Blood Makes Noise (7 page)

“What?”

The familiar smile but now weirdly dysfunctional. A fun-house mannequin out of sync. “With any luck, and in all probability, we will never have that discussion.” One of Hector’s friendly squeezes on the arm that suddenly wasn’t Hector’s at all. “Ah, but the time. I’m not as young as you, Michael, I belong in bed.” He stood. “Please give my love to Carmelina.”

Not long after that first night in the tango bar, Michael had screwed up an attempt to bug the Polish ambassador’s new residence with a direct-current listening system. In the middle of wiring it up, a maid Michael hadn’t accounted for appeared suddenly, forcing the pair of Technical Support Division guys down from Panama City to bail in such haste they left gaping holes in the home’s plaster walls.

For a day and a half Michael had waited for the phone call that would say the maid had fingered him, that he was officially burned operationally in DO and would be sent home, to the utter delight of Norris, to spend the rest of his career disgraced on a desk in Barton Hall.

But when the call finally came, it wasn’t from Washington but Hector. Apparently the Argentine spook had already bugged the residence a week before Michael’s attempt, and in the interest of protecting his own operation had, under some official pretext, delayed the Polish ambassador that night, paid off the maid, and had an emergency crew repair the mess Michael’s TSD team had left, all of which probably saved Michael’s career.

But what Hector did next put it on a whole different trajectory. The deputy head of military intelligence then offered to share his recordings of the ambassador’s residence with the CIA, but with a catch: Hector would only deal with Michael. Not Norris, not anyone sent down from SB Division to replace him, only Michael. And from that moment onward, Michael became Hector’s personal conduit to Washington. Any messages to be sent,
any insights that suited Casa Rosada, and some that suited merely Hector, went through the junior CIA officer. It saved Michael from being yanked home, but it also made him a prisoner here. Hector had became his only real friend in BA outside his marriage, and that made him another kind of prisoner. Hector had never asked anything in return, but Michael had always known, someday, that the request would come. Favors were, in the end, the grease that ran their worlds.

“Walk home careful, Hector.”

Hector turned and his eye—the damaged, wandering one—caught the light, and for an instant it took on the dead glisten of a reptile.

“The night holds few surprises for me, Michael.”

A tap of his cane, two at most, and he was gone.

Michael walked home, through a night full of the flinty whisper of clouds and the lonely warp of sirens drawing pointless circles in the asphalt…

Over the last six months he’d dreamed four times of Her. The dried husks of flies, the spark of candles, the weight of a twelve-year-old girl. In the dreams, always, as they were about to close the lid of her box, the eyes would open, the lips smile, and three of the times she said what she had written to him in life:
You Will Never Forget Me
. In the fourth dream, the last dream, the smile grew larger and the words changed.

I Will Always Be a Part of You
.

M
ichael was at the window, stripped to his undershirt, sitting beside the camera tripod. Attached to it was a 400-mm lens aimed across the street at another window in another apartment, known to be quietly leased by the Soviet embassy as a safe house. Lately it seemed to be used more for sex than debriefings, though sex certainly had its place in Michael’s SPR files.

“Anybody moving? Fucking?” The gravel voice belonged to Ed Lofton, who was sitting across the room, reading the paper.

“Not yet.” The routine window-watching was done by a retired American couple on retainer with the station. After logging a Monday evening assignation between two members of the Sov embassy, it was decided to send down a pair of case officers the following Monday to check it out for themselves.

“Bombs, bombs, and bombs…all for that stupid, arrogant cunt.” Lofton was having his usual go-around with the morning paper. Seemingly oblivious to the heat, he still wore a jacket and tie, his bloodless, veined face sporting a moist, toxic sheen. “South America’s biggest secret. ‘Where’s Evita?’ Just give the bitch back to them, I say.”

Lofton grinded on Michael, but he was the only case officer that would even consider helping him out with this work, though Michael suspected the attraction was more likely the opportunity to spend an afternoon sipping bourbon, there in his seersucker suit like a Tennessee Williams character, than anything to do with policy directives from E Street in Washington.

“Ever read her file? There’s something to keep you warm on a winter night. Lady spread her legs faster than day-old butter in her youth. But always for a price. Good ol’ Evita always knew the price of everything. Use to be a betting pool in the station on how many millions she’d stolen from her beloved citizens. Or where she put it. How that thieving whore ended up a national saint should be proof by itself of the existence of miracles. But then you knew her, right?”

