Blood Makes Noise

by Gregory Widen

  “C’mon, think.”

  “Sunday.”

  She blew out a petulant breath. “Oh come on, don’t be so stupid.”

  He could see several fragments of his mind drifting through the bathroom, and he was in no mood to try and collect them for an answer. “I don’t know.”

  “It’s your birthday, silly.”

  He dried himself, but she combed his hair and presented the results proudly in the medicine cabinet mirror. “See? Cute.”

  He felt absolutely no ownership of the face that stared back.

  The shower had roused him to at least a heightened state of stupor as he pulled on clean jeans and a shirt. Rosa was waiting on the bed coyly, hands behind her. “Close your eyes.”

  He was feeling game and complied. Rosa led him to the bed, laid a package in his hands, and declared, “Ta da!” He opened his eyes.

  “Well, look at this…” He slipped the ribbon off and pulled away the top. Inside was an antique clarinet. Rosa bit her lip uncertainly.

  “I thought you’d want a new one…”

  She must have looked forever to find the exact model. The one Michael inherited from his father and lost during one of his three-day disappearing acts in the desert. It was in good condition, just a little tarnished, the velvet box frayed but sturdy.

  He lifted it. His father’s clarinet had been the absolute last link to his childhood. It was such a thoughtful gift it made him feel mean and unworthy. He turned to Rosa, sitting there now wondering if she’d made some terrible mistake, and kissed her. “It’s wonderful. Thank you. It’s more than I deserve.”

  She hugged him back fiercely. “Oh baby, I love it so much when you’re happy.” Her touch, the feel of her sweater, renewed him. He stood and opened the door, ready to face the day.

  It was night.

  They had dinner/breakfast at the mom-and-pop steak joint—Rosa’s treat—and the food sat foully in his belly, but he felt okay and tried to make it good for Rosa. The evening had a shot, but then they went by her bar for a nightcap, and there was noise and other shithead miners and suddenly she was his girl now and his mood imploded, leaving him hunched in the restroom jamming pills down his throat, seeking the middle distance.

  She had a cake waiting for him at the trailer, but he couldn’t even count the candles on it, which weren’t forty-four anyway. They ate it, sat there rummaging the wreckage of another night, and fell asleep.

  When he woke there was thunder ugly and deep over Tonopah. He disentangled himself from Rosa, pulled on his jeans, and walked out barefoot amongst luminescent gravel. The wind had lost its arrogance and was in full retreat from a thunderhead coming over the mountains, swallowing the sky, black on blacker.

  And Michael began to run.

  Out of town, across beaten, weedy lots. Through fissured sandstone, into the path of the storm. Thunder throbbed his frame, and it began to rain. He couldn’t hear his breath, but when it failed he collapsed to his knees, shot his face up into a sky roiling spun lead above him, and thought, Oh God, oh God, what have I become…

  August 29, 1971

  19.

  Strange time, the ride up. You had to stand still because the bucket swayed easily and there were always too many, shoulder to shoulder. Down at the minehead the weight of the earth crushed and steamed the air. On the way up it relaxed, and the armor of sweat he wore went clammy as he was dumped into a sucking Nevada August.

  The crew drifted to their pickups and Suburbans, haphazard in the lot. Michael hated these moments. The ten seconds of forced interaction to hitch a lift back to Beatty. The half-tons and four-wheel drives gunned, and as Michael shuffled among them he noticed the tan rental sedan, puny and awkward. Standing against the door, arms folded, was Hector.

  He looked exactly the same, unchanged, and that only deepened the nightmare mirage.

  “Michael.”

  Michael stood there, squinting as the glare scooped out his mind, listened once more to the nightmare speak, then did the only sensible thing with a nightmare: turned his back on it and walked away.

  Rosa did his dishes nervously. She knew the troughs of his existence, but this frightened her. Instead of passed out on the bed, he was hunched in the corner, watching the door. The knock startled her. Never in the time she had known Michael had anyone else visited the trailer. He made no move to answer, so Rosa went to the door.

