Blood Makes Noise

by Gregory Widen

  “We understand each other?”

  “I’ll talk to Gulliano this afternoon.”

  “And Mike…” Norris leaned back in his chair, took the time to light a cigarette and stroke his advancing chin. “Last few months…some of my ears…have been hearing rumblings…”

  “Rumblings?”

  “Buzz in the corridors. Lights left on in Casa Rosada. Whispers…”

  “Saying?”

  “I thought you might have picked up something.”

  In four years Norris had never outwardly admitted that Michael might have a source better than his. Michael wasn’t completely sure he was now.

  “I’ll ask around.”

  He turned to leave.

  “Mike.”

  He hesitated.

  “Is something going on?”

  In a normal universe, in a normal field intelligence office of the United States of America, to any other brother station chief, Michael would have sat down and told him of dust and Ara and women who wouldn’t fade being laid in pine boxes. But this was Norris and Buenos Aires, and Michael had learned a long time ago that though they occupied the same floor of the First Boston Bank building, that didn’t mean they worked for the same company.

  “Not that I know of, Bud.”

  4.

  In the beginning there was nothing.

  Then there was World War II, and with reluctance was born the Office of Strategic Services, a nervous America’s first spy agency, a birth not marked with joy by either of its older siblings: the War Department and, more important, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. For the FBI had always been the nation’s answer to interstate robbery, be it banks or state secrets. And with the war there was plenty of the latter. But Hoover’s flatfoots were by temperament cops and never really developed a love of the cloak or a feel for the dagger. But it was still a big, bad world only getting worse, and a frightened Uncle Sam finally decided he needed people that could find that peculiar love and feel, so the OSS came into being.

  Hoover’s FBI fought the idea, watching in horror as Roosevelt handed the OSS and its smug Ivy League sociopaths the cloak for Europe and the dagger for Asia, till he finally drew a line in the sand. And that line was South America. In a wartime compromise, Roosevelt left South American espionage, its bananas and generals and odd Nazi cruising dockside bars, to the FBI.

  But soon World War II ended and another, chillier war began, and Uncle Sam decided to unite his frat boys and equatorial flatfoots under one roof, and so the OSS and the FBI’s Latin American SIS branch were given a shotgun wedding in ’47 and renamed “CIA.”

  But South America had always been FBI, and though their stationery now had “CIA” in its letterhead, the boys down there were still, in their hearts, Hoover’s boys. And Hoover’s boys just looked at the world differently.

  In the internal struggle that followed the wedding, it was the frat boys, the old OSS, that ended up running the new CIA store. But the old World War II FBI hands didn’t give up easily. They dug in behind the walls of the Western Hemisphere Division, where their boss, J. C. King, kept them physically separate from the rest of the CIA by running WH operations out of Barton Hall, an old wartime dormitory in Potomac Park, far away from the other CIA division headquarter staffs grouped together in the former OSS buildings along E Street.

  During those first years, the frat boys on E Street would send memos south, and the ex-FBI flatfoots would ignore them. And they grew older, married into the local oligarchy, and carried on as they always had, targeting Hitler’s ex-doormen, Mafia dons, and the odd unionizer screwing with General Motors.

  By 1950, in the frat boys’ minds, Buenos Aires was a basket case. There was zero penetration of East Bloc missions, the station was completely frozen out of the Perón administration, and its reports, when Norris bothered to come to work and file them, were legendary in the halls of the DOP for their inaccuracy. Norris was even credited—after leaking to the press a boneheaded report connecting Juan Perón to Nazis—with helping get the peacock, whom Truman hated, elected president of Argentina in the first place as a vote against “US meddling.”

  But despite all this, J. C. King, who had bonded with Norris and the others running deception ops against the Japanese in Buenos Aires during the war, continued to be a firewall between the WH Division and the rest of the CIA, and as long as King was WH chief, Norris, Lofton, Miller…all of them were protected. And J. C. King—who everyone assumed must have pictures of Dulles either with a dead hooker or a live boy—wasn’t going anywhere.

