Days of the Dead

by David Monnery

  He drained his cup and got to his feet. The deal with Gustavo required him just to ask, and he had promised Isabel he wouldn’t take any real risks. He smiled to himself as he began walking towards the office building – he just knew that he wasn’t going to like taking no for an answer from a man like Toscono.

  But on this visit he would be polite. It wouldn’t have been hard to get hold of a gun – the hotel receptionist would no doubt have a brother or an uncle who just happened to have one for sale – but carrying one into Toscono’s den would be asking for trouble. He wouldn’t get to see the head honcho without being frisked, and, should they decide for some reason to shoot him, a gun would simplify the task of convincing the local police that they had killed the gringo in self-defence.

  He pushed through the glass doors into the air-conditioned lobby and walked confidently up to the attendant. ‘I am here to see Señor Toscono on a personal matter,’ he said, hoping the Argentinian’s curiosity would get the better of him. ‘My name is James Docherty, and I have travelled here from Chile to see him.’

  So what? the attendant’s eyes said, but he picked up the internal phone and relayed the message. ‘Fifth floor,’ he said briefly, nodding towards the lift.

  Docherty walked in, pressed the button, and allowed himself to be carried skyward. So far, so good, he thought. He’d already got further than he’d expected.

  The lift doors slid open to reveal a reception area and several doorways leading into the rest of a richly carpeted suite. The waiting bodyguard ran professional hands over Docherty’s arms, legs and back, then led him into what looked like a doctor’s waiting room. There were several paintings on the wall, all of flowers, and a framed front page of an Argentinian newspaper celebrating the sinking of HMS Sheffield, which took Docherty back to the night he’d heard the news himself, pissed half out of his mind in a Glasgow pub.

  The door to Toscono’s office opened and the bodyguard gestured him in. The man himself was sitting behind his desk in shirtsleeves; through the large window behind him the roofs stretched away towards the fuzzy green line of Chapultepec Park.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ Toscono asked as Docherty sat down. He had not offered to shake hands, and his voice was decidedly cool.

  ‘It is a delicate matter,’ Docherty began. ‘A family matter.’

  ‘You are English, yes?’

  ‘Scottish. And I am married to an Argentinian. This matter has to do with her family,’ he went on, stretching the truth somewhat. ‘Her uncle had a son, who was a student in Rosario in the late 1970s.’

  At the mention of Rosario, Toscono’s face seemed to congeal. ‘This conversation is over,’ he said, getting up.

  Docherty remained seated. ‘My wife’s uncle is dying,’ he continued. ‘He just wants to know what happened to his son.’

  ‘I expect he died,’ Toscono said coldly, his eyes catching the bodyguard’s.

  Docherty stood up as the man towered over him, and the temptation to take him out was almost overwhelming. But Toscono would probably have a gun in his desk and there were probably other people in the suite, so a demonstration of SAS unarmed-combat skills would be more satisfying than wise. He turned to leave, then stopped at the door. ‘Why would you refuse to comfort a dying man?’ he asked, but Toscono didn’t even bother to look up, the bodyguard grabbed an arm, and a few seconds later he was being bundled into the lift.

  ‘Don’t come back,’ the man said, speaking for the first time and displaying a row of gold teeth which Docherty could have combed his hair with. He emerged into the lobby and walked out on to the street, telling himself that he’d been wise not to fight back. If he was going to get anything from Toscono he would need to get him alone, and it would be much easier taking out a bodyguard who underestimated him.

  He stopped at a convenient bar for a drink and reminded himself that he’d just earned $20,000, but he still felt angry. He told himself it was a childish kind of anger, but that didn’t make it go away. He needed to put Toscono on the back-burner and regain his ability to think clearly.

  A walk in the park, he thought, and then he remembered one of the things he’d planned to do once his business here was done. In 1977, during his last couple of days in the country, he’d set out to visit two famous houses in the southern suburb of Coyoacán, but both had been closed for refurbishment. He could visit them now, spend a few hours allowing his anger with Toscono to subside, then put his mind to the business of their next meeting. He already knew there’d be one – he might have satisfied the conditions of his deal with Gustavo Macías, but he hadn’t satisfied himself.

  The thought of driving ten kilometres and back through the capital’s traffic was not a pleasant one, so he took the Golf back to the hotel, recovered the guidebook from his room and took the Metro south. A pleasant walk through shaded streets brought him to the last home of the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, whose politics had obviously not prevented him from living in an upmarket neighbourhood. The house itself was not big, but it had a lovely cloistered garden. The rooms had supposedly been left exactly as they were on the day Stalin’s agent stuck an ice-pick in Trotsky’s skull, and the latter’s broken glasses were still lying on the desk where they had fallen.

  Docherty found himself wishing his father had been here to see this. The old man, who had been a shop steward on the Clyde most of his life, had often announced his admiration for the man who’d lived and died in this house. If Trotsky rather than Stalin had followed Lenin, he’d been fond of saying, it would all have been different. Docherty doubted it, but seeing these rooms and the hammer-and-sickle-draped grave in the garden, he felt moved just the same.

