Blood Makes Noise

by Gregory Widen

  “Who’s the suit?”

  “Attorney general rep.”

  The knot of revelers in the station chief’s office didn’t notice Michael, and against his will it stung a little. He hated these guys, but being here, on the outside, he couldn’t help it…it stung. Lofton, as if sensing it, shrugged. “We would have invited you, Mike, but y’know…nobody thought you’d come.”

  Michael watched them a beat longer, remembered Hector and what he left outside the freight elevator, and pushed off. “Give Miller my congratulations.”

  “Mike…” Michael paused. Lofton toyed with his drink. “Take a good look. Guys like me, pre-CIA, we’re dying off, retiring. Few more years this place’ll be full of bright young Cold Warriors like you. But before you piss on our graves, think about something: Johnny in there just busted a mass murderer and took back some ground from the Mafia stateside. Even a three-year-old can tell you that makes this miserable planet a tiny bit better than it was yesterday. In four years of peeking through Ivan’s keyholes, what have you really accomplished?”

  Hector’s face registered no surprise when Michael returned with the cart, rubbed his eyes, and simply said, “Wrong night.” Michael loaded her back into the Leyland and climbed into the cab.

  “And if not here, Michael, where?”

  Michael cut the engine and coasted into the alley that ran behind his house, stopping in front of a neighbor’s garage. He knew the family; they were in Europe for another month. It would be as safe here as anywhere. Hector and he picked the lock, drove the Leyland inside, and pulled the garage door down behind it.

  He glanced up at his and Karen’s bedroom window down the way. It was dark, and Michael knew he’d never tell his wife the former First Lady of Argentina was locked in their alley. He turned to Hector. “I’ll drive you home.”

  “It’s not necessary, Michael. I am very comfortable with the night.”

  “Then I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  “Please get some sleep, my son.” Hector lingered, his cane drawing circles in the pebbled surface. “Do you have a gun, Michael?”

  In the entire station there was a single .38 locked in a drawer somewhere that hadn’t been fired since Bonnie and Clyde.

  “No.”

  Hector handed him a Molina .45, the Argentine version of the US Colt automatic. “Not that I believe you would ever need it, but…well…these are complicated times.” The gun was heavy and malevolent, raised grip prickly in his palm. “Are you familiar with it?”

  About the time Michael was snatched by a baby CIA during his senior year in college, he was sent a navy draft notice. His spook personnel officer told him he’d have to do his swabby service, but they’d make sure it was in Naval Intelligence, where they could quietly transfer him out after a year. Crew cut and nine to five at Western Pacific Fleet Command, Yokosuka. As a college boy that meant automatic OCS and a pair of lieutenant JG bars. Higher pay, nice white uniform, and officer shore duty once a month: strapping on a .45 and accompanying the enlisted MPs patrolling Yokosuka’s red-light district, doing the formal cuffing of drunk-and-disorderly brass the enlisted MPs couldn’t touch. It was shitty duty, the biggest danger a hernia from lifting unconscious, vomit-stained captains and commanders, the .45 never coming out of its holster.

  Except on ammo day.

  At the end of each month, all officers turned in their empty .45 ammo clips for fresh ones at supply. Since target practice was mandatory, it was expected your clips would be empty. But of course nobody ever got around to the shooting range—it was on the other side of town, and the mosquitoes had bloodlust that time of year—so come the thirtieth, down to the beach the officers would go, there to spend the afternoon in a cordite haze firing off clips so the count would match. They’d start with the ocean, move to rocks, then seagulls, crabs, and by sundown, anything that moved.

  He’d been hunting crabs with his .45 in the tidal rocks. Crab Killer. Destroyer of crustacean cities. Blam! Submit! Blam! Tremble before your white-uniformed god! Blam! Little side-shuffling bodies obliterated in thundering overkill. By summer the algae-eaters had wised up, gotten cagier, and he had to lie in wait, slinking flat across the rim. He was doing that one thirtieth, frustrated at that day’s take of crab pelts, when he spied three magnificent bulls shuffling ten feet below on a table of slick rock. In a single move he rolled, stood, and unloaded—Blam-Blam-Blam-Blam. A split second later four ricochets whoosh-whoosh-whoosh-whooshed past his ear.

