Who Is Vera Kelly?

by Rosalie Knecht

“Not like me.”

  I waited for her to go on, but she didn’t.

  “Some are very critical of the government,” I said. She was clearly used to being looked at, stared at. That made it easy to watch her carefully while she spoke. “Juan José. Elena.”

  “Of course they’re critical,” she said, changing back to Spanish now. “The government is very weak.”

  “And conservative,” I said. “Reactionary.”

  “Strength is what matters,” she said. “We haven’t had a strong leader in—a long time.” I wondered if she wanted to say “since Perón.”

  “Does it matter more than policy?”

  “Policies change, they come and go. I love Argentina, and I want it to be strong. That’s all.”

  Perhaps Gerry had been right. Her interest in politics was limited; maybe I was wasting my time. But there was a vividness to her that seemed important. I was starting to think that I couldn’t understand Román without understanding Victoria.

  DECEMBER 1957

  MARYLAND YOUTH CENTER, BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

  About a third of the girls at the Maryland Youth Center were there on grounds of immorality, which usually meant they were pregnant. Some of them were showing but most weren’t, because once you were showing they would send you to St. Catherine’s Home in Delaware, which was a worse prison than the Maryland Youth Center. At St. Catherine’s Home there were no visitors of any kind, and if someone called for you they would say they’d never heard of you. I was told all that by a weeping girl who had given birth there four months earlier and been sent back to MYC afterward because she tried to scratch the eyes out of the on-staff obstetrician. It was because of the immorality that they took away the makeup. The pregnant girls would congregate in the dayroom after breakfast, and a woman from a church would come and teach them to crochet.

  Then there were the girls who had committed actual crimes. I was one of those, I guess. There were quite a lot of thieves, but most were the shoplifting kind. My grand theft gave me some status over the girls arrested for stuffing Schiaparelli perfume and paste earrings into their coats in department stores, although I felt my offense was less intentional than theirs, since I had only been borrowing the car. Of course, if things had gone differently for me that night, I might have been borrowing it for quite a long time. But I tried not to think about that.

  And then there were the girls who frightened the rest of us, whose offenses were unclear because they were so feral we couldn’t ask them questions. One girl had cut a boy’s face with a razor; another had broken her little sister’s arms, both of them. Another girl, the one who most horrified and fascinated the staff and the rest of us, actually straddled the line: she was both violent and pregnant. Every third day she was taken out of the general population and confined to the solitary rooms on the second floor for bloodying noses or tearing out clumps of hair. She scratched at first, and then they sedated her and cut her nails. She would wait out her time in solitary, and when she came out she would be completely unchanged. She threw her relative freedom away each time with a new fight over nothing, which I thought was kind of aristocratic, how little she cared. She was showing, but no one talked about transferring her. She was like something painted on a vase, a pregnant Medusa. Her haircut looked involuntary, short like a child’s and crooked across the bangs, as if she’d been coming out of sedation when it happened, and she was too tall for her smock, so it showed her knees and pulled on her arms, bending her into a parenthesis.

  Sometimes black girls came in, but they were always transferred in a day or two to another place on the other side of Baltimore. “They have their own place,” said a girl who had been leaning over me in the homemaking class that followed breakfast on a morning when two black girls, cousins, had been brought in overnight. “They don’t stay here. There’s some standards, at least.” I told her she should shut her mouth and that segregation was against the Constitution, and she called me a Jew. We were knitting and not sewing that morning because a fourteen-year-old had made a dogged effort at killing herself with a needle the day before. The story was causing amusement on the third floor. They said she had been at it for forty-five minutes when they caught her, and had succeeded only at putting a bunch of red dots on her wrist, like a polio vaccine.

  APRIL 1966

  BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA

  The VHF transmitter I had hidden in Román’s bicycle was tracked through triangulation by two antennas, which I had to set up. For reasons of safety and convenience, I put one in the attic office of the confitería and one in the kitchen of my apartment in San Telmo. This second one could get the signal properly only if it was fixed to a hanging basket of onions that allowed it to angle toward a north-facing window; when the onions sprouted, the green shoots reached out in the same direction, toward the light. The device was very powerful. It was miles away, but it sent its pulse every ten seconds to my apartment and the office.

