Blood Makes Noise

by Gregory Widen

  He stroked her head absently. “It’s okay. You’ll feel better. It’s just the baby. I’ll be here more…”

  She stiffened suddenly and stared fiercely at him. “Don’t work me, Michael. Don’t ever work me like one of your johns.”

  “I’d never do that.” But he wasn’t sure if he just hadn’t. Christ. I’m not at work. This is my wife. This is my real life. He caressed her arm. “I’ll get us out of here, Karen. I promise. I’ll get us out of here…”

  And he still wasn’t entirely sure what part of him was speaking.

  She went to bed early, and he read till he couldn’t stand the heat or the stare of his living room and went out.

  There was a small café on Juramento that served sidewalk cappuccinos. The owner, a transplanted West African who did little but nod, dispensed drinks from a bar behind which a record player spun solely ’30s French cabaret tunes. Michael sat there, the only patron, and listened to the flare of bugs against an electrified lamp, the singing of damp power lines, a bruised recording of Jean Sablon.

  Christ, the alienation didn’t help their marriage any. Karen and he had rented a house in the wealthy Belgrano district, a city’s-width away from La Boca. But still his childhood kept creeping in around the edges of his vision, cutting him off from her. To make matters worse, nobody at the American mission would talk to them. To the legit embassy wives, Karen was a spook’s spouse, to be tolerated for cover’s sake but not drawn close. The station support wives and flatfoot spouses had their own inner circle, forged over years here, that effortlessly froze her out. That left the BA oligarchy, the serrated generals’ wives whom Karen loathed. Michael had his work, such as it was, and Karen had nothing. Long, wet days with no one to talk to but a distracted husband slowly turning to smoke…

  “Michael.”

  That voice. The one that always seemed to come from the hollowed end of dark alleys. He hadn’t heard him come up. But then you never did with Hector.

  The crippled deputy head of Argentine military intelligence took a chair beside him. It had been nearly six months since Michael had seen Hector, candlelit beside the embalmed remains of his former employer’s wife. It seemed a thousand.

  “Such heat so late in the year.” Hector dabbed his forehead with a handkerchief. “You’re out late, Michael.”

  “I could say the same about you.”

  “It is my natural condition.”

  Hector smiled his Hector smile, but there was something wrong with it.

  “How is Karen?”

  “Confused. Pregnant. A little pissed off at me tonight.”

  “Our life is hard on the ones we love.”

  “You’re not married.”

  “It is an academic observation.”

  Michael toyed with his coffee. “I lie to her every day. About my work, my thoughts, my life, really. It’s become easier than telling the truth.”

  “The fear of being truly known. Perhaps it is that, more than anything, that unites people like us.”

  “I think I was known only once, and then just for a moment.”

  “Where?”

  “Italy. A thousand years ago. Her name was Gina. I didn’t know her long, but she’s still the only person who ever stared straight through the chaos in me.”

  “What became of her?”

  “No idea…”

  “You’ve never called her?”

  “It was complicated…” His thoughts drifted a beat on the memory before returning reluctantly. “Everything feels so out of control lately…”

  “You’re young, Michael. Soon you’ll understand that the basic condition of life is chaos. Given enough time, you’ll even grow to prefer it that way. And with your abilities, Buenos Aires isn’t forever.”

  “It’s sucking the life out of me.”

  “Talk to Carmelina, Michael. You must tell these things to your wife, not your coffee.”

  Carmelina was Hector’s pet name for Karen, from that night four and a half years ago when the CIA’s first real man in BA stood with his wife, alone on the edge of their third embassy reception, where no one would speak to them. The other foreign missions, the local power elite—none of them had yet figured if Suslov-and-spouse were worth talking to. So they were left standing next to the shrimp bowl, bored, ignored.

  Then Hector appeared. Smiling and arms wide with charm, he asked their names, brought them drinks, pointed out who was who and told funny stories about each. They liked him instantly, were flattered by his attention, his smile, his uncliquishness. It wouldn’t be long before Michael learned that a foreign intelligence officer is always the first to bring you a drink.