  “Don’t open it.”

  His warning chilled her, and she backed away as there was another knock. “Who is it?” she called out.

  “Rosa?”

  The sound of her name brewed curiosity and she reached for the handle, glancing once at Michael—who offered no further protest—before pulling it open. Standing on the dirt stoop was an old, frail man. He wore a dark-blue suit despite the heat, and rested his weight on a silver dog-headed cane. His face was friendly and alert, his hair slicked flat and white. He smiled.

  “You must be Rosa. How beautiful you are.”

  Despite herself she tucked a piece of hair shyly behind one ear. His voice was soft and smoothly foreign.

  “Who are you?”

  “Hector Cabanillas,” the small man answered brightly. “A friend of Michael’s”—the voice changed just a little—“from the old days.”

  “Michael doesn’t have any old friends.”

  “May I see him?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Just to talk…visit…” He limped up two stairs to the doorway. Rosa didn’t budge. Hector’s voice drew close. “I know him, Rosa. I can help.”

  And Rosa thought, This is death and devastation standing before me.

  “Let him in.” Michael.

  Rosa hesitated, then reluctantly stepped aside. Hector squeezed her arm and entered. Michael pulled out a gun.

  “I said if I ever saw you again I’d kill you.”

  Hector registered nothing as he stared at Michael, huddled there on the floor.

  “You won’t shoot me, Michael.”

  “You took my life.”

  “I’m the only one who can give it back to you.”

  Michael got off the floor, stumbled into the bathroom, and threw up.

  She couldn’t hear them where they stood together in the vacant lot. Hector spoke in a low mantra, without gesture. Michael hung his head, swayed, listened to the words pouring into his ear. They stood there till pink fell on the mountains and the sky cooled, and Rosa thought, I’m losing him.

  “The embassy is very impressive now, Michael. Kennedy discovered the south, and everywhere there are great blocks of American diplomatic marble, all full with dedicated, eager young men”—Hector smiled just a little—“who won’t talk to us anymore.”

  He told Michael of how the economy had slid faster and faster through the ’60s, how urban guerrillas, Montoneros, calling for the return of Papa Perón, had started the killing, but how the generals had gleefully joined in. How there was a whole apparatus of death squads now, on both sides. How thousands had simply disappeared—thrown from aircraft into the Rio Plata or weighted with lead bars in nameless Andean reservoirs. How the mass killings were isolating Argentina. How most of the world had stopped talking to them…

  “Terror, yes, sometimes it is necessary. Useful. But now…terror without reason…without result but more terror…is vile waste. It has become like everything else in Argentina: cyclical, pointless, cruel. A struggle passionately felt and completely misunderstood.”

  “Why are you here, Hector?”

  Hector took off his glasses and wiped them on the end of his tie. “The civil war has taken a disorganized nation and organized it around death. The government and its enemies are in stalemate. This stalemate is destroying Argentina. Destroying even the notion of it. Something must be done.”

  Hector slid the glasses back onto the bridge of his nose.

  “It is time for Eva Perón to return to politics.”

  He knew these words would come. Had known for years. Still…“Why now?”


  “To wait is to lose everything. Only she can save her nation.”

  “Why now?”

  Hector smiled. “Still the smartest CIA officer in Argentina.”

  “I don’t work for the CIA. Or Argentina. Not anymore.”

  “I know, Michael. And you will do this for neither of these, and certainly not for me. But you will do it. For yourself.”

  Hector looked up and saw Rosa watching from the trailer. “Are you good to her, Michael?”

  “I’m not good to anybody.”

  Hector nodded and looked away from the worried woman on the porch. “Since that day, for fifteen years, I have never pressed you for the location of the Senora. Perhaps this was self-interest. By telling no one, she has stayed a secret. Perhaps the last secret our country possesses. Certainly it has cost us—a former president, Aramburu, just last year.”

  “I read about it.”

  “You knew him, Michael.”

  “Briefly.”