  He gave the crabs the rest of the summer off.

  “Yeah. I know how to use it.”

  He didn’t go to bed, and Karen found him the next morning in the living room chair, twitching half-asleep, mumbling something about Evita and crabs.

  He got to the embassy early, threw himself into his commercial attaché cover job, and tried to work the night before out of his skin. Everyone else had apparently decided to give themselves the morning off, and he welcomed the silence. But with it came, at the edge of his thoughts, what Lofton had said about him and Ivan’s keyholes.

  That afternoon he took the station car downtown and parked behind a strip of green near the Paloma Hotel. A month ago he’d bugged room 710. Every Thursday during siesta a group of cranky military officers gathered there to drink, screw whores, and talk sedition. The station car had a Ferranti mobile radio receiver bolted on the rear passenger-side floor. Michael settled in, slipped on the headphones, and tried to drown out Lofton.

  He left early at four. Karen had an obstetrics appointment, and he could use the space to decide what to do with Evita. Wintergreen was just coming on, and they met in the parking lot. “Hey, Jarhead.”

  “How’s the fever?”

  “Lots of liquids, right?”

  Wintergreen eyed him strange a moment. “Everything okay, boss?”

  “Nothing a career change wouldn’t cure.”

  Wintergreen reached over, tucked in the butt of the Molina .45 sticking out of Michael’s coat pocket, and walked on toward the embassy. “Don’t hurt yourself with that, Spook.”

  13.

  He went back to the Leyland, found blankets to help conceal the casket in its bed, sat beside it, and sneezed on dust and unreality. For hours now—was it days?—he’d spent so much time with this box he’d stopped thinking of it as anything but a box. It wasn’t, and he decided to remind himself of that.

  It only took a few turns with a socket wrench to loosen the bolts, lift away the plywood top, and there She was. So like Her it was nothing like Her. Moments after death, in preparation for two weeks of state viewing, Dr. Ara had replaced the blood first with alcohol, then repeated heated treatments of Formol, thymol, and glycerin pumped through heel and ear. After the viewing, he withdrew the body and spent months bathing it in endless baths of acetate, potassium nitrate, and other secret chemicals he referred to only as his “parafinization method,” often sleeping in the same room as his charge, proudly declaring when finished that this was better than mummification, because not a single organ was disturbed. This was Evita in toto: flesh, brains, and bone all waxed and sealed for a thousand years. Only the blood was removed, for no matter how well you tried to calm it with preservatives, its life force would not be silenced. She was everything but her blood, because blood makes noise.

  Michael fought the urge to touch her luxuriant hair—washed, dyed, and combed for the coming millennia. He thought of a hundred years and tried to make it a thousand, thought about his mother, death…

  And the second time he saw Her.

  By the time Michael had returned as an adult to Buenos Aires, the Eva Perón Foundation—originally just the plaything of a powerful man’s girlfriend—had, under her tireless obsession, exploded into a mammoth organization with assets of 200 million dollars, fourteen thousand employees, and a full staff of priests, all under her name. Funded by shakedowns of corporations and the vast Confederación General del Trabajo union membership, Evita held court in her labor ministry office, the underclass filling the hall
s with requests for clothes, sugar, a job. Tirelessly, Evita would listen, pull back the sleeve of her fur coat, and grant, always, more than they asked, because she hated charity.

  Some wondered how much she granted for herself.

  Across the countryside she built hospitals, a thousand schools, dorms for young women. To the wretched she gave cooking pots: two hundred thousand. Shoes: a million. A city: fifteen thousand homes built east of the capital. The poor named it as they named every school, every bridge, every matchstick she produced: Eva Perón. Eva Perón City, Eva Perón Street, Eva Perón Park Bench.

