and the doors opened, he would grab Schrade and pretend to be ministering to him. If someone was waiting there, he would call for help. If no one was waiting, he would shove Schrade out into the hall and go on up to the next floor, then down and out of the hotel.
All of this burst into his mind as an instant template for the next three minutes. He felt for the safety on the pistol. The doors were closing. He flicked off the safety.
Then a bell chimed and the doors jerked back. A man and a woman were waiting apologetically.
“Sorry,” the man said. The two of them stepped in, between Schrade and Strand, and the man punched the seventh floor. The woman was wearing a gardenia fragrance that instantly permeated the elevator, a saccharine epitaph for the demise of another opportunity.
Strand was trembling inside when Schrade stepped off the elevator on the fifth floor. That was the end of it for the evening. He got off the elevator on the sixth and then waited in the hall until he could descend again to his own room on the fourth floor.
Once inside, he stood still a moment, panting as if he had run the whole distance from Ma Micheline. Jesus Christ, how could he have been that close without… He stopped. He reminded himself again of the reality of what he was doing. It was no different from surveillance work, until the last moment. Up to then it required the same patience, was subject to the same frustrations, required the same instantaneous adjustments in plan to accommodate unforeseen intrusions. One always expected the inevitable unexpected event. Changing course was routine. Adapting to sudden reversals was the norm.
Back in his suite, he pulled off his raincoat and hung it in the closet, then his suit coat. He laid the pistol on the coffee table. He kicked off his shoes and slumped down on the sofa, looking out toward the Italian embassy. He stared out to the London night for a moment and then picked up the telephone.
“It’s me,” he said when Mara answered.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. Drained. No luck.” He told her about the events of the evening. She listened without comment.
“So that leaves the morning,” he said.
She waited a second. “Listen, Harry. Don’t… don’t…”
“Don’t get desperate. Don’t do anything rash,” he said.
“Yeah, that’s what I meant.”
They both seemed to realize how bizarre that sounded, in light of what he was trying to do.
“I was, uh, surprised at how I felt, seeing him after all this time,” Strand said. He was speaking softly, as though the telephone were the walls of a confessional. “I was very surprised.”
“What do you mean?”
He hesitated. “I wanted to kill him. It wasn’t dispassionate.”
“Did you think it would be?”
“I’d imagined it would be.”
They did not speak for a moment, and then she said, “Harry…” The tone of her voice hinted at a conversation he did not want to have. “Maybe… maybe…”
“Don’t say it.”
“Harry, neither of us is sure we’re doing the right thing here.”
“I am.”
“No, you’re not. Where’s the wisdom in being blind about this?”
“I’m not looking for wisdom, Mara.”
She said nothing else. They stayed on the telephone together, but neither of them spoke for a long time. Then Mara said:
“It’s raining again here. And it’s lonely.”
Strand struggled a moment with the lump in his throat. He thought she must know what was happening.
“I love you,” he said.
“And I love you, Harry Strand.”
CHAPTER 59
The morning was so overcast and dark that the street lamps were still on as Strand sat in Claridge’s plush robe and ate the light breakfast he had ordered. The night had been a grim phantasmagoric passage from one day to the next, during which he had tried to stay flat on his back to avoid inadvertently damaging the face of the stranger who slept with him. He tried to think of anything other than Wolfram Schrade: he succeeded in thinking of nothing else.
He had ordered an extra pot of coffee and already had begun drinking from the second one when he looked at his watch. It was seven-thirty.
He had known two professional hit men during his years in the intelligence business. They were, seemingly, unremarkable men, a little remote, perhaps, but one of them in particular he quite liked. The man was forty-three years old, Strand remembered, and he had grown up in the midwestern United States. He had been trained to kill when he had served in Vietnam, and when he’d finished his second tour in Southeast Asia, his superior officer had recommended his services to the Metsada. It was as though he had simply accepted another assignment. There was a military angle to it, being an Israeli operation, so it had seemed like an extension of his last Saigon assignment. After that the Israelis referred him to someone else, and very gradually the military aspect of it faded away. One day he woke up and realized he was making a very good living being paid to kill people; he was a professional assassin.
At the time Strand had known him, they were staying in a very shabby hotel in Algiers. They spent a lot of time talking, sometimes in their rooms, sometimes wandering in the narrow, alleylike streets of the city. He confided to Strand one hot night as they sat in the dark beside a window in Strand’s room, smoking and looking down into the crowded street, that he vomited every time he killed someone. Sometimes before, sometimes after. It was odd, he said, because he was not repulsed by the killing, so he didn’t know why it happened. But when it was time, he didn’t fight it. He just accepted it as part of the business. It used to bother him, he said, but now he didn’t worry about it anymore.
But Strand had always wondered why the man had told the story.
He picked up his cup and saucer and walked to the window with it. He had not turned on the lights in the room, so the suite was washed in a gray luminescence in which the burnished surfaces glistened with a pearlish haze. The light died away kindly into the corners, and colors were reduced to pallid values. It was an effect that he especially liked, though he felt odd about being able to enjoy it at this particular moment.
He had thought of Schrade until he was sick of him. He doubted that he had had a single heartbeat during the night that Schrade had not shared with him. He was saturated with the man. Killing him would be a sweet liberation. He knew it would be a scarifying act, too, like that of a fox that chewed off its own paw and left it behind in the jaws of the trap as it limped away on a bloody stump to freedom.
Mara was sitting on the edge of their bed, fastening the buckle on her shoes, when she decided to go on to Knight’s immediately even though she would be a little early. The decision was a result partly of a nagging sixth sense and partly of anxiety. She was worried sick about Strand, her mind generating an endless chain of scenarios about what he was doing and what was happening to him, none of them good. She couldn’t help it. That none of these scenarios was hopeful was depressing, which she feared would adversely affect the way she had to handle herself within the next hour.
The sixth sense was, naturally, more difficult to deal with. It was, simply, a discomfiting tug at the back of her mind that was so persistent, it seemed foolish to ignore it.
She stood up and smoothed her dress, a dove gray wool knit that fell to her ankles. She stepped to the windows and regarded her faint reflection. There was no full-length mirror in the bare town house. She entertained the idea of wearing a belt and finally decided against it, preferring a sleeker look. Her stockings were bone, her shoes matched the dove gray of the dress. She had taken the single braid of her hair and coiled it in a complicated chignon. A single black pearl drop dangled from each ear.
