He opened the screen door of the long, screened-in room that ran the length of the front of the house just as the door to the house itself opened.
“Baby!” Arnette said softly, smiling at him, and Graver stepped to the front door to hug a wiry, smallish woman with large brown eyes who was still a few years away from sixty. Arnette wore her thick, brindled hair pulled back-though it rebelled and strayed in a spray of salt and pepper filaments-and woven in a single braid which she habitually wore over her left shoulder in the rather coy manner of a much younger woman. She was trim and had the face of a gypsy, with a strong narrow nose and white teeth. As always when she was at home, she was dressed in a high-necked Vietnamese silk blouse and pants, today of bright saffron.
“I couldn’t believe my ears,” she said, holding Graver’s arm in a kind of embrace as they entered the living room of the house. “It’s been close to a year, mister. Where the hell have you been?”
“Wandering in the sloughs of bureaucracy,” Graver said. “Lost in the Valley of Darkness.”
She laughed knowingly as they stepped into a large room as eccentric in appearance as Arnette herself. Of the three houses in a row, only hers had been completely renovated, its dominating feature being its most immediate one, a sprawling and spacious living room with heavy teak pillars holding up the ceiling where walls once had been. Much of the lighting came from a continuous cornice that circled the room near the ceiling, which had been raised to include the higher spaces of the attic and which provided an unusual soft glow throughout, as though the room existed in a perpetual dawn. This lighting was supplemented by table lamps sprinkled among comfortable armchairs and sofas and small incidental tables stacked with books. The furniture and the walls were decorated with fabrics and artifacts that Arnette had picked up in Southeast Asia and Latin America during her years of work there. The effect was as if they were entering the enormous tent of a nomadic tribe or a large marao, the communal grass hut of the Montagnards of South Vietnam.
Arnette was still smiling as she gestured for Graver to sit down and then took her place on one of the sofas. Above her head on the wall behind her was a display of wicked-looking blades with wooden handles, a goose-necked chuang and smaller siput and a variety of hook-tipped maks. They were not weapons, however, but farming tools used by the rice-farming Jeh tribe of Montagnards who lived in the murky Dak Poko valley where Arnette had spent several lifetimes when she was younger, during the early years of the Vietnam War.
Surrounding them here and there as if in a museum were glass cases with pre-Columbian Mexican statuettes in the Remojadas style from Veracruz, life-sized stone masks in the Classic Teotihuacan style, and ceramics of every sort, including tripods decorated in the carved relief technique as well as Thin Orange ware. Weaving from the Guatemalan highlands hung on other walls, huipiles and caries and cintas in the brilliant, exploding colors of the Indian imagination. There were black and white photographs in thin black frames, Arnette on a bridge in Vienna, Arnette and Mona in a restaurant in Buenos Aires and at a cafe table in Montevideo, three people with no identification standing on the front porch of a cabin surrounded by aspens, a cur with three legs and a ribbon tied around his neck somewhere in Latin America.
Arnette tucked one of her legs up under her and sat back on the sofa, smiling at him.
“God, baby, it’s really good to see you,” she said. “I told Mona you were coming. She’ll be over after a while, if that’s all right with you.”
“Sure, I’d love to see her,” Graver said. Mona Isaza was Arnette’s companion. They had met when Arnette had spent a year in Mexico City in the early 1970s and had been together ever since. She lived in one of the houses next door.
“How have things been with you, anyway?” Arnette asked, still smiling, seeming to relish his being there.
“Busy,” he said and left it at that. Normally he would have brought her up to date on everyone, but he was sure she knew of his recent divorce, and he saw no reason to go into it. But if he mentioned the twins it would be uncomfortable to leave the subject of Dore just hanging there, so he chose not to say anything about any of them. “Just like everyone else.”
“When are you going to get out of this work?” she asked. “If I calculate right, this is your twenty-third year with the department… fourteen in that wretched intelligence maze.”
“Yeah, well, I’m going for twenty-five. Better benefits.”
“That suits you, huh?”
Graver shrugged. “Mixed feelings.”
“Oh, hell, that’s the business, isn’t it? Mixed feelings are the least of it. Everything else leaves a scab of some sort.”
Graver nodded.
She looked at him a moment in silence, and her smile softened. She could tell he was in no mood for visiting.
“You’ve got something on your mind.”
“I need some help.”
“Good.”
“Unofficially.”
“Oh.”
“Not for me, personally, it’s for the department, but I’m the only one who’s going to know about it.”
“Uh-oh. You’ve got internal problems.”
“I think it’s bad.”
“Jesus.”
“I need you to do twenty-four hours on Dean Burtell and his wife.”
Arnette thrust her head forward, her eyes wide open. “Burt-tell? Goddamn!”
Graver took the better part of an hour to tell her what had happened during the last two days. He told her everything. While he was talking she got up and lighted a joss stick and set it aside, the incense curling up into the twilight above them. Outside the birds were boisterous and shrill.
“The thing is,” Graver said after a while, “I’ve decided that I don’t want to turn this over to anyone just yet. I don’t want to go to anyone in the department, not even IAD. And I don’t want to go outside-DA’s office or FBI-until I know more about what I’ve got here.”
Arnette was sitting with one leg tucked up under her as before, the room now filled with the smoke of sandalwood. It was the waft of conspiracy, and Graver wondered if the fragrance put Arnette’s mind in the way of contrivance and secrecy, the way a mantra called to mind a meditative discipline. He was afraid she was going to say something about Burtell, but she was more savvy than that and, to Graver’s relief, stuck to the immediate business.
“Afraid they’ll cut you out?”
“I think it’s a distinct probability.”
She thought a minute. “I’m sorry if I sound… mercenary, but if this is an ‘unofficial’ contract, how am I going to get paid? This is going to take a lot of people-five to seven for Dean, four or five for Ginette-at least. He hasn’t been on the street in a long time, but I’ll bet he knows a team tail when he sees it. We can’t mess around here.”
“I have a small discretionary fund,” Graver said. “It can buy me several weeks if it needs to.”
Graver had met Arnette Kepner more than a decade back when he was lecturing on network analysis at the Georgetown University’s Consortium for the Study of Intelligence. After his lecture she was among the people who came up to the podium to ask more questions and talk for a few minutes. But she lingered until she was the last one and then asked to take him to dinner. It turned out to be a fascinating evening and was the beginning of a friendship.
He learned from her that she had spent nearly twenty-five years with the government, all of it in various intelligence branches, traveling to hot spots around the globe, first with army intelligence and then with “various other” agencies throughout her career. She said she was considering retiring and had thought that Houston would be a good place. They talked about the city in general terms, and she told him enough about her life for him to understand that she was a very unusual woman.