  After sitting for a while he got up and left, walking the couple of blocks to the Frida Kahlo Museum. She had lived in this house with fellow-Mexican painter Diego Rivera, and both had been friendly with Trotsky. Isabel liked her paintings a lot, and seeing them here in all their vibrancy Docherty could better appreciate why. Looking out into the well-tended back garden he could imagine her, Rivera and Trotsky sitting round the wrought-iron table drinking coffee in the late 30s, lamenting the fact that the rest of the world was sliding inexorably into war.

  He ate lunch in an overpriced Coyoacán restaurant, then headed back north on the packed Metro, still wondering what to do about Toscono.

  David Shepreth had been back in London only two days but already he felt at a loose end. On impulse he rang his father to suggest a visit, and almost instantly regretted it. His father’s words were welcoming enough, but the tone wasn’t, and the final ‘of course, I’ll be watching the football’ effectively guaranteed one more evening of non-communication in a relationship already burdened with too many.

  Feeling depressed, Shepreth steered the Escort in the direction of Barnsbury and his father’s basement flat. The kick-off in the German game had to be imminent but half the fans still seemed to be in central London, or maybe it was just that the whole country had gone mad. As he swerved to avoid one flag-waving pedestrian in Kingsway it occurred to him that it was almost impossible to serve MI6 in the field and maintain any level of patriotic fervour. If you lived out there in the world it was impossible to ignore the fact that everyone else had a point of view. In these days of international travel only the Americans were still clinging to the childlike belief that theirs was the greatest country on earth – everyone else had grown up and accepted relativity. True, most people were fondest of their own homeland, but that didn’t stop them realizing that many other countries had just as much to offer.

  As far as MI6 was concerned, this was a two-edged sword. Their agents were working for one country and one country only, but if they were any good at their job they acquired a knowledge of the way the world worked which was completely at odds with any simple notion of ‘my country, right or wrong’. The end-result, as Shepreth knew only too well, was a thoroughgoing cynicism, sometimes worn like a badge, at others hidden beneath the mask of a cold professionalism. Everything became impe
rsonal.

  And I’m sick of it, he thought, as he waited at the King’s Cross lights. He wanted it to be personal. The two goons in Panama with their ‘B’-movie dialogue, they hadn’t thought of killing him as anything personal, and if he allowed the curtain of his profession’s cynicism to close behind him then he was no better than they were – just a player of violent games. Like a Len Deighton, he thought. Game, Set and Match. Hook, Line and Sinker. Egg, Beans and Chips.

  Well, he’d already laid an egg in Panama, and Mexico seemed typecast for beans. It only remained to see where he’d cash in his chips.

  The thought gave Shepreth his first real smile of the day, but his father’s offhand welcome – they hadn’t seen each other for six months – soon put paid to it. The game had already been on for about half an hour, and by some miracle England were a goal up. Shepreth took the other end of the sofa and tried to watch, but soon found his mind beginning to wander. Looking round the room at his father’s things from Spain he felt himself drawn, as always, back into the past, to the school holiday visits to his parents in Madrid, which had always promised so much more than they actually delivered. Looking back now it was easy to see that both his parents – his journalist father and highly social mother – had been busy people and that even if either of them had been really interested in their only child, they would have acted little differently. But at the time he had felt alternately abandoned and ignored, and deep down he knew that his life was still ruled by the consequences, that he was torn between conflicting compulsions to hide and to prove his worth to the world.

  Why did I come? he asked himself. He tried to take an interest in the game, but found himself wondering once more at how easily his parents had got used to living without each other. His father had taken early retirement and announced that he was returning to England; his mother had said fine, but she would be staying in Spain. Five years later she was still in Madrid and he was still here, and they didn’t seem to miss each other at all. Twenty years ago their desire to spend every minute together had caused him to be sent off to boarding school, and now they didn’t even bother to call each other.

  ‘How are you doing?’ his father asked, and Shepreth noticed that the half-time whistle had been blown.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘How are you?’

  His father grinned. ‘Pretty good. I’ve got quite a lot of stuff in the pipeline, and the novel’s coming on. Want a beer, glass of wine?’ he asked, getting up.

  ‘Beer,’ Shepreth said.

  By the time his father came back with it the second half was about to start. The old man wasn’t as steady on his feet as usual, but he was probably into his fifth or sixth beer by now. There was something vaguely pathetic about him these days. Shepreth thought. He was fifty-seven, but rather than realize the dreams of his youth he seemed to have just carried them through middle age. In his thirties he could often be heard on the radio reporting on events in Spain, and several newspapers had been happy to print his articles, but there had been no advance from that position – he was still writing the odd article, doing the odd piece of translation, talking about the novel which no one else expected would be written. He was a classic under-achiever.

  Am I the same? Shepreth asked himself. He lived in hotels, had no real home. His love life was non-existent, his sex life almost so. He was neither enough of a cynic nor enough of a believer to fit in, which didn’t augur well for his career prospects.

  ‘Fuck,’ his father said, and Shepreth realized that the Germans had equalized. Even he had expected that to happen.

