Strand took another drink of Scotch. He had to be very careful with that. If he was going to do something foolish, he wanted to do it because he had planned to do it, not because of the Scotch. He put down the glass.
“Well, the end has to begin somewhere, doesn’t it?” he said.
The challenge in Schrade’s eyes did not retreat.
“I think you should know a few things, Wolf,” Strand said, looking down the long table at Schrade, “before anything else happens here.”
Schrade waited.
“You were very carefully baited,” Strand began. “The two Schieles were meant to bring you here-today.”
Knight’s mouth dropped open.
“There are other drawings here that you haven’t seen that were also offered to Carrington for the same purpose. But the plot got complicated, and the other drawings were unnecessary.” He stopped, fixed his eyes squarely on Schrade.
“Then I was never supposed to have got here.”
“That’s right.”
“And the meeting in Zurich…”
“Fabrication.”
Schrade grew still. His clear eyes lost all sense of his personality and became as dead as the glass eyes of a mannequin.
“Then you really… cannot… get the money.”
“That’s right. Your money’s gone. I lied to Bill Howard. The money’s exactly where your accountants have been telling you it is. Scattered to the stars. It’s been completely out of my hands for years now, almost from the beginning. You could have killed me a long time ago. I was never any good to you.”
Schrade’s thoughts were buried deeply behind his clear eyes. His face was far more of a mask than the latex shreds of Harry Strand’s disguise.
“You are not giving me enough credit, Harry,” Schrade said calmly. “The truth is, I have already killed you. And I must say, it was easy.” He shook his head slowly, pulling down the corners of his mouth in a disdainful shrug. “You were never really capable of objectivity. You had ‘friends,’ Harry, the dumbest mistake in the world.”
Schrade’s hands rested calmly on the library table. He looked down at them. He betrayed no tension, no sign of stress, no anxiety. He looked at Strand again.
“I have killed you, Harry, piecemeal. Dennis Clymer. Ariana Kiriasis. That pretty young woman who worked for you in Houston.” Pause. “Marie.” He shifted his eyes to Mara. “And this one, sooner or later.”
Knight gasped. He was looking at Schrade with an expression of shock that altered the appearance of his face.
“You blame yourself for every one of those deaths,” Schrade went on, “and for the ones to come. And you should. You are right about that, at least. You used them to try to damage me, knowing very well what would happen to them, eventually, knowing they would die for it someday. And you used them anyway.”
He paused, regarding Strand with glacial disapproval.
“You should have been a philosopher or a theologian, Harry, because real life has always confused you. You would have been better off in a profession where the answer to every real-world problem is just another question. The hard answers in life, the reality of brutal solutions, always made you queasy. You had this… exasperating weakness for empathy.”
He paused, and again he almost smiled.
“But you were very good at deception, I’ll give you that. It isn’t much, manipulating shadows, orchestrating subtleties, subterfuge, but you did have a natural ability for it. In fact, you have proved to be altogether too good at it in the end, haven’t you, Harry? Predictably, you have finally succumbed to the single greatest risk of your profession: self-deception. Even at this very moment you are befuddled. The moral gray stretches out from you in every direction, and you have lost your way in the barrens of your own confusion.
“That business about the hospitals… about the schools… that thin, sanctimonious soup for the weak conscience. I think you actually convinced yourself that those things would absolve you from the guilt of all these deaths that you so willfully pretended would not happen.”
Outside, the summer storm intensified and leaden clouds descended over the city, pulling a shroud of gray over Carlos Place, the little island of plane trees, and the tarnished statue of the inward shrugging nude. The rain quickened and began to fall in drifting sheets. The windows now let in not light, but darkness, and the mandarin red walls of the library deepened and turned a grim, hematic hue.
Strand said nothing. Schrade was right, of course. Strand did feel guilty for all the lives lost. There were ways to rationalize their deaths, ways of escape that sounded reasonable, and he had tried them all. But the guilt remained, a stain with just enough of the truth mixed into it to make it indelible.
Strand walked halfway down the length of the table and stopped a few steps from Schrade, who, having satisfied himself momentarily with his bitter soliloquy, had turned away from Strand again and stared straight out the windows.
Strand had to acknowledge Schrade’s despicable form of bravery. He was still holding the gun, and in the face of the kind of loathing and threatened menace that Schrade had just unleashed, any man might be expected to be provoked to a sudden rash impulse.
Schrade showed no fear that such a thing might happen. Yet he remained seated. He made no effort to leave, a tacit acknowledgment of Strand’s control of the situation. Schrade was not feeling comfortable enough to offer a physical challenge. He recognized the instability of the moment and stared straight ahead, toward the muted light of the storm.
Strand sat on the table again, as before, one leg on the floor, the other one dangling from the knee. He continued to study Schrade. Then he lifted his chin, indicating the two pictures leaning on the bookcase counter behind Schrade.
“The two Schieles,” he said, “the ones you came to see. Do you know who’s offering them?”
Schrade didn’t bother to answer.
Strand looked at Knight. “Tell him, Carrington.”
Knight actually hesitated. Avarice was a strong rival to the survival instinct. Finally he said, “Claude Corsier.”
This time Schrade reacted sharply, glaring at Strand.
“I’m curious about him,” Strand said. “I noticed you didn’t list him among those I’m responsible for killing. How did you miss him, Wolf?”
Schrade was suddenly distracted, not listening closely. Conspiracy was his heart’s milieu. He was good at it, and he fell to it naturally. He understood its intimacies. Only a hint of it in other men leavened his imagination.
“Yeah,” Strand said, “I suspect the Schieles are forgeries. I wasn’t the only one who wanted you to be here.”
Schrade’s eyes turned thoughtfully to the library windows, to the gloom that had swallowed Carlos Place and obscured the buildings on either side, and to the windows of the Connaught, some of which were lighted, some of which were dark.
Corsier held his breath as he peered into the lenses of the binoculars, his back tight and aching, his headphones in place. He strained to hear more clearly, to see more clearly through the ashen dusk that had descended during the last few minutes of the storm.
“Damn! What do the dials say?”
“He is too far away to be killed outright,” Skerlic answered. “It would tear him up, he might linger… but he would eventually die, I think.”
“So would Harry.”
Skerlic said nothing. For a moment he studied Corsier’s sooty silhouette a short distance away, then slowly put his eyes back to his own pair of lenses.
Suddenly Corsier grabbed the telephone off a little table nearby and dialed. He cocked up the earphones on one side of his head, put the receiver to one ear, and bent again to his binoculars.
The telephone rang once, and Corsier saw everyone in the room turn to look at it. It rang a second time, a third. No one in Knight’s library moved.