Blood Makes Noise

by Gregory Widen

  Wintergreen tried to bring the gun up again as his arm jerked madly. Michael rushed him and Wintergreen collapsed, the gun tumbling to the dirt with the FBI agent swaying stupidly now on all fours. Gina stood behind him, her vet bag open.

  Michael looked at her amazed. “What was that?”

  “Robaxin. Canine muscle relaxant.”

  Wintergreen couldn’t get his face off the ground, and a thick drool rolled from his lips. Evita lay above it all, serene on the flat rock.

  “…Please don’t take Her from me.”

  It was Alejandro, still kneeling on the ground, voice wet and shallow.

  “What do we do?” Gina asked.

  Wintergreen was still drooling on all fours. Michael went to Alejandro, leaned down to him and said, “You’re dying.”

  “Yes.”

  “If I promise you that you’ll never leave her side, will you behave?”

  “Yes.”

  Michael pulled Alejandro to his feet. “We’re bringing him?” Gina asked, still finding ways Michael could astonish her.

  “He’s the only one that knows how to get us out of here.”

  Michael handed off Alejandro to Gina, accidentally stepping on Wintergreen’s hand as he did, and the ex-marine gurgled a curse: “Sasiko!”

  Something old in Michael died.

  He stood there, frozen, above his old embassy guard. “What did you say?”

  Wintergreen was all drooling incoherence, trying to crawl away, and Michael put his foot in his back. “I know that word…”

  Images rushed Michael—that night in his Buenos Aires house, the figure shooting at him, the curse it hissed when Michael struck its leg. “Sasiko…”

  Michael bent down to Wintergreen’s ear. “You son of a bitch. You all knew. You all knew.” Michael pulled the FBI agent’s face from the earth. “Were you going to kill us both? Make it look like a robbery? Sasiko—it’s fucking Basque, isn’t it? That was you. Why? Why?”

  “We…we…” Wintergreen’s mouth was as unhinged as a shark’s. “We knew you were trying to ship her out through the station…some BAPD joe saw the truck in your alley that night…you weren’t supposed to be home…you said you were leaving that weekend. Nobody was supposed to be home. Your wife, that’s on you, asshole.”

  Michael drove the rancher’s son’s face into the dirt. Wintergreen struggled feebly, but Michael only pressed harder, digging a crater with the man’s face, pressing till Wintergreen’s body slacked. Michael stood. Gina had helped a stumbling Alejandro into Wintergreen’s dark blue four-wheel and returned, the two of them staring a beat at Wintergreen’s body before wordlessly loading Evita onto the backseat.

  Michael climbed in beside Alejandro. Gina was behind the wheel, and after starting the engine she eased them along the gravel path leading down the opposite side of the ruins.

  “I’m having trouble understanding,” Alejandro said through clenched, bloody teeth, “exactly who your friends are.”

  “Don’t bother,” Gina said.

  33.

  They came out of the night hills briefly, south of Narbonne, and quickly passed small settlements that reminded Michael of eastern Montana or western Argentina. Ash danced in the cab. Alejandro stared at the silk-shrouded body of Evita in the back as they drove, and for an instant, beneath the destruction, Michael saw the eleven-year-old farm boy.

  Wintergreen’s four-wheel had maps jammed between the dashboard and windshield that showed the local dirt paths and, more importantly, the locations of French police roadblocks. Even half-dead, Alejandro had an uncanny sense of direction, and they skirted roadblock after roadblock on the feeder roads west.

  Thirty kilometers later dawn snuck up, and the Mediterranean appeared in the distance like dull chrome in moonlight. They crossed stale mudflats where a forever wind crippled trees and carried the stench of low tide and sewage. The swamps here had been drained in ’63, but the decay went on remorselessly, and the pseudo-Italianate apartment blocks laid over them sagged, corpse-like, and would never look, or smell, finished.

  “We’d better stop. It’s almost day…” Gina said. Michael nodded. It was the end of the tourist season, and he told Gina to cruise the outskirts of Perpignan and look for a vacant holiday cottage.

