other people could hardly avoid.
“You ought to reconsider what you’re doing to Strand,” Howard said.
“No.”
“No, shit. I’m going to tell you, you kill that woman he’s with now, and he’ll never let go of a single goddamn Deutsche mark of what he took from you. Hell, he’s got to think he can save her life by giving it up.” He paused. “Most people, Wolf, respond to pressure when they have some reason to. You take away a man’s reason to live-”
“Nothing is going to save her life.”
“Fine. Whatever.” Howard glared at him. Vicious fucker. Howard always walked a narrow line with Schrade. He had to exhibit a certain amount of brazen aggression. Schrade understood and appreciated that. But he couldn’t push it too far. Fear and fortune were closely aligned in Schrade’s orbit. Right now the guy was as serene as a nun. Howard couldn’t figure it out. He always looked as though he were wearing new clothes. His shirts and suits were unfailingly fresh and crisp. His damn pants were never even wrinkled at the crotch after he had been sitting behind his desk all day. Did he have some kind of fetish about putting on new clothes every day? That would be weird, even for Schrade.
“I have to tell you…” Howard started out carefully; he didn’t want to provoke the goose until he’d put one more golden egg in his own Liechtenstein account, but he had to conduct some business here. “The FIS is pretty damn hot about the way you handled the Houston hit. That was over the top.”
“The man responsible for that fiasco has been put away,” Schrade said. “That was regrettable.”
“They’re trying to contain the investigation, but, Jesus…” Howard hesitated, again wanting to be careful. “It’s thrown us into an emergency situation back in the States.”
Schrade’s clear eyes picked up the faintest hint of a pale glacial blue from his navy suit.
“Yes, I imagine it has. You realize, of course, I don’t give a damn. If the FIS had not been so feeble, this would not be happening. You understand, if it had not been for the very”-here his voice allowed a tonal change of nearly imperceptible difference-“ thinnest margin of chance, I would never have known about this disaster in the first place. If Dennis Clymer had not made the mistake of using the same tactics to embezzle for one of Lodato’s clients, if that client’s accountant hadn’t bungled the plan, if I hadn’t agreed to launder a certain sum for Lodato, and if my accountants hadn’t seen a curious familiar pattern in Clymer’s Lodato scheme…” Schrade paused and approached to the very edge of Howard’s chair. “If all of that had not happened, none of this would have been discovered at all.”
Howard was looking up at him, a perspective he didn’t like. These had become Schrade’s mantras: the thinnest margin, the stupidity of the FIS, his terrible financial losses.
“That, Mr. Howard, is too many ifs,” Schrade concluded. “The FIS should not have sent you with this little complaint.” Pause. “Considering our relationship, you should not have even passed it on to me.”
“I still have to work for them.”
“That is no concern of mine.” Schrade turned away and walked to the nearest of the lime wood cabinets, where he began idly paging through the drawings displayed there.
Finally he was doing something with his hands, Howard thought.
“It ought to be,” Howard said. “You’re making a fortune off the intelligence I’m still passing along to you.”
“No, it ought not to be,” Schrade disagreed with a mild finality, still studying the drawings. “My only concern regarding you is whether you are useful to me.” He looked at Howard. “Everyone is always ‘making a fortune’ off of something or someone. I hear that hyperbole all the time.”
The starched young man who had escorted Howard into the house entered the room. Schrade turned his head.
“The two representatives from Christie’s and the woman from the Galerie Severine are here.”
Schrade gave a dismissive nod to the young man, then looked back at Howard.
“I want to see you again tomorrow. Same time. There are some additional concerns on this issue. Aside from that, I have several client requests for intelligence. Very important. Lucrative. For both of us.”
Howard began to get up out of the overstuffed armchair, but Schrade was through and had already turned toward his desk, unfolding his reading glasses as he went. By the time Howard had gained his feet, Schrade was sitting in his chair, already absorbed in his reading. Howard paused and looked at him a moment. The impertinent son of a bitch. Never said hello, never said good-bye. Those were transitional niceties of human communication that, over the years, Schrade had gradually abridged, and then completely eliminated, from his dealings with people. At the exact moment he was through with you, you ceased to exist. The man had no soul; he really had no need for one. The only time Howard had ever seen him behave with anything resembling an actual human emotion was when he encountered new pieces of art that he wanted to buy. Only then, in the presence of oil and canvas, when his pale, pellucid eyes fell on sheets of paper scrabbled and scratched with pen or pencil or chalk, did he appear to want to interact with something outside his own intellect. Such an absence of human needs was frightening.
Howard turned and walked out of the long museum of Schrade’s mind, accompanied only by the sound of his own footsteps and a sour taste in his mouth.
CHAPTER 32
Charles Rousset cautiously made his way along the stone path that for a few meters clung to the curve of the precipice above the Cap d’Antibes like a swallow’s nest glued to a cliff before it gained solid ground again and ascended toward the old house. He paused a moment and turned to enjoy the view of the Mediterranean. There was a haze over the water today, an impressionist’s interpretation. How could one help but be romantic about such a stunning perspective?
Reluctantly he turned back again to the path, which, like the house to which it led, was in a state of neglect, not from indifference, but from a lack of the proper funds to maintain it. At one time it had been a pristine piece of real estate. In the 1950s it had been purchased by a London banker who lavished a great deal of his fortune on it. In those days the footpath had been lined with brilliant bowers of saffron sepiara and the blindingly bright cerise bracts of the bougainvillea. Exotic flowering cycas marked each turning of the way, and pastel perennials of every color snuggled in among the crevices and corners.
Those were former days. The banker and his wife were long since gone, as were the flowers and the blooming trees. Common cactus and weeds had now overgrown the edges of the footpath, and unforgiving rocks gouged up through the flat stones to make walking a precarious effort.
The house was large but could not be called a proper villa. It was sited handsomely above the blue-and-green bay, and though its stucco was cracked and stained, though the stones of its courtyard and terrace were loosened and hosted sprays of dried native grass, and though some of its terra-cotta roof tiles were slipping and askew, the style and beauty of the house still gave Rousset a thrill as he rounded the last turn in the footpath and came upon it, silhouetted against the ageless Mediterranean.
Edith Vernon was the only child of the banker who had built the house, and when her father died, in much reduced circumstances, the house was the only thing he left her. Though it was debt free, Edie, who was now in her early sixties, was hard-pressed to keep it up and pay the proper taxes. When her father was in his financial heyday, Edie was in hers as well. An art student in her university years, she fully partook of Rome’s la dolce vita, and her beauty opened what few doors her father’s money would not. Though the memories of those days remained, they were all that remained, and Edie had scratched out a poor living during the last two decades, trying to live off her art. Like many artists, she was a better copier of others’ work than she was a creator of her own. At this she was brilliant.
“Good God!” she exclaimed. She was standing solidly in the kitchen doorway, her hands on her hips, looking out at him. “Claude?”
“Indeed.”
She gaped at him.
