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.
“Well, we know he’s killing them, for Christ’s sake. I can’t go knock on his door and ask him to please stop because he’s screwing up our little program here. Schrade’s tactics are a lot more persuasive than ours, Gene. I think we’re trying to be too smart for our own good. It’s hard to compete with brutality and goddamn hair-raising fear.”
He listened.
“I know, I know. We haven’t got any choice now but to go ahead and play it out, but I think we need to be flexible here. Schrade’s scattering these people all the hell over the place. They’re either dying or running. My bet is that his harebrained revenge program is eventually going to screw up our own operation. I don’t care how much time and money and planning we’ve put into it.”
He listened.
“Of course Schrade knows where he is. You kidding me?”
He listened.
“Look, let me get through another twenty-four hours here. Let’s let our deal work. Give it another twenty- four…”
Howard clenched his teeth. Payton was talking to someone. He was, no doubt, getting advice from all the experts sitting behind their desks. They had no idea. They had read Strand’s files, and they thought he was a character in a screenplay that they could just manipulate from where they sat, make him do this, make him do that. Harry Strand was the last person in the world you could manipulate, and they didn’t have a clue about that. He had tried to tell them. He had gone over it and over it with them at Camp Peary. Yeah, yeah, they would say, but we’ve got to get him to…
“Fine, then,” Howard said, his throat tight with anger. “I’ll get back to you after I talk to her again.”
He listened.
“No,” he said, “I haven’t heard anything.”
He wanted to say, I told you so, but he didn’t.
After the disconnect he stormed out of the communications room, leaving his pencil and pad and coffee sitting on the countertop. He was so pissed he didn’t give a shit.
CHAPTER 13
HOUSTON
When Strand was out of town Meret Spier lived in his home until he returned. This was an arrangement that suited her enormously. Not only was Strand’s place larger than her West-heimer condo, but it was just plain fun to be in a grand house, and she could “go to the office” dressed any way she wanted. When she knew there were to be no deliveries or appointments, she often didn’t bother putting on makeup, didn’t bother with her hair, and, sometimes, didn’t bother to dress in anything other than her underwear.
But Strand’s absence didn’t mean she didn’t have to work. When he traveled he constantly called on collectors, visited dealers, and prowled galleries; and his curiosity about the art he encountered was wide-ranging and insatiable. It was not unusual for him to call her two or three times a day to ask her to look up something in his library, whether he was in San Francisco or New York or Geneva or Madrid or Warsaw. As far as Strand was concerned, the only time zone on earth was the one he was in.
So, given the fact that she was on call twenty-four hours a day for weeks at a time while Strand was traveling, Meret decided that going to work in her underwear was a justified perk.
After Meret’s initial astonishment at Strand’s sudden developing relationship with Mara Song, she hardly had time to adjust to it before Strand was planning to follow up on the unfinished business with Aldo Chiappini and Denise Yarrow, energetically planning the trips to San Francisco and then to Rome.
In the two years Meret had known Harry Strand-she had been working for him only ten months when Romy died-she had come to admire him immensely.
Strand had dealt with the sudden disaster no differently than grieving men had always dealt with it, sometimes stoically, sometimes nearly childlike in his helplessness, sometimes pathological in his hopelessness. Since Meret had nothing to compare it to, she didn’t know if Strand’s behavior was what she should have expected. She knew only that it was a painful thing to watch as he passed through all the gates and passageways that opened and closed for him on his journey back from Romy’s death.
What surprised Meret most of all, and what endeared Strand to her, was that he was as concerned for her as for himself. She had never been close to anyone who had died: though she had known Romy only ten months, the two women had worked practically in the same room for all that time, and she had grown fond of Romy’s brightness and intelligence and affectionate nature. They had become very close in a short period of time.
Moreover, Meret had only narrowly missed being in the car with Romy. They had invited Meret to spend the weekend with them at their beach house near Galveston Island, and the two women had planned to drive out Thursday night, taking Friday off for a long weekend, and set the place in order before Strand’s arrival late Friday. At the last minute Meret had decided to take her own car and run some errands first. They had decided that Romy should go on and Meret would follow shortly. Meret had found Romy’s Land Rover in the tidewater stream. Death, such an alien idea to her in her youth, had stepped right in front of her face, so close that she could almost smell its breath.
Strand knew what a dreadful experience this had been for her and took especial care to help her absorb its impact. His response was simply and naturally to treat Meret as family, as Romy’s sister. He talked with her a lot and nursed her emotions through those early awkward weeks when the void that is death’s wake seemed so brutal in its banality. One evening when they had worked late-Strand worked ferociously in those early months-and she