  They patrolled grassy, smelly hillsides in Wintergreen’s truck, three damaged heads rubbernecking low-rent, wind-blown streets, and every place looked vacant, looked never used, and it was a matter of picking one. Michael broke the lock on a garage and they parked the four-wheel inside.

  Gina took Alejandro into the cottage, laid him down, and did what she could with her vet bag. Michael tried to sleep and for his trouble got amphetamine-warped half dreams of blood and Argentina, waking from them exhausted, his clothes soaked and clinging, Alejandro groaning incoherently on the couch.

  Michael stepped outside, and it was nearly sunset. He popped an amphetamine, felt the sweat on his body chill, and looked out across the breezy mudflats, the disorganized farms climbing the hillside, the toffee-colored bay. The Pyrénées sat in hazy distance, old with rounded, gentle tops, pushing the coast farther to sea, and that was the Spanish border that he, Gina, and Alejandro—if he lived—would try for tonight.

  Gina offered him an espresso she’d rounded up inside. Michael sipped it like a child, and they both watched the day sink behind mountains as dark clouds raced the sun, their torn undersides bleeding pink. “Have you eaten?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “You should.”

  “In Spain.”

  Inside, Alejandro shouted out in dreamy agony, and it should have fried Michael’s nerves, but he had nothing left to fry and so just stared at the sunset. “I gave him some morphine,” she said, “some antibiotics. He’s bleeding inside.”

  “He’s bleeding everywhere.”

  “It’s the inside that’ll kill him.”

  “I think I’m losing it. I keep seeing things, in the dark.”

  “I’m here.”

  He looked at her bag. “Do you have anything for pets losing their minds?”

  “We just put them to sleep.”

  Michael held her hand. “I think that was your first joke.”

  “How did I do?”

  “Terrible.”

  She pressed herself against him, and he let his face rest in her hand. Over the Pyrénées a last defiant shot of sunset had caught the clouds, and the horizon exploded one last time. There were insects in the grass, and Alejandro’s screams on the couch.

  “I think it will be a good thing when this is over,” Gina said.

  34.

  Hector napped till four o’clock. He rose, bathed, put on the old suit coat and a new tie he bought the day before near the Prado. The villa on Calle de Navalmanzano hummed with heat and the snores of siesta. Even the flies drowsed. Though rest never failed him, Hector did not like sleep as a rule and found naps especially bad for the soul. But the General would nap—would nap until Hector returned his dead wife and would only wake then if Lopez Rega said it was okay.

  He could see through the window a sedan pull up to the villa’s gates. One of Franco’s drivers. Michael had chosen his own route, his own schedule, but from what Hector could glean from his French contacts, from what he knew of the boy himself, Hector felt sure Michael would make the journey into Spain tonight. Hector would let Franco’s driver take him across the dry plains to the border crossing he had arranged a thousand million years ago in Beatty, Nevada, and wait.

  It had been hot that day too in Beatty, with tiny grains of sand aloft as time tried to bury them all early. Hector felt a grain of sand strike his cheek through the sedan’s passenger window. He held it between fingers and crushed its sandstone core. Time would have to wait one more night.

  There were no crickets, and the silence as they left after sundown was total but for gusts of salty wind. The cottage, lifeless once more, receded on the unlit street as they chanced the small road that webbed southward into the foothills.

 
Alejandro was still breathing. He sat between Gina and Michael, the dog morphine forcing his eyes open to cartoon size. He held a soaked compress to his belly and he didn’t moan, though his teeth chattered occasionally. He spoke to Michael in Spanish, dreamy, drugged. “She is the light, the mother of the revolution.”

  “She’ll be safe.”

  “We didn’t trust the government. We didn’t even trust Perón. Not in bringing Her home.”

  “Perón will bring Her home. We’ll see to it.”

  Alejandro’s eyes were frozen open, unblinking. “I may still have to kill you.”

  “I understand.”

  Gina tried to pretend she wasn’t listening and heard the sound of a helicopter.

  “Turn off the lights,” Alejandro said. She did. They slowed and crept in darkness, the treeless, wind-battered land around them emerging as moonscape.