  It was ’51 before the DDP Wisner, could finally muscle one of their own into Buenos Aires station: an expansion of the case officer staff by one to create a designated Russian-speaking Soviet Bloc desk.

  Since none of Norris’s team spoke Russian, in August, 1951, Michael Suslov, twenty-four years old and fresh from spook camp and the frat-boy world view, was sent south, the first new blood in these parts since the consolidation in ’47. The first of the new CIA.

  And they hated him on sight. Ignored him, fucked with him, and every moment of every day for four years reminded Michael that he worked not for Buenos Aires station but for them.

  From Norris’s office Michael went back to his desk and picked up the Ramirez 201 file. A gift from Hector, Ramirez was a Chilean military attaché anxious to fund a mistress habit by acting as an access agent to a female Czech code clerk, whom he claimed to also be sleeping with. There was so much going on in the world. Moscow station was riding the whirlwind of a nation shaken to its foundations by Khrushchev’s ascension and execution of Lavrentiy Beria. Stations in Iran and Guatemala were changing whole governments, while in Indochina the SE Division was in the middle of a shooting war, trying to keep the French from giving an entire subcontinent away. All that history being made, all those careers, and here he sat, chasing senile Krauts for Norris. The station chief of course forbade Michael from tasking Lofton or any of the others with his Soviet Bloc work, which meant Michael was essentially alone in trying to keep tabs on the USSR missions here and the half-dozen spooks and support staff operating out of them.

  The absurdity of all this reached a peak the previous spring when Michael discovered that the station actually owned an empty property that shared a wall with the Soviet commercial office lying along the back of the Russian embassy compound. Though it was a God-given opportunity for audio surveillance, Norris had inexplicably refused to authorize the budget for a listening post, so the possibility languished to the point where Norris was now openly talking about selling the building to conserve station resources. Norris’s strategy was obvious. If a bugging operation, if anything Michael was doing down here, turned up something interesting, DDP Wisner would insist on expanding the Soviet Bloc desk in the station with more Michael clones, which would weaken Norris’s grip on the place and the lifestyle he and his crew had comfortably built for themselves. So rule one here was simple: keep Michael from finding anything interesting.

  Michael had tried appealing directly to WH HQ in Barton Hall, but he was still recovering from an operational fiasco with the Polish ambassador during his first year here and was, for the moment, radioactive with the SB branch. That and the unshakable J. C. King/Norris bond meant the building continued to sit empty while Michael spent another in a series of late nights here alone, processing Rameriz’s 201, finishing the KGB/GRU SPRs, managing his Argentine contract agents in the police department, and basically running half a station by himself.

  Michael was reaching the end of his emotional tether here, but if he could hang on a little longer, get some traction on any of this, he just might finally impress his bosses, his real bosses—not in Barton Hall but across Potomac Park on E Street. That would eventually mean a promotion. Which would mean a transfer. Which meant getting the fuck out of Buenos Aires.

  Michael left early for lunch and strolled Calle Florida, ducking into three different tobacco shops on the bustling pedestrian way before finding what he wanted: a carton of imported Sob
ranie Black Russians. He’d come far enough down Calle Florida that, despite the humidity, he decided to loosen his tie and walk the rest of the way to the Central Post Office.

  Michael had never requested Argentina. With his Russian and Romance languages he’d hoped for the East Bloc, and would have settled for Italy, even Spain. But with the perverse accuracy of a silver bullet, they’d shipped him back to the one black hole in his life: Argentina.

  The fit, physically at least, was not a bad one. Unlike his station mates—all of whom seemed recruited from the same Minnesota football team—Michael, with his medium height and dark hair, blended easily into the lunch crowds around him. His Slavic blood left him with blue eyes and it was that, if anything, that marked him.

