sleeker look. Her stockings were bone, her shoes matched the dove gray of the dress. She had taken the single braid of her hair and coiled it in a complicated chignon. A single black pearl drop dangled from each ear.

After calling for the cab and slipping on her long black raincoat, she stood at the windows and looked down at the street. Whatever was going to happen to them was already in motion and couldn’t be stopped or turned back or undone. She did not feel good about it, and the fact that she was not optimistic filled her with an enormous sadness.

The black cab came down Chesterfield Hill, emerging slowly from the fog and the drizzle. Suddenly she was angry, furious at herself and at the weakness of her feelings. She wheeled around from the windows and started down the stairs.

When the doorbell rang, Carrington Knight was surprised. He glanced at his watch and stepped to the windows to look down.

“A cab?” He turned with a puzzled frown to Claude Corsier, who was sitting in one of the armchairs, balancing a cup of tea on a saucer. “I don’t have any idea who that is. Excuse me a moment.”

At the landing he pushed a button to unlock the front door and started down the curving staircase.

Upon reaching the ground floor, he crossed the foyer and opened the front door.

“Oh, good Lord, Ms. Paille.”

“I’m sorry I’m early,” she said, stepping inside. “I hope this isn’t inconveniencing you.”

“Oh, my goodness, no, no, no, not at all,” he said, ushering her inside. “Let me take your coat.” He relished looking at her as she turned her back to him and let the raincoat slip off her shoulders. What an exquisite neck, Knight thought, the little wisp of dark hair there at the nape. The supple wool knit fit the woman like a kiss.

“Listen,” Knight said, his mind jittering with a way to handle this awkward circumstance as he hung her coat in the closet, “there’s a gentleman upstairs, another collector and dealer. He’s actually just on his way out, but if you don’t mind, I’d like him to meet you, and to quickly look at your collection.” He could not, on the spur of the moment, think of any other way to get them around each other now that Corsier had stayed a little too long and she had come a little too early.

“Certainly,” she said, “I’d love to meet him.”

Corsier was waiting for them when they topped the last step on the landing. Knight introduced her to Corsier, whom he presented as Mr. Blanchard, an impromptu fabrication that Corsier accepted as smoothly as if they had rehearsed it.

Corsier, regal as always, bowed slightly from the waist and took her hand. He did not kiss it, although he looked as if he wanted to. Like Knight, Corsier was a connoisseur of beauty in its endless variations. Everything, even beauty, existed within a continuum, and a beautiful woman was certainly at the highest end of the scale. Ms. Paille was no less stunning today than she had been two days before.

Well aware of their tight schedule, Knight quickly retrieved Cao’s drawings from the vault and, while keeping up a rapid-fire, though oblique, explanation of Ms. Paille’s situation, placed the portfolio on the library table and opened it with a precious manner.

He stepped back. Claude Corsier silently studied the Balthus encased in the first leaf. Then he methodically went through the portfolio without hurrying, much to Knight’s increasing agitation. Occasionally Corsier leaned forward to examine a drawing more closely, his nose nearly touching it. At last he straightened and turned around.

“Ms. Paille, you are in possession of a very handsome collection here. I’m sure you know that.”

“Mr. Knight has made me aware,” she said.

Corsier elaborated on his thoughts about each of the drawings, turning to look at one of them now and again. Knight could see that the old bear found Ms. Paille to be a bright brush stroke of beauty, eliciting his most charming manner.

After consulting his watch, Corsier excused himself, pleading obligations elsewhere. He took Ms. Paille’s hand once again with a shallow bow.

Knight walked him down the stairs to the door.

“Are you going to offer those drawings to Schrade, too, Carrington?” Corsier asked softly, pausing in the foyer.

“I think I am, yes.”

“You should. What a remarkable collection.”

He walked to the cloak closet and took out his raincoat. “You know, Carrington, you should keep them in the vault until the very last moment, until the Schiele deal is completed. Bring them out just before he’s about to leave.”

“Don’t worry.” Knight smiled. “I’m going to squeeze the most out of the Schieles. I won’t let the drawings compete. They are a completely separate situation and negotiation-altogether.” He handed Corsier his umbrella.

Corsier smiled also. “Thank you, Carrington.” He turned to the door. “Oh, the woman, Ms. Paille. Is she going to stay for the meeting?”

“No, I think not. Definitely not.”

“Good,” Corsier said. He turned and walked out the door, putting up his umbrella. He descended the front steps and disappeared around the corner on Carlos Place.