An Absence of Light

by David Lindsey

  At least, this was the scenario Burtell was offering. Despite a growing disgust at Burtell’s egregious lying, Graver was fascinated. Burtell was incredible. If he was in fact fabricating all of this to cover for the nonexistent investigation—which Graver was sure he was doing—then he was even inventing a subtext for Graver to discover, knowing that as an old hand Graver would know how these things “really” worked. This was a deception within a deception within a manipulation. The full realization of the sophistication of Burtell’s betrayal began to work its way to the surface of Graver’s understanding, and for the first time he sensed something eerie creeping into the equation.

  “We thought we could work it out,” Burtell continued. “Art didn’t want to file another daily report that would reflect that he’d come up empty-handed again. I agreed to go along with it” He looked at his coffee and decided not to drink any more of it. It was probably cold. “Art waited a week, and sure enough the guy called him. He was ready to do it Everything. He swore. They were supposed to have met Saturday night.”

  “Do you know if they did?”

  Burtell shook his head. “No, I don’t know.”

  “Jesus Christ, Dean,” Graver said, making his voice portray disappointment now, rather than impatience or anger. “And Tisler was the only one who knew what he looked like?” This was the central point of the entire game here; this was going to be Burtell’s “explanation.”

  Burtell looked at him. “That’s right.”

  Even in this, Burtell was playing his role perfectly. His eyes met Graver’s as though he was admitting his fault like a man. He would courageously swallow the medicine, admit that he had let the investigation get away from him. Graver felt like he was in a theater group. His next question was calculated to see if Burtell could keep this up.

  “Did Ray know you were pushing this?”

  At this there was a slight bobble in Burtell’s demeanor and in what had been, up to this point, a smoothly-played hand. Now Burtell had to ask himself some quick, tough questions. Should he drag Besom into the deception? Should he expand the cast of characters? Burtell’s answer demonstrated how well he could balance on the wire.

  “No, he didn’t know. Art and I were skating this on our own.”

  Graver reached out and gave the cobblestone a few thoughtful turns.

  “Did you ever get the impression from Art that there was anything… sinister about Nieson? Do you think there’s even the slightest reason to suspect that he killed Art?”

  “No, honestly I don’t,” Burtell said. “I’ve been over and over that too, Marcus, don’t think I haven’t But… I just can’t see it.”

  “Did he ever call Art here?”

  “Yes.”

  Graver stared at the Seldon documents in front of him. That was it Burtell had not hesitated to commit himself wholeheartedly to a course of action that was a clear abandonment of everything that Graver, at least, had thought he stood for. Burtell was embracing a deception that could not be explained away. If he ever had an inclination to get out of it he had to know that now was the moment to do so and that Graver was his best hope for effecting an extrication. He had to know this, and yet Burtell did not hesitate to step over the line that would separate them for a certainty. For Graver it was a truly painful display of hypocrisy. Graver felt as if Burtell had walked up to him and hit him in the stomach.

  “Okay,” Graver said, closing the manila folder. “I’ve got to think about this.” He sat back in his chair and leveled his eyes at Burtell. “You shouldn’t have let yourself get caught empty-handed—I mean completely empty-handed.”

  He wanted to say something entirely different, but that, at least, was expected of him. As he sat there staring at the man who was like a younger brother to him he came within a hairsbreadth of dropping all pretense, of stopping the charade. He wanted to take Burtell by the shoulders and shake him and ask him for God’s sake what was he doing; how could he do what he was doing; what in the hell was happening to him.

  Burtell was nodding at him, his eyes cast awkwardly to the side as he pretended to swallow the reprimand. “Yeah, I know,” he said. “I screwed it up.”

  Graver was suddenly assaulted with a confusion of emotions. He was furious at Burtell’s performance, standing in front of him dressed immaculately in lies, wearing them so well he was fluid and articulate and—if it had not been for Paula’s and Neuman’s discoveries—believable. He was furious that Burtell had played the altar boy for more than two years while at the same time he had operated some kind of shell game that Graver didn’t even yet understand. He was disgusted with himself for having let it happen. He was frightened that the dimensions of this game were still unknown. He was baffled and maybe even a little rattled that he didn’t yet know how to deal with it. And he was stung to the quick by the betrayal.

  “I’ll get back to you,” he managed to say dismissively, hoping that his face was not giving away the turmoil he was feeling. Burtell nodded and for an instant Graver thought he hesitated. But he could no longer allow himself to trust anything he saw in Burtell’s behavior. It was as if Dean Burtell had died right there in front of him.

  Burtell bent down and picked up his files from his chair and headed for the door. But then he stopped and turned. He looked at Graver and then advanced a few steps to Graver’s desk.

  “Uh, Marcus. Did you… remember that I was scheduled for vacation?”

  Graver looked at him blankly. “Sorry,” he said. “I’d forgotten about it.”

  “Do you have any objections to me going ahead with it now? Under the circumstances… I… frankly, I could use it.”

  Graver shook his head. “No, of course not. I can’t see any reason for you to hang around now.” He pushed aside the paperwork on his desk and looked at the calendar. “That’s two weeks. Starting tomorrow,” he said.

