More often it was his mother, unable to contain another slur against her family, who would take the bait, their voices leapfrogging over each other, and Michael and Maria would dive for cover, knowing one would eventually brush its mate and release a furious, scrapping brawl. In the face of Constantina’s flailing rage, Nikolai’s temper would collapse into belly laughter as she’d struggle and shriek and finally collapse into tears. There’d be kisses, and a pause, and the scoot of a chair as he’d carry her to the bedroom. Foreplay in Michael’s home usually involved broken furniture.
And once a broken body.
Up past the docks. To the tanneries, where the canal fermented with cattle guts and bone. Where they were never allowed and where they stood now—his gang, and he and little Maria—on a rise over the tannery’s waste pipe, shouting over the roar of chemical entrails blasting—too heavy, too slow—in their tumble to the canal. There, even though it was forbidden, to see an older girl living in one of the tar paper shacks clinging to the rear of the tannery—a girl who, for a fistful of dock candy, would lift her dress and let them touch her thing.
A boy’s moment, and Maria can’t come. She’s to wait by the belching pipe. Because she’s a girl and most of all because she’s his sister. So he lines up with the others, passes down his toll of Belgian taffy, reaches, and feels something to his eleven-year-old mind mind horrifying, thrilling, impossibly important. When it’s over he stands with the gang, wired and anxious and a little sick, making it better with bravado. Making it go away. Finally he remembers Maria, goes to the churning wastepipe, and she’s not there. Annoyed at first, he calls her name harshly, looks briefly around the mushy rise, and decides, even as a shiver rattles his guts, that she got bored and left.
He starts home, slowly, then faster, then finally in a blind, stumbling panic. Her room is empty and Michael stands on its threshold, feeling the stare of her only doll.
His parents were in the kitchen, and hadn’t heard him come in. He waited, shivering, till they saw him, blurted out that Maria was gone in a single, tangled breath. Watched his mother’s face grow and distort into reaches unfathomable. His father leapt from the table, demanded to be taken to the spot. Neighbors followed—the D’Annunzios and Spitalieris, Calabresis and Mottos. They searched the banks, the shrubs, pulled the ears of each boy till they were satisfied none knew. Except Michael. No one pulled Michael’s ears. He was left on the muddy embankment, alone.
They searched till nightfall, then beyond with lanterns, calling her name, roving like fireflies over the tannery grounds. Michael sat in the dirt and watched as his father—crouched in the wan glow of a neighbor’s lamp, tears streaming his cheeks—plunged both arms to the shoulder in to the roiling entrails of the canal, raising them empty and stiff and bleached with acid.
And Michael lay down, pulled the earth over his head, and willed himself to die.
There was never a funeral, just a day they gave up looking. His mother never cried, his father never cried again, and both seemed to lose track of Michael. He lay in his room, missed school, left at first light each day to sit above the pipe, where he coaxed clouds of lye and blood to scald him clean. He tried to imagine Maria in the blurry rush below, tried to imagine her tiny bones rolling and mingling with those of steers and sheep. His mind would reach from there to death and forever empty night, would just touch its truth before disappearing under a smothering curtain of survival.
They may have tried to carry on as a family, but the rhythm was gone. Meals grew silent, his father came home later and later, and Michael’s mother retreated to a place Michael could not follow.
She burned herself sometimes now at the wood stove, sometimes forgot to make dinner, sometimes never got out of bed. When one day she didn’t come home at nightfall, her husband and neighbors took to the streets, calling her name. It was Michael who found her, above the tannery pipe, staring into the rust-colored water below. He didn’t know if she’d heard him approach, but she turned in his direction, looked at him with eyes long moved on to other things, and whispered, “I have nothing. Nothing in this world is mine.”
And Michael fell howling at her feet. Gurgled in a finished voice that he was sorry—for Maria, for being born—that he would do anything, anything, if she would only come back to him.
And his mother stroked his hair absently, like he were a vaguely familiar dog, and listened to the rush of tannery waste speak soft, soothing words.
