David Lindsey - The Color of Night

He bent over and kissed her, surprised by her fragrance and by the ache for her that mixed so strangely with the grief. He sat down, his chest tightened to the point of collapsing his lungs.

“I’m glad you saw the note,” he said, taking a napkin and unfolding it.

“Couldn’t miss it,” she said, smiling.

“At the last minute I needed a few more books,” he said. The waiter appeared and poured wine for him from the bottle that Mara had already ordered.

They ate dinner slowly, Strand concentrating intensely on trying to pace himself so that he didn’t betray even a hint of uneasiness or preoccupation. It was a greater burden even than he had anticipated, for every time he smiled or tried to make a lighthearted remark he saw Romy’s face looking back over her shoulder at him. Trying to maintain a semblance of equanimity with that image flashing constantly into his mind was torture.

Halfway through the meal he was jolted by the sudden realization that he had made a terrible mistake. He should not have let the videotape out of his hands. After he had viewed the complete tape three times, after he had collected his unraveled thoughts, he had immediately begun the necessary procedures to find Darras. When he’d finally found him, they had agreed on a meeting place and Strand had hurried out of the house-leaving the tape in the machine.

Now that seemed a tragic mistake. What if it wasn’t there when he returned? What if he had let the only proof of Romy’s murder get away from him? Aside from the evidence that it represented, it would be a betrayal of Romy to have let that documentation slip through his fingers. He feared that if he never saw the tape again, eventually, over time, he might begin to wonder if he had ever really seen it at all. Too easily those stark images of the crash might fade from reality into a vivid nightmare, and at some point in a future as yet unimagined he might awaken suddenly in the darkness, sweating, haunted by the question of whether he had only dreamed what had seemed so terrible and so real.

The rest of the meal was excruciating.

It seemed an eternity before Mara’s breathing settled into the unmistakable rhythm of sound sleep. He lay in the dark beside her, exhausted. Though they had had sex-a truly schizophrenic experience for him-his fatigue was the result of nervous tension, not the sex. He really didn’t know if he could do this. He was less resilient than he used to be. This would have been hard in the past, of course, but it wouldn’t have taken so much out of him. It had been only seven hours since he had found the video, but every hour had seemed a full day in itself. The tension and the doubt and the lack of direction had consumed him.

He had to admit that the three years with Romy had been disarming, and as those years had added up, Schrade had receded further and further into the past. After Romy’s death-he was stunned that he had ever accepted her car crash as an accident-Schrade had faded off the screen entirely. Until tonight. Strand was feeling the full strain of the whiplash.

As he waited for Mara to fall asleep, her head on his chest, his arm around her naked shoulders, he replayed the evening minute by minute. Had he given himself away? He sifted through the vocabulary of their conversation and tried to remember her exact facial reactions to everything he had said. Were there subtleties that, in retrospect, were telltale signs of suspicion? Had her eyes lingered on him at any point, or had they turned away as she asked a question that might have been planted to elicit a revealing response? Had she been more reserved than before, or had she been too relaxed, pretending not to notice something in his behavior that had set her sensors tingling?

Then, later, there was the surreal sexual intercourse with her, she who was suddenly no longer Mara. His imagination careened from possibility to possibility. All of this piled on top of his own emotions about her, emotions that had grown and matured during the last three months so quickly and comfortably that he would never have imagined he could have been capable of it. His was a fool’s dismay, precisely the thing he himself had relied on in the past to catch a fool. It was a bleak realization.

Mara’s breathing had been consistent for half an hour. She had shifted in her sleep and rolled over on her stomach away from him, throwing back the sheet so that she was naked all the way down to the two dimples above her buttocks.

He eased out of bed and lifted his robe off a chair and went downstairs. A pale light from the city flooded the room in powder blue as it came in from the courtyard. He could easily make his way around the first large sofa, across the Persian carpet to the black Maillol statue.

The tape was gone.

His ears actually began ringing, and he almost lost his balance. He scrambled through the cassette boxes and put each one into the player, regardless of its label. No luck. He stood still, looking out to the courtyard where the palms were black silhouettes. U.S. EMBASSY, VIENNA

Bill Howard sat alone in a room filled from floor to ceiling with electronic equipment: computer screens and keyboards, television screens, deck panels crowded with square and round buttons and toggle switches, red-and-green digital readouts, and black-and-white analogue dials. He sat at a built-in countertop with a notepad, a pencil, and a mug of coffee. Though the room was permeated with the odor of hot plastics and electrical wiring, he was freezing, the thermostat on the air-conditioning system having been turned down low to keep the equipment from overheating.

To Howard’s left was a plate-glass window that looked into the next room, where two engineers worked in an environment almost identical to the one in which Howard was sitting. He had just put on a set of headphones with a pencil-thin microphone attached, leaving his hands free so that he could doodle on the notepad and sip coffee.

He heard a series of stereophonic clicks in the headphones and looked at the engineers through the plate glass. One of them looked at Howard and began counting down through the headphones and then pointed at Howard.

“Hello, Gene?”

Gene Payton was always very polite, and Howard impatiently endured a brief exchange of pleasantries. Then he said, “Well, it’s just exactly what I goddamn thought, Gene. We’ve got a serious glitch in the Strand situation. Bad, bad timing. Kiriasis is afraid Schrade has discovered the embezzlement and is tracking them all down. She swears she hasn’t been in touch with any of them except Corsier. She wants protection.”

Howard stared at the blinking lights and listened.

“No, I acted shocked, stunned to hear what they’d done. If she’s lying and really is in touch with Strand, or even if she isn’t and he gets in touch with her, whatever, if they communicate, we don’t want him to know we’ve known about this for over a year. If he knew that, his mind would go to work on it. We sure as hell don’t want that.”

Howard listened.

“Sure, she wants to know how we’re going to handle it. What we’re going to do with Strand.”

Howard sipped his coffee. The mug was crazed and a thousand servings of coffee had permanently stained it. It should have been thrown away. It looked filthy.

“I told her the truth,” he said. “I said it would depend on who ended up with the money… What?”

He listened.

“No, my hunch is Harry kept it strictly compartmentalized. She’s not going to know much, but we need to find out what she does know. I have to find out if there’s some way we can use her. If we can’t use her, then we sure as hell have to keep her out of the way.”

He doodled on the notepad and glanced up at the engineers in the next room. The one standing was telling the other one an animated story. They were both laughing. Howard tossed his pencil down in disgust.