An Absence of Light

by David Lindsey

  Neuman nodded eagerly. He was wired, ready to do it.

  “I’m going to meet the surveillance people and listen to what they picked up. When I’m through, I’ll get right back here. We’ll go from there.” He looked at each of them. “Don’t use my telephone and don’t answer it. I’ll leave the answering machine on. It’s important,” he said, “that we keep in touch. But use the handsets.”

  Chapter 52

  Victor Last lay on his back staring up at the ceiling, his right arm hanging off the side of the bed holding a champagne glass. He was naked. The sheets were a pale tea rose silk. His left hand held one of Rayner Faeber’s very generous, very jiggly breasts. She lay with her blond head tucked up under his arm, and when he looked down he could see her other breast with its peachy aureole, her so very white and nearly plumpish body, and her splayed legs—she liked to splay her legs—with her dusty pubis at their apex. She smelled of a kind of bath oil that she said she could buy only at this one small shop in the Rue du Bourg-Tibourg. It smelled like… heather. He loved the stuff, which he told her once and so she always put a dash of it in her bathwater when she knew they were going to be together.

  He looked to his left, out through one of the bedroom’s glass walls and through an atrium, through another glass wall and into the living room. Beyond that was another glass wall, another atrium… all of it washed in the wan light of a city night as though he were in Atlantis, looking through houses of water, the light refracting in undulations of aqua so pale and anemic as to be almost colorless. It was, he had to admit, the perfect environment for Rayner. She was almost translucent herself. So much so, that sometimes when he had sex with her in this watery glass world, he half-expected to see her inner parts working, expected, even, to see his own erect self in her in flashes of clarity that illuminated them like flashes of lightning.

  She took a deep breath to sigh and her breast rose and filled out under his hand. He liked that. He really did like it when she did that Rayner was sybaritic, as true to the concept as any woman he had ever met, and she had the money to indulge her nature. The first night they had been together in Veracruz—Colin, as usual, having left her alone to take a “business trip” to Mexico City—they had had sex on the beach. At one point during that extraordinary event, he had had the astonishing sensation that she had disappeared from beneath him, so alike had her flesh appeared to the water and the moon.

  She raised one of her hands, which also held a champagne glass, and raised her head to meet it, the effort tightening the breast he held, and drank what was left of her champagne. Or almost all of it She held the glass above her and let the remainder dribble onto her. He could see the snail trail of its rivulet reflected in the sourceless light. She lowered her hand, and he heard the whisper of the glass falling on the carpet. In the next moment her champagne-cooled hand found its way between his legs. His stomach tightened reflexively.

  “Victor,” she said, and she turned a little to him, her breast pulling out of his hand, and ran her tongue up the side of his rib cage. Again his gaze went to the partitions of glass walls, through light and water and light and water.

  She suddenly sat up, her face right in the center of his line of sight. She wore no makeup—they had been at this a while, in and out of the pool, and at it again—so her face was only an apparition, though he could make out her wonderful mouth and her eyes that tilted upward on the outer edges.

  “If you could have anything in the world,” she said, “what would it be?”

  “All of Colin’s money,” he said without hesitation.

  Rayner’s lips rose at the edges in a smile, and she was close enough for him to feel the little burst of breath as she gave a single voiceless laugh. Her hand toyed between his legs.

  “All of his money,” she said, leaning over him, the weight of her pendulous breasts resting on his chest “And to that end, how are you progressing?”

  “I’m not quite sure,” he said, and he wasn’t quite sure what in the hell she meant by the question, either. He turned his head, drank the rest of his own champagne and set the glass on the jade green marble of the small table beside the bed. He reached down to her breasts and kissed her forehead. “Not sure about the money,” he repeated, “but I’m having a dee-vil of a time with his wife.”

  There were a few minutes of aggressive fondling and kissing which almost led to more heated action, but Last was able to avoid that without letting her know that he thought it was time to move on to precisely the issue he had just raised.

  “Bloody champagne,” he said, giving one last tongue-flick to a peachy aureole before rolling over and sitting up on the side of the bed. “I’ve got to get some coffee or something. I won’t even be able to steer the bloody car.”

  “Why don’t you spend the night?” she suggested, leaning on one elbow, facing his back.

  “No, can’t do that,” he said, shaking his head and running his fingers through his hair. “We’ll get shot in bed one of these nights. A very bad end to a very good thing.”

  She didn’t say anything for a moment, and he waited with his head in his hands, his eyes cut to the side, as if he were a hunter listening with held breath for the single thwick of a broken twig to betray the approaching prey.

  “I want to go ahead and divorce him,” she said. “This is driving me nuts.”

  “That’d be crazy, love,” Last said. “It’s not time yet. He’d know. He’d have me shot.”

  “He doesn’t know anything. Doesn’t even suspect anything.” She put a hand on his back, two fingers straddling the ripple of his spine, kneading and massaging it “It’s been years since he’s noticed anything about me except whether or not I’m absent or present.”