  “All presidents in Argentina are brief.” Hector turned to the mountains, pink with afterglow. “He came from a place not unlike this, a desperate land full of nothing but men seeking to be consumed by it. Most of them let the place work itself into their bodies, till it found the emptiness within and suffocated them. A few had conviction enough to seek an answer there. Aramburu was such a man. He came from a place, Michael, not unlike this…”

  “You want me to tell you where she’s buried.”

  Hector turned slowly from the mountains and faced him.

  “No, Michael. I want you to bring her home.”

  20.

  The night was in free fall. By the small light of the trailer stoop, Michael and Hector stood where they had for hours.

  “How can I go? How can I go like this?”

  Hector’s whisper was fierce. “Hate me, Michael. Hate your whole existence. But understand that your life, all our lives, are great circles. To move beyond this, to find grace, we must pass once more through the beginning. Your circle is broken, Michael. And it is only I, and this deed, that can join it again.”

  There was silence. There was Michael asking, once again, why now?

  “Our relationship, Michael, was many things, but it was always private. No written records ever existed of our contacts together.

  “But I alone was not the Argentine government. I alone was not even the sum of Argentine intelligence. There were other departments—accounting, security, even the city militia—into whose files your name, during that time, might have wandered.

  “Recently an extreme branch of the guerrilla Montoneros attacked and burned a SIDE records center in Puerto Madera. It is unlikely, but possible, that they acquired from there files from the years you were in Argentina. This cell is led by a fanatical revolutionary named Alejandro Morales. He is completely devoted to the return of Eva Perón to Argentina. I know him. He was picked up once in one of our raids. He is a remarkable man. We think he’s operating alone now. Hunted even by his own Montonero comrades. He’s dangerous and capable, and it is possible he may connect you to the Senora.”

  “How?”

  “Michael, my son, you shot your wife, betrayed your agency, and disappeared with a corpse stuffed in a radio crate. I’m sorry. These are brutal words. It would be unlikely, but absolutely not impossible, for this man to draw together those events and come to a conclusion. If so, you could be in danger.”

  “You’ll forgive me, Hector, if I have difficulty swallowing that you came all this way out of concern for my safety and the unbroken circles of our lives.”

  Hector’s thoughts fell inward for a moment. “I once told you long ago, Michael, how symbols will always be more important to the people of Argentina than ideas. With so much of the nation devouring itself, the Senora—and the time she represents—is the only great symbol we have left.

  “The current government has negotiated with General Perón to return him from his exile in Spain as head of a reconciliation government. If he brings with him Evita, peace is assured. But if a Montonero fanatic should hijack her body first, return it under revolutionary control, make it their symbol…the killing will continue. Forever. Her body, even in death, has become the key to everything.

  “The Senora has been safe in your care, Michael. But we cannot know what this man learned from Aramburu and those burned files. What he will surmise. And so we cannot be sure that the Senora is now safe.”

  “I could just tell you where she is. Send in an armed detachment, claim the body, and bring Her home.”

  Hector nodded. “That would be the simplest thing. But nothing is ever simple with the Senora. You see, our nation’s current fashion of annihilating whole age groups has made it an international pariah. The governments of Italy and France have severed nearly all diplomatic relations with the current administration and would never allow a formal armed detachment of anybody from Buenos Aires to cross their borders.”

  That left mounting a clandestine intelligence operation to acquire the corpse. But Hector’s palpable nervousness, and the fact that he came all this way alone, meant it was likely that he feared his own security bureau was bored full of Montonero holes. And so once again it seemed there was no one the old secret policeman could turn to except an American whose life he had helped destroy.

  “Do you have a passport?”

  Michael had lost his real one years ago but still had the fake one he’d had made in the name of Gary Phillips. “It’s expired.”

  “Give it to me. I have a contact that can update it overnight. It will be waiting for you at the airport with an airline ticket. I have a nephew at our embassy in Bonn. He can meet you in…”

  “Milan.”

  “Milan, then. He’ll help you retrieve the body from…from where you’ve kept her.”

