“Millions of pictures of humping Russians. That’ll change the world.” Lofton straightened up, looked out on the clumsy orgy. “Your bosses must be proud.”
They’d all been switched from FBI to CIA down here since ’47. Eight years and still they were Michael’s bosses. Them.
Michael clicked off a few more shots without even looking through the lens, then sat down on the carpet with his back against the window.
“You’re missing the big finish.”
“I got enough.”
Michael would have to wait, though, for the obligatory sidewalk shots. He wanted to go home, get away from sweating Russians and Lofton. Yet he craved Lofton’s approval, craved one—just one—accepting face among his spook partners.
“Why do you think Hector picked you out, Mike?”
“Who says he did?”
“C’mon. I read the cables. The guy likes you. Ever since your belly flop at the Polack ambassador’s house, he’s been giving you stuff.”
“Maybe I’m the only one that’s interested.”
“Oooh. FBI bashing. Wondered how long it was going to take before your right hook came up.” Lofton winked and took a long, leisurely drag on his pocket flask. “No, I don’t think that’s it. Want to hear my theory? Isn’t that you used to live here. It’s because you’re the only one of us that wants out—your Sovs are on the sidewalk, butch.”
Michael rose to a crouch and squeezed off a few more. Federov had a stain on his pants that no one was going to mistake for coffee. The others weaved and faded into the sidewalk crowds. A last shutter frame of the back of someone’s head and he was done.
Michael started breaking down the camera. “Hector likes you, Mike. He tells you things. Things he doesn’t tell his own government.” Michael slipped the 400-mm lens into its cut-foam suitcase. “Think he’d tell you where she is?” Michael loaded the camera body into the case. He just wanted to go home. “Do you know, Mike? Do you know where she is?”
Michael stopped and the two stared at each other as Wintergreen, the station guard, came barreling suddenly through the door in his civvies. Lofton smiled, “Master Wintergreen, everyone’s favorite marine. Favor us with some Basque, dear boy.”
“Zoaz infernu. It means ‘Go to hell.’”
“Warms the heart to see a boy speaking the native language of his parents.”
“Only when I’m pissed off.”
Michael looked in disbelief from Wintergreen to Lofton. “You always tell the marines where our safe houses are?”
“Well, young Wintergreen here is hardly just any marine. He’s our marine.”
Michael thought, Scratch one fucking safe house. He shook his head, buckled the case, and stood.
“Ed and I were just getting some dinner,” shrugged the marine.
“Raising a little infernu tonight,” Lofton said, walking back to retrieve his newspaper. “We’d invite you, Mike, but most of your hell seems to be pretty much self-contained.”
June 22, 1956
7.
They were in the land of frightening skies.
Here, the earth was an afterthought, a pathetic strip of taupe running away without character or form. It was the sky that consumed everything: color, movement, texture. It was the sky that was real and the earth insubstantial. So hungry, so big, you lost trust in your feet, as if you could tumble upward into the maw. Vast, empty blue that was an arrogant, mean piece of forever.
Karen liked the pampas. She had spent summers as a child in eastern Colorado, and it spoke to her. To Michael it was a vaguely evil place in which he never felt at ease.
Michael studied his wife’s profile, fuller now with pregnancy. That same profile first glimpsed against a foggy morning in the Reynolds coffeehouse at the University of Chicago. Her hair was full of midnight, like his mother’s, with just a few silvery strands she’d had since sixteen, like her mother. It cupped a face the color of no color, with eyes so startlingly gray Michael had never seen them on anything but wolves. When he’d finally glanced over her shoulder, she had the worst handwriting he’d ever seen…
They shot past a pampa town, its grim coupling of expressionless buildings low and fearful of rising from the earth’s safety into the swallowing sky. A poverty fragment sucked away in a dusty second.
Karen was in a good mood. These flat, expressionless miles west of BA always lifted her morale, and they were playful with each other—careful play, cautious of the hidden hair triggers that had grown into the fabric of their lives here. But nobody misstepped. Karen was in too high a spirit, happy just to be freed from a city they’d begun to see as the enemy.
