Maria dipped her head and squinted through the frame of the window. Her dark hair fell forward. I couldn’t help notice the swing of her breasts under the light cotton. She didn’t seem terribly surprised when she recognized me.
‘Where you going?’ I asked.
She stayed leaning over, put one hand on the window opening to steady herself as she tottered on her heels. She has such full lips, I thought. Dark eyes.
‘Ciudad Azul,’ she said.
‘Get in. I can give you a ride. I’m going back to my office.’
She looked uncertain for a moment, glanced back the way she’d come, another glance ahead, raised her head to look over the roof of the car, and then reached for the door handle and opened it. She slid onto the passenger seat and slammed the door a little too hard.
‘Thanks.’ She looked straight ahead through the windshield, her hands resting on her knees. Her legs were brown. The straps of her high-heeled shoes cut into her instep a little. I didn’t think that they’d be comfortable shoes to walk in. I checked the mirrors, let out the clutch and eased the car forward into the street. There was hardly another vehicle on the road. A lot of the stores would be closed soon for lunch.
I kept my mouth shut. I eased through the gears, left behind the last of the stores on Main Street, and then began the climb from the other side of the village up toward Route 60. When we passed the soccer field I saw that the Ford Falcon was parked outside Arenas’s house.
‘How’s your uncle?’
‘You don’t like him, do you?’ Maria said.
‘He beat up some old lady, I put him away for it.’
‘And for robbing those queers.’
‘Yeah, and for robbing the queers.’
‘The boy that the queers killed was a cousin of mine.’
‘I’m sorry.’
I didn’t think I was really sorry but the words just slipped out of my mouth.
‘I don’t think you’re very sorry,’ she said.
‘I was doing my job. I found out who it was robbed the old lady and the queers and then I had to testify and then they went to jail.’
‘With a couple of cops.’
‘Yeah. With a couple of cops.’
‘You aren’t a cop any more,’ she said.
‘Well, yeah. That’s right.’
‘So why you come round and ask my uncle all those questions?’
‘Some guy’s gone missing. I’d like to know where he is.’
‘Why?’ Maria pulled her hair back from her face.
I pulled onto Route 60 and stepped on the gas a little. That was a good question she’d asked. Why? Because I was getting paid to do it was the correct answer. Except it wasn’t just the only correct answer: because I was involved in something, now, with a little more dignity to it than a simple divorce case. And then there was the angle that Arenas had brought my father into this. And now my father had agreed to look for Fischer and Arenas’s records. My father’s involvement meant something to me.
‘I’m getting paid to do it,’ I said.
‘You’re fucking with my family,’ she said. ‘For money.’
It was pretty obvious I wasn’t going to be doing any of that with her.
‘Do you know anything about this guy who’s gone missing?’
‘Is that why you picked me up?’
‘I picked you up because I thought I might give you a ride into town. And I might like your company.’
‘Well. Do you like my company?’
‘It’s very enlightening. But not what I expected.’
‘What did you expect?’
‘I wasn’t sure. I was willing to take a risk.’
‘Was it worth the risk?’
‘Sure.’
‘You just might regret it.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Do yourself a favor. Stay away from my uncle. He doesn’t like you.’
‘Is that why you got in the car? To tell me that.’
‘No. I thought I’d get to Ciudad Azul quicker in your car than if I waited for the bus.’
‘You’re in a hurry?’
‘Yeah. I’m meeting my boyfriend.’
‘Does he know anything about this guy disappearing?’
‘Do you think I’d tell you if he did?’
‘No, I guess not.’
The road curved down along an inlet of the lake and passed the first of the high-rise hotels. We reached the town clock. It’s a big ugly mock-baroque affair.
‘This is my stop,’ she said.
I pulled over. She opened the door and got out without a backward glance. The door slammed shut. As I watched the sway of her hips and the tilt of her hair I realized what a pathetic fantasy it had been to think that I could have seduced her, won her to my side, and got her to talk about her uncle’s involvement in the robberies and possible disappearance of Fischer. The clock clanged for midday. I figured it was time for lunch. I’d get a steak sandwich and a cup of coffee.
