An Absence of Light

Chapter 64

Panos Kalatis leaned against the door of his bedroom and looked out across the veranda through the white heat of the sunlight to the murky waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Wearing only his white pajama trousers, he was barefoot and shirtless, his well-tanned barrel chest thrust out in general defiance. He was smoking his first cigar of the day, and he was worried.

Behind him, Jael lay across their bed, nut brown and naked, stretching her long limbs in the warm, late morning breeze that blew in through the veranda doors from the Gulf. Occasionally the squeal of a seagull broke the silence that was otherwise only interrupted by the wash of the water on the beach below and the rustling of the palm fronds moved by the breeze.

Kalatis was worried because his chief security officer had caused him to be awakened at eleven o’clock, thinking it unwise to allow him to go another hour without knowing of the explosion at the South Shore Marina. Though he had cut off all communication with Sheck and Burtell, his men had tried to renew them since news of the explosion this morning and had had no success. Kalatis had something to think about.

“Panos,” Jael said from behind him, her voice throaty from sleep. “Panos.”

He turned a little and looked over his shoulder. She was an absolute marvel. He knew of nothing more heightening to a sexual experience than sleeping with a woman who knew how to kill you in five different languages. A woman like this one. He could not get enough of this woman; he was capable of watching her for long periods of time in much the same way that an animal trainer might watch a prized cat, just for the pure pleasure of enjoying the incomparable marriage of sinew and movement. Her beauty was so unaffected and powerful that it nullified the dimension of danger she occupied, or rather transformed it, so that the violence of which she was capable was no longer a thing to be feared, but to be appreciated, if not altogether desired.

And he liked the way she said “Panos.”

Nevertheless, he turned his back to her and squinted at the eye-watering brightness of the Gulf. Colin Faeber had been trying to get in touch with him. No doubt he had heard of the explosion too and was in a state of panic. Kalatis decided his best course of action with Faeber was simply never to see or speak to him again. Though Faeber had been one of the few people who had been to Kalatis’s beach house without having been presented with the pretense that he was being taken out of the country, he always had been brought there at night and still was deceived as to its true location. But he knew Kalatis was not in Mexico; he knew Kalatis lived as close as an hour’s flight. No, Kalatis did not want to see Faeber again-ever.

The explosion in the harbor had disturbed a very tightly scheduled series of events and possibly had ruined the rest of Kalatis’s program. Possibly. Now he had to decide whether he thought he could salvage all of it, or whether he thought he should cut his losses. That would mean passing up nearly forty million dollars, and that kind of money was worth considerable risk.

But, there was considerable risk. Not the least of which was continuing his plan without knowing who was responsible for the explosion. Was this an accident? Burtell and Sheck were almost surely killed in that fire, since it was their habit to meet on Burtell’s boat If they were, what kind of a coincidence was that? None, he was sure. Kalatis had planned and escaped too many intrigues to believe in coincidence. Coincidence was a thing that occurred so rarely that he considered it almost an apocryphal concept. Like the unicorn, it was an idea of fools and romantics. As an explanation for anything as concrete as an explosion, it was a delusion.

He had so little time left-he was beginning his last day of collections-that it was hardly worth the effort of putting into operation any kind of serious investigation. His best course of action was to try and speed up the collection process which was, as always, to take place late at night and in the early morning hours. Now he had his people getting in touch with the three remaining clients, trying to arrange their appointments for earlier in the evening or, even better, late in the afternoon. This change would be catching his clients by surprise, and they would surely have procedural adjustments to bring about before they could comply with his request All of this was to be negotiated during the next three or four hours. By daylight the next morning, Panos Kalatis would have disappeared off the face of the earth.

Of course, there was the possibility that Sheck, or even Burtell, had enemies Kalatis knew nothing about The explosion did not necessarily have to do with him or with their relationship to him. There was no way of knowing who Sheck might have angered and for what reasons. It could be that this had nothing to do with Kalatis at all.

But Kalatis had not remained alive all these years by keeping faith with “possibilities” and “could be’s.” He had remained alive because at the slightest hint of the inconsistent or the inexplicable, he vanished. He did not wait for explanations. They would come eventually, but when they did Kalatis would be somewhere safe to hear them out. A man without a sixth sense was a dead man.

Thus his thoughts turned to Graver. Kalatis was well aware of Graver’s friendship with Dean Burtell, but he had seen big money come between friendships before-it was almost the rule-and he had fully intended to cause such a breach-to his benefit-when he had offered Burtell the five-hundred-thousand-dollar retirement fund. That had been Tuesday night. Now it was Thursday morning, and he had heard not a word from Burtell. He had been willing to bet that the intervening silence was good news. Burtell, it seemed to him, was no less venal than all the other people whose loyalties he paid for every day of the week. He believed he had made a sound investment.

But with Burtell’s death, all bets were off. He knew Graver well enough to know what to expect. If Graver didn’t already know Kalatis was involved with one of his men, he would know soon enough. It was time to stop calculating and start moving.

Standing in the doorway thinking of these things, he flinched only a little when the two bare arms reached around his chest, and he felt Jael’s breasts against the middle of his back, felt her pelvis tuck into his buttocks.

“What are your thought?” she asked in her accented and ungrammatical English.

Kalatis did not respond immediately. He was always polite to her, even kind, even indulgent, but he was never tender. He really did think of her as a cat. You kept it well fed and well groomed. You could scratch it and rub it, give it small pleasures, but you must never become its friend. You must never display a regard that hinted you would make any sacrifice, however small or insignificant, on its behalf. It was not a relationship that accommodated friendship.

So he ignored her because he did not want to be bothered at that moment He smoked and shrugged her off irritably. She backed away, and in the silence behind him he heard the soft crunching of the mattress as she returned to the bed and the cool Egyptian cotton sheets. He had to think, not of her, but of himself. He had to make sure he was doing the right thing, dispensing with the right people, setting into motion the right timing.

In reviewing his plans there was nothing he regretted. Well, perhaps walking away from the house in Bogota. And leaving forever the dusky loins of Colombia’s remarkable women. That he truly would regret But as for the rest of it, he gave nothing else a second thought He had done it often enough for it to be almost familiar. In fact, all those Spartan vanishments over the years-those times when he had built a full life and then one day, because of a telephone call or a three-word note slipped under his door or a notice in the personals column of the newspaper, he closed the door behind him and walked away into another life leaving the alarm clock still set for the next morning-all of those Spartan disappearances when he left a life with only the clothes on his back to accompany him were like dress rehearsals for this final one in which he was taking as much of the world with him as he could possibly manage. His new life would be his last life. He did not intend to disappear ever again, nor did he intend to start all over with nothing, as he had every time before. This final time he would have millions, scattered over the globe in a dozen caches protected by codes and ciphers and shielded accounts. The plan was elaborate, extensive, with dozens of people needed to bring it to its conclusion, but in the end, after a lengthy unfolding, there would be only himself, walking through a doorway alone, to a new life. For the last time.