“As for the other business, even though Schrade is being very useful to me right now, eventually the crows will return from Amsterdam and Naples. They’ll come home to Berlin to roost.”
Obando was not being clever. He was pissed. Cool, but pissed.
“Aside from that, it galls me—a lot—that Schrade’s been able to play both sides of the game for so long. I have to admit, he’s got huge balls. I’ve got to admire that. As far as it goes.”
The two drinks arrived. Obando picked up his glass, raised it to Strand, said, “Prosit,” and drank his first sip.
“But I think it’s gone far enough,” he said. “Obviously, so do you.”
Strand had no idea where this was going.
“You want him killed,” Obando said matter-of-factly, dismissing Schrade with a wave of his hand. For an instant the gold oval of his cuff link caught the light coming from behind Strand’s back and made it glint far brighter than anything else in the room.
“What happened, Harry?” Obando went on, “You’re a government man, were. You’ve been out of it several years now. By this time Schrade should have been just so much past business. An old war story. Yet here you are, right back in the middle of it. You’ve kept these files—” He nodded at the table. “Schrade was never past business with you, was he? And you never expected him to be.” Obando tilted his head a little. “That’s interesting to me.”
He stopped and regarded Strand.
“Listen,” he said, “I was raised in a religious family. Went to Catholic schools in Bogotá. Elementary and then high school. Two years in a Catholic
college
before I went to UCLA. I’ve read lots of Bible. Lots of it.”
Obando lounged in his chair, one arm resting on the table, enjoying the conversation now. “You’ve heard the story of King David.”
Strand just looked at him.
“I’ll take that as a yes. And the story of Bathsheba.”
Strand was silent.
“Another yes. And the story of Uriah.”
Strand waited.
“Well, you get the point, Harry.” Without looking at it, his long fingers found the gold cigarette lighter. He set it on its edge. “Actually, it was something of an understatement when you said this was personal, wasn’t it?”
Obando smiled knowingly. Strand had the queasy feeling that he was about to encounter something he had not anticipated.
“I’ll have to tell you a story,” Obando said, shifting in his chair. “I know a little bit about you, but I didn’t know it was you until today.” He touched the lighter as if adjusting its position. “A couple of years ago Schrade came to me with a new proposition. I’d had these two big failures in Europe—which, thanks to you, I now know that son of a bitch caused—and he came to me and said, ‘Look, I know we’ve had these setbacks, terrible luck, but I’ve got a connection in a certain place that’ll allow us to develop some Mexican operations with almost zero risk.’ I was listening.
“‘I’ve got a brother-in-law,’ Schrade said, ‘who is an officer in the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Service. The guy’s in a position to open and shut doors. He can offer us a conduit for heroin and designer product
and
laundered money—through Mexico, in and out of the States.’ I told him to give my people a proposal. We’d study it, get back to him. He did. We made some preliminary inquiries. We went over it in detail. Everything was good. I got back to Schrade, and we made a deal.
“I was cautious at first. Gave him small projects while we continued to do background. Then larger and larger commitments as all of this has proved to be sound and lucrative. It’s been very nice, Harry. When the FIS stationed you to Houston the timing couldn’t have been better. Mexico was just coming into its own in a very big way. Shit, the money I’ve made through you has already offset what that son of a bitch Schrade made me lose on those other two projects.”
Obando closed his eyes halfway.
“So you see, Harry, after this long collaboration—even though we’d never met—I was already curious about you. And then you contact my people. You come here, give me this documentation on Wolf, and you want me to kill your own brother-in-law.” Obando raised his eyebrows. “See what I mean? You say, ‘It’s personal, I won’t talk about it.’ I’m wondering, What the fuck’s going on here?”
Strand was almost dizzy. What did he expect? Why was he surprised? Did he not think that Schrade’s obsession with him was everything that defined an obsession? Did he think that Schrade’s attention to revenge would be anything less than excessive? For two years this man sitting across the table from him had thought that Strand was still an FIS officer and the
éminence grise
behind a very successful money laundering and drug smuggling operation in which Obando was a participant and major beneficiary. He had believed this because his own intelligence people had “verified” Schrade’s information through “independent” information brokers.
