Blood Makes Noise (8 page)

Across the entry hall, a pair of latticed glass doors stood open, the sound of laughter riding thin breezes. Off the back of the house sprawled a brick patio with a raised fire pit, flaring now with the juices of an entire steer turning above coals. It could feed fifty, and fifty milled about waiting, biding their time with gossip and gin and tonics. They were the usual mix: half BA upper crust, a few foreign diplomats, a blend of American ex-patriots—businessmen, technocrats, CIA station Buenos Aires.

Their host was still out on his horse—tradition at these gatherings—the lord leading a group of husbands on a manly gallop across the estancia. Heavy drinks appeared in their hands—also a tradition—and hoisting them, Michael and Karen took their
place on the rim of the party, waiting for a point to enter the fray.

The point today was Norris, Michael’s boss. Two tall ones’ worth of mellow, he smiled at Michael, something he did only in public. Standing with a knot of British utilities magnates who owned most of BA’s power grid, he had his arm warmly around Michael’s shoulder now, one happy family. It was what Michael disliked most about these weekends. But Michael was good at his job, and a CIA officer is nothing if not the most outgoing person at a party.

The rules were looser away from the city, and a group had taken Karen in. His wife was attractive and intelligent if you gave her a chance, and it warmed something hopeless in Michael to see her fawned over by listing men hanging on her anecdotes. When she was angry, when she was depressed, it gave Michael’s life a kind of certainty. But when she was happy, grasping the reins of her life, it confused him.

He’d downed his first two drinks fast, just to swallow the road dust, and they were slithering up on him now, warm numbness across the top of his skull. The house stood on what in these parts passed for a rise, and thousands of acres drew away from it to where land and sky smacked in silence. A hard line of clouds had taken station there, hitching the thermal up from Patagonia.

The pampas.

No one was sure how deep the topsoil was. Eight feet or eighteen, black richness that sprung wheat like weeds and grass a hundred million cattle couldn’t finish. So effortless the wealth of this place that its ability to absorb the abuses of its owners was legendary: “
Dios arregla de noche la macana que los argentinos hacen de día.
” God puts right at night the mess Argentines make by day. So effortless, this wealth, it stunk with the stale tragedy of how a nation so endowed had added up to so little. For Argentina
should have been great. But the easy land didn’t require talent, and its people produced none, becoming instead a place obsessed with its dead and alive with the thrill of its own self-destruction.

Evita had seen her country as great, and for a shining instant the country believed it. But she was just an echo now across a nation sliding out of control, ruled by nonruling generals stalling and clucking and driving the whole show into the ground.

There were plenty of them here. Norris’s polo teammates, bemedaled and snug behind their new authority. The queen was dead, the king stateless, and maybe if you did call her a thief, maybe if you ran her underpants up a flagpole to show her commonness, maybe if you ordered her memory disappeared, she would disappear.

Maybe if you moved her body.

They’d tried to show she was just a whore mimicking the rich she supposedly despised. They displayed her diamonds, proved she stole magnificently from the treasury. But they missed the point. She had started poor and so, in becoming wealthy, fulfilled the Cinderella dream so many fantasized about. And if she stole from the rich for herself, she also stole for the poor, and no one had ever done that before. No one had shaken down international corporations to build hospitals and dedicate schools. And if it was all vanity and greed, who cared? No one had ever spoken to the great unwashed as an equal, held them to their breast, cooed to them like lovers, whispered hatred for those they hated: the rich; the privileged; the whole pointless, pathetic history of their nation.

She was dead, and she lived on in the stares of servants. And all the generals’ medals, all the posturing Michael knew only underlined a fear so deep none had the courage to destroy her. Because maybe her corpse really was protected by God, or the devil, or the stares of servants.

He was drunk.

Nothing can sneak up on you in the pampas, and
El Amo
’s riding party was already a mute plume of dust at vision’s edge. Valets prepared cool towels and
mate
for the returning adventurers, flushed with the ride, sun, and booze. A gaucho bringing up the rear carried in one hand half a dozen strung pheasants, the day’s shotgun catch. Each horseman half dismounted, half spilled out of his saddle as the chef rang the bell announcing the meal.

