An Absence of Light (32 page)

He didn’t have to wait long. Ten minutes later Last came sauntering around the corner and stepped under the arbor and joined Graver at his table. He ran his fingers through his long hair and smiled.

“You’re always surprising me, Graver,” Last said, looking around, nodding approvingly. “This is a real find, a very nice place indeed.” He looked at Graver. “I’ll bet you this is your ‘usual’ place, isn’t it?”

“I come here sometimes,” Graver said. The girl came and took Last’s order for wine. “What have you got for me, Victor?”

Last sat back in his chair and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. As he lit one, he looked casually around the sidewalk tables and then inside the nearby French doors at the empty dining room. He was wearing an expensive-looking linen sport coat with small brown and beige checks and a solid nut-brown silk shirt buttoned at the neck.

“Well, this did not turn out to be as, uh, easy to do as I’d thought,” Last said, his voice softening. “But I have a name for you. Your ‘mole,’ as it were.” He stopped as the girl brought his wine, thanked her, watched her go to another table, appreciating her hips, maybe even taking his time in order to whet Graver’s curiosity. He turned to Graver. “Arthur Tisler.” He lifted his wine, grinned, and took a long drink.

Graver could hardly contain himself. Goddamn it!

“Can you elaborate?”

“Not much,” Last said, sucking on his cigarette. “I just heard he was selling information from your intelligence records.”

Graver was almost beside himself. Victor Last was sitting across from him telling him that Arthur Tisler was selling information. For the past twenty-four hours he had agonized about this and, even with all the progress they had made, the breach in security was still a matter of conjecture. The only thing they knew for sure was that Tisler, Burtell, and Besom were creating bogus contributor interviews. The rest they had to guess. Now Last had laid it in his lap. And if Last could be believed, it was coming from a completely independent source.

But Last had delivered this astonishing information in a very relaxed manner, and Graver had the suspicion that Last did not understand the full impact of what he had just said. The information might have been parceled out to him. Graver did not believe that Last would have been so comfortable about giving this kind of volatile news to Graver if he had known what lay behind it.

“Arthur Tisler,” Graver said.

Last nodded, appreciating what he must have thought was a shocking revelation to Graver.

“How did you get that name, Victor?”

There must have been something in Graver’s voice. Last shot a look at him, his eyes regarding Graver with new interest, in a manner that sought an explanation for whatever it was he had heard that alerted him.

“What’s the matter?” Last asked.

“Arthur Tisler’s dead,” Graver said.

“Wh-at?”

“You didn’t know that?” Graver didn’t even know why he asked that question. Sometimes when you were talking to a man like Last there was a point at which you might find yourself wondering exactly where you were in the game. The whole point of the exercise was to learn something you didn’t already know, or to corroborate something you already had learned from someone else. Likewise, you later would take what you learned from this informant and try to corroborate it with another. You asked questions the answers to which you already knew, though you pretended you didn’t. You asked questions pretending to believe the responses, though you probably didn’t You tried to discern the informant’s hidden agenda, though he already had given you his reasons for what he was doing. You didn’t give the informant new information. You didn’t trade information. You fished and bobbed in deceptive currents, and you tried to discern the particles of truth suspended in the lies and half lies, and you tried not to overlook an actual truth when you stumbled upon it You imagined a world of mistakes and tried to anticipate how you would explain why you did, or why you didn’t, do something some other way. You imagined yourself coming. You imagined yourself going.

“Hell no, I didn’t know.” Last was frowning. He
didn’t
know. “Dead when? A year ago or yesterday or what?”

Graver hesitated. It had been in the paper. It wouldn’t matter.

“He killed himself Sunday night.”

Last straightened his shoulders in surprise. He studied Graver, slowly bringing his glass to his mouth, sipping the wine to cover his uneasiness, keeping his eyes on Graver over the rim.

“Killed himself,” he said, suspicious of that explanation.

“That’s right.”

“Was he dirty?”

“I didn’t think so. But now you’re telling me he was.”

Graver could see Last thinking. He was going to hold on to it.

“Well, yeah, that’s what I heard.” He paused. “Maybe that’s why he killed himself.”

“Could be. What kind of information?”

“What?”

“What kind of information was he selling?”

Last was thinking again. He straightened up in his chair and leaned forward over the small table.

“You didn’t know any of this?” he asked.

“You seem surprised.” Graver was finding this a very slippery conversation. “Did you think you were telling me something I already knew? Did you think that was going to be helpful?”

“I thought I might be
corroborating
.” Last was indeed an old hand at this. He knew all the roles. And apparently he hadn’t believed Graver the previous evening when Graver had said there was no breach in CID security. “I don’t think I’m understanding what’s going on here,” he said.

He was decidedly uncomfortable. Which was fine with Graver. He was pretty damned uneasy himself.

“Is this it, then?” Graver asked. “Tisler was selling CID information, and that’s it?”

Last didn’t say anything. He sipped his wine and smoked his cigarette, once again slumped back in his chair. It was apparent he had been given good information, but maybe for the wrong reasons, which seemed to be Last’s concern. Graver wanted desperately to know what Last had stumbled onto, and he was trying to decide how to get information without giving away any more than he had to. As Graver sat looking at his only direct link to an independent source who obviously knew invaluable information, he began to wonder if he was up to the opportunity. He began to wonder if there weren’t extenuating circumstances.

Last straightened up in his chair, leaned his elbows on the table, and smiled uneasily.

“This is awkward, isn’t it,” he said. His voice was soft, soothing.

“Not for me,” Graver lied.

“Well, I’m not at all sure… I mean, I thought you already knew this.”

“You’ve said that, Victor.”

“Yeah.” Last looked away, his right hand on the stem of the wineglass as he turned the flat base of it on the surface of the table, the uncomfortable smile giving an enigmatic expression to his profile. “Okay, there’s somebody else, too, in CID.”

Graver waited. This was going to be telling.

Last looked back to Graver. “Guy named Besom.”

Graver thought so. Three men involved, as far as Graver knew, and Last had named the only two who were dead. Last was giving him leads to nowhere. The question was, did he realize that? Last was looking at him closely, hoping to learn something himself from Graver’s reaction.

Graver sipped his coffee, put down his cup, and leveled his eyes at Last.

“Before I react to that,” Graver said, “I want you to tell me, right now, if you have any other names. Don’t dribble them out to me, Victor. This is internal. I’m not inclined to joust with you over internal matters that affect the security of my Division.”

A pause as Last stared into Graver’s eyes and made quick mental calculations that Graver could only imagine.

“No. No other names,” he said. He was almost squinting at Graver, puzzled, maybe a little apprehensive. Graver had the feeling Last didn’t know what it was he had gotten into and was wondering if he had made a big mistake.

“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.

“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.”