Replay (9 page)

He crossed out Olson’s name and wrote a reminder to himself to reread the three anonymous death threats he’d received.

His thoughts turned to his investigation in Argentina. The military dictatorship in power from 1976 to 1983 had had no qualms about sending contract killers outside its borders to eliminate opponents to the regime and anyone who might denounce the atrocities it had committed. Times had changed, but the methods devised by twisted minds tend to stay the same.

His investigation must have bothered quite a few people, too. It was possible—even probable—that his killer was a former member of the armed forces, in charge of ESMA1 or another of the secret camps where “the disappeared” were taken to be tortured and killed.

He fished out his other notebook and from it started copying down the names of all the people he had interviewed on his first trip to Argentina. For obvious reasons, the notes he’d taken on his second trip weren’t in it. He would have to be very careful not to let his guard slip when he returned to Buenos Aires.

What about Valerie’s ex? She never mentioned him anymore, but they had been together for two years—that’s a considerable amount of time. It wouldn’t be the first time a spurned lover had turned violent.

Thinking about all the people who might want him dead had ruined Andrew’s appetite. He pushed his plate away and left.

He toyed with the little ring box in his pocket as he walked back to the office, refusing to entertain one possibility that had just occurred to him. No, Valerie wasn’t capable of doing something like that.

Are you sure?
his innervoice asked. The question made his blood run cold.

* * *

On the Thursday of the first week of his resurrection—the expression filled him with terror each time he thought it—Andrew got down to finalizing the last details of his trip. He was in more of a hurry than ever to return to Buenos Aires. He gave up on the idea of changing hotels; he’d met some of his key informants thanks to his stay at the last one. Marisa, the cute girl who worked at the hotel bar, had told him about a café where former members of the ERP, the People’s Revolutionary Army, and the Montoneros, an urban guerrilla group, hung out. These men had survived their stay in a detention center, and there weren’t too many of them. She had also put him in touch with one of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo—women whose children had been kidnapped by army commandos and never been seen again. Braving the dictatorship, they had paced up and down the sidewalks of the Plaza de Mayo every single day for years, carrying signs with photographs of their disappeared loved ones on them.

* * *

Simon called him around 11
A.M.
to remind him they were having lunch. Andrew didn’t remember them making plans; maybe their conversation would come back to him over lunch.

* * *

As soon as Simon told him the woman he’d on met his ski trip last winter had called him the previous evening, Andrew remembered that this had been a totally uninteresting lunch. Simon had fallen yet again for some girl with a great body and no sense of humor. Andrew wanted to get back to work. He broke in and told Simon bluntly that this was going nowhere.

“You said this girl lives in Seattle and she’s coming to spend a few days in New York, right?”

“Yup. And I’m the lucky guy who gets to show her around the city,” Simon replied happily.

“Next week we’ll be sitting at this same table and you’ll be in a shitty mood, telling me you’ve been had. That girl’s looking for some poor schmuck like you who’ll take her out, pay the bills and offer her someplace to sleep. When you get back to your apartment every night she’ll tell you she’s exhausted, say ‘not tonight, darling,’ and fall asleep instantly. All you’ll get by way of thanks is a peck on your cheek the day she’s leaving.”

Simon gaped at him.

“What do you mean, ‘not tonight, darling’?”

“Want me to spell it out for you?”

“How do you know all that?”

“I just do.”

“You’re just jealous. You’re pathetic.”

“You got back from your ski trip five months ago. Have you heard from her before this?”

“No, but Seattle isn’t exactly next door, you know.”

“Trust me, Simon: she flipped through her address book and stopped at S for Sucker.”

Andrew picked up the tab. The conversation had taken him back to the year-end holidays and that incident on Christmas Day. He had nearly been knocked over by a car backing out of the Charles Street police station. Journalistic investigations were right up his alley, but he didn’t have the particular skills needed for a criminal investigation. The services of a police detective—even a retired one—could come in very handy right now. He flipped through his address book to find the telephone number Inspector Pilguez had given him.

