An Absence of Light (50 page)

“Does all the product come from the same region in Afghanistan?”

Ms. Donata was a curious woman, but he also thought she must find her role gratifying and rather found some adventure in using words like “product.” Well, she should be gratified. She had put together a collection of businessmen who twice before had trusted him with their millions. And now for the third time. She had been a very clever woman, the arrangements for this venture had been complex—by Kalatis’s design—but she had handled the negotiations astutely and creatively. Really an admirable achievement for such a young woman.

But in sixty days, Ms. Donata*s life would become a living hell. Everything she saw now, all that she had schemed for and accomplished through the shadow ways of Panos Kalatis, would vanish overnight, and she would be ruined.

So he did not mind indulging her sense of amusement at this time. It was like playing backgammon with a woman who, expecting to marry a prince in the morning, was unknowingly whiling away the last hours before her execution. There was a peculiar kind of stimulation that came from entertaining a woman whose imminent ruin was certain, but unknown to her. It gave her an air of fragility that he very much enjoyed. Yes, Ms. Donata had been a clever woman indeed, but she should have been a little cleverer still.

He told her glib lies of the mujahideen and poppies, of pack trains out of the mountains of the Badakhshan and Hazarajat, of Deh Khavak and Kamdesh and Asmar. He told her enough for her to believe that she could believe what she heard. He often saw this sort of worldly naïveté in Americans who grew up in the United States and never left it, middle-class people who lived middle-class lives, and for whom an adventure was to move to a middle-class neighborhood in a different city. Having seen nothing of the world except the evening news, they were gullible and easily deceived. They might be well educated, as Ms. Donata surely was, but it was an education gotten among the homogeneity of people just like themselves. It was like being a well-educated sheep.

After a while the conversation turned to more benign topics, as a maid—Kalatis had thought that under the circumstances a woman was wanted for this job—brought out some small finger sandwiches and replenished their drinks. They talked of places they had traveled. They were killing time. Below them on the dock—there was the audible shuffling of feet and an occasional dull, hollow thunk as someone bumped a hull or pontoon—as the last twelve million dollars of her thirty-two million dollars in cash was being loaded from the plane to the cruiser. The previous twenty million dollars had been transferred in smaller increments during the course of the last few days.

Kalatis was suppressing a premature euphoria. He was very near to concluding a nine-year project True, he had not planned
this
particular venture until just the last twenty months—when he saw how incredibly eager American businessmen were to abandon legitimacy—but it had issued from the larger picture, an exercise that he was already looking back on as his American years. The money. My God, the money these men were willing to part with in a calculated gamble to triple what they already had astonished and delighted him. But cogs and wheels were still turning elsewhere, everything was synchronized to terminate simultaneously, and while so many diverse events were still pending he did not let his mind dwell too long on the sweet potential of his rewards.

His thoughts returned to the task at hand as Ms. Donata was beginning an anecdote about Vail. And down below on the docks millions of dollars from the West Coast were about to depart from the South Coast, to points far removed and unknown… except to Kalatis.

Gilbert Hormann pushed Panos Kalatis out of his mind. It was growing increasingly easy to do with every passing moment.

He had been working late at the office, a regular occurrence especially when there was a shipment to Colombia in the offing. The door was open to his adjoining private apartment where he had been to pour himself a drink half an hour before. His personal line in his apartment rang, and he walked in and picked it up expecting to hear his wife ask how much later he was going to be.

It was Kalatis. The Greek said he was rushed. He said he had just gotten the documents required for the Colombian shipment—these were counterfeited bills of lading and other forms that had to be filed with governmental agencies in order to be able to export significant quantities of sulfuric acid and acetic anhydride. Kalatis wanted Gilbert to have the documents tonight, and he was going to send over someone with them, just to drop them off. Gilbert knew there was no use arguing that he was just about to leave.

