The Color Of Night by David Lindsey

eating olives, the slick, denuded pits lying beside the bottle like legless beige beetles. The doors of the trattoria were open to the street, where people from the neighborhood were coming out to linger in the cool Roman evening, young men lounging around the parked cars, children playing sidewalk games, old women watching life from the kitchen chairs they had brought outside where life was happening.
    “You haven’t been in Rome,” Darras said.
    Strand shook his head.
    Darras slid a small glass toward Strand with the back of one hand in which he was holding a half-eaten olive, and with the other hand he poured some of the rosy wine into the glass.
    Strand nodded thanks.
    Alain Darras was in his late fifties. He was French, which was all that Strand knew about his past. Though his straight black hair was thinning, he still kept it combed back from his forehead with a high part. He was a little more jowly now, but the mustache on his long upper lip was still neatly trimmed, though grayer, and his handsome, sad eyes were still handsome, though sadder.
    “This is something of an emergency,” Darras said. He had an olive in his mouth, and he was worrying the meat off of the pit. He always asked questions as though they were statements. They were more like assessments that he threw out for confirmation.
    “I have a few names,” Strand said.
    “And you are in a very big hurry.”
    “I’m no longer in the business,” Strand said.
    Darras took the clean pit out of his mouth and placed it on the table with the others.
    “Photographs.”
    “No.”
    “Photographs are a big thing these days,” Darras said. “Digital capabilities. My business has changed more in the last four years than it changed in the entire twenty years before. With the computers it is getting pretty damn close to magic. Half the people working for me now are children. I want more children. They come out of the universities with brains like alchemists. They know chips and digital. They don’t know shit about life, but they know ‘virtual.’ They think virtual
is
life. Damn, sometimes they can almost convince me that it’s real, too.” He shrugged. “We’re raising a generation of completely fucked-up kids, you know.” He dropped his eyes to his wineglass. “I like them.” He picked up another olive.
    “I need this tomorrow,” Strand said. He knew he was being curt, but he didn’t have the strength to finesse it.
    “That is enormously expensive.”
    “If I thought it was physically possible, I would ask for it tonight.”
    Darras nodded slowly. “I see.”
    A few more people wandered into the trattoria. Romans ate late. A little girl about five or six years old came from the kitchen in the back and dawdled past their table, chewing on a crusty piece of bread, carrying half a hard loaf under her chubby arm. When she got out the front door, she broke off pieces for two little friends who were waiting for her on the sidewalk.
    “Odd, isn’t it, that it’s like the Mafia,” Darras said, “intelligence work. You never really get to leave it. It follows you to the last place you lie down.” He regarded Strand with melancholy reserve. “I see it all the time.”
    Strand took a piece of paper out of his coat pocket and placed it on the table. With a flick of his fingers he spun it around so Darras could read the names written there. Darras dropped his eyes to the paper.
    “Oh.”
    “I want to know how to get in touch with these four men. I need to get to them personally, without some ambitious lieutenant trying to get between us. I have to speak to these men themselves… no one else.”
    “I see. So you actually have been out of touch after all. And the lady?”
    “Everything.” Strand jabbed the end of a forefinger on the table. “Everything.”
    Darras bit into the olive. “The names below. She uses these, too.”
    “Yes, she might.”
    Darras sighed as he picked up the list and put it in his inside coat pocket. He regarded