“Blossoming into what?” she asked.
“Her word.”
And the girl didn’t answer, because she didn’t understand. But its import warmed her, and she drew him close when he reached out, didn’t resist when he pulled her down into dust flickering with the candles of Her shrine.
It couldn’t happen, because she was too young, the pain too great, and she was crying, clutching her dress, running away down the road.
He lay there in the dirt, bathed in candle and starlight, and as the girl’s footsteps faded, he thought of his mother: headless and corrupted and haunting.
The slow girl was brought to her father, the damage shown, and the father beat his daughter. This brought him no satisfaction and he went to the boy, still lying beneath the shrine, and attacked him savagely, would have killed him, but the boy crawled away to the river. There, heaving shallow breaths, Alejandro washed the hot pain of his body and noticed: the pressure in his head had stopped. He found the girl’s father sitting near his hearth, drinking from a mate gourd. The man didn’t look up and possibly never recognized Alejandro before the boy killed him with his stepfather’s shotgun. He dragged the gun on the floor to the door and was hit by the slow girl—half mad, clawing him savagely, screaming and biting—and he pushed the girl to the ground, reloaded the gun, and shot her too.
The lights were out in his stepparents’ home, a mandinga wind gritty in his hair. He dropped the gun, hot and spattered. There was nothing left but to leave, and so he did—into darkness, the pampas, into Her.
He had no idea how long he walked.
The sun swelled his lips and blistered his scalp. Rain split his shoes and rent his shirt. He sucked water from muddy holes, cut the throats of dull cattle and ate their tongues. He passed through lightning storms, locust clouds; felt his clothes rot and peel away. Felt himself transformed into something more than dead.
Two months later he entered Buenos Aires the immortal protector of Her word.
August 15, 1971
17.
They’d refused to come closer than two blocks, Juan and Emilio, his worthless party hacks. The guards at the door had spooked them and they held back, holding a car ready. So be it. Alejandro went on alone, climbing into the building from the opposite roof. The guards were simple militia, not the more effective death squad paramilitaries, with their dark sunglasses and dark-green Ford Falcons. Was there any sight closer to the rim of hell, thought Alejandro, than a pair of Latinos in a dark-green Ford?
The roof door was brittle with exposed hinges. The room beyond was large, a records-storage area stacked floor to ceiling with files. He moved swiftly through the carefully labeled boxes, mundane catalogs of tyranny. If there was one thing the generals of Argentina had inherited from the Nazis, apart from their war criminals, it was an obsession with documenting in exacting detail the most pedestrian of police horrors. Everything organized and alphabetized and ready for quick burning on flash paper should the merry-go-round suddenly come to a stop.
Choose your secrets well and they will stay buried. But make everything a secret and it’s like burying the ocean: it’s going to leak.
Alejandro walked past 1971 and 1970, the latest years, sagging with thousands of smiling young men dismembered and disappeared. His own file was there, luscious with broken bones, electrified genitals, transcripts of him howling in the dark for anybody, even his torturers, to keep him company.
The years ticked back, a secret policeman’s view of history, wide rows of shelves in the seasons of coups and paranoia, smaller ones in times of distraction and order. They swelled and shrank, each in passing, till he arrived at the particularly thick years of the mid-1950s.
It would not announce itself, this secret. Even the president of the time had not wanted to share in its ugliness. Alejandro remembered the president with fondness: a man, even in death, who understood things as they were. A skill rare enough in this world, rarer still in this city. No, this secret was like the buried ocean: you had to look for the leaks.
Alejandro plied through Casa Rosada memos. The dull work of dull, savage men. Alejandro’s efforts, his obsession, was supposedly the charter obsession of all neo-Peronist Montoneros. But theirs had become a commitment thin as a peso coin. With rumors of the government considering negotiations to bring Juan Perón back from exile to stop the country’s descent into civil war, many considered the battle essentially won. They were fools. Perón was never the heart of the movement. An old man now, he would easily be manipulated by the ruling junta. This was never about him. It was always about Her. She was the soul of the revolution. If Her body were allowed to be returned under this government’s control, even with Perón, it would inevitably become their tool. That’s why it was absolutely necessary they find Her first and bring her back under Montonero control. Why couldn’t these middle-class clowns understand that?