A
fter he’d left Simon, Andrew called Inspector Pilguez. He got his voicemail. Unsure whether to leave a message, he hung up.

As he walked into the newspaper’s offices he found himself shivering, and felt a shooting pain in the small of his back. It was so strong that he had to lean on the stair’s bannister for support. Andrew had never suffered from back pain, and this anomaly immediately reminded him of the grim deadline that was approaching. If this was the first sign of imminent death, he thought, he’d better stock up on prescription painkillers as soon as possible.

Olivia found him breathless and doubled up in pain at the bottom of the staircase when she came in from lunch.

“Are you all right, Andrew?”

“I’ve been better, to be honest.”

“You’re looking terribly pale. Do you want me to call 911?”

“No, it’s just my back playing up. I’ll be fine.”

“You should take the afternoon off and get some rest.”

Andrew thanked Olivia. He told her he’d go splash some water on his face and everything would be okay.

Looking at himself in the restroom mirror, Andrew got the impression death was lurking behind him. He murmured to himself: “You’ve had a stroke of luck, buddy, but you better start racking your brains if you want it to last. You don’t think everybody gets a second chance, do you? You’ve written enough obituaries to have some idea what it means when your time’s up. You can’t overlook anything anymore, not a single detail. The days are slipping by, and they’ll go by faster and faster.”

“Talking to yourself again, Stilman?” asked Olson, coming out of a stall. He zipped up his pants and walked over to where Andrew was standing next to a washbasin.

“I’m not in the mood,” Andrew said, sticking his face under the faucet.

“You’ve been acting really weird lately. I don’t know what you’re up to now, but it’s got to be something fishy.”

“Olson, why don’t you mind your own business and leave me the hell alone.”

“I didn’t report you,” Olson declared proudly, as if he’d done something laudable.

“Good for you, Freddy. You’re finally becoming a man.”

Olson went over to the towel dispenser and yanked with all his might.

“These things never work,” he said, banging the lid.

“You should write an article about it, I’m sure it’d be a winner. Your finest story this season. ‘The Hand Towel Conspiracy,’ by Freddy Olson.”

Olson shot Andrew a dark look.

“Hey, I was joking. Don’t take everything so literally.”

“I don’t like you, Stilman. I’m not the only one on this paper who can’t stand your arrogance, but at least I don’t pretend. A lot of us are waiting for you to slip up. You’ll topple off your pedestal sooner or later.”

Andrew looked at his colleague.

“So who else is part of this merry anti-Stilman band?”

“You should be wondering who likes you, actually. You’ll find it’s not a long list.”

Olson looked at him scornfully and walked out of the men’s room.

Andrew followed him, grimacing with pain, and caught up with him in front of the elevator.

“Olson! I shouldn’t have hit you. It’s just that I’m feeling on edge right now. I want to apologize.”

“Really?”

“Hey, we’re colleagues. Let’s cool it, okay?”

Olson stared at Andrew.

“Okay, Stilman. I accept your apology.”

Olson stuck his hand out and Andrew made a superhuman effort to shake it. Olson had really clammy palms.

Andrew felt a lingering sense of fatigue all afternoon that made it impossible for him to write. He used the time to re-read the introduction to his article about the terrible things that had gone on in Argentina during the dictatorship.

Andrew Stilman
, The New York Times

On May 24, 1976, a fresh coup d’état brought a tyrant to power once again in Argentina. After banning all political parties and unions and muzzling the country’s press, General Jorge Rafael Videla and the members of the military junta began carrying out a campaign of repression on a scale that Argentina had never previously experienced.

Their self-proclaimed objective was to prevent any form of revolt and eliminate anyone suspected of opposing the regime. A manhunt for suspected dissidents was launched throughout the country. The regime’s opponents, their friends and acquaintances, and anyone holding views contrary to conservative Catholic values were considered to be terrorists, regardless of their age or gender.