  “The man’s in the information business, Rayner. He knows. As a matter of fact, I’ve been half-thinking we’ve already pushed our luck too far. Something hasn’t seemed right in the last couple of weeks.”

  Her hand stopped on his back. “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know… exactly,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “Something’s going on with him. I can feel it.”

  Her hand dropped, and she sat up in bed. “Turn around,” she said. “Let’s talk.”

  Last turned around and sat with his back resting against the headboard. Rayner arranged herself beside him and facing him, her legs crossed yoga style, her hands straight down on either side of her for support as she leaned back slightly. This provided him a wonderful view of her bosom, which he loved to look at and which she loved to have him to look at. Her strawberry blond hair was tousled.

  “You know once you asked me why I never seemed hurt or sad or bitter because of the way Colin treats me?”

  “Yes.”

  “I gave you some fluffy answer.”

  He nodded.

  “The truth is that by the time you and I met in Veracruz, I had already been through that ‘hurt’ stage of our so-called marriage. It was past, well past. I should have listened to his first wife. She actually came to see me once, before I married him. A nice woman. I liked her, which should have been warning enough.” She paused and looked at Last. “That makes sense,” she said, “but I’m not sure you’d understand it. Anyway, when everything she had warned me about began proving true, I saw the handwriting on the wall.”

  She paused and raked the fingers of one hand through her hair. “I’m not a total bitch,” she said, “but I’m not a patsy, either. We’d been married a couple of years, this house was new, and his business had just undergone a giant growth leap. Boom. Suddenly the business was huge. That was because Brod Strasser and another guy had bought into it.”

  “Who was the other guy?”

  “A Greek—a weird man if you ask me—named Panos Kalatis.”

  “Colin told you all this?”

  “God, no.” But she didn’t say how she knew. “Actually, these men own controlling interest now, or Strasser does, through one of his holding companies. Poor Colin’s just an employee for all pract
ical purposes. A highly paid errand boy, no longer his own man. The man’s smart, Colin is. I’m not saying he’s not smart. It’s just that… I didn’t have much respect for the choice he made.

  “Once he’d sold out, figuratively and literally, I thought to myself: okay, where am I, exactly? I’m married to a man who’s indifferent to me, treats me like an outdated appliance. I could live with that, I guess, for a while, if the benefits were good. I mean extraordinarily good.”

  “But they weren’t.”

  “No, not in the long term, I didn’t think. Colin makes this fabulous salary, but he doesn’t have a piece of the action. Fabulous salaries are great as long as you’re employed. But people get fired. I mean, the 1980s are littered with surprised executives. They thought it would never end too. But it always does. People like Strasser and Kalatis own the action. They don’t get fired. And when Colin’s no longer any use to them they’ll throw him away like something they’ve wiped their behinds on. He’s only a breath away from losing everything… whenever it suits them. And then where would that leave me?”

  She reached out and took one of the tea rose pillows and held it in her lap, her arms wrapped around it. She looked at him a moment before she continued.

  “So I made up my mind to get something out of this… relationship. I thought, well, if they can buy information I can too. I hired a first-rate private investigator. He documented on film and tape Colin’s affair with his secretary. In flagrante, as they say. It was rather erotic footage, if you could forget who they were. When I had had enough of it, when my sick curiosity had been indulged ad nauseam, I told the guy thanks and paid him off. Then I contacted the secretary and had her come over here one afternoon when Colin was out of town.

  “We sat in the living room over there,” she said, looking through the walls of glass, “and I showed the videos to her. She was stunned and frightened. Ashamed. I kept playing them until she simply ducked her head and wouldn’t watch them anymore. It was cruel of me and, frankly, I surprised myself. By this time I didn’t think I had any emotional investment left in the man, but I found that I was getting some kind of unseemly satisfaction out of this perverse humiliation of her. But finally I stopped.

  “I really didn’t blame her, after all. The woman’s intelligent, a superb executive secretary. She knew sleeping with the boss was going nowhere but, on the other hand, it wasn’t hurting her at all at bonus time, and he was continually giving her all these gifts. I know what executive secretaries do. I used to be one. I know what it’s like. A good one practically runs the company, but she never gets any credit for it and compared to some of the men executive officers—who do a hell of a lot less than she does—her salary’s paltry. She thinks, what the hell, she deserves the perks she gets from sleeping with the bastard. She knows all about the boss’s personal life—this woman knew Colin and I hadn’t had sex in two years. She knows all about the business. Where it’s strong, where it’s weak. Where all the corporate skeletons are buried. Who’s got clout, who hasn’t. But most important: she has access.”

  Rayner stopped and looked at her hands. She was doing something with her fingers, more precisely her fingernails, looking at them as though she could see what she was doing, though Last doubted she could in the pale, watery light. Then she looked up and went on.