Then I had to go back out to the Temenos Artists Colony for my meeting with Sara Suarez. Priebke on Arenas’s wall, the postcards from Bariloche in Gerardo Fischer’s folder. It was a tentative link to explain Fischer’s disappearance. I didn’t know if I could trust a sense of intuition that the key to unlocking the motive for Gerardo Fischer’s disappearance lay in the discovery of something dangerous from his past. So far, it was all I had to go on.
Witness Deposition:
Sara Suarez
Isabel was picked up early on in the dictatorship. She disappeared for a month. And then she came back. God knows what they did to her in that jail. I was sixteen at the time. My mother put Isabel on a plane to Israel and told her to stay there until it was over. Until what was over? And how long would the Dirty War take to be over? We didn’t know back then. And all of us couldn’t leave. The family didn’t have the money to just sell up and go. Go where? Israel, too? Barcelona? Mexico City? Always the question: is poverty better than… what?
Isabel was a friend of Francesca Damiani, one of Gerardo’s lovers. The police picked up Francesca, and she was let go, too, and then she and Gerardo got out to Italy. This was in the early days. When people were picked up and interrogated and some of them were released. It got worse later. Much worse.
My sister Isabel had some kind of connection with Gerardo through Francesca. They wrote to each other, Francesca and Isabel: when Isabel was in Israel and Francesca in Italy. Isabel was involved in the peace movement in Israel. A lot of good that did. She lived on the border with Lebanon for a time.
Francesca turned up in Buenos Aires not so long ago. I don’t have a telephone number for her but Isabel would. They’re still good friends, I think, but Francesca has always been very secretive. It’s an addiction of hers. I suppose you can’t blame her really after all she went through back then.
For me the time of the dictatorships was like the thirties and forties… the time when our grandparents dropped everything and left Germany for Argentina. That was like a legend in the family. And in the seventies those shadows slipped back into our house in Buenos Aires. It was like a haunting: these black uniformed ghosts of my childhood imaginings: silver death’s heads, lightning flashes, about to materialize at any moment. I was afraid of what might be behind the shuttered windows, the velvet curtains, the solid panels of the varnished front door. I was scared of the sound of every car that passed by in the street, terrified if a car stopped, the doors opening and slamming, and then the wait for the knock on the door, the ring on the doorbell. The wait. How many nights like that?
And worse and worse… for years it went on… and then we’d hear that someone close by had been taken away and disappeared… who was taking them away? The military because they were militants? At first, yes. And then there were the Montoneros to fear, and the ERP, because the family was bourgeois and we had some money so they might take someone away for ransom, or just for execution. Or it could be just some gangsters out for a ransom payment. And then we began to hear the stories, the
rumors of what happened to the ones who had disappeared, heard about the discoveries of the bodies thrown from helicopters, floating in the Riachuelo, washed up on one of the delta beaches at Tigre. We were so glad that Isabel had gone. But we were terrified that some day they might come for one of us.
Thank God that seems to be over. But there are so many ex-cops and criminals… you can’t just relax at all… you know what I mean… those robberies we had, and now this, with Gerardo… and Arenas out of jail.
The dogs are a comfort to me, especially now, with all this. We thought it would end after Melissa was robbed. But then they came back for Miriam and Carlos and Ramón, didn’t they? They wanted to terrorize us, I’m sure. And Carlos and Ramón found out that Arenas had been in the Triple A.
I’ve known Carlos and Ramón for years. I was supposed to interview them for my book on the day that Arenas tried to rob them. Miriam is another subject I’d like to explore. Carlos had been looking forward to the interviews… Carlos is Miriam’s son… so he’s Jewish through Miriam’s line… and he identifies with being Jewish… even if Dieter, you know, his father… you know that Carlos’s grandfather is one of those Germans who left Germany in 1945… with a handy passport provided by the Argentine embassy in Berne, that got him to Bariloche with a different identity – Renato Brescia, a good Italian name – and an invented past that hardly anyone would ever talk about in public…
Carlos knew that I must have been practically foaming to get the story of his family. It’s so rich, when you think about it… and complicated… like a soap opera in a way. And now we were all up here in this other soap opera with Melissa getting robbed by someone in a rubber werewolf mask, kinky enough, and the others in ski masks… Carlos admitted that he felt very nervous after Melissa was robbed. And he was glad he wasn’t just living on his own with his mother.
