An Absence of Light

Chapter 83

Graver rounded the far end of the pool and started the last half of his final lap. He was up to forty minutes, and by the time his right arm had completed its stroke and his left hand touched the edge of the pool, his heart was banging against the walls of his chest like a diesel-driven piston.

He jerked his goggles off his head and hung on to the edge of the pool, wheezing for air. Even though he couldn’t have gone another lap the workout felt good. As he rested, the late August sun warmed the top of his wet head and burned its way into the muscles of his shoulders like a heat lamp. He waited for his heart and lungs to regain their equilibrium as he felt his body being moved gently by the water that was slowly settling from the disturbance of his laps.

As he sucked in the heavy afternoon air, he stared across the hot green lawn broken by scattered sago palms and let his thoughts return for the thousandth time to the recent events and their aftermath.

The mandatory suspension imposed for the duration of the investigation should have been a blessing, an opportunity to relax, to recoup his sapped energies, and to think. But it didn’t work out that way. Though the media had been sluggish in connecting all the dots at the beginning, they made up for lost time after the calamity at Bayfield. The investigative reporters in every branch of the media suddenly came alive, and within a week “new leads” were breaking every day and continued to break through the blistering months of July and August.

The withering media assault effectively shut down the Criminal Intelligence Division, and the complexities of what had happened during those five hot days in June promised an extended investigation.

Graver’s report to the special investigating commission had been lengthy and detailed, exceptionally detailed. During the entire period he had been able to account for almost every hour of his time. He had outlined the labyrinth of relationships among the players, pulling no punches for those under his command-or for himself-for not having detected anything amiss despite his having designed a new counterintelligence program two years earlier that had been intended to prevent just such breaches. He had provided names, linkages, information to enable the commission to subpoena entire computer programs from DataPrint and Hormann Plastics and Gulfstream National Bank and Trust, and provided complete copies of Dean Burtell and Bruce Sheck’s computer and microfilm accounts of their involvement. The detail-and amount of detail-had required nearly two weeks of assisted accumulation before the administration could even reach the point that they could suspend him and the commission’s work could begin. Then he walked out of the office and went home.

The only thing that presented a problem was the involvement of Arnette Kepner and her people. Graver had refused to disclose her as a source and, much to his surprise and gratification, so had Casey Neuman and Paula Sale. Though they also had been suspended for the duration of the investigation, their silence was an extraordinary vote of confidence. There would be a way, of course, to resolve the problem. There always was with bureaucracies, especially bureaucracies that relied on secrets to assure their own survival.

That was almost two months ago. He swam twice every day. He drank more wine than he should have, but not too much. He gained weight, but not more than he needed to. His supporters within the Department kept him apprised of the rumors and, when they could, the actual facts. Apparently Westrate had rolled over immediately and had offered up Graver’s career to mollify the fury of the bureaucrats for the shame the Department was suffering under the cloud of scandal. In all likelihood, Graver’s career was gone. The fate of Neuman and Paula was less clear; their futures were still in the balance.

He never heard a word from Arnette. That was expected; that was as it should be. It was a tough business and certain things were understood. By helping him as she had, she had gone way beyond the understood rules of the game. Her silence now was nothing more than self-preservation. She would have expected the same from Graver.

But Graver was a realist and already had accepted the inevitable; he didn’t need to wait for a sitting special commission verdict to know that eventually he would be relieved of his position. He would be lucky if he was allowed part of his pension. He spent most of his time, however, brooding over the events of those few days. The days passed one into the other without distinction as he replayed the mistakes, the disappointments, the bad luck.

All the dying had haunted him.

It would have been easy to blame it on others, on Panos Kalatis and Brod Strasser and their unconscionable commerce in the chemistry of sour dreams, their traffic in a merchandise that commanded unspeakable fortunes. It would have been easy to blame it on the businessmen like Faeber and Hormann and the nameless “clients” whose greed was so vast and dark it blotted out the light of common decency.

