Far South

by David Enrique Spellman

  ‘I don’t get this,’ Sandino said.

  ‘Sandino, listen, I’ve done you favors in the past. I hate to bring this up. I need to know something. Is my father dealing heroin or coke?’

  Sandino’s stunned stare and the way his mouth dropped open made it obvious he didn’t want to be having this conversation.

  ‘That’s a very indiscreet question, Juan Manuel.’

  ‘So what am I going to do with this information? Bust you?’

  Sandino regained his composure. His lips pressed together in a straight line. Silence.

  ‘It’s just like a weather report,’ I said. ‘What’s blowing through? That’s all. I find out. I go away. I’m not interested in a drug bust. I’m not a cop any more. But if my father is dealing heroin or coke, I’m going to fuck him up.’

  ‘I don’t get this… You’ve become a concerned citizen all of a sudden.’

  ‘I’m a family man.’

  ‘You’re worried that your father is leading young children into a life of perdition and addiction,’ Sandino said. ‘I don’t buy this, Juanma. Even you’re not that squeaky clean.’

  I colored up now, worked up a rage inside.

  ‘Listen… there are some things… maybe more than a few things… I can’t stomach. Especially not from my own father. You know this. I know this. That’s why I want to know if he’s involved in coke or heroin.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘I’m serious.’

  Sandino’s stare was simply incredulous.

  ‘Juanma, this is bullshit. I don’t know why you asked me this.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘It’s a simple question,’ I said.

  ‘Juanma, sit down… please.’

  I sat down. The office chairs were upholstered in green plastic over a steel-molded frame. He walked over to the office door and closed it. He sat back down behind his desk. He had a decent chair. I made a conscious effort to relax.

  ‘You’re overwrought,’ Sandino said.

  ‘You’re right. I’ve got to get away for a few days.’

  ‘You don’t worry about your father getting involved in any of that kind of shit, okay?’

  ‘He’s involved in something,’ I said.

  ‘Rest your weary mind.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Okay, let me tell you. You’re going away. And I have a special present for you… very special… Everybody wants to get their hands on this. Something very rare these days. Very smooth, very mellow. Hashish to mellow your brain, my friend. Legendary hashish. You been a cop… you know this hash… you smoked this hash… I know… you know… Lebanese Red. Can you believe this? Wonderful. The stuff of legend… Arabian Nights, my friend. Showed up about a month ago; rumors of more on the way. Everybody’s waiting for more.’

  ‘Lebanese Red,’ I said.

  ‘If your father’s involved in this… and I say if… then he’s doing the world a favor. It’s not crack, it’s not coke, it’s not heroin, no harm to anyone. Just a very mellow smoke… chill everyone out… Put your mind at rest.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘This what you want to ask me?’ Sandino said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You want to take a little smoke with you. I’ll give you a little smoke… my personal stash. You’ll see I’m not lying.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  Sandino knew I had a weakness. A little weakness. But I hadn’t smoked any hash in years. Well, at least… not since I gave up being a cop. Not since my buddies in the drug squad stopped popping in on my office to drop off little presents for me. Sandino went over to his filing cabinet, opened the top drawer and took out a round cake of hashish wrapped in pale muslin. It must have weighed about half a kilo. That was worth a lot of fucking money. If he kept it in the drawer, he wasn’t afraid of any raid. Maybe he bought it from my father. Or maybe Sandino was paying someone off. He’d paid me off in the past and I’d got him out of a little trouble. Okay, like he said, I’m not so squeaky clean myself.

  The muslin that covered the cake of hashish was scorched where it had been cut with a hot knife. It also had a design printed on it, some letters, some Arabic, some Latin script. I’d seen large muslin-wrapped blocks of hashish from Lebanon at various times in my cop career. All of it came with the distinguishing marks in purple or blue ink of some Middle Eastern guerrilla group: Christian militia, Shia militia, PLO and this one, Hizbullah.