  Burtell nodded. “Thanks, I appreciate it.” He seemed to hesitate again, then turned abruptly and walked out of the office.

  Graver slumped back in his chair and stared at the closed door. “Jesus Christ,” he said.

  Chapter 22

  Graver opened his desk drawer and got his car keys. He needed to talk to Paula and Neuman, but he also had to do something else, and he had to do it now. After locking his desk, the files, and the safe, he walked out of the office and told Lara that he had to leave for several hours, and it probably would be after lunch before he would be back.

  She looked at him, and as their eyes met he could tell instantly by her expression that she saw something on his face that caught her attention. He turned and walked out of the office without telling her where he could be reached. It was something he never did. He felt her eyes on him until he was out the door.

  Four or five blocks away from the office, he pulled into a self-service station to fill the car with gasoline. He set the nozzle on its slowest automatic setting and made a brief telephone call from a pay phone outside the station. After the call he gave the attendant fifteen dollars and got back to the nozzle just in time to catch the fifteen clocking around on the pump dials. He checked his watch.

  It took him longer than he had thought it would to get to Arnette’s. She lived in one of Houston’s older neighborhoods where the ethnic diversity was reflected in almost exactly the same proportions as the city’s demographic pie charts. It was a mixture that pleased Arnette Kepner just fine.

  She lived in a World War II-vintage house that backed up to one of the city’s bayous. When Arnette cashed in her twenty-five-year retirement from the federal government eight years ago, she looked for a long time before she found just the situation she wanted, a modest-to-low-income neighborhood, three houses in a row. It took every penny of her savings, but she bought all three of them and then proceeded to transform the yards of the three lots into something resembling a tropical nursery with the outside property lines of the two outside houses fortified with thick walls of rangy Asian bamboo. Although from the front each house appeared to have an entirely di
fferent owner, Arnette’s three properties actually formed a compound with each adjacent house accessible to the other through a common back yard from which the interior fences had been removed creating one large, wooded lawn that was not visible from the street. Aside from this slightly overgrown appearance, nothing distinguished Arnette’s houses from the others in the neighborhood since all of them tended toward a careless woodiness.

  Within the perimeter of Arnette’s bamboo wall was a well-hidden security system that encircled the three lots. It was a very thorough piece of technology. The mailbox of each house was set into a rock pillar by each of the front gates and was accessible from the back side; one was completely covered with fig ivy, one was moss green with a lichen patina, and the other was almost hidden in Paradise bamboo.

  Graver parked in front of the middle house, which was Arnette’s residence, and got out of the car. He knew the security lock on the front yard gate already would be opened for him, so he didn’t hesitate to open it and step inside the yard. The winding street, which closely followed the curves of the bayou for a dozen or more blocks, was shaded by large pecans and oaks and cypresses which seemed to be populated with every kind of bird that could inhabit a coastal, subtropical region, and their screeching and whistling and burbling filled the still, late morning air. As Graver made his way along the short brick path through the elephant ears and plantains and palmettos, he thought how closely Arnette had come to making the place seem like “a little bit of ‘Nam,” as she had said she wanted to do.

  He opened the screen door of the long, screened-in room that ran the length of the front of the house just as the door to the house itself opened.

  “Baby!” Arnette said softly, smiling at him, and Graver stepped to the front door to hug a wiry, smallish woman with large brown eyes who was still a few years away from sixty. Arnette wore her thick, brindled hair pulled back—though it rebelled and strayed in a spray of salt and pepper filaments—and woven in a single braid which she habitually wore over her left shoulder in the rather coy manner of a much younger woman. She was trim and had the face of a gypsy, with a strong narrow nose and white teeth. As always when she was at home, she was dressed in a high-necked Vietnamese silk blouse and pants, today of bright saffron.

  “I couldn’t believe my ears,” she said, holding Graver’s arm in a kind of embrace as they entered the living room of the house. “It’s been close to a year, mister. Where the hell have you been?”

  “Wandering in the sloughs of bureaucracy,” Graver said. “Lost in the Valley of Darkness.”

  She laughed knowingly as they stepped into a large room as eccentric in appearance as Arnette herself. Of the three houses in a row, only hers had been completely renovated, its dominating feature being its most immediate one, a sprawling and spacious living room with heavy teak pillars holding up the ceiling where walls once had been. Much of the lighting came from a continuous cornice that circled the room near the ceiling, which had been raised to include the higher spaces of the attic and which provided an unusual soft glow throughout, as though the room existed in a perpetual dawn. This lighting was supplemented by table lamps sprinkled among comfortable armchairs and sofas and small incidental tables stacked with books. The furniture and the walls were decorated with fabrics and artifacts that Arnette had picked up in Southeast Asia and Latin America during her years of work there. The effect was as if they were entering the enormous tent of a nomadic tribe or a large marao, the communal grass hut of the Montagnards of South Vietnam.

