An Absence of Light

“No, this is not the Third World, my friend,” Kalatis assented. His voice was patient, his manner polite. “But what you don’t understand yet is that you are no longer in the First World either. Or the Second. When you got involved in this work, Faeber, you got yourself into a different world altogether. I tried to tell you this, remember? This world is the same all over the globe. Believe me. You will not survive if you do not grasp that completely… and quickly.”

Faeber looked at Kalatis and in the pale glow coming from across his shoulder from the house above them Kalatis could see the other man’s eyes shift ever so slightly away from him as he looked at the woman on the veranda beyond. Kalatis smiled to himself. He had been waiting for that Men, even intelligent men, perhaps especially intelligent men, were such predictable animals. There were very few who could have kept their eyes off that veranda. He had known men who, even when they knew they were about to die in the next few moments, would have had to look at that veranda.

With a blink Faeber quickly brought his eyes back to Kalatis, but the Greek had looked down toward the dock so that Faeber would not detect that he had been caught stealing a look at Jael.

“You said there were two things that bothered you,” Faeber said.

“Graver.”

“Oh?”

“I have taken the time to study him in a little more depth than what was provided in the dossier you gave me,” Kalatis said. “You know, he could be an easy man to underestimate. This is a serious thing, for him to conduct an inquiry. He will not be so easy to deceive.”

“No,” Faeber agreed. “I think you’re right there, but we’ve got a bit of luck on our side-in the timing here. These are not good times for Graver. He’s had distractions lately.”

“You mean because of his wife.”

“That’s right Your wife runs off with a society doctor it tends to break your concentration.”

“That’s not quite accurate.”

“Okay, she had a long affair with the doctor, and now she’s left Graver to marry the guy. The thing is, this doctor’s a gadfly, this has been in the gossip columns for Christ’s sake. Graver’s a very private kind of man. It’s got to be driving him nuts.”

“Yes,” Kalatis said. “I can imagine how he must feel.”

Down on the docks a man laughed softly, and feet shifted on the planks. Kalatis had spent many nights listening to waiting men talk. They smoked; they talked softly about everything from sex to death; they waited for signals; they waited for something to make their adrenaline squirt and shock them to life. When Kalatis was young he was one of those men, but now he was the one they waited for. Men had waited in the darkness for him all over the world, and he had learned that the feel of night was different everywhere, different in Trieste than in Prague, different in Lima than in Lisbon, different in New Orleans than Milan. But the darkness, well, the darkness was always the same.

“Then is there something specific you think I should do?” Faeber asked.

“No.” Kalatis dug his toes into the moist grass. “I only recommend that you second-guess yourself every time your heart beats. You know what must happen and what must not happen.” There was a pause, but Faeber said nothing. “Okay,” Kalatis said.

He whistled once sharply, and the murmuring voices stopped. Suddenly there was the sound of hurried footsteps on the pier, something bumped against the metal pontoons of the plane, and then the engine coughed and caught.

“They will take you back to Clear Lake and then drive you into the city.”

Faeber seemed suddenly uncertain, hesitant to leave as though he thought he had missed something, some instruction, something more specific. Kalatis only looked at him in silence knowing that with the pale light coming from Kalatis’s back Faeber could see little more of his features than his silhouette.

After an awkward moment, Faeber turned away and headed down the slope to the pier. Kalatis watched him and then when the darkness had covered him he listened to his choppy footsteps descending the stairs, his stride changing as he got to the dock and headed toward the plane.

Kalatis sucked his lungs full of the smell of the Gulf of Mexico and shrugged his shoulders forward to stretch his back muscles. He waited there on the sloping lawn while the moorings were untied from the plane and its engines slowly revved and whipped the water as it pulled away from the dock. Moving out into the Gulf, it picked up speed and then the pilot bore down on the throttle and the engines whined and beat the night air and in a moment it was airborne, climbing into the spangled black, its receding lights eventually becoming indistinguishable from the stars. He lost sight of it and even lost the sound of it as the surf reclaimed its rhythm on the night.