by K. Ferrari
He opens his wallet and takes out his license. He cuts out two thick lines on the dash and snorts them up greedily. The cold rush of the coke rouses him.
First confirm. Then decide. He goes back to the trunk and opens it.
It’s as though the BMW were pregnant with a man in a blue suit covered in blood. In the fetal position, seeming to embrace himself, the dead man nearly fills Mr. Machi’s trunk.
The cocaine has him thinking quick and clear. Mr. Machi realizes the first order of business is calling back the insurance company.
“Carbajales Insurance Company, good morning, my name is Patricia, how can I assist you?” Another gentle, impersonal voice, this time female.
“Gimme Fernando,” Mr. Machi tells her, trying to steady the trembling in his voice.
“Please stay on the line for a moment while I transfer you over, sir,” the impersonal voice says before giving way to “Für Elise.” Twenty seconds pass, endless for Mr. Machi, before Fernando comes on, begs his pardon for the delay, and asks how he can be of assistance.
“I don’t want the mechanic,” Mr. Machi shouts. “Listen closely, pal, do not send the mechanic that I called for, okay?”
“My apologies, sir. Could you please let me know your license plate number?”
“VTN-431,” Mr. Machi says, and repeats that he no longer wants the mechanic they were going to send.
Fernando—who now knows who he’s talking to and remembers their earlier conversation and the mention of the name López Lecube—asks if there’s been a problem, tells him the mechanic is on his way, that he will be there in fifteen minutes to change Mr. Machi’s tire, just as requested.
“Don’t send him, pal. Make absolutely sure he doesn’t show up here, get it?” Mr. Machi says.
Fernando’s voice, less gentle and impersonal now than anxious and confused, replies: No problem, he’ll cancel the service order, and thank you for calling …
But Mr. Machi’s already hung up.
He takes another look at the blue-suited cadaver in his trunk. Suppressing the disgust touching the lifeless body provokes, he turns its head around to see if he knows the guy. But Mr. Machi can’t see the man’s face. There isn’t one. Where a face should be, there’s only wreckage: bones, organic matter, blood, and gunpowder. Mr. Machi feels himself heave again and tries to steady his stomach. He wonders: how close did they have to be when they shot him to do that to his face?
He wonders: how long has this guy been dead?
But more than anything, he wonders what a corpse is doing in his two-hundred-thousand-dollar BMW. And how the fuck it got there.
6
NOW HE HAS A PRACTICAL matter to deal with: to ditch the body, he needs to get off the Panamericana, and to do that, he needs to get the spare tire out from underneath, no way around it.
Knowing it won’t be the last time he touches that cold, stiff body, doubled over with a bloody mess where there ought to be a face, Mr. Machi pushes the thing with all his might to the very back of the trunk. Then he starts jerking on the tire. His sunglasses fall and one of their hinges chips on the ground.
Son of a bitch, Mr. Machi thinks.
He picks them up and sets them on top of his head like a hairband. He feels the weight of the stares coming from every car that passes by. He sees the smug smiles of the drivers in their Dunas, Peugeot 504s, and Renault 19s, looking at a car they’ll never afford stranded on the side of the road—he knows they won’t be able to resist sharing this tiny triumph with their wives, and that they’ll point at him, asking:
“What could be giving that guy in the black car so much trouble?”
They’ll joke, they’ll laugh.
“If it’s so hard for him to change a tire, why doesn’t he call roadside assistance or something?”
“Maybe the car cost so much he can’t afford the insurance,” the wittiest among them will say.
But these jokes, which would normally have made Mr. Machi’s blood boil, now don’t disturb him in the least. Or, if they do, it’s for a different reason. His worry now is that he’s drawing attention to himself—to his backbreaking efforts, to his broken-down BMW—and that every one of those poor fuckers looking at him and smirking is a potential witness.
Finally he manages to pull out the tire, the jack, the lug wrench from beneath the stiff, heavy arm of the corpse.
He changes the tire as fast as he can.
Like he was working the pit for Norberto Fontana, he thinks.
Then he puts the powerful engine in gear and jets off—a two-hundred-thousand-dollar lightning bolt on the asphalt of the Panamericana—leaving behind a mound of incriminating evidence on the roadside: the lug wrench, the jack, and the punctured tire.
7
MR. MACHI BUTTONS his Scappino blazer and flips up the lapels to cover the bloodstains streaking his white Armani shirt. He doesn’t look at himself in the rearview. If he did, he’d see he’s aged ten years in the past fifteen minutes.
He accelerates, no fixed course in mind, and makes a call.
“You have reached…” the voicemail of his security chief begins.
Where’s that dope when I need him? Mr. Machi wonders. Since when did he decide he doesn’t need to bother taking my calls?
“… the number of Robledo Pereyra…”
Don’t I pay him twice what he used to make? Didn’t I take him on after that shitshow in Ciudadela? Wasn’t it my lawyers who pulled his balls out of the fire? Didn’t I spend a fortune on witnesses? But hey, it was no big deal, because that’s what I do: Business. Clean business, dirty business. Business.
What I don’t do is deal with bodies in trunks, for fuck’s sake, he thinks with mounting irritation. That’s what I pay him for, and now he won’t pick up.
“You have reached the number of Robledo Pereyra, please leave a message…”
Plus, I’ve got you by the balls, Cesspit—now he’s having a full-blown conversation in his head—and we both know it: so what the fuck are you doing not picking up?
“You have reached the number of Robledo Pereyra, please leave a message after the tone.”
“Call me, Cesspit. It’s urgent,” is the message Mr. Machi finally leaves, his voice trembling more from fury than from fear.
A minute passes.
Mr. Machi glances at his white gold Rolex.
Two.
He looks back at the Rolex, taps instinctively with his index finger on the glass. Then he takes the first exit off the Panamericana.
Imagine that moron’s had a heart attack and I’m waiting for a dead man to call me back, Mr. Machi thinks. That’s how Loco Wilkinson died—a miserable, rotten heart attack in his sleep.
He smiles at the thought of Cesspit Pereyra’s giant inert body on a bed with white sheets—his thick, graying mustache over his rigid mouth, his beard climbing halfway up his cheek, a cigarette burning down in the ashtray, his eyes staring into nothingness—while his cell phone rings and rings. But this image immediately reminds Mr. Machi of the shredded face and blue suit in his trunk, and his smile vanishes, transformed into a look of dread. He shakes his head, as though trying to keep the thought of it at bay.
No, no way, who gave him permission to die? he thinks, wavering between perplexity and indignation.
But if he’s not dead, then why won’t he pick up?
There’s a pause in his deliberations. He advances up a tree-lined street and turns onto the first dirt road to look for an empty lot.
What if he’s the one who stashed it there? The question comes out of nowhere and smacks Mr. Machi across the face. On the chessboard in his mind, a few scattered pieces shift into place.
What if he’s the one who put the dead guy there—he presses on, still incredulous, but horrified by his growing conviction—and that’s the reason he won’t pick up?
Who else could lug a dead body down to the basement of El Imperio, open the trunk of the BMW without breaking the lock, dump the corpse, and disappear, just like that? Only Cessp
it, the direct supervisor of that bald-headed gorilla who guards the garage. A scary guy, Pereyra, Mr. Machi thinks. And complicated. You never know what’s what with him: sometimes he’s a roughneck, sometimes a gentleman. Always dangerous though. Very dangerous.
That son of a bitch is trying to fuck me so he can rest easy about the thing with Ciudadela, he thinks. Or the thing with that fuckhead from Entre Ríos. Or the thing with Don Rogelio. Or for cash. Son of a bitch.
Then his cell rings: Pereyra.
Mr. Machi doesn’t pick up.
I’m all alone, he thinks.
PART III
TAMED
8
BACK WHEN MR. MACHI met Robledo Pereyra, no one called him Cesspit. Even now, no one calls him that except for Mr. Machi. People who know him from the wild years of the dictatorship call him “the Fox”; people who know him from his boxing days call him “Knuckles”; his family calls him by his childhood nickname, Robi, which he can’t stand; his closest friends call him Pereyra. Mr. Machi dubbed him Cesspit the first day they met, and it was his personal privilege to do so.
Alejandro Wilkinson introduced them a long time back.
“You need a guy like this, Machi,” Wilkinson told him when the two men showed up one day, “and he needs you to help him out of a little predicament. A good lawyer, a decent alibi, you catch my drift, people know me too well for me to be of much help, but you, you’re clean. And if you do this for him, he’ll have your back from here on out. This guy’s a rock … Tell him, Pereyra.”
A real bag of shit, this Pereyra. One foulmouthed motherfucker.
He never says “Zip it,” he says “Shut your cock-holster,” or “How’s about I sew your fucking face shut.” He never says “That dude over there,” he says “That pencil-dicked gimp.” He never says “Check out that hot number,” he says “Get a load of that piece of skirt with the dick-sucking lips over there.”
And that first time was no exception.
Explaining himself, he never told Mr. Machi “I’ve got a bit of a problem,” he said, “I’m in it up to my fucking balls.” He didn’t talk about murder preceded by torture, he said, “Damn right I wasted that Jew fuck, I even made him shit his pants before he kicked the bucket.” He didn’t say it was a matter of vengeance, something he’d been waiting years for; he said, “I’ve been dreaming of taking that shithead out since I had two hairs on my dick.” He didn’t say the deceased happened to have a relative employed in the justice department, and that this was why there was an investigation already closing in on him; he said, “And apparently that kike was kin to some swinging dick downtown who’s trying to nail me to the fucking wall.” He didn’t finish up by complaining that his boss had left him out in the cold; instead he spat and said, “After all the shit I been through, scumbag ditches me like I’m Joe Jerkoff and tells me I gotta fix shit on my own.”
“Don’t rile yourself up. I’ll talk to one of my lawyers and we’ll get you three or four witnesses to place you somewhere else. Then you can come work for me. What’d you say you make?” Mr. Machi said after listening to the man’s explanations.
Pereyra gave him a number, followed by the phrase: “That’s what that greedy rat fuck pays me.”
“You’re a Cesspit, Pereyra,” Mr. Machi said, cracking up at the comparison, and added, “You’re gonna need to work on your vocabulary, eh? You work for me now, Cesspit. I’ll pay you double, how’s that sound?” and the sobriquet and the doubled salary served as confirmation of ownership. Mr. Machi had bought himself some muscle same as a guy goes to a pet shop to buy himself a dog.
“Start getting my security together, then tell me whatever you need,” Mr. Machi said with a handshake. It was the first and last time they bothered pretending to be equals.
“Leave us alone now, Cesspit, I want to talk with our friend Wilkinson here,” Mr. Machi said.
“Of course, Mr. Machi,” Pereyra responded, already knowing his place.
9
“TAKE THAT DIPSHIT over there in the yellow tank top,” Pereyra said, “you think he even knows who the commie fuck he’s got stamped on there is?”
Wilkinson enjoyed Pereyra’s fits of indignation. And they call me loco, he thought.
“Because at least you all knew—maybe we scared you shitless, but you knew. These stupid fucks though…”
“So what are you gonna do, you gonna tell him?” Wilkinson egged him on for his own amusement.
They were at a roadhouse alongside Route 12 headed toward Misiones, eating sweetbreads and drinking red wine. Alejandro Wilkinson, who boasted of never drinking wines that cost less than two hundred dollars, thought, Here goes my last stab at populism, and chuckled. They were on their way to pick up matching 4x4s from Brazil and a package of coke Romero had sent.
“Reckon I will,” Pereyra said. Then he wiped off his mouth with the back of his hand and turned to the neighboring table: “Hey you, dickhead