An Absence of Light

He parked in the gravel driveway, locked the car, and followed the sidewalk to the front porch. He had forgotten to leave on the front porch light, so he fumbled in the dark for the keyhole, finally found it, and let himself in, turning on the porch light behind him as he closed the door. He threw the dead bolt and took his suit coat off as he started up the stairs.

Throwing his coat on the unmade bed, he sat down and started taking off his shoes. He undressed, hanging his clothes in his closet across from Dore’s, the door of which he kept closed. Walking into the bathroom, he took off his underwear and kicked them into the clothes basket He took his swimsuit off the hook near the shower door and put it on, avoiding looking at himself in the mirrors. Grabbing a towel along with his goggles and lap watch, which he kept on a shelf near his washbasin, he walked out of the bathroom, removed his dress watch, tossed it on the bed, and started down the stairs. As he walked through the house, he turned on the lights and left them on behind him, through the main hallway, into the kitchen, and out into the back patio.

It was a simple pool, rectilinear, and long enough for lapping. Graver did not turn on the pool lights or the yard lights, though he could see the dial of the watch in the cast-off glow from the patio. The summer night air enveloped his bare skin like a warm breath as he walked to the edge of the pool, dropped his towel, and sat on the edge with his legs in the water as he pulled on his goggles. When they were in place, he slipped into the water which had a slightly cooler feel to it because of the passing rains. Normally, after soaking up the sun all day, it was as warm as a womb.

He swam forty minutes in the dark, the steady back and forth of his laps causing the waves in the water to rock the flappers in the skimmers, a gentle, hollow clapping that died out as it crossed the lawn to the hedges of honeysuckle and jasmine. He had done it so much he could tell within five minutes when he almost had swum his allotted time. Tonight he pushed himself a little more, added ten more minutes to the half hour and picked up the pace as well. When he finally finished, his lungs were sucking for air, and he had to hang on to the side of the pool a while before he could pull himself out.

Upstairs he changed into a pair of casual trousers and an old dress shirt, stepped into a pair of loafers, and went down to the kitchen. It was too late to cook anything, and nothing in the refrigerator looked good to him anyway. Bored with the prospect of eating, even though the laps always made him ravenous, he poured out a bowl of cereal, sliced thin slivers of a nectarine onto it, added milk, and sat down at the kitchen table to eat.

He didn’t know what to do with his thoughts. Not wanting to think about Tisler for a while, he tried to make his mind blank. It was an exercise in futility. His Weltanschauung was thoroughly Westernized, and a blank mind was not an easy thing to come by. His meditations tended more toward the baroque.

Finishing his cereal, he stood wearily and took his empty bowl to the sink and rinsed it out, opened the dishwasher, and put the bowl and spoon into the washer. Taking a glass from the cabinet, he ran water from the faucet and stood at the sink as he drank it, looking out at the back yard. He could see the pool, and here and there a few yards from its margins the silhouettes of sago palms and palmettos; and in the near-dark he could make out the lower boughs of the oaks, too, with Spanish moss hanging from them in cheerless festoons that he found somber even in the best of times and which he now regarded with a painful sadness.

Then he heard the doorbell ring.

Instinctively he looked at his watch; it was nearly twelve o’clock. He set the glass on the counter, grabbed the hand towel that hung on the cabinet and dried his hands as he walked down the hallway to the front door. The light was off in the entry, but the front porch light was still on, and he could see the fractured figure of a man through the beveled glass of the door. He didn’t readily recognize this Cubist silhouette. Tossing the hand towel over his shoulder, he threw the dead bolt and opened the door.

Chapter 6

Jack Westrate was standing in front of him, his hands jammed into his pockets, his dark silk suit rumpled, shirt collar and tie undone. He was several inches shorter than Graver with a body frame that brought to mind words like bulwark and redoubt. He was decidedly stout, but it was the kind of heaviness that suggested a hard aggressiveness. There was nothing at all soft about Jack Westrate, in either his manner or his appearance.

“We’d better talk,” he said and clamped his mouth shut, his long upper lip and dimpled lower lip clinched tightly in determination.