The Color of Night

EPILOGUE

QUAI DES GRANDS AUGUSTINS, PARIS

Mara Song sat at a table by the window and watched the early autumn light soften to a pale peach on the spires of Sainte-Chapelle across the Seine. The lunch-hour crowds had long since cleared out of the restaurant and the few customers who remained were outnumbered by the waiters, who generally ignored them as they went about their business of changing tablecloths, sweeping the floors, preparing for the evening clientele.

Eugene Payton came into the restaurant and spotted her immediately, waving off a waiter who had started toward him. Mara turned her face away and listened to his footsteps on the floor, slowing as he drew near. When he stopped, she looked up.

“Well, it’s good to see you again, finally,” Payton said.

Mara nodded dismissively.

“No, honestly.” Payton grinned. “It is.” He unbuttoned his suit coat, pulled out the chair opposite her, and sat down. “We’ve talked so much by telephone and fax and e-mail during the last couple of months that it doesn’t seem as though it’s been that long since Camp Peary.”

“It seems that long to me,” she said. “And more.”

Gene Payton was second in command of the Foreign Intelligence Service. Strand had said that Payton was among the best of them. He had always been on the fast track to the top, and he understood the intelligence business in a way that very few did. He believed that the FIS was important, that it was even essential. He did not believe that it had a holy mission, which made a big difference in the way he saw the role and responsibilities of his officers.

“You’re looking good, Mara,” Payton said, clasping his hands on the table after ordering a cup of coffee from the waiter. He rigorously avoided letting his eyes go near her scars. She imagined he had rehearsed it, repeated to himself over and over not to look at them. He must have decided that he would candidly refer to her wounds right at the beginning. That would seem open and honest, without being gratuitous or unnaturally oblivious. “We were worried when we saw the photographs after your first operation.” He smiled. “But I can see those concerns were unwarranted. You look great.”

“I don’t have any complaints,” she said. Fine. She didn’t want him to say any more about it. He had something to tell her and she wanted him to get on with it. There was no need for small talk, as if their meeting was social, as if they could actually relax with each other. Cordiality seemed ill-suited to the circumstances.

Payton paused a moment as the waiter left his coffee. He poured in some cream and stirred.

“Okay,” he said, putting down his spoon. “I’ll get right to the point.” Payton was no fool. Whatever else, he was not that. “I can’t say that the final decision on all of this was unanimous, but it was a solid decision. Everyone understands that it’s the decision. Anybody who doesn’t like it can take a hike. It’s that solid.”

Mara lifted her glass and sipped the Bordeaux she had been nursing for the past twenty minutes.

“FIS is walking away from it, Mara,” he said. “Officially, unofficially, on the record, off the record, casually, formally, on the books, off the books, any way you can describe it. We’re out.”

Mara couldn’t help herself. She dropped her head and closed her eyes. She was suddenly weak, as if she had received an injection of morphine. Jesus Christ.

“I’ve got to tell you,” Payton went on, “letting the money get away from them, that killed them. Some of them couldn’t believe it. The scheme has their grudging admiration, but if it hadn’t been for the offsetting circumstances, the grudging part would have far outweighed the admiration part. For some of them, it always will.”

“What about the investigation? Where do they all stand on it?”

Payton cautiously took a sip of coffee. “Scotland Yard and the Bundeskriminalamt,” he said, “are inundated with possibilities, hundreds of leads, thousands of names, scores of new relationships and connections. They’ll be investigating Schrade’s assassination for a decade. They’ll never solve it. The German intelligence community is shut tight on this. So are the British. So are we.”

He looked out the window to the Seine, and Mara thought he was trying to decide whether or not to bring up something else.

“The wild card was that the international media got hold of the information about Schrade’s double life first. That pissed off the law enforcement agencies and the intelligence community. Rumor got way ahead of reality. The gaudy headlines made everyone cringe: ‘RECLUSIVE BILLIONAIRE TIED TO INTERNATIONAL CRIME SYNDICATES. GERMAN BILLIONAIRE LINKED TO GLOBAL CRIME LORDS.’ That kind of thing was alarming all of us. It could’ve gotten out of hand and pulled us all into a full-blown international scandal.”

