As Graver walked through one of the French doors that opened obliquely into the dining room, he paused a moment to let his eyes adjust from the glare of the street There were a few diners, and he could hear a murmur of conversation and the clinking of tableware. One of the waitresses whisked by him with a tray of coffee and croissants on her way to the sidewalk tables. “Please, anywhere you wish,” she said in passing, and following that he heard Last’s relaxed, mellow English.
“Right here, Marcus.”
Graver turned to his right and made out Last’s shadow ghost sitting at one of the more choice tables, next to a window with a thick stone sill. An iron grille covered the window and a lacework of ivy covered the iron, forming a delicate panel of privacy separating them from the tables outside like the screen in a confessional. Graver walked to the table and sat down.
“This is untypical,” Last observed. “So late.”
“I couldn’t help it,” Graver said. “You’ve seen the papers?”
“Oh yes. I gathered as much.”
One of the waitresses came and took Graver’s order for coffee.
“Okay,” Graver said. “Let’s hear it” He was in no mood for pleasantries, and he wanted Last to know that Last nodded.
“Of all the stuff I’d told you before,” Last said, “I left out something… rather central.”
“Really?” Graver couldn’t resist a note of sarcasm.
“What I didn’t tell you was, I’ve been boffing Mrs. Faeber almost from the beginning.”
Graver looked at him. “Okay.”
“This is a lonely woman, Marcus. I knew it from the moment I met her.” Last paused to sip his own coffee when the girl brought Graver’s. “I saw opportunity there… one way or the other. They had money; I had… artifacts. Surely we could work out something, I thought. But Rayner-Mrs. Faeber-was, is, a sexually aggressive woman and ‘Colin,’ apparently, has the sexual curiosity of a sheet of paper. By the time they left Mexico that first time we met, Rayner and I had… connected, so to speak.” He paused to light a cigarette. “This woman, Graver, I tell you she’s insatiable. I’ve never seen anything like it. Do you know that-?”
“Victor, I don’t want to hear it. You know what I do want to hear.”
Last paused and looked at Graver across the table. Graver’s eyes had adjusted to the low light now, and he saw Last’s handsome face with its glory of wrinkles, battle scars from his encounters with the bottle and from sleepless nights in bordellos, from the anxiety of a life of fleecing and deception, from the punishing pleasures and constant disquiet of silk-sheet adulteries, from never being sure of anything except the assurance that nothing was sure. He was smiling slightly, a smile that was at once boyish and wizened. He looked like a man who, on the brink of finally having to admit to himself that he had pissed away the better part of a lifetime with nothing to show for it, had spotted one more long shot-a good one this time-and was about to put everything he had left into the wager.
“Marcus, I was with Rayner last night She told me an incredible story. I think it has enormous potential.”
“You said you could ‘deliver Faeber’s ass.’”
“Better than that. I think… if we give it some thought… we can put our hands on Kalatis.”
Chapter 64
Panos Kalatis leaned against the door of his bedroom and looked out across the veranda through the white heat of the sunlight to the murky waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Wearing only his white pajama trousers, he was barefoot and shirtless, his well-tanned barrel chest thrust out in general defiance. He was smoking his first cigar of the day, and he was worried.
Behind him, Jael lay across their bed, nut brown and naked, stretching her long limbs in the warm, late morning breeze that blew in through the veranda doors from the Gulf. Occasionally the squeal of a seagull broke the silence that was otherwise only interrupted by the wash of the water on the beach below and the rustling of the palm fronds moved by the breeze.
Kalatis was worried because his chief security officer had caused him to be awakened at eleven o’clock, thinking it unwise to allow him to go another hour without knowing of the explosion at the South Shore Marina. Though he had cut off all communication with Sheck and Burtell, his men had tried to renew them since news of the explosion this morning and had had no success. Kalatis had something to think about.
“Panos,” Jael said from behind him, her voice throaty from sleep. “Panos.”
He turned a little and looked over his shoulder. She was an absolute marvel. He knew of nothing more heightening to a sexual experience than sleeping with a woman who knew how to kill you in five different languages. A woman like this one. He could not get enough of this woman; he was capable of watching her for long periods of time in much the same way that an animal trainer might watch a prized cat, just for the pure pleasure of enjoying the incomparable marriage of sinew and movement. Her beauty was so unaffected and powerful that it nullified the dimension of danger she occupied, or rather transformed it, so that the violence of which she was capable was no longer a thing to be feared, but to be appreciated, if not altogether desired.
And he liked the way she said “Panos.”
Nevertheless, he turned his back to her and squinted at the eye-watering brightness of the Gulf. Colin Faeber had been trying to get in touch with him. No doubt he had heard of the explosion too and was in a state of panic. Kalatis decided his best course of action with Faeber was simply never to see or speak to him again. Though Faeber had been one of the few people who had been to Kalatis’s beach house without having been presented with the pretense that he was being taken out of the country, he always had been brought there at night and still was deceived as to its true location. But he knew Kalatis was not in Mexico; he knew Kalatis lived as close as an hour’s flight. No, Kalatis did not want to see Faeber again-ever.
The explosion in the harbor had disturbed a very tightly scheduled series of events and possibly had ruined the rest of Kalatis’s program. Possibly. Now he had to decide whether he thought he could salvage all of it, or whether he thought he should cut his losses. That would mean passing up nearly forty million dollars, and that kind of money was worth considerable risk.
But, there was considerable risk. Not the least of which was continuing his plan without knowing who was responsible for the explosion. Was this an accident? Burtell and Sheck were almost surely killed in that fire, since it was their habit to meet on Burtell’s boat If they were, what kind of a coincidence was that? None, he was sure. Kalatis had planned and escaped too many intrigues to believe in coincidence. Coincidence was a thing that occurred so rarely that he considered it almost an apocryphal concept. Like the unicorn, it was an idea of fools and romantics. As an explanation for anything as concrete as an explosion, it was a delusion.
He had so little time left-he was beginning his last day of collections-that it was hardly worth the effort of putting into operation any kind of serious investigation. His best course of action was to try and speed up the collection process which was, as always, to take place late at night and in the early morning hours. Now he had his people getting in touch with the three remaining clients, trying to arrange their appointments for earlier in the evening or, even better, late in the afternoon. This change would be catching his clients by surprise, and they would surely have procedural adjustments to bring about before they could comply with his request All of this was to be negotiated during the next three or four hours. By daylight the next morning, Panos Kalatis would have disappeared off the face of the earth.