An Absence of Light

by David Lindsey

  “I see,” Last said, nodding a little. “Well, that’s pretty clear, isn’t it.”

  Graver said nothing.

  Last looked around at the other tables under the arbor. It wasn’t as if he was concerned about being overheard, rather it was more a gesture of restlessness. Again he picked up on the hips of the waitress and watched her bring coffee to a couple of girls who had just sat down at a table nearest the street. Watching the girl walk back into the deserted dining room, his prematurely old eyes followed her with the practiced imagination of a decadent When she was out of sight, he looked into his glass. He swirled the wine.

  “Fellow I met in Veracruz,” Last said softly, speaking slowly and thoughtfully, “and at whose house I overheard the conversation, is Colin Faeber. He owns a computer company called DataPrint. I don’t know much about the company, I mean, what it does, compiles data for businesses looking to buy other businesses or something like that. I checked it out a bit, though, you know, to see if the guy had a heavy purse. He does.” He sipped his wine.

  “But you don’t know the names of the men you overheard talking?”

  “No, I don’t. And I don’t know of any way to find out without raising immediate suspicion. I mean, I can’t just ask Faeber outright, can I. And I didn’t see them well enough to make some circumlocutious inquiry. Something tells me I’d be a damn fool to do that.”

  “What about the names? Where’d you get Tisler and Besom’s names?”

  Last nodded. He knew he was going to have to explain that now.

  “Both were mentioned by the peeping Tom.” He looked at Graver and saw the disgust on his face. “Well, shit, you can’t really blame me for trying to string it out, can you?”

  “Then he did mention the CID?”

  “No. When he mentioned the names I made a point to remember them, but I only had a phonetic knowledge. Tisler. Besom. Those are not common names. But of course a conversation like that, I suspected the police department. So I called information at police headquarters and asked to speak to them—then your CID receptionist answered, and I hung up.”

  “And you overheard the names in that conversation?”

  “Absolutely. But I’m telling you, I don’t know who those two men were. That was a blind fluke, I’m telling you.” He pushed his wineglass to the side and leaned in. “Frankly, Graver, this looks like this is very deep shit here. I mean, if these two deaths are not ‘self-inflicted’ and ‘natural causes,’ then I seriously believe I’m altogether in the wrong place. I don’t want any part of this kind of thing. This is definitely not my kind of work, and you know it.”

  Graver sat quietly a moment, allowing Last to think he was just going to walk away from this or, rather, watching him try to convince Graver that that was just the thing he ought to do. Then he said:

  “I’ve made a few inquiries, Victor. Someone’s been shopping around forgeries of eighteenth-century Spanish land grant documents to private collectors in California. A curator at the Stanford Museum of Meso-American Artifacts reported being approached by a dealer who was offering what she believed to be stolen jade and clay sculptures. The curator at the Kimbell Museum reported being approached by a dealer offering what he believed were bogus stone masks.” Graver stopped. “I have a list And all the inquiries aren’t in. There seems to have been a resurgence of this stuff in the last seven months. I called Alberto Hyder who heads the Art Thefts section of the National Police in Mexico City. They’d like very much to talk to you.”

  Last had sat back in his chair, crossed his legs, and put his hands in his pockets in a slouching posture as he regarded Graver with a sober diffidence. After Graver stopped talking, Last’s pensive, pale eyes remained as still as opals in a setting of weathered wrinkles.

  “What is it, exactly, that you want me to do?” Last asked.

  “Nothing?” Graver was skeptical, looking in his rear-view mirror as he pulled away from the curb where he had picked up Lara around the corner from the apartment house.

  “Nothing suspicious, nothing like you described,” she said, getting the binoculars out of her purse. “Incidentally, these things are incredible.”

  “What did you see?” Graver quizzed.

  Lara settled into her seat, getting the long straps of the purse and binoculars out of her way, straightening her dress.

  “First of all, I scanned the people at the tables along the sidewalk,” she said. “There weren’t that many. A couple of girls, a couple of guys. A man and a woman. One guy by himself. I was immediately suspicious of him, but he just sat there, wasn’t doing much but staring out to the street, actually in my direction. Besides, he was the first to leave, and he just wandered off down the street under the trees until I couldn’t see him anymore.