Strand hardly knew where to begin. The same senseless technology that had enabled him to steal millions from Schrade had allowed Schrade to steal his identity from him. In certain parts of the world, at least, Strand was a garbled concoction of Schrade’s devising. Strand was appalled that when he had been gathering files on Mara and Ariana and Claude and Schrade, he had not had the foresight to have Alain Darras pull a file on himself as well. He guessed that Darras had done that to satisfy his own curiosity, and he guessed that Darras had wondered why Strand had “lied” to him about still being in the intelligence business.
“Harry.” Mario Obando’s voice brought Strand back to the moment. “Harry, you have been listening to me for a long time. I would like very much to hear a word from you now.”
Strand decided simply to tell the truth to this most unlikely of men, who, having been raised a good Catholic, could still remember Bible stories though he had decided long ago not to believe them.
“I’m afraid Schrade’s deceived you again,” Strand said. He circled the ice around in his glass with his forefinger, chilling the amber Scotch.
Obando waited.
“Almost all of it is a lie.”
“Tell me.”
“I’ve been retired for four years. I wasn’t your Mexico man. Couldn’t have been. I’ve been living in Houston, but I’ve been an art dealer there. Not an FIS officer. It’s that simple.”
Obando nodded.
“I can give you the names of people with the Foreign Intelligence Service in Washington who can confirm that.”
“I’ve already confirmed it with the FIS.”
“In Washington?”
Obando’s hesitation was almost imperceptible. “No. Here in Europe. It was confirmed at a very high level.”
“High level,” Strand said. “Let me guess: you talked to Bill Howard.”
Obando’s expression lost its composed confidence, a subtlety toward qualmish uncertainty.
“How did you know to talk to him?” Strand pressed. “Who gave you his name?”
Obando stared back at Strand in smoldering silence. Though he was far too sophisticated to let his embarrassment show, he could not so easily hide his aggravation. He seemed to be receding farther into the margins of the shadows as the light coming in from the Boulevard des Capucines grew more oblique and wan.
Strand broke the silence, “Don’t feel bad about it, Mario. I’ve only recently learned about Howard myself.”
“I don’t know why Schrade lied to me about this, Harry,” Obando said, “but I’m inclined not to give a fuck. Whatever’s going on between you and him is your business. I’m still making a fortune from him, and I don’t want anything to happen to that situation.”
“I’m sure you don’t,” Strand said.
Obando’s eyes were fixed on Strand, but his fingers again found the gold lighter and he began spinning it absently on the surface of the table, suddenly stopping it with his fingers. Spin… stop. Spin… stop. Spin… The lighter caught the dull light in its whirling, throwing off soft, rhythmic glimmers.
“Of course, I understand your own thinking, Harry…”
“No,” Strand interjected, “you don’t.”
“Well, not exactly, maybe, but I understand revenge. I recognize it when I see it, even if the man who seeks it doesn’t recognize it himself. Some men don’t want to admit to it. They’re embarrassed by feeling such a primitive emotion. They call it something else.”
Strand closed his briefcase, leaving the documents on the table. He no longer had any use for them.
“One question,” Obando said, still twirling the gold lighter. “You said almost everything Schrade had told me about you was a lie. What about that ‘almost’?”
Strand studied Obando’s face in the bruised light, studied the effect the swelling shadows had on the Colombian’s coloring, on his features, on, it seemed, the very nature of the man himself.
“I married his sister,” Strand said. “A year ago, in Houston, Schrade had her killed.”
Claude Corsier sat in the rental car at the entrance to Harley Mews and craned his head over the steering wheel, watching for the light to come on in the garage at the end of the turn. He was uncomfortable sitting in the dark, a rather obvious, curiosity-provoking behavior, he thought. People walked by on their way to evening dinners in the cafés and pubs a few streets over, or just coming and going to God knew where. Sometimes they would spot him in the dark interior, and after they had passed they would turn and look back at him. Besides, he wasn’t a lurk-about sort of man. Not that he hadn’t done it before, but he never thought he did it particularly well.
