David Lindsey - An Absence of Light

by An Absence of Light (mobi)

  For the first time Arnette had no response.

  “All the loose ends are falling into place,” Graver went on, “but it’s all happening a little too late, isn’t it We’ve uncovered a wealth of information in record time, but Geis has evaporated, and we’re not a single step closer to Kalatis.”

  “That’s right,” Arnette snapped back. “Look, Marcus, I don’t know how to answer your questions about Dean, but I do know he’s put us onto some very serious operations here. Yes, all the big players are disappearing into the woodwork. That’s what they’re trained to do. That’s their business. If they didn’t sew up loose ends, they wouldn’t be in business. But the fact is, Dean’s given us a hell of a lot more than we would have had without him. I’m not going to agonize about his ethics this late in the game. We’re not through here; we still need a lot of answers. I’m not going to blame Dean because he didn’t clear up everything for me. As for his role in this, you may never figure it out. Or if you do, you might not like it But does that really make a goddamned bit of difference as to what we do now?”

  For a few moments the line was dead, no one spoke. Then Graver said:

  “Okay, Arnette. You’re right” He paused again. “But for right now I’ve still got just one objective… and just one more chance at achieving it. Paula, can you glean anything else from the files?”

  “Oh, sure,” Paula said. “There are a million details, stuff we can follow up on for months. As far as connections go, this is a bonanza.”

  “Arnette,” Graver said, “you have no interest in the operational end here, I know. But if I get a shot at Kalatis can I get some backup from your people? Before you answer, you’d better know this: there’s not a dime in it.”

  “I told you, I’m already making money off this, baby,” Arnette said. “You can have my people anytime. I’m way ahead of the game here.”

  “Okay,” Graver said. “We may have a long shot I’ll get back to you within a couple of hours.”

  Chapter 63

  By the time Graver got to La Facezia, he was nearly twenty minutes late. He parked a half block away, locked the car, and walked back on the sidewalk under the shade of the catalpa trees, a welcome shelter from the mid-morning sun. The temperature already had climbed into the upper eighties and surely would not stop until it reached the mid nineties.

  The tables under the arbor on the sidewalk were popular this morning, and the patio doors were thrown open so that the dining room was open to the shady cool. As Graver suspected, Last was not among the sidewalk coffee drinkers. He went through one of the iron gates, under the arbor, and into the dining room which retained a cavernous coolness, its three sets of French doors allowing a wash of arbor-muted morning brightness into the big room.

  As Graver walked through one of the French doors that opened obliquely into the dining room, he paused a moment to let his eyes adjust from the glare of the street There were a few diners, and he could hear a murmur of conversation and the clinking of tableware. One of the waitresses whisked by him with a tray of coffee and croissants on her way to the sidewalk tables. “Please, anywhere you wish,” she said in passing, and following that he heard Last’s relaxed, mellow English.

  “Right here, Marcus.”

  Graver turned to his right and made out Last’s shadow ghost sitting at one of the more choice tables, next to a window with a thick stone sill. An iron grille covered the window and a lacework of ivy covered the iron, forming a delicate panel of privacy separating them from the tables outside like the screen in a confessional. Graver walked to the table and sat down.

  “This is untypical,” Last observed. “So late.”

  “I couldn’t help it,” Graver said. “You’ve seen the papers?”

  “Oh yes. I gathered as much.”

  One of the waitresses came and took Graver’s order for coffee.

  “Okay,” Graver said. “Let’s hear it” He was in no mood for pleasantries, and he wanted Last to know that Last nodded.

  “Of all the stuff I’d told you before,” Last said, “I left out something… rather central.”

  “Really?” Graver couldn’t resist a note of sarcasm.

  “What I didn’t tell you was, I’ve been boffing Mrs. Faeber almost from the beginning.”

  Graver looked at him. “Okay.”

  “This is a lonely woman, Marcus. I knew it from the moment I met her.” Last paused to sip his own coffee when the girl brought Graver’s. “I saw opportunity there… one way or the other. They had money; I had… artifacts. Surely we could work out something, I thought. But Rayner—Mrs. Faeber—was, is, a sexually aggressive woman and ‘Colin,’ apparently, has the sexual curiosity of a sheet of paper. By the time they left Mexico that first time we met, Rayner and I had… connected, so to speak.” He paused to light a cigarette. “This woman, Graver, I tell you she’s insatiable. I’ve never seen anything like it. Do you know that—?”

  “Victor, I don’t want to hear it. You know what I do want to hear.”

  Last paused and looked at Graver across the table. Graver’s eyes had adjusted to the low light now, and he saw Last’s handsome face with its glory of wrinkles, battle scars from his encounters with the bottle and from sleepless nights in bordellos, from the anxiety of a life of fleecing and deception, from the punishing pleasures and constant disquiet of silk-sheet adulteries, from never being sure of anything except the assurance that nothing was sure. He was smiling slightly, a smile that was at once boyish and wizened. He looked like a man who, on the brink of finally having to admit to himself that he had pissed away the better part of a lifetime with nothing to show for it, had spotted one more long shot—a good one this time—and was about to put everything he had left into the wager.