Mara remained silent.

“A lot of questions had to be answered. People are still scrambling. Once the cat was out of the bag, the media wanted to know what else was in the bag and what it was doing in there.” He paused, looked down at his cup. “Whoever did that created a firestorm.”

She said nothing. He wasn’t going to get any reaction from her.

Payton took another sip of coffee. “But the mitigating factor was that the media received no information connecting Schrade to the FIS, or to any intelligence service. Just information about his crime world connections. That gave the whole intelligence community deniability when the inevitable spy rumors started flying around. No one ever definitively tied Schrade to any agency.”

“That was good.”

“Yeah”-Payton gazed at the quayside again-“that was good.”

Another couple left the cafe. The place was practically closed.

Payton turned back to Mara. “As far as your situation was concerned, the clincher was the information about Bill Howard.” He paused. “You know, Mara, we didn’t have a clue about him. The son of a bitch, he might’ve retired and we’d never have known.”

“Have you found him yet?” Mara asked.

Payton shook his head in disgust. “No, and with the kind of money he’s got he’ll be able to buy a hell of a lot of ghost help. This could take a long time. Plus, it’s got to be done in silence. Rules of the game.”

She nodded.

“Anyway, everyone knew you didn’t have to do that. I mean, it worked to your advantage, it was a score on your side of the ledger.”

“That’s not why-”

“I know, I know,” Payton held up his hand to stop her, “that’s what I mean. Everybody knew that, and that’s why it gave you the edge.”

He was silent a moment, looking at the buildings on the Ile de la Cite. Mara looked out to the Seine also. Her face ached, but it didn’t matter anymore. Time would pass, the scars would heal. The ones on her body, anyway. Right now was not the time to think about the others.

“One question,” Payton said, turning back to Mara. “This is for me-just me, believe it or not.”

Mara did believe it. “What’s that?”

“How did you get away from there? I know Mayfair was immobile with shock after the explosion. It’s not exactly on Scotland Yard’s hot patrol list. The weather was bad. The response time was bad. But still… shit, you were both blown up.”

A simple question. It seemed ingenuous enough. But within the last year her life had undergone irreversible changes. Ingenuous. The word had almost lost its meaning.

“I can’t talk about that,” she said, dropping her eyes to the last deep mulberry sips of wine left in her glass. “If it’s over, it’s over.” She hesitated, then looked up at him. “I don’t know how you people do this, how you make a life out of it. There are always more questions than answers, more tragedies than triumphs… and more secrets than all of it put together.”

Even for a man as circumspect as Gene Payton, even for a guy who knew the ropes and the rules as well as he did, the frustration was written all over his face. Still, he was destined to disappointment. That was the nature of his business. Almost all of the men and women in the intelligence profession died taking an entire nightful of secrets with them.

They visited a little longer, but they really had nothing to say to each other beyond the business of business. Though Mara’s connection to Payton and the FIS had been intense and indelible, it had been brief. And it had been stormy. She had breached trusts; she had abandoned loyalties. Regardless of the extenuating circumstances, the bridges lay smoldering and in ruins. There just wasn’t anything else to say.

Payton left. They would never see each other again. There would never be any need to.

Mara reached up and absently touched the side of her face, the tips of her fingers tracing the silky surfaces of the tender, helical scars. Touching them, checking them, had become a habit. She was trying to break it. She was the only patron remaining in the cafe nearly half an hour later when the door from the Quai des Grands-Augustins opened again and Claude Corsier walked in. He was dressed like the most correct member of the Academie Francaise. He walked over and stood looking down at her. She was never self-conscious about the scars with Corsier. She always had the feeling that when he looked at her they disappeared. It was a way he had.

“Sit down, Claude.”

Corsier shook his head at a questioning waiter and sat down.

“I followed him for a while,” he said. “There was no one else.” He had kept his mustache and goatee. The look suited him.

“They’re walking away from it,” Mara said. “They’re not going to come after us. Your name never came up. It’s over.”

