An Absence of Light

He could see Faeber stiffen, and he thought that if he were a dog he would have been able to smell the fear riding on the gusts coming off the water from behind him.

“What’s the matter?” Faeber asked.

“Arthur Tisler has killed himself.” He pronounced the name Tee-sler.

Pause. “God…!” The ejaculation from Faeber was an aspirant, a hiss.

Kalatis thought he saw Faeber’s left leg move, maybe to steady himself on the slope of the lawn.

“Wh… when was this? Christ… that’s incredible. Jesus Christ. When was this?”

“A few hours ago.”

“Goddamn… Arthur Tisler.”

“Yes.”

“Was he alone? I mean, someone found him I guess. Who found him?”

“That’s irrelevant.”

Faeber was silent Kalatis did not interrupt him. Years of experience had taught him that good people-and Faeber was a good man-responded to very little stimulus. If they were intelligent enough, venal enough, and if he had brought them along with enough skill and just the right tincture of anxiety, they would make the right decisions. They would be dependable-for his purposes, at least-even when they were caught off balance.

Faeber had turned to look down the beach, at the curving line of lights, as though he could do his best thinking if he were not looking directly in Kalatis’s face. Kalatis studied his profile. He was a typical American businessman, a kind of perennial, overgrown boy who always would be impressed by-and who always would try to impress others with-his odd sense of masculinity, a concept that was comprised in large part of financial competitiveness. Kalatis had never met an American businessman who didn’t eventually try to puzzle out your approximate financial worth by circuitous conversation during which they tried to elicit your occupation, where you lived, what you drove, what clubs you belonged to, whom you knew, where you went on vacation, and what kind of toys you employed for your leisure-boat, car, skis, guns, et cetera. It was a kind of penis comparison, a sophomoric measuring of oneself against the next man, using dollars instead of genitals.

Faeber turned to Kalatis. “You said you got a call. Is this going to be on the news?”

“No. I understand this can be handled very quietly. They’ve had some luck on that.”

Faeber didn’t pursue the question further or ask Kalatis to elaborate. He didn’t need to. He loosened his tie.

“Then I guess the Seldon operation is dead in its tracks,” he said. He paused and shook his head. “Suicide. Goddamn, can you believe that? What a butt stupid thing to do. Unbelievable. Okay, uh, there’ll be a flurry of departmental investigations. Homicide and IAD. Graver will conduct an inquiry of his own to make sure nothing was compromised. If it’s suicide…” He stopped and focused on Kalatis. “They’re sure it’s suicide…”

Kalatis nodded. “They are saying suicide.”

“Then since it’s suicide there’s no problem with Homicide or IAD, only Graver’s inquiry. But we should be covered there. Our people are good, very careful. I’ll keep an eye on it, make sure nothing’s unraveling.”

Kalatis drank the remaining rum and tossed the ice out into the grass.

“I’m sure you will keep everything under control, Faeber,” Kalatis said. “But two things bother me about what is happening here,” he said. “Very serious concerns. It has been my experience that a suicide in this business always means trouble. I have seen it before. Mexico City. Brindisi. Montevideo. Marsala. Tel Aviv. Marseille.” He named them slowly, hesitating a beat or two between each as though he first had to visualize the incident in each city before he could speak the name. “In each of these places I saw suicides, and in every instance they caused confusion, unexpected reversals. Other people died. Trouble.”

He paused and rolled the cold glass across his bare chest, wiping the chilled sweat from the glass onto his skin. He wanted Faeber to listen to his words, to think about what he was saying.

“Men like this,” he said, “do not kill themselves for ordinary reasons like money trouble or women or depression. They kill themselves, often, out of fear. Because they believe they cannot escape something. Or, perhaps, because they have done something they know will guarantee that they will have to be killed and, for some reason that I have never understood, they want to cheat the assassin.”

“Maybe,” Faeber said. “But this isn’t the Third World, for Christ’s sake. It’s not the same here, Panos.”

Kalatis nodded indulgently at the American chauvinism, an assumed superiority so deeply ingrained in this man that he wouldn’t even have understood the sense of it if you had stopped him and explained it to him. A gust from the water tugged at the baggy legs of his pajamas.