  For the first few days after I placed it, I was preoccupied with thoughts of what would happen if Román found the device. If he was working for the KGB, he would, of course, instantly recognize it for what it was. My hope was that he would suspect Argentine intelligence services first. Student subversives in Argentina were regularly surveilled by their own government, and Gerry had taken the precaution of custom-ordering my brand-new VHF telemetrics with a casing that resembled an older, more widely disseminated design, which was used by governments all over the world. But my position was inherently precarious. I was foreign, my Canadian cover aside; suspicion could naturally fall on me.

  As Gerry had said, if things went bad, I could be killed. And yet, in the place where my fear should have been, there was a blank space. I felt that I had been living for a long time in a place beyond fear, where my life was contingent and didn’t amount to much anyway. Back home, I had known that if I was arrested at a dyke bar I would lose my job, and if I lost my job I would end up in a flophouse or worse. I went out anyway, because living was a dry waste if I didn’t. When I started working for Gerry and made enough money to keep some in the bank, I knew that if Gerry found out I went with girls, I would be fired twice over—the CIA did not pay out to homosexuals, because they were too easy to compromise. For a long time already, I had been half a step from the edge of a cliff. That was how I lived. I did not look over.

  The bicycle didn’t move from the boardinghouse for the first three days, because it rained. There was a chill in the air on the morning of the fourth day, and I was dressing to go to the confitería when the signals came in that the bicycle was moving. I took my shoes back off and pulled a chair into the kitchen. The receiver was whirring on the floor, scratching out data on a roll of paper. This machine had been a bear to assemble—I had brought some of the parts with me, but had to get the rest from a wholesaler for office machines in the Centro and build it myself, as it wouldn’t have looked right for me to come through Ezeiza Airport with the whole thing ready to go in my suitcase. The paper was sized to fit an adding machine, but it worked.

  I worked out the coordinates from a reference book. In an hour he was back where he’d started, and in three hours, with my map and handbook, I had figured the farthest point of his journey, the place where he had stopped and spent twenty minutes before turning around and heading home. It took a ruler and protractor, and my head ached. He had gone to La Boca, to a strip near the water. The machine confirmed that the bike was motionless again, back at the boardinghouse. Over the course of several weeks the machine recorded Román’s data and I worked it out at night, after my long afternoons in the confitería. He went to class, to La Taberna, to the law library. He went to Victoria’s apartment, the location of which she had mentioned during our English lesson. And he went, three times in two weeks, to a desolate industrial block in La Boca.

  The day after his third trip, I took a bus to La Boca. It was raining again, a temperate mist that could not be warded off with an umbrella. I tied a scarf over my hair and put on a pair of glasses. T
he bus was old, creaking and shuddering at its many stops. When it passed La Bombonera, the soccer stadium, I hummed a rude song I’d heard about the prowess of the Boca Juniors. The view from the window was rows of bright buildings, small markets, and then the blocks of warehouses that lined a narrow river, the Riachuelo. The bus lingered for a long time at an intersection while an old man in a horse-drawn cart slowly crossed. On the next block, I pulled the cord and stepped down. It was raining harder; the city fell away on the far side of the Riachuelo, and dark clouds were banked up over the low buildings of Avellaneda. A line of tidy houses stood to my right, which reassured me. As long as the neighborhood was somewhat residential, I was less conspicuous. I turned left and walked for a few minutes past auto garages and small factories, Y HERMANOS and E HIJOS written proudly over several doors. The foul smell of tanneries drifted over the street. The block I was looking for was close to the water, and at the riverbank a few derelict fishing boats were casually tied up, like badly parked cars. There were two gray buildings on that block, both with small dark windows: one was marked WHOLESALE GARMENT COMPANY, and the other METALLURGY. The second sign was rusted; one of the windows in the front of the building was broken. Two stray dogs wandered companionably down the street. I walked to the end of the block and found the alley that gave access to the backs of the buildings.

