drawings that Corsier had brought him four months before, perhaps the best group of symbolists that Corsier had ever had in his possession and which he had collected over a period of nearly a year, specifically with this client in mind. There had been an even dozen drawings of extraordinary quality. It had come to 1.3 million Deutsche marks. Corsier had taken them to the German’s Berlin home. Where he had left them. With only a promise of payment.
That was not so extraordinary. It wasn’t an entirely comfortable position to be in, but he had known his client for twelve years and had never had any trouble collecting. So he had taken a deep breath…
Now this. Nine drawings by the increasingly popular nineteenth-century Italian realists. Almost a million Deutsche marks. The German’s assumption that Corsier would carry him yet again was appalling. Especially since in the corner behind the refectory table sat a computer. Its screen was dark, but a small lime green light burned on the keyboard, proving to Corsier that it still had a heartbeat. On more than a few occasions Schrade had turned around at his desk-in Paris or Berlin or here-and paid Corsier instantly from his accounts in Liechtenstein or Cyprus. So Corsier knew that it could be done. He was just an electrical spark away from two million Deutsche marks.
He managed to swallow the Prosecco.
The more serious implication of Schrade’s remark, the one that had caused a sudden empty space in Corsier’s chest, a huge cavity without tissue or feeling or breath, was the implication that these two reversals in their relationship-for, to a man of Corsier’s sensibilities, they were irrefutably reversals-were premonitory.
Schrade knew!
Corsier looked at his client, whose neutral coloring was a perfect foil for the dusty colors that fell on him, the failing light passing through the concentric striations in the small panes of the windows. He heard a gondola, the thick chuck-chuck-chuck of the oar in the rowlock as the boat was propelled along the canal. He concentrated, desperate to absorb everything in these last moments. Was that a cat mewing? A barrel, or something like it, being rolled along the fondamenta? What could it be if not a barrel? A cart?
All of this aural sensitivity had gone through his brain in an instant, no longer than it had taken him to swallow the imperceptibly hesitant Prosecco. After all, Corsier was a professional. He had been an operator most of his adult life, and he had done nearly all of his work in the brutal, high-stakes world of wealthy men. He had survived, and he had been successful. Corsier had brass balls, as a matter of fact. Though, to be sure, he himself would never, ever, have expressed it in such crass language.
“Oh,” he said, lowering his glass. “This is very awkward for me, I’m afraid.” He knitted his brow and looked squarely at Schrade. “This seriously affects my liquidity. After accommodating your last request… well, this is most difficult.”
“Difficult?” Schrade smiled ever so slightly. “Well, I certainly understand the awkwardness of a loss of… liquidity.”
It was a pointed remark. Corsier knew that his client was never going to baldly state the real subject of this conversation. Corsier pursed his mouth thoughtfully as though he were trying to ferret out a mutually agreeable resolution. In fact, he was concentrating as he had never concentrated before in his life, bringing to bear his entire genetic code on one single thing: not bolting for the door.
He was stunned at how complete, how all consuming, was his fear.
How would it happen? A gunshot? Poison? Torture to make him tell everything, even things he could no longer remember himself, and then end it with simple asphyxiation? Why this charade first? This cruel pretense of civility? He couldn’t imagine, but he struggled with the nausea and continued to play his own part flawlessly.
“This is really quite irregular. Very difficult for me.”
“I’m sorry,” Schrade said, which he clearly was not.
“How long do you think you will need to delay payment?”
“Payment? Oh, I plan to resolve this as quickly as possible.”
The double meanings shimmered before Corsier’s sightless eyes. Venice, he thought, what a monumental surprise to die in Venice. He would never have imagined it. Never.
As he rode in his host’s private launch back down the Grand Canal on his way to Marco Polo Airport, Claude Corsier was numb with fear. He was also tremulous with hope. There was the launch driver and a companion. After they passed through the mouth of the Grand Canal and skirted San Giorgio Maggiore, more than ten kilometers remained across the lagoon to the airport. He looked at the two men in front of him. Was one of them the executioner? Surely not. They hardly paid him any attention.
My God, Corsier thought, if he ever got away from this situation, he would disappear so thoroughly that he would become as invisible as breath.
The wind picked up and the launch slapped the waves with a hard, rhythmic jolt, throwing a light spray from the hull. A short distance away he could see the public vaporettos filled with tourists headed to the same destination. He fought to avoid hyperventilation. His thoughts swung wildly back and forth between black, oppressive fear and an almost giddy exhilaration.
Then he thought of the drawings. Holy Mary. The wretched German was going to get twenty-one of some of the finest drawings Corsier had ever possessed… for absolutely nothing.
CHAPTER 2
HOUSTON
The first time he saw her was through the clear, moonstone colors of water. Suddenly she entered his peripheral vision, gliding past him in the opposite direction, her long legs close together and scissoring gently, trailing an unstrung necklace of tiny silver bubbles.
She wore a black, membrane-sheer suit, and her dark hair, pulled back from her face and held in place by a single band at the nape of her neck, spread out behind her like a billow of ink let loose in the water. Though she wore a small pair of swimming goggles that partially obscured her eyes, he could see from the shape of her face and mouth that she was Asian.
That morning she got out of the pool only a few minutes before he did. By the time he had completed his last lap and pulled himself from the water, she was nearly finished drying off, bending to towel between her thighs, her wet hair pulled to one side and draped over her shoulder. Without acknowledging him, she turned and walked away beside the pool toward the women’s dressing room, nonchalant, as though they had done this together for decades, leaving a code of damp footprints behind her.
At seven o’clock in the morning the Olympic-size lap pool at the River Oaks Swimming Club is deserted. The water is glass still. The fresh early light, entering obliquely through the upper windows, refracts off the arched angles of the lofty groined ceiling and plunges into the water, penetrating all the way to the pale floor of the pool. It is quiet.
Every day for nearly four years Harry Strand had come here to swim, well before even the earliest club member appeared at eight o’clock. It was a routine he had interrupted only once, for a period of three weeks, when his wife died. That had been eleven months ago. Her death had shaken him more deeply than anything that had ever happened to him. She had come to him late and had left him too soon, a flash of clarity in a life tangled with obscurities. He was approaching fifty when she died, and she had been eleven years younger. Though they were not in their youth anymore, they had no reason to believe that time was short. Her sudden death had sent him reeling, wobbling to the far edges, where he had teetered precariously, dangerously close to breaking down, before wobbling back toward a holding pattern, to the old, anxious tensions of former times.
For the three rare years of his marriage to Romy, he had actually felt as though he had accrued some real measure of an elusive emotional equanimity. She had redeemed him from a lifetime of dissembling and increasing self-dissatisfaction and had taught him to believe in the simple reality of virtue. Then she was gone.
The morning swim was one of the things he did to keep his brain from flying apart. It was a place and a way to begin the day with a reliable rhythm, an affirmation of purpose on a small scale and of peace at the heart of the universe. The aquatic ritual had been Romy’s idea, a regimen deliberately put into play to contravene nearly twenty years of obfuscation. She had said, only half-joking, that the daily immersion would cleanse him, a circadian baptism to remind him that his life had changed.