The estancia’s gate was white between two gnarled ombu trees. It was swung open, a shotgun gaucho checking names. The ranch house lay three miles farther along a sycamore-shaded road, where two dozen cars already crowded the circular drive. The house was like most out here: a sprawling, Mediterranean one-story. The floor was cool tile, the furniture covered in treated hide. Everything had a tricked-up, kitschy feel: the Lore of the Gaucho. Like most pampa estates it didn’t feel lived in, and it wasn’t. The wealth of Argentina came from these pampas, but it didn’t stay. Like the owners of the estancias, it slipped quickly away to the city and rarely returned. The lords of these nation-sized plots lived most of their lives as urban Porteños, putting on their grandfather’s gaucho knife only on the weekends when they’d return to the muddy source of their cars, furs, and perfume. The only people that truly lived out on these horizon tracts were the impoverished peasants who worked them. Half-breeds whose flat noses were all that remained of an Indian culture Spanish colonialists wiped out in just six bloody years. There were no Indian reservations in Argentina.
Across the entry hall, a pair of latticed glass doors stood open, the sound of laughter riding thin breezes. Off the back of the house sprawled a brick patio with a raised fire pit, flaring now with the juices of an entire steer turning above coals. It could feed fifty, and fifty milled about waiting, biding their time with gossip and gin and tonics. They were the usual mix: half BA upper crust, a few foreign diplomats, a blend of American ex-patriots—businessmen, technocrats, CIA station Buenos Aires.
Their host was still out on his horse—tradition at these gatherings—the lord leading a group of husbands on a manly gallop across the estancia. Heavy drinks appeared in their hands—also a tradition—and hoisting them, Michael and Karen took their place on the rim of the party, waiting for a point to enter the fray.
The point today was Norris, Michael’s boss. Two tall ones’ worth of mellow, he smiled at Michael, something he did only in public. Standing with a knot of British utilities magnates who owned most of BA’s power grid, he had his arm warmly around Michael’s shoulder now, one happy family. It was what Michael disliked most about these weekends. But Michael was good at his job, and a CIA officer is nothing if not the most outgoing person at a party.
The rules were looser away from the city, and a group had taken Karen in. His wife was attractive and intelligent if you gave her a chance, and it warmed something hopeless in Michael to see her fawned over by listing men hanging on her anecdotes. When she was angry, when she was depressed, it gave Michael’s life a kind of certainty. But when she was happy, grasping the reins of her life, it confused him.
He’d downed his first two drinks fast, just to swallow the road dust, and they were slithering up on him now, warm numbness across the top of his skull. The house stood on what in these parts passed for a rise, and thousands of acres drew away from it to where land and sky smacked in silence. A hard line of clouds had taken station there, hitching the thermal up from Patagonia.
The pampas.
No one was sure how deep the topsoil was. Eight feet or eighteen, black richness that sprung wheat like weeds and grass a hundred million cattle couldn’t finish. So effortless the wealth of this place that its ability to absorb the abuses of its owners was legendary: “Dios arregla de noche la macana que los argentinos hacen de día.” God puts
right at night the mess Argentines make by day. So effortless, this wealth, it stunk with the stale tragedy of how a nation so endowed had added up to so little. For Argentina should have been great. But the easy land didn’t require talent, and its people produced none, becoming instead a place obsessed with its dead and alive with the thrill of its own self-destruction.
Evita had seen her country as great, and for a shining instant the country believed it. But she was just an echo now across a nation sliding out of control, ruled by nonruling generals stalling and clucking and driving the whole show into the ground.
There were plenty of them here. Norris’s polo teammates, bemedaled and snug behind their new authority. The queen was dead, the king stateless, and maybe if you did call her a thief, maybe if you ran her underpants up a flagpole to show her commonness, maybe if you ordered her memory disappeared, she would disappear.
Maybe if you moved her body.