But in all honesty, he couldn’t shift the blame so easily. He could have avoided much of the killing if he had kept strictly to his business of gathering intelligence. That’s what he told himself on some days. On other days he told himself something quite different. On those days when he counted the deaths over and over again, it seemed to him that everyone who had died would have died anyway, regardless of what he had done. Their fate had been cast in a game of chance that had been designed and put into play by Kalatis and Strasser, a game that already had run a long course and was just coming to a conclusion as Graver stumbled upon it in its closing hours. Despite what he might think he could have done, it had been out of his control all along. No matter what he could have done Kalatis still would have disappeared with a hundred million dollars. Strasser still would have flown away with twenty-two million in crumbs. Neither man would miss a beat marketing drugs. They simply would move to new venues. They would surround themselves with a different cast of bit players, and in no time at all the river of sour dreams would resume its flow, swollen to its banks with wrecked hopes and the human flotsam of their trade.

As for those two nebulous personalities, little was said in the news reports. Their names appeared only twice and both times only in passing and in the context of rumors. Graver heard that a couple of men from the State Department had been in town for a few days, and after that Kalatis and Strasser were pushed out of the picture altogether by stories of Art Tisler having been selling CID intelligence for sex. Kinky sex and crooked cops were a jazzier story and pushed simple greed completely out of the headlines.

“Fed Ex,” Lara said, coming out the back door of the house. She was wearing her swimsuit, carrying her towel and a large envelope.

Graver pulled himself out of the pool, shook off the water, and walked over to the wrought-iron table and chairs and picked up his towel. He dried off, watching Lara walk toward him across the grass. She handed the envelope to him by slapping it against his stomach. He took it as she tossed her towel on one of the chairs, walked to the edge of the pool, and dove in.

Graver looked at the sender’s address. It had originated in Houston. He opened one end of the envelope and slipped out three eight-by-ten colored photographs and a handwritten note on a single sheet of paper.

Joel stayed with him until she had been able to obtain one of the foreign account numbers. Within forty-eight hours of getting the last one, I had all the money, and she had finished her job. She was a good and faithful servant.

I thought you would like to know.

“Geis”

Graver looked at the first photograph. It had been taken while the photographer was standing over Kalatis’s nude body. He was lying on his stomach on a poolside lounge, his head turned to the side with his arms under his head as though he were asleep. A shiny piece of silver metal, about two inches long, was resting horizontally on the back of his neck.

The second photograph was a picture of the metal pin pulled halfway out of Kalatis’s neck. Proof that it had been driven home.

The third photograph was a clinical close-up of the entry wound, the pin still in place.

Graver put the photographs back into the envelope, and thought of the innocuous figure of Strasser standing on the tarmac, looking like an overworked traveling salesman.

“What was that?” Lara asked. She was in the water at the end of the pool where he had been, her arms resting on the side of the pool as she pushed her wet hair away from her face.

“Just more stuff about the investigation,” Graver said. “People still trying to tie up loose ends.”

He looked at the note. “She was a good and faithful servant.” The past tense of the verb was significant.

Perhaps Satan had in fact stepped out of that black helicopter that night at Bayfield. Graver’s mistake had been that he never had been able to think in dark enough terms to have had any real understanding of what it was he had been dealing with. Arnette had hinted as much. Instead of thinking in terms of data or kilos or dollars, instead of thinking in terms of bits of information or accumulative intelligence, he should have been thinking in less tangible terms. He should have viewed his work, at bottom, as a struggle of abstractions.

His career had been devoted to shedding light on a subject of mystery, to illuminating the darkness through knowledge, albeit secret knowledge. He thought now that he had had the right objective all those years, but he had employed the wrong technique in trying to achieve it And maybe, even, he had been looking in the wrong places for the answers. Perhaps it was not the business of shedding light on people’s deeds that he should have been concerned with, because, after all, when light arrived the essence of darkness was changed; it was no longer darkness. It seemed to him that he was arriving too late in the sequence of events. Perhaps he should have been trying to understand, instead, the character of darkness itself, and what it was that happened when men’s desires were shaped and formed in an absence of light.