An Absence of Light

“Okay,” Graver said. “The man you are referring to is Ray Besom. He’s the supervisor of the Organized Crime Squad. He’s been on vacation, fishing down on the border, near Port Isabel. About noon today he was found dead.”

“Bloody hell…” Last swallowed; his face was rigid. It conveyed no self-assurance, no easy smile that connoted a smug knowledge that he was one step ahead of developing events. Graver guessed that not only was Last not ahead of developing events, but it was now beginning to dawn on him that maybe he was being used for reasons that had been hidden from him and which might have put him at great risk.

“Christ, and you people weren’t suspicious?”

“I didn’t say that. I only said we didn’t know we had a breach in security.” Graver paused and gave Last a moment to run over his options once again. He watched Last take another drink of wine and savor it, tasting it with the back of his tongue. “I don’t have much room to maneuver, here, Victor.”

Last looked at Graver as though he wanted to see if he could read in Graver’s eyes what he thought he was reading in the inflection of his voice.

“I see,” Last said, nodding a little. “Well, that’s pretty clear, isn’t it.”

Graver said nothing.

Last looked around at the other tables under the arbor. It wasn’t as if he was concerned about being overheard, rather it was more a gesture of restlessness. Again he picked up on the hips of the waitress and watched her bring coffee to a couple of girls who had just sat down at a table nearest the street. Watching the girl walk back into the deserted dining room, his prematurely old eyes followed her with the practiced imagination of a decadent When she was out of sight, he looked into his glass. He swirled the wine.

“Fellow I met in Veracruz,” Last said softly, speaking slowly and thoughtfully, “and at whose house I overheard the conversation, is Colin Faeber. He owns a computer company called DataPrint. I don’t know much about the company, I mean, what it does, compiles data for businesses looking to buy other businesses or something like that. I checked it out a bit, though, you know, to see if the guy had a heavy purse. He does.” He sipped his wine.

“But you don’t know the names of the men you overheard talking?”

“No, I don’t. And I don’t know of any way to find out without raising immediate suspicion. I mean, I can’t just ask Faeber outright, can I. And I didn’t see them well enough to make some circumlocutious inquiry. Something tells me I’d be a damn fool to do that.”

“What about the names? Where’d you get Tisler and Besom’s names?”

Last nodded. He knew he was going to have to explain that now.

“Both were mentioned by the peeping Tom.” He looked at Graver and saw the disgust on his face. “Well, shit, you can’t really blame me for trying to string it out, can you?”

“Then he did mention the CID?”

“No. When he mentioned the names I made a point to remember them, but I only had a phonetic knowledge. Tisler. Besom. Those are not common names. But of course a conversation like that, I suspected the police department. So I called information at police headquarters and asked to speak to them-then your CID receptionist answered, and I hung up.”

“And you overheard the names in that conversation?”

“Absolutely. But I’m telling you, I don’t know who those two men were. That was a blind fluke, I’m telling you.” He pushed his wineglass to the side and leaned in. “Frankly, Graver, this looks like this is very deep shit here. I mean, if these two deaths are not ‘self-inflicted’ and ‘natural causes,’ then I seriously believe I’m altogether in the wrong place. I don’t want any part of this kind of thing. This is definitely not my kind of work, and you know it.”

Graver sat quietly a moment, allowing Last to think he was just going to walk away from this or, rather, watching him try to convince Graver that that was just the thing he ought to do. Then he said:

“I’ve made a few inquiries, Victor. Someone’s been shopping around forgeries of eighteenth-century Spanish land grant documents to private collectors in California. A curator at the Stanford Museum of Meso-American Artifacts reported being approached by a dealer who was offering what she believed to be stolen jade and clay sculptures. The curator at the Kimbell Museum reported being approached by a dealer offering what he believed were bogus stone masks.” Graver stopped. “I have a list And all the inquiries aren’t in. There seems to have been a resurgence of this stuff in the last seven months. I called Alberto Hyder who heads the Art Thefts section of the National Police in Mexico City. They’d like very much to talk to you.”

Last had sat back in his chair, crossed his legs, and put his hands in his pockets in a slouching posture as he regarded Graver with a sober diffidence. After Graver stopped talking, Last’s pensive, pale eyes remained as still as opals in a setting of weathered wrinkles.

“What is it, exactly, that you want me to do?” Last asked.