The lights suddenly came on, clearly visible through the windows at the top of the wide doors that swung open to give access to the double-car interior. As he started his car, a curtain or some kind of drape was pulled across the windows, creating a glow through the cloth.
Having put the car in gear, Corsier turned on the parking lights and idled around the corner and into the mews, moving past the other garages and doorways before pulling to a stop outside the address at which he had an appointment.
He cut the car’s motor, reached over into the rear seat, and picked up the two Schiele forgeries, which were carefully wrapped for protection. He locked the car and walked around to the doorway slightly recessed into the wall beside the garage doors and rang the bell. The door was poorly lighted by a single lamp on a curved bar coming down from the wall above, and Corsier could see vines of some sort growing all around the doorway and over his head.
Waiting for an answer, he looked around the mews. It was not exactly an upscale neighborhood, not ratty, but solidly lower middle class. He smelled curry cooking and tried to identify from which of the open second-story windows it might be wafting. His heart began tripping rapidly when a motor scooter entered the opposite end of the L-shaped mews and pulled up to a doorway several removed from where he was standing. He turned away, took a firmer grip on the forgeries, and then flinched when the door opened suddenly.
“Okay, come in,” Skerlic said, backing away, opening the door wider. He was wearing an undershirt and a pair of baggy trousers. He smelled of gin and cigarettes.
They immediately turned into the garage area, but not before the curious Corsier got a glimpse into the kitchen, where an old woman with her head covered Islamic fashion sat spraddle legged in a plastic chair, watching a tiny television that flickered pale light into her face.
“In here,” Skerlic said, gripping his arm, hurrying him on.
Inside the garage a workbench made of a thick piece of plywood placed across sawhorses sat in the center of the space, lighted by two light bulbs partially covered with improvised pasteboard shades. Woodworking tools were scattered about on the bench, which was littered with wood shavings, an electric drill, and various gadgets that Corsier did not recognize. In the middle of all this, resting front down on a ragged towel to protect their surfaces, were the two picture frames that Corsier had sent from France to an address other than this one.
Standing on the other side of the bench was a very pregnant woman who appeared to be somewhere in her middle thirties. She also was wearing the traditional Islamic women’s headscarf, but her misshapen dress was Western and clearly not designed as a maternity garment. Its hem was hiked up in front to compensate for the additional volume it was so awkwardly covering. She had dusky, Middle Eastern coloring and features. Her left hand, which was gripping some sort of wood-carving tool, rested on the rounded shelf of her protruding stomach. Her right hand, holding a smoldering cigarette, rested on the edge of the bench. She was staring at Corsier as though she could pierce his mind and discern any disingenuity he might utter in the next few moments. It was an oddly tense situation, almost a confrontation.
Skerlic said, “Those are the pictures?”
“Yes… yes,” Corsier said quickly, pulling his eyes away from the woman.
Skerlic held out a thick hand, and Corsier gave him the drawings.
“Be careful with them,” Corsier managed to say. He felt as if he had risked the dark woman’s wrath, but the drawings were invaluable.
Skerlic nodded, unimpressed, and turned and leaned the drawings up against the garage wall. He gestured to the woman.
“Tell him how it works.”
The woman flicked her hot eyes at Skerlic, then turned them on Corsier.
“Move up to the table,” she said. “I’ll go over it step by step.”
Corsier was astonished. Her English had no Mediterranean accent. It was American.
She turned slightly and leaned the side of her tight belly against the edge of the plywood. She gestured with the hand that held the cigarette, strewing ashes among the wood shavings. Huge damp splotches of perspiration stained the underarms of her dress and the material between her distended breasts.
“Your two frames,” she said. “They’re good, thick and heavy like we needed. In each of them I’ve routed out a groove an inch wide, an inch deep.” She ran the middle finger of the hand holding the cigarette around the edges of the nearest frame. “It’s cut to within a half a centimeter of the carved surface on the front of the frame.”
She reached into the junk on the table and picked up a scrap of metal channeling as shiny as chrome.