  Michael held a penlight in his mouth and a map in his lap. “Take the next right. Toward Col de Banyuls.”

  “Will someone be waiting?” Gina asked.

  “Only if we’re unlucky.”

  The wind that never stopped shook the low brush just over the Spanish border. Generations spent on the exposed flank of the Pyrénées bred them thick and low to the ground. They hissed first this way, then that, and Hector thought himself kin to them: bred thick, low to the ground, flexible to shifting winds.

  The customs post was small, little more than a shack and striped barrier bar. A single dirt road ran off in both windy directions, and not much disturbed the three Guardia Civil officers’ evenings of pulp magazines and TV. Hector’s driver carried with him a letter from Franco himself to the effect that one Michael Suslov and cargo were not to be disturbed or detained in any way, whatever hysterics the officers heard over their radios from the French or Italians. Or Americans.

  One letter, three guards, a quiet little adjustment of routine quickly forgotten by everyone involved.

  The road went gravel and they drove slower, in deference to the steepening terrain, in deference to French police officers Michael imagined around each bend. There was little moon but you could see, far off, the faint winking of white caps on the Mediterranean. The truck growled through its gears.

  No one seemed to be on the road anywhere, and Michael wasn’t sure if he should be thanking God for the favor. Ahead, the ridgeline appeared faintly, and that meant Spain. The French had their border checkpoint down the mountain, nearer town, and by sidestepping it on a dirt track, all that remained between them and the border would be the Spanish post.

  Hector waited in the sedan with Franco’s driver. It would be dawn in less than two hours, and he hoped Michael would be out of France before then. He longed for an espresso, Italian-style, and was surprised when the local guards hadn’t at least offered him some Spanish instant coffee. No matter. Hector smiled to the driver, let himself out, and trudged against the wind, with his cane, toward the guards’ duty shack.

  Amber light spilled from the doorway; the soft purr of Spanish military frequencies carried on the wind. Hector stepped into the shack. There was a warm kettle, half-drunk plastic coffee cups…

  And no guards.

  Hector stepped back into the wind. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust. When the land around him came back, he saw his car and driver were missing. In their place, standing in the clearing, were Lopez Rega, two young malevolent men Hector didn’t recognize, and Ed Lofton. “Good morning, Hector. Or nearly morning. You look good.”

  “You look exactly the same.”

  Lofton smiled. Hector turned to Lopez Rega. “This your idea, Lopez?”

  “I work only for the interests of the General.”

  “Ah. And is he aware of this particular interest?”

  “Your Michael Suslov is a wanted criminal, endangering the vessel of our nation’s beloved Evita. We want what you want, Hector: her safe return with the General to Argentina.”

  Hector’s eyes went back to Lofton. “I suppose this has nothing to do with the money?”

  “It always had to do with the money, Hector,” Lofton said. “Just ask Evita’s brother, Juan.”

  Hector drifted back over the decades to that night with him, Perón, and Juan Duarte’s official suicide. He sighed. So many suicides. Pity, really.

  Lofton again: “You’ll get her back, Hector. Clean as a whistle. Argentina will be saved. There’s enough of the Senora for everyone.”

  Hector turned to Lopez Rega. “I never thought the money would matter to you, Lopez.”

  “The General cannot last long after his return. You’ve seen him. A year? Two? Then it will be Isabel’s turn. She will need the money, Hector, to help the poor. To secure her reputation…”

  “To become Evita.”

  “There will be only one Evita. But the beloved Senora will be in Her crypt, and Isabel will live, will carry on the Senora’s work, and I will be right beside her, guiding her…”

  “You’ve forgotten one thing, Lopez.”

  “What is that?”

  “You can only become a hero in our country after you’re dead.”

  Lopez Rega smiled. “Dear Hector. Perón’s favorite. And Edelmiro’s before that. And Ramirez’s before he. And how many before Ramirez? I’ve done your horoscope, Hector Cabanillas, read your signs, and I think you can become Isabel’s favorite too.”

  They could hear the truck engine. Lofton craned his neck down the dirt path for a glimpse of headlights. One of Lopez Rega’s men raised the striped barrier bar, and the other rested a machine pistol against his leg.

