An Absence of Light (8 page)

She waited in the darkness of a tree’s canopy at the edge of the parking lot, and when the front door to the club opened she started walking. Kalatis watched with interest.

Having opened her purse again, she was looking in it as though searching for something, as she approached him in the dimly lighted car park. He saw her first, of course, and just as she looked up and closed her purse, he said something to her and she stopped. She turned, and oh, yes, recognized him.

Kalatis watched their body language and followed the gist of their conversation. Toland straightened up a little, tightened his stomach a bit What in the world are you doing here?

She explained she was supposed to meet X here, but the arrangements had been made quite early in the evening. and then she had got delayed and could not reach him by telephone, and a cab had just dropped her by on the off chance that he might still be here.

No, he wasn’t here, Toland said. She tilted her head with good-natured disappointment. He asked a question, and she shook her head and explained something. He asked another question and gestured to his car only a few feet away. She tilted her head again, thinking a moment as she looked toward his car, and then nodded in appreciation.

She took him to the parking lot of a condominium not far from the club where her car was already parked anonymously among the others. She told him where to park, the precise spot. By now she was teasing him shamelessly, and he would have driven off the bank of the bayou into the water if she had allowed his hand another inch inside her panties. Instead of going up to her place, she suggested, why didn’t they…

Kalatis had choreographed the event, but it would not have worked so well if his principal dancer had not been so talented. When Kalatis pulled into the parking lot behind them with his lights off, Toland was oblivious to everything but the increasingly revealing glimpses of the unfamiliar flesh in the seat next to him.

Parking among other cars a good distance away, Kalatis rolled down his windows, took out his binoculars, and balanced them on the steering wheel. He focused them on Toland’s car, the interior of which was illuminated by the streetlamp behind it, presenting the two figures inside in sharp silhouettes. He gave them a few moments, until she had removed her blouse. He would have let her go further, but he was afraid she wouldn’t remove her bra, that she would end it before he wanted. He still would have to pay her, but he wouldn’t get the satisfaction he wanted. So, he adhered to the plan and picked up his telephone and dialed.

It rang four times before Kalatis saw her push Toland away. He could only imagine what was being said.

“Yeah…” Toland’s voice was tense, irritable.

“Robert, this is Panos Kalatis.”

Pause.

“Kalatis?” Pause. “What are you doing calling my car phone at this hour?”

“Somehow I knew you would be there to answer it.”

“What do you want?”

“It’s payback time, my friend.”

“What?”

“I know what you’ve been doing, Toland.” Kalatis kept his voice reasonable, relaxed. “You are not nearly good enough at this to try to steal from me. You’re such a stupid pig, Robert.”

Pause.

“I think there’s a misunderstanding here…” Toland began. His voice had changed.

“I believe you’re right,” Kalatis said, “so let me explain it to you.” He watched Toland’s profile closely through the binoculars. “The woman sitting next to you… she’s going to kill you for me. And I’m going to listen to it on this telephone and watch it through my binoculars. Robert, you are really so stupid…”

Kalatis didn’t actually hear the two gunshots, not as gunshots, just as phuut! phuut! at the same time as part of the window behind Toland’s head flew out into the parking lot sounding like crushed ice as it scattered across the pavement. The remaining parts of the window were glazed in rusty smears.

Kalatis counted to twelve before the passenger door opened, and she got out and closed it behind her. She walked through the few cars with business-like deliberation until she stopped at one, unlocked it, and got in. He counted to eight before the headlights came on, and she drove away.

Just for the hell of it Kalatis dialed Toland’s number again. He felt better, much better. He listened to the busy signal with satisfaction.

Graver turned off the porch light, threw the dead bolt on the door, and walked back into the living room. He went over to his desk and sat down, picked up the notepad and looked at his doodles. Jesus, what a situation. What a goddamned night.