Eight months later her body burned with cancer. She embraced it, shoveled it her flesh. At the end her husband was there, her relatives, the neighborhood priest. Everyone but Michael. They’d forgotten to fetch him, and on the curb he waited in his Sunday best, drawing pointless circles of chalk, till someone remembered to tell him she was dead.
The next day his father packed their bags, closed the apartment, and, without a word between them, booked a ticket back to Chicago.
He died on Michael’s first day of college. No brother to sort through a pile of frozen bodies, no wife to throw herself at his casket, no daughter to weep softly. Only quiet Michael, not tossing in a handful of dirt like they do in Italy, or lighting a candle like they do in the Ukraine; just standing there stupidly and apart, waiting for it to be over, like they do in America.
May 12, 1956
3.
The sun threw lances into a cloudless sky as Michael parked at the American embassy on Roque Sáenz Peña—actually three rented floors in the turn-of-the-century First Boston Bank tower. In London and Paris, US government representatives worked out of palatial structures blocks long. Even in the new, instant capital of Bonn they had broad lawns, brick patios, and colorful gardens. But South America was still an afterthought in the Eisenhower State Department, its diplomats to the Republic of Argentina tenants between accounts receivable and domestic loans.
Michael got off on the middle floor of the embassy, where the CIA station was located. The theory was that by sandwiching the station between the upper and lower floors, they could cut down on electronic eavesdropping. It was a joke of course, what with all the pipes and elevator shafts running between here and the bank offices above and below. The consolation was that this particular station rarely did anything worth bugging it over.
It wasn’t even seven and the floor was deserted but for Wintergreen, the marine who sat at a desk guarding a single door labled MILITARY LOGISTICS—embassy-speak for a CIA station.
“Morning, Jarhead.”
“Morning, Spook.”
“You could save my life with some coffee.”
“Why would I do that?”
“I’m bigger than you are.”
“I’m armed.”
“I sign your time card.”
Wintergreen poured him a cup. “Yours is the mug with ‘Asshole’ on it, right?”
Wintergreen and Michael were the only ones on the floor under thirty. Barely old enough to drink back home, the marine guard was a good-looking Wyoming kid for whom semper fi had been a plank off the sinking ship of his Basque parents’ sheep ranch.
Michael glanced over the marine’s shoulder to the comic book he was reading. “Superman?”
“In his greatest struggle with the arch fiend.” The Wyoming kid’s accent still had, despite his constant effort, tiny tracks of Basque over it.
“How is Lex Luther?”
“He has a new titanium-blade snapping arm. I’m concerned.”
Michael signed for the overnight dispatch pouch from Washington, left the guard to his early morning Eternal Struggle for World Domination, and headed for his own pathetic little corner of it.
Just beyond the “ML” door were the station support offices where an administration assistant, record clerk, and three secretaries worked, most drawn from the wives of ex-pat vice presidents of locally based American internationals like Dun & Bradstreet. The room was empty.
Through a second metal door was the inner station itself where five of them worked. Norris, the station chief, had the large corner offi
ce. Esther, the code clerk, worked in the windowless communications center. There were a few storage rooms, a darkroom at the end of the hall, and, across from it, the cluttered corner the three remaining case officers—Lofton, Miller, and Michael—shared.
Michael dropped into a chair and slid himself on squealing casters. His desk faced an ornate, curved window typical of the building’s design, which he liked to think of as Early Robber Baron. Parquet floors, scooped lintels, even roof-line figurines—of whom, Michael had no idea. His view was the corner of Roque Sáenz Peña and Calle Florida, the fancy pedestrian shopping street. There was a cable car stop directly below, and his mornings here usually began with the strangle of metal brakes. Casa Rosada and the Plaza de Mayo were just a few blocks away at the other end of Roque Sáenz Peña. When the anti-Perón pilots bombed it in June, every window was blasted out of the embassy, and Michael had spent weeks picking fragments of glass from his typewriter. Someone on the State Department side claimed to have found a hand blown onto the roof. Just another weekend at the First Boston.
