by Marc Levy
“I thought you really had gone on vacation with the money I sent you,” he told her. “You promised me you’d be in touch.”
“It turned out to be more complicated than we thought. Antonio’s in the hospital.”
“What happened?” Andrew asked.
“We had a car accident on our way back.”
“A serious one?”
“Serious enough that my boyfriend’s got one arm in a cast, six fractured ribs and head trauma. It’s a miracle we didn’t both end up in the hospital.”
“Was it his fault?”
“If you consider that he didn’t brake at the red light, yes. But since the brakes had stopped working, I suppose he isn’t responsible.”
“Was his car as well maintained as yours?” asked Andrew, who was struggling to extricate the jammed seat belt.
“Antonio’s fanatical about his car. I sometimes wonder if he loves it more than me. There’s no way he’d have started out on a trip without checking everything first. Someone deliberately cut our brakes.”
“Do you suspect anyone in particular?”
“We located Ortiz. We watched him and took photos of him. We asked about him—too many questions, probably, and his friends aren’t exactly choirboys.”
“That’s not going to help me with my investigation. He’ll be on his guard now.”
“Antonio’s in serious condition and all you can think of is your investigation? I’m extremely touched by your concern, Mr. Stilman.”
“That was tactless of me. I’m sorry about your boyfriend. Don’t worry, I’m sure he’ll pull through. But I can’t help being nervous about my work. I haven’t come all the way here for vacation, you know. When did this accident happen?”
“Three days ago.”
“Why didn’t you let me know?”
“Because Antonio only regained consciousness yesterday evening, and you were the last thing on my mind.”
“Have you still got the photos?”
“The camera case was badly damaged in the crash. We were using an old camera because we didn’t want to attract too much attention with an expensive model. The film will probably turn out grainy. I’m not sure we’ll be able to see much. I’ve given it to a photographer friend. We can pick it up tomorrow.”
“You’ll have to go on your own. I’m leaving for Córdoba tomorrow.”
“There’s no way you’ll be doing anything that stupid, Mr. Stilman. With all due respect, if Antonio and I, who are locals, managed to get ourselves noticed, it’ll take Ortiz’s men less than half a day to spot you. Besides, there’s no need for you to drive all the way there. Ortiz comes to Buenos Aires every week.”
“When’s his next visit?”
“Tuesday, if he sticks to his routine. That’s what we were told when we questioned some of his neighbors, which is probably why we had the accident.”
“I’m sorry, Marisa,” Andrew said sincerely. “I had no idea I’d be making you run any risks. If I’d known . . . ”
But Andrew didn’t remember this accident. Nothing was happening like it had the last time. On his former trip, he’d been the one to photograph Ortiz, and he’d had his camera stolen in an alleyway in a Buenos Aires suburb after being attacked by three men.
“Do you really think a man who’s put so much effort into changing his identity to avoid going to prison will just sit there and let himself be unmasked? What planet are you living on?” Marisa asked.
“You’d be surprised if I described it to you,” Andrew replied.
Marisa pulled up in front of the Quintana Hotel in Recoleta, a middle-class neighborhood.
“Let’s go see how your boyfriend’s doing,” Andrew suggested. “I’ll drop my stuff off here later.”
“I appreciate your concern, but Antonio needs his rest, and visiting hours are over. We’ll go tomorrow. He’s in intensive care at General de Agudos hospital. It’s close to here. I’ll come by and pick you up at nine o’clock tomorrow.”
“You aren’t working at the bar this evening?”
“No, it’s my day off.”
Andrew said goodbye to Marisa, got his suitcase out of the back seat, and walked towards the hotel.
A white van stopped outside the hotel entrance. The man sitting in the front seat aimed his camera at Andrew and took a series of shots. The rear door opened, and another man got out and strolled into the lobby. The van started up again and fell in behind Marisa’s car. Its driver had been tailing her ever since she and Antonio left Córdoba.
Andrew smiled when the receptionist handed him the key to room 712. It was the same room he’d been given in his previous life.
“Could you ask housekeeping to change the batteries in my TV remote control?” he asked.
“Our cleaning service checks them daily to make sure they’re working,” the employee intoned.
“Trust me, whoever did my room didn’t do his job properly.”
“How would you know that, sir? You haven’t been up to your room yet.”
“I have ESP!” Andrew said, opening his eyes wide.
Room 712 was exactly the way he remembered it. The window wouldn’t open, the closet had a squeaky door hinge, the shower leaked and the mini-fridge made coughing noises like a cat with tuberculosis.
“Some cleaning service!” Andrew snorted, throwing his suitcase on the bed.
He hadn’t had a bite to eat since New York—the food on the plane had looked so disgusting he didn’t want to risk it—and he was starving. He remembered having eaten on his last trip in a parrilla right across from the Recoleta cemetery. He pulled his room door shut behind him, amused by the thought of eating the same steak for the second time.
When Andrew left the hotel, the man in the lobby got up from his armchair and followed him. He sat on a small bench in front of the restaurant.
