An Absence of Light

by David Lindsey

  Westrate was on the edge of the chair now, his stomach and pugnacious, tight-lipped face thrust forward, on the attack.

  “The thing is,” he said, “I don’t want to give the impression that we’re afraid that it might be professional. I don’t want anybody to see me go into your office, and I don’t want anybody to see you go into mine. From now on we communicate only by secure telephone. Or, we meet like this, face to face, somewhere we know we won’t be seen. I don’t want the staff, yours or mine, to see us putting our heads together. I don’t want any scuttlebutt I don’t want any leaks. That’s how the press gets on to something like this. Some little tight-butted secretary, some damn daydreaming file clerk, sees shit and reports it I don’t want the internal rumor mill to feed on this. And I’ve already made this clear to Katz, too.”

  Graver imagined that Westrate had been all over Katz, badgering him mercilessly to do this, to avoid that He very definitely had worked up a lather over this. Graver couldn’t make up his mind whether Westrate’s paranoia was routine theatrics or whether he was hiding something that Graver should have been smart enough to pick up on. The truth was, if Westrate was trying to maneuver him because of one of his innumerable hidden agendas, there simply was no way Graver could see it coming. Not at this point, anyway.

  Westrate stood. “I’ve got to go,” he said. “Listen, Graver, I want you all over this. Any doubts, any questions, anything doesn’t look right, doesn’t add up, you get to me quick.” He opened his eyes wide. “Understand?’’

  “I think I do.” Graver said.

  Westrate gave a snappy nod as if to say good, then we understand each other and that is that. He wheeled around and headed out of the living room like a wild boar, on to other business. In a few seconds he was at the front door, pulling it open. “Call me,” he said without looking around and walked out.

  Graver closed the door behind him and waited in the darkened entry hall, looking at the broken glow from the porch light as it came in through the refractions of the beveled glass on the door. He waited until the headlights of Westrate’s car came on and then watched as they moved slowly and crookedly away from the curb and disappeared obliquely skyward down the street.

  Chapter 7

  “I don’t much like the idea of you watching,” she said, looking out the car window down the little lane of trees which still glistened from the passing rain. The lane, too, was glittery from the shower earlier in the evening and an occasional wisp of steam broke loose from the pavement and hovered momentarily under the glow of the lamps before it rose slowly and joined the darkness.

  “I want to see this,” Kalatis said. “Don’t think about me. Just do what you do.”

  The woman was in her early forties with roan hair which she wore pulled back loosely and gathered behind her head. She was well built, having a figure that was not lean but which she kept much younger than its years by a lot of sweat and a grim determination to do battle without quarter against gravity and failing elasticity. Determination had marked her life. Her will was lapideous. Her ability to concentrate was singular. Her nerve was inflexible.

  Panos Kalatis liked to use her because, over the years, she had learned to be afraid. The accumulating years had done that to her. That which constant threat had not been able to instill in her when she was younger, when he first had met her in Trieste, the creep of days passing one into the other, month into month, year into year, had accomplished with nothing more threatening than the moving hand of a clock. Diminishing time, the slow inevitable shrinking of it, had made her less rash. Life, which had been nothing to her in the past, acquired a looming significance. She still was deliberate, but the motivation now involved an equation of self-preservation. Kalatis liked to see her afraid. Thirty, even twenty years earlier, simply watching her walk across the street used to make the hair prickle on the back of his neck. Today her silent menopausal body had done what neither gun nor knife nor poison had done in her youth: it had taught her to fear, and her fear, though she kept it hidden, unacknowledged, had unmasked her mythology. She still was death, but now she was death of another sort.

  He looked at her. She wore a bone-white silk blouse with long sleeves and a straight black dress. The flesh visible above the first button of her blouse was as white as the silk. He had not seen her breasts in fifteen years, and he wondered about them. So different from Jael’s… in every way.

  “I don’t like it,” she said again.

  These few—two, maybe three jobs—would be her last for him. He thought she had just about outlived her usefulness.

  “How much longer do you think you can do it this way?” Kalatis asked. It was a cruel question, but for Kalatis cruelty was an amusement, his own feelings long ago having been seared beyond such subtleties.

  “What do you mean?” she said, opening her purse and looking around inside for something.

  “Using your body. Maybe you ought to consider another angle. Something more… suitable…”

  “Suitable,” she said, looking into her purse. She took out a tube of lipstick and applied it without looking in a mirror. “Suitable…” She nodded, lightly pressing her lips together, staring out the windshield.

  Kalatis guessed her insouciance was only feigned. He imagined she was furious. He thought that if the light in the car were brighter he would be able to see on the pale flesh across her cleavage the appearance of the blushed marbling that flared there when she grew impassioned. In the old days, in Trieste, he would watch for that delicate reddening whenever they went to bed together. She was always in such control he couldn’t tell what she was feeling—her sexual engagement, like everything else she did, was done with a cool deliberation that did not give way to abandon until the very last moment At first it was a puzzling thing for him because he never knew how he was doing, and sometimes the end caught him by surprise. Until he discovered the secret of her blushing bosom. She could control everything except that very specific behavior of her anatomy.