“My God.” Corsier gasped and sat back. He had been fatalistic about the outcome. In the three months since the explosion Corsier had been glum. He had gained little peace from his deliverance from Schrade. Too much-and too many-had been lost in the process.

The Swiss turned his face away to the street, and Mara studied his profile. Corsier had been horrified that he had allowed the Serb to deceive him about the precision of the explosives. He should have known better. And he was horrified that Skerlic had detonated both bombs, slaughtering Carrington Knight for no reason at all. What he had found most difficult to live with was that he himself had benefited enormously from Knight’s death. Knight was the only person who could have tied Corsier to the assassination. He had been the only unresolved flaw in Corsier’s plan, the one reason Corsier had resigned himself to being a fugitive for the rest of his life.

He had been lucky, but the price had been steep, and he would not pay it off in a lifetime.

Though Mara had been badly hurt, none of her wounds had been life threatening. Because the Schiele forgeries had been sitting on the bookcase countertop, above the level of the library table, and because Mara had been twice the distance from the explosion as Strand, the extra millisecond had given her time to react. The top of the heavy table had shielded her from the greater force of the blast. By the time an appalled Corsier had run across Carlos Place, Mara had already dragged Strand, bleeding badly, down to the first floor, away from the fire and smoke. Corsier had gotten them out the back door, into Mount Row, and away from the building as the crowds had begun to gather in the rain in Carlos Place.

“This is quite incredible,” he said, turning back to her.

“I think so, too. There were so many other possibilities.”

Corsier thought about it for a while, absorbing it. Then he sighed heavily. “I went to Rome,” he said. “Ariana had given quite a lot of money to Santa Maria del Priorato, near her home on the Aventine. The priory allowed an urn with her ashes to be placed in those lovely gardens there. It seems it was her request.”

He drummed his fingers on the table.

“She had drawn up legal papers to have her house converted to a residence for young Greek women who come to Rome to study art. She had set aside a large endowment for it, to be administered by a private university in Athens.”

He drummed his fingers on the table.

“I went to Santa Maria. The urn, of course, is beautiful.”

For the second time he turned to look out at the Seine and the Palais de Justice. The afternoon was quickly slipping away.

“My God, Mara, look at that light.”

They watched as the softening light stained the stone architecture and the slate roofs with tea rose and pale coralline. The shadows were turning dusty blue, poised for the deeper hues of dusk.

He turned to her.

“I am back in Geneva,” he said. “Back with my niece in the gallery.” He smiled. “It’s heaven.”

“Good, Claude. That’s good.”

“Come to see us, Mara. Let us hear from you. We must never lose touch. It would be a sad mistake.”

“I promise.”

“What will you be doing?”

“Staying on here for a while.”

“In Paris?”

She nodded, but offered no clarification. Corsier studied her a few moments.

“You know,” he said, choosing his words carefully, thoughtfully, “they say that a wise man will befriend the shadows that move into his life. They say that if he will embrace them and make them his companions, they will teach him how to live with his regrets.”

Mara said nothing. Then, suddenly, inexplicably, she felt her eyes moisten. She concentrated; she didn’t blink; she managed to stop it.

Corsier reached across the table and gently put his heavy, bearish hand on hers.

“Come to see us in Geneva.”

Mara was now alone in the empty cafe. It was finally over, and it had ended the way such things end, with a quiet conversation, a mundane and almost feckless dismissal of the extraordinary.

She stood and made her way out of the cafe just as the first few dinner-hour clientele began to trickle in and evening was settling over the Seine. She crossed the Quai des Grands-Augustins and walked slowly along the quayside toward the Pont St.-Michel. The lights of Paris were aglitter in the lilac air, and in the Seine the large bateaux mouches plied the approaching darkness, their swags of tiny lights sparkling doubly bright against the water.

She walked past the Pont St.-Michel and went on to the Petit Pont where she turned and started across the Seine. She was nearly to the other side when she saw him. He was waiting at the edge of the trees, leaning on his cane against the stone ramparts. He was watching her.