Far South

by David Enrique Spellman

  ‘So you found something out about his disappearance?’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ Pa said. ‘This Fischer that you’ve been contracted to look for is a man whom a lot of people would prefer wasn’t around… and a lot of them for opposing reasons. Any one of those groups may have found him… worried cops or ex-cops, Triple A, someone else with a particular business interest… And now we have politicians who want to show that the police force is different, is capable of prosecuting former members who were acting under different rules in the past. So maybe some of them are looking for Fischer, too, and maybe someone in the police department found this out, and asked someone to fix it so that Internal Affairs didn’t find any files on Gerardo Fischer or anyone else with whom the police had dealings to take care of some maybe… extracurricular activities.’

  ‘Like Arenas.’

  ‘Arenas has done his time,’ Pa said. ‘You don’t need to put him away again. And you can’t… you’re not a cop any more.’

  My father pulled the bay’s head up from where it was still nipping at the green shoots below the granite boulder. He leaned across its mane.

  ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘If this Fischer is out of the way maybe it’s the best for everybody… best for you… best for me… you understand? Do you really need to find this guy… if he’s still alive? If he’s skipped out, he’s a smart guy. But fuck him. If he’s dead, what’s the point?’

  Those hard blue eyes on me. He wasn’t trying to intimidate me consciously but it was all I could do not to turn my gaze away from him. His stare reminded me of Matas, that flat stony stare. I continued to look straight back at him but my thoughts were sparking like pinwheels.

  ‘People have called me up, Juanma,’ he said, ‘people of respect. I said I’d have a word.’

  Respect. Was my father involved with this disappearance? My father had found out enough now through his connections that he needed to warn me off. And somehow Fischer’s involvement in politics or business might implicate my father in some way. I didn’t know anything about my father’s current business interests. He might well have a reason to be happy that Fischer was gone, if Fischer, Carlos and Ramón had dug up something to which he was connected. So where did that leave me? If my father had taken on a private case… as I had done… that might result in me doing time… what would he do? I knew what he’d do: he’d drop it. He’d never keep on with anything that might allow outsiders to hurt his family. He had hurt my mother by divorcing her and marrying Costanza… but that was inside-the-family business. My father had brought me out here to show me in private why I should give up the case. I would do nothing to have my father jailed. I would not call the cops on my father. This I knew. But I’d been hired to find Gerardo Fischer. To me, it didn’t seem like Fischer was such a bad guy. He may well have been an indiscreet guy. But unless I found out something about Fischer that made me think he wasn’t worth finding, I was going to discover what had happened to him. My father knew that. And he didn’t like it. But also he did expect me to have filial piety… and just lay off on his say-so.

  I kept looking into those blue eyes in the deeply tanned face of a man that I genuinely loved and I didn’t have to say a word to him. What I wouldn’t do is call the cops directly about anything Pa might have done, or might be doing, that I might discover while looking for Fischer. The cops had their job to do. And I had mine. Mine was to find Fischer, that’s all. Pa knew I wasn’t going to give up my case. He must have known that from the start; but because he loved me, he was asking me in a dignified way to walk away from it.

  ‘Some very dangerous people have become very annoyed with you. And they won’t let me stand in their way for long.’ he said. ‘Think it over.’

  And he knew I would. He knew I would think a lot about this. I suspected that he knew Matas was involved as well as Arenas. Pa really wanted me to just give up the case altogether. I knew it would hurt him if I kept on. It would hurt him like he hurt my mother over Costanza. He’d been well aware of how much the divorce would hurt my mother… and his remarrying Costanza… and he’d gone ahead anyway. Like I was going ahead in the hunt for Fischer. My father was a stubborn old bastard. I guess I’d inherited that stubbornness from him, too. He was also well aware of how men like Matas and Arenas might hurt me severely.

  Damn… I’d rushed out here to talk to my old man and I hadn’t collected my money from Sara. I wasn’t going back to Temenos right now after this little chat. First thing in the morning, I’d go get paid.

  Pa turned his bay horse and set off down the trail at a canter, back toward his ranch house, and his new wife. Now that he’d warned me off, I had a strong sense of nausea: if I got into deep trouble searching for Fischer, Pa would let whatever consequences there might be for me take what course they may, without any help, or interference from him. Pa had his own hard streak. He could be mean and vindictive, too. I’d seen that over my mother and the divorce. But I wasn’t giving up any search, was I? That’s a fact. I think he knew it.

  Extract from the casebook of Juan Manuel Pérez

  January 12th 2006

  Hours: 18:30 to 20:30

  I took it easy on the drive back to Ciudad Azul. My father’s warning had stirred up old resentments that I still harbored over him divorcing my mother. I had my own theories about why he’d left and it wasn’t that he’d just fallen in love with a sexier younger woman.