  “What did he do to you?” she asked, closing her purse.

  “This man?”

  She nodded.

  Panos put his hands on the steering wheel and stretched his legs and sighed. “He is very wealthy. He has two airplanes. One of these airplanes was seen where it should not have been. He knows it was there. He knows it should not have been there.” Panos turned and looked at her. “I believe he has been unfaithful to me… in his way.” He grinned.

  The telephone between them rang before she could respond to that, and Panos answered it.

  “Yes.” He listened a moment “Thank you.” He put down the telephone. “He is with two other men, but he has just asked for his bill.”

  She opened the door of the Mercedes and got out The private club was in an old, ivy-covered brick building and sat in the center of a thickly wooded grounds. The narrow lane that led to it was one-way, entering from one side of the grounds to a small parking lot and exiting on the other side. Kalatis was parked very near the entrance to the small lot, and she had to walk nearly fifty yards, passing through the dim wash of a streetlamp before she rounded the end of a hedge to the parked cars.

  As he watched her walk, Kalatis had to admit she was far from losing her touch, or her shape, or, certainly, her sexual appeal. Though he would never let her know that. Whatever her fears of aging might have been, they were premature, but he liked seeing her afraid nonetheless.

  There were only six or seven cars in the small lot that could not have held more than twice that number when it was full. The club was very exclusive indeed. She had met the man on two occasions only recently, while she was in the company of someone else, but it was enough for her to have made an impression on him, enough to give him a reason to think about her after she was gone. This would not have worked with ninety-five percent of the men Kalatis knew, but in his middle age Toland had become rash about sex. Irresponsible.

  She waited in the darkness of a tree’s canopy at the edge of the parking lot, and when the front door
to the club opened she started walking. Kalatis watched with interest.

  Having opened her purse again, she was looking in it as though searching for something, as she approached him in the dimly lighted car park. He saw her first, of course, and just as she looked up and closed her purse, he said something to her and she stopped. She turned, and oh, yes, recognized him.

  Kalatis watched their body language and followed the gist of their conversation. Toland straightened up a little, tightened his stomach a bit What in the world are you doing here?

  She explained she was supposed to meet X here, but the arrangements had been made quite early in the evening. and then she had got delayed and could not reach him by telephone, and a cab had just dropped her by on the off chance that he might still be here.

  No, he wasn’t here, Toland said. She tilted her head with good-natured disappointment. He asked a question, and she shook her head and explained something. He asked another question and gestured to his car only a few feet away. She tilted her head again, thinking a moment as she looked toward his car, and then nodded in appreciation.

  She took him to the parking lot of a condominium not far from the club where her car was already parked anonymously among the others. She told him where to park, the precise spot. By now she was teasing him shamelessly, and he would have driven off the bank of the bayou into the water if she had allowed his hand another inch inside her panties. Instead of going up to her place, she suggested, why didn’t they…

  Kalatis had choreographed the event, but it would not have worked so well if his principal dancer had not been so talented. When Kalatis pulled into the parking lot behind them with his lights off, Toland was oblivious to everything but the increasingly revealing glimpses of the unfamiliar flesh in the seat next to him.

  Parking among other cars a good distance away, Kalatis rolled down his windows, took out his binoculars, and balanced them on the steering wheel. He focused them on Toland’s car, the interior of which was illuminated by the streetlamp behind it, presenting the two figures inside in sharp silhouettes. He gave them a few moments, until she had removed her blouse. He would have let her go further, but he was afraid she wouldn’t remove her bra, that she would end it before he wanted. He still would have to pay her, but he wouldn’t get the satisfaction he wanted. So, he adhered to the plan and picked up his telephone and dialed.

  It rang four times before Kalatis saw her push Toland away. He could only imagine what was being said.

  “Yeah…” Toland’s voice was tense, irritable.

  “Robert, this is Panos Kalatis.”

  Pause.

  “Kalatis?” Pause. “What are you doing calling my car phone at this hour?”

  “Somehow I knew you would be there to answer it.”

  “What do you want?”

  “It’s payback time, my friend.”

  “What?”

  “I know what you’ve been doing, Toland.” Kalatis kept his voice reasonable, relaxed. “You are not nearly good enough at this to try to steal from me. You’re such a stupid pig, Robert.”

  Pause.

  “I think there’s a misunderstanding here…” Toland began. His voice had changed.

  “I believe you’re right,” Kalatis said, “so let me explain it to you.” He watched Toland’s profile closely through the binoculars. “The woman sitting next to you… she’s going to kill you for me. And I’m going to listen to it on this telephone and watch it through my binoculars. Robert, you are really so stupid…”

  Kalatis didn’t actually hear the two gunshots, not as gunshots, just as phuut! phuut! at the same time as part of the window behind Toland’s head flew out into the parking lot sounding like crushed ice as it scattered across the pavement. The remaining parts of the window were glazed in rusty smears.