Michael unlocked the dispatch pouch and spilled out the usual: requested files from Records Integration Division, cipher updates, budget forms, name checks, and a red-striped envelope marked TOP SECRET SELF-RESTRICTED HANDLING EYES ONLY addressed to Michael—in a manner of speaking. Upon induction into operational intelligence, each wet-nosed neophyte is issued an official pseudonym to use in all CIA correspondence. At first the idea appealed to Michael—a sort of nom de spook. He imagined such dashing possibilities as L. L. Shadow or Maximilian Devereaux. When the name finally arrived, dreamed up by some chinless functionary in a Potomac basement, it didn’t have quite the ring Michael had hoped for: FRANK SNIFF.
FRANK SNIFF BUENOS AIRES STATION
TOP SECRET SELF-RESTRICTED HANDLING EYES ONLY
Michael debated opening it now or after lunch and decided to get it over with.
FROM: PETER NORTH AC/WH/5/
TO: FRANK SNIFF BUENOS AIRES STATION
SUBJECT: RYBAT BI LETTER
MESSAGE:
I HAVE, AFTER CAREFUL CONSIDERATION, COME TO THE CONCLUSION THAT YOU CAN JUDGE THE DEVELOPMENT OF A CIVILIZATION BY HOW LATE YOU CAN GET A PIZZA ON A TUESDAY NIGHT.
END MESSAGE
Michael sighed. “Peter North” was the working pseudonym of Billy Patterson, a grinning, murderous carrottop he went through CIA boot camp with at the agency’s newly acquired Camp Peary. They were partners on field exercises, including a mock border-crossing, where Patterson managed to nearly kill an instructor in a watchtower explosion. After graduation, both ended up in the Directorate of Plans Western Hemisphere Division—Patterson in Branch 5 communications—and it was then the TOP SECRET SELF-RESTRICTED HANDLING EYES ONLY messages from Washington started haunting Michael’s desk, their contents always a different, meaningless whimsy that had crossed Patterson’s deranged mind over coffee. Michael had tried begging him to stop, telling him that so much EYES ONLY traffic directed to him personally from division HQ was further alienating his already alienated coworkers, but Patterson had responded by gleefully doubling his output and upping the security clearance.
Michael had considered showing them to Norris and the others, but that would only get Billy into trouble, and the fact was Michael owed him. Billy might have almost gotten them killed at Camp Peary, but he also happily, almost perversely, stood up and taken the fall later for a team failure that was entirely Michael’s fault. This resulted in Billy being punished after graduation with a desk rotation in Washington while Michael was assigned immediately on an FI rotation abroad. He owed Billy, so he kept his mouth shut and took his lumps in cold stares from his boss.
Michael fed Billy’s dispatch to the shredder, put his feet up, stared at the plaster ceiling—at cracks running through it like veins—and thought of Evita.
Of her funeral and the thousands who stood in the rain for hours to glimpse her ravaged body. Of a city that came to a shuddering stop as if it would never start again. Of a gloating oligarchy and shattered peasants. Of a note left fluttering on his front door.
Of her frightened husband.
With Dr. Ara’s work finished, Evita was brought to the third floor of the CGT to lie in wait while her husband and president, Juan Perón, began work on a monumental tomb. It was to be based on Napoleon’s, a towering marble facade topped with a 450-foot shirtless laborer—a descamisado—standing taller than the Statue of Liberty.
But Evita was Perón, and Perón was Evita, and only together were they that improbable political fantasy of Peronism. And during those first nights, when Perón would climb the CGT stairs alone to sit outside her door, he came to realize that not only did his wife lay dead in there, but also half his power. In public he began to bang his fist harder, drive his motorcycle faster, sleep with women younger—a howl of exorcism against a wife that had gone from his greatest love to his greatest yoke.
In three years he was gone. A pathetic creature in a seedy smoking jacket, escaping to a Uruguayan gunboat that would lead him away from the hounds, from memories, into exile.
He left plenty behind: a nation in economic chaos, a thirteen-year-old lover, a dead wife sealed behind wax. The first thing the new government—a government of generals—did was dynamite her monument. And they banned her. Banned even the notion of her.
