The list was long and curious, and it shed no direct light at all on Kalatis himself or on what he was doing during these years. There are no records of business involvements with any of these people; he was known only to have been seen with them.
He has no visible means of income though he has bank accounts of undetermined amounts in Switzerland and Luxembourg.
Under the bold-face subtitle Unconfirmed: “It is thought that somewhere around 1989 Kalatis may have bought a second residence in the Houston area. Since that time it has been rumored that he makes irregular trips back and forth between Bogota and Houston in a private jet, a Desault Falcon which was at one time registered in the name of his pilot, a former Israeli Air Force instructor who is thought to have worked for Kalatis since the mid 1980s.”
This seemingly trivial bit of information was the last entry. The last piece of paper was a single sheet with twenty-three lines of coded references. And then there was an 8?? 11 glassine envelope. Graver opened it and took out three photographs. The first was a picture of Yosef Raviv during his last year in the Israeli Defense Forces. He was in uniform and wearing sunglasses. Broad-shouldered with a rakehell smile and a cigarette tucked in the corner of his mouth, he was holding an Uzi as he stood on a hilltop with a barren stretch of rugged desert valley behind him. It was 1962 and he was twenty-six. There was no one in the picture with him.
The next photograph was stamped simply: “Buenos Aires, 1980.” Raviv was sitting at a sidewalk cafe. He was wearing a sport coat and shirt opened at the neck, and again he was wearing sunglasses. In eighteen years Raviv had acquired the solid frame of a man approaching middle age, though he was distinctly athletic. He looked hard and fit. The photographer had caught him in profile, one forearm resting on the small cafe tabletop, the hand of the other on the handle of a coffee cup which he had just put down or was about to pick up. He was alone and there was a folded newspaper at his elbow.
The third picture was in color, but it was very grainy. Stamped: “Mexico City, 1982.” Raviv was walking along a residential street on a sidewalk next to a high wall. The second floor of a house with its red tile roof peeped up over the high wall. Raviv was wearing what appeared to be a light linen tropical suit, light shoes, and sunglasses. A bough of cerise bougainvillea was sagging over the top of the wall behind him. One hand-the one next to the whitewashed wall-was in his suit pocket while the other one, holding a cigarette, was in midair leaving his mouth where he had apparently just puffed on the cigarette. A foggy plume of smoke made a blurred spot in front of his face. He was alone and looking directly at the photographer, though Graver assumed the picture had been shot from a clandestine position. Raviv was looking straight into the lens with the considered suspicion of a wolf who had 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.