The beef, sliced from the side of the mammoth rotating carcass, was sweet and so juicily raw Michael’s mouth sang as his gut sagged. He’d held Karen’s hand under the table at dinner, felt her brush his arm in suggestion, but he’d lost her now somewhere among the greasy laughter on the patio, the piles of bones going red in the retreating day.

He was cornered now, pinned against an adobe planter by his host, his office mate Lofton, and a nonspecific
Porteño
whose name he couldn’t keep straight over the growing gin rush in his ears.

“Tell him the story, Mike.” It was Lofton, living up to his reputation as the drunkest man in Argentina. The veins in his nose had taken on a life of their own and were rivaled only by the pulsating red in his eyes. “Come on, Mike, tell him.” The conversation was in English, despite the two Argentines; Lofton in fifteen years here never bothering to pick up the language.

“Please, Mr. Suslov,” his host, Senor Carenza, said, swaying. Carenza was spectacularly fat in gaucho
bombachas
and a cotton riding shirt. His face was easy and drunk and listing dangerously to one side. Lofton had heard the story a dozen times and had never shown any particular interest in it. But Lofton liked to be around people without having to deal with them, liked being at the center of a good story he didn’t have to tell.

“Once, when I was a kid…” His tongue felt bloated and alien in his mouth, the words unwieldy blocks to scale. Michael knew
the story by heart—how his father, stuck with him for the evening, had dressed Michael up as an adult dwarf so he could take him drinking in the local tavern. It was a funny story, but Michael knew if you looked closely enough it was a sad one too.

“Where did you grow up?” Carenza asked.
I grew up in La Boca
, Michael thought,
tasting the malevolence of your class.

“Chicago.”

Days died fast out here, twilight lasting just long enough to find the light switch. The gnats had risen and with them bats, blurry shapes dashing through the glow of strung party lamps. The drinks had stopped slithering and were now outright tackling his body. His face was numb, and it was getting hard to concentrate on what anyone was saying. So he stopped trying. The gaggle of husbands had grown tight enough around Karen he could barely glimpse her brunette head. It was always the same out here: endless drunken weekends on endless pampas, heat and booze and husbands flirting with his wife.

“So. Mike.”

He slurred his head to look. “Barbara.”

“You’re drunk.”

“Old news I’m afraid.”

Barbara DeVries was a full inch taller than he. From his slouch it seemed ten. She had a frosty glass in one hand, surveying the party. “Saturday night in Argentina.”

She was his age, with short, severe brown hair and a face so mannishly angular it could cut paper. Her British education left her talking Oxford, but she was Dutch, here as a secretary for the Dutch mission.

“Where’s Short Eyes?” He was hammered and probably said it too loud. Barbara smiled.

“Oh, he’s around. Probably on his knees in the stable boy’s quarters by now.”

Short Eyes was her boss, the Dutch mission’s economic attaché. Notorious for his fixation with dark-haired boys, Barbara was his beard, someone over fourteen to have on his arm at social functions.

Barbara drank from her glass. A rivulet of melted frost rolled over the back of her hand.

“I’ve been checking the BA obits for a month now to see if you were killed in a car accident or something.”

“What?” His face was stupid, and it annoyed her.

“It’s a joke, Mike. You haven’t called.”

“Oh. Yeah. It’s been, y’know, sorta crazy lately with—”

“It’s a
joke
, Mike.”

Last year, with work sinking to new lows and Karen’s morale beginning its ruined turn, Barbara had asked him to lunch. She didn’t eat meat—a weird, lonely practice in cow-crazy Argentina—and they ended up at probably South America’s only beat café. There, surrounded by Latin hepcats, she had ignored him, taunted him, then taken him home.

She was thin, and it amazed him how breasts so large belonged to shoulders so narrow. When they got to her place nobody spoke, and before it was over he was already gone, reading the little paper notes around her phone as she gulped breaths in his ear. He thought how weird it was; how you spend most of your life thinking about sex, except during it, when your mind wanders.