  It was fall ’51, a few months after her speech on the Avenida 9 de Julio. Michael had been running down Tom Anderson, a United Press stringer that sometimes did sidebar errands for the station. Anderson had left a note saying he’d be all day covering the grand opening of another Eva Perón City. Michael drove down and saw that, as a compliment to her real city, Evita had built one for children: 250 miniature houses with a miniature store, miniature stoplights, a miniature church—an entire miniature universe for a group of orphaned poor, standing there, bewildered, afraid to touch anything. Evita waded among them for the photographers, hugging shoulders, cutting ribbons with oversized scissors.

  Michael spotted Anderson standing with the other stringers, scratching his notepad.

  “Nice day for an ego fest,” Michael said.

  “I love this country.” The Peronist lackeys hung on her every word. The rest of the foreign press contingent—one Limey, one Italian—were already yawning and drifting away. Anderson, though, couldn’t get enough of it. “Look at her, huh?” he bubbled. “The muddy little girl—you know she was a bastard, right?—fucks and sucks her way to the top and tries to make it better for all the dirty little Evitas out there.”

  “Sort of overkill, isn’t it?”

  “But that’s what makes it great! It’s like a guided tour through her screwy past. Look at the kids now. See? Santa Evita trying so hard, and all she’s doing is scaring the shit out of them. What theater! You gotta love her, man. You gotta love this whole place.”

  Michael finished his business with Anderson, as the UP reporter basked in the footlights of Evita’s theater of the id. “You oughta stay for the whole show, kid. Better than the Teatro Colón, and it’s free.”

  CGT hacks were shepherding the reporters now on a guided tour of Evitaland. Michael begged off, took a shortcut across the compound toward his car. He was passing the tiny houses, the tiny store, when the tiny church snagged him. Modeled on a traditional, white-plastered Spanish colonial, the arch was festooned with saints as frolicking small children in bas-relief. He couldn’t resist and lingered, finally poking his head in the five-foot oak doors.

  The light was speckled stained glass. He stooped through the doorway, walked among shrunken pews, and tried to imagine them full of children. Tried to imagine exactly which god they’d be offering their prayers to.

  “Are you lost?”

  Evita was bending through the doorway. His mind leaped—spook alibi scramble whenever somebody sneaks up on you. “No, I was just going to my car. I saw this, and I guess I was curious. It’s very beautiful.”

  “Yes. My favorite building here. I designed it myself, an exact one-third scale of my hometown church. I wanted to spend a few minutes away from the others, here, before I give it over to the children.”

  “I’m sorry. I’ll leave you, then.”

  “No. Stay. Honest admiration is always welcome.” She was dressed casually—thin maroon blouse and cardigan over tan slacks. Her hair was looser than usual, tucked behind her ears in a way almost schoolgirlish. “You’re a Porteño?”

  “I’m American.”

  Her face cooled. “You speak without accent.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re a reporter?”

  “I’m with the embassy.”

  From cool to frost. Dean Acheson, the American secretary of state that year, was loathed by the Peróns, and the feeling was mutual. His ambassador to Argentina, Ellsworth Bunker, was the constant target of searing cartoons run in Peronist rags depicting him as a drunk, bootlicking sycophant named Mr. Whiskey and Soda. Michael had some of the funnier cartoons on his desk.

  “One of Bunker’s boys, then.”

  “Afraid so, Mrs. Perón.”

  “I am ‘Mrs. Perón’ to children and enemies.”

  “What would you like to me to call you?”

  “What do you call Ambassador Bunker?”

  “Froggy. But not usually to his face.”

  She smiled. “I like that.”

  “You didn’t hear it from me, Senora—”

  “Evita, please.”

  “Evita.”

  “Mr…?”

  “Suslov. Michael Suslov.”

  “Russian.”

  “Ukrainian.”

  “I don’t like Russians much.”

  “Neither did my father.”

  “Your father is in America?”

  “Buried there. He died when I was seventeen.”

  Evita nodded. “I know what it is like to lose a father young. When he was put in the ground, you stood at the coffin?”

