David Lindsey - The Color of Night

She heard the key working at the lock in the door, and she turned in her chair and watched as the door swung open and he walked into the room.

“Ariana,” he said.

“Hello, Bill.”

He closed the door and flipped the deadlock. When he turned around again he stood still a moment, looking at her from the denser shadows away from the windows. She couldn’t see his face, but she knew he could see hers.

She mashed out the last of her cigarette and stood up. He moved away from the door, taking off his suit coat as he came into the center of the room. After taking a pack of cigarettes from the inner breast pocket of the coat, he folded the coat and draped it over the back of a chair. He tossed the cigarettes onto the sofa.

“What’s it been?” he asked as she approached him. “Nearly five years?” He made no gesture of greeting. The intervening years were nothing.

She said, “Something like that.”

They regarded each other awkwardly, and then Bill Howard sat on the sofa and crossed his legs. He picked up the cigarettes, took one for himself and then offered one to her. She took it from him and bent down for the tiny flame he held up to her. He had a handsome, old-fashioned gold lighter, heavily engraved and much worn. It was the only elegant thing about the man, and it didn’t seem to fit him at all. She had always wondered how he came to have it. She wasn’t surprised to see he was still using it.

Howard smelled of an American shaving lotion, the same lotion she remembered from the years before. She had seen a bottle of it once in his bathroom in a hotel in Salonika. It was emerald green. Nothing exotic, a cheap aftershave that could be purchased in any pharmacy.

Bill Howard had put on weight, but other than that he had not changed. He was still wearing suits in tones of brown, the same unremarkable hue as his thinning hair. He wore a white shirt and a tie-geometric patterns in burgundy and beige-that could have been one from those earlier years. As always he looked as if he had dressed without paying attention to what he was doing, as if he had had something else on his mind.

She pulled heavily on her cigarette and crossed her arms again. None of the lamps in the room were turned on, and the only light came from the window, tinted with green reflected off the broad leaves of the chestnuts. The apartment was dowdy with forty-year-old furniture that needed reupholstering. The place made her terribly sad.

“Still beautiful,” Howard said, appraising her in the pale light. “Greek women, I remember, have a way of ignoring the passing years.”

“I thought you weren’t going to come,” she said, disregarding his remark.

“I’m sorry it took so long.” He looked around.

“I’ve been waiting in these damn rooms for five days,” she said.

“I was traveling.”

“They might have told me that.”

“You’ve forgotten how it is.”

“I haven’t forgotten a single moment,” she said.

Howard said nothing.

“Claude Corsier has disappeared,” she said.

He didn’t have much of a reaction, only a fleeting frown.

“What do you mean?”

She looked at him, tense, restless. “Which of those words don’t you understand?”

“You’ve been keeping in touch with him?”

“Yes.”

“Really. And with Strand, too?”

“No.”

“Okay,” he said, shifting his shoulders on the sofa, settling in, “go ahead and tell me what’s going on.”

Ariana nodded and took a long drag on her cigarette for support. She collected herself.

“After the FIS changed our mission to criminal intelligence, everything changed for us… who worked with Harry. Even before that we knew things were going to be different after the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union disintegrated. The cold war was over. We knew we were living through the end of an era. Harry said the FIS was being forced to… you say, downsize. Even though we had been redirected”-she shrugged-“we saw how easily we could be thrown away when we were no longer useful in a certain way.

“Harry… well, all of us… the three of us made certain plans to, uh, ‘improve’ our retirement situation. It was late in the day for me,” she continued. “I was approaching middle age, had no money to speak of and no pension waiting for me. No husband and no prospects of getting one-that’s too high a price to pay for security. I decided to look after myself.”

Howard’s expression changed slightly, taking on the impassive rigidity one often saw in people who suddenly realized they were about to hear news that they expected would shock them. They reflexively prepared themselves with a kind of facial fortification.

“We developed a strategy to get away with some money, a scheme. It went on for exactly six months, until Harry closed it down nearly six months before he retired.”

Howard’s face fell. “Jesus… Christ… Wolf Schrade?”

She nodded. “Of course, everyone scattered after that. We never saw each other again. None of us.”

Howard had forgotten to smoke his cigarette. It smoldered between his fingers.

“But Claude and I decided we wanted to stay in touch with each other. We agreed on a secret way to communicate, a way to make sure that each of us knew the other was still alive. A warning system.”

“He’s missed his turn.”

“Exactly.” She smoked, her stomach aching from the tension.

Howard wasn’t interested so much in Claude Corsier’s disappearance. “How much did Schrade lose?” His voice betrayed a forced stoicism.

She hesitated. “Millions.”

“How many?”

“I don’t know. Quite a few.”

Howard didn’t react.

“The way it was set up,” Ariana went on, “he didn’t know. It was a very good operation. Very good. Extensive planning.” She paused. “I think he has finally puzzled out what happened. And who did it.”

“Shit.” Howard remembered his cigarette, which had burned down to the filter and was stinking. He put it in the ashtray.

“The point is,” she said, “I think this is going to get dirty. This is very complex.”

“God… damn.” Howard swallowed. “This was Harry’s idea, wasn’t it?”

Ariana looked at him. “We were all involved…”

“But it was Harry’s idea.”

“You’ve got to understand-”

Howard held up one hand to stop her. His face had grown red. He was furious. She knew the reality here. Bill Howard didn’t give a damn that Ariana was afraid, that she believed she was going to be killed, and that she was desperate for protection. What was coursing through his thoughts like a fever was that his twenty-three-year career in the Foreign Intelligence Service, a carefully shepherded career, was suddenly as unstable as the smoke wisping up from the end of her cigarette.

She smelled food cooking, a thick odor that she couldn’t identify. It lacked the tangy sharpness she would have smelled in Salonika or Athens, or even Rome. She turned away from Howard’s silence and moved back to the window. Below, a car purred by slowly in the street.

She wasn’t sure where she stood legally on this, but the game was intricate from the point of view of international law. It had all taken place in the gray areas of the spying game, and it was her guess that it would unravel in the same sphere. Behind her she heard the flick and scratch of Howard’s lighter. A pause while he inhaled.

“I can’t believe you people thought you’d get by with this,” he said, his voice husky with smoke. “Screw a guy like Schrade and just get slick away with it.”

She turned around. “It was a lot of money. Harry, well, you know, he inspired a lot of confidence. We thought we had a good chance. You know better than I do that people like Schrade steal from each other all the time.”