“Harry… well, all of us… the three of us made certain plans to, uh, ‘improve’ our retirement situation. It was late in the day for me,” she continued. “I was approaching middle age, had no money to speak of and no pension waiting for me. No husband and no prospects of getting one—that’s too high a price to pay for security. I decided to look after myself.”
Howard’s expression changed slightly, taking on the impassive rigidity one often saw in people who suddenly realized they were about to hear news that they expected would shock them. They reflexively prepared themselves with a kind of facial fortification.
“We developed a strategy to get away with some money, a scheme. It went on for exactly six months, until Harry closed it down nearly six months before he retired.”
Howard’s face fell. “Jesus… Christ… Wolf Schrade?”
She nodded. “Of course, everyone scattered after that. We never saw each other again. None of us.”
Howard had forgotten to smoke his cigarette. It smoldered between his fingers.
“But Claude and I decided we wanted to stay in touch with each other. We agreed on a secret way to communicate, a way to make sure that each of us knew the other was still alive. A warning system.”
“He’s missed his turn.”
“Exactly.” She smoked, her stomach aching from the tension.
Howard wasn’t interested so much in Claude Corsier’s disappearance. “How much did Schrade lose?” His voice betrayed a forced stoicism.
She hesitated. “Millions.”
“How many?”
“I don’t know. Quite a few.”
Howard didn’t react.
“The way it was set up,” Ariana went on, “he didn’t know. It was a very good operation. Very good. Extensive planning.” She paused. “I think he has finally puzzled out what happened. And who did it.”
“Shit.” Howard remembered his cigarette, which had burned down to the filter and was stinking. He put it in the ashtray.
“The point is,” she said, “I think this is going to get dirty. This is very complex.”
“God… damn.” Howard swallowed. “This was Harry’s idea, wasn’t it?”
Ariana looked at him. “We were all involved…”
“But it was Harry’s idea.”
“You’ve got to understand—”
Howard held up one hand to stop her. His face had grown red. He was furious. She knew the reality here. Bill Howard didn’t give a damn that Ariana was afraid, that she believed she was going to be killed, and that she was desperate for protection. What was coursing through his thoughts like a fever was that his twenty-three-year career in the Foreign Intelligence Service, a carefully shepherded career, was suddenly as unstable as the smoke wisping up from the end of her cigarette.
She smelled food cooking, a thick odor that she couldn’t identify. It lacked the tangy sharpness she would have smelled in Salonika or Athens, or even Rome. She turned away from Howard’s silence and moved back to the window. Below, a car purred by slowly in the street.
She wasn’t sure where she stood legally on this, but the game was intricate from the point of view of international law. It had all taken place in the gray areas of the spying game, and it was her guess that it would unravel in the same sphere. Behind her she heard the flick and scratch of Howard’s lighter. A pause while he inhaled.
“I can’t believe you people thought you’d get by with this,” he said, his voice husky with smoke. “Screw a guy like Schrade and just get slick away with it.”
She turned around. “It was a lot of money. Harry, well, you know, he inspired a lot of confidence. We thought we had a good chance. You know better than I do that people like Schrade steal from each other all the time.”
“And they get killed all the time. It’s a violent vocation.”
“Maybe, but then a lot of others get away with it, too, don’t they? It happens. We thought it could happen to us.”
She put out her cigarette in the ashtray she had left on the windowsill. Her heart was loping erratically. Below on the sidewalk a couple paused under the trees to talk in the fading light. She could see only the lower part of the woman’s skirt and her legs.
She turned around and came back toward the sofa. She avoided a heavy armchair with its loathsome upholstery worn bare in spots by the buttocks of spies and traitors and the women who slept with them. She pulled around a wooden dining chair and positioned it in front of him.
“Claude Corsier,” Howard mused, “that son of a bitch would’ve picked the devil’s pocket for spare change if he thought the extra pennies would help him buy another goddamned little scratchy drawing.”
“He took a lot of risks for you, too, Bill. And you didn’t pay him shit.”
“I haven’t forgotten that.” He dropped his eyes to the dead cigarette butts in the ashtray beside him. He was lost in thought. Then he closed his eyes and slowly shook his head. “Jesus H. Christ,” he said. He looked up at her. “And what did your cut come to?”
