An Absence of Light

“You know,” Arnette said, a kind of smile softening her face, “I’ve been in this business so long… Most of the people in this work, when you get to know them well enough, have an element of the unchaste about them, at some level or other. Even the bureaucrats who don’t actually get their hands dirty in the real blood and earth of the business.” She narrowed her eyes in thought “It has something to do with secrets, it seems, with dealing in secrets. You know, it’s like trafficking in the power of the Holy Ghost It’s not something a person ought to do. But a person has proclivities… in that direction, I mean toward ‘uncleanliness,’ as the old Hebrews used to say. A person has proclivities, so he gravitates to a business that has the appearance of respectability, but which allows him all manner of vicarious indulgences… in the name of something higher, something cleaner. Very common men and women get into this work. It’s almost a stereotype of the profession. The ordinary, workaday fellow, the ‘invisible’ plodder who years later, well into his retirement, is revealed to have been a longtime ‘famous spy.’ “She stopped. “But if you really dissect him, psychologically I mean, this banal old man, he is anything but benign. His perversity is only more cleverly dissembled. He’s uncanny, disguising his moral petulance as a virtue.”

She smoked a moment more and Graver waited, knowing all of this was prologue, watching her, suddenly and strangely aware of the extreme nature of this profession and how quickly logical steps could take you, one at a time, to such outrageous places.

“Except you, Marcus,” she continued. “I’ve known you a good while now, longer than many. But I’ve never sensed any perversity in you at all. And I can tell you, dear, I look for it. Oh, I look for it in everyone I have anything to do with.”

Her smile was very faint now, almost not there at all. Outside, the world seemed to be populated only by birds.

“It could be,” he said, “that you’ve never met anyone who was so adept at guile.”

It was a remark both cynical and self-condemning, one that Graver himself almost had come to believe. It was the kind of extreme thinking one came to when one began searching inside one’s self for the reasons for other people’s actions. Maybe it didn’t make sense, but for some people it was instinctive, and it took an equally extreme act of will not to believe that the search was justified.

Arnette studied him, the smoke coiling from the cigarette beside her gypsy face, so exotic in saffron, in the twilight.

“Well, it could be,” she drawled thoughtfully, her voice barely audible. Then stronger, her tone changing: “Anyway, this looks like a rough one, baby. I hope you’re ready for it.”

Chapter 23

On the way back to the office Graver stopped at a small steak house that catered to businessmen, a place that had sat very still and very quiet while the last two decades had passed it by. It was a sunless retreat with heavy wood furnishings that smelled of liquor and cigarettes and cigars, and whose waitresses dressed in little Heidi uniforms with white ruffled scoop necks and push-up bras. The steaks sizzled in their own grease; there were only three kinds of salad dressings, none of them low cal; and the only kind of sweetener on the table was sugar. Everything was unhealthy and delicious.

He ate alone at a corner table and reviewed his conversation with Arnette. He remembered the look on her face when he told her he wanted her to put Dean and Ginette Burtell under surveillance. For just a flicker of an instant she had looked as if she doubted his loyalties, rather than Burtell’s. What in the hell was he doing putting a tail on Burtell? That’s the way it was with everyone, Dean Burtell was beyond reproach, his integrity was a given, so solid you just didn’t bother to give it any thought. He was the kind of guy you would want standing beside you if one day the world suddenly turned nasty on you and all the rules changed and everything seemed stacked against you through no fault of your own. You’d want Dean there because you knew there would be no recriminations, an abundance of understanding, and an assurance that he would see you through to the end. Graver knew that was the way people felt about him. That was the way he felt about him too.

Graver’s chopped steak arrived swimming in its own juices and with a side of fries that were long, thin, limp, and golden brown. As he ate, he tried to force his thoughts out in front of events. He really didn’t have a lot of time to mull over his options. He knew that And he also knew he didn’t have much room to maneuver in a conventional sense. By the time he polished off the last bite of steak he had made some major decisions. There were certain points of reference he had to establish. There had to be one or two things he could rely on unequivocally.

It was nearly one-thirty when he got back to the office. He stopped at Lara’s door and stuck his head in.

“Have you got a minute?”