A dig, and Michael ignored it. His strange and brief friendship with the former First Lady was something he never spoke of.

“She ever talk about it?”

“What?”

“The money.”

Michael snorted and shook his head. “Argentina’s favorite ghost story.”

“Well, can’t blame a boy for wondering.”

Lofton flipped through a few more pages and then abandoned the paper, bored.

“How’d you get into this business, Mike?”

“Like everybody else. Wrong word in the right ear in college.”

“Never went to college. Bud neither. Johnny Miller for that matter. None of us down here did. Just old-fashioned cops. Not as
educated
in the ways of world domination as you boys.”

There were stirrings in the apartment. Two couples, midthirties. “Company.” Michael stepped up to the 400-mm lens. Lofton turned the page of his newspaper. “Looks like Federov and Guylina. The blonde’s Alexis’s wife. Don’t recognize the other woman.”

“Tell me when the clothes come off.”

Michael clicked off a few shots. The four took seats on a couple of sofas, produced a bottle, and started pouring. Michael took his eye from the camera and paged through his notes. “All four are married, though not to one another.”

“Way of the world with Sovs, isn’t it?”

It was. Moscow kept its kids on such short leashes, about the only peccadilloes possible were with fellow staff from the embassy. Russian culture seemed remarkably elastic on the matter, and such activities rarely caused ripples through the Soviet station. Still, it never hurt to know who was doing whom. At least in Michael’s training.

Lofton lit a cigarette, bent forward, and held his temples between two fingers. “Amazing, really, the trouble they’ve gone to trying to keeping her hidden.”

“Who?”

“Evita.”

Michael was back up at the camera. The foursome was laughing it up now, getting touchy-feely.

“Maybe they just want to protect her.” Michael tried to keep his eye on the lens, but his sweat kept fogging the view finder.

“From what?”

“Themselves.”

And just like that the clothes came off. No preamble. One minute chat, next buttons working their way down, exposing pale flesh. “The clothes are coming off.”

Lofton groaned as he stood and leaned against the window frame. “Lovely.”

“Don’t let them see you.”

“Don’t think their attention’s on me, butch.”

Their skin looked pocked through the lens’s ground glass. Mouths on breasts, buttocks dimpled with carpet indentations.

“Did you know even President Aramburu doesn’t know where she is? Nobody at Casa Rosada does. It’s Argentina’s only secret.”

Except for whoever brings those flowers. Every night.
“I’m sure someone there knows.”

“You mean Hector?”

Hands groped into pants. You could see sweat on the women’s backs. “Whoever.”

“We all know that means Hector. Anything that happens after midnight in this country has Hector’s name on it. Coups rise and fall, but Hector always endures. Casa Rosada’s resident demon. Just comes with the furniture.” Federov was climbing atop the blonde now. Lofton let out a sigh. “I was hoping for something a little more exotic from our communist friends.”

“Four on four isn’t enough for you?”

“You haven’t lived in Argentina long enough.”

Yes he had. Strangers’ sweat in unventilated Buenos Aires rooms brought up foul memories of his own, not involving his wife. It was an ugly association.

“How’d you like it, someone photographing you?” Lofton said it right against Michael’s ear, and the alcohol rot of the man’s body pushed him to the edge. He took his eye from the lens. Rubbed it. “It’s just for the SPR files.”

“Millions of pictures of humping Russians. That’ll change the world.” Lofton straightened up, looked out on the clumsy orgy. “Your bosses must be proud.”

They’d all been switched from FBI to CIA down here since ’47. Eight years and still they were
Michael’s
bosses.
Them
.

Michael clicked off a few more shots without even looking through the lens, then sat down on the carpet with his back against the window.

“You’re missing the big finish.”

“I got enough.”

Michael would have to wait, though, for the obligatory sidewalk shots. He wanted to go home, get away from sweating Russians and Lofton. Yet he craved Lofton’s approval, craved one—just one—accepting face among his spook partners.

“Why do you think Hector picked you out, Mike?”

“Who says he did?”

“C’mon. I read the cables. The guy likes you. Ever since your belly flop at the Polack ambassador’s house, he’s been giving you stuff.”

