An Absence of Light

She smoked. With her long braid, laced with silver strands and draped over one shoulder of her lemon silk blouse, with her gypsy complexion and straight, sharp-ridged nose, Arnette Kepner was a creature created by the dappled world of secrecy, every kind of secrecy, personal and professional, individual and governmental, official and unofficial. There was as much of her in the shadow as in the light, and that which was in the light never revealed so much as it implied. Arnette had been a long time in the deception game. It had affected her physiognomy, or the aura that surrounded it.

“The thing about Kalatis,” she continued, “is that because he’s a loner, there are fewer layers of small-timers between him and the dirty work. He’s close. Just around the corner.” She paused, and her voice assumed a note of calculation. “My advice: get your hands on one of the small-timers. Take them into a room and don’t come out until you have the person above them. Get your hands on that person and do the same thing with them. Two, three ‘interviews’ like that and you’ll be close enough to smell him.”

Graver sipped the coffee and nodded, watching her. Jesus.

“What about Dean’s contact at the fountain? What in the hell do you think he’s doing?”

“Marcus, I told you I thought this guy looked like government, didn’t I?” Arnette said, tapping an ash off her cigarette into the ashtray. “Well, we’re checking into that I’m trying to get wire photos of… relevant… CIA and FBI people.” She was being uncharacteristically evasive. “Luckily, this part of the business is relatively small. I should get something pretty quick.”

“This part?”

“The government doesn’t know how to handle people like Kalatis. There’s a lot of intelligence community overlapping. He’s a former foreign intelligence officer-that’s CIA. He’s probably working drugs-that’s DEA. Whatever he’s doing, he’s doing it Stateside-that’s FBI. So who gets him? CIA? DEA? FBI? Usually, everybody feels free to pursue their separate courses of inquiry.” She mashed out her cigarette in the ashtray. “And you know how well they cooperate with each other.”

“Then you think Dean is working for a government agency?”

“Well, not exactly.” Arnette lowered her eyes cautiously, and her thin fingers dropped to the ocher pack of cigarettes. She moved it a little, repositioned it, stood it on its side, stood it on its bottom. “The question is, does Dean know who he’s dealing with? What they’ve been doing, Marcus, is pretty far out It’s dirty. Being co-opted by the bad guys is pretty… sleazy. I don’t know who’s fooling whom here. I just think the guy’s got government written all over him… Dean has business with him… and they’re talking about Panos Kalatis.” She shrugged.

“Anyway,” she went on, “with Kalatis getting into the picture, this becomes business to me, too. It turns out Dean’s reference to Kalatis is the first action the intelligence networks have had on this guy in almost a year. This is a fantastic opportunity for me, for my business. I want to get all I can on him. Now that we’ve both got a stake in him, you won’t have to bear the whole financial burden. And the guy at the fountain. I want to know who the hell he is, too. There are some things I can do that you won’t have to pay for, and I’ll simply pass along what I can.”

Graver nodded.

She leveled her eyes on him. “And I’ll expect you to do the same,” she added.

Graver nodded again. “Sure, of course,” he said. “I appreciate it.” He straightened up in his chair, put his elbows on the table and held his head in his hands for a second and then dropped them.

“We could be making a big mistake here,” he said, looking at Arnette. “Why should we believe that the information behind lister’s bogus investigations has to be originating with Kalatis? What if they’re coming from the people at the fountain? What if the unknown is providing the information, not Kalatis?”

“We’re thinking Kalatis made the hits.”

“Based on this, yes,” Graver said, tapping the dossier. “But what if we’re wrong about that? Dean mentions Kalatis, but we don’t know in what context If we hadn’t heard his name, if we didn’t know he existed, wouldn’t we be assuming the guy at the fountain was behind all this? We’d almost have to be. This dossier may have thrown us off track.”

“Or put us on track,” Arnette countered, slipping another cigarette out of her pack. “We could have been making the wrong assumption. But, okay, let’s say we weren’t Dean is still talking to the guy at the fountain about Kalatis. Is he asking about Kalatis or reporting about him? Either way”-she waved the unlighted cigarette balanced between her thin fingers-”Kalatis is involved-somehow. Either way I can guarantee you’re going to be dealing with him.”