  “You want me to turn her over to him?”

  “No, Michael. You must, please, transport the Senora alone to her exiled husband General Perón in Spain. Franco has a long connection with Argentina and has promised to open his borders to us without formality. I have personally arranged a quiet crossing location. Once in Spain, Juan Perón and his new wife, Isabel, will be waiting for you in Madrid. But first Evita must reach that border, unannounced and undetected, through Italy and France.”

  “Will I have any help?”

  “I have no one else I trust, Michael. Not with this. My nephew can help you in Milan, but after that, this is a journey you would make alone.”

  And Michael had always known, at the last ragged edge of his life’s broken circle, that was how it would be.

  Rosa stood against the laminated paneling, chain-smoking. “You’re not coming back, are you?”

  He was packing his case. Light. He owned so little. “I’m coming back.”

  “But not to me.”

  “I’m coming back.”

  He buckled the case. He had some things—old spook toys—at a storage locker in Bakersfield he’d pick up on the way. His mind craved chemical distance. He touched her face and she winced because it felt final.

  “Rosa…I…”

  “Don’t,” she begged.

  And he thought, Of all the things I chose not to see in her, the most essential was her dignity.

  He lifted his case, opened the door, and was surprised by how rubbery his legs had become.

  Hector returned with a car and $5,000. “I’ll also need an Argentine ID in the name of Carlos Maggi,” Michael said, “and a telegram in his name sent to Musocco Cemetery requesting the exhumation of a nun named María Maggi by her nephew.”

  Hector nodded, impressed. “A nun. Clever. I’ll see it’s done at once. I would go myself if I were not such a useless old man.” As long as Michael had known Hector, the man had seemed old. “But I’ll be there at the Spanish border. I’ll wait for you, Michael.”

  Hector stood outside the trailer as Michael drove away. Rosa followed the car’s dust from the porch, her hands folded tight across her middle as if in deep cold.

  “You’re a mons
ter.” There was little rancor in it.

  “I love him too, Rosa. You may not understand that, but I do.” He turned from the sedan disappearing now on the highway. He was a frail old man on a cane, but Rosa knew he would outlive them all. “But if there are truly monsters in this world, then I suppose I am among them.”

  Michael took Hector’s car over the California line, through the Panamint Mountains, and south on 395, past naval weapon ranges and the skeletons of Japanese internment camps.

  He’d promised himself to stay off the pills till Bakersfield, but his mind was growing addled in the heat and he swallowed two with a warm Coke to keep it from seizing completely.

  The storage locker in Bakersfield was a serve-yourself series of white catacombs. He’d lost the key and needed the moonlighting ranch kid to saw the lock off. The steel door howled, and the sound brought Michael back to that night on the third floor of the CGT a hundred centuries ago. The kid lingered, and Michael felt his eyes sweep his clammy, bennie-sweat clothes. Michael shrugged it off. “I’m not feeling real good. The weather…”

  The kid’s expression went dull with an understanding that transcended anything he might have picked up punching doggies, and Michael felt suddenly impatient. “I’m okay now. Thanks for the help.”

  The kid, in no hurry, gave him the up and down one more time, drawled, “You’ll have to pay for the lock,” turned on his shit kickers, and ambled away. Michael went inside, braced himself, and yanked the light chain.

  On what would turn out to be Michael’s last day of operational intelligence in Argentina, his new station chief, Pompian, who had already decided to have his troubled case officer removed and sent to Walter Reed for evaluation, woke up to the realization that Michael had been missing for three days. Wintergreen was given the thankless job of finding him and was getting nowhere till he caught on a PD frequency the local BA cops responding to a drunk American making a scene in La Boca.

  Wintergreen ran down the address, and there was Michael, throwing desperate punches at a circle of beat cops on the stoop of an old apartment building. His clothes were ripped, slept in, and soaked with gin. The station marine sweet-talked the angry cops into backing off and came up on Michael easy. Blood drooled down his scalp from police payback. Michael swung a wild fist at Wintergreen and missed miserably.