It was a rotten time for him, before the resignation set in. He hated his work and he hated going home, so he concentrated on the empty peripheries of his days: the wiretaps, the late-night interviews, Barbara. They met all that summer in her small flat, lay sweaty on a mattress, listened to the squeak of a fan shoveling leaden air from one side of the room to the other. Just like Russians…

Sometimes he told her stories. But Barbara liked to talk, so they talked mostly of her: old lovers, home, life in the Dutch
embassy. It was during a story about an argument between her boss and the ambassador that she stopped suddenly and drew away from him.

“You’re working me, aren’t you?”

They’d been making love that afternoon on her floor. She’d scooted against the wall.

“What?”

It was a kind of admiration worn on her clenched, half smile. “Sitting there listening about the ambassador and Short Eyes. You’re working me.”

Michael understood finally and collapsed on his back in frustration. “Aw, c’mon, Barb. You know I’m not.”

Her face changed. The weak smile disappeared as she studied him. “No, you’re not, I suppose.” A sigh, then as she pushed a damp strand of hair from her eye, “When I first met you, I used to think you were a spy by accident. You were too open, too boyish to be a real spook. But I was wrong. All those silly stories you tell, the innocence, you know it makes people feel intimate with you. But it’s all a lie, isn’t it?”

“They’re real stories, Barb.”

“But they’re nothing to do with the real you. They
feel
intimate, but they’re just a screen. By the time people figure that out, they’ve spilled their life to you. The sickest part is that you don’t even do it consciously. It’s just who you are.” She laughed then, hollow. “Dulles got a bargain when he hired you. The boyish cherub who’s really a cunning, ambitious little fuck and doesn’t even know it.”

They didn’t talk much after that, and somewhere along the line he just stopped coming. Since then Barbara was ironic when she saw him. Not because he had worked her, but because he had worked her without noticing it.

Her look fell from the party back to him. “So I was just a summer’s distraction.”

“Jesus Christ, Barb, do we have to talk about it now?”

“We
never
talked about it.”

There was something dangerous about her today Michael didn’t want to provoke. So he did what he always did. Smile. It provoked her.

“You’re a chickenshit, Mike—is that the right word?”

“Close enough.”

“You’re not happy with your life. When are you going to wake up and do something about it?”

“You don’t know me, Barbara.”

“Sure I do. You really think this new fatherhood thing fools anyone? You’re a rotten son of a bitch, Mikey. You think if you ignore something long enough it’ll just go away. Well it’s not going to. Not this time. Not unless you do something about it.”

Old, ugly truths. Barbara shifted her gaze to something neutral. The edge of the planet maybe.

“Do you ever think about those nights?”

“Sure.”

“Bullshit.”

“I do. Honest.” It sounded stupid and high-pitched to himself. Barbara smiled and shook her head.

“You never were a fun drunk…”

The temperature didn’t drop much but the sky darkened and darkened till it seemed to glow with darkness. Stars raked powerfully over them, and the dusty breeze stilled and bedded for the night.

Fluted glass lanterns appeared as small cliques formed around wrought-iron tables. Most of the party had stumbled off to home or bed in the guesthouses, leaving remaining knots of laughter, toasts, and ghost stories tossed into the insect cry.

Michael was with Karen now, alone in their own warm circle. Her eyes caught the night and it hurt Michael to think that her eyes probably sparkled all the time, but he didn’t notice like
he once had. She touched his hand, let her hair fall into her face as she studied the fingers. And Michael felt the world sharpen for just a second. He leaned over, reached up under her cotton blouse, and touched their child.

They made love in the guest room. Careful. Mindful of the life pressed between them. And it was better, fuller for the care. Afterward they stood naked at the window and watched heat lightning flash somewhere over Montevideo. There had been lightning that first time in Michael’s college dorm, a slashing storm that shook the walls with fury. They had stood at that window too, and below them blue stutters of light had lit up green, copper roofs. They’d counted softly together the space between each flash and its following thunder. “One, one thousand…two, one thousand…three, one thousand…” All night, a chant: “One, one thousand…two, one thousand…three, one thousand…” Till the storm passed with dawn.

From the guesthouse now they could see sputtering arcs low in the sky. But neither of them counted, for on the pampas no thunder followed the lightning. Like everything else in Argentina, it was different.