“Maybe I’m the only one that’s interested.”

“Oooh. FBI bashing. Wondered how long it was going to take before your right hook came up.” Lofton winked and took a long, leisurely drag on his pocket flask. “No, I don’t think that’s it. Want to hear my theory? Isn’t that you used to live here. It’s because you’re the only one of us that wants
out
—your Sovs are on the sidewalk, butch.”

Michael rose to a crouch and squeezed off a few more. Federov had a stain on his pants that no one was going to mistake for coffee. The others weaved and faded into the sidewalk crowds. A last shutter frame of the back of someone’s head and he was done.

Michael started breaking down the camera. “Hector likes you, Mike. He tells you things. Things he doesn’t tell his own government.” Michael slipped the 400-mm lens into its cut-foam suitcase. “Think he’d tell you where she is?” Michael loaded the camera body into the case. He just wanted to go home. “Do you know, Mike? Do you know where she is?”

Michael stopped and the two stared at each other as Wintergreen, the station guard, came barreling suddenly through the door in his civvies. Lofton smiled, “Master Wintergreen, everyone’s favorite marine. Favor us with some Basque, dear boy.”

“
Zoaz infernu
. It means ‘Go to hell.’”

“Warms the heart to see a boy speaking the native language of his parents.”

“Only when I’m pissed off.”

Michael looked in disbelief from Wintergreen to Lofton. “You always tell the marines where our safe houses are?”

“Well, young Wintergreen here is hardly just
any
marine. He’s
our
marine.”

Michael thought,
Scratch one fucking safe house
. He shook his head, buckled the case, and stood.

“Ed and I were just getting some dinner,” shrugged the marine.

“Raising a little
infernu
tonight,” Lofton said, walking back to retrieve his newspaper. “We’d invite you, Mike, but most of your hell seems to be pretty much self-contained.”

T
hey were in the land of frightening skies.

Here, the earth was an afterthought, a pathetic strip of taupe running away without character or form. It was the sky that consumed everything: color, movement, texture. It was the sky that was real and the earth insubstantial. So hungry, so big, you lost trust in your feet, as if you could tumble upward into the maw. Vast, empty blue that was an arrogant, mean piece of forever.

Karen liked the pampas. She had spent summers as a child in eastern Colorado, and it spoke to her. To Michael it was a vaguely evil place in which he never felt at ease.

Michael studied his wife’s profile, fuller now with pregnancy. That same profile first glimpsed against a foggy morning in the Reynolds coffeehouse at the University of Chicago. Her hair was full of midnight, like his mother’s, with just a few silvery strands she’d had since sixteen, like her mother. It cupped a face the color of no color, with eyes so startlingly gray Michael had never seen them on anything but wolves. When he’d finally glanced over her shoulder, she had the worst handwriting he’d ever seen…

They shot past a pampa town, its grim coupling of expressionless buildings low and fearful of rising from the earth’s safety into the swallowing sky. A poverty fragment sucked away in a dusty second.

Karen was in a good mood. These flat, expressionless miles west of BA always lifted her morale, and they were playful with each other—careful play, cautious of the hidden hair triggers that had grown into the fabric of their lives here. But nobody
misstepped. Karen was in too high a spirit, happy just to be freed from a city they’d begun to see as the enemy.

The estancia’s gate was white between two gnarled ombu trees. It was swung open, a shotgun gaucho checking names. The ranch house lay three miles farther along a sycamore-shaded road, where two dozen cars already crowded the circular drive. The house was like most out here: a sprawling, Mediterranean one-story. The floor was cool tile, the furniture covered in treated hide. Everything had a tricked-up, kitschy feel: the Lore of the Gaucho. Like most pampa estates it didn’t feel lived in, and it wasn’t. The wealth of Argentina came from these pampas, but it didn’t stay. Like the owners of the estancias, it slipped quickly away to the city and rarely returned. The lords of these nation-sized plots lived most of their lives as urban
Porteños
, putting on their grandfather’s gaucho knife only on the weekends when they’d return to the muddy source of their cars, furs, and perfume. The only people that truly lived out on these horizon tracts were the impoverished peasants who worked them. Half-breeds whose flat noses were all that remained of an Indian culture Spanish colonialists wiped out in just six bloody years. There were no Indian reservations in Argentina.