An Absence of Light

“I have to say,” she said in her unadorned and familiar California manner, “you did it up right, Panos. The logistics were handled beautifully. It relieved the nervousness of a couple of my clients when you sent people out there to work with their own security groups. I don’t normally travel with thirty-two million in cash. Everybody liked the way your people in Houston handled it.”

“I am delighted to hear it,” he said. “And I was also pleased that you were able to allay the fears of some members of your consortium.”

“When you’re working with eight different personalities, businessmen with strong egos, it takes patience and savvy-and you have to put up with a lot of shit-to get them to agree on anything,” she said, providing herself with a nice, oblique compliment.

Yes, Kalatis thought, but they finally agreed to cough up the cash, didn’t they. Ultimately greed, not Ms. Donata’s patience and savvy, got the best of them. The magnetism of the sexual appetite, Kalatis knew, was not even in the same league as the pull of greed. Offer a man a three hundred percent return on his investment, and he will follow you panting into hell for it If the percentage points are high enough, nothing is sacred, nothing is forbidden.

Kalatis looked at her with an expression of commiserate understanding.

“This kind of investment makes everyone… cautious… he said. “But you must remind your clients that this time we are buying in commodity volume. Metric tons. That is why their waiting time is shorter. They can check their accounts in sixty days.” He smiled. “I think they will be satisfied.”

“Have all of your consortia come through as you anticipated?*’ she asked.

It was a bit of a pushy question, but Kalatis wrote it off to her personality. She was, in short, a bitch.

“Exactly as anticipated, I am glad to say.” He held up one hand and counted them off by fingers, beginning with his thumb. “Chicago, Atlanta, Seattle, Miami, Washington, D.C., and”-he held up the index finger of the other hand-”New York. Everything as planned. No surprises. It took the better part of a year to arrange this so that everyone who wished to participate could do so with as much assurance as possible.*’

“Does all the product come from the same region in Afghanistan?”

Ms. Donata was a curious woman, but he also thought she must find her role gratifying and rather found some adventure in using words like “product.” Well, she should be gratified. She had put together a collection of businessmen who twice before had trusted him with their millions. And now for the third time. She had been a very clever woman, the arrangements for this venture had been complex-by Kalatis’s design-but she had handled the negotiations astutely and creatively. Really an admirable achievement for such a young woman.

But in sixty days, Ms. Donata*s life would become a living hell. Everything she saw now, all that she had schemed for and accomplished through the shadow ways of Panos Kalatis, would vanish overnight, and she would be ruined.

So he did not mind indulging her sense of amusement at this time. It was like playing backgammon with a woman who, expecting to marry a prince in the morning, was unknowingly whiling away the last hours before her execution. There was a peculiar kind of stimulation that came from entertaining a woman whose imminent ruin was certain, but unknown to her. It gave her an air of fragility that he very much enjoyed. Yes, Ms. Donata had been a clever woman indeed, but she should have been a little cleverer still.

He told her glib lies of the mujahideen and poppies, of pack trains out of the mountains of the Badakhshan and Hazarajat, of Deh Khavak and Kamdesh and Asmar. He told her enough for her to believe that she could believe what she heard. He often saw this sort of worldly naivete in Americans who grew up in the United States and never left it, middle-class people who lived middle-class lives, and for whom an adventure was to move to a middle-class neighborhood in a different city. Having seen nothing of the world except the evening news, they were gullible and easily deceived. They might be well educated, as Ms. Donata surely was, but it was an education gotten among the homogeneity of people just like themselves. It was like being a well-educated sheep.

After a while the conversation turned to more benign topics, as a maid-Kalatis had thought that under the circumstances a woman was wanted for this job-brought out some small finger sandwiches and replenished their drinks. They talked of places they had traveled. They were killing time. Below them on the dock-there was the audible shuffling of feet and an occasional dull, hollow thunk as someone bumped a hull or pontoon-as the last twelve million dollars of her thirty-two million dollars in cash was being loaded from the plane to the cruiser. The previous twenty million dollars had been transferred in smaller increments during the course of the last few days.