  “I was the only one.”

  “You’re lucky”—the words struggled a moment—”to have been able to stand there.”

  The story would not be found in any of Evita’s endless autobiographies, but Michael knew it by heart. How her mother had been a third-string mistress to Evita’s petty manager father. How, when he died, the real wife refused to allow bastard Evita and her brother at the church service. They could only follow their father’s funeral cart on its way to the grave, fifty yards behind the wife’s family, choking on their dust, through the roads of their town. In one version of the story, Evita defied her father’s legitimate family and rushed the funeral cart, reaching in and snipping a lock of the man’s hair.

  She seemed to disappear into a private moment, drawing herself back out on steel staves. “Your mother?”

  “Dead too.”

  Evita paused. “Was her death peaceful?”

  “I wasn’t there.”

  “You were spared.”

  “I wasn’t invited.” It hung there, awkward. “It’s complicated.”

  She watched him carefully, seemed to make some small discovery, and changed the subject. “Why did you go to work in Acheson’s State Department, Mr. Suslov?”

  “People often ask me that.”

  “What do you tell them?”

  “That you had to be there.” She paused and you could see those Latin mental gears searching for the slight, any affront to the almighty dignidad. Michael glanced at the door. “Won’t they be looking for you?”

  “They know better than to bother me.”

  He smiled. “I’m sure they do.” Again the gears. Clack, clack…

  “Are you a Peronist, Mr. Suslov?”

  “I think every honest man is a Peronist. And every demon.”

  She grinned ruefully, and that surprised him. “Juan Perón will save this country, you know. His genius is the light in every worker’s eye.”

  “Perhaps. But it is Evita on their lips.”

  “I am only the General’s instrument.”

  “I was there at the Avenida 9 de Julio.” The name, the night, were still burned ice on her. “I saw what you wanted. Half a million did.”

  Cinnamon eyes appraised him. “Exactly which department of the embassy do you work in?”

  “I’m a commercial attaché.”

  A tug at the edge of her mouth. “Then you must know Hector.”

  “Everyone knows Hector.”

  “Especially those of you in the attaché’s office.”

  Michael’s turn to smile.

  “What do you write home, Mr. Suslov? To Mr. Acheson?”

  “As a commercial attaché?”

  “Yes, Mr. Suslov, as a commercial attaché.”

  He should have backed off five minutes ago. What was pushing him? “That Argen
tina was never great, that possibly it can never be great. But that now, because of you, Argentina believes it is great. And in the end perhaps that’s the same thing.”

  He expected anything and got a small nod. “Few speak to me like this.”

  “Few are as ill-mannered. I apologize.”

  “I know plenty of ill-mannered. Embassy Row is full of them. No, you’re different. There is something…sad about you. You have a Latin soul, Mr. Suslov.”

  “I was raised here.”

  “As I thought.”

  José Espejo, CGT head and number four in the Perón administration, stuck his head in. “Senora, pardon—”

  “Get out.”

  “But—”

  “Shut up and get out!” No dog ever slinked away faster. She turned back to Michael. “I must go. The children…”

  “Of course, Senora.”

  She turned for the tiny door and paused. “I should think, Michael, your life in that embassy, with such a soul, must be a very lonely one.”

  “I think so must be yours.”

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Suslov.”

  “Good afternoon, Senora.”

  Children’s voices could be heard, tiny voices calling her name. “My children await.” She smiled with lips famously full and was gone.

  Even then cancer was already spreading through her groin, and Michael would always wonder if on that day she suspected all that awaited her come summer would be Ara and his embalmer’s syringes of heated glycerin. Along the way there would be small notes left for him in the embassy. Never signed but smelling unmistakably of her. They would be snippets of Latin poetry, always of patriotism and the melancholy thrill of giving one’s life. Sometimes there would be a handwritten line beneath the poetry: For your soul, Michael…

  He never answered these notes—he knew the rules—but they warmed him with maternal affection, touched regions long in ache, and he would reread them often, when alone in the station.