David Lindsey - The Color of Night

“So you’d know.”

“Do I need to know?”

“I feel better that you know.”

Darras was very still. He took the smooth pit out of his mouth and without even looking down added it to the pile of beetles.

“See. That’s what I mean,” he said. He drank his wine. When he put his glass on the table he shoved it around in a tight, idle circle, moving only his fingers, watching the wet snail smear of the glass on the tabletop. Then he looked up at Strand.

“When the Wall came down, when communism died its ignominious death, I thought I would starve for lack of work,” he said. “In fact, just the opposite has happened. All of those intelligence services collapsed and disbanded and closed shop and shut down networks. The Eastern bloc, Soviets, you people. Suddenly Europe was drowning in unemployed secret service hacks and spies. Now they are all working again, much busier than ever, except this time they’re working for criminals. I’m making a fortune, Harry. From criminals. Drug smugglers, counterfeiters, embezzlers, money launderers, car thieves, gunrunners, smugglers of illegal aliens. Assassins. They all need information. Reliable information.”

He drank some more wine.

“I bought a ton of Stasi and KGB records-there are millions of tons of them, but I was specific about what I wanted-and my kids scanned them into the computers. I made so much money off the Russian Mafia in the early years after communism collapsed that I could afford to buy records from all the Eastern-bloc secret services. I bought Asian files. I bought South American files. Middle East. I have to admit, I was surprised that I could buy so much. Nobody has any loyalty anymore. The American dollar is more coveted than peace of mind. Anyway, for the last four years I have had nearly fifty people working day and night on computers I keep on two full floors of an office building here.”

He sighed hugely.

“Only God has more names in His files than I do.”

Strand was adept at the ruse of seeming to listen while letting his mind go elsewhere. It was not an easy thing to learn. Vacuity has a way of registering on a person’s face the moment the mind begins to wander. But Strand had learned to do it well. It was a valuable deception, like hiding fear and panic.

“… state of the art, of course,” Darras droned on. “They’re piranhas, these computers. So small, yet so voracious. You feed them and feed them and feed them. They digest everything you feed them.”

Strand listened with his eyes, but his chest was tightening. It was the worst feeling in the world, and he had hoped never to experience it again. It was what the fleeing springbok felt when the pursuing cheetah seemed to read its mind-every feint was anticipated, with every dodge the cat was there… and there… and there.

Suddenly he said, “Alain, I need a couple of forged passports.

U.S.”

Darras regarded him. “I need a photograph.”

“Use one of yours. I know you’ve got one.”

“This is costly.”

“I don’t have any choice. And I need dossiers on two other names.”

He took a notepad from his coat pocket and wrote down “Ariana Kiriasis” and “Claude Corsier.” He tore out the piece of paper and put it on the table and again spun it around with his finger for Darras to read.

Darras dropped his eyes to the paper and then looked up.

“You decided to cut yourself off from them.”

“Yes.”

“They don’t know where to find you.”

“No.”

“That was your idea.”

“Yes.”

Darras was almost amused but conquered the impulse.

“You tried to slip away from your own shadow.” Without looking he reached for an olive, but they were all gone. “That’s what I was talking about,” he said, wiping his fingers on a napkin. “The shadow of intelligence work. Once it attaches itself to you, it follows you around on the ground, on the water, up the sides of walls. You try to get rid of it at your own peril.”

“Any problem with the other names?” Strand asked. He looked at his watch, just to let Darras know he had to leave.

“No.”

“By tomorrow.”

“If at all possible. Certainly as soon as possible.”

Strand nodded. “Thank you.”

He pushed back his chair to leave. Darras didn’t move; he was staying. Strand stood, and Darras looked up at him.

“I like you, Strand,” Darras said. “I always thought you were a decent fellow, which is a curse in this business.”

Strand parked the rental car in Largo Fontanella Borghese, a cobblestoned courtyard only a few steps from Toula. For a moment he sat in the car and watched the occasional nocturnal pedestrian drift toward Via Condotti and the Spanish Steps. The steps were a colossal magnet for the tourists, and if you were anywhere in the neighborhood, you were within the pull of that romantic flight of stairs and the pink place of John Keats’s death that overlooked it.

He felt as though he were about to go onstage and had to give the performance of his life. He didn’t know who Mara Song was, but he knew damn well what she might be. His proximity to danger, his sudden realization of his unknowing close association with it over the past several months in the person of this woman, made him light-headed. What had she done? What was she supposed to do? How close had he come-how close was he-to disaster?

He remembered too well the physiological symptoms of fear. It racked the body so thoroughly that hardly any organ remained unaffected. Everything reacted, everything threatened to fail under the stress of it. And in this case the metaphorical ache in the heart was by no means the least of Strand’s anxiety. He had been a fool. Had he really been so out of touch with his benighted past as to believe that he could meet a woman like Mara, a woman who seemed so right to him in nearly every way, and she wouldn’t be a player? Did he really believe that he could have a life apart from all those cryptic years? Jesus. He was getting old after all, wasn’t he, and now he could add a deeply felt heartache to the rattling confusion of dread.

He guessed Darras was about right. Strand was like a man who had been a heavy drinker all his life and was now suffering from damaged organs. The past wasn’t going to go away for that man, and it wasn’t going to go away for Harry Strand, either. It would always be with him to threaten him, to despoil even his quiet moments, to remind him that what he had done for nearly twenty years had come at a high cost and that a large part of the debt was still outstanding.

Suddenly the image of Romy, her arms fighting to control the steering wheel, flashed into his mind. He saw her face as she looked back over her shoulder into the spotlight from the car behind her. How horrified she must have been. Had she thought of him in those last terror-stricken moments? Did it enter her mind that he somehow had failed her?

He swallowed the lump in his throat and got out of the car.

The restaurant was long, with a small bar just to the right of the entry with large armchairs and settees. To the left, one descended five steps to the main dining rooms, a series of three of them separated by an enfilade of arches that terminated in a pale terra-cotta wall. The rooms were lighted by lamps that made the stucco walls throw off a warm hazy light and caused the white linen tablecloths to phosphoresce like so many moonflowers scattered throughout the twilight of the rooms.

Mara waited for him in the center room at a table that he guessed she had requested specifically, since it afforded considerable privacy. She had quickly learned of Strand’s demanding preference for a quiet table. She wore a simple black cocktail dress with thin straps and a low-cut neck. Her hair was pulled back in a chignon, and she wore black pearl earrings set in a crescent of diamonds.