  But that night Hector was just a free radical, a friendly uncle who suggested they three become their own clique. Declaring himself clique president, Hector moved that the first order of business be to adjourn somewhere else. The motion was seconded and passed unanimously.

  The night was freezing, and Michael’s tux kept grabbing at his crotch. The cabbie Hector stopped spoke English and turned out to have played two years of AA ball in the Carolina league. When the cabbie asked “Where to?” Hector deferred to the vice president and secretary of the new clique, and the secretary declared, “Music!” Hector mumbled an address to the former third baseman, and soon they were down along the nervous side of the river, past shadowy docks, and finally at a blank door that opened with a hot red gust onto a working-class tango bar.

  They took a bug-gut-stained table right up front, their tuxes ludicrous, the lights and noise and arrogant thrusts of the dancers prickly on their skins. They drank, got drunk, laughed, and slurred stories they wouldn’t remember to people they’d never see again. He remembered Hector’s ease with everyone there. That unique confidence with kings and prostitutes, possible only by vice cops and spooks. And somehow Karen ended up on the dance floor, whirled and spun and locked hip to hip with a lustful ship mechanic who kept insisting she was a woman named Carmelina. And Michael remembered Hector’s laugh and his promise that from now on Karen would always be Carmelina to him. He remembered the heat and the music and the bites of his tux. But most of all Michael remembered looking at his wife, sweaty and naughty in the hands of her tango partner, and thinking that he loved her and that their lives here were, after all, going to be good.

  The taxi ride home had been a blurry hiss of tires and damp hair. Impossibly, they hailed their AA ballplayer again, and joining in their sloppy harmony he missed the turnoff, plunging through a strange, shuttered neighborhood that with a hollow thump Michael realized was that of his childhood: La Boca. As if a part of his thoughts, Hector had leaned close to his ear and whispered, for the first time in Spanish, “Welcome home, Michael…”

  “How is the Senora?” It’d been several moments of silence before Michael said it. He couldn’t keep his eyes off Hector’s dog-headed cane, the way the light spun off the silver from the café’s single lamp. Its master spoke carefully.

  “History is sometimes…difficult.”

  “Argentina loves a corpse.”

  This nation had an unreal fixation with the remains of their famous. School children here were taught to dutifully recite the last words of national heroes, like San Martin, and celebrated not their birthdays but the day of their deaths. General Manuel de Rosas, a nineteenth-century strongman who died in England, had been buried there more than a hundred years, yet the government was today using all its wheat power to blackmail a hungry Europe into shipping his moldy bones home. The dead have power everywhere, but nowhere, it seemed, did their bodies themselves speak more forcefully than in Argentina.

  “I’ve heard the rumors,” Michael said. Everyone had. That since that night at the CGT five and a half months ago, each time they moved her, no matter how secret the new location, how remote, flowers would follow. Always.

  “A woman loves her flowers.” It was perhaps Hector’s first joke, and Michael knew something was wrong. “We have never spoken of that night.” Hector calmed the dog head with soft str
okes.

  “Then we’re the only two people in BA that haven’t.”

  “Do they press you? At work?”

  Michael shrugged. “They’ve got their rumors too. Ninth-generation cocktail drivel.”

  “These are very strange times. You can feel it everywhere.” On clear nights you could hear it too. The muffled thwack of kitchen bombs. The hiss of spray paint, someone’s thirty seconds of four a.m. courage bled across a wall: WHERE IS SHE? The first snips in the fabric of a society deciding if it should unravel completely.

  Hector stared down the dark throat of road fronting the café. “Michael, within the confines of our relationship, would you say you trust me?”

  He couldn’t place the emotion behind it. “Within the confines of our relationship, I suppose so.”

  “I trust you, Michael.”

  That silence again. The buzz of damp transformers.

  “Michael, I may someday—possibly someday soon—ask you to do something. It will not be a favor but a request. Of someone I trust.”