  Sandino picked up a jackknife off his desk, opened the blade, dipped a hand into his pocket and clicked a flame from his gold lighter. He heated the blade, set the cake of hashish on the desk and pressed the blade into muslin and through the reddish brown resin. A pungent blue smoke curled up from the blackened blade. That was good fucking hash. Sandino carved off a large block that I reckoned was about twenty-five grams. The edge of it crumbled a little. Sandino took a plastic bag from his desk drawer. He dropped the lump of hash into the bag, sealed it shut.

  ‘You always treated me well, Juanma,’ Sandino said. ‘And your father’s a decent guy, too. You don’t need to fuck him up, okay? Now just go somewhere and fucking relax, okay? And don’t come back here and ask me any more indiscreet questions, okay. I always liked you.’

  I stood up. Sandino dangled the plastic bag of hash and I held out my palm. He dropped the bag into my hand. I slipped it into my jacket pocket.

  ‘I said nothing,’ Sandino said. ‘I know nothing.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Thanks. I owe you one.’

  ‘No, you don’t. You owe me nothing. I never saw you here.’

  And by implication, he owed me nothing more. I’d called in a debt. He’d paid, and now I had to get out of there and never ask him a favor like this ever again. It was a cheap pay off: a little information and twenty-five grams of hash, no matter how good it was. I left Sandino’s office. The bouncer let me out. The air had cooled a little. Very little. It was still brutally hot.

  Lebanese Red. My father and Lebanese Red: Lebanese Red comes into the province in one direction; boxes of small arms go back the other. What were the odds? With that truck up there, pretty good, I guess: automatic rifles, maybe a few pistols, some larger items. Who knows what the fuck Arenas had got his hands on? How was my father involved? He seemed to be very close to Casares. Had Fischer found out about this when he was nosing around with Carlos and Ramón? And that’s why he disappeared.

  I’d take very short odds that Sandino would be having a word with my father very soon. It would concern my nosing around about him and his interest in drug deals. Thus it would get back to Casares and Matas and Arenas. Happy days. Hizbullah, Gerardo Fischer, Sara Suarez, Isabel Suarez, Israel, synagogue bombings, AMIA bombings, Jose Arenas, Sandro Casares, Lebanese Red, Argentine military rogue traders… my father was in very deep. What was his role in all this? Had Casares, Arenas and Matas pulled him into the deal just to close me down?

  Maybe Fischer had been some kind of problem to them, too. He’d disappeared the same day as the heist of a shipment of arms from the military base at Córdoba. What the fuck did I know? I was stumbling around in the dark making a nuisance of myself for some very nasty people.

  I walked down to the lakefront. Out in the distance a lone speedboat tore up the lake surface and made wavy wakes. Taped to the stanchion of the streetlight was another of Clara’s leaflets with Gerardo Fischer’s face in among the notices about bands, clubs, and bars. And yet more leaflets decorated the brick pillars of the lakeside fence. I went back up the shady side street and got into my car. The cops would be at the colony very soon, at the latest tomorrow, if the leaflets had got all around town, which they probably had.

  I ought to talk to Isabel Suarez in Buenos Aires about Gerardo Fischer. Why didn’t I have much heart for it? Because my father was in this now. Still, that was no guarantee that I was safe any more. I had been safe just after the horse ride with the old man… right up until I decided to follow Pedrito’s Arab buddy up into the hills. Now I wasn’t. My life m
ight or might not be in danger but I didn’t want Casares or Pedrito Matas or Arenas or anyone else to come looking for me in Ciudad Azul or Córdoba. A few days in Buenos Aires pursuing a possible line of investigation might help to clear my head and keep me out of their thoughts.

  I drove back to the office. I drove around the block twice to make sure there weren’t any black SUVs or blue VW Passats. There weren’t. I parked the car and walked up the stairs. Rangel was at his computer. I tossed the heavy bag of dope to him. It clattered on the desk next to his keyboard.

  ‘What’s this?’ he said.

  ‘Lebanese Red,’ I said. ‘It’s a present from my father.’

  He lifted the bag to eye level.

  ‘You fucking with me?’

  ‘I gave it up long ago,’ I said.

  ‘You know,’ Rangel said, ‘a guy came around early this morning asking to see you.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah… Pedrito Matas.’