The memo names flitted past, mostly dead now, some in exile, one in retirement, one foreign—an American.
The American.
They’d clearly burned his main file a long time ago, but the ocean is deep and the name dripped constantly on tiny invoices, surveillance chits, patrolmen’s musings. The beads of water drew together, began to form a picture…
Footsteps.
Alejandro slunk against the cool metal racks, waited to hear if their cadence was lazy and militia. The pair of footsteps cleared the stairwell and halted several yards away. He had a Walther P88 in his waistband, but to use it now would be to bring down an army.
A radio gagged. “Suspect is believed in building. Armed and dangerous. Wait for backup…”
So the army was already coming down.
He pulled the gun from his back and stepped out. The shock of seeing him toppled one backward onto his ass. The second jerked spastically at his gun belt, probably for the first time. Militia. When nothing but Alejandro’s stare struck their bodies, the two militiamen—gulping wrecks—backed away and fled.
Sirens outside now on pretty dark-green Fords. These guns would certainly come out of their charcoal blazers more skillfully.
From his own leather coat Alejandro removed two cap-fused tubes of jellied gasoline. The first he laid on the stairwell, played out its fuse and lingered, waiting for dark-green footsteps. Arrogant on new heels, they didn’t disappoint. Alejandro let them draw nearer, lit the fuse, and walked calmly back onto the floor as a hot concussion blew down the stairwell and licked out along the ceiling. There were one or two screams, and a great deal of footsteps headed the other way, now distinctly without arrogance.
More footsteps, coming through the roof door now. Alejandro lit the second tube, winged it over the stacks, and there was a blossoming whump of thick gasoline droplets pelting the room. The footsteps fanned out, separated, and Alejandro withdrew into darkness.
The fire moved with animal speed, kicking out over 1971 and 1969. Footsteps continued their search but grew cautious, now fearful, now slower still.
And Alejandro waited.
Waited as rising heat stiffened hairs on his arm and stung his eyes. Waited, because he knew he could always wait longer than they.
The fire’s voice grew from taunt to bully, and the building offered its first groan of protest. Alejandro couldn’t hear the footsteps anymore but knew they were in full, terrified retreat. Still he waited, as his skin cracked and ears blistered, and watched the fire stumble and close around him.
Then he ran. Through its maw and the fire was surprised and made way, tapping just enough to ignite his hair. He bashed through the consuming stacks, took a fistful from the year 1956, felt his melting hair fall in dollops, and went for the roof.
Out across the top where the smoke rolled in iron waves. He could hear shots buzz past as the roof tar began to bubble, and it was hard to get speed as he moved, faster and faster, for the edge, pushing off the granite lintel, falling through air, over the narrow alley, and onto the roof of the building opposite. His hair snuffed out, and his legs rose raggedly, drawing themselves to a
ladder, off the building to the street.
His two party hacks were gone.
They startled when he entered the safe house. When his party hacks finally recognized the face beneath the destruction, the stupid gaggling began.
“We waited…I swear, man, we waited as long as we could…” The fat one, Juan.
The short one, Emilio, now: “He’s right. Shit, the terror cops were everywhere, cutting off the streets. We thought you were dead, man, dead for sure…Goddamn, you need a doctor…We’ll get you a doctor…”
Their words bounced off him. Alejandro lowered himself into a chair. Pieces of skin, colored and stiff, dropped in to his lap. I am a mess, he thought. Soon, this is going to hurt.
In no particular hurry he cut off their jabbering. “Where did you park the car?” He was surprised how a voice could sound so…burnt.
“Don’t talk, man, just relax. We’ll get a doctor…” He was, just by living, scaring the shit out of them.
“The car.”