  “What?”

  The familiar smile but now weirdly dysfunctional. A fun-house mannequin out of sync. “With any luck, and in all probability, we will never have that discussion.” One of Hector’s friendly squeezes on the arm that suddenly wasn’t Hector’s at all. “Ah, but the time. I’m not as young as you, Michael, I belong in bed.” He stood. “Please give my love to Carmelina.”

  Not long after that first night in the tango bar, Michael had screwed up an attempt to bug the Polish ambassador’s new residence with a direct-current listening system. In the middle of wiring it up, a maid Michael hadn’t accounted for appeared suddenly, forcing the pair of Technical Support Division guys down from Panama City to bail in such haste they left gaping holes in the home’s plaster walls.

  For a day and a half Michael had waited for the phone call that would say the maid had fingered him, that he was officially burned operationally in DO and would be sent home, to the utter delight of Norris, to spend the rest of his career disgraced on a desk in Barton Hall.

  But when the call finally came, it wasn’t from Washington but Hector. Apparently the Argentine spook had already bugged the residence a week before Michael’s attempt, and in the interest of protecting his own operation had, under some official pretext, delayed the Polish ambassador that night, paid off the maid, and had an emergency crew repair the mess Michael’s TSD team had left, all of which probably saved Michael’s career.

  But what Hector did next put it on a whole different trajectory. The deputy head of military intelligence then offered to share his recordings of the ambassador’s residence with the CIA, but with a catch: Hector would only deal with Michael. Not Norris, not anyone sent down from SB Division to replace him, only Michael. And from that moment onward, Michael became Hector’s personal conduit to Washington. Any messages to be sent, any insights that suited Casa Rosada, and some that suited merely Hector, went through the junior CIA officer. It saved Michael from being yanked home, but it also made him a prisoner here. Hector had became his only real friend in BA outside his marriage, and that made him another kind of prisoner. Hector had never asked anything in return, but Michael had always known, someday, that the request would come. Favors were, in the end, the grease that ran their worlds.

  “Walk home careful, Hector.”

  Hector turned and his eye—the damaged, wandering one—caught the light, and for an instant it took on the dead glisten of a reptile.

  “The night holds few surprises for me, Michael.”

  A tap of his cane, two at most, and he was gone.

  Michael walked home, through a night full of the flinty whisper of clouds and the lonely warp of sirens drawing pointless circles in the asphalt…

  Over the last six months he’d dreamed four times of Her. The dried husks of flies, the spark of candles, the weight of a twelve-year-old girl. In the dreams, always, as they were about to close the lid of her box, the eyes would open, the lips smile, and three of the times she said what she had written to him in life: You Will Never Forget Me. In the fourth dream, the last dream, the smile grew larger and the words changed.

  I Will Always Be a Part of You.

  June 9, 1956

  6.

  Michael was at the window, stripped to his undershirt, sitting beside the camera tripod. Attached to it was a 400-mm lens aimed across the street at another window in another apartment, known to be quietly leased by the Soviet embassy as a safe house. Lately it seemed to be used more for sex than debriefings, though sex certainly had its place in Michael’s SPR files.

  “Anybody moving? Fucking?” The gravel voice belonged to Ed Lofton, who was sitting across the room, reading the paper.

  “Not yet.” The routine window-watching was done by a retired American couple on retainer with the station. After logging a Monday evening assignation between two members of the Sov embassy, it was decided to send down a pair of case officers the following Monday to check it out for themselves.

  “Bombs, bombs, and bombs…all for that stupid, arrogant cunt.” Lofton was having his usual go-around with the morning paper. Seemingly oblivious to the heat, he still wore a jacket and tie, his bloodless, veined face sporting a moist, toxic sheen. “South America’s biggest secret. ‘Where’s Evita?’ Just give the bitch back to them, I say.”