Yet they never gathered the courage to touch Evita herself. She lay where her husband left her, stowed in silence. But not forgotten by voices that grew louder each passing night, spoken with flowers, and now more often, violence. She wouldn’t go away, so they had finally come for her. To take her out of politics.
In Michael’s desk was a letter from Evita, written near the end of her life in a shaky, chemotherapy hand. Of the lines she wrote, the one that stuck with Michael these three years since her death was always the last: You Will Never Forget Me. At the bottom of the envelope was a single lock of blonde hair…
“Mike.”
Michael jerked awake. It was Ed Lofton, one of the case officers he shared the room with and the only one who came close to liking him, which wasn’t much.
“Spend the night again?”
It was an old station joke. Michael had a habit of falling asleep in his chair. Once, during a particularly insufferable lecture from Ambassador Nufer, he’d curled up into a fetal ball and begun snoring. This time he had at least an excuse: Karen was four months now into a pregnancy that seemed to be a scientific experiment in continuous vomiting. Neither of them had slept the night before.
Lofton had a copy of the local rag, headlines screaming about the latest Peronist bombing. “Cocksuckers are getting on my nerves,” he sighed. Lofton was in his midforties and lanky, with a soft belly, seersucker suit, and Gallic nose that was a web of exploded capillaries. Michael had stumbled on some of Lofton’s more debauched moments during stakeouts, and the fact that he had never brought them up had earned him, if not the affection of his fellow case officer, a certain respect.
Lofton tossed the newspaper on the desk. “Bud wants to see you.”
“How’s his mood?”
“Usual.”
Robert “Bud” Norris’s office was across the hall. The door to the station chief’s domain was always closed, and Michael dutifully knocked.
“Come.”
He entered. Norris was behind his desk, going through the day’s cable traffic. “Did you get an ‘Eyes-Only’ this morning?” he asked without looking up. Norris had the cable inventory list in his hand, and for the millionth time Michael cursed Billy’s name to all the sprites in redheaded hell.
“Yeah.”
It hardly mattered anymore. What few fantasies Michael might have entertained of fitting in here had been choked in their crib years ago.
At sixty, Norris’s face was still remarkably handsome but for the beginnings of a jowl that was edging inexorably forward with each year. Norris would be a turkey-neck by sixty-five. He stretched his chin and ran a finger along it as he studied Michael, a habit picked up
from his wife, a strained, brittle Porteño beauty named Flavia.
“Anything I should know about?” he asked. The routine. Michael, keeping up his end of their kabuki dance, answered exactly the same way he had for four years.
“Nah. Nothin’ special.”
In the entire time Michael had been assigned here, no one else had received an EYES-ONLY. Norris stroked his turkey-neck-in-training. “Have a seat.”
Michael obeyed. The wall behind Norris’s head was blank but for a framed photo, not of CIA Director Allen Dulles but FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover. The significance of this was made abundantly clear on Michael’s first day here, when, after leaving Michael’s extended hand hanging stupidly in midair, Norris had eyed him up and down and growled, “So why the fuck are you here?”
Norris had the bullshit file open on his desk. The bullshit file was green and thick and dictated most of Michael’s waking moments in the Republic of Argentina. “So how’s Schmidt coming?”
Rudolph Schmidt. Volkswagen dealer. Ex-son of Deutschland who may or may not have once been an SS officer and may or may not be ranked about nine billionth on the attorney general’s list of escaped war criminals.
“No ID yet. State doesn’t have any prints, and I still haven’t gotten a wire photo from Army CID.”
“You’ve snuggled his neighbors? Opened his overseas mail?”
“I’m working on it.”
“I’ve been on you a month about this.”
“I’ve still got the GRU SPR file updates to finish. They’re due next week.”
“Schmidt’s an ODENVY liason request. Give it priority.”
Michael sighed. ODENVY was CIA-speak for the FBI. Which meant the FBI legal attaché at the embassy, Cosgrove, had made a call to Norris on behalf of Hoover or the US attorney general’s office for help, which was now, once again, being dumped in Michael’s overflowing lap. It was utter bullshit, but it was the way life worked down here.
Blood Makes Noise Page 3