An Absence of Light

“Sometimes parts of the Israeli coast remind me of Greece,” he said, straightening up, but keeping his eyes on the photographs. “Harsh. Olive trees. Rocks. You can’t really tell in these black and white photographs, but the light is the same too. Especially in the late summer.”

He moved to the next photograph. A young couple in khaki walking shorts and sandals were moving just ahead of him, talking softly. He said nothing more until, after a few moments, the couple rounded the exhibit panels to the other side. Burtell came up beside him again.

“I thought we ought to talk, just the two of us,” Kalatis said. “Without Faeber.” He stepped close to another photograph, but then moved quickly to the next one. “You don’t much like him, do you?”

“Not much,” Burtell said.

“Why is that?”

“He’s a little too ready to please.”

“But that’s what I pay people to do, to please me.”

“Do you want them to lie to you?”

“Is Colin Faeber lying to me?” Kalatis asked, backing away from a photograph to see it better. He didn’t seem to be too concerned about his question.

“He’s the one who advised you to come down on Tisler, wasn’t he?” Burtell said.

“Maybe,” Kalatis said.

“He gave you bad advice.”

“Well, bad advice is hardly lying, is it?”

Kalatis moved around the end of the panels to the next aisle. It was empty. They kept talking.

“I guess you know a lot about computers,” Burtell said.

“Computers? Not a lot, no. That’s why I hire people like Faeber. They know computers for me.”

“Hiring someone to run your computer for you is like hiring a lawyer or an accountant. Before you turn your business over to them you’d better be damned sure you can trust them.”

“I trust him,” Kalatis said. “I trust everyone who works for me.” He leaned a little sideways to look at a picture of an Israeli girl in a swimsuit She was standing close to the photographer and with a slender index finger thrust under the piping of her suit at her groin, she was delicately tugging on the elastic to adjust the fit of the suit She was smiling, wincing a little into the sunlight.

“Why?”

Kalatis turned away from the photograph and looked at Burtell. “Because,” he said without a trace of a smile, his mellifluous voice modulated to accommodate the resonance of the granite and marble surroundings, “every one of them knows that if he screws me over I will have four big men hold him down while one of those blue-snouted baboons rips out his throat.”

He turned and stepped to the next picture. A couple of men came around the corner and locked onto the pictures. One of them whispered something in Israeli to the other, and Kalatis turned and looked at them. For a moment he studied them, and then he moved efficiently to the end of the aisle and rounded the corner into the next branch of the maze. Burtell followed.

“I’m not sure Colin Faeber understands that,” Burtell said.

“Oh, he understands it,” Kalatis said. He had rolled his program into a tighter cylinder. He touched it quickly a couple of times to his trousers’ leg as though he were going to give in to a nervous gesture and then caught himself. Burtell was glad to see that.

“Maybe he forgot,” Burtell said.

“What the hell are you getting at?” Kalatis said in the same relaxed tone of voice that he might have used to make an observation about one of the photographs. He continued looking at the pictures, but there was a slight tension in his demeanor now, a tight pitch to his shoulders.

“I’m not at all sure I can tell you,” Burtell said, more sure of himself after seeing the crack in Kalatis’s porcelain cool. “A few days before he shot himself Art came to me and wanted to talk. He said he thought Faeber was having him watched. I asked him why he thought that, and he told me he had picked up surveillance. I asked him why he thought it was Faeber, and he got nervous and started hedging. He would only say that Faeber had it in for him, but he wouldn’t explain why. I talked to him a long time about it, but he wouldn’t go into it Then he told me about receiving the envelope of photographs. He was distraught He said Faeber had photographed him with the black woman for insurance.” Burtell looked at Kalatis. “I couldn’t get him to calm down. That was Friday afternoon. I didn’t hear anything from him again until Graver came over Sunday night and told me he’d killed himself.”

Kalatis stared at a photograph, but now Burtell could tell he wasn’t seeing it A woman laughed somewhere in the exhibit hall, and the laughter echoed off the hard surfaces of the museum and then suddenly died faraway in another gallery.

“You believe this?” Kalatis asked.

“Yes.”

“Why would Faeber want ‘insurance’ from Tisler? Was Tisler trying to blackmail him with something? Another woman? Faeber screws his secretary. Everybody knows that Christ That’s not anything to use against a man.”

“I give Art more credit than that,” Burtell said.