  My father didn’t sleep so well at nights. After dark, he lived in a world of nightmare. Around the time I’d been born, he’d waded into the mire of politics and crime at a time of terror and confusion… and for a long time he couldn’t help but relive the images of horror that came back to haunt him: the broken bodies of the dead, the broken minds of the survivors… these men and women with whom my father’s mind maintained a disturbed psychic connection… hardwired into his consciousness by the horrific and relentless suffering to which these prisoners had been subjected under my father’s direction; or under the operation of his own hands.

  And he’d told my mother what he’d done when the icy lid on his memory shifted to let his demons out. My mother had only sought to relieve his guilt. As far as she was concerned, Pa had been protecting the fatherland from the godless reds. I think Pa left Ma because he’d poured all his guilt into her and the way he saw to expiate it was to push her off the cliff of divorce. Or am I being too biblical? He’d unloaded his guilt on my mother and dumped her, and he believed that with Costanza, he could make a fresh start. I guess that’s why I’ve always hated Costanza. It stops me hating him.

  I knew of my father’s insomnia. Of course I did. But when I was a child, I’d never suspected the reason. He had never once mentioned his night horrors to me. Years later – post-divorce – that was when I found out, just after Pa announced to Ma that he was going to marry Costanza, I’d gotten a call from my mother at about three in the morning. She’d sounded terribly drunk and asked me to come to her apartment right away. She’d been distraught. When I reached the apartment house, Ma was slumped in an armchair. The whisky bottle on the coffee table in front of her was more than half empty. She had a full tumbler in her hand that spilled over each time she swirled the ice around. Some awful late night soap opera was on the television and she talked at me over the noise of the melodrama. She recounted a long and detailed compendium of my father’s recurring night visions: bare bed-frames, cattle prods, blowtorches, and the contorted faces of the often innocent victims.

  ‘And I know he kept a lot back from me,’ she said. ‘That’s the kind of man your father was.’

  And then she had broken down completely: her eyes puffed up red, streaming tears, her mouth twisted, the sobs that racked her body. This hadn’t been the picture of my mother that I’d always carried around with me in my head. She had always been strong and beautiful, dark and sexy, to me. Now she was a frail old woman with a shattered self-image who was taking solace from her mental anguish and abandonment through the booze and cigarettes that were rava
ging her looks and mental stability even more. I never really forgave my father for reducing her to that… How bizarre that the suffering that he’d caused my mother affected me more than the knowledge of the terrible suffering he’d inflicted on others… while at home I’d grown up in comfort and ignorance.

  In the present time, we’re dealing with a different kind of evil: a callous kind of evil that isn’t driven by any other ideology than self gain. Money. Power. I guess that isn’t much different than the old days. Except there are people like me, from families like mine, and people like Ana from groups like Temenos who can now talk to each other. Help one another. Even make love together. This was unthinkable thirty years ago.

  At that moment when I watched my mother break down, I became aware of all the little corrupt acts to which I’d been a party when I’d served as a policeman. The way I didn’t see some things: like a long-term lowlife thief getting a beating; a little pay-off you take from a drug dealer, or a pimp, because these are small things; and your job is the need to take care of far bigger crimes and more terrible violence from which to protect the ordinary citizens of this country. That’s what I’d believed when I’d been a cop.

  All of those stories that I heard about my father, that night, from my mother, I’d always tried to keep shut up in the darkness myself, out of memory, just as she had for so many years. Now, I could feel them wanting to surface from a deep and fearful place inside of me. How would I have reacted if I’d been a cop back in that time of total political turmoil? Hadn’t Pa’s genes formed my body? Hadn’t his DNA shaped my mind? Of what might I be capable right now?

  Like him?

  I knew what I wanted to believe. But I had no way of knowing.

  Driving back to town, I wanted to make sure that my mother was okay. I’d had enough of seeing my father just fine with Costanza. When I reached Ciudad Azul, the sun was close to setting. I pulled up outside Ma’s apartment house, just at the western end of town, not far from the lake.

  I rang the buzzer on the gate.

  ‘Who is it?’ Her voice crackled in the speakerphone. She buzzed me in both doors when she recognized my voice. I took the elevator to her floor. She’d left the apartment door open. It was dark inside. The shutters were down and the air was stale with smoke. She was standing in the living room, the flickering of the muted television illuminating the walls and the gaunt stick frame of her. Her dark dress covered her arms and fell below her knees, elegant, as if she was in mourning. I went to her and she lifted up her head to give me a kiss on the cheek.

  ‘Juanma, so nice to see you.’ Her voice was gravelly with whisky and cigarettes. Her hair was stiff in a new dyed permanent, and her eyes dark with shadow, her lipstick a reddish brown. ‘You want a little whisky, Juanma?’

  ‘Yeah, go ahead… Christ, open the shutters, Ma… Get some air in here.’

  She waved me toward the windows with a dismissive hand: wrinkles, liver spots, not like Costanza. I yanked on the canvas tape and the shutters clattered up. I opened the glass doors to the balcony. The last rays of the sun glinted on the lake. It was cooler this evening. The stale air drifted out. Cool lake air drifted in.

