Blood Makes Noise

by Gregory Widen

  Isabel, the third wife, entered. “Darling, Lopez Rega says you must unfasten your trousers. For your digestion.” Perón complied, right in front of them, and Hector knew Perón was finished. Anything he might have been once had drained away years ago in this mausoleum. A turn or two in the revolving door and he’d be gone—replaced, Hector knew, by his ratlike ambitious wife, Isabel. Isabel and Lopez Rega, of course.

  Perón sat there like furniture stuffing, his pants unfastened and lying in peeled flanks. You could glimpse underwear, urine-stained. Their leader. This was not stability before Hector but merely a pause before deeper chaos. Still, one nightmare at a time…

  Later that night, Isabel—bar dancer, future First Lady—roamed the darkened villa with a candelabra, singing incantations of power. An entourage of maids and cousins followed her in a train, and Hector watched them from the upstairs gallery, a sinister glowworm, the light rising and falling through the house.

  When he looked up, Lopez Rega, Isabel’s spiritual advisor, stood beside him. He was a short, brutish man with the hot eyes of a demon. He preferred to stroll the house in silk pajamas and stank of lavender toilet water. It was Lopez Rega who now screened all the General’s letters, decided whom he saw and whom he didn’t, prescribed the General’s diet, read his bowel movements; the one who led endless séances to call spirits to Perón’s side. Claiming to be in daily contact with the archangel Gabriel, he drew up complicated horoscopes only he could interpret. It was Isabel who first brought him into the house, but it was Rega—all Rega—who stayed.

  “Dr. Ara is coming,” Rega said. Even normal sentences had a way of sounding perverse and obscene in his mouth.

  “The embalmer,” Hector answered.

  “He’s much more than that.” Lopez Rega’s eyes fell to the glowworm, snaking its way through the dining room. “Isabel shall usher in a new age for our nation. I have seen it in the stars, read it in the leaves, seen it in my own dreams.”

  “And the General?”

  “All this through the greatness of General Perón, of course.”

  Of course.

  “She will need not only support but tools to help this dream come to pass.” Rega’s lips quivered when he spoke in a manner that made Hector avert his eyes.

  “Tools?”

  “Money.”

  “She will be First Lady of a great nation.”

  “A nation broke. Defeated…”

  Lopez Rega thought a moment. “You liked Evita.”

  “I like everyone I work for, Lopez.”

  “You admired her.”

  “Yes.”

  “Even though she stole.”

  “Even though everything.”

  Down below, Isabel’s childlike songs echoed strangely, and Hector thought of graveyard interrogations.

  “Don’t you ever still wonder, Hector, after all these years, where she put it?”

  September 7, 1971

  30.

  He isn’t taking the highways. We have men watching all the westbounds. They stop any trucks that fit your profile.”

  The Surete Nationale officer stood at a map of the area. He was speaking French, and it was Wintergreen who translated for Lofton, sitting there in a chair, staring at a map of highways and the clouds of lesser roads between highways.

  “He’s taking the country roads.” Lofton’s words went up and back along the language chain.

  “It would take him days that way to reach Spain.”

  “He has days.”

  “All the local provincial police have been notified.”

  “Have they set up roadblocks?”

  “We cannot stop all of France.”

  Lofton stared glumly at the map, then smiled brightly at the French police official. “Thank you, Captain. I appreciate your help. I know you and your men are doing everything possible.” The captain nodded. “Master Wintergreen, why don’t you and I take a stroll in the delightful southern French sunshine.”

  They did. Lofton stopped a dozen yards from the police station and sighed. “Am I correct in detecting a certain lack of urgency on the part of our frog comrades?”

  “An American guilty of American crimes, dead Italians or no, I’m sure a part of our police captain would just as soon see Suslov make Spain. It’d be out of their hair.”

  “Do you think he’ll make it?”

  “Suslov?…No.”

  “How’s our bloodhound?”

  “Off sniffing his own trails.”

  “Has he checked in?”

  “Of course not. He’s switched to a motorbike, but there’s a transmitter in the radio we gave him. He’s still on a leash.”

  “Homing transmitters. Haven’t done one of those since…”

  “Buenos Aires.” Lofton looked at his feet and was somewhere else a moment. “They’re smaller now,” Wintergreen added, “the transmitters.”

  When Lofton looked up, his bloodshot eyes were somewhere else. “Do you ever have second thoughts? About all of this?”

  “Not really.”

  “Me neither, son.” Lofton turned and started back for the police station. “Though I was rather hoping you would.”

  You could smell the ash in the fireplace and know they had been here the night before. You could see the imprint of two bodies left behind in the wadded drapes, and that meant Michael had brought the woman with him into France. Alejandro had understood Michael would have to stop at this place, one of Her places. And of course he would have brought a woman—he seemed always to keep women near—to prevent his mind from completely melting down.

  Rosa was such a woman. Michael hadn’t brought her, because she clearly knew him too well, and he had reinvented himself with old clothes for this last mile of life.