  “Marcus, I was with Rayner last night She told me an incredible story. I think it has enormous potential.”

  “You said you could ‘deliver Faeber’s ass.’”

  “Better than that. I think… if we give it some thought… we can put our hands on Kalatis.”

  Chapter 64

  Panos Kalatis leaned against the door of his bedroom and looked out across the veranda through the white heat of the sunlight to the murky waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Wearing only his white pajama trousers, he was barefoot and shirtless, his well-tanned barrel chest thrust out in general defiance. He was smoking his first cigar of the day, and he was worried.

  Behind him, Jael lay across their bed, nut brown and naked, stretching her long limbs in the warm, late morning breeze that blew in through the veranda doors from the Gulf. Occasionally the squeal of a seagull broke the silence that was otherwise only interrupted by the wash of the water on the beach below and the rustling of the palm fronds moved by the breeze.

  Kalatis was worried because his chief security officer had caused him to be awakened at eleven o’clock, thinking it unwise to allow him to go another hour without knowing of the explosion at the South Shore Marina. Though he had cut off all communication with Sheck and Burtell, his men had tried to renew them since news of the explosion this morning and had had no success. Kalatis had something to think about.

  “Panos,” Jael said from behind him, her voice throaty from sleep. “Panos.”

  He turned a little and looked over his shoulder. She was an absolute marvel. He knew of nothing more heightening to a sexual experience than sleeping with a woman who knew how to kill you in five different languages. A woman like this one. He could not get enough of this woman; he was capable of watching her for long periods of time in much the same way that an animal trainer might watch a prized cat, just for the pure pleasure of enjoying the incomparable marriage of sinew and movement. Her beauty was so unaffected and powerful that it nullified the dimension of danger she occupied, or rather transformed it, so that the violence of which she was capable was no longer a thing to be feared, but to be appreciated, if not altogether desired.

  And he liked the way she said “Panos.”

  Nevertheless, he turned his back to he
r and squinted at the eye-watering brightness of the Gulf. Colin Faeber had been trying to get in touch with him. No doubt he had heard of the explosion too and was in a state of panic. Kalatis decided his best course of action with Faeber was simply never to see or speak to him again. Though Faeber had been one of the few people who had been to Kalatis’s beach house without having been presented with the pretense that he was being taken out of the country, he always had been brought there at night and still was deceived as to its true location. But he knew Kalatis was not in Mexico; he knew Kalatis lived as close as an hour’s flight. No, Kalatis did not want to see Faeber again—ever.

  The explosion in the harbor had disturbed a very tightly scheduled series of events and possibly had ruined the rest of Kalatis’s program. Possibly. Now he had to decide whether he thought he could salvage all of it, or whether he thought he should cut his losses. That would mean passing up nearly forty million dollars, and that kind of money was worth considerable risk.

  But, there was considerable risk. Not the least of which was continuing his plan without knowing who was responsible for the explosion. Was this an accident? Burtell and Sheck were almost surely killed in that fire, since it was their habit to meet on Burtell’s boat If they were, what kind of a coincidence was that? None, he was sure. Kalatis had planned and escaped too many intrigues to believe in coincidence. Coincidence was a thing that occurred so rarely that he considered it almost an apocryphal concept. Like the unicorn, it was an idea of fools and romantics. As an explanation for anything as concrete as an explosion, it was a delusion.

  He had so little time left—he was beginning his last day of collections—that it was hardly worth the effort of putting into operation any kind of serious investigation. His best course of action was to try and speed up the collection process which was, as always, to take place late at night and in the early morning hours. Now he had his people getting in touch with the three remaining clients, trying to arrange their appointments for earlier in the evening or, even better, late in the afternoon. This change would be catching his clients by surprise, and they would surely have procedural adjustments to bring about before they could comply with his request All of this was to be negotiated during the next three or four hours. By daylight the next morning, Panos Kalatis would have disappeared off the face of the earth.

  Of course, there was the possibility that Sheck, or even Burtell, had enemies Kalatis knew nothing about The explosion did not necessarily have to do with him or with their relationship to him. There was no way of knowing who Sheck might have angered and for what reasons. It could be that this had nothing to do with Kalatis at all.

  But Kalatis had not remained alive all these years by keeping faith with “possibilities” and “could be’s.” He had remained alive because at the slightest hint of the inconsistent or the inexplicable, he vanished. He did not wait for explanations. They would come eventually, but when they did Kalatis would be somewhere safe to hear them out. A man without a sixth sense was a dead man.

  Thus his thoughts turned to Graver. Kalatis was well aware of Graver’s friendship with Dean Burtell, but he had seen big money come between friendships before—it was almost the rule—and he had fully intended to cause such a breach—to his benefit—when he had offered Burtell the five-hundred-thousand-dollar retirement fund. That had been Tuesday night. Now it was Thursday morning, and he had heard not a word from Burtell. He had been willing to bet that the intervening silence was good news. Burtell, it seemed to him, was no less venal than all the other people whose loyalties he paid for every day of the week. He believed he had made a sound investment.