  No one passed. The longer no one passed, the more my heart hammered in my chest. I walked down the alley, a gravel track just wide enough for a small truck. Behind the garment shop, a card table and a couple of chairs suggested an outdoor staff lounge. The ashtray on the table was full. Quickly, feeling exposed, I carried one of the chairs over to the back of the metallurgy building and stood on it, peering inside.

  “What do you need, miss?”

  A woman in thick glasses and a worn dress was standing in the doorway of the garment factory, an unlit cigarette in her hand.

  “Thinking of buying it,” I said cheerfully. “Well, my husband is.”

  “Oh, I see.” She relaxed and lit her cigarette, but continued to watch me.

  “It’s a mess,” I said, squinting through the window. What I could make out of the interior was a large, empty room, with a jumble of machinery on the right. Abandoned? I didn’t think so. On the left I saw an umbrella, propped against the wall.

  “The boys over there are quite rude,” the woman said.

  “Oh?”

  “They hardly say hello. One nearly ran into me coming out of there, and he didn’t say a word.”

  “Where are they?”

  “I haven’t seen them today.”

  I feigned irritation. “They were going to show me the building.” I shook my head, climbing down off the chair. I returned it to its spot and rummaged in my pocket, as if looking for a key. The woman finished her cigarette and adjusted her bobby pins.

  “Well, good luck,” she said, and went back in.

  I worked quickly in the empty alley with a pick, and the lock gave. I pushed the heavy door open and propped it behind me with a piece of a brick. The machinery on the right, I now saw, consisted mostly of old table saws and grinders, covered with a thick layer of dust. On a table pushed against one wall, a bright spot in the dim room: a red can of Coke, brand-new. There was a bright, sour smell of metal in the air. A track ran through the dust, as if something had been dragged across the floor. I followed it to a crate on the far side of the room and lifted the lid.

  Inside was a bundle of wires and packages wrapped in plastic. The explosives from Paraguay. I stopped breathing entirely, then replaced the lid and got back to work.

  The safest place for a bug was in the ceiling, which was crisscrossed with iron struts and the pipes of the ventilation system. I pulled on gloves and climbed up on the table with the bug I’d brought with me. Using a broom, I managed to place the bug on the top of a girder, just out of sight.

  I hurried back to the bus. The rain had cleared, and the Riachuelo gleamed gray and blue. Halfway home, I alighted from the bus and called Gerry. “The Paraguay purchase is in La Boca,” I said, and he called me clever.

  JANUARY 1958

  MARYLAND YOUTH CENTER, BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

  Joanne didn’t write or call, and I couldn’t bear to write to her. I wrote to Angelina instead, telling her about the powdered eggs the Maryland Youth Center served us and the nasal drip of the girl sitting across from me in typing class and the weather during the twenty minutes of rec time that we spent on a fenced-in patch of grass that abutted the building like a chicken run. I had nothing to do when classes were over for the day but fight with the other girls or work on the letter, so by the time I sent it, it was ten pages long. In the second week, Angelina sent me a letter in return, a page and a half on the stationery she’d gotten for her sixteenth birthday, wishing me well in juvenile detention and describing the preparations for the Spring Fling that were under way in the student committee she chaired. It made me feel lonelier than getting nothing, so I didn’t write her again.

  JUNE 1966

  BUENOS AIRES, ARGENTINA

  On a cold afternoon I had been listening to Vice President Perette’s secretaries murmur for hours when the man himself burst in. I sat up, coughed twice—I had been fighting a cold for two weeks—and scrabbled for my transcription notebook.

  “Out, out,” he said. “Get out, all of you.”

  There was a moment of silence and then a flutter of footsteps and high-pitched voices. The door shut. I had never heard this unhinged tone before. I fussed over the wires in my kit, checking and rechecking the connections. For a few minutes the reels hissed in silence. I imagined Perette sitting at the desk, staring at the wall. Then he began speaking again. He must have been on the telephone.