  As a child he’d liked the Central Post Office, a gaudy monument of stone and iron. He remembered calling off echoes in the massive marble lobby, the tellers smiling patiently at him from their art deco cages. Entering now, he couldn’t resist striking his heels hard on the floor to hear the echo come back to him off the muraled ceiling.

  Assistant Postmaster Alphonse Gulliano’s office, a large room with a small window through which no air moved, lay on the second floor. Gulliano, a slight, meticulously dressed man Michael’s age, stood nearby signing time cards and smoking a Sobranie Black Russian.

  “Senior Suslov.”

  “Senior Gulliano.”

  “Please. Come sit in my office. It’s cooler.”

  It wasn’t.

  “Cigarette?” Gulliano offered the pack, careful as always to make sure Michael saw the crested label on the box.

  “No, thank you.”

  “My only vice.” It was, in fact, what first attracted Michael to him. One afternoon three and a half years ago, feigning some problem with his overseas mail, Michael had wandered in. There were over a dozen employees and several managers, but it was the acrid, heavy smell of the Sobranies that caught his attention. Imported, they were several times more expensive than local or even American brands. Bitter, Sobranies were at best an acquired taste, like caviar—a status symbol, and that was all Michael needed to know about Gulliano.

  “You are here about one of your international renegades, no? One of the alemanes malos?”

  That first afternoon Michael had segued their conversation from his alleged postal difficulties to international correspondence in general, and how, back home, his own father was a mailman. Gulliano had eagerly given Michael a tour, explained their procedures, and as he spoke, Michael took inventory of the young man’s slightly above-market slacks, the occasionally dropped Spanish theta, the stench of the Sobranie Black Russians. A poorly paid civil servant heroically struggling to maintain airs above his station.

  Michael shifted in his chair. “Rudolph Schmidt.”

  “On Juncal?”

  “Yes.”

  That first afternoon quickly turned into lunch, and lunch again, where Gulliano would alternately pontificate on the failures of Peronism and devour Michael’s stories of his college year in France, demanding the most mundane details—how strong the coffee was, the fashionable length of men’s ties—and furrow his brow as if memorizing them. Michael spoke little of his work—embassy paper shuffling—except to hint at his difficulty in gathering evidence on certain notorious criminals wanted by the US attorney general. For his part, Gulliano spoke rarely of his wife and family and never invited Michael to his flat for dinner—ashamed, Michael assumed, of the lie it would give his cultivated exterior.

  “This could cost me my career, Senor Suslov.”

  “I understand the difficulty of your position.”

  Michael pulled out the carton of Sobranies he’d bought on Calle Florida. “Here. These are for you.”

  “I couldn’t possibly. They’re very expensive.”

  “We get them free at the embassy. I don’t smoke. They might as well not go to waste.”

  “Well, if you insist. Thank you.”

  It was always thus. Gulliano wasn’t a bad guy when you got past the posing, and Michael began to see more of him. Lunches became dinners, coffee became wine, and talk of politics and airmail slid away into deeper regions of dreams, women, and fathers. Gulliano was surprised, then impressed, when Michael told him he was raised as a boy in working-class La Boca. Only then did he dare to bring Michael home to his sad flat in a sadder building in an old and tired outer barrio. There, surrounded by children and a harried, tiny wife coached not to speak, Gulliano would talk of his crippled mother, his fallen sister, and his eyes would mist with emotion. Sometimes in these moments, Michael would confide in Gulliano stories of his own family. Some of which were even true…

  It was during a walk through Recoleta Park that it finally happened. They’d been talking about something trivial. The afternoon breeze was off the pampas, full of March and the snap of camaraderie. Gulliano’s voice had suddenly changed, and with it Michael’s heart leaped and his palms dampened, because he knew, after months of work, that he had him. In a tone struggling to remain casual, to brush it off as inconsequential, Gulliano let drop that Michael could, if he was discreet, perhaps glance at the mail of certain individuals of concern to his embassy. Through the blood slamming excitedly in his skull, Michael managed to protest that it was too great a risk to ask of a friend, but Gulliano had waved it away. “In the interest of justice…”