Carlos used to live right here in the colony … that’s where Ramón met him at a party one summer. They’d had drinks and one thing led to another… and now Ramón has been living with Carlos… and his mother… for a few years. That’s enough of a soap in itself… Dieter, Carlos’s father, had left Bariloche before Priebke’s arrest… Dieter didn’t want to be part of that scenario any more… the secret nods… the collusive whispers… all those awful parties that just happened to be celebrated on Hitler’s birthday… Carlos is very proud of Miriam and Dieter for taking a stand…
Miriam is just amazing… Carlos couldn’t imagine many mothers standing up for their gay son in Argentina. Dieter ran a travel business in Ciudad Azul… it ran itself, basically, after about ten years of Dieter’s hard graft… and he sold it all before the crash in 2001. Smart enough to have a dollar account in Florida, too, not in a bank in Argentina. They felt so lucky to have survived when so many people lost everything. And then Dieter was diagnosed with cancer. This whole country is a series of disasters, isn’t it? You think you escape one and the next one…
Carlos would probably get all philosophical about it. He’s quite New Age, really. Just before Dieter died… maybe only two years ago, now… Dieter asked Carlos to look after Miriam when he passed. They had a kind of special understanding. Carlos thought that Ramón would object when he said he wanted Miriam to move in with them when she got ill. Miriam has always been reluctant to talk to me. I can understand in a way. Who wants to go into all those maybe unconscious reasons for her and Dieter’s relationship – you know, a Jewish woman marries the son of an ex-Nazi, who turns out to be gay? Well, I do for one. And Carlos was happy to be part of it. He knew he was being narcissistic. But we’re all a bit narcissistic, aren’t we? Carlos just doesn’t mind being honest with himself. He’s such a good boy. And Ramón, too. They’re very passionate about justice. I think doubly so since they were robbed. They’ve been part of a human rights group since before the robbery.
I don’t know if Gerardo has some particular interest that he might share with them. Except that he’s always interested in people. I don’t think he’s gay though. Maybe he wants to write a play about them. I mean, with those ingredients: the Nazism, the Jewish connection, the robbery, Miriam, and how Gerardo reconnected with her through Carlos seeing his play in Buenos Aires and Ana inviting him here to do those workshops. I want to write about them anyway.
Did you know that Gerardo is Jewish? I think so. But it’s so hard to get a straight answer out of him. He’s such a bastard. I know that he’s interested in the Kabbalah. He studied it for years. He did a play, you know, based on the life of the alchemist, Francesco Bono. Bono disappeared in Rome… I can’t remember when, back in the Renaissance time… If you read Gerardo’s work, it’s always connected with doors… entrances into other spaces… it would make a whole other psychological study… but I don’t want to get distracted from my own subject… the psychology of immigration, yes.
And now he’s disappeared. As if he’s gone through some door in time and space. And everyone looking for him. He’d love the irony of that.
Extract from the casebook of Juan Manuel Pérez
January 11th 2006
Hours: 17:15 to 18:20
The drive from Temenos to Miriam’s house was a familiar one to me. Three years previously, I’d had to interview Miriam, Carlos and Ramón at some length about the robberies. And then there was the corpse of Arenas’s buddy to pick up off the porch. The two gay guys and their mother had been pretty shaken up, but truth to tell who wouldn’t have shot those two bastards, armed as they were, threatening murder, and firing through the door of the house? I pulled into the driveway and parked: only one car there, the old lady’s. Maybe she’d say that Gerardo had gone to Buenos Aires with the boys.
But I didn’t think she would.
