An Absence of Light

Surrounding them here and there as if in a museum were glass cases with pre-Columbian Mexican statuettes in the Remojadas style from Veracruz, life-sized stone masks in the Classic Teotihuacan style, and ceramics of every sort, including tripods decorated in the carved relief technique as well as Thin Orange ware. Weaving from the Guatemalan highlands hung on other walls, huipiles and caries and cintas in the brilliant, exploding colors of the Indian imagination. There were black and white photographs in thin black frames, Arnette on a bridge in Vienna, Arnette and Mona in a restaurant in Buenos Aires and at a cafe table in Montevideo, three people with no identification standing on the front porch of a cabin surrounded by aspens, a cur with three legs and a ribbon tied around his neck somewhere in Latin America.

Arnette tucked one of her legs up under her and sat back on the sofa, smiling at him.

“God, baby, it’s really good to see you,” she said. “I told Mona you were coming. She’ll be over after a while, if that’s all right with you.”

“Sure, I’d love to see her,” Graver said. Mona Isaza was Arnette’s companion. They had met when Arnette had spent a year in Mexico City in the early 1970s and had been together ever since. She lived in one of the houses next door.

“How have things been with you, anyway?” Arnette asked, still smiling, seeming to relish his being there.

“Busy,” he said and left it at that. Normally he would have brought her up to date on everyone, but he was sure she knew of his recent divorce, and he saw no reason to go into it. But if he mentioned the twins it would be uncomfortable to leave the subject of Dore just hanging there, so he chose not to say anything about any of them. “Just like everyone else.”

“When are you going to get out of this work?” she asked. “If I calculate right, this is your twenty-third year with the department… fourteen in that wretched intelligence maze.”

“Yeah, well, I’m going for twenty-five. Better benefits.”

“That suits you, huh?”

Graver shrugged. “Mixed feelings.”

“Oh, hell, that’s the business, isn’t it? Mixed feelings are the least of it. Everything else leaves a scab of some sort.”

Graver nodded.

She looked at him a moment in silence, and her smile softened. She could tell he was in no mood for visiting.

“You’ve got something on your mind.”

“I need some help.”

“Good.”

“Unofficially.”

“Oh.”

“Not for me, personally, it’s for the department, but I’m the only one who’s going to know about it.”

“Uh-oh. You’ve got internal problems.”

“I think it’s bad.”

“Jesus.”

“I need you to do twenty-four hours on Dean Burtell and his wife.”

Arnette thrust her head forward, her eyes wide open. “Burt-tell? Goddamn!”

Graver took the better part of an hour to tell her what had happened during the last two days. He told her everything. While he was talking she got up and lighted a joss stick and set it aside, the incense curling up into the twilight above them. Outside the birds were boisterous and shrill.

“The thing is,” Graver said after a while, “I’ve decided that I don’t want to turn this over to anyone just yet. I don’t want to go to anyone in the department, not even IAD. And I don’t want to go outside-DA’s office or FBI-until I know more about what I’ve got here.”

Arnette was sitting with one leg tucked up under her as before, the room now filled with the smoke of sandalwood. It was the waft of conspiracy, and Graver wondered if the fragrance put Arnette’s mind in the way of contrivance and secrecy, the way a mantra called to mind a meditative discipline. He was afraid she was going to say something about Burtell, but she was more savvy than that and, to Graver’s relief, stuck to the immediate business.

“Afraid they’ll cut you out?”

“I think it’s a distinct probability.”

She thought a minute. “I’m sorry if I sound… mercenary, but if this is an ‘unofficial’ contract, how am I going to get paid? This is going to take a lot of people-five to seven for Dean, four or five for Ginette-at least. He hasn’t been on the street in a long time, but I’ll bet he knows a team tail when he sees it. We can’t mess around here.”

“I have a small discretionary fund,” Graver said. “It can buy me several weeks if it needs to.”

Graver had met Arnette Kepner more than a decade back when he was lecturing on network analysis at the Georgetown University’s Consortium for the Study of Intelligence. After his lecture she was among the people who came up to the podium to ask more questions and talk for a few minutes. But she lingered until she was the last one and then asked to take him to dinner. It turned out to be a fascinating evening and was the beginning of a friendship.