sensed something that his senses could not confirm. Graver laid the three photographs side by side and looked at them again, each in turn, slowly. Then he picked them up, put them back into the glassine envelope, gathered together the pages, straightened them, placed everything back in the folder and closed it.
Chapter 42
When Arnette came back into the library, she was carrying two cups of fresh coffee. She was wearing common Vietnamese street clothing, a lemon, loose-fitting silk blouse with high collar and long sleeves and baggy white silk trousers. Without saying a word, she put one cup of coffee in front of Graver and went around to the other side of the table and sat down, placing her own cup on the table in front of her along with the ever present ocher pack of foreign cigarettes. She unhurriedly slipped a cigarette from the pack and lit it, looked at the thick dossier, and then at Graver as she exhaled the smoke.
“This is becoming a goddamned nightmare,” Graver said, taking a drink of coffee. He needed the caffeine. He needed a jolt of something undeniably simple and immediately apprehensible.
“I’ll have to say… this is extraordinary,” Arnette said. “And it’s big. There’s no need in pretending it isn’t.
Graver nodded at the dossier. “You think this guy’s back with the Mossad?”
“There’s no way of knowing about that,” Arnette said, shaking her head. “There never is.” She reached down to one end of the table and dragged the glass ashtray over in front of her. “We just have to go with the record in the file. Let’s say he’s not. In this case that actually seems to fit With no system behind him he is even more dangerous. An organization-no matter how secret it might be-always has records, someone’s personal diary, something tucked away in a vault for posterity, something to set the record straight someday. People can’t help themselves it seems, most people anyway. But Kalatis isn’t one of those people.” She looked at the folder and shook her head again. “To a guy like that, other people-and organizations-are a liability. On his own he’s not going to leave much of a trail. Most of the time he’s not going to leave one at all.”
They stared at each other for a moment.
“You think he killed Tisler and Besom.”
“I think…” She pondered the question a moment “Yeah”-she began to nod-”yeah, I think you ought to make that assumption.”
“Christ.” Graver looked away, let his eyes wander around the walls of books.
“They could have been doing anything, Marcus,” she said. “Those investigations, Probst, Friel, the other one… Seldon… If Dean was fabricating the sources but had good information, then someone-Kalatis-was feeding them the information. Kalatis had inside knowledge, and it served his purposes, somehow, to have them go down. So he gave Dean the cases, and together with Besom and Tisler they made them look like they’d done the investigations.”
“I don’t see how Besom fit into it,” Graver said and then, without waiting for her to respond, tacked in another direction. “They were doing it for money, a lot of money.”
“Yeah,” Arnette said, “I think you’re right Money is the whole story here.” She gestured at Graver with the hand holding the cigarette. “I said you should assume Kalatis killed Tisler and Besom… or was responsible for it You can also assume that you’ve probably stumbled onto the outer edges of a damned big operation. The people mentioned in that dossier, all of them are in business to turn hundreds of millions… per deal. They may have half a dozen deals going. Drugs. Arms. Information. Those are the big three. But to make those millions, and at the same time keep themselves in the background, they have to rely on a spider’s web of small-timers. And they will mix as readily with these little guys as they will the money barons or Third World bosses or junta generals. They need them. Like all clever people, they know they can’t be powerful unless they’re surrounded by weakness.”
She smoked. With her long braid, laced with silver strands and draped over one shoulder of her lemon silk blouse, with her gypsy complexion and straight, sharp-ridged nose, Arnette Kepner was a creature created by the dappled world of secrecy, every kind of secrecy, personal and professional, individual and governmental, official and unofficial. There was as much of her in the shadow as in the light, and that which was in the light never revealed so much as it implied. Arnette had been a long time in the deception game. It had affected her physiognomy, or the aura that surrounded it.
“The thing about Kalatis,” she continued, “is that because he’s a loner, there are fewer layers of small-timers between him and the dirty work. He’s close. Just around the corner.” She paused, and her voice assumed a note of calculation. “My advice: get your hands on one of the small-timers. Take them into a room and don’t come out until you have the person above them. Get your hands on that person and do the same thing with them. Two, three ‘interviews’ like that and you’ll be close enough to smell him.”
Graver sipped the coffee and nodded, watching her. Jesus.
“What about Dean’s contact at the fountain? What in the hell do you think he’s doing?”
“Marcus, I told you I thought this guy looked like government, didn’t I?” Arnette said, tapping an ash off her cigarette into the ashtray. “Well, we’re checking into that I’m trying to get wire photos of… relevant… CIA and FBI people.” She was being uncharacteristically evasive. “Luckily, this part of the business is relatively small. I should get something pretty quick.”
“This part?”
“The government doesn’t know how to handle people like Kalatis. There’s a lot of intelligence community overlapping. He’s a former foreign intelligence officer-that’s CIA. He’s probably working drugs-that’s DEA. Whatever he’s doing, he’s doing it Stateside-that’s FBI. So who gets him? CIA? DEA? FBI? Usually, everybody feels free to pursue their separate courses of inquiry.” She mashed out her cigarette in the ashtray. “And you know how well they cooperate with each other.”
“Then you think Dean is working for a government agency?”
“Well, not exactly.” Arnette lowered her eyes cautiously, and her thin fingers dropped to the ocher pack of cigarettes. She moved it a little, repositioned it, stood it on its side, stood it on its bottom. “The question is, does Dean know who he’s dealing with? What they’ve been doing, Marcus, is pretty far out It’s dirty. Being co-opted by the bad guys is pretty… sleazy. I don’t know who’s fooling whom here. I just think the guy’s got government written all over him… Dean has business with him… and they’re talking about Panos Kalatis.” She shrugged.
“Anyway,” she went on, “with Kalatis getting into the picture, this becomes business to me, too. It turns out Dean’s reference to Kalatis is the first action the intelligence networks have had on this guy in almost a year. This is a fantastic opportunity for me, for my business. I want to get all I can on him. Now that we’ve both got a stake in him, you won’t have to bear the whole financial burden. And the guy at the fountain. I want to know who the hell he is, too. There are some things I can do that you won’t have to pay for, and I’ll simply pass along what I can.”
Graver nodded.
She leveled her eyes on him. “And I’ll expect you to do the same,” she added.
Graver nodded again. “Sure, of course,” he said. “I appreciate it.” He straightened up in his chair, put his elbows on the table and held his head in his hands for a second and then dropped them.
“We could be making a big mistake here,” he said, looking at Arnette. “Why should we believe that the information behind lister’s bogus investigations has to be originating with Kalatis? What if they’re coming from the people at the fountain? What if the unknown is providing the information, not Kalatis?”
“We’re thinking Kalatis made the hits.”
“Based on this, yes,” Graver said, tapping the dossier. “But what if we’re wrong about that? Dean mentions Kalatis, but we don’t know in what context If we hadn’t heard his name, if we didn’t know he existed, wouldn’t we be assuming the guy at the fountain was behind all this? We’d almost have to be. This dossier may have thrown us off track.”
“Or put us on track,” Arnette countered, slipping another cigarette out of her pack. “We could have been making the wrong assumption. But, okay, let’s say we weren’t Dean is still talking to the guy at the fountain about Kalatis. Is he asking about Kalatis or reporting about him? Either way”-she waved the unlighted cigarette balanced between her thin fingers-”Kalatis is involved-somehow. Either way I can guarantee you’re going to be dealing with him.”
She lit the cigarette. The background noises from the computer room drifted into their silence, a telephone ringing, voices, the occasional shrill beep of a computer complaining of a wrong entry. Graver knew Arnette was
