No one said anything for a moment Kalatis was turning the cigar in his mouth, keeping the butt of it damp, tasting the tobacco. With the women out of the picture there was nothing to distract their attention from the cicadas throbbing in the thickets of the park, the late June heat intense enough to keep them singing hours into the night.
“I wouldn’t want to lose everything we’ve gained so far,” Kalatis observed.
Burtell was attentive to every nuance in Kalatis’s voice. His tone was not threatening, but it might have carried a thin imputation, or maybe it was simply an old-fashioned portent of imagined consequences, the kind of thing you perceived between the lines when the juices in your glands squirted into action and turned you cold even before you understood why. In this business, there was an entire language, an invisible lexicon that was only apprehensible in just that way, with your juices, elliptical communications conveyed solely in those absent spaces between the apparent You understood because there was a portion of a primitive instinct left within you that you could not define or explain, except that it had to do with survival.
“All this preparation, this significant capital investment,” Kalatis went on.
Burtell had to reassure him. “Look, Marcus Graver is writing a report that will close this down. Everybody wants this over, and everybody wants it clearly to appear to be over.”
Kalatis had been staring through the windshield at the park where the surrounding trees were quickly turning from deep blue-greens to sooty black, their towering presence darker than the darkening sky. He turned and looked into the back seat again.
“What about Graver? He’s good enough to get onto this, isn’t he?”
“Yeah, he’s good enough,” Burtell said matter-of-factly. But he suspected Kalatis already knew that.
“Then we’ve got to worry about him.”
“I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think so.”
“He’s in a very awkward situation, Panos,” Burtell said wearily. “I think he’ll follow Homicide’s lead. He’ll almost have to. If he insists on pursuing suspicions of conspiracy, he’s going to run into resistance from Westrate. Westrate’s not going to want to hear any of that kind of talk. No matter how suspicious Graver may be-and I don’t know that he is, this is just for the sake of your argument-regardless of any suspicions he may have, he’s the kind of guy who’s very good at making reality checks on himself. Homicide says suicide. IAD says suicide. He has no tangible evidence that Tisler was doing anything out of the ordinary. No matter what his suspicions, he’s going to let it go. He’s an empiricist.”
Kalatis emitted a coil of cigar smoke, still looking over the back of the seat “An ‘empiricist,’ uh-huh,” he said with pointed boredom.
Burtell doubted the Greek knew what that meant To hell with him, let him wonder.
“You have confidence that Tisler didn’t have some kind of mental meltdown and leave something behind?” Faeber challenged again. “I mean, the man shot himself, for God’s sake!”
“Colin, you son of a bitch,” Burtell snapped. “The poor bastard told me what you did.” Faeber quickly looked at Kalatis, who turned away, undoubtedly disgusted with Faeber’s clumsy double take. “You wanted to ‘guarantee’ his loyalty? How goddamned bumbling can you be?”
“We had to do that,” Kalatis interjected. He pulled at the knot of his tie, twisting his neck this way and that and unbuttoned his shirt collar, opening it wide. The heat seemed to have grown more oppressive with the fading light. Burtell had pulled off his suit coat a long time ago and laid it in the seat beside him. Faeber hadn’t loosened anything or removed anything.
“You thought you had to do that,” Burtell clarified. He wasn’t going to let Kalatis weasel out of that so easily. Faeber cut his eyes at Kalatis to see how he was going to react to Burtell’s challenge, but Burtell didn’t give a damn. He went on. “Whatever reason you had to doubt him was a stupid reason. Somebody way overplayed this. Somebody didn’t know what they were doing. You pushed him, and you lost him. Now you’ve got a dead man on your hands, and you want me to make sure it doesn’t mean anything. Well, I can’t do that.”
“We’re only suggesting,” Kalatis said with calculated patience, “that you need to be sure about what you’re telling us.”
Faeber nodded in agreement.
Burtell didn’t like this alliance he was seeing between the two men in front of him. He didn’t like being on the defensive. Something was poisoning the well.
“There’s… nothing… in… CID,” Burtell emphasized. “If he’s got something squirreled away outside, I can’t be responsible for knowing anything about that. If he did that, it’s because he was desperate, felt like he’d been pushed up against the wall.” He let this hang in the sticky air for a moment “It didn’t have to be that way.”
There was a long silence, Kalatis and Faeber half-turned in the front seat, Kalatis looking away now, out the windshield. He was big, and he often reminded Burtell of a minotaur. It was an apt image: Kalatis, his feet planted firmly in front of the doorway to darkness, guarding a subterranean maze of lies.
“What about Seldon, then?” Kalatis asked. He was holding his cigar, looking at its glowing tip. “What do we do now?”
“You forget about it,” Burtell said. “It’s gone, done.”
Kalatis turned his head slowly toward Burtell. “Oh, I don’t think so, my friend. I just said a moment ago that I didn’t want to lose my situation here.”
“You’ll lose that and everything else if you try to force this,” Burtell warned. “We can’t screw around with Graver too much, Panos. We won’t get by with it very long.”
“What do you mean?” Kalatis asked softly, smiling. “We’ve been screwing him for two years.”
“No, we’ve been lying to him for two years,” Burtell clarified. “There’s a difference. Tisler’s death, that’s screwing with him. Any idiot can tell lies, but you’ve got to be at the other end of the IQ scale if you want to deal successfully with Marcus Graver’s suspicions.”
“So it’s over?” Faeber was incredulous.
“Seldon is, yes,” Burtell said. “We put everything on hold for right now. Let everyone relax over there. Wait until Ray gets back from his vacation and then see if we can’t restructure, pull this back together.”
Kalatis had turned back to looking out the windshield. From where they sat they could see the tops of the downtown skyscrapers rising out of the darkness, just beginning to glitter in the twilight.
“Okay,” Kalatis said suddenly with a huge sigh. He tossed his cigar out onto the asphalt of the parking lot “We’ll get with Besom when he gets back. When is that?”
“Tomorrow,” Burtell said.
“Okay,” Kalatis continued. “We’ll get with him, get his opinion. Let’s give this some thought Work up the options. If we want to go on with the operation, how do we do it? Are the gains worth the risks? What do we do if Graver does come up with something?” He looked at Burtell and then at Faeber. “You know what we need.” Again to the back seat “I’ll be in touch.”
That was all there was to it.
Kalatis turned around to face the steering wheel and hit the buttons on his armrest that controlled the windows. As the windows were going up Burtell picked up his suit coat, feeling as though he ought to say something else, but not knowing just exactly what or just exactly why. Nothing more was said, so Burtell opened his door and got out He closed the door just as the windows locked into place, and Kalatis started the car and flipped on the air conditioner.
Burtell hesitated a beat beside the dark windows of the Mercedes and then turned and walked across the small lot to his car, unlocked it, and threw in his coat He looked back at the Mercedes which didn’t move, just sat there with its motor running, its air conditioner humming along with the cicadas in the dark heat. He got into his own car and started the engine, feeling a little queasy as he adjusted the air conditioner vents to blow directly on him. The goddamned Greek was just too spooky. He was so goddamned byzantine he made intrigue look like a game of checkers.