  Kalatis counted to twelve before the passenger door opened, and she got out and closed it behind her. She walked through the few cars with business-like deliberation until she stopped at one, unlocked it, and got in. He counted to eight before the headlights came on, and she drove away.

  Just for the hell of it Kalatis dialed Toland’s number again. He felt better, much better. He listened to the busy signal with satisfaction.

  Chapter 8

  Graver turned off the porch light, threw the dead bolt on the door, and walked back into the living room. He went over to his desk and sat down, picked up the notepad and looked at his doodles. Jesus, what a situation. What a goddamned night.

  He tossed the notepad aside. He was restless still, far too wired by the events of the evening. He picked up the dish towel from the magazine stand and absently began folding it lengthwise, matching the corners, letting his thoughts drift. He thought about going for another swim, to clear his head, but then, too quickly, even before he could avoid it, he was remembering the weedy field and the fight that Tisler’s stiffening limbs had put up against the final confirmation of his death. Tisler had managed to surprise everyone, had managed to set minds to work on his death that had never given him a second thought when he was alive. That was, of course, a sad inversion of the way life should be played.

  But Graver learned a lesson every day on the fallacy of the concept that life “ought” to be a certain way. Everyone believed in that, of course; perhaps it was the last vestige of a long-submerged Platonism—the idea of the ideal, that somewhere there was lightness and perfection and if we could only adjust or fine-tune ourselves or society or our environment, then life would be as it “ought” to be.

  Maybe Tisler’s suicide was his own comment on the “oughtness” fallacy. Maybe he decided that was a screwed concept—or maybe he decided that just a little more pressure on the trigger was the precise amount of fine tuning needed to bring the idea of “oughtness” full circle to perfection.

  When the telephone rang on the corner of his desk, it startled him. He cringed to think that there were still developments breaking in Tisler’s grim death. It was approaching one o’clock. It occurred to him that he might not answer it, though there was never really any possibility that he wouldn’t. But he did let it ring six times. Still holding the dish towel in one hand, he reluctantly picked up the receiver with his other.

  “Hello.”

  “Marcus?”

  It was a woman’s voice, not Dore’s, not instantly recognizable. His mind began reeling through an inventory of voices.

  “Yes,” he said, waiting for another audible clue. And then immediately he was cautious, even suspicious, afraid she might disconnect without speaking again.

  The next voice was a man’s. “Graver, this is Victor Last.”

  Graver recognized this voice immediately, even though he didn’t think he had heard it in eight years. Last’s voice was distinctive for its softness, even kindness, and its peculiar accent Last was the son of British parents who owned a shipping business in Veracruz, Mexico, where Last was raised. His pronunciation was a wonderful amalgam of several languages.

  “Well, this is a surprise, Victor,” Graver said. He was wary.

  “Yeah, well, I’m in the city now,” Last said. “Thought I ought to check in with you.”

  Graver could hear the hollow, rushing-air sound of Last attempting to cover the mouthpiece while he spoke to someone with him, probably the woman who had been on the telephone when Graver answered it.

  “Uh, look,” Last said, coming back on the line, “I’d, uh, I’d like to talk to you. Could we get together for a drink?”

  “Victor, you’ve caught me at a bad time. I’ve got a lot of fires to put out at—”

  “It actually would be best tonight,” Last interrupted. His voice was calm and natural, agreeable, as though Graver had called him to ask for a meeting at Last’s convenience.

  This polite disconnect with the reality of their situation put Graver on guard even more. Graver looked at the dish towel in his hand. Shit.

  “Okay. Where are you? North? South?”

  “The best place, I think, would be where we used to meet,�
�� Last said casually. Graver noted that he had avoided saying the name.

  “Is it still there?”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s late. It’ll be closed.”

  “I checked it out,” Last said. “It’ll be open.”

  “Fine,” Graver said in resignation. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

  “Twenty minutes,” Last said, and the line went dead.

  Chapter 9

  The small La Cita Cafe was only a block from the ship channel, near the neck of the turning basin in a barrio that never changed. Two languid Guadalupe palms still flanked the dirty, mandarin red front door, their huge, rough trunks rooted on the little spit of dirt and weeds between the buckled sidewalk and the rock building. A single strand of flamingo pink neon light still bordered the two horizontally rectangular front windows with their rounded corners, and the porthole in the front door still allowed a glimpse of the murky interior before you entered.

  Graver parked across the street and waited a moment. He surveyed the neighborhood of small bungalows tucked back under old trees, their dim interiors glimpsed through the cinnamon vines that laded the dilapidated fences of thin wire and wood and the banana plants that lent a cool grace to the graceless, bare yards. He saw no cars parked along the street that seemed out of place.

  He got out of the car, locked it, and walked across to the cafe. The neighborhood night smelled of the ship channel, a mixture of bayou and bay water, of diesel engines and foreign ports, of neighborhood kitchens and other-country foods. Graver inhaled deeply of the smells and let them carry him back eight years.