“A lot.” She wasn’t going to get into that until she knew if they were going to help her.
Howard swore again. “Strand knows about this, that Claude’s disappeared?”
“I don’t know.” She knew he wasn’t going to believe this. None of them had ever really understood Harry Strand.
“Our agreement,” she said, “actually, it was Harry’s stipulation, was that we would never contact him after this was over. Never even try. Ever. And I haven’t.”
Howard was already shaking his head. “I don’t buy that, Ariana. You worked together too long, went through too much. You were like a family. He couldn’t do that.”
“Well, he did, Bill.” She was finding it difficult to stay calm. Both of them were barely handling the tension. “None of you ever really understood what you were dealing with in Harry Strand. The reason you find this idea so confounding is that you never could have made that kind of decision yourself. It’s too extreme, too radical. That’s why Harry was so successful for you for so many years. He never let reality get in the way of possibility. That is why he is what he is… and why you are what you are.”
Howard said nothing for a little while, and though she couldn’t read his face, she sensed his agitation.
“How is this going to work?” she asked. It was time for blunt questions.
He shook his head. “I don’t know.” He sounded tired. “Anyway, it’s not for me to decide, you know. It’s them.”
“It’s the same thing.”
“No. Big difference. I’m out here. They’re back there. It’s not the same thing at all.”
Ariana felt a resurging nausea. “You tell them I want to talk,” she said. “I’ll tell them everything—but I want protection from Schrade. They need to know what happened.”
“What about Harry? This can’t be good for him.”
She fixed her eyes on him. She felt near tears, but she fought it. “You tell me about Harry,” she said coldly.
“What.”
“Is he alive, Bill?”
“How the hell do I know?” He started to say something else but stopped.
Neither of them trusted the other, but Ariana was at a distinct disadvantage. They both knew it.
“I need to know what I’m dealing with here, Ariana,” Howard said. “Give me some idea of where you’re going with this. I’ve got to know where this is headed before I can take it back to the guys who call the shots.”
She really had no choice.
Mara’s home near the Piazza Sallustio was a lovely place with a garden surrounded by high walls and well-kept grounds. In the 1950s and 1960s, when the nearby Via Veneto was the center of European la dolce vita, the home was owned by a titled family from Monaco who put it to good use entertaining the glitterati of those heady days. Today the area had slipped into genteel quietude. The real estate was still choice and expensive.
Mara seemed most comfortable here; she had scattered throughout the house the myriad small personal items that one kept around simply because one liked something’s shape or color or had fond remembrances associated with its acquisition.
Here, too, Harry Strand saw for the first time some of Mara’s fully developed drawings, which she had framed and hung throughout the house. She had not told him that they were hers. They had been there nearly a week before he had enough leisure time to wander unhurriedly through the large rooms and examine all the paintings and drawings she had accumulated.
She was a far better artist than she had allowed him to see from the sketching she had been doing in Houston, having implied that her work was little more than academic. She had a very fine hand, a sound grounding in draftsmanship, and a genuinely original eye. She had a few figure studies, but most were studies of Roman architecture and city scenes.
When Strand looked at these pictures, Mara came into a clearer focus. It is inherent in an artist’s work to be revelatory, and Mara’s drawings were no exception. In the way she expressed the attitude of a seated nude, in the way she brought the light to a church or palazzo, or chose a perspective of one of Rome’s countless small, winding streets, she revealed, incrementally, ever more of her mind and personality and gave him access to other dimensions of understanding her. He saw nothing in these works to lessen his growing affection for her. He saw everything to enhance it.
After he had finished the week-long process of acquiring the Fuseli drawings, he and Mara began showing each other “their” Rome. They were surprised to learn that in the past they had spent many months in Rome at the same time, and Mara found it intriguing to speculate that with their common interests they might very well have been in some of the same galleries or museums or restaurants at the same time. In reality, however, Strand knew that his Rome and Mara’s Rome, despite all their common interests, had never had the remotest chance of overlapping. They had been, in fact, worlds apart.