While Andrew was enjoying his meal, a cleaning service employee at the Quintana hotel was going through the belongings of the guest in room 712 in exchange for a sizeable amount of cash. He carried out his mission meticulously, opened the tiny room safe with his staff key and photographed all the pages of Andrew’s address book, passport and diary. When he’d put everything back in its place, he checked to see if the remote control was working, changed the batteries and left. He found his generous benefactor waiting for him at the service entrance of the hotel and returned his digital camera.
* * *
Feeling pleasantly full, Andrew slept like a log and didn’t have any nightmares. He woke up refreshed early in the morning. After having breakfast in the hotel dining room, he went outside to wait for Marisa.
“We’re not going to see Antonio,” she announced as soon as Andrew got into the Beetle.
“He hasn’t gotten worse, has he?”
“No, he’s actually feeling better this morning. It’s my aunt. She received a very unpleasant phone call in the middle of the night.”
“What do you mean?”
“A man who didn’t bother to introduce himself told her she should keep an eye on the people her niece is getting involved with. He told her I could get into serious trouble otherwise.”
“Ortiz’s pals don’t waste any time, do they?”
“What really worries me is that they already know you’re in town and that we know each other.”
“Am I the only bad company you could be keeping?”
“Is that a serious question?”
“There must be quite a few guys, upstanding and otherwise, hanging around you.”
“No, because I love my boyfriend very much.”
“It was a compliment, nothing more,” Andrew assured her. “Do you know which street the service entrance of the hospital is on?”
“It won’t do us any good to try and play smart. Ortiz’s men probably have an accomplice inside the building. I don’t want to
put Antonio in any more danger. He’s taken enough risks as it is.”
“What do we do next?”
“I’m taking you to see my aunt. She knows more than I do—more than most other people in this city, actually. She was one of the very first Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. But keep in mind I’m not here to be your tour guide.”
“I wouldn’t really call this sightseeing, but I’ll remember that. And that you’re in an excellent mood.”
* * *
Luisa lived in a small house in the Monte Chingolo neighborhood. A courtyard shaded by a huge purple jacaranda, its walls covered in passionflower, preceded her front door.
Marisa took him through to the living room.
“So you’re the American journalist who’s investigating our history,” Luisa said, getting up from the armchair where she’d been sitting and doing the crossword. “I thought you’d be better looking.”
Marisa grinned. Her aunt beckoned Andrew to a place at the table and she then went into the kitchen. She reappeared holding a plate of cookies.
“Why are you interested in Ortiz?” she asked, pouring Andrew a glass of lemonade.
“My editor finds his career interesting.”
“Your boss has some funny interests.”
“She does, like understanding what makes an ordinary man become a torturer,” Andrew replied.
“She should have come here instead of you. I’d have given her the names of hundreds of soldiers who turned into monsters. Ortiz wasn’t an ordinary fellow, but he wasn’t the worst of them. He was a coast guard pilot—small fry. We’ve never found hard evidence that he participated in the torture. And don’t think I’m trying to make excuses for him. He did some terrible things, and he deserves to rot in prison for his crimes, like a lot of other people. But, like many others, he’s gotten away with it—until now, anyway. If you can help us prove that Ortiz has become the trader who calls himself Ortega, we can have him taken to court. Or at least we can try.”
“What do you know about him?”
“About Ortega? Not much so far. As for Ortiz, all you need to do is go through the ESMA archives to find his pedigree.”
“How has he managed to evade justice?”
“What justice are you talking about, Mr. Journalist? The one that granted amnesty to those jackals and gave them time to manufacture new identities for themselves? After the transition to democracy in 1983, we—the victims’ families—thought the criminals would be convicted. We didn’t expect that President Alfonsin would be so spineless and the army so powerful. The military regime had time to erase its tracks, clean its bloodstained uniforms and hide the torture equipment in anticipation of better times. And there’s no guarantee those times won’t return one day. Our democracy is fragile. If you think you’ll be shielded from the worst of it because you’re American, you’re mistaken; as mistaken as we were. In 1987, Barreiro and Rico, two high-level army officers, provoked unrest and managed to declaw our legal system. Two shameful laws were passed—the ‘due obedience’ law, which established a hierarchy of responsibility based on military rank, and the even more disgraceful ‘full stop’ law, which set a deadline for bringing charges for all the crimes that hadn’t yet been judged. So Ortiz and hundreds of his comrades were basically offered a pass that protected them from being prosecuted. And the ones who were in prison were freed. We had to wait fifteen years for those laws to be repealed. But as you can imagine, fifteen years gave those lowlifes plenty of time to cover up their tracks.”
“How could the Argentine people let such a thing happen?”
“How can you ask me that question? Did you Americans take your President Bush, Vice President Cheney or Defense Secretary Rumsfeld to court for authorizing the use of torture in the interrogation of Iraqi prisoners in the name of national security? Or for setting up the detention center in Guantanamo? Have you closed down that center, which has violated the Geneva Conventions for more than a decade? You see how fragile democracy can be, so don’t judge us. We did what we could in the face of an all-powerful army manipulating the machinery of the state to its maximum advantage. Most of us were merely trying to send our children to school, to fill their plates and put a roof over their heads. That alone took a great deal of effort and sacrifice on the part of impoverished Argentines.”
