He stared at the rumpled sheets. Like the patterns of sand in an estuary, washed into drifts that belied the flow of the water that had moved it, the sheets, too, had a pattern. The folds all drifted to one side, the side of the bed opposite him, next to the opened French doors.
Strand walked around the end of the bed with a sense of dread so heavy that it almost prevented him from moving at all.
She was there, on her stomach, her head and upper torso stuffed under the bed, her naked buttocks exposed, her bare legs partly wrapped in the sheets that had been dragged off with her. And here was the blood. A lot of it, sneaking out from under the bed as though it had tried to escape the horrible moment.
Strand had to see her face. Trembling, he stepped over and knelt down and grabbed her waist above her hips. She had the remarkable weight of death, a phenomenon he hated, the oddness of how death seemed to add tens of pounds to a body that would have been so much lighter in life.
She was difficult to get out from under the bed, and he heard himself apologizing to her for the rough treatment, for the way he wrenched her body to free her from where they had wedged her. When she came free, her wonderful mane of wavy black hair was all around her head, gummy and caked with the grume of the end of her life.
He turned her over and with the tips of his fingers separated her hair away from her face. She had been all night in her own blood, which had long since begun to curdle. When he had rolled her over the sheet around her legs had wrapped with her and covered her pubic hair. Her exposed navel seemed so… risque. With her wild hair swirling around her head, her body cocked oddly at the waist, she looked like a Greek belly dancer closing her eyes, caught up in the dance. Danseuse du ventre. One night in Salonika they had been going to bars, drinking. At a crazy place, almost out of control, she had made a joke. Danseuse du ventre.
He thought of Romy. And Meret.
And Mara.
CHAPTER 24
Strand did what he could to cut himself off from Geneva. With his stomach churning, he turned away from Ariana’s body and went back into the living room, where he sat at a writing desk and plugged in his laptop. He sent an e-mail to Mara:
Bad luck here-but I’m fine. I’ll be home tonight. Be careful.
For just a moment he stared at the computer screen and thought about e-mailing Bill Howard. Then he decided to hell with it. Let them find out about it when they find out about it.
He logged off, folded up the laptop, put it in the briefcase with the papers from the bank, and walked out of the suite. He took the “Do Not Disturb” sign off the door handle. Goddamn it, she didn’t need to lie there all day. He did not go back to the Beau-Rivage. There was nothing of him there. The only traces of his existence-the bogus passports and papers-he always carried with him.
Once again he chartered a private plane, leaving Cointrin in Geneva in midafternoon and arriving at Malpensa outside Milan a couple of hours later. He rented a car at the airport and drove to Bellagio, arriving there around dusk. By the time he pulled into the courtyard of Hotel Villa Cosima his back was aching and his neck was taut with the beginnings of a headache.
When he walked through the door of their suite, Mara was there instantly, embracing him. She held him a long time without speaking, and he could feel the worry in her body and in her breath at his neck as they held each other.
She had been sitting with a drink in the main room of the suite. She had not turned on the lamps, letting a pale dusk deepen to the blue of evening as she watched the lights come on along the steep slopes of the opposite shore. He mixed a strong drink and joined her on the sofa, and for a little while they sat together in silence, looking out across the lake. Strand was grateful to her for not speaking right away, for allowing him to gather his thoughts. He knew she must have a swarm of questions, yet she didn’t press him. That was gutsy. As soon as he had hit the “send” key on the e-mail from Ariana’s suite, he was sorry he had mentioned “bad luck.” He shouldn’t have done that. Mara probably had imagined a thousand scenarios, created a thousand ghosts, feared a thousand harms.
He told her everything. As far as he was concerned, now they were inseparable. Their survival would depend on a symbiotic reliance. He hoped she would agree. If she left him now, there would be no way that he could protect her.
“How long had you known her?” Mara asked.
“Twelve years,” Strand said. “But it was longer than that. The kind of work we did… it alters time. Sometimes stretches it out, sometimes compresses it. It drains you and changes you in countless sad ways. And you’re aware of it, even while it’s happening.”
“She must’ve been good at it.”
“Yes.” He raised the Scotch to his lips. “She was.”
Mara waited a couple of beats. “That’s what’s happening now, isn’t it? You’re slipping back into that old life.”
“I don’t know,” he lied.
“You do know, Harry. Don’t do this. I’ve got to be able to believe you.”
Strand turned his eyes away from the tiny sequins of light across the lake. He looked at her. It wasn’t dark in the room; there was an ambient glow from the lights below on the promenade at the water’s edge. They provided her with a small luminant speck just near the center of each eye.
“When Schrade changed his focus to global organized crime,” Strand said, his voice almost husky, “he stepped into a far more dangerous world than the Russian spy game. It was one thing to spy on a derelict state, but it was quite another to inform against growing criminal enterprises. They were strong and fast and vicious.
“International crime has no ideology. It has no parameters, no borders, no lines to cross. It’s a vast, horizonless galaxy: no rules beyond brutality, no values beyond greed. Drug profits alone-only one of many markets of international crime-exceed three hundred billion every year. Every year. That superabundance of money inspires a kind of madness that can be stunning in its savagery.
“When I got the idea to steal Schrade’s money after he’d laundered it, I got a safety deposit box in a Geneva bank. I immediately started filling it with documentation. Without any of our people knowing it, I wired myself and taped nearly all of my conversations with Schrade. When he gave me information about the Lu Kee group out of Taipei doing contract hits in Germany for Matvei Grachev’s Russian organization there, I got it on tape. When he told me about Sergio Lodato in Naples providing the Russians with counterfeit hundreds in exchange for armaments and Russian real estate and Russian bank ownerships, I taped it. When he told me that Mario Obando in Colombia was selling cocaine to the Chinese (who gave him heroin in return and which the Mexicans then smuggled into the U.S.) and to the Yakuza, who distributed it in Japan-and then everyone laundering their profits through the Italians in Eastern Europe-I taped it.”
Strand shook his head and took another drink. The alcohol was beginning to loosen his knotted muscles.
“I even managed to photograph him with Bill Howard on four separate occasions when Schrade demanded face-to-face meetings to reassure himself that the FIS was following through. He was constantly afraid his sweet deal was going to fall apart.”
A motor launch left the quayside below and started across the lake, the deep-throated mutter of its engines dying as it disappeared into the darkness.
“That’s your insurance,” Mara said.
Strand nodded. “Well, maybe insurance isn’t quite the right word. It’s more like having a contingency plan for a defensive maneuver. My idea was to divide the information up between myself and Ariana and take it to the concerned parties. I think the evidence would be convincing.”