  I nodded. Matas was here in the office. That was not good news.

  ‘He brought a message from Mr Casares. Mr Casares says that you don’t need to worry. He’s talked with your father about you. Casares has got a file he’d like you to see. You can see it any time you want. Matas left this phone number. “Make an appointment,” he said.’

  Rangel handed me a card: Casares’s name and number.

  An appointment to see this file: what file? Arenas or Fischer? Not Arenas, must be Fischer; or an appointment with a bullet in the back of the neck? That wasn’t a phone call I needed to make. Not now. Maybe if I got desperate.

  ‘I’ll call them later,’ I said. ‘I’m going out of town for a few days.’

  ‘Good idea,’ Rangel said. ‘Don’t tell me when you’re coming back.’

  I parked my car between Fischer’s white Fiat and Clara’s Dodge Ram. I walked across the hillside to Ana’s house. She wasn’t home. I walked back across the property to Sara’s house. Clara opened the door to me.

  ‘Is Ana here?’ I said.

  ‘She and Sara went for a walk down by the river,’ Clara said.

  ‘I’d like to talk to them.’

  ‘Let’s go down there. I’ll come with you.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Are you okay?’ Clara said to me. ‘You look terrible.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  From the porch I looked back toward my parked car. All quiet on the road to the colony. I walked down the hill with Clara. Some thunderheads were gathering over the Sierras. The sky beneath them was a deep orange.

  ‘I saw your notices by the lake.’

  ‘They’re all over town.’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘Do you think the police will ever show up?’ she said.

  ‘They will now,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t think it’s a good idea, do you?’

  I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Honestly…’

  We passed by Fischer’s house that was all shuttered up. As we walked along with the orchard wall on our right, I glanced across toward the plum trees. Ana was lying in the hammock. Sara was sitting on a garden chair on the terrace above us.

  ‘I thought they’d gone to the river,’ Clara said. ‘I’m sorry.’

  I opened the orchard gate. Ana appeared to be asleep, her tattooed arm was flung across her breast and her other arm across her face. Her head twitched for a moment as if something was troubling her. She was lost in that world of sound and image that exists somewhere inside our skulls into which we cross every time we fall asleep. I’d slept with her once and I wanted to sleep with her again. I still didn’t know enough about her or her about me to know if we could go much further than that. Except that I was being drawn more and more into this theater world. It was phantasmagoric in a lot of ways. But how much more illusory was this world than the world that I’d been used to: the world of cops, and thieves and killers. The muscles of her face were so relaxed, framed by the dreadlocks that pillowed her head on the hammock. She looked so young. I touched her shoulder.

  ‘Oh,’ Ana said. ‘I drifted off.’

  She had dark rings under her eyes. They were puffy.

  ‘I had a dream about Gerardo,’ she said. ‘He was standing beside the hammock in the shade of the plum trees. It seemed so normal. I reached out to touch him but then he stepped back into the light and I couldn’t see him any more.’

  ‘It was just a dream,’ I said.

  ‘He was standing right here,’ Ana said. ‘I just reached out to touch him, and he stepped back into the light and then he was gone.’

  She slid off the hammock and stood next to me. Maybe Ana had just come up with the answer. So easy. Fischer had stepped out of this dimension and disappeared into another. He was fine. He was okay. He’d let us know through Ana having a dream about him. Maybe you had to be dead to be able to communicate like that.

  ‘Come on,’ Ana said. ‘I’ve got to drink some mate.’

  Clara was above us on the terrace with Sara.

  ‘What are you doing down here?’

  ‘We miss him,’ Ana said.

  Fischer. This Fischer was so important to them. These Temenos actors were decent people. But what had made Fischer become so important to me? I’d never even met him. This guy that these people cared so much about, who’d been with them for so many years, he must be worth finding, right? I hoped that he wouldn’t turn out to be just a normal, egocentric son of a bitch, like most of us. If he turned up at all.

  Ana and I climbed up the steps to the terrace.