  “After taking the inventory of people, I surveyed the cars parked along the street I wrote down the numbers of as many license plates as I could see and made a note of where the cars were located.” She pulled a steno pad out of her purse and opened it “Made a little diagram of where they were. I didn’t see anyone sitting in any of the cars. About halfway through your conversation, the two men got up and left They walked out and got into one of the cars and drove away. The two girls left just before you and Last They walked down the street and got into a car about a block away and drove off. None of the other cars moved; no new ones came and parked. And”—she shrugged, closed the pad, and tossed it onto the seat—”the man and the woman are still back there.”

  “Did you see people out walking?”

  “I didn’t see anyone else,” she said. “I just didn’t.”

  Graver pondered all this as he worked his way back toward Montrose. Lara reached into her purse again and took out several tissues.

  “That old building,” she said, blotting her face. “Window units in the apartments; in the hallway, nothing. The window I was looking out of was open.” She dabbed around her face with the tissues and then opened her blouse another button and dabbed at the tops of her breasts. She said, “What about the couple, the man and woman? They were there when you arrived, and they were there when you left. Could they have known enough ahead of time to get there before you?”

  “Good question,” Graver said. “From the time of the telephone call to the time we arrived was about forty minutes. Sure there was time.”

  “Did you get a good look at them?” Lara asked. She put her hand under her hair and raised it up off the back of her neck and held it there.

  “I think I’d remember them if I saw them again,” he said.

  “Do you think they could have been countersurveillance?”

  “They could’ve been.”

  “If they were, then that would mean… that Last tipped them off.”

  “Either that, or… let’s say he’s entirely uninvolved. Then for someone else to know about it they would have had to tap the phone.” He thought a second. “But if that was the case, where had he been when he called? Whose telephone was he using that someone thought needed to be tapped?”

  “God,” Lara said. “I don’t believe all this.” She leaned forward, twisted a little, and let the cool air from the air-conditioning vent blow on the back of her neck, her face turned toward Graver. He looked at her bending forward in the darkness, the highlights of her dress and body enameled in a soft wash of sea-green light from the dash.

  Chapter 36

  “It’s very simply an economic reality,” Panos Kalatis said, gesturing with his large Cuban cigar and speaking slowly, letting his deep voice resonate from his chest, his slight accent distinguishing his pronunciation. “The best shelters, triple A bonds, CD’s, those things provide yields of only half what they did in the eighties. The stock market? You’d have to be crazy. It’s a world market now. Who knows what’s going to happen with the EC or in Eastern Europe or in the Middle East or Japan or with the next political party in power here? To play the market with any kind of consistency you have to work twice as hard as you did a decade ago, and it will still take you
twice as long to recover the kinds of profits you did in half the time in the eighties.”

  The man sitting across from him knew what Kalatis was saying was true. That’s why he was there. They were sitting on the veranda across the front of which bamboo blinds had been dropped so that the guest could not see anything but the interior of the long veranda and portions of the dimly lighted interior of the house. As was routine with all the others, the guest had been picked up earlier in the evening in Houston as prearranged, blindfolded, and taken up in Kalatis’s plane. The pilot had flown for over an hour along the Gulf Coast and then had turned in several slow, wide banking maneuvers and returned an hour later to Houston. A two-and-a-half-hour diversionary flight The guest was not told his destination, but had been led to believe he was somewhere on the coast of Mexico or Central America. Kalatis’s men had been instructed to speak only Spanish or, when they had to communicate with the guest, English with a Spanish accent.

  After the plane had landed, the guest had been led along the dock, up the beach stairs, and across the lawn to the house where his blindfold was removed only after he had been seated on the veranda. Then he was introduced to Kalatis who assumed the name of Borman for each of these meetings.

  Though it was two o’clock in the morning, and they had been drinking Cuba Libres and talking since midnight, both men were wide awake. For the first hour Kalatis had talked about everything except the subject of their meeting. That was Kalatis’s way. He had learned from his past mistakes—they were decades behind him now—that your quarry was more easily taken if he first was put at ease.