They’d tried to show she was just a whore mimicking the rich she supposedly despised. They displayed her diamonds, proved she stole magnificently from the treasury. But they missed the point. She had started poor and so, in becoming wealthy, fulfilled the Cinderella dream so many fantasized about. And if she stole from the rich for herself, she also stole for the poor, and no one had ever done that before. No one had shaken down international corporations to build hospitals and dedicate schools. And if it was all vanity and greed, who cared? No one had ever spoken to the great unwashed as an equal, held them to their breast, cooed to them like lovers, whispered hatred for those they hated: the rich; the privileged; the whole pointless, pathetic history of their nation.
She was dead, and she lived on in the stares of servants. And all the generals’ medals, all the posturing Michael knew only underlined a fear so deep none had the courage to destroy her. Because maybe her corpse really was protected by God, or the devil, or the stares of servants.
He was drunk.
Nothing can sneak up on you in the pampas, and El Amo’s riding party was already a mute plume of dust at vision’s edge. Valets prepared cool towels and mate for the returning adventurers, flushed with the ride, sun, and booze. A gaucho bringing up the rear carried in one hand half a dozen strung pheasants, the day’s shotgun catch. Each horseman half dismounted, half spilled out of his saddle as the chef rang the bell announcing the meal.
The beef, sliced from the side of the mammoth rotating carcass, was sweet and so juicily raw Michael’s mouth sang as his gut sagged. He’d held Karen’s hand under the table at dinner, felt her brush his arm in suggestion, but he’d lost her now somewhere among the greasy laughter on the patio, the piles of bones going red in the retreating day.
He was cornered now, pinned against an adobe planter by his host, his office mate Lofton, and a nonspecific Porteño whose name he couldn’t keep straight over the growing gin rush in his ears.
“Tell him the story, Mike.” It was Lofton, living up to his reputation as the drunkest man in Argentina. The veins in his nose had taken on a life of their own and were rivaled only by the pulsating red in his eyes. “Come on, Mike, tell him.” The conversation was in English, despite the two Argentines; Lofton in fifteen years here never bothering to pick up the language.
“Please, Mr. Suslov,” his host, Senor Carenza, said, swaying. Carenza was spectacularly fat in gaucho bombachas and a cotton riding shirt. His face was easy and drunk and listing dangerously to one side. Lofton had heard the story a dozen times and had never shown any particular interest in it. But Lofton liked to be around people without having to deal with them, liked being at the center of a good story he didn’t have to tell.
“Once, when I was a kid…” His tongue felt bloated and alien in his mouth, the words unwieldy blocks to scale. Michael knew the story by heart—how his father, stuck with him for the evening, had dressed Michael up as an adult dwarf so he could take him drinking in the local tavern. It was a funny story, but Michael knew if you looked closely enough it was a sad one too.
“Where did you grow up?” Carenza asked. I grew up in La Boca, Michael thought, tasting the malevolence of your class.
“Chicago.”
Days died fast out here, twilight lasting just long enough to find the light switch. The gnats had risen and with them bats, blurry shapes dashing through the glow of strung party lamps. The drinks had stopped slithering and were now outright tackling his body. His face was numb, and it was getting hard to concentrate on what anyone was saying. So he stopped trying. The gaggle of husbands had grown tight enough around Karen he could barely glimpse her brunette head. It was always the same out here: endless drunken weekends on endless pampas, heat and booze and husbands flirting with his wife.
“So. Mike.”
He slurred his head to look. “Barbara.”
“You’re drunk.”
“Old news I’m afraid.”
Barbara DeVries was a full inch taller than he. From his slouch it seemed ten. She had a frosty glass in one hand, surveying the party. “Saturday night in Argentina.”
She was his age, with short, severe brown hair and a face so mannishly angular it could cut paper. Her British education left her talking Oxford, but she was Dutch, here as a secretary for the Dutch mission.
“Where’s Short Eyes?” He was hammered and probably said it too loud. Barbara smiled.
“Oh, he’s around. Probably on his knees in the stable boy’s quarters by now.”