None of that mattered, for in the Rome of the present they stopped pretending that the very thing each of them had desired, and each had believed was inevitable from their first meeting, was not going to happen.
They had been dining late at Toula, which had become their favorite restaurant, an understated place at the throat of the tiny Via della Lupa in the center of the city. They lingered long over desserts and more wine, then walked awhile in the narrow streets near the Pantheon in the cool of an evening so rare that it seemed to have been conjured for them from antiquity. She leaned against him in the taxi, and he could smell her, not her perfume, but the fragrance of her skin, and the ride to Sallustiano took them through a Rome that had never seemed to Strand more beautiful or ancient.
There was no decision, no word spoken, as they climbed the stairs together. With Mara still holding to his arm, he simply walked past his own bedroom and followed her into hers.
He undressed her by the opened balcony doors above the palms, the late Roman breeze moving all about them like a vague memory he could never quite remember. She waited for his hands, head bowed, leaning into him slightly with a grace of controlled desire that he had never before experienced with a woman. When her dress fell away to the floor, she was naked. As he touched her waist, traced his fingers over the rise of her hips, and gently moved his hands up to cup her breasts, she leaned her head forward and put her lips lightly upon his neck. The feel of her was as new and erotic to him as the first moment he had ever felt a woman’s naked breasts, that long lifetime ago as an astonished boy.
“I just got a call from an old friend,” Mara said, approaching the door to the room where Strand had been spending the afternoon poring over half a dozen art books he had bought that afternoon in the Largo Chigi. “A woman I’ve known for years. We’re going to have drinks at a little café near the bottom of Veneto. Want to go along?”
Strand looked at his watch and then outside to the courtyard, where the light was already softening in the late afternoon.
“You still want to have dinner at Toula’s at nine?” he asked.
“Sure.”
“Then I think I’ll pass.”
“She’s going to be disappointed.”
Strand shrugged. “I’ll open a bottle of something here and think about you at dusk.”
She came across the room to the sofa, where he sat among books and papers scattered about him, and leaned over the back of the sofa, put her arms around his neck, and kissed him.
“She’s pretty,” she whispered. “You’ll be missing something.”
“Well, that’s enticing”—Strand scratched his temple with his pencil—“but I really don’t want to stop in the middle of this. Tell her… it pained me to forgo the pleasure of her company.”
“Yeah,” Mara said, straightening up, “she’ll swoon.” She turned and headed for the door, grabbing her shoulder bag from a chair on the way out. “See you later.”
Strand worked for nearly an hour more before he stopped, laid aside a folio volume of early Renaissance architectural drawings, and rubbed his eyes. He hadn’t even gotten up from the sofa since Mara left, and he needed to stretch his legs and go to the bathroom. First he turned on a few lamps, giving the room a soft amber glow.
This generous room had become Strand’s favorite place in the house because of its antique furniture and broad doorways opening to the loggia and courtyard. Pictures hung everywhere here, covering the high walls, hanging over the fireplace and over the doors. There were tall narrow paintings and horizontal drawings, some with elaborate frames, some with simple ones, square pictures, small oval ones; oils, pastels, pencil, charcoal, and metal point. One of Mara’s rare large nudes hung on the north wall, a dominant piece that Strand liked very much. In one corner of the room was an easel and a small table cluttered with pencil and charcoal boxes with colorful French and Italian labels.
He went down the corridor to the bathroom, and when he returned he opened the French doors to the evening air, standing and looking out with his hands in his pockets. Somewhere in another concealed garden a peacock cried. The city was all around him, yet the only evidence of it was a faraway and almost imperceptible hum of traffic.
Leaving the French doors open, he stepped outside and stood for a moment in the loggia. The east wall in the courtyard was rosy and deepening quickly as the sun fell behind the Janiculum across the Tiber. He stepped out onto the cinder path that followed the wall and began walking, his shoes making a crunching sound on the cinder. At the far end of the garden he stopped and listened to the peacock again and took a deep breath of the air. The air of Rome changed at dusk and acquired a special quality in the same way that the city’s famous light took on a unique character of its own at certain times of the year. At night the air was nearer to antiquity than in the day, and one could imagine with greater clarity the men and women of former ages.