  In the past hour, however, Kalatis finally had started way out at the margins of the subject and had been working his way in. Sometimes he had seen American businessmen grow impatient with this leisurely approach—they tended to think of themselves as ball-busters and wanted to get right to the business of “crunching numbers” and talking about “the bottom line.”

  But he insisted on doing everything his way from the very beginning, for two reasons. First of all because they would see in the long run that he had been right in everything he said. And secondly, having demonstrated this, he achieved an authoritative position at the outset They tended to believe what he said after that, and every time he was right about something else he gained credibility. Everything was on his terms, or they didn’t do business together. He was always polite; he was always gracious. But only by doing business on his terms could he gain even a semblance of control in what was essentially a very dicey enterprise. His guest was never allowed to suspect that Kalatis had only a semblance of control, however. The weight of that responsibility was Kalatis’s alone. That was how he earned his living.

  Even though the man had come to Kalatis on the recommendation of someone else, someone the man already trusted, Kalatis felt obligated to present very carefully as many facets of the arrangement as he thought wise, anticipating the questions his guest would want to have answered. Eventually, he would bring the presentation full circle, and the actual commitment to the deal would be as abrupt and as final as the thrust of a gaff through the gills of an exhausted marlin.

  They were just about at that point now. Kalatis could smell it on the salty breeze coming across the lawn; he could taste it in the dark tobacco, hand-rolled by brown fingers in the steamy Vuelta Abajo. But still Kalatis spoke slowly, his voice mellow, his accent, usually kept in check, creeping more and more into his pronunciation. He was the picture of stability, assurance, right thinking.

  “And, as I was telling you,” he concluded, “it doesn’t matter who is coming or who is going in Medellín or in Cali. It doesn’t matter if the Escobars or Marquezes or Orejuelas are on top or if they have all fallen to the sicarios or the agents of the Dirección de Policía Judicial e Investigación. It just doesn’t matter… the stuff is going to move regardless. The market environment is stable.

  “Look at it this way. Last year was a bad year for the business in Colombia. Cocaine seizures reached record levels—fifty-five tons seized inside Colombia itself—and the three leading cartel bosses were arrested or killed in the last six months. Cocaine consumption in the U.S. is declining—though that is partly due to more people turning to heroin… and heroin sales are exploding. The extradition situation continues to be troubling, not much stability there. The DEA has once again wheedled its way into a stronger role, as has the U.S. Army, and of course the CIA. Sounds gloomy for the spice barons, huh?”

  He shook his head slowly with a smile, drew on his Cohiba, and blew the aroma into the Gulf breeze.

  “Not so. Last year nearly twelve hundred tons of cocaine was shipped out of Colombia. A very good year, a record year. Where is it going if the consumption rate is declining in the U.S.? Well, a lot of people don’t believe it is declining. But even if it is, it’s not declining much, and besides that in the past five years the cartels’ expansion plans have paid off and their distribution routes have now established a solid footing in Europe and Japan. The rest of the world is going to become what the U.S. was in the sixties, seventies, and eighties. But don’t think that leaves the U.S. in a backwater situation. Heroin is making a comeback… all over the world. Big time. The point is, the trade is not going away. If it’s not cocaine in some form or heroin in some form, it’s going to be the synthetics. A world of synthetics. It’s only going to get bigger.”

  Kalatis paused to enjoy his cigar a moment It was a testimony to his abilities as a raconteur that the guest did not take advantage of this hiatus. In the gloam of the veranda Kalatis’s powerful figure was a dusky presence that presided ceremoniously over the occasion of this meeting. Presenting his strong profile to his guest, he looked toward the Gulf of Mexico and nurtured his Cohiba in silence while Jael appeared, barefoot and wearing something gauzy which afforded the guest a diaphanous profile of quite another sort, and replaced their drinks with fresh ones.

  “Now, at this point I should mention the European opportunities,” Kalatis said as he reached out and picked up his fresh Cuba Libre and sat back again, resting the cold drink on the broad arm of his wicker chair.