“I wasn’t judging you,” Andrew assured her.
“You’re not a judge, Mr. Journalist, but you can help us to ensure that justice is done. If you expose the man hiding behind the name of Ortega and he really is Ortiz, he’ll get the treatment he deserves. That is why I’m prepared to help you.”
Luisa got up from her chair and went over to the sideboard that held pride of place in her living room. She took a file out of a drawer and placed it on the table. She turned the pages one by one, licking her finger each time, until she got to the page she was looking for. She handed the page to Andrew.
“There’s your Ortiz,” she said. “That was in 1977. He would have been around forty—already too old to pilot anything other than coast guard planes. His career as an officer was fairly run-of-the-mill. According to the investigation report I found in the archives of the National Commission on the Disappeared, he piloted several of the death flights. Many young men and women, some of them barely out of adolescence, were thrown alive into the waters of the Río de la Plata from the plane he was flying.”
Andrew couldn’t help grimacing in disgust as he looked at the photograph of the officer in his haughty pose.
“He didn’t report to Massera, the head of ESMA. That’s probably why he managed to slip by unnoticed during those few years when he could have been arrested. Ortiz was under the orders of Héctor Febres, the Coast Guard chief. But Febres also headed ESMA’s intelligence service. He was in charge of Sector 4, which included a number of torture rooms and the maternity unit—if you could call it that, considering it was a tiny hole measuring a few square feet where women prisoners were made to give birth like animals. Worse than animals, even, because their heads were covered with burlap sacks.
“Febres forced those brand-new mothers to write a letter to their families asking them to look after their babies while they were in prison. You know what happened next. Now listen carefully, Mr. Stilman, because if you really want me to help you, we’ll have to make a pact, you and I.”
Andrew refilled Luisa’s glass with lemonade. She gulped it down and put the glass back on the table.
“It’s very likely that Febres did Ortiz a favor for services rendered—meaning he was given one of those babies.”
“Very likely, or do you know that for a fact?”
“It doesn’t matter. That’s why we’re making a pact. You have to choose your words with great care when you’re telling one of those stolen children the truth: that’s something we Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo insist on. When you are told, as an adult, that not only are your mother and father not your biological parents, but that they were associated either directly or indirectly with the disappearance of the woman who gave birth to you, it can have terrible consequences. It’s a difficult and traumatic process. We’re fighting to expose the truth and give the victims of the junta their true identities back, but the last thing we want is to destroy the lives of innocent people.
“I’ll tell you everything I know and can find out about Ortiz. As for you, you’ll talk to me—and only to me—if you find out anything about his children. I want you to swear to me that you won’t publish anything on the subject without my permission.”
“I don’t understand.”
“There are truths that need time to be revealed. What if you were Ortiz’s ‘adopted’ child? Would you want to find out all of a sudden that your birth parents were murdered, that your life has been one big web of deceit and that your entire identity, right down to your name, is false? Would you want to discover all of that just because you happened to open a newspaper? Have you
ever thought about the consequences a newspaper article can have for the lives of the people involved?”
Andrew got the unpleasant feeling that Capetta’s shadow was lurking in the room.
“But let’s not get too carried away,” Luisa said. “We have no proof that Ortiz adopted one of those stolen babies. But just in case he did, I prefer to warn you and make sure we’re both on the same page.”
“I promise I won’t publish anything without asking you first, even though I suspect you’re not telling me everything.”
“We’ll come to the rest of it when the time is right. Meanwhile, you should watch your step. Febres was among the cruelest of the lot. He picked ‘Jungle’ as his code name during the war because he boasted he was more ferocious than all the predators combined. The stories told by the few people who survived his treatment are horrifying.”
“Is Febres still alive?”
“No, unfortunately.”
“Why unfortunately?”
“After benefiting from the amnesty law, he spent most of the rest of his life as a free man. It was only in 2007 that he was finally brought to trial, for just four of the four hundred crimes he’d been accused of. Everyone was waiting for the verdict. This was the man who’d strapped a fifteen-month-old child to its father’s chest before flicking the switch on the electric chair to make his victim talk. A few days before his trial—and by the way, he was given special treatment in prison, where he lived in princely conditions—he was found dead in his cell. Cyanide poisoning. The military were too scared he’d talk. Justice was never done. For the families of his victims, it is as if the torture continues.”
Luisa spat on the floor, then continued: “The only problem is, Febres took everything he knew about the identities of the five hundred babies and children he kidnapped with him to the grave. His death has made things harder for us, but we’ve carried on with untiring faith and determination. This is all my way of telling you to be careful. Most of Febres’s men are still alive and free, and they’re prepared to go to any lengths to silence anyone who takes an interest in them. Ortiz is one of them.”