He tossed the notepad aside. He was restless still, far too wired by the events of the evening. He picked up the dish towel from the magazine stand and absently began folding it lengthwise, matching the corners, letting his thoughts drift. He thought about going for another swim, to clear his head, but then, too quickly, even before he could avoid it, he was remembering the weedy field and the fight that Tisler’s stiffening limbs had put up against the final confirmation of his death. Tisler had managed to surprise everyone, had managed to set minds to work on his death that had never given him a second thought when he was alive. That was, of course, a sad inversion of the way life
should
be played.

But Graver learned a lesson every day on the fallacy of the concept that life “ought” to be a certain way. Everyone believed in that, of course; perhaps it was the last vestige of a long-submerged Platonism—the idea of the ideal, that somewhere there was lightness and perfection and if we could only adjust or fine-tune ourselves or society or our environment, then life would be as it “ought” to be.

Maybe Tisler’s suicide was his own comment on the “oughtness” fallacy. Maybe he decided that was a screwed concept—or maybe he decided that just a little more pressure on the trigger was the precise amount of fine tuning needed to bring the idea of “oughtness” full circle to perfection.

When the telephone rang on the corner of his desk, it startled him. He cringed to think that there were still developments breaking in Tisler’s grim death. It was approaching one o’clock. It occurred to him that he might not answer it, though there was never really any possibility that he wouldn’t. But he did let it ring six times. Still holding the dish towel in one hand, he reluctantly picked up the receiver with his other.

“Hello.”

“Marcus?”

It was a woman’s voice, not Dore’s, not instantly recognizable. His mind began reeling through an inventory of voices.

“Yes,” he said, waiting for another audible clue. And then immediately he was cautious, even suspicious, afraid she might disconnect without speaking again.

The next voice was a man’s. “Graver, this is Victor Last.”

Graver recognized this voice immediately, even though he didn’t think he had heard it in eight years. Last’s voice was distinctive for its softness, even kindness, and its peculiar accent Last was the son of British parents who owned a shipping business in Veracruz, Mexico, where Last was raised. His pronunciation was a wonderful amalgam of several languages.

“Well, this is a surprise, Victor,” Graver said. He was wary.

“Yeah, well, I’m in the city now,” Last said. “Thought I ought to check in with you.”

Graver could hear the hollow, rushing-air sound of Last attempting to cover the mouthpiece while he spoke to someone with him, probably the woman who had been on the telephone when Graver answered it.

“Uh, look,” Last said, coming back on the line, “I’d, uh, I’d like to talk to you. Could we get together for a drink?”

“Victor, you’ve caught me at a bad time. I’ve got a lot of fires to put out at—”

“It actually would be best tonight,” Last interrupted. His voice was calm and natural, agreeable, as though Graver had called
him
to ask for a meeting at Last’s convenience.

This polite disconnect with the reality of their situation put Graver on guard even more. Graver looked at the dish towel in his hand. Shit.

“Okay. Where are you? North? South?”

“The best place, I think, would be where we used to meet,” Last said casually. Graver noted that he had avoided saying the name.

“Is it still there?”

“Sure.”

“It’s late. It’ll be closed.”

“I checked it out,” Last said. “It’ll be open.”

“Fine,” Graver said in resignation. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

“Twenty minutes,” Last said, and the line went dead.

The small La Cita Cafe was only a block from the ship channel, near the neck of the turning basin in a barrio that never changed. Two languid Guadalupe palms still flanked the dirty, mandarin red front door, their huge, rough trunks rooted on the little spit of dirt and weeds between the buckled sidewalk and the rock building. A single strand of flamingo pink neon light still bordered the two horizontally rectangular front windows with their rounded corners, and the porthole in the front door still allowed a glimpse of the murky interior before you entered.

Graver parked across the street and waited a moment. He surveyed the neighborhood of small bungalows tucked back under old trees, their dim interiors glimpsed through the cinnamon vines that laded the dilapidated fences of thin wire and wood and the banana plants that lent a cool grace to the graceless, bare yards. He saw no cars parked along the street that seemed out of place.

