JL wishes to speak to HS.
This is HS.
Sir, I would like to arrange a meeting. Where are you?
Europe.
I am in Zurich. Is that near you?
Relatively.
I would like to meet tomorrow night. Is that possible?
Strand quickly flipped through Lu’s file. He had a large French-made LaSalle jet. Strand hesitated and looked at Mara. He began typing.
May I suggest Lake Como. I can be there by eight o’clock in the evening.
Do you know Villa d’Este? I can arrange a suite there. Will you be alone?
Strand stared at the screen. He turned and looked at Mara. “I think it could help if you went along. How would you feel about it?”
Mara swallowed. “Well, you don’t think that’ll be just a little obvious? You bringing along your token Chinese to show him how simpatico you’ll be.”
“Maybe. But something tells me that a token Chinese is better than no Chinese at all.”
“I’ll do it if you want.” She hesitated. “I’m going to assume I don’t have to be ‘prepped’ for this. I go along; I look good, follow my instincts on the light conversation, and keep my mouth shut when the serious stuff starts.”
“That’s about it.”
“I can do that.”
Strand turned back to the computer screen.
No, there will be two of us.
Then I will see you both at eight o’clock.
Agreed.
Strand stood up from the computer. “That’s it,” he said. He turned his stiff neck to one side and then to the other and rolled his shoulders foreward. He stopped. “What’s bothering you?” he asked.
She shrugged and cocked her head. “Isn’t that just an extraordinary… coincidence, him being, of all the places on the globe, just a couple of hours away?”
Strand nodded. “You’re right to be suspicious,” he said, “but it’s not unusual for Lu to be in Zurich. He has a lot of money there. He keeps tabs on it. And he likes the city. It’s clean. It’s orderly. Sometimes Latin Europe frustrates him. I doubt if he’d ever set foot in Italy at all if he didn’t need Lodato’s organization to move his China white.”
“How do you know all this? Have you met him?”
“No. How about you? You feel okay about this?”
Mara swung around in the chair, holding her sketchpad in her lap. She thought a moment before answering.
“This is your business, Harry. You know what you’re doing. You know what I can do and can’t do. If you’re willing to have me do this, I’ll do it.”
“I honestly think it would help to have you with me,” Strand said. “You’ll be all right.”
He put one hand in his trousers pocket and walked toward the balcony but stopped before he got there. He looked out a moment, then turned and came back and reached for the chair sitting in front of the computer. He turned it around to face her and sat down.
“Tomorrow morning I’ll make arrangements for getting us there tomorrow night. Lu’s people may try to follow us afterward. I don’t want to take a car to the hotel because they’ll tag it while we’re talking. And we’re going to need it.” He paused. “Tomorrow night when we leave here for the Villa d’Este we have to leave here packed. Three days is long enough to stay in one spot.”
“Where are we going?”
“I’m still thinking about that.”
Mara frowned. “And this moving, we’re going to have to keep it up until… something happens, with Schrade.”
“We’ll know more after we talk to Lu.”
CHAPTER 26
SPLIT, CROATIA
The old woman was seventy-four years old. Her left leg had been blown off just above the knee in a little town called Lijeska in Bosnia Herzegovina, late in the war. She was taken away to Gorazde to a grim little hospital, where she waited out the remainder of the fighting. Her husband had been killed early in the conflict, one daughter had disappeared, and the second daughter had fled to Split, where she had friends.
When the fighting had been over several months, her daughter from Split had shown up at the hospital one day and taken her away to live with her. Now, thanks to French doctors, she had had three operations on her leg and had been fitted with a prosthesis that she kept under her bed in her daughter’s house.
The mother and daughter waited patiently in line at the ferry quay. The daughter was very thin, with lifeless, dusty brown hair that hung to her shoulders. Her face portrayed no expression at all, and she seemed resigned to waiting, in silence. The old woman was sitting in a battery-powered wheelchair, also provided by French relief programs. Unfortunately the batteries had lost their charge a week earlier, and the daughter had not had the time- she worked the night shift in a small laundry-to have the battery recharged. During the last week the daughter had had to push the wheelchair wherever the old woman needed to go. The old woman was carrying a small suitcase in her lap. Her daughter was taking her to visit her sister, who had fled the former Yugoslavia well before the war and now lived in London.
The ferry left very early in the morning, passing through the Split channel and heading out into the open Adriatic. The old woman sat at the observation rail near the front of the ferry, staring across the hazy sea toward Italy. After an hour she opened her suitcase and took out a plastic bag from which she withdrew a loaf of bread, a large wedge of cheese, and a bundle of little green onions. The two women proceeded to eat, watching the blue gray coast of Italy grow larger in the approaching distance.
When the ferry arrived at Pescara, the two women disembarked and took a taxi to the Stazione Centrale, where they boarded a train for Rome. A bus would have been much quicker, but the wheelchair presented a problem. In silence they watched out the window of their compartment as the train wound across the middle of Italy from sea to sea, from the Adriatic to the Tyrrhenian.
The train finally pulled into the Stazione Termini near the center of Rome late in the afternoon. Tired now, the two women took another taxi to the Leonardo da Vinci International Airport. After half an hour of waiting in lines the daughter finally purchased two budget tickets to London. But the flight didn’t leave for two hours. They settled down in one of the terminals. Again the plastic bag came out of the old suitcase, and the rest of the bread and cheese and onions were consumed as the two women watched the milling crowds with the weary but fascinated eyes of two provincials waiting on the brink of the twenty-first century.
When it came time for their departure, the old woman was told that she would have to be taken out of her personal wheelchair and put into one of the airline’s wheelchairs to be boarded. She panicked. That wheelchair was the only way she could move. The French doctors had given it to her. It was hers to keep. She could not leave her wheelchair, no, under no circumstances could she leave it. Where would she get another one in England? The French doctors…
She was assured that her wheelchair would be folded up and put in the cargo bins in the belly of the plane, and she would be able to return to it in London. To placate her, they let her watch them put a tag on the chair that said it belonged to her and put it on the conveyor belt that would take it to the luggage carts that would carry it to the plane.
She boarded first, was installed in the first row in the cabin-there were no first-class seats on this economy
