An Absence of Light

“But your instincts were right about one thing,” she said. “Somebody else hasn’t stepped out of the shadows yet. I’m guessing, too, that Tisler, Besom, and Dean could have ID’d that somebody else, and he, whoever he is, has benefited from their deaths as much as Kalatis has. Maybe he’s safe now. Unless you come up with something.”

She gestured at him with her cigarette.

“You can do two things. Bury it as long as you can while you keep hammering away at it on your own. Or write a goddamned elaborate, thesis-sized document about everything that’s happened in the last three days since Arthur Tisler turned up dead.” She stopped. “You did keep a personal log.”

Graver nodded.

“Okay, good. Write it just exactly the way it happened, detailing what you did and why-leaving me out, of course-giving them everything in chronological order. Bypass Westrate and give it to Hertig. Let him decide for you. That’s his goddamned job.”

She stared at him, a small, wiry woman of dusky complexion and murky past, who at too young an age had had to learn to make hard choices, not the least of which was to remain in a profession that demanded hard choices of her as a matter of course. Having done so, she had discovered too late that living with such decisions was altogether another proposition from making them. It was the former that had aged her. But for a long time now she no longer flinched at having to make gut-wrenching decisions. She made them and then did battle with her conscience afterward and in private. These were the true ugly confrontations, she once admitted to him, facing yourself, being your own judge and jury-and, someday, if it became necessary, hangman.

“We did some checking into Gulfstream Bank,” she said, interrupting Graver’s silence. “Did you know the bank is only six years old? I’d guess that maybe seven years ago Kalatis conducted a kind of market survey of Southern cities. I don’t know what his criteria might have been, but Houston seems to have fit the bill for whatever it was he wanted to do. Now that’s long-term planning. When you think about it, this ‘project’ has consumed the greater part of a decade of Kalatis’s life. That gives you some indication of the volume of money at stake here. It’s got to be colossal.”

She shook her head, staring at Graver, studying him though her thoughts were wandering.

“You know, more and more this business scares the shit out of me. Guys like Kalatis and Strasser, there are no limits, just no damn limits. They’re like a rogue government that commands a fortune but has no physical territory, has no constituency except its victims, no raison d’etre except greed.” She paused. “Makes you wonder if this is the future… bigger and bigger appetites, rapacious avarice.” She smiled cynically. “But I’m forgetting my history, aren’t I. All the way back to King Menes the Fighter.”

“Hermes Exports,” Graver said, as if he hadn’t been listening to her.

“Yeah, we’re running them down, too. It looks like they sell to a hell of a lot of importers. They’re probably scattering cocaine all over the nation.”

“You think they’re ‘Reconstituting’ it all here, then shipping it out?”

“Why would they? If the stuff ships safely, why not let it go on?”

“Then the process can’t be that difficult.”

“I imagine Strasser’s chemists have trained people… all over the place. Besides, the drug business, working with that shit, doesn’t take a big brain. You could almost train an orangutan to do it Sanitation and precise-ness are not exactly the hallmarks of a good drug processor.”

Graver let his eyes fall to the steno pad. He wanted to ask her to run a computer check on Victor Last to see if her data banks had anything he couldn’t get from his own source agencies, but something made him hold off.

“You’re cut off, aren’t you,” Arnette said, studying him. “Sheck would have been your next step. Failing that you could have hauled in Dean. That would have been a wild swing, but it would have been the only shot you had left if you wanted to stay hot” She smoked, studying him. “Now all you have is the prospect of a long, difficult investigation. No more sizzling fuse to follow to its source. You’re going to have to piece it together a fragment at a time, in the tried and true manner of intelligence work.”

He looked at her. She bent over the library table and mashed out her cigarette in the ashtray. Her fingernails were immaculate, no polish, precisely and smoothly filed to oval ends with narrow, bone-white outer margins. He chose his words carefully.

“I know it’s out of my territory,” he said, “and even out of my league, for that matter, but Kalatis is the only thing I can think about right now. For the present, he’s the only thing I care about, and a ‘long, difficult investigation’ is not going to get him.”

He saw a look of sober fear set in behind Arnette’s eyes.

“What the hell do you mean by that?” she asked.