  Ma freshened her glass with the scotch and poured me a liberal one. She put the bottle back down on the sideboard where she kept her framed photographs, none of my father, obviously, but four of me: one as a baby in her arms – I guess I must have been about seven months old; me in the cassock and surplice of an altar boy, about nine years old – a picture I’d found embarrassing as a teenager; my high school graduation photograph – a boy with an already receding hairline; and my graduation photograph from the Police Academy – head shaved, goatee and looking tough. Behind the pictures was the trophy I’d won for marksmanship in my last year at the academy. I don’t know why she kept it there. I didn’t want it.

  Ma sat on the sofa and I slumped into the armchair opposite her. On the coffee table was an old newspaper, the one with the report on the weapons heist from the airbase in Córdoba; and a playbill from a production that had been on at the Theater Colón that was nothing to do with the Temenos people.

  ‘What brings you to see your old mother?’ she said.

  ‘I just thought we could have a little drink together,’ I lied.

  I really wanted to ask my mother more about Pa’s involvement with the political right and if she’d heard of Arenas – or if she knew anything about him from the old days – but for the moment, I couldn’t bring myself to form the words.

  This visit wasn’t helping me to find Gerardo Fischer. And her squeezing my hand with such affection didn’t endear me any more toward my old man. So I said it. ‘Hey, Ma, what do you know about Pa and Pablo Arenas?’

  Her hand shook as she lifted the glass to her lips. She took a large swallow. When she lowered the glass her eyes were two little balls of ebony. She had a wry smile that told me what she was going to say before she said it.

  ‘I don’t know anything about any Pablo Arenas. Who’s he?’

  I knew right then that she wasn’t going to say another word no matter how much I pressed on it; on Arenas, or anything to do with my father in the far or the not so distant past. If I had pressed her, this little affectionate visit would all end up badly. I knew that.

  ‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘He’s just some guy.’

  Extract from the casebook of Juan Manuel Pérez

  January 13th 2006

  Hours: 08:00 to 10:30

  I guess it was inevitable that I would have a particularly vivid dream that night. I was in a city on the coast of Chile, not in Argentina, and a powerful storm in the distance had obscured the Andes with dark cloud. The coastal ranges hid the full impact from my view so I climbed up a steep street and by the time I reached the top of a hill above the city, the blizzard seemed to have blown itself out. In the distance, Aconcagua and the peaks around it were completely white with new snow that gleamed in the bright sunlight. Bright beams cut through the clearing mists and clouds and they evaporated into an empty blue sky. A broad canal with barges docked at its wharves ran the length of the plain between the coast range and the Andes. With what looked like a huge snowplow on the bow, a gigantic icebreaker ship broke up ice floes that had formed on the canal’s surface during the storm.

  I was now a bodiless point of consciousness observing the unfolding dream vision. I became aware of a large mansion behind me. In the house, a young boy, about seven or eight years old, was being held captive by a large family that included a husband, a wife and four or five of their children. The family seemed to be in a momentary state of suspended animation, as if they were aware of what was going on in the house but were unable to move. The disembodied state of consciousness in which I found myself was somehow responsible for this. The captive boy realized that he had a chance to make a run for freedom. I urged him to climb out of the window while the family was still in a state of paralysis. I followed him onto the street to make sure that he got away safely… and then I was wide awake.

  I didn’t think I needed to analyze anything. The dream was mysterious and beautiful and had left me in a good mood. I got up. I showered. I shaved. I sat on the balcony of my apartment that overlooked the lake and I sipped at a cup of coffee with milk. My cell phone rang. It was Ana.

  ‘I’d like you to come and meet someone,’ Ana said. ‘She wants to help with the investigation.’

  ‘And this is?’

  ‘Clara Luz Weissman. She’s the producer for Gerardo’s theater company.’

  ‘The producer?’

  I had another moment of doubt as to whether it had been such a good idea to sleep with Ana. Did it come from guilt? Or was it a baseless anxiety? She was so different from me. Younger for sure… but why should that be an obstacle? The dreadlocks, the tattoos, the oriental symbols on her arms, and me an ex-cop, in white shirt, black pants and penny loafers. I was a digger in the dirt of human lives. But wasn’t that what she aspired to as an actress? We must have that in common, right? We were both
interested in extremes of what people did. I was also interested in getting paid. Had that made me anxious? I needed the money and I’d complicated collecting it by having sex with the client. I wanted to be with Ana some more, I was sure of this, but I also wanted to get paid for doing my job. How much would she want to be with me? I might have just been a one-night stand for her, some fun, a little fling.

  ‘She drove all the way up here from Buenos Aires,’ Ana said. ‘She knows more about Gerardo’s movements in the past few years than any of us.’

  ‘And she wants to help?’

  ‘Yes…’

  Ana paused.

  I waited.

  ‘She has the archives of the company, everything Gerardo has done…’

  Had this Clara Luz Weissman seen the folder that I’d found in the kitchen drawer of Gerardo’s house? Maybe she could shed some light on the people in the photographs, the signatures on the postcards.

  ‘Can you come to the house and meet her?’ Ana said.