An Absence of Light

“Nothing?” Graver was skeptical, looking in his rear-view mirror as he pulled away from the curb where he had picked up Lara around the corner from the apartment house.

“Nothing suspicious, nothing like you described,” she said, getting the binoculars out of her purse. “Incidentally, these things are incredible.”

“What did you see?” Graver quizzed.

Lara settled into her seat, getting the long straps of the purse and binoculars out of her way, straightening her dress.

“First of all, I scanned the people at the tables along the sidewalk,” she said. “There weren’t that many. A couple of girls, a couple of guys. A man and a woman. One guy by himself. I was immediately suspicious of him, but he just sat there, wasn’t doing much but staring out to the street, actually in my direction. Besides, he was the first to leave, and he just wandered off down the street under the trees until I couldn’t see him anymore.

“After taking the inventory of people, I surveyed the cars parked along the street I wrote down the numbers of as many license plates as I could see and made a note of where the cars were located.” She pulled a steno pad out of her purse and opened it “Made a little diagram of where they were. I didn’t see anyone sitting in any of the cars. About halfway through your conversation, the two men got up and left They walked out and got into one of the cars and drove away. The two girls left just before you and Last They walked down the street and got into a car about a block away and drove off. None of the other cars moved; no new ones came and parked. And”-she shrugged, closed the pad, and tossed it onto the seat-”the man and the woman are still back there.”

“Did you see people out walking?”

“I didn’t see anyone else,” she said. “I just didn’t.”

Graver pondered all this as he worked his way back toward Montrose. Lara reached into her purse again and took out several tissues.

“That old building,” she said, blotting her face. “Window units in the apartments; in the hallway, nothing. The window I was looking out of was open.” She dabbed around her face with the tissues and then opened her blouse another button and dabbed at the tops of her breasts. She said, “What about the couple, the man and woman? They were there when you arrived, and they were there when you left. Could they have known enough ahead of time to get there before you?”

“Good question,” Graver said. “From the time of the telephone call to the time we arrived was about forty minutes. Sure there was time.”

“Did you get a good look at them?” Lara asked. She put her hand under her hair and raised it up off the back of her neck and held it there.

“I think I’d remember them if I saw them again,” he said.

“Do you think they could have been countersurveillance?”

“They could’ve been.”

“If they were, then that would mean… that Last tipped them off.”

“Either that, or… let’s say he’s entirely uninvolved. Then for someone else to know about it they would have had to tap the phone.” He thought a second. “But if that was the case, where had he been when he called? Whose telephone was he using that someone thought needed to be tapped?”

“God,” Lara said. “I don’t believe all this.” She leaned forward, twisted a little, and let the cool air from the air-conditioning vent blow on the back of her neck, her face turned toward Graver. He looked at her bending forward in the darkness, the highlights of her dress and body enameled in a soft wash of sea-green light from the dash.

Chapter 36

“It’s very simply an economic reality,” Panos Kalatis said, gesturing with his large Cuban cigar and speaking slowly, letting his deep voice resonate from his chest, his slight accent distinguishing his pronunciation. “The best shelters, triple A bonds, CD’s, those things provide yields of only half what they did in the eighties. The stock market? You’d have to be crazy. It’s a world market now. Who knows what’s going to happen with the EC or in Eastern Europe or in the Middle East or Japan or with the next political party in power here? To play the market with any kind of consistency you have to work twice as hard as you did a decade ago, and it will still take you twice as long to recover the kinds of profits you did in half the time in the eighties.”