He hung up the telephone and looked at his watch. Kalatis had said the documents would be there in half an hour. Great Gilbert had been only minutes away from quitting for the night anyway, and the telephone call had broken his concentration. He turned off the light in his office and walked into his apartment There was a small kitchen there, a well-furnished bar, a sitting area with a couple of sofas and several armchairs for entertaining. There were plants scattered about, an enormous television, and a view of the entire Galleria area below and, just slightly to the right, the shimmering skyline of downtown. Around the corner was a large bedroom with a generous bath and a Jacuzzi with the same view as in the living room.

Gilbert made himself another drink, kicked off his shoes—he had taken off his tie long ago—and settled down in front of the television, flicking the remote control until he came to the Playboy channel. Forty minutes passed quickly, lubricated by several more drinks, and when the security phone rang he quickly punched in the numbers to let Kalatis’s messenger into the elevator. Deliveries from Kalatis were not rare, and his emissaries had the routine well rehearsed.

In five minutes the buzzer to the main office reception area sounded, and Gilbert got up and walked out through his office carrying his drink and without bothering to put on his shoes. When he entered the reception area he almost dropped his glass. Standing on the outside of the glass wall was Kalatis’s emissary, Jael.

Gilbert actually stopped. She was wearing a simple, deep-burgundy cocktail dress which hung off her shoulders like a sheet of water. Gilbert was stunned. She held up a manila envelope against the glass, a gesture that seemed to jar him into action. He walked to the receptionist’s desk and buzzed open the glass panel door.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, smiling and reaching out the envelope. “Panos called you about this?”

Gilbert nodded stupidly. He could see her goddamn
nipples
.

“I’m so sorry it is so late. You know Panos,” she said with a rueful wrinkle of her brows and a little shrug. Gilbert would have given fifty dollars to see her shrug that away again. “Everything is so… hectic… so busy there. He was leaving for a business trip… everyone was busy. No one but me to come.”

No one but her to come. Gilbert loved her choice of words… and her accent He didn’t know what the hell kind of an accent it was, and he didn’t care. He always had thought she was one of the hottest-looking women he had ever laid eyes on. Panos’s woman, some kind of Middle Eastern blood was what he guessed, but that didn’t matter either. She was just an incredible thing. Lean and young and buxom and dark, eyes like a goddamn cat’s. He may have been staring at her, he didn’t know. He already had drunk enough to make such fine distinctions indistinguishable.

She looked at his glass and smiled. He reached out for the envelope, and he
thought
she kind of held on to it when he took it.

“What have you drinking there?” she asked.

“Oh, uh, scotch. Whiskey.”

She nodded, still smiling like she had caught him doing something… naughty.

“Uh”—he gestured vaguely—”you… want”—he gestured more vaguely, maybe toward her with the glass—”something?”

She raised her eyebrows. “To drink… with you?”

And it was at that moment that Panos Kalatis slid out of Gilbert’s mind for good. The spice of the present instant was overwhelming. He reached for the door which he suddenly realized she had been holding open with her… hip.

“I don’t have to hurry to go back,” she said, brushing past him. “It is so busy there, and anyway, they will everyone be gone away when I am back there.”

“You came by yourself?” he asked with appropriate concern in his voice as they made their way through his office and into his apartment.

“Oh yes,” she said, looking around, locking on the view of the city from the sitting room windows.

“What would you like to drink?” he asked, tossing the envelope into a chair and going straight to the bar.

“Cuba Libre,” she said, standing at the windows.

Cuba Libre. She goddamned looked like Cuba Libre. He managed to make it, as well as another scotch for himself, though he was in a bit of a fog, and he wasn’t sure he made it as good as he could have. He spilled some of each on his hands as he made his way over to her, and then was momentarily disconcerted to find her sitting primly on the sofa in front of the television, back straight, hands in her lap, breasts dripping burgundy, watching a man humping a woman on what appeared to be a motorcycle in a rainstorm.

“What is that?” he said stupidly, standing flat-footed with the wet glasses in his hands.

“They having some love,” she said equanimously. She pronounced it “lowve.”

