David Lindsey - The Color of Night

Strand removed his hands from the sweaty Scotch glass and touched his face with his cool fingers. He sighed.

“But when he’s on art business, the bodyguard is little more than a chauffeur. He doesn’t follow Schrade into restaurants, doesn’t follow him around in the hotels, doesn’t go into the galleries. Schrade is in a different world when he’s looking at art. He almost-almost-becomes a different man. He doesn’t want the trappings of his other life to interfere.”

Mara nodded. “So, you think you’d…”

“Catch him in a noisy restaurant. Catch him coming or going to the restaurant, in the street. Catch him in the men’s room. In the bar.”

Strand went straight into the specifics. He was going to give her everything.

“My feeling is that in any of these situations I can do a ‘brush-by.’ To muffle the sound of the ‘slap,’ and to make sure the pellet penetrates his clothes, I’ll jam the pistol into his side, just under his rib cage, and fire. He’ll flinch, slump. I’ll grab him and hold him up. This will do two things: give me a chance to hide the pistol somewhere in my clothes, and prevent him from reflexively recoiling from me or gesturing at me and attracting attention to me. I’ll act surprised, confused, then shocked: ‘What’s the matter! Are you all right?’ I’ll appear to come to his assistance, call for help, bring people to us. Since I’ll be catching him away from his bodyguard, no one will suspect a menacing situation. I think most people will immediately conclude that I just happened to be standing next to the guy when he had a stroke or heart attack.”

He stopped, his forearms leaning on the table.

“That’s my thinking right now. That’s what I’d like. In the confusion I’ll manage to slip away. I’ll want to be gone before the bodyguard gets there. But even if I’m not, Schrade will be past any ability to communicate. The saxitoxin takes only moments.”

“God, Harry… you can do that?”

“I have to do it.”

She had gone right to the heart of it. He was by no means as confident as he wanted to sound. The risk was the least of it. It was killing the man that he tried not to think about. He had rehearsed over and over everything right up to the instant of squeezing the trigger, then his mind derailed. He couldn’t imagine what he would feel like as he walked away, leaving behind him the confused crowd and the dead, or dying, Schrade. How in God’s name would that feel?

“How are you going to get that close to him without him recognizing you?”

Strand nodded. “There’s a shop in Soho where West End actors buy their makeup and wigs and things. I’ll need you to go there and get something for a disguise. A mustache. Maybe a wig. The most expensive ones they have. Very good ones. Subtle. Then we’re going to have to change the way I look.”

Mara had been listening to him with an expressionless concentration, hearing things, he knew, that she could hardly believe. Everything he said was being absorbed, being made over in her mind to fit into reality as she had always understood it. He guessed it was as difficult a task as she had ever encountered. A leap beyond, way beyond, what she had been taught in the FIS training course in Virginia.

Her eyes glittered with the impact of the accumulative brutality of the details. All the concern, all the fear, the nearly panicked imagination, gathered in a single crease between her eyebrows. As Strand watched, she gradually composed herself. She took a long, deep breath and slowly straightened her back and set her shoulders.

Strand felt sick doing this to her. Then he thought about Romy and Meret and Ariana. It was too late to get weak in the stomach.

Just after nightfall Claude Corsier hung up the telephone from talking to Carrington Knight, who had at just that moment received a message from Wolfram Schrade. He would arrive at Knight’s at ten o’clock the next morning. Corsier looked at the two drawings sitting on the floor of his hotel room in South Kensington. Good God. These Schieles, more Schieles than Schieles themselves now that Carrington Knight believed in them as if they were two Holy Grails, would soon attract yet another knight to his death in his quest for them. Corsier shook his head pensively. It was unbelievable, really, that Wolfram Schrade was coming like this, to two worthless drawings, like a rat to carrion. Corsier had planned it and imagined it, but now that it was really about to happen, well, it was rather a triumph. So, the mighty and powerful could be deceived, too. It was no special thing to be made a fool. And no one was so special that he couldn’t be. But it did feel rather special having done it twice to a man like Schrade. To be rid of the murderous freak in the process… it was a triumph.

Corsier wished he had tried to get in touch with Harry Strand. He would like Strand to know what he had done and how he had done it. After his close call in Schrade’s private launch in Venice, Corsier had been convinced that his only hope for salvation lay in cutting himself off from everyone he knew, making it impossible for Schrade to use anyone to find him. With the exception of Edie Vernon, and Carrington Knight just two days ago, Corsier had not spoken to a single soul he knew since the Venetian nightmare. He had diminished into a shadow and floated unnoticed from country to country. Strand had done something like that four years ago, and as far as Corsier knew, the transformation had served him very well.

Corsier’s niece, who ran his gallery in Geneva, had eventually reported him missing to the police. He had seen it in the papers and once on the television news. He was sorry he’d had to put her through that, but if he had sent her any note of reassurance, she would never have been convincing to the police or, more important, to Schrade’s intelligence creatures.

He had not found it especially difficult to disappear. Of course, he was highly motivated. As had been often observed, nothing was so galvanizing as brushing against the cold shoulder of one’s own mortality. Even now just the mere thought of Venice accelerated his heartbeat.

The incident had wrenched a new crease in the folds of Corsier’s brain and was now a permanent feature of his psyche. His escape had been born of blind chance, which haunted him. As Schrade’s launch pounded the waves and Corsier swore to himself over and over and over in prayerful chant that if he ever got away from this situation he would become as invisible as a breath, the driver of the launch changed course abruptly, leaving the lane to Marco Polo Airport and angling in a traverse course. Corsier was horrified. This was it.

In the quick maneuver of changing course, their launch cut across the wake of one of the public vaporettos filled with tourists heading for the airport. The hull of the launch slapped roughly against the large wake at the precise instant that the second of the two men in the launch was turning to reach for something on the dash. Thrown off balance by the sudden slam of the hull, he flailed out reflexively for something to save himself from falling. It was the steering wheel. The launch pitched violently as it turned against the second part of the vaporetto ’s V-shaped wake, flinging the off-balance man against the side of the launch.

Corsier grabbed a heavy black flashlight from a bin in the hull beside him, leaped at the man, and in a frenzy of panic bashed his head repeatedly. An automatic pistol skittered across the fiberglass floor from the man’s jacket. Corsier grabbed it without thinking and fired repeatedly at the driver, who was fighting to regain the steering wheel as he pushed down the throttle to cut the power. The pistol was equipped with a silencer, and the lethal hush of each shot gave an even more surreal character to the frantic sequence. The launch spun around, dead in the water, as the driver was hammered to the floor with each quiet burst from the pistol. Then Corsier shot the second man as well.