  Schmidt’s mail was in the side drawer of Gulliano’s desk, a half a dozen or so letters, all postmarked Germany but for one from Chile. That would be Schmidt’s brother, who owned a small farm in the Lake District. Michael would steam them open, have an old German couple the station kept on retainer transcribe the contents, seal them again, and have the packet returned the next day. He already knew what the letters would say—pathetic drivel from aunts and uncles back home complaining of shortages and demanding money. There’d be no secret Fourth Reich codes or reminiscences about gas chambers and firing squads.

  “You must stay for coffee. I have some West African roast, just the way you like it.” Meaning the way Michael drank it when he was going to school in France.

  “If it’s not any trouble, thank you.”

  After the third time Gulliano had slipped him somebody’s mail, Michael had suggested that perhaps his friend, who was clearly running a risk, might be incurring certain costs. Surely it was only fair that he be reimbursed by the embassy, say, a hundred dollars a month? Michael knew that was at least double the struggling civil servant’s salary, but he knew also, as he did that first day, that Sobranies didn’t come cheap…

  With his bullshit FBI Nazi hunt out of the way, Michael felt free to at least make a stab with Gulliano at some of his real CIA work—the GRU Soviet Personality Reports. He was, of course—despite a direct policy command from Washington—the only spook in the station trying to finish the damn thing. But then he was the only spook there that actually bothered to work for the CIA.

  Gulliano handed him a stack of incoming East Bloc mail. Michael didn’t expect any state secrets—those were shipped by pouch—but sometimes the staffs wrote private letters to friends and lovers within Argentina, letters they didn’t want passed through the diplomatic system. It was these letters that could give a small hint about the personalities of his potential targets: who hated his wife, who was broke, who might be looking for a way out. The staff at those embassies weren’t stupid enough not to at least suspect some of this sort of mail was being read, so there were no outright confessions. Still, if you read between the lines…Michael would do it himself, being the only Russian speaker and damn near the only Spanish speaker there. More homework, more nights away from Karen…

  On the way out, Michael lingered and looked back at Gulliano, returned now to his work, and treated himself to that first memory. How the thrill had been not unlike the day Kimberly Mann let him clasp her hand when he was twelve. Something pure, almost childlike. A singular instant Michael had never before experienced with another male. The jolt of tasting for the first time the knowledge that someone wi
ll betray their government, their work, possibly their life, not for patriotism or money, but for friendship. You never forget your first…

  Michael didn’t see as much of Gulliano as he used to. The money changed it. Without anything being said, their relationship had become…business. Still, Michael wouldn’t let Miller or any of the other flatfoots near Gulliano. Like with an old girlfriend, he couldn’t stand the idea of someone else manhandling the slightly built postal clerk who was not only Michael’s first, but the CIA’s first agent-in-place in Buenos Aires.

  5.

  It was dark when he finally got home, and he felt foul with it. Loosening his tie in the foyer, he could see Karen grilling a steak in the kitchen for dinner, her growing belly keeping her nearly a hand’s length from the range. Five months. Five months and their lives would be changed forever.

  “Barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. I finally feel like a real Argentine husband.”

  She smiled, eyes still on dinner, and he came up and reached around her from behind. She leaned into him and the damp smell of her neck wiped away his day.

  “I didn’t hear you come in.”

  “I’m sneaky that way.”

  His strokes moved south and took on another character. “Your asada is going to be negra,” she breathed, “again.”

  By the end they were lying in a blanket, half in, half out of the garden’s french doors. The night was peaceful, he was peaceful; even the alien constellations seemed on their side.

  “How was work?”

  “Stupidness. Another day of stupidness.”

  “I hate it here. Hate what this place is doing to us. To you. We never talk anymore. Not really. You’re never here, and when you are you’re still not here. You’re still at work…or La Boca…”