“On the boulevard. Where we’d be sure to see you. We were there. I swear, we waited as long as we could. We’ve always backed you up. You know that. That time with the president, with this…”
Parked on the boulevard. Two guys sitting in a car on the busiest street in town, pointed straight at the building. Waiting nervously and not bothering to look like anything but two college terrorists waiting nervously. Anyone who saw them—that is, half of rush hour—would’ve been blind not to report it.
“I see.” His mind was starting to fog. He could let it go of course, but honestly, he was just so tired of their voices.
He shot the fat one in the neck, and the kid registered nothing as he dropped to the floor. The short one blanched, backed up to a chair, and collapsed fearfully into it, an obedient schoolboy once again. He started to moan something, and Alejandro opened a hole in his chest that kicked out plaster in the wall behind.
Academically, he considered that this probably ended his affiliation with the local Montoneros.
He spent two nights in Palermo Park, under the abandoned carousel, letting his mind draw together beads of ocean from a fistful of singed 1956–1957 files. He took time. Time for the blisters on his face to calm. Time to absorb the words of the files. The words between words.
Michael Suslov, a mediocre suit at the American embassy during the 1950s—skipped across those words lightly. Alejandro would have passed over him completely but for two facts: this colorless ghost of a man seemed to have a gift for being in the orbit of people like Hector Cabanillas, Pedro Ara, Moori Koenig, etc., all of whom had, in some way, rumored involvement with the theft and concealment of Her.
And Michael Suslov had shot his wife.
The act was so completely without motive, the situation so confused and out of character for the man—this and the fact that it happened almost immediately after Her final disappearance was suggestive, only made more so by a passing reference in a BA police memo that while Michael had sat dazed on the kitchen floor, splashed with his wife’s and unborn child’s blood, someone had searched his house. Searched it for what?
Maybe this embassy ghost wasn’t so colorless after all? Was it possible he had somehow come into possession of Her in the fall of 1956? And if so, would Michael Suslov, fifteen years later, have any knowledge of where She was now? Alejandro had no answers to this, but if the American who shot his wife was still alive somewhere, there, under the old carousel, Alejandro vowed that he and Suslov would have a small conversation about it.
His Montonero friends must have figured him for the north road out of town, for there they waited for him. But his friends were slow, and deep down, he knew, wanted to ask him why first.
The leading one he killed simply because he chose to fire first, and that was always the most important thing. The second fled behind a wall as Alejandro faded into shadow. He waited. Felt the anxiety of the other. Waited for the man to fidget, feel the darkness turn enemy, make a mistake.
It came quickly. A break left for the light—a Porteño thing to do—when a break right, into darkness—a gaucho thing to do—might have saved him.
The crack, echoing off cobblestone, pierced his thigh and he tumbled hard. Alejandro lined up again, then paused, for he recognized the face. Corada, the guerrilla unit’s accountant and document forger. Corada’s gun had skittered clear, and Alejandro approached leisurely. If the leg shot had frightened the accountant, the sight of Alejandro’s face terrified him.
“Oh sweet mother of God…”
Alejandro stood above him. “Corada.”
Corada’s face crinkled at the voice. “Jesus…Alejandro? I…I didn’t mean…it wasn’t…” The words stacked up, collided with one another. Alejandro knelt down, drew his facón blade and danced it across Corada’s neck.
“Do you want to live?”
“…What?”
“Do you want to live?”
“Yeah…yeah…”
Alejandro tapped the blade lightly over the accountant’s throat. “I need the address of a certain American. Then I will need a passport, money, and a plane ticket.”
The accountant gulped once. “Sure. Sure, Al.” He drew his hand to his face and studied the blood. “Christ…you blew half my leg away…” Corada gritted his teeth. “This is for Her, isn’t it?”
“It’s for the revolution.”
“It was always for Her with you, Al.” He swallowed. “It was always for Her…”
August 22, 1971
18.
