An Absence of Light

Chapter 82

In late August the breezes that usually grace Italy’s Amalfi coast succumb to the late summer heat and grow weak and listless in the long afternoons. There is a villa there, the color of a fawn, wedged into the rocky coast above the Golfo di Salerno with a view that skirts the island of Capri and looks across the fifteen miles of the Tyrrhenian Sea to Sardinia. It is a jewel of a villa, with a terrace that hangs on the edge of the cliffs and from which the view of the blue, lively western Mediterranean stretches unmarred to the horizon.

Panos Kalatis lay naked on a deck lounge. He lay on his stomach, his arms folded under his head. He was marvelously tanned, his rakish graying hair combed straight back from his forehead. Twenty feet away the pool where he and Jael had been swimming sparkled in the sun that was halfway past meridian in the west.

Jael, also naked, was on her knees, straddling Kalatis. Deeply tanned, her long, wet hair was put up on the back of her head and held loosely in place with a hairpin. She had filled a cupped hand with oil and was rubbing it into his back with her long fingers. The smell of herbal oils heated by the sun against his back filled Kalatis’s nostrils with a fragrance as ancient as the Amalfi coast itself. As Jael massaged him and the sun warmed the muscles in his back, Kalatis felt the double lobes of her buttocks rocking back and touching his own as she moved up and down his spine with her oily hands.

Kalatis grew languid, allowing himself that lightweighted feeling of drifting, a slight sense of arousal at the touch of Jael’s soft inner thighs against his sides.

Watching her own shadow on the tile terrace, Jael paused and reached up and took the thick hairpin out of her long hair. She shook it loose until it hung straight and untangled, almost to the middle of her back.

Taking the thick pin in her left hand, she lightly touched the point of it at a precise spot between the second and third vertebrae of Kalatis’s spine at the base of his skull. She angled the pin upward slightly and then, with the palm of her right hand, she smacked the wide haft of the pin, driving the stainless steel shaft straight into his spinal cord. She sat back on his buttocks until his legs had ceased quivering, and he was still.