David Lindsey - An Absence of Light

All the dying had haunted him.

It would have been easy to blame it on others, on Panos Kalatis and Brod Strasser and their unconscionable commerce in the chemistry of sour dreams, their traffic in a merchandise that commanded unspeakable fortunes. It would have been easy to blame it on the businessmen like Faeber and Hormann and the nameless “clients” whose greed was so vast and dark it blotted out the light of common decency.

But in all honesty, he couldn’t shift the blame so easily. He could have avoided much of the killing if he had kept strictly to his business of gathering intelligence. That’s what he told himself on some days. On other days he told himself something quite different. On those days when he counted the deaths over and over again, it seemed to him that everyone who had died would have died anyway, regardless of what he had done. Their fate had been cast in a game of chance that had been designed and put into play by Kalatis and Strasser, a game that already had run a long course and was just coming to a conclusion as Graver stumbled upon it in its closing hours. Despite what he might think he could have done, it had been out of his control all along. No matter what he could have done Kalatis still would have disappeared with a hundred million dollars. Strasser still would have flown away with twenty-two million in crumbs. Neither man would miss a beat marketing drugs. They simply would move to new venues. They would surround themselves with a different cast of bit players, and in no time at all the river of sour dreams would resume its flow, swollen to its banks with wrecked hopes and the human flotsam of their trade.

As for those two nebulous personalities, little was said in the news reports. Their names appeared only twice and both times only in passing and in the context of rumors. Graver heard that a couple of men from the State Department had been in town for a few days, and after that Kalatis and Strasser were pushed out of the picture altogether by stories of Art Tisler having been selling CID intelligence for sex. Kinky sex and crooked cops were a jazzier story and pushed simple greed completely out of the headlines.

“Fed Ex,” Lara said, coming out the back door of the house. She was wearing her swimsuit, carrying her towel and a large envelope.

Graver pulled himself out of the pool, shook off the water, and walked over to the wrought-iron table and chairs and picked up his towel. He dried off, watching Lara walk toward him across the grass. She handed the envelope to him by slapping it against his stomach. He took it as she tossed her towel on one of the chairs, walked to the edge of the pool, and dove in.

Graver looked at the sender’s address. It had originated in Houston. He opened one end of the envelope and slipped out three eight-by-ten colored photographs and a handwritten note on a single sheet of paper.

Joel stayed with him until she had been able to obtain one of the foreign account numbers. Within forty-eight hours of getting the last one, I had all the money, and she had finished her job. She was a good and faithful servant.

I thought you would like to know.

“Geis”

Graver looked at the first photograph. It had been taken while the photographer was standing over Kalatis’s nude body. He was lying on his stomach on a poolside lounge, his head turned to the side with his arms under his head as though he were asleep. A shiny piece of silver metal, about two inches long, was resting horizontally on the back of his neck.

The second photograph was a picture of the metal pin pulled halfway out of Kalatis’s neck. Proof that it had been driven home.

The third photograph was a clinical close-up of the entry wound, the pin still in place.

Graver put the photographs back into the envelope, and thought of the innocuous figure of Strasser standing on the tarmac, looking like an overworked traveling salesman.

“What was that?” Lara asked. She was in the water at the end of the pool where he had been, her arms resting on the side of the pool as she pushed her wet hair away from her face.

“Just more stuff about the investigation,” Graver said. “People still trying to tie up loose ends.”

He looked at the note. “She was a good and faithful servant.” The past tense of the verb was significant.

Perhaps Satan had in fact stepped out of that black helicopter that night at Bayfield. Graver’s mistake had been that he never had been able to think in dark enough terms to have had any real understanding of what it was he had been dealing with. Arnette had hinted as much. Instead of thinking in terms of data or kilos or dollars, instead of thinking in terms of bits of information or accumulative intelligence, he should have been thinking in less tangible terms. He should have viewed his work, at bottom, as a struggle of abstractions.

His career had been devoted to shedding light on a subject of mystery, to illuminating the darkness through knowledge, albeit secret knowledge. He thought now that he had had the right objective all those years, but he had employed the wrong technique in trying to achieve it And maybe, even, he had been looking in the wrong places for the answers. Perhaps it was not the business of shedding light on people’s deeds that he should have been concerned with, because, after all, when light arrived the essence of darkness was changed; it was no longer darkness. It seemed to him that he was arriving too late in the sequence of events. Perhaps he should have been trying to understand, instead, the character of darkness itself, and what it was that happened when men’s desires were shaped and formed in an absence of light.