  Lofton grinded on Michael, but he was the only case officer that would even consider helping him out with this work, though Michael suspected the attraction was more likely the opportunity to spend an afternoon sipping bourbon, there in his seersucker suit like a Tennessee Williams character, than anything to do with policy directives from E Street in Washington.

  “Ever read her file? There’s something to keep you warm on a winter night. Lady spread her legs faster than day-old butter in her youth. But always for a price. Good ol’ Evita always knew the price of everything. Use to be a betting pool in the station on how many millions she’d stolen from her beloved citizens. Or where she put it. How that thieving whore ended up a national saint should be proof by itself of the existence of miracles. But then you knew her, right?”

  A dig, and Michael ignored it. His strange and brief friendship with the former First Lady was something he never spoke of.

  “She ever talk about it?”

  “What?”

  “The money.”

  Michael snorted and shook his head. “Argentina’s favorite ghost story.”

  “Well, can’t blame a boy for wondering.”

  Lofton flipped through a few more pages and then abandoned the paper, bored.

  “How’d you get into this business, Mike?”

  “Like everybody else. Wrong word in the right ear in college.”

  “Never went to college. Bud neither. Johnny Miller for that matter. None of us down here did. Just old-fashioned cops. Not as educated in the ways of world domination as you boys.”

  There were stirrings in the apartment. Two couples, midthirties. “Company.” Michael stepped up to the 400-mm lens. Lofton turned the page of his newspaper. “Looks like Federov and Guylina. The blonde’s Alexis’s wife. Don’t recognize the other woman.”

  “Tell me when the clothes come off.”

  Michael clicked off a few shots. The four took seats on a couple of sofas, produced a bottle, and started pouring. Michael took his eye from the camera and paged through his notes. “All four are married, though not to one another.”

  “Way of the world with Sovs, isn’t it?”

  It was. Moscow kept its kids on such short leashes, about the only peccadilloes possible were with fellow staff from the embassy. Russian culture seemed remarkably elastic on the matter, and such activities rarely caused ripples through the Soviet station. Still, it never hurt to know who was doing whom. At least in Michael’s training.

  Lofton lit a cigarette, bent forward, and held his temples between two fingers. “Amazing, really, the trouble they’ve gone to trying to keeping her hidden.”

  “Who?”

/>   “Evita.”

  Michael was back up at the camera. The foursome was laughing it up now, getting touchy-feely.

  “Maybe they just want to protect her.” Michael tried to keep his eye on the lens, but his sweat kept fogging the view finder.

  “From what?”

  “Themselves.”

  And just like that the clothes came off. No preamble. One minute chat, next buttons working their way down, exposing pale flesh. “The clothes are coming off.”

  Lofton groaned as he stood and leaned against the window frame. “Lovely.”

  “Don’t let them see you.”

  “Don’t think their attention’s on me, butch.”

  Their skin looked pocked through the lens’s ground glass. Mouths on breasts, buttocks dimpled with carpet indentations.

  “Did you know even President Aramburu doesn’t know where she is? Nobody at Casa Rosada does. It’s Argentina’s only secret.”

  Except for whoever brings those flowers. Every night. “I’m sure someone there knows.”

  “You mean Hector?”

  Hands groped into pants. You could see sweat on the women’s backs. “Whoever.”

  “We all know that means Hector. Anything that happens after midnight in this country has Hector’s name on it. Coups rise and fall, but Hector always endures. Casa Rosada’s resident demon. Just comes with the furniture.” Federov was climbing atop the blonde now. Lofton let out a sigh. “I was hoping for something a little more exotic from our communist friends.”

  “Four on four isn’t enough for you?”

  “You haven’t lived in Argentina long enough.”

  Yes he had. Strangers’ sweat in unventilated Buenos Aires rooms brought up foul memories of his own, not involving his wife. It was an ugly association.

  “How’d you like it, someone photographing you?” Lofton said it right against Michael’s ear, and the alcohol rot of the man’s body pushed him to the edge. He took his eye from the lens. Rubbed it. “It’s just for the SPR files.”