  ‘I’d like to visit your sister, Isabel, in Buenos Aires,’ I said to Sara. ‘You said she should be back from Israel… maybe last night… Will you call her for me?’

  ‘Didn’t I give you her number?’ Sara said.

  ‘Something’s come up,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure it’s so smart to use my phone.’

  ‘Let’s go up to the house,’ Sara said. ‘There’s no signal down here anyway.’

  In Sara’s living room, Clara took the gourd from Ana and filled it again from the thermos. She handed it to me. I sucked on the silver tube.

  ‘When you talk to Isabel,’ I said, ‘please… just find out if she’s going to be in Buenos Aires for the next few days. I think it’s better that way.’

  ‘But you said you wanted to talk to her?’

  ‘There,’ I said, ‘face-to-face, in Buenos Aires. Don’t even mention my name, right now, if you don’t mind.’

  Sara stared at me. Her mouth twisted.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Please,’ I said. ‘I have my reasons.’

  She punched the buttons of Isabel’s number into her cell phone.

  ‘Isa, is that you? Yes… how was Israel?… Right… Wait a minute.’

  Sara went into her study to talk to her sister. She closed the door behind her. Maybe she wanted privacy for such an intimate call. We drank another round from the gourd among the three of us again before Sara came out of the study. Her face was wan.

  ‘She’s tired. She plans on staying in Buenos Aires at least for the next few weeks,’ Sara said.

  ‘She already knew about Gerardo’s disappearance by email,’ I said.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘When you gave her the news, how did she take it?’

  Sara shook her head.

  ‘I can’t judge my sister’s emotions. She spent so many years in the Middle East. That’s hardened Isabel. It’s difficult to judge her emotions at all, but especially in an email.’

  ‘Can you give me her address?’

  Sara picked up a slip of paper and a pen and wrote down Isabel’s address for me. I put it in my wallet right next to Casares’s business card that Matas had left for me at the office. The one thousand dollars was still in there, too.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’ll see you when I get back.’

  Ana followed me down to the car. It’s not that I didn’t want to spend the night with her, it’s just that I didn’t want Matas or Casares’s goons to fin
d out I was up here and arrive in the middle of the night when I might be asleep like a baby in Ana’s arms.

  ‘How long will you be away?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know. Not long.’

  ‘We’ll be in Buenos Aires in a few days to put on the theater piece.’

  ‘I’ll come see it if I’m still there.’

  ‘I’ll call you,’ Ana said.

  ‘Don’t call me for a couple of days. Someone might want to trace my phone.’

  ‘You’re frightening me,’ Ana said.

  ‘Your friend Gerardo did you a favor. Kept you out of it.’

  ‘Am I going to see you again?’

  I couldn’t help but smile.

  ‘I hope so.’

  I kissed her on the lips. I didn’t care who saw.

  I got in my car and reversed it out of the parking lot. She stood and looked at me while she could. I got into a forward gear and took off down the dirt road. Yeah, I really did want to see her again.

  I drove to Córdoba. I would keep my discreet hotel for a few nights so that I could leave the car in the underground garage, but in the morning I’d fly to Buenos Aires and search out Isabel.

  I checked into my room at the Hotel Cristal. I used the hotel phone booth again to make a call.

  ‘Hello, Ma, it’s Juan Manuel.’

  ‘Oh, Jesus, how are you?’

  ‘Are you okay, Ma?’

  ‘Your father came around here, today, Juan Manuel. He was so mad. What have you done to him?’

  ‘What did he want?’

  ‘He said, “You tell that boy of yours to give up this stupid investigation he’s involved in. Tell him to stop digging up the past. He’ll be sorry if he keeps on.” He was so mad, Juanma.’

  ‘Are you okay, Ma?’

  Her words were slurred. She’d been drinking… a lot of whiskey. What the fuck was my father doing showing up at my mother’s apartment? He hadn’t spoken to her in years. When he’d left, she’d been on the verge of a nervous breakdown. She was still pretty fragile. And the whiskey on top of the medication didn’t help.

  ‘Please, Juanma, do as he says, it’ll be better for all of us. You don’t know what he’s capable of.’