Sometimes she came in dreams. Young, familiar, forgiving. On bad days she materialized on corrugated waves of desert heat. On those afternoons Michael would stop taking amphetamines.
When he got up for work, the sun hadn’t. When he came home it was already a memory behind mountain rims. In between he labored in the mine’s darkness, waste water soaking him to the thigh.
Nobody spoke on the bucket ride up. There was a time when this had been a cowboy job—chasing fat, gleaming veins of gold, like drowsy buffalo—a time when you could hold a fortune in one hand. Now you crushed ten million tons of anonymous ore a day, and nothing passed through your hands but your life.
On the surface it was as dark as below, and the transition was a simple one. Nobody got a beer; nobody wanted to talk about it. They just drifted, undead, for home.
He caught a ride the rocky dozen miles to the weak, sodium glow of Beatty. Michael didn’t own a car. Didn’t see the point of ever leaving this place. He tried to remember the driver’s name but couldn’t. He didn’t know any of their names.
Beatty. The other towns of this desolation zone had folded and died a half century ago when the ore turned against them. But Beatty, the coffin maker, endured, limping through the years an eviscerated truck stop. Then gold was pronounced once more worth the effort to remove it, and again Beatty went into the mountain.
Michael stepped off the pickup at his trailer, shut his eyes against a gritty blast. The wind never stopped. Primeval and bigger than your whole life, Beatty was a speck it didn’t even pause over. Flotsam spun about his legs. Nothing rotted here. It was all a time machine: old cars, dead dogs, last year’s leaves. They whirled around some, settled, but they didn’t disappear. Nothing did, every night faithfully waiting for you on the front step.
There was a small dusty chapel across from the trailer park. Michael had gone there alone once to light a candle for his mother but once there lit one also for Karen, his father, then Maria, Evita…and soon there weren’t enough candles. And Michael realized there would never be enough candles, not ever, and didn’t return.
He shut the door to his paper trailer, fell on the bed as the swamp cooler banged and drooled down laminated panel walls. The exhaustion cleared a moment, as it always did before he passed out, and that was a dangerous time. The time when his wife came, a woman whose love was someone else’s memory but whose death was all his. He needed hate, but she wouldn’t oblige. So he brought his own, fermented and self-administered. When finally
he dropped into a shallow amphetamine sleep, he was wearing his clothes.
Four hours later he jittered awake, vomited once, and sat on the carpet with his head against the paneling, feeling the vibration of the swamp cooler. It was so ravaged, this night, every night, that it comforted him like a muddy grave.
There would be no question of sleep. He’d sit there, listening to wind buffeting past on its way to Death Valley. Sometimes he’d turn on the a.m. talk shows, hollow voices crackling off the ionosphere from Salt Lake. Sometimes he just sat there and cried.
Come dawn it would be his day off, and the first cold shots of light would freeze him with terror at an entire day available and unplanned. Later it would bring Rosa.
“Mike?”
“Go away.”
She’d come in anyway, Rosa. All business as she got him off the floor, stripped down his week-old clothes, and forced him into the bath. He’d curse her, but he’d go, and she’d tell him the news—which brother was in jail, her asshole manager at the bar, the two hippies some highway patrolmen beat the shit out of for being hippies and being in Nevada.
“They were actually yippies though, y’know.”
Michael swallowed some pills, and Rosa’s voice moved to arm’s length, where he could handle it. She didn’t mind the pills. Alcohol had killed her father, fucked up her brothers, and continually induced her mother to take off her panties in public. That Michael didn’t drink much, even if he spent most of his time in a pharmacological haze, put him a notch below sainthood.
Rosa. Gap-toothed with ironed hair dyed a flaxen chrome. Friendly eyes and strong, no-nonsense hands.
“Oh my, what would you do without me, Mike?”
Rosa was certain she alone stood between Michael and oblivion. But Michael needed his pain far too much to ever let that train pull too far out of the station.
“Guess what today is?”
“I don’t know.” It was the guttural rasp of a drowned man. It’d been…days?…since he’d spoken.
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