An Absence of Light

Chapter 63

By the time Graver got to La Facezia, he was nearly twenty minutes late. He parked a half block away, locked the car, and walked back on the sidewalk under the shade of the catalpa trees, a welcome shelter from the mid-morning sun. The temperature already had climbed into the upper eighties and surely would not stop until it reached the mid nineties.

The tables under the arbor on the sidewalk were popular this morning, and the patio doors were thrown open so that the dining room was open to the shady cool. As Graver suspected, Last was not among the sidewalk coffee drinkers. He went through one of the iron gates, under the arbor, and into the dining room which retained a cavernous coolness, its three sets of French doors allowing a wash of arbor-muted morning brightness into the big room.

As Graver walked through one of the French doors that opened obliquely into the dining room, he paused a moment to let his eyes adjust from the glare of the street There were a few diners, and he could hear a murmur of conversation and the clinking of tableware. One of the waitresses whisked by him with a tray of coffee and croissants on her way to the sidewalk tables. “Please, anywhere you wish,” she said in passing, and following that he heard Last’s relaxed, mellow English.

“Right here, Marcus.”

Graver turned to his right and made out Last’s shadow ghost sitting at one of the more choice tables, next to a window with a thick stone sill. An iron grille covered the window and a lacework of ivy covered the iron, forming a delicate panel of privacy separating them from the tables outside like the screen in a confessional. Graver walked to the table and sat down.

“This is untypical,” Last observed. “So late.”

“I couldn’t help it,” Graver said. “You’ve seen the papers?”

“Oh yes. I gathered as much.”

One of the waitresses came and took Graver’s order for coffee.

“Okay,” Graver said. “Let’s hear it” He was in no mood for pleasantries, and he wanted Last to know that Last nodded.

“Of all the stuff I’d told you before,” Last said, “I left out something… rather central.”

“Really?” Graver couldn’t resist a note of sarcasm.

“What I didn’t tell you was, I’ve been boffing Mrs. Faeber almost from the beginning.”

Graver looked at him. “Okay.”

“This is a lonely woman, Marcus. I knew it from the moment I met her.” Last paused to sip his own coffee when the girl brought Graver’s. “I saw opportunity there… one way or the other. They had money; I had… artifacts. Surely we could work out something, I thought. But Rayner-Mrs. Faeber-was, is, a sexually aggressive woman and ‘Colin,’ apparently, has the sexual curiosity of a sheet of paper. By the time they left Mexico that first time we met, Rayner and I had… connected, so to speak.” He paused to light a cigarette. “This woman, Graver, I tell you she’s insatiable. I’ve never seen anything like it. Do you know that-?”

“Victor, I don’t want to hear it. You know what I do want to hear.”

Last paused and looked at Graver across the table. Graver’s eyes had adjusted to the low light now, and he saw Last’s handsome face with its glory of wrinkles, battle scars from his encounters with the bottle and from sleepless nights in bordellos, from the anxiety of a life of fleecing and deception, from the punishing pleasures and constant disquiet of silk-sheet adulteries, from never being sure of anything except the assurance that nothing was sure. He was smiling slightly, a smile that was at once boyish and wizened. He looked like a man who, on the brink of finally having to admit to himself that he had pissed away the better part of a lifetime with nothing to show for it, had spotted one more long shot-a good one this time-and was about to put everything he had left into the wager.

“Marcus, I was with Rayner last night She told me an incredible story. I think it has enormous potential.”

“You said you could ‘deliver Faeber’s ass.’”

“Better than that. I think… if we give it some thought… we can put our hands on Kalatis.”