An Absence of Light

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 different 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 Teotihuacan 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.

The age of the personal computer had brought about a sea change in the private investigation and intelligence business. Now anyone who could afford a modem could enter the voyeuristic world of “databanking” where a subterranean network of information resellers, known as superbureaus, had assembled in a limitless number of categories every fact imaginable about most American citizens. Every time an individual filled out an information form, whether he was registering for a free prize at his local grocery or answering a “confidential” medical record form at his doctor’s office, he was providing data that in all likelihood eventually would be purchased by an information reseller. Bank records, medical records, insurance records, personal data, credit records, everything was fair game in the information reselling business where practically nothing was protected by law. And virtually everyone who collected information-including doctors, bankers, and creditors-would eventually sell it The fact was, in the United States today, the individual had no way of controlling information about himself. For a price, everyone’s privacy was for sale.

This ongoing boom in information had been a boon to the burgeoning private investigation business, so much so that anybody and everybody was doing it Now anybody could do a skip trace, search for a missing person, check the background of a job applicant, check criminal history records, track down an old girlfriend, check out a competitor’s financial status and credit standing, locate anyone’s address, telephone number, bank account, and medical records. The data was so easy to obtain that it was like picking it up off the sidewalk.

A surprising number of these agencies had even turned their investigation businesses into huge corporate entities like Kroll and Associates of New York (with branches all over the world), Investigations Group Inc., of Washington, and Business Risk International based in Nashville, whose annual gross incomes were in the tens of millions. These high profile agencies often specialized in money chasing for corporations and even for foreign governments. They provided credit assessments of corporate acquisition targets, conducted forensic accounting studies, collected environmental research, and investigated computer crimes, all logical criminal extensions of a modern, technological age.

Heraclitus, and a good number of wise and observant men after him, had remarked on the constancy and inevitability of change. It was now axiomatic, and anyone who ignored the importance of evolution did so at their own peril. But as the world entered the closing years of the twentieth century, few of those sages could have imagined the neck-snapping speed at which change would one day occur. Only human nature, with its abundant and ineluctable follies, continued to defy the philosopher’s wisdom.

There was one other way in which all investigative and intelligence work had changed during the past several decades. Now that the Computer Age suddenly had given private investigation the means to be enormously profitable, the budgets of literally hundreds of agencies-and corporations who had their own competitor intelligence divisions-outstripped those of many budget-stressed law enforcement agencies. Because of this, the private sector could offer much larger salaries to experienced officers and agents, and as a result private investigative and intelligence agencies were aswarm with ex-police officers, ex-DEA agents, ex-FBI agents, ex-CIA officers, and personnel from practically every agency in the government’s vast intelligence community.

Some private agencies had become so specialized in certain fields of data collection and analysis that law enforcement agencies at every level-all the way up to the CIA-were utilizing these specialized information resellers and private agencies whenever those entities had an edge on them in any given arena of activity. They didn’t like having to do it, and they didn’t publicize it But they did it.

Now, more than at any other time in world history, “private” information was in danger of becoming only a nominal concept The information business, legal and illegal, governmental and private, commercial and political, personal and public, legitimate and underground, was in an era of explosive growth. And, as in all boom-time businesses, abuse was rampant Unfortunately, the American public didn’t have a clue about what was happening to it.

But there were a few independent-private-intelligence operations like Arnette Kepner’s whose work was nothing akin to the highly visible corporate swashbucklers like Kroll. Her experience was in the world of international intelligence, not merely investigation, and in her profession a high profile was the kiss of death and anonymity was the mark of a right-thinking operation. She did not work for businesses or governments, but for other intelligence agencies, and her computers, which occupied most of the rooms in one of her adjacent houses, were packed fat with rarified data about intelligence networks and thousands of individual agents, officers, and operatives which the traditional private and corporate investigative agencies knew nothing about.

Arnette stared at him through the thin haze created by the smoldering joss stick, her errant gray hair forming a lively aura around her face.

“Okay,” she said. She leaned forward and took a cigarette from an ocher pack of a foreign brand sitting on the coffee table in front of her. She lit it and blew the smoke up into the midday dusk to mingle with the incense. Sitting back, she folded one arm across her waist and rested the wrist of the hand holding the cigarette on her knee. “What do you want?”