  Arnette was still smiling as she gestured for Graver to sit down and then took her place on one of the sofas. Above her head on the wall behind her was a display of wicked-looking blades with wooden handles, a goose-necked chuang and smaller siput and a variety of hook-tipped maks. They were not weapons, however, but farming tools used by the rice-farming Jeh tribe of Montagnards who lived in the murky Dak Poko valley where Arnette had spent several lifetimes when she was younger, during the early years of the Vietnam War.

  Surrounding them here and there as if in a museum were glass cases with pre-Columbian Mexican statuettes in the Remojadas style from Veracruz, life-sized stone masks in the Classic Teotihuacán style, and ceramics of every sort, including tripods decorated in the carved relief technique as well as Thin Orange ware. Weaving from the Guatemalan highlands hung on other walls, huipiles and caries and cintas in the brilliant, exploding colors of the Indian imagination. There were black and white photographs in thin black frames, Arnette on a bridge in Vienna, Arnette and Mona in a restaurant in Buenos Aires and at a cafe table in Montevideo, three people with no identification standing on the front porch of a cabin surrounded by aspens, a cur with three legs and a ribbon tied around his neck somewhere in Latin America.

  Arnette tucked one of her legs up under her and sat back on the sofa, smiling at him.

  “God, baby, it’s really good to see you,” she said. “I told Mona you were coming. She’ll be over after a while, if that’s all right with you.”

  “Sure, I’d love to see her,” Graver said. Mona Isaza was Arnette’s companion. They had met when Arnette had spent a year in Mexico City in the early 1970s and had been together ever since. She lived in one of the houses next door.

  “How have things been with you, anyway?” Arnette asked, still smiling, seeming to relish his being there.

  “Busy,” he said and left it at that. Normally he would have brought her up to date on everyone, but he was sure she knew of his recent divorce, and he saw no reason to go into it. But if he mentioned the twins it would be uncomfortable to leave the subject of Dore just hanging there, so he chose not to say anything about any of them. “Just like everyone else.”

  “When are you going to get out of this work?” she asked. “If I calculate right, this is your twenty-third year with the department… fourteen in that wretched intelligence maze.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m going for twenty-five. Better benefits.”

  “That suits you, huh?”

  Graver shrugged. “Mixed feelings.”

  “Oh, hell, that’s the business, isn’t it? Mixed feelings are the least of it. Everything else leaves a scab of some sort.”

  Graver nodded.

  She looked at him a moment in silence, and her smile softened. She could tell he was in no mood for visiting.

  “You’ve got something on your mind.”

  “I need some help.”

  “Good.”

  “Unofficially.”

  “Oh.”

  “Not for me, personally, it’s for the department, but I’m the only one who’s going to know about it.”

  “Uh-oh. You’ve got internal problems.”

  “I think it’s bad.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I need you to do twenty-four hours on Dean Burtell and his wife.”

  Arnette thrust her head forward, her eyes wide open. “Burt-tell? Goddamn!”

  Graver took the better part of an hour to tell her what had happened during the last two days. He told her everything. While he was talking she got up and lighted a joss stick and set it aside, the incense curling up into the twilight above them. Outside the birds were boisterous and shrill.

  “The thing is,” Graver said after a while, “I’ve decided that I don’t want to turn this over to anyone just yet. I don’t want to go to anyone in the department, not even IAD. And I don’t want to go outside—DA’s office or FBI—until I know more about what I’ve got here.”

  Arnette was sitting with one leg tucked up under her as before, the room now filled with the smoke of sandalwood. It was the waft of conspiracy, and Graver wondered if the fragrance put Arnette’s mind in the way of contrivance and secrecy, the way a mantra called to mind a meditative discipline. He was afraid she was going to say something about Burtell, but she was more savvy than that and, to Graver’s relief, stuck to the immediate business.

  “Afraid they’ll cut you out?”

  “I think it’s a distinct probability.”

>   She thought a minute. “I’m sorry if I sound… mercenary, but if this is an ‘unofficial’ contract, how am I going to get paid? This is going to take a lot of people—five to seven for Dean, four or five for Ginette—at least. He hasn’t been on the street in a long time, but I’ll bet he knows a team tail when he sees it. We can’t mess around here.”

  “I have a small discretionary fund,” Graver said. “It can buy me several weeks if it needs to.”

  Graver had met Arnette Kepner more than a decade back when he was lecturing on network analysis at the Georgetown University’s Consortium for the Study of Intelligence. After his lecture she was among the people who came up to the podium to ask more questions and talk for a few minutes. But she lingered until she was the last one and then asked to take him to dinner. It turned out to be a fascinating evening and was the beginning of a friendship.

  He learned from her that she had spent nearly twenty-five years with the government, all of it in various intelligence branches, traveling to hot spots around the globe, first with army intelligence and then with “various other” agencies throughout her career. She said she was considering retiring and had thought that Houston would be a good place. They talked about the city in general terms, and she told him enough about her life for him to understand that she was a very unusual woman.

  Eighteen months later he received a telephone call from her saying she was in town, that she had bought a home and why didn’t he come by to see her. When he did, he discovered her three-house compound and learned that she had retired only from the federal government, not from the business. She already had been in Houston six months and had all the work she could manage, solely by word of mouth, free-lancing special operations for practically every agency from whom she used to draw a salary.