The ruling junta opened secret detention centers and set up special sections made up of police units and members of the three branches of the armed forces. Death squads were rampant. Under the authority of regional chiefs, their mission was to kidnap, torture, and kill anyone suspected of sympathizing with the opposition. Over the next ten years, the ruling junta would enslave and make “disappear” more than thirty thousand people—men and women of all ages, but most of them very young. Several hundred newborn babies were stolen from their “dissident” mothers and given to supporters of the regime. The identity of these children was systematically erased, and a new one created from scratch. The regime claimed it was upholding Christian values by removing innocent souls from parents with perverted ideals, and offering the children salvation by entrusting them to families worthy of raising them.

The “disappeared,”
los desaparecidos
, as they were known, were buried in mass graves. Many of them were drugged in detention centers before being loaded into planes flying under the radar, from which they were thrown alive into the Río de la Plata and the ocean.

There would be no traces of the massacre to incriminate those in power.

For the umpteenth time, Andrew pored over his list containing the names of those who had committed these atrocities in every corner of Argentina, rural and urban. The hours ticked by as he read the names of the torturers and leafed through transcripts of first-person accounts, confessions, and minutes of trial proceedings that had come to nothing. Once democracy had been restored, an amnesty law was passed granting these monsters near-total immunity.

It was painstaking work, and as Andrew went on with it he kept looking for traces of a man named Ortiz. Going by the information his editor had given him, Ortiz’s case was typical of the many ordinary soldiers who had become tacit accomplices to some of the worst atrocities.

Why him in particular? Olivia had told him it was because Ortiz’s story was shrouded in mystery. In Argentina, as elsewhere, the same question kept cropping up time and again: what kind of fanaticism could have inspired the ruling junta to turn normal men into torturers? How could a good husband and father return home and kiss his wife and children after spending his day torturing and killing other women and children?

Andrew knew he’d come this close to cornering Ortiz. Was it possible that one of the man’s former accomplices or comrades-in-arms had pursued him all the way to Hudson River Park?

Something about that theory wasn’t quite right. Andrew had been killed two days before his article appeared, so it couldn’t have been revenge. Even so, when he returned to Buenos Aires he’d have to be much more careful than he had been in his previous life.

The more Andrew thought about it, the clearer it became to him that he needed help. He tried Inspector Pilguez again.

The retired cop immediately assumed the phone call meant bad news: Andrew had decided to take legal action against him after all because of the accident.

“My back
is
hurting, but it’s not your fault,” Andrew reassured him. “This call’s got nothing to do with your energetic way of exiting parking lots.”

“Oh.” Pilguez sounded relieved. “In that case, to what do I owe the pleasure?”

“I need to see you. It’s an emergency.”

“I’d ask you to come over for coffee, but I live in San Francisco now. Might be a bit far for you.”

“I understand,” Andrew sighed.

Pilguez hesitated, and then asked: “What kind of emergency?”

“A life-and-death one.”

“If it’s a criminal case, I’m retired. But I can suggest Inspector Lucas of the 6th Precinct.”

“I know you’re retired, but you’re the one I want to talk to. Call it instinct.”

“I see.”

“I doubt it. The situation I find myself in is bizarre, to say the least.”

“Try me,” the inspector urged. “I’ve heard a few in my day.”

“It’s too complicated to discuss over the phone. You wouldn’t believe me. Sorry for calling this late. Have a nice evening.”

“It’s still mid-afternoon in San Francisco.”

“In that case, have a good afternoon, Inspector.”

Andrew hung up. He dropped his head into his hands and tried to collect his thoughts.

He was meeting Valerie in an hour’s time, and he had to get himself in a better mood if he didn’t want to screw up this very important evening. He’d used up his share of selfishness in his previous life.

* * *

He proposed to her as if for the first time. She admired the ring Andrew had slipped on her finger and tearfully assured him she would have picked exactly that one.