An Absence of Light

The man sitting across from him knew what Kalatis was saying was true. That’s why he was there. They were sitting on the veranda across the front of which bamboo blinds had been dropped so that the guest could not see anything but the interior of the long veranda and portions of the dimly lighted interior of the house. As was routine with all the others, the guest had been picked up earlier in the evening in Houston as prearranged, blindfolded, and taken up in Kalatis’s plane. The pilot had flown for over an hour along the Gulf Coast and then had turned in several slow, wide banking maneuvers and returned an hour later to Houston. A two-and-a-half-hour diversionary flight The guest was not told his destination, but had been led to believe he was somewhere on the coast of Mexico or Central America. Kalatis’s men had been instructed to speak only Spanish or, when they had to communicate with the guest, English with a Spanish accent.

After the plane had landed, the guest had been led along the dock, up the beach stairs, and across the lawn to the house where his blindfold was removed only after he had been seated on the veranda. Then he was introduced to Kalatis who assumed the name of Borman for each of these meetings.

Though it was two o’clock in the morning, and they had been drinking Cuba Libres and talking since midnight, both men were wide awake. For the first hour Kalatis had talked about everything except the subject of their meeting. That was Kalatis’s way. He had learned from his past mistakes-they were decades behind him now-that your quarry was more easily taken if he first was put at ease.

In the past hour, however, Kalatis finally had started way out at the margins of the subject and had been working his way in. Sometimes he had seen American businessmen grow impatient with this leisurely approach-they tended to think of themselves as ball-busters and wanted to get right to the business of “crunching numbers” and talking about “the bottom line.”

But he insisted on doing everything his way from the very beginning, for two reasons. First of all because they would see in the long run that he had been right in everything he said. And secondly, having demonstrated this, he achieved an authoritative position at the outset They tended to believe what he said after that, and every time he was right about something else he gained credibility. Everything was on his terms, or they didn’t do business together. He was always polite; he was always gracious. But only by doing business on his terms could he gain even a semblance of control in what was essentially a very dicey enterprise. His guest was never allowed to suspect that Kalatis had only a semblance of control, however. The weight of that responsibility was Kalatis’s alone. That was how he earned his living.

Even though the man had come to Kalatis on the recommendation of someone else, someone the man already trusted, Kalatis felt obligated to present very carefully as many facets of the arrangement as he thought wise, anticipating the questions his guest would want to have answered. Eventually, he would bring the presentation full circle, and the actual commitment to the deal would be as abrupt and as final as the thrust of a gaff through the gills of an exhausted marlin.

They were just about at that point now. Kalatis could smell it on the salty breeze coming across the lawn; he could taste it in the dark tobacco, hand-rolled by brown fingers in the steamy Vuelta Abajo. But still Kalatis spoke slowly, his voice mellow, his accent, usually kept in check, creeping more and more into his pronunciation. He was the picture of stability, assurance, right thinking.

“And, as I was telling you,” he concluded, “it doesn’t matter who is coming or who is going in Medellin or in Cali. It doesn’t matter if the Escobars or Marquezes or Orejuelas are on top or if they have all fallen to the sicarios or the agents of the Direccion de Policia Judicial e Investigacion. It just doesn’t matter… the stuff is going to move regardless. The market environment is stable.

“Look at it this way. Last year was a bad year for the business in Colombia. Cocaine seizures reached record levels-fifty-five tons seized inside Colombia itself-and the three leading cartel bosses were arrested or killed in the last six months. Cocaine consumption in the U.S. is declining-though that is partly due to more people turning to heroin… and heroin sales are exploding. The extradition situation continues to be troubling, not much stability there. The DEA has once again wheedled its way into a stronger role, as has the U.S. Army, and of course the CIA. Sounds gloomy for the spice barons, huh?”

He shook his head slowly with a smile, drew on his Cohiba, and blew the aroma into the Gulf breeze.