  “It’s no good,” he said. “The Basque doesn’t want it, the son of a bitch.”

  He meant Onganía. I lit a cigarette, fumbling with the matches. I had a feeling that this was big. There was a note of despair in his voice.

  “Two million,” he said. “A cabinet post, contracts worth another ten, and he says he doesn’t want it.” There was a muffled thunk. “Let him come here, if that’s what he wants. Let him come here and get a bullet in the neck. We offered him two million and a cabinet post, and who the fuck is he?”

  My headphones were cutting into the top of my ear, but I hardly noticed. They had offered Onganía a deal, and he had turned it down. He was set on a coup. It would have to be soon, now. Illia’s government was out of ideas if they had resorted to an offer like this, and if Onganía hesitated now, at the moment when his strength was most obvious, he would lose ground. I sat up stiffly. I’d been hunched in the corner behind the desk all morning, and my knees crackled when I straightened them. I needed to call Gerry.

  My favorite phone box faced a candy store on a side street leading into the plaza. I walked to it automatically, and then hesitated and walked past it to one I’d never used, on the corner of a busy, ugly street that amplified the traffic noise with a cliff of featureless modern buildings. A cold wind snaked along the pavement. The Argentine winter had a penetrating quality that wore you out, a fatigue from never quite being warm, the gas heaters on the walls struggling without conviction. I fed my coins into the slot and dialed the service. The usual woman answered and I asked for Gerry and gave the number of the phone box, and then hung up.

  When the phone rang I jumped, and a man passing gave me a funny look.

  “What is it?” Gerry said.

  “It’ll be soon.”

  There was a brief silence. “What happened?”

  “A deal failed.”

  “I see. Good girl.”

  “I have some papers for you. Am I mailing to the same place?” I said. He alternated among various PO boxes.

  “Let me see.” He receded from the phone, and then came back on the line. “Use number three,” he said.

  I would take the bus out the next day and mail the transcripts from a post office on the outskirts of town. We never used the same place twice
.

  “Three, all right,” I said, and hung up.

  I dialed Nico’s number. His wife answered.

  “He’s not here,” she said.

  “Will he be home later?”

  There was a pointed silence that I took for a shrug.

  “At suppertime?” I suggested.

  There was another silence, as if she failed to see the significance of this guessing game.

  “I’ll come at eight,” I said finally.

  “You will do what you will do,” she said.

  That night I told Nico about the deal Onganía wouldn’t take, and Nico got up from the kitchen table and took a bottle of red wine out of a cabinet. His wife was in the other room, administering some home remedy to a large marmalade tomcat with an abscess on its back, and the animal was making a continuous low growl that carried clearly into the kitchen. Nico found two glasses. “Do you drink?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He sat down again and pushed the taller glass across the table to me.

  “This is not good news,” he said.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “Perette must think it’s coming soon. He wouldn’t make an offer any earlier than he had to.”

  I sipped the wine.

  “This piece-of-shit country,” Nico said, and I was surprised to see that his eyes were wet. He looked precarious, like a house succumbing to a mudslide. “I tell you what. My boss, he doesn’t care. As long as the next man isn’t a Communist, he’ll be happy. But me? Every time this happens, I age ten years.”

  I fumbled in my bag for a cigarette. A minute of silence passed.

  “I’m sorry this is happening,” I said.

  “Oh my God, you should have seen us in ’55, ’56, ’62,” he said, sighing. “Every year, another old man shouting from a grandstand with all his medals on. ‘I’ve come to replace your previous old man.’ Some people would go to jail, everyone else would get used to it, and then it would start all over.” He rubbed his face. I shifted in my seat, then made a production of getting up to fetch an ashtray from the sink. I paused to look through the living room doorway and saw the cat, half its fur scissored down to felt, struggle free of Señora Fermetti and wedge itself under the dainty sofa on the far side of the room.