  “There are wonderful investment opportunities there now, too, primarily in heroin and morphine base. The Europeans are acting as if they had just discovered candy, consuming three to four tons per month. Street value consumption is approaching two billion dollars a month there now, and we expect enormous growth as the borders between the countries are relaxed. The poppy crops are grown primarily in Afghanistan and Pakistan. As with the South American situation, the opportunities for us are in transhipping. The war in the Balkans has disrupted our usual overland routes, so now, for the most part, we are using ships. Ships also allow us to regularly move from one to three tons at a time. Typically our freighters leave the port of Karachi, Pakistan, and onload at sea very near the Iran-Pakistan border. The freighters cross the Arabian Sea, go up through the Red Sea, and into the Mediterranean.”

  A pause for a sip of rum, a tug on the Cohiba.

  “At this point we listen very closely to what our counterintelligence people tell us. According to their recommendations we sometimes offload in Turkish ports, sometimes Creek ones. Other times it is best to go straight up the Adriatic to the Italian ports. Brindisi, Bari, Acona, Trieste. A good part of our investment goes to intelligence. This is a business. No one wants to lose money. We plan carefully, very carefully. As a result, our seizure rate is… zero.

  “Of course, there are other European route investments too, but they involve relationships with the overlords of Istanbul’s organized crime community, while others involve relationships with the Kurdish separatist rebels in Eastern Turkey. Right now our intelligence cautions us about these groups. The returns are greater—fewer parties involved—but the risks are higher because of the volatile political situations in which these people are currently involved.”

  Kalatis paused again. He knew his face was in the shadow so he took some time to regard his guest The man was mesmerized. Kalatis knew he liked to
hear about the security, the intelligence behind these operations. He didn’t blame him. The drug business had long ago discovered the value of intelligence and counterintelligence, and they had developed it to a remarkably sophisticated degree. But Kalatis had taken his intelligence program well beyond the operational level. His intelligence capabilities were strategic. He was far ahead of the curve in that regard, and because of that his record was impeccable.

  The guest waited for Kalatis to refresh himself with his tobacco and rum. If he had been anxious when he had arrived, the rum had settled him down. He felt no need to assert himself. And that was as it should be. He had come to listen to Kalatis.

  “But for you, of course, the primary concern is Colombia,” Kalatis said, his voice resonant and rich. “There is a kind of aristocracy of wealthy families there, old families of four and five generations, who have weathered every tumultuous surprise that that exotic society has produced. Wars. Rebellions. Terrorists. Foreign occupation. Coups. And finally democracy and capitalism. Everything. The men of these families are always there to wave good-bye to every passing event, always there to greet the coming of the next one. They are known as ‘los hombres de siempre.’ The men of always. These are the men who are responsible for Colombia being the only Latin American country that makes its debt payments promptly every single year. They are the reason its economic growth rate purrs along smoothly at four percent They are the reason Colombia has a solid, educated, and growing middle class, the best universities in Latin America, and the oldest constitution in Latin America—which has just been revised, incidentally, and is a model of progressive politics.”

  Kalatis waved his cigar languidly. “The thing is, despite all that happens there, the place still works and it works well. There is a reason. ‘Los hombres de siempre.’

  “Now that the narcotics trade has proved its stability over several decades, now that it is easily into the tens of billions of dollars per annum without fluctuating or being appreciably affected by law enforcement or the vagaries of the world economy, these cautious men have gradually inserted themselves into the picture. Escobar, Ochoa, Gacha, men of that kind were the roughnecks, the pioneers, the cowboys. They were neither educated nor sophisticated. They were unpredictable. They had the mentality of street fighters even though they were dealing in billions. They were necessary, of course, every frontier must have its pioneers, but the ‘drug culture’ is no longer a new phenomenon, no longer a frontier. It is an established way of life now, all over the world, and as always happens when something new becomes an established part of society, the torch is passed from the pioneers to the settlers, to the men of commerce and politics. Change is inevitable, and the time for a more mature perspective in this business is long overdue… and now it’s here.”