An Absence of Light

The third picture was in color, but it was very grainy. Stamped: “Mexico City, 1982.” Raviv was walking along a residential street on a sidewalk next to a high wall. The second floor of a house with its red tile roof peeped up over the high wall. Raviv was wearing what appeared to be a light linen tropical suit, light shoes, and sunglasses. A bough of cerise bougainvillea was sagging over the top of the wall behind him. One hand-the one next to the whitewashed wall-was in his suit pocket while the other one, holding a cigarette, was in midair leaving his mouth where he had apparently just puffed on the cigarette. A foggy plume of smoke made a blurred spot in front of his face. He was alone and looking directly at the photographer, though Graver assumed the picture had been shot from a clandestine position. Raviv was looking straight into the lens with the considered suspicion of a wolf who had sensed something that his senses could not confirm. Graver laid the three photographs side by side and looked at them again, each in turn, slowly. Then he picked them up, put them back into the glassine envelope, gathered together the pages, straightened them, placed everything back in the folder and closed it.

Chapter 42

When Arnette came back into the library, she was carrying two cups of fresh coffee. She was wearing common Vietnamese street clothing, a lemon, loose-fitting silk blouse with high collar and long sleeves and baggy white silk trousers. Without saying a word, she put one cup of coffee in front of Graver and went around to the other side of the table and sat down, placing her own cup on the table in front of her along with the ever present ocher pack of foreign cigarettes. She unhurriedly slipped a cigarette from the pack and lit it, looked at the thick dossier, and then at Graver as she exhaled the smoke.

“This is becoming a goddamned nightmare,” Graver said, taking a drink of coffee. He needed the caffeine. He needed a jolt of something undeniably simple and immediately apprehensible.

“I’ll have to say… this is extraordinary,” Arnette said. “And it’s big. There’s no need in pretending it isn’t.

Graver nodded at the dossier. “You think this guy’s back with the Mossad?”

“There’s no way of knowing about that,” Arnette said, shaking her head. “There never is.” She reached down to one end of the table and dragged the glass ashtray over in front of her. “We just have to go with the record in the file. Let’s say he’s not. In this case that actually seems to fit With no system behind him he is even more dangerous. An organization-no matter how secret it might be-always has records, someone’s personal diary, something tucked away in a vault for posterity, something to set the record straight someday. People can’t help themselves it seems, most people anyway. But Kalatis isn’t one of those people.” She looked at the folder and shook her head again. “To a guy like that, other people-and organizations-are a liability. On his own he’s not going to leave much of a trail. Most of the time he’s not going to leave one at all.”

They stared at each other for a moment.

“You think he killed Tisler and Besom.”

“I think…” She pondered the question a moment “Yeah”-she began to nod-”yeah, I think you ought to make that assumption.”

“Christ.” Graver looked away, let his eyes wander around the walls of books.

“They could have been doing anything, Marcus,” she said. “Those investigations, Probst, Friel, the other one… Seldon… If Dean was fabricating the sources but had good information, then someone-Kalatis-was feeding them the information. Kalatis had inside knowledge, and it served his purposes, somehow, to have them go down. So he gave Dean the cases, and together with Besom and Tisler they made them look like they’d done the investigations.”

“I don’t see how Besom fit into it,” Graver said and then, without waiting for her to respond, tacked in another direction. “They were doing it for money, a lot of money.”

“Yeah,” Arnette said, “I think you’re right Money is the whole story here.” She gestured at Graver with the hand holding the cigarette. “I said you should assume Kalatis killed Tisler and Besom… or was responsible for it You can also assume that you’ve probably stumbled onto the outer edges of a damned big operation. The people mentioned in that dossier, all of them are in business to turn hundreds of millions… per deal. They may have half a dozen deals going. Drugs. Arms. Information. Those are the big three. But to make those millions, and at the same time keep themselves in the background, they have to rely on a spider’s web of small-timers. And they will mix as readily with these little guys as they will the money barons or Third World bosses or junta generals. They need them. Like all clever people, they know they can’t be powerful unless they’re surrounded by weakness.”