  “Well, don’t be rude,” Lofton said to Hector. “Go and welcome them.”

  Around a bend the post came up suddenly, and Gina braked to a stop at the concrete marker dividing France from Spain. The barrier bar was open and a single figure stood in the road. Dark and backlit by the guard shack, it leaned on a dog-headed cane.

  Michael got out as Hector stepped up and grabbed his arm. “Michael. Michael. You made it. You’re injured.”

  “Just mortally.”

  “We’ll get you a doctor immediately.” Hector set off to the cab. Leaned in and saw Alejandro ashen faced on the seat. “Alejandro. My son.”

  “Hector…”

  “I knew you and Michael would find each other. Are you hurt badly?”

  “He’s dying,” Gina said.

  “No one need die, my lady. Not now.” He touched Alejandro’s face, icy and wet.

  “Don’t let them take Her…” the young man wheezed.

  Hector glanced at the passenger in the backseat and shook his head in amazement. “Remarkable.” He swept back Alejandro’s hair. “We are an understanding apart. You and I. Do not worry about the Senora’s safety. She is with us, both of us, now.” Alejandro nodded. Hector backed out and turned to Michael beside him. “Please. Michael. Climb back inside.” Hector spoke brightly, enthusiastically.

  “Why?”

  “Let’s get you out of France, no? Just a few meters, and we can make it official.”

  Michael did as he was told. As he went to close the door, Hector grasped it with surprising strength, and now the secret policeman’s voice was quiet and stern. “Michael Suslov, within the confines of our relationship, would you say you trust me?”

  “Within the confines of our relationship.”

  “When I say, please drive as hard as you can, as fast as you can, and don’t stop. Not for anything.” Hector looked at Gina, behind the wheel. The engine idled beneath them. Gina nodded.

  Hector withdrew from the cab and his voice was bright again. “Ah! I think I see it!” Hector drew his eyes low, to the rear tire, and walked back as if looking for something. When he had reached the four-wheel drive’s rear he opened the hatch and said evenly, “Now.”

  With whatever strength remained in his ageless frame, Hector jumped into the four-wheel as it jerked into reverse and spun itself backward into France.

  Gunfire erupted from the darkness and clattered against the truck like hail as the windshi
eld exploded into snowing glass. Gina kept the pedal jammed in reverse, unable to see, and the truck careened over brush and rocks. Lofton, Lopez Rega, and his two thugs, they were all in the open now, guns spitting short flames.

  Alejandro drew his blood-caked machine pistol from the floor, laid it on the dash, and fired through the destroyed windshield, hot shells ejecting against Michael’s arm, till the magazine clicked. Michael had no idea if he hit anything. But the truck did—a rock—and stopped neck-wrenching dead.

  Hector, flung against the rear seat, half draped over Evita, said with surprising calm to Gina, “I meant drive into Spain.”

  Gina hit the accelerator and the four-wheel flew in rocky confusion off-road over bramble and roots. Michael had no idea what direction they were heading, the world outside blurry, wind-blown insanity.

  The land dropped quickly away, a cleft rose on Gina’s side, blocking the customs station with an earthen berm, and that probably saved them. The steering wheel leapt from Gina’s hands with every bone-jarring bounce, knocking the truck to a different point on the compass. They serpentined madly across open ground like that, Gina never letting up the pedal, and when Michael made eye contact with her he wanted to shout slow down! or speed up! or look out! and only managed “Un-fucking-believable!” And Gina laughed a gulping, panicked laugh, and it was the first time Michael had ever seen her laugh—a beautiful laugh—and he knew he loved her, if only for the five or ten seconds they had left to live.

  “The road!” They crashed right across it, would have missed it entirely if not for Hector’s shout. Gina fishtailed right, bounded along in a cloud of dirt, and at about the same moment the right fender tumbled away, Michael saw a surveyor marker stuck in the roadside and the language was Spanish. “Keep going…keep going…” Michael closed his eyes, and it was sandpaper. He opened them again as a fat blood bubble rose from Alejandro’s mouth and broke over his chin. “Sorry.”