  But with Burtell’s death, all bets were off. He knew Graver well enough to know what to expect. If Graver didn’t already know Kalatis was involved with one of his men, he would know soon enough. It was time to stop calculating and start moving.

  Standing in the doorway thinking of these things, he flinched only a little when the two bare arms reached around his chest, and he felt Jael’s breasts against the middle of his back, felt her pelvis tuck into his buttocks.

  “What are your thought?” she asked in her accented and ungrammatical English.

  Kalatis did not respond immediately. He was always polite to her, even kind, even indulgent, but he was never tender. He really did think of her as a cat. You kept it well fed and well groomed. You could scratch it and rub it, give it small pleasures, but you must never become its friend. You must never display a regard that hinted you would make any sacrifice, however small or insignificant, on its behalf. It was not a relationship that accommodated friendship.

  So he ignored her because he did not want to be bothered at that moment He smoked and shrugged her off irritably. She backed away, and in the silence behind him he heard the soft crunching of the mattress as she returned to the bed and the cool Egyptian cotton sheets. He had to think, not of her, but of himself. He had to make sure he was doing the right thing, dispensing with the right people, setting into motion the right timing.

  In reviewing his plans there was nothing he regretted. Well, perhaps walking away from the house in Bogotá. And leaving forever the dusky loins of Colombia’s remarkable women. That he truly would regret But as for the rest of it, he gave nothing else a second thought He had done it often enough for it to be almost familiar. In fact, all those Spartan vanishments over the years—those times when he had built a full life and then one day, because of a telephone call or a three-word note slipped under his door or a notice in the personals column of the newspaper, he closed the door behind him and walked away into another life leaving the alarm clock still set for the next morning—all of those Spartan disappearances when he left a life with only the clothes on his back to accompany him were like dress rehearsals for this final one in which he was taking as much of the world with him as he could possibly manage. His new life would be his last life. He did not intend to disappear ever again, nor did he intend to start all over with nothing, as he had every time before. This final time he would have millions, scattered over the globe in a dozen caches protected by codes and ciphers and shielded accounts. The plan was elaborate, extensive, with dozens of people needed to bring it to its conclusion, but in the end, after a lengthy unfolding, there would be only himself, walking through a doorway alone, to a new life. For the last time.

  Chapter 65

  Colin Faeber put down the telephone in his office and was immediately aware of a clammy dampness around his mouth. He knew that a condensation of perspiration was forming on his upper lip. The woman had said that Gilbert Hormann had died of a heart attack in the suite adjacent to his office sometime during the night His personal secretary had found his body herself, when she came into the office that morning. She was sorry, she said, but she couldn’t talk anymore. There was so much confusion there now. They had just taken away the body. Everyone was very upset It was tragic, so tragic.

  Faeber sat immobile in his chair and counted them off: Tisler, suicide. Besom, heart attack. Burtell, probably in the explosion. He couldn’t find Sheck. Possibly in the explosion with Burtell, since that was their primary meeting location. Hormann, heart attack.

  And now he could not raise Kalatis on their code line. Had something happened to him as well? What the hell was happening? He put his hands on the edge of the desk in front of him as if he were steadying himself against the gunnel of a boat, as if he were fighting the nausea of too many hours at sea. Was there something going on here that he should see, something obvious that in retrospect he would see all too clearly and wonder why he hadn’t detected it in the first place? His stomach tumbled at the thought of it But since he couldn’t “see” it, what should he do? Should he take the extreme step of contacting Strasser? He had been told never to do that Strasser was “out of the picture” except financially. He was completely removed, and it was clearly his intention to remain that way. The idea was only fleeting, for if Faeber was intimidated by Kalatis, he was petrified by Brod Strasser whom he had met on only four occasi
ons during the three and a half years since he had bought controlling interest in DataPrint.

  He looked around his office which was modern in style as befitted his profession, chrome and glass and copolymer furniture, decorated in primary colors with touches here and there of Italian moderne furnishings, the coffee server, the cocktail pitchers in the liquor cabinets. He stood up from his desk. He didn’t know why. He wasn’t going anywhere. He didn’t know what to do. But he couldn’t sit still, either. There was no contingency plan for this kind of thing, everyone dying, nobody to contact What the hell was going on? Was this thing coming to an end? Was he in danger? Christ! What would make him think he wasn’t? Why wouldn’t he be?

  He started toward the door of his office, hesitated, turned back and stood at the window behind his desk. From the western edge of downtown he looked westward, over a sweep of the green canopies of trees toward the satellite commercial centers whose office towers punched up out of the carpet of thick woods like futuristic cities on a jungle-covered planet. Though he had stood at these windows and daydreamed over this view countless times, just now it seemed alien, as though he had awakened in an unfamiliar world. He felt only an unmistakable anxiety.

  Turning away from the window again he walked to the door and opened it.

  “Connie,” he said. That was all he had to say. She was typing at her computer screen and stopped immediately, though without hurrying, and in one or two moments she was in his office. “Close the door,” he said.

  She looked at him as he turned around midway to his desk.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked.