An Absence of Light

“Strasser. Strasser.” It was Victor Last, coming up behind Graver from the hangar where he was supposed to be holding the pilots and the two remaining clients. At the sound of his voice calling Strasser’s name, Graver felt as if he were enveloped in an insulting cold breath. He knew instantly. Betrayal was everywhere a popular sin.

“Two thirds of the money is still in the planes,” Last wheezed, jogging up beside them, glancing once awkwardly at Graver.

Strasser smiled benignly, the first time his face had shown any expression at all.

“Well, Vic, let’s just get it all out then,” he said. He looked at Graver. “I guess this is a surprise,” he said, tilting his head at Last.

“Yes, this is a surprise.” Graver turned to Last “How long have you been working for him, Victor? From the beginning?”

Last didn’t know exactly how to behave, at least he had enough scruples remaining in his soul to be ashamed. He mumbled something lame about it being “just business.”

“We wouldn’t have known where you were tonight if it hadn’t been for Vic,” Strasser explained. “He’s been carrying a couple of special frequency beepers. He kept one turned on all the time so we knew where you were. Then, when he was sure where the money was going to be, he turned on the second one. We just homed in.”

Strasser then turned and waved at the plane again and another man jumped out Strasser turned back to Last “Where’s the other plane?”

“Around behind the hangar. They pushed it around there.” Last was ingratiatingly eager to help. He didn’t look at Graver again. Like a lamprey, he was firmly attached to Strasser’s soft, hosting underbelly. Last was going to make enough from his usefulness in this affair to pull off his own bourgeois retirement.

“Take these guys around there,” Strasser said to Last, as the second man jogged up to join the man with the radio.

Graver turned and waved for Remberto and Murray to come over to him. He looked at Strasser.

“I’ve got to tell them what’s happening here.”

Strasser nodded, understanding.

When Remberto and Murray approached it was clear they recognized “Geis” too.

“This is Brod Strasser,” Graver said. Remberto and Murray shifted their eyes from Graver to Strasser who just stood there with his hands in his pockets as though he was waiting for an elevator to arrive. “Kalatis was ‘stealing’ this money from him. He’s apparently already squirreled away over one hundred million. There’s forty million over there,” he said, nodding his head toward the hangar. “Strasser’s people have Neuman, Ledet, my assistant from my office, and Ginette Burtell. He wants the money.”

“Ho-ly shit,” Murray swore.

Remberto looked at Strasser as if he had seen it all before. This was the drug business.

“Mr. Strasser,” one of Last’s helpers yelled, “it’s going to be easier to push the plane over there. It’s a small Mooney. We could use the spot from the chopper.”

Strasser turned and walked back to the helicopter and told the pilot to turn on the spotlight.

“Did you talk to Neuman?” Remberto asked quickly as Strasser stepped away.

“Yeah, I did. And to my assistant She was keeping Ginette Burtell at my house.”

“Then Strasser’s people are actually holding them?” Murray said.

Graver nodded. “I’m afraid so.”

As Strasser started back toward them they all turned and looked at the path of the spotlight shooting down between the two hangars and saw the three men turn the Mooney and then begin pushing it toward them between the two buildings.

“I see some bodies over there,” Strasser observed incidentally. “The guards?”

“Yeah,” Graver said. “One of them killed-”

The explosion was a double impact: the bomb and then the Mooney’s fuel tank, both combining into a mini-mushroom that lifted up between the two hangars, incinerating the plane, Strasser’s two men, and Last in a fluorescing orange flash. The blast also blew the thirteen million dollars high into the night sky so that when the mushroom burned itself out in midair in a matter of one or two seconds, the only fire in the sky was another cloud, a floating, drifting, fluttering cloud of burning money, individual bills flittering crookedly like falling leaves, leaves afire, an autumn of burning millions.

Everyone gaped in stupefaction at the incinerating fortune that hung in a slow descent like a star-burst of fireworks.

And then Strasser screamed:

“God Almighty! God damn his soul to bloody hell! The son of a bitch…”

Everyone had the same thought at the same instant: Kalatis’s guards had probably left bombs on all the planes. All of the pilots had been doomed the moment they unloaded their planes and flew away. Kalatis had come close to making a clean sweep.

“The Pilatus,” Strasser croaked. When the Pilatus blew, it would take the van with it Forty million up in flames.