  “She was sobbing, distraught. I could tell that in her mind she had lost everything. I started talking to her. I said, look, relax, relax. Truth is, the marriage was over, and you were just the next in line. That’s okay, really. I admitted that I was angry but not because I loved the man. I was just angry at being used by him. And I said that, frankly, she should be angry about being used too. I said I wasn’t going to do anything with the videos. I said I didn’t think either of us would get what we deserved out of a nasty divorce battle. I calmed her down, got her to thinking. And then I said that we’d both be better off putting our heads together and try to come up with a way to earn ourselves a little security out of all this. I told her that neither one of us had any protection, any security for the future. We could both end up on the sidewalk tomorrow with nothing. Nothing. And it could happen so easy.” She paused. “I presented her with a proposition.”

  As Rayner talked, Last sat with his back against the wall and slowly felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. Surrounded by the aqueous light of Rayner’s peculiar world, he listened to a woman he had been cultivating for eight months, waiting for just the right opportunity to use her and their affair as a stepping-stone to his own fortune, only to have it slowly revealed to him that he had been thrusting in the moonlight with Morgan le Fay. As she talked his heart alternately hammered and started as he thought that at any moment she was going to blast him to hell for his many months of calculated intercourse. He felt as though this woman had been reading him like a newspaper, and she was about to deliver the coup de grace.

  But it didn’t happen. Instead, he listened to the story of how two women, invisible in plain sight, had gathered enough information—about DataPrint… and related businesses called Concordia Investments and Hormann Plastics and Hermes Exports and Strasser Industries—to have the two of themselves killed on the spot. When she finally came to a stopping point, they sat in silence among the silk and glass and fragrance of heather and for the first time in his life Last didn’t know whether to scream in jubilation or horror. He had discovered either the mother lode of all his adventuring, or he had just listened to his own death warrant. He honestly could not place a bet on which it might be. The odds were skewed by the magnitude.

  “Jesus… Mary… and Joseph,” he said.

  She was looking at him as though she were awaiting his assessment She wanted to know what he thought.

  “Rayner,” he swallowed, “listen to me.” His mouth was cottony. “This could get you killed… I mean, I cannot believe you’ve gone this far. Do you have any idea how… exposed, how vulnerable you are? Both of you.”

  “Only in the last few months,” she said. “When we began to piece together the drugs part of it. That scared the shit out of us.”

  Last looked at her. He thought he could sense the fear in her now, but at the same time he didn’t know why he hadn’t sensed it before. Who, exactly, had he been deceiving all these months? Her or himself?

  “How long have you been doing this?” he asked.

  “Nine months. We had to take it slow,” she said with unintended understatement. “We didn’t want to screw it up. You know, little by little, checking and double-checking, take a step and listen. Take another step and listen.”

  He waited a moment, not wanting to seem too eager.

  “You have documentation?”

  “Of course. That’s what it’s all about, isn’t it?”

  “But…” And then it dawned on him. “She—the secretary—continued her affair with Colin?”

  Rayner nodded. “She had to. I don’t think this would have worked otherwise. Every time he took her, she took him.” She smiled. “Talk about poetic justice…”

  “And she’s still sleeping with him?”

  “I hope so.”

  She was looking at him, her face only a few feet away from his, through the clear water. In the instant before she spoke he anticipated her.

  “We’ve gone about as far as we can go,” she said, “without some help.” He could almost see her holding her breath, hoping she hadn’t made a mistake about him. “Do you want in on this?”

  Chapter 53

  Neuman could see the glow from the fire in the South Shore Harbor Marina even before he turned off NASA Road 1 into the Swan Lagoon development of Nassau Bay. Cars were slowing along the highway to puzzle over the orange light reflecting off the bottom of the Gulf clouds that were drifting inland, and when he turned into the neighborhood street that would take him to Sheck’s house, people were standing on their front lawns looking toward the fire.

  Sheck’s house was a modern one-story bungalow on a winding street lined with palms and green lawns and
in a price range not unlike Valerie Heath’s. Neuman parked in the front drive, hiding the car as best as he could behind a screen of oleanders, and got out, hardly noticed by the scattered clusters of people standing in their front lawns across the street looking in his direction. The back of Sheck’s house was right on the water and almost directly across the lagoon from the marina.

  He didn’t go to the front door but casually walked around to the side of the house, found a wooden privacy fence with a gate and went into the back yard. From here the fire in the marina looked like a conflagration as it reflected from both the clouds and the surface of the bay water, the fire itself the brightest point between the two illuminations. The entire marina seemed to be burning.

  Throwing a glance at the back of the house to make sure he didn’t miss the obvious—a light, someone standing at a window or door—he moved along the thick hedges that lined both sides of the back yard for privacy from the neighbors and stood near a pier at the edge of the water and looked across. He could hear sirens and bullhorns and the wailing of emergency vehicles, the cacophony hanging in the moist, still air as though the entire confusion were taking place in an amphitheater. As he stood there with his feet in the damp grass, it was hard for him to believe that Burtell was over there, burned up in a fire that no one understood yet. For a moment he wondered what it had been like for Burtell to be blasted into the next life.