  It was easy to smell the ash in the fireplace, to interpret the drapes on the floor, and it was no harder to see the small white envelope peeking out from a crevice beneath the window. It was sealed, and when he tore it open he recognized Hector’s handwriting. My thoughts are with you, my son. Consider the other. Consider the unity of both your missions…

  And Alejandro wondered if he had written it to Michael or him.

  31.

  The drive was slow, choked with harvest and grapevines so vital they leapt the road, went native, and strangled trees. The sun stung, mountains elbowed them south toward the Mediterranean. The day grew hot by the hour, and Michael slumped in the sawtooth shoals of an amphetamine crash.

  “Michael?” She was driving and he had trouble remembering where he was. “Are you okay?”

  “Sure.” He looked down at the floorboards. “I think my foot is beginning to stink.”

  “It’s just the bandage. We’ll change it later.” He leaned back and thought, I’ve been shot. I was actually shot. I’m driving the French countryside and I have a bullet hole in my ankle.

  “Where are we?” he asked.

  “Between Pont du Gard and Nîmes.”

  “We’re getting nowhere in these hills.”

  “These hills have only one direction out going west, Michael.”

  “Meaning?”

  “If I were the police, I’d be watching that road.”

  Michael looked at the map. “What are you thinking?”

  “Stay on this road till the last moment, then slip into Nîmes. They won’t expect that.”

  “Because it’s insane. Us, Her, in the middle of a city?”

  “Only for a moment. Just south of Nîmes, four separate roads branch back into the hills after the western exit. Four roads they would have to watch, Michael, instead of one.”

  “We’ll be sitting ducks.”

  “We’ve been sitting ducks since we started.”

  He drove as fast as the stolen motorbike would let him, air howling around his sunglasses. He stuck to the coastal highway and blew in a rage through flat, insular towns grouped around funnel-shaped water towers. At a roadside mall he bought a two-franc bottle of wine he poured in the dirt. At another he bought an alarm clock an
d wire. At a gas station he filled first his panting bike, then the wine bottle, adding powdered Jell-O and corking it.

  Alejandro no longer noticed if people blanched at his face. He had been following Michael too long, spent too many days just reacting to him. The time had come to anticipate, to reach into the lost man’s mind and cut him off. The bottle of gasoline, stinking of Jell-O, clinked in the saddlebag, and Alejandro thought, It’s a medieval plan, like this land, and yet all Argentine…

  The one road west curled two turns below them. European bugs hummed European songs in the grass. Wintergreen handed Lofton a Coke.

  It was sticky outside the tree shade. French cops sat on the trunks of their cars, smoking. Some kicked around a soccer ball.

  “You should get out of the sun.”

  “I find its rays today…medicinal.”

  “You look like you’re going to have a stroke.”

  “And will, I’m sure. But not before we finish this.” There hadn’t been a car in twenty minutes. Lofton sighed. “Think you could suggest that our Gallic colleagues be ten percent less obvious? You can see the roadblock from bloody Normandy.”

  Wintergreen nodded and turned. Lofton held him with a touch on the sleeve. “Speaking of international cooperation, our boy Alejandro still sniffing his own tail?”

  “Moving like a bat out of hell along the coast toward Béziers.”

  “Young man has the conviction of a crusade. Any idea what he’s doing there?”

  “Transmitter says where, not why.”

  “Amuse me with a guess, son.”

  “Alejandro thinks he has a bead on Suslov.”

  “An empathy.”

  “One doomed fuck to another. Maybe he figures him for the coast.”

  “Suicidal, isn’t that?”

  “Mrs. Perón went the same route, on her trip here in ’47.”

  Lofton paused, thoughtful. “Think Suslov’s really that screwed up?”

  “No. But I think he’s that doomed.”

  Lofton tapped a fingernail against his tooth, a habit that had driven Wintergreen crazy since BA.

  “Get the car.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “You.”

  “Where am I going?”

  “Béziers.”

  “And then?”

  “Don’t lose Al, Mr. Wintergreen. Just don’t lose Al…”

  He felt as if a large sign was painted across the side of the truck: HERE! EVA PERÓN IN HERE! He sensed the stares of every face and had the time to concentrate on them because they were stuck flat dead in traffic.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “I need caffeine.”

  “You need a week’s sleep.”

  “Till then I need caffeine.”

  Nîmes was hard, a faded city laced with the danger of the coast. They kept to its scarred fringes: hypes sleeping under palm trees; Africans selling out of suitcases; easy, loose-stepped women in shorts; and young men appraising everything.

  They turned right on Rue du Gard and just like that there was a beat cop on the corner. Michael felt the top of his head float slowly away as the officer looked directly at him. Michael stared back, was afraid to break the connection too hastily, and every detail of the officer’s blue pillbox hat, his epaulet, his gun strap and buckle were burned into his brain. He would never forget that face, would sooner forget Karen’s. They were locked together forever.

  The cop turned away. It was only after a moment that Michael realized he hadn’t been breathing. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to start now.

  “It’s okay, Michael,” Gina said.

  “I need some caffeine.”

  Farther from the road than he had in mind, but better because this canyon was just tight enough to form a natural chimney and loose enough to keep feeding it air.