He got out of the car, locked it, and walked across to the cafe. The neighborhood night smelled of the ship channel, a mixture of bayou and bay water, of diesel engines and foreign ports, of neighborhood kitchens and other-country foods. Graver inhaled deeply of the smells and let them carry him back eight years.

He pushed open the door and stepped inside. La Cita had never been much of a place, but it had been a good cafe. Now the once warmly lighted interior that had smelled of Greek and Mexican food was a gloomy twilight of neon beer signs, and the air was a bad breath of stale bodies, dead cigarettes, and rancid grease. Behind the bar a heavy Mexican woman was huddled under a small, goose-neck lamp reading a magazine. There were a few dark visages in the corners, but he walked past them to the back door and stepped out into the patio where strings of low-wattage, colored lights were draped back and forth above the stained concrete dance floor. Here everything was the same, the cinder-block walk that formed the sides and, across the back, a series of low-arched openings through which he could see the slow-drifting lights of ships moving through the channel. And the chunky wooden tables that randomly bordered the edges of the patio were still there too. But on this hot summer night only three or four of them were occupied by a few men and women who looked as though they had never had a chance at anything or, worse, had thrown it away and never had learned to forgive themselves.

Walking to an empty table toward the back corner, Graver sat so that he could see the door that opened onto the patio from the tavern. Behind him, through one of the arches, he could hear a tug grumbling softly past the wharves. He ordered a bottle of beer from a young man who had one side of his chest caved-in, causing a shoulder to sag and making him walk crab-like as though always having to correct a drift He distinguished himself in this shabby setting, however, not by his deformity, but by having an immaculate haircut which he had combed to perfection. He also wore a dazzling white waiter’s apron which, in this setting, undoubtedly was considered a foppish flair.

As Graver drank his beer, a wraith of a man in his early thirties got up from where he had been sitting alone and put some coins in the jukebox on the far side of the dance floor. He returned to his table, and in a moment the accordions and cornets of a
conjunto
began playing while the man lighted a cigarette. As if by request, two worn prostitutes wearing tight dresses that barely reached past their crotches and accented their obtruding stomachs, left their male companions at their table, stepped onto the dance floor, embraced, and began dancing. Seemingly oblivious to the sprightly rhythm of the
conjunto
, they moved mournfully about the floor, the calves of their thin legs knotted tightly as they crane-stepped on high heels that scratched across the gritty concrete floor, stomach to stomach, the arms of each draped over the other’s shoulders, their foreheads together in unsmiling partnership.

Graver watched them, as did their companions and the wraith. Nearby a man and woman ignored them and shared a thick joint of marijuana in a sweet, mauve haze. When the music stopped the women returned to their companions, and Graver finished his beer.

Five minutes later Victor Last walked out the back door of the cafe, looked quickly around the courtyard, and started toward Graver, passing through the patches of colored lights in his casual, loose gait with which Graver was so familiar. He was wearing straw-colored, full-cut linen trousers with pleats, a blousy and wrinkled long-sleeved silk shirt, and a light tan, soft-shouldered sport coat with patch pockets. His dun hair was stylishly long, though barbered around the ears and neck, and combed back with a lock falling carelessly over his forehead.

He smiled modestly as he approached Graver who stood, and the two of them shook hands.

“Sit down,” Graver said, motioning to the chair across from him.

Last nodded and sat down. Graver could see him better now and was surprised to see that Last must have had some hard years. Though he still was lean and had a good tan—the sun had streaked his dun hair with blond strands —his face was incredibly wrinkled, his eyes pinched with crow’s feet and the corners of his mouth beginning to pucker. He looked like he had suffered a lot of sun and had given in to the rum and tequila of former days. Whatever he had been doing in the last eight years, he had done it with a vengeance.

Last grinned at him from across the table, slumped back rakishly in his chair with his legs crossed at the knees. Graver noticed his teeth were still white and even.

“You don’t look any differently, Graver,” Last said. “You must’ve made a bargain with the Deevil himself.”