She might have said it was going to be clear to partly cloudy, but then she smiled at him in such a way that entirely obliterated this alternate possibility.

Not once during the next half hour did Gilbert Hormann ask another question. Not of her. Not of himself. Not of Fate or of Good Fortune. Not of God. He never asked why it was that he should be naked on the sofa with this incomparable hetaera, Jael. He never asked why he should have her breast in his mouth or feel what he was feeling between her legs. He never asked himself why it should be his good, dumb luck to be in the Jacuzzi with her, swilling scotch and sliding all over her while the city lights went round and round in the vast, black firmament He never asked any questions at all until he was aware of holding his mouth open because she had asked him to, and looking past her glistening breasts above him to see her holding an eyedropper… an eyedropper… over his opened mouth.

But then it was too late.

His heart stopped. While he was exhaling, something invisible squeezed out what little air was left and held his chest and lungs in an excruciatingly painful vacuum. He was agog with pain, specific pain. He could feel his face turning scarlet, empurpling, and could sense the arteries in his heart growing thin, attenuated, dissolving, flooding the muscle in a hemorrhage of uncontained blood. He watched helplessly as Jael pulled her hand away, the dropper still poised, hesitant, with a clear drop on the very end of it He could see it, right on the very end of the glass ampule, and her breasts inviting even now at this very terrifying moment when he was thinking, God he had screwed up, her breasts inviting him to have one more mouthful.

She got out of the Jacuzzi very carefully and stepped onto a towel she had laid out ahead of time. He hadn’t noticed. She knelt beside the Jacuzzi, turned off the circulating pump, and released the water. As the basin emptied, she patted herself dry, watching the water disappear, leaving the pinkish Gilbert Hormann lying in the bottom like a great hairless bear.

Carefully folding the damp towel in a very precise square, she put it on the step to the Jacuzzi and knelt on it as she took the sprayer hose from its seat on the side of the basin and began washing down the body and the inside of the tub. She got back in the tub with him and turned him over, washing him thoroughly, washing the sides of the tub to make sure none of her head hair or pubic hair remained. She opened his mouth and sprayed it out and then took shampoo from the shelf of the tub and washed his hair, and hosed him down again very thoroughly, having to turn him over once more.

When she was satisfied, she refilled the Jacuzzi and restarted the circulating pump. The body floated awkwardly in the swirling water, moving oddly as the currents pushed it about. She wiped down the steps to the Jacuzzi with the towel on which she had been kneeling, and then put it in a plastic trash bag she found in the kitchen.

Before dressing she went into the living room and got her glass, washed it, and returned it to the liquor cabinet Then she took a hand towel from the kitchen and wiped down all the table surfaces around the sofa so that there would not be too many damp rings for one glass. She took Hormann’s clothes that were scattered about and draped them with reasonable carelessness on a chair in the bathroom, put his shoes near the chair, as though he had just kicked them off there, and put his socks on top of them.

When everything was to her satisfaction, she went back into the living room and picked up her dress from the floor and slipped it on over her head. She picked up one of the magazines from a coffee table—a
Newsweek
—and returned to the bath where she tossed it into the Jacuzzi. She also turned over the glass from which Hormann had been drinking and left it rolling around in a circle on the side of the tub.

All of this was probably unnecessary. Panos had thoroughly researched the man’s medical records. Chronic high blood pressure. They had used precisely the right chemistry. Still, she liked to do everything every time. It was a good habit.

She picked up the manila folder she had brought, picked up her plastic bag containing her towel and walked out of the apartment leaving the lights on. Turning out the lights in his office, she walked out through the reception area, buzzed herself out, and disappeared down the hall to the elevators.

They crowded into the darkroom, Graver, Arnette, Neuman, who was still trying to absorb what had been revealed to him in the three common little houses on Rauer Street, and Boyd, who was handling the canister. In the room’s cool redness everyone looked pale and conspiratorial, intent on the object in Boyd’s hands.