  Alejandro picked his way through dry brush to the bottom. There he stuck a length of wire into the bottle of gelatin gasoline, capped it with wax, and ran the other end to an alarm clock. Alejandro needed a time, an exact time, and he set the hands at 8:25 p.m.: the moment She died.

  He hiked back up, stood on the ridge, and thought, I don’t sweat anymore. My pores have been cauterized shut.

  Below, bunched up close, were four roads heading west.

  Hector had his contacts in the French police, ears bought over time the way everything is ultimately for sale in France. Roadblocks were being thrown up across the western routes of the country. There was a circulation picture of their quarry, and it was such an old photo Hector wondered if Michael had photographed any part of his life over the last fifteen years.

  The Italians wanted Michael to avenge a dead cop. But the French wanted Michael because the FBI wanted Michael.

  The FBI. It was a piece Hector had trouble fitting. He didn’t force it, rather let it glide over the puzzle, seeking its own place. The FBI knew Michael, but was it really Michael they wanted? They’d turned loose a damaged Argentine boy to hunt their quarry down, a boy they couldn’t possibly come close to understanding, but was it all for Michael?

  Or Her?

  That night Dr. Ara joined them for dinner at Perón’s Madrid villa. Long since retired from diplomatic service, his body imploding on itself, he still carried that elfin face and Castilian superiority Hector let wash over him like dull wind. Evita’s embalmer spoke of his travels, of lazy sunsets on Greek islands, of chance cadavers in Africa and Bombay on which he practiced his art of preservation. He spoke of many things and many places, but never of Her. Yet she was at the table just the same as if she were his date, and no one could help think, each time the doctor opened his mouth, of his promiscuity with her fluids and tissue, with her essence, and of the room he supervised being readied in the attic for her return.

  Hector watched Perón. While Isabel clattered her dinnerware in a child’s attempt to reclaim attention she felt being sucked from her, Perón grew silent. He had difficulty looking at Ara directly, as if the months the embalmer had spent alone with his wife’s body were a kind of adultery never confronted.

  Hector excused himself to bed early enough to avoid the night’s offerings of witchcraft. He slept well as usual but awoke late with a call to the toilet down the hall. It was at the stairs that he saw Lopez Rega on the landing below, speaking quietly to Dr. Ara. They could have been talking of almost anything sacred or vulgar, but they weren’t.

  They were talking about Evita’s stomach.

  32.

  At 8:24, the western hills filled with sunset.

  At 8:25 they filled with the tingle of an alarm clock a and, a moment later, the liquid pop of glass.

  It wasn’t long before people smelled it, but this was the season of harvest burns and no one was sure. And when they were, when the orange glow set the ridges against the sky like a second setting sun, it was too late.

  They were not long out of Nîmes on a road headed west when the traffic suddenly came to a stop. Gina got out, walked the line of impatient French drivers, and saw a fireman holding traffic. When she got back in, you could see tufts of ash on the seat. “They’re stopping traffic. There’s a fire.”

  “I don’t trust our luck twice in Nîmes.”

  “The whole ridge is burning.”

  “We can’t stay here. We’ve got to find another road. Someplace to wait this out.”

  Gina watched the growing radiance in the sky. “Do you ever think about God, Michael?”

  “No. But I’ve always had the feeling he spends a lot of time thinking about me.”

  Gina slipped the truck into gear, pulled out of traffic in a U-turn, and started back down the road.

  Trapped drivers sat like lemmings on the four western roads, in four barricaded lines, each growing longer with the futile hope that the fire wasn’t that bad.

  Alejandro dropped his motorcycle and walked the rows, just another irate driver, and his no-face dipped in and out of shadow from the burning glow. He stopped at any vehicle big enough to carry a coffin, sometimes sc
aring small children, always looking for Suslov, knowing, in his heart, that the man had more in him than to wait and die at a roadblock.

  The police would be shutting down the exits from Béziers or Montpellier, so either they were bottled up in town, in which case the gendarmes would eventually trip over them, or they were up here, between roadblocks, alone with him. Alejandro felt he knew Michael now. And he knew they were close. Each advancing barrier of fire he set shrunk the remaining distance between Alejandro and Michael. Alejandro and Her.

  You would return Her for the use of a government that despised Her. I want only to return Evita to those that love Her. Love Her, Michael Suslov.

  Like you, I’m starting to think.

  Lofton watched the fire from the edge of Béziers. Ridge after ridge consumed silently miles away. The air was still here but you could tell it was devilish at the center of that.

  “Your boy does subtle work.” Wintergreen on the radio. He was out there tracking Alejandro south of the fire. “Though I suppose if you’re going to create an international incident, you might as well make it a good one.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Al? Doing circles up here somewhere. I think. Fire’s playing fuck-all with his tracker. What do you want me to do in this mess?”

  Lofton swallowed from his flask. The taste had gone metallic. He keyed the radio. “Wait.”

  To get off the barricaded road they took the first gravel path they came on, and it went to dirt immediately, dying altogether in a rumpled field. They backtracked to the road and sought out another path. It was getting hard to see, the smoke thickening and no longer smelling of harvest but of sage and dirt and things wild. The power must have gone down in the few villages, for there were no lights anywhere to orient with.