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.”
“Did you see people out walking?”
“I didn’t see anyone else,” she said. “I just didn’t.”
Graver pondered all this as he worked his way back toward Montrose. Lara reached into her purse again and took out several tissues.
“That old building,” she said, blotting her face. “Window units in the apartments; in the hallway, nothing. The window I was looking out of was open.” She dabbed around her face with the tissues and then opened her blouse another button and dabbed at the tops of her breasts. She said, “What about the couple, the man and woman? They were there when you arrived, and they were there when you left. Could they have known enough ahead of time to get there before you?”
“Good question,” Graver said. “From the time of the telephone call to the time we arrived was about forty minutes. Sure there was time.”
“Did you get a good look at them?” Lara asked. She put her hand under her hair and raised it up off the back of her neck and held it there.
“I think I’d remember them if I saw them again,” he said.
“Do you think they could have been countersurveillance?”
“They could’ve been.”
“If they were, then that would mean… that Last tipped them off.”
“Either that, or… let’s say he’s entirely uninvolved. Then for someone else to know about it they would have had to tap the phone.” He thought a second. “But if that was the case, where had he been when he called? Whose telephone was he using that someone thought needed to be tapped?”
“God,” Lara said. “I don’t believe all this.” She leaned forward, twisted a little, and let the cool air from the air-conditioning vent blow on the back of her neck, her face turned toward Graver. He looked at her bending forward in the darkness, the highlights of her dress and body enameled in a soft wash of sea-green light from the dash.
Chapter 36
“It’s very simply an economic reality,” Panos Kalatis said, gesturing with his large Cuban cigar and speaking slowly, letting his deep voice resonate from his chest, his slight accent distinguishing his pronunciation. “The best shelters, triple A bonds, CD’s, those things provide yields of only half what they did in the eighties. The stock market? You’d have to be crazy. It’s a world market now. Who knows what’s going to happen with the EC or in Eastern Europe or in the Middle East or Japan or with the next political party in power here? To play the market with any kind of consistency you have to work twice as hard as you did a decade ago, and it will still take you twice as long to recover the kinds of profits you did in half the time in the eighties.”
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,