Carlos and Ramón took good care of the plants and flowers in the garden: a beautiful border of azaleas and marigolds and tall gladioli. I called out a hello. No one answered. The curtain pulled back for a second and the old lady winced when she saw me but she raised a hand to me in recognition. The bolts on the other side of the front door clacked back and she opened up.
‘Lieutenant Pérez,’ she said.
‘Señora Brescia. I’m not a cop any more. This is a private thing.’
There, I’m an honest guy.
‘Come in,’ she said.
Miriam’s black dress and gold earrings gave her an austere and faded elegance. She was wrinkled under the chin and the delicately shadowed eyes. A pale liver spot stained her skin back toward her ear, close to her jaw. Her bobbed hair was dyed black. This was the woman who had seen her son shoot one man to death and wound another with a twelve-gauge shotgun. She leaned toward me, familiar enough to her that she inclined her head for a friendly greeting. Miriam’s perfume was lemony. My cheek brushed against her face powder. She smiled a thin smile as I drew back.
‘Sara told me about Gerardo,’ she said.
‘I’m just looking around to see if I can help. We’ve seen no sign of violence. Nothing of the sort…’
I followed her into her spacious living room. The farmhouse had been converted into a high-tech designer showpiece since the shootings. Red and shiny, a boxer’s heavy bag hung from the ceiling about ten feet from the bookshelves on the back wall. Her boy’s no doubt. The walls were painted white and hung with posters from art-house movies: Hombre Mirando al Sudeste; Nueve Reinas; an American movie, Stranger than Paradise. The white leather sofas and armchairs all looked as if they’ve been imported from New York, or at least from Buenos Aires.
Miriam sat down on the L-shaped sofa in the far corner of the room. The low glass table in front of her was scattered with foreign movie magazines in English and French: Sight and Sound, Cahiers du Cinema… She had a thermos and a gourd there, too.
‘Would you like some mate?’ she said.
‘Yes, thank you,’ I said.
She filled the gourd with hot water from the thermos and passed it over to me.
‘So you’re all alone up here?’ I said.
‘The boys have gone down to Buenos Ai
res. I can take care of myself.’
I wasn’t so sure. But she did have that shotgun in the house.
‘When did they go?’
‘The day before yesterday… around lunchtime.’
‘Just the two of them?’
‘Yes.’
‘Gerardo didn’t go with them?’
‘No. They would have said.’
‘They know he’s disappeared?’
‘They’re worried as we all are.’
‘You knew Gerardo, of course.’
She smiled a wry smile.
‘Know Gerardo? It’s difficult to know much even about Gerardo. Always has been.’
‘You’ve seen him recently?’
‘A few days ago, he came over to talk with the boys.’
‘Do you know what about?’
I sucked at the silver tube and the hot liquid scalded my tongue.
‘I’ve no idea… they were talking on the terrace. I was inside. At one point I took a bath and when I came out Gerardo had gone.’
‘You have no idea what might have happened to him?’
‘None at all.’
‘You’ve heard from the boys?’
I handed the gourd back to Miriam.
‘They called from Buenos Aires the night before last. They arrived after midnight but they know I’m always awake until two or three in the morning.’
She filled the gourd again and cradled it close to her chest.
‘So they’re safe?’
‘Yes, of course,’ she said.
‘How friendly are they with Gerardo?’
‘Gerardo has known Carlos since he was a baby.’
‘How did you meet him?’
‘Gerardo?’
‘Yes.’
‘Through my husband, my ex-husband. Dieter was a little younger than Gerardo. He’d arrived in Buenos Aires in 1968, early winter… it was June… Dieter wanted to get into cinema work but when he met Gerardo he fell in love… He fell in love with the idea of theater: live audiences, raw emotion, pure communication. Gerardo had just published his first book, Los Delincuentes, and he was making a name for himself in the federal capital. I was an actress with the company. Gerardo would take just about anybody with talent and ideas into the company. Always writing, composing, performing, theorizing, criticizing… Dieter got caught up in it. Everybody was caught up in something… 1968…’
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