Short Eyes was her boss, the Dutch mission’s economic attaché. Notorious for his fixation with dark-haired boys, Barbara was his beard, someone over fourteen to have on his arm at social functions.
Barbara drank from her glass. A rivulet of melted frost rolled over the back of her hand.
“I’ve been checking the BA obits for a month now to see if you were killed in a car accident or something.”
“What?” His face was stupid, and it annoyed her.
“It’s a joke, Mike. You haven’t called.”
“Oh. Yeah. It’s been, y’know, sorta crazy lately with—”
“It’s a joke, Mike.”
Last year, with work sinking to new lows and Karen’s morale beginning its ruined turn, Barbara had asked him to lunch. She didn’t eat meat—a weird, lonely practice in cow-crazy Argentina—and they ended up at probably South America’s only beat café. There, surrounded by Latin hepcats, she had ignored him, taunted him, then taken him home.
She was thin, and it amazed him how breasts so large belonged to shoulders so narrow. When they got to her place nobody spoke, and before it was over he was already gone, reading the little paper notes around her phone as she gulped breaths in his ear. He thought how weird it was; how you spend most of your life thinking about sex, except during it, when your mind wanders.
It was a rotten time for him, before the resignation set in. He hated his work and he hated going home, so he concentrated on the empty peripheries of his days: the wiretaps, the late-night interviews, Barbara. They met all that summer in her small flat, lay sweaty on a mattress, listened to the squeak of a fan shoveling leaden air from one side of the room to the other. Just like Russians…
Sometimes he told her stories. But Barbara liked to talk, so they talked mostly of her: old lovers, home, life in the Dutch embassy. It was during a story about an argument between her boss and the ambassador that she stopped suddenly and drew away from him.
“You’re working me, aren’t you?”
They’d been making love that afternoon on her floor. She’d scooted against the wall.
“What?”
It was a kind of admiration worn on her clenched, half smile. “Sitting there listening about the ambassador and Short Eyes. You’re working me.”
Michael understood finally and collapsed on his back in frustration. “Aw, c’mon, Barb. You know I’m not.”
Her face changed. The weak smile disappeared as she studied him. “No, you’re not, I suppose.” A sigh, then as she pushed a damp strand of hair from her eye, “When I first met you, I used
to think you were a spy by accident. You were too open, too boyish to be a real spook. But I was wrong. All those silly stories you tell, the innocence, you know it makes people feel intimate with you. But it’s all a lie, isn’t it?”
“They’re real stories, Barb.”
“But they’re nothing to do with the real you. They feel intimate, but they’re just a screen. By the time people figure that out, they’ve spilled their life to you. The sickest part is that you don’t even do it consciously. It’s just who you are.” She laughed then, hollow. “Dulles got a bargain when he hired you. The boyish cherub who’s really a cunning, ambitious little fuck and doesn’t even know it.”
They didn’t talk much after that, and somewhere along the line he just stopped coming. Since then Barbara was ironic when she saw him. Not because he had worked her, but because he had worked her without noticing it.
Her look fell from the party back to him. “So I was just a summer’s distraction.”
“Jesus Christ, Barb, do we have to talk about it now?”
“We never talked about it.”
There was something dangerous about her today Michael didn’t want to provoke. So he did what he always did. Smile. It provoked her.
“You’re a chickenshit, Mike—is that the right word?”
“Close enough.”
“You’re not happy with your life. When are you going to wake up and do something about it?”
“You don’t know me, Barbara.”
“Sure I do. You really think this new fatherhood thing fools anyone? You’re a rotten son of a bitch, Mikey. You think if you ignore something long enough it’ll just go away. Well it’s not going to. Not this time. Not unless you do something about it.”
Old, ugly truths. Barbara shifted her gaze to something neutral. The edge of the planet maybe.
“Do you ever think about those nights?”
“Sure.”
“Bullshit.”
“I do. Honest.” It sounded stupid and high-pitched to himself. Barbara smiled and shook her head.
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