David Lindsey - The Color of Night

Silence.

Knight was standing between Schrade and the stairs, his mouth hanging open stupidly.

“Harry Strand,” Schrade said in his heavily accented English, recognizing the voice.

“Is your driver parked in front?” Strand asked.

“Yes.”

Strand took his left hand off Schrade’s shoulder, reached back without turning around, and punched the electric lock.

“We’re going to get away from the door,” Strand said. “Upstairs.”

They stepped forward, and Schrade caught Mara’s figure in his peripheral vision as she waited inside the gallery doorway. He turned to look at her. He stopped.

“Mara Song.” He said it as if he were ticking off the names on a list.

“Mara Song?” Knight was completely adrift.

Strand pressed the gun into Schrade’s neck again, and they all started up the winding staircase.

As they filed into the library, Strand motioned for Schrade to go into the vault, the door of which always stood open. When he did, Strand closed the door and turned the handle once. Schrade never even saw his disguise.

He told Knight to sit in one of the chairs behind the library table. And Knight sat near the two Schiele drawings, as far away from the pistol as he could get.

Strand gave the pistol to Mara and nodded at Knight. “I’ve got to get this shit off my face,” he said.

“What are you going to do, Harry?” She kept her eyes on the mortified Knight as Strand began peeling off the latex features of the man he had been hiding behind.

“I don’t know,” he mumbled as he worked at the elastic bits of mask.

“The choices-”

“I know, ” Strand cut her off. With trembling fingers he peeled away the layers of the stranger’s broad nose. He knew his agitation was noticeable and disturbing to her, but he could do nothing about it. His fingers scrabbled at the bulk of latex over his brow. The adrenaline that had shot through him when he’d heard the doorbell had hit him like a jolt of electricity. He clawed at the ridge along his jaw that had added weight and heft to his head. What had astonished him even more was what he had experienced the moment he’d put the gun to the back of Schrade’s neck. Suddenly he had been suffused with a feral hatred that was the most intense emotion he had ever experienced, and he had almost shot Schrade then, at that instant.

“Good God…” Knight was watching Strand emerge from the rubbery peelings that were gathering in front of him on the table like limp shreds of actual flesh. “ Good God, man, what in bloody hell is going on here!” Knight’s voice rose wildly.

“Shut up, Carrington.” Strand’s hands were still trembling as he raked and rolled away the last bits of latex from his face. Then he took off the wig and removed the eyebrows. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his face. He was panting. He felt odd, which scared him.

He stood a moment at the far end of the table from Knight, Mara halfway between them. Across the table in front of her was the closed vault. He put his hands on the table to steady himself. The mandarin red walls shimmered, affecting his eyes.

Without saying anything, he turned and walked over to the ebony liquor cabinet near the settee and searched among the bottles for the Scotch. He found it, opened the doors and took out a glass, and poured it half-full. He stood there with his back to them and sipped it, held it in his mouth, and swallowed. He took another sip, did the same.

He returned to the table and looked at Knight.

“Get him out of the vault.”

When Claude Corsier recognized Harry Strand’s voice, he froze. He leaned into the binoculars and pressed against them until the tripod rocked and he had to steady it. He couldn’t believe his eyes. Strand was nowhere to be seen. But he did believe his ears. He knew Harry Strand’s voice. Then the unknown man, incredibly, locked Schrade into the vault, and Corsier watched, spellbound, as the stranger stood at the end of the library table and removed his face.

“Don’t touch anything,” Corsier whispered.

“He’s not even there,” Skerlic said. Despite his aloof attitude about the binoculars, he too was using them, hunched over his own tripod like a beetle.

“It doesn’t matter,” Corsier said. “Everything has changed.”

“What?” Skerlic took his eyes away from the binoculars. “What do you mean, ‘everything has changed’?”

“Everything has changed,” Corsier repeated. “That man who removed the disguise.” He finally pulled his face away from the tripod and looked at Skerlic. “You do not touch a button until I tell you,” he said, and his tone carried a clear note of threat, something totally foreign to Skerlic’s understanding of Claude Corsier.

Schrade sat across from Carrington Knight at the far end of the library table, facing the windows that looked out onto Carlos Place and the dark, rainy morning. To his left, a little over an arm’s reach away, were the Schiele drawings that had brought them all together. Mara and Strand stood at the opposite end of the table, Mara on Knight’s side, Strand on Schrade’s.

Strand held the pistol again, but he wasn’t pointing it at anyone. He sat on the edge of the table, turned toward Schrade, one leg on the floor. Mara stood next to the windows, leaning against the wall, her arms crossed, hugging herself. Since Schrade had sat down, no one had spoken. Schrade was arrogantly unimpressed by his plight. Knight was miserable with anxiety.

The silence in the room was prolonged, but not deliberately calculated by Strand to ratchet up the tension. He was trying to make decisions that he simply did not know how to make. Knowing Claude Corsier so well, he was sure Corsier had lured Schrade to Knight’s for the same reason he had.

Strand ran the fingers of one hand through his damp hair and looked at Schrade, then at the wide-eyed Knight, and back to Schrade. Strand was beyond exhaustion. The struggles in his own mind, committing himself to a course of action and then at the last minute veering off, his efforts to will himself to do what his will would not allow, his fear of what his actions would do to his relationship with Mara when, if, he finally did kill Schrade-all of it had worn him down to a weariness that he had rarely experienced. And he was finding himself unsure of just about everything, ashamed of himself for having planned an assassination and, even worse, for having dragged Mara into it and ashamed of himself for not having the fortitude to do what he had planned.

“Are we waiting for something, Harry?” Schrade asked finally, turning and looking at Strand. “Or are you simply incapable of making up your mind?” He was wearing an elegant double-breasted suit of charcoal gray with chalk stripes. He was very correct, his tie knotted tightly against his starched collar.

Strand took another drink of Scotch. He had to be very careful with that. If he was going to do something foolish, he wanted to do it because he had planned to do it, not because of the Scotch. He put down the glass.

“Well, the end has to begin somewhere, doesn’t it?” he said.

The challenge in Schrade’s eyes did not retreat.

“I think you should know a few things, Wolf,” Strand said, looking down the long table at Schrade, “before anything else happens here.”

Schrade waited.

“You were very carefully baited,” Strand began. “The two Schieles were meant to bring you here-today.”

Knight’s mouth dropped open.

“There are other drawings here that you haven’t seen that were also offered to Carrington for the same purpose. But the plot got complicated, and the other drawings were unnecessary.” He stopped, fixed his eyes squarely on Schrade.