  The rest of the game passed slowly by, through the ninety minutes and another non-existent ‘golden goal’ to the penalty showdown. When Southgate finally missed his father couldn’t even manage a curse; he just turned off the TV with a look of disgust and indifferently asked his son if he was staying the night.

  Shepreth had meant to, but now he couldn’t face it. He felt like screaming at his father, but he simply took his leave and drove back across London to the studio flat which was this year’s apology for a home.

  Docherty got back to his hotel around five, to find both the receptionist and his room key missing from reception. Perhaps the room was being cleaned, he thought. Perhaps the receptionist was out distributing alms to the poor.

  He stealthily climbed the stairs and edged along the corridor towards his room. The door was wide open, and one man in uniform was going through his bag while another leant indolently against the wall smoking a cigarette.

  ‘This is a non-smoker,’ Docherty told him as he walked through the door. ‘And what the fuck are you doing?’ he asked the one elbow deep in his bag.

  The arm came out like a shot, but then the policeman remembered who was supposed to be giving the orders. ‘Identification,’ he demanded, holding out a palm.

  Docherty handed over his British passport. The other policeman, he was pleased to see, had ground out his cigarette. Little victories, he told himself.

  ‘You must come with us, Señor Docherty,’ the first policeman said, shoving the passport into his tunic pocket.

  ‘Where?’ Docherty asked.

  ‘To the police station. It is not far.’

  ‘Why? Am I being arrested?’

  ‘You are required to answer some questions.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘That will be explained to you at the station.’

  The policeman’s patience was obviously wearing thin, but Docherty was damned if he was going to get into a car with two armed men he didn’t know from Adam. ‘I need to see your identification,’ he said firmly.

  The policeman looked at his partner, shrugged and pulled out a crumpled card.

  As Docherty handed it back he said, ‘And I want to phone your station to verify that you are who this says you are.’

  ‘We do not have the time for such…’

  ‘If I’m not allowed to make that call, you’ll have to carry me out,’ Docherty said, hoping they wouldn’t take him up on it.

  They didn’t, and he made the call from the empty reception desk downstairs. The two policemen were genuine, for what that was worth in Mexico.

  Their car was unmarked, which explained why he hadn’t noticed it coming in. One man sat in the back with him while the other broke every rule of the road on their drive to the police station. It was almost dark now and by the time they arrived Docherty had only a vague idea of where he was.

  The two men left him in a large, stuffy room and disappeared. He lay down on the long wooden bench lining one wall and stared up at the peeling paint on the ceiling. The fan, having shed one of its four blades, had apparently lost the will to turn.

  The minutes went by, then an hour, then two. He could hear feet above his head and the occasional voices of passers-by but not much else. He wondered if they were just wasting his time or deliberately trying to scare him.

  Another hour went by. He thought about Isabel and the children in Santiago – she would be putting them to bed about this time, maybe telling Ricardo a story. He wondered what they’d think if they could see him now.

  Still, his only problem so far was thirst. His mouth was as dry as the Mexican dust he’d been swallowing all day, and he was beginning to get a headache. He could no doubt bang on the door and demand water, but in the unlikely event that some was brought it would not be bottled, and he’d rather be thirsty than spend the next week suffering Montezuma’s famous revenge.

  It was nearly nine o’clock when the door finally opened. Two uniformed men escorted him down one corridor, up a flight of steps and down another corridor, before ushering him into a much better-decorated room than the one he’d just left. Another man in uniform – this one in his forties or early fifties, with a balding head, moustache and rotund frame – was sitting behind a huge desk. ‘Sit down, Señor Docherty,’ he said in English.

  ‘And who might you be?’ Docherty asked.

  ‘I am Lieutenant Colonel Orantes.’

  ‘Police or Army?’ Doc
herty asked. He had considered refusing to answer any questions until he was allowed to contact the British Embassy, but had decided that such a move might needlessly complicate matters. If Orantes was only going to slap him lightly on the wrist…

  ‘Federal Police,’ Orantes answered. ‘It has…’

  ‘So why am I here?’ Docherty interrupted.

  ‘You don’t know?’

  ‘If I did, I wouldn’t be asking.’

  Orantes raised an eyebrow. ‘This morning you visited the offices of Señor Toscono, did you not?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Where you threatened him with violence…’

  ‘I did not threaten him – he threatened me. I merely asked him about one of his victims in the Dirty War.’

  ‘What happened in Argentina twenty years ago is not the business of the Mexican police. Threats against a prominent citizen – and Señor Toscono is a citizen of this country now – are our business.’

  ‘I made no threats.’

  ‘That is not what he and his employees say.’

  ‘They are lying.’

  Orantes smiled. ‘And whose word should I take – a prominent Mexican citizen or an Englishman passing through?’

  Docherty smiled back. ‘I expect you’ll believe the man who pays you to.’

  Orantes, rather than getting angry, simply laughed. Once his amusement had subsided he fixed Docherty with his eyes, pointed a finger at him and said, ‘Do not try to contact Señor Toscono again. If you do, I promise that you will regret it.’

  Docherty returned the stare. ‘Have you considered a career in films?’ he asked.