The Matador Murders (Roger and Suzanne South American Mystery Series Book 4)

by Jerold Last

He examined her appraisingly. "Of course."

  "Do you deal with the drug organization in Salta?"

  "That's a strange question. No, they deal directly with the organization in Bolivia. They don't come across the Andes as far west as Chile or Peru. Our interactions with Argentina are mainly with organizations in Mendoza, Cordoba, Rosario, and of course Buenos Aires. As far as I know, any drug traffic across the Andes between San Pedro de Atacama and Salta or Jujuy is completely amateur."

  Bernardo turned back to Eduardo, who he clearly had decided was in charge of our little group, but continued to include us in the conversation. "We have one more major item of business to discuss. You understand how the military is organized into line officers that lead troops into actual battles and staff officers of higher rank who instruct the line officers in larger scale strategy. Our organization here works in much the same way. I'm one of the top line officers, which would make me the equivalent of a captain or a major, so I still take orders from the generals and colonels. In this case our generals are wealthy businessmen who usually handle the financial side of the business and leave the messier stuff to guys like me. I've been instructed to invite you to spend tonight and tomorrow as the personal guest of our organization's equivalent of a 5-star general. He wants to get to know you better while he decides whether you have common goals. I believe that he is considering whether you and he might become collaborators in this enterprise you seem to have become involved in even if your motives are obscure.

  "He's arranged to have a limousine pick you up outside of the Museum of Belles Artes promptly at 3 PM. You'll have no problem recognizing it. He thought you might like to see Valparaiso and Viña Del Mar while you had a chance, then the limo will deliver you to his country home an hour or so outside of Santiago to meet his family, have dinner together, and spend some time seeing how real Chileans live.

  "Finally, I gather that you busted up one of my employees pretty thoroughly in Montevideo, Eduardo. You certainly look big enough to have taken him, but you don't look that fast. I guess appearances can be deceiving. Don't worry, there are plenty of errand boys just like him and I really don't care what you did to him. But I want to thank you for seeing that he was properly cared for."

  None of us corrected his assumption that Eduardo was the muscle in our group. Sometimes it's a good idea not to be completely truthful, especially when your new friends could just as quickly become your new enemies. We said our good-byes, assuming that we would never see each other again.

  From the restaurant we walked across a wide boulevard to the Metro stop for Line 2 at Puente Cal y Canto. The Metro itself is an ultra-modern subway that runs on rubber tires, so is quiet. It is kept so scrupulously clean that you can comfortably eat off the floors of the trains. The trains run frequently and there is no graffiti. Another attractive feature of the Santiago Metro System is the extensive artwork, murals and tile compositions, clearly visible through the train windows on the walls of the stations as the trains pass through. The entire system is underground in the downtown area, so traffic is not an issue; the Metro is by far the fastest way to go from point A to Point B in Santiago if A and B are within walking distance of the frequent Metro stops.

  We got on the train for a single stop to Santa Ana then switched trains to Line 5 for two stops to Belles Artes. The whole trip including transfer between the two Metro lines took less than ten minutes. The subway was pretty deep underground, but multiple wide escalators at each station made ascent and descent fast and easy.

  “Remember what I said about earthquake construction in Santiago?” inquired Eduardo, shifting effortlessly back into his tourist guide persona. “This Metro system didn't sustain any significant damage in the earthquake that did a lot of damage to many of the older buildings directly above it, as you’ll see in a couple of minutes. The secret is how the subway and tunnels are constructed around here. They are cushioned from the surrounding earth by the engineering equivalent of springs and a lot of concrete for support. It’s expensive, but it works. The other amazing thing about the subway line you just took, which was completed about 10 years ago, is that all of the construction downtown was done using horizontal drilling techniques, which meant it was being built from underground with little or no disturbance on the streets above during the construction. You could see occasional squares of canvas several blocks apart to let people climb up and down ladders to access the construction sites, but everything else was completely invisible to all of the folks who worked and lived here in the most crowded part of Santiago.”

  We went back to street level on an escalator and walked one block over to an urban park. The Chilean National Museum of Fine Arts occupies the Palace of Fine Arts in a lovely park in downtown Santiago. It is a masterpiece of period architecture that dates back to more than 100 years ago and was obviously not built under the current building codes to protect it from a large earthquake. The exterior of the building suffered substantial damage during the major earthquake in 2010, some of which remains obvious. You enter the museum into a huge lobby that was remodeled shortly before the earthquake and held up well. The lobby features some rather interesting art, including participatory performance art. A very large half-pipe construction invites the local skateboarding community to partake, and a lot of the local teenagers (and older skateboarders) are continuously in various stages of climbing the central staircase to a 2nd floor balcony or noisily skateboarding down (or up) the half-pipe course. The imagery and the noise make this a focal point for attention in a very large museum with one of the best, if not the best, collections in South America. We spent half an hour just getting an impression of what the museum contained in its eclectic collection until Eduardo suggested that it was time to go on to the next destination on our mini-vacation.

  Chapter 10. Valparaiso, Vi ña del Mar, and elsewhere

  Our limousine picked us up precisely at 3 PM from in front of the museum. We had our overnight bags with us, and a 1.5-hour drive of about 75 miles north and west to Valparaiso to look forward to. The entire trip was on a high-speed toll road that passed through mainly agricultural country, including several large vineyards and wineries alongside the highway. Along the way the driver commented on notable places and sights we were passing, and told us an amusing story about the history of Valparaiso, which at one time was called San Francisco in honor of Saint Francis of Assisi.

  “Valparaiso was originally named after a small village in Spain, and was the first name given to the port when Spanish explorers discovered it in 1536. Valparaiso grew into a major seaport in the 19th Century when the only practical way to get from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean was via the Straits of Magellan and around Cape Horn. Ironically, it had its most affluent years when the Gold Rush began and San Francisco del Sur was the required stop to restock ship's water supplies and to take on fresh provisions between Atlantic Coast ports in Europe, South America, and the USA and San Francisco del Norte. With the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914, it ceased to be the major international port for the entire Atlantic to Pacific Coast trade route.”

  Our driver was really getting into his story now. He continued enthusiastically, “Prior to the 1849 gold rush in California, San Francisco del Sur rivaled San Francisco del Norte in importance as a commercial port. However, with the huge increase in ship traffic accompanying the massively increased transport of people and equipment to California to mine gold, grow food for the miners, and tend bar for the miners and farmers, San Francisco del Norte grew much faster than its Chilean counterpart, both as a port and as a city. The sailors who worked the Pacific Coast continued to refer to San Francisco del Norte as “San Francisco”, while the Chilean city got the somewhat derisive nickname of “Paco”, the diminutive form of Francisco in Spanish.

  “Needless to say, the city fathers, bankers, Rotary Club members, and local politicians did not care to be known worldwide as ‘Paco’, or ‘Little San Francisco’. Civic pride demanded something better. The name had to be changed. A
fter much debate, the name Valparaiso was re-adopted for the city that had become the little brother, ‘Paco’, of San Francisco del Norte.”

  A while later, we came into Valparaiso, a city literally built on the sides of several mountain peaks. Our driver told us we didn’t have time to stop anywhere, so he was going to give us a narrated driving tour of the city and a few of its major touristic attractions.

  “You’ll like these streets, which are the perfect width for horse-drawn carts,” the driver told us sarcastically as we drove up and down curvy switch-backed streets that were only a few feet wider than our car and sloped up or down as steeply as the average roller coaster. “Strangely enough, they don’t have as many accidents as you might expect. I guess you learn how to drive this way or you move somewhere else.”

  To emphasize his comment, we were climbing an especially steep and curving street when a small brown pickup truck came barreling around the next curve ahead and kept coming straight at us at well over any sensible speed limit. Our limo pulled up on the sidewalk against a convenient cliff to make space, the pickup passed by us with the width of a coat of brown paint of clearance to spare, and both vehicles proceeded on their way as if this were normal.

  The houses were mostly old, small, and clung to the sides of cliffs on relatively tiny lots. The driver slowed to give us a good look at a small cottage painted a very bright shade of blue at the top of one of the higher hills, with an expansive view of the city and the distant harbor on the Pacific Ocean.

  “That’s Pablo Neruda’s main house,” announced the driver. “As you probably know, Neruda was Chile’s, and perhaps the entire world’s, greatest poet of the 20th Century. He was also a beloved politician, a fervent communist, and an internationally admired diplomat. Neruda won a Nobel Prize in literature just a couple of years before he died in 1973. Pablo also had several other houses here in Valparaiso, so when the tourist brochures write about Neruda's house, they may or may not mean this one, which is usually referred to as his "Blue House".”

  We drove towards the big seaport itself, which featured huge stacks of containerized cargo and a lot of freighters in a sheltered Bay that was perfect for the old clipper ships to sail in and out of. The driver turned north along the coastal highway and announced, “Next stop, Viña Del Mar, Vineyard of the Sea. So named because of its extraordinary productivity as a fishery and source of seafood. There’ll be time for a Pisco sour and a bathroom break.”

  We drove through a crowded beachfront downtown that looked a little bit like Santa Barbara or San Diego. The driver pointed out The Miramar Hotel, an older, elegant structure right on the Oceanfront. Across the street was an old castle, Castillo Wulff, built a century earlier by German immigrants to the area. Big elegant hotels and pricy looking restaurants faced the highway and the Pacific Ocean. Crowds of tourists walked the streets and beaches. Traffic moved at a snail's pace. The driver pointed to a small park containing a big clock whose numbers on the clock face were made of fresh flowers.

  "That's called the Plaza de Reloj (Clock Park) or El Parque Reloj de Flores by the locals," the driver announced.

  In 5 minutes we were half a mile and a world away, even though we were still in Viña Del Mar. Now it was rugged beaches, ocean, and weathered shacks containing restaurants, weathered small apartments built of wood, and small shops catering to beach visitors from Santiago. A short ride north of Viña del Mar on the coastal highway brought us to Reñaca and the Mirador Lobos Marinos, a preferred location for watching Sea Lions frolic and bathe in the Pacific Ocean. The Sea Lions were huge; they honked and grunted a good deal, which entertained the tourists when the animals weren’t diving for their fish dinners.

  The many beaches we passed were beautiful---dark sand, blue-green seawater in constant motion, rocky coast. The driver warned us that the water was dangerous, very cold with strong currents and undertow and a lot of unpredictable wave action. There were several drowning deaths reported every year here. The streets were also far from beautiful. A lot of tourists, and presumably some locals, shared the narrow crowded streets with a lot of poorly maintained and poorly fed street dogs. Most of the dogs were unrecognizable small and medium sized mixed breeds with dark brown and light brown colors predominating. Our driver mentioned that the feral dogs were not well controlled and were definitely not meant to be petted or played with, as many of the dogs carried diseases and often tried to bite the tourist’s hand that fed them.

  Our driver was clearly enjoying his role as a tour guide and perhaps also as political commentator. His politics obviously ran left of center. “Those run-down wooden buildings you see lining the streets include a large number of Bed and Breakfast establishments catering to the lower middle class tourists who take their two weeks of vacations to the beaches of Viña del Mar to escape from Santiago’s summer heat. The upper class prefer to stay in the more luxurious hotels like The Miramar in the south of town that we passed as we entered the city, and up in the hills above where we are now. This is the most important beach resort area in Chile, but it is intended to be a playground for the rich. While the working masses are tolerated in this less affluent area, the amenities are pretty rudimentary.”

  On the way back we stopped at a lucky parking space just off the highway and were told we had 10 minutes to get filled with Pisco sour and otherwise emptied in a nearby restaurant. The driver told us to look for the signs that said "Damas" and "Cabelleros", or the unisex sign that said "Baños". Ten minutes later we had taken in about the same amount of fluid in the form of the National Chilean cocktail, the Pisco Sour, as we had donated to the Baños and were back in the limousine, heading east towards Santiago and our eventual destination, San Tomas de Aconcagua in the Aconcagua Valley to the northeast of the capital city.

  It was getting dark so the tourism waned, just in time for the local traffic to noticeably increase as we hit the hordes of commuters driving from work in Santiago to their homes in suburbia and the sprawling barrios of the city. The driver paid a lot more attention to driving on congested highways and through crowded and poorly lit tunnels cut through the solid rock of the Andes as we started to climb eastward and northward out of the valley of the Mapocho River towards the valley of the Acongagua River.

  Suzanne, who had been quiet and thoughtful since we left Viña del Mar, turned towards me and said very seriously, "I think Robert needs a dog to grow up with. I know you would like a hunting dog, Roger. Why don't we buy a nice one that we could breed when she is old enough? We could name her Viña, and we could name her puppies after different varieties of wine grapes."

  "I think I like that idea," I answered. "Let's figure it all out when we get home."

  This was obviously not a time for frank discussion about the case with the driver listening, so we all relaxed with our own thoughts. Eduardo tried calling Martin on his cell phone, and wonder of wonders the call went through. He didn't say much after buenos noches, but spent a lot of time listening and affirming that he understood what he was hearing. About ten minutes later he finished the call, told us he had some news to share when we arrived at our destination, and promptly rearranged his huge body and took a power nap. That seemed like a good idea so we tried to do the same. An extraordinarily short time after I shut my eyes I was jolted awake by the driver announcing we'd be there in five minutes. Two of those minutes were spent getting oriented. It was too dark to see beyond the car's headlights, but we were on a two-lane blacktopped road pretty much by ourselves, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. All of the dense traffic we had been sharing the highway with was somewhere else.

  We turned off the country road onto a dirt and gravel driveway and coasted to a halt several hundred meters further on in front of a huge house. It was too dark to see any details. I thought briefly that we might just have been driven into some elaborate kind of trap, but that didn't seem any too likely and the whole scenario didn't feel wrong. We all walked up to the door and our driver rang the bell. We heard footsteps coming to the door fr
om the inside.

  Chapter 11. San Tomas de Aconcagua

  Our host was wearing an expensive and well-tailored business suit and white shirt, but had removed the tie as a gesture towards informality. He was mid-fifties, looked fit, about 5 foot eight, 175 pounds, graying dark hair, dark eyes, and a smile of greeting that lit up his entire face. His English was excellent with little or no Spanish accent. "Good evening. Welcome to my home."

  He ushered us into the living room where he introduced himself and the rest of his family with obvious pride. "I am Octavio Cortes. Please call me Octavio. This is my wife Alicia." A woman of about the same age as Octavio stood up from her chair to greet us. She had obviously been beautiful as a younger woman; now she was handsome.

  "And these are my two sons Roberto and Fernando". The two boys stood and shook hands all around. The older was about 17, the younger perhaps 15. Both boys had their mother's good looks and their father's stature and demeanor.

  "And last, but certainly not least, this is my daughter Louisa." Louisa stood and shook hands. She was a beauty of perhaps 19 or 20 who looked a lot like her mother must have looked 30 years ago. He introduced each of us by name, city, and country of origin, an impressive gesture since we had not been formally introduced to him.

  Octavio went on, "I went to university in Canada where I studied economics, which is where my wife and I both learned our English. Our children go to a school here in San Tomas where they are taught in English, so are completely bilingual. Please feel free to converse in English if that is more comfortable for you. Dinner should be ready in 10 minutes or so if you'd like to wash up first. There are bathrooms upstairs attached to the bedrooms you will use. Roberto and Louisa can show you where the towels and small necessities are kept, as well as give you a quick tour of the house so you will be able to find your way around. Let's all meet back here in 10 or 15 minutes if that is all right with you."