“You tell me, Harry.”
The waiter arrived with their coffee, a Pharisaer with a small liqueur glass of rum for Howard and an Einspanner for Ariana. He left a tiny plate of the Central’s chocolate wafers. Strand waited until he was well away.
“They don’t know how to get at it without having me expose the Schrade operation. So they’re in a quandary. They keep thinking about the money. They keep thinking forfeiture. They can’t bear the thought of us getting away with that kind of money and not being able to either seize it or hang me for it.”
“That’s about it,” Howard said, picking up his coffee and then sipping it. “The truth is, nobody in Washington has the balls to go after you on this. You stole a march on them, Harry.” He nodded at Ariana. “All of you. So, what they want to do is, we all just walk away from it. It’s a wash.” He paused. “But you’ve got to keep your mouth closed. It’s a real-life stalemate. That’s it.”
“No, that’s not nearly it,” Strand said.
Howard looked up from his coffee with an expression of mild, innocent surprise.
“Romy’s death was no accident, Bill. I’ve seen proof.”
Ariana gasped.
Howard stared at him. “Bullshit.”
“I want you to call him off.”
“Call him off? We’ve got nothing to do with the man anymore. We can’t do that.”
For a moment the two of them looked at each other across the table, hearing only the murmuring of conversations and the clinking of spoons and cups and saucers.
“Tell them to do it.”
“Jesus, you’re pushing them, Harry. That’s dangerous.”
“More dangerous than waiting for Schrade to get all of us? Am I going to have to look over my shoulder for my own people, too?”
“Your ‘own’ people? Don’t get righteous with me, Harry. I mean, you took the goddamned money-you want to get righteous?”
“FIS was letting it go. If you’d seized it, it would have been yours by forfeiture, but you were letting it go.”
Howard fixed his eyes on Strand. Another silence.
Strand sat back in his chair. He was aware of Ariana’s silent, waiting fear, a rare thing in a woman who had been willing to face it and fight it off for so many years. He looked out through the rain-stippled window to the glittering Strauchgasse. Who would have thought that this city, cleaned by a fresh July rain, could be freighted with so much menace.
He turned to Ariana, thoughtful a moment, then smiled.
“You’ve not changed,” he said, “not even a little.”
She was surprised at his sudden remark, having been concentrating on the growing tension between the two men.
“Do you remember Madame Sosotris, the famous clairvoyant in Athens?” he asked.
Ariana gaped, recovered, and forced a smile. She spoke hesitatingly.
“How could I forget her? She predicted everything exactly wrong.” Her smile faded. “The last time I saw her it was winter in Athens. She had a terrible cold.”
“Well, I saw Guy Parain in Geneva, almost a year ago. He told me she’d died.”
They visited a few moments about her and other old friends, other times and other places, until Howard found the diversion too distracting to tolerate.
“For Christ’s sake, Harry. I don’t have time for this.”
Strand turned on him abruptly, almost angrily.
“ You don’t have the time? What about the two of us, Bill? How much time do we have? That’s a problem for us right now. Time.”
“You want me to tell them to stop Schrade or you’ll blow this thing apart? Jesus. Have you thought about what that means?”
Strand locked his eyes on Howard.
“Wolfram Schrade is conducting a scorched earth policy against me. Romy. Every physical thing I own on this earth was in that house in Houston. As well as most of my memories. Not to mention the two wasted lives.” He paused. “What do people do, Bill, when something like this is happening to them?” He paused. “Have I thought about it? You impertinent son of a bitch.”
Silence.
“This is it?” Howard clearly didn’t want to take this back to Washington.
“I’m stripped down to my life and a suitcase,” Strand said. “That’s all I have left. Do you really think there’s any question what I want you to do?”
Howard looked down at his Pharisaer, largely unconsumed, picked up the tiny fluted glass of rum, and sipped it. He put down the glass, watched his own fingers turn it this way and that.
“This implied threat…”
“It’s an explicit promise.”
Howard nodded, still looking at the tiny glass. “This is backed up…”
“After what we did to Schrade”-Strand had recovered a measure of self-control-“even though we were careful, even though we were thorough and we thought we had gotten away with it cleanly, and on top of that, covered our tracks, even with all that confidence, do you really think I wouldn’t also have had the imagination to envision a day like this? Do you really think I wouldn’t have a plan for such a development?”
Howard sighed and sat back. He looked at Ariana and shook his head. His expression was sober, even grim. Finally he looked at Strand.
“So this is one of those ‘if anything happens to me’ threats, I guess.”
Strand said nothing.
“I don’t know what they’re going to do, Harry. I can’t imagine… can’t imagine.”
“Just make it clear to them.”
“Oh, I’ll do that.” He paused. “Harry, listen, the most dangerous thing you can do to these people is get the upper hand.” He lifted the tiny fluted glass and drank the last of the rum, then put the glass on the table, upside- down. “It makes them desperate.”
CHAPTER 20
PRAGUE
The two men dawdled along the center aisle of St. Vitus’s Cathedral. They were dwarfed by the immense, soaring height of the cathedral ceiling, a vaulted work of intricately webbed Gothic tracery as high above them as heaven itself. Tourists walked quietly all about them in the massive nave, the hissing of whispers and the murmuring of lowered voices creating an aural undercurrent befitting the respect due hallowed stones.
The taller man was middle-aged and dressed impeccably in a dove gray suit. He wore a stiffly starched white shirt with a high, spread collar, cobalt blue striped tie knotted in a firm Windsor. There was a sparkling white pocket handkerchief in the breast pocket of his suit coat. He walked with his hands clasped behind his back in a dignified way that seemed befitting of another era when correctness of carriage in public places was a matter of manners. He was broad shouldered and wore a mustache and goatee, very neatly trimmed and peppered with gray.
As they strolled, he stooped slightly toward his companion in order to hear better what he was saying. The companion was a man perhaps twenty years younger, dressed casually in dark trousers, a faded striped dress shirt, olive sweater vest, and a flea market sport coat. The shorter man was stocky, with a round florid face, his tight cheeks beginning to show outcroppings of scarlet spider veins. He had pale eyes and a button nose, and though he might have been a little heavier than a doctor would have advised, he exuded an air of military efficiency and capability.