“A log of their movements and photographs of everyone they talk to. I want to be briefed daily.”

“This kind of thing can be a long haul, Marcus. Two weeks is nothing.”

Graver nodded. “Yeah, I know. But I don’t have much of a choice here.”

She looked at him seriously. “Okay, let’s see what comes up. What’s his address?”

Graver told her and gave her Ginette’s office address as well. She nodded thoughtfully but didn’t write down anything.

“Tomorrow Dean starts two weeks of vacation,” Graver said. “I think his wife will have to work during the first week, but the second week they’re off together.”

“I’ll put someone out there right now,” she said, “something to hold it until I can get a team together later on in the evening. You have any reason to think he’ll bolt?”

“No. I think it’s too soon for that kind of panic. He’ll try to sweat it out. He knows Westrate-everyone-wants to see this thing put to bed. He’ll wait to see if it is.”

“Okay, well, by tonight I’ll have this together anyway.” She pulled on her cigarette and then studied him, a sober expression on her face. “I know this is eating you alive,” she said. “I’m so sorry it’s happening.”

To his surprise, Graver was suddenly relieved she had just come right out with it He felt like he was wrapped in a straitjacket, and he alternately panicked and despaired at his condition.

He shook his head. “It’ll soak in, I’m sure,” he said. “But right now it doesn’t seem very real… I just don’t understand it… why in the hell he’s in this situation. It’s absolutely… senseless.”

Arnette nodded. “It’s going to take a lot of guts to do this, baby. It’ll be hard on you. It’s going to tear you apart You’ve got to know that.”

He didn’t respond immediately. “I just want to know why he’s doing it,” he said.

“And you think you’ll ‘understand’ it then? You don’t really believe it’ll be that simple, do you?”

Graver shrugged. He didn’t even know if what he had just said was that simple. If he had thought about it for ten minutes he might have said something else. If he had this same conversation half an hour from now, he wasn’t sure it would be anything like it was now. Maybe if there was one thing he did know it was that nothing that had happened to him in the last year was “that simple,” least of all what was happening to him now.

“You know,” Arnette said, a kind of smile softening her face, “I’ve been in this business so long… Most of the people in this work, when you get to know them well enough, have an element of the unchaste about them, at some level or other. Even the bureaucrats who don’t actually get their hands dirty in the real blood and earth of the business.” She narrowed her eyes in thought “It has something to do with secrets, it seems, with dealing in secrets. You know, it’s like trafficking in the power of the Holy Ghost It’s not something a person ought to do. But a person has proclivities… in that direction, I mean toward ‘uncleanliness,’ as the old Hebrews used to say. A person has proclivities, so he gravitates to a business that has the appearance of respectability, but which allows him all manner of vicarious indulgences… in the name of something higher, something cleaner. Very common men and women get into this work. It’s almost a stereotype of the profession. The ordinary, workaday fellow, the ‘invisible’ plodder who years later, well into his retirement, is revealed to have been a longtime ‘famous spy.’ “She stopped. “But if you really dissect him, psychologically I mean, this banal old man, he is anything but benign. His perversity is only more cleverly dissembled. He’s uncanny, disguising his moral petulance as a virtue.”

She smoked a moment more and Graver waited, knowing all of this was prologue, watching her, suddenly and strangely aware of the extreme nature of this profession and how quickly logical steps could take you, one at a time, to such outrageous places.

“Except you, Marcus,” she continued. “I’ve known you a good while now, longer than many. But I’ve never sensed any perversity in you at all. And I can tell you, dear, I look for it. Oh, I look for it in everyone I have anything to do with.”

Her smile was very faint now, almost not there at all. Outside, the world seemed to be populated only by birds.

“It could be,” he said, “that you’ve never met anyone who was so adept at guile.”

It was a remark both cynical and self-condemning, one that Graver himself almost had come to believe. It was the kind of extreme thinking one came to when one began searching inside one’s self for the reasons for other people’s actions. Maybe it didn’t make sense, but for some people it was instinctive, and it took an equally extreme act of will not to believe that the search was justified.

Arnette studied him, the smoke coiling from the cigarette beside her gypsy face, so exotic in saffron, in the twilight.

“Well, it could be,” she drawled thoughtfully, her voice barely audible. Then stronger, her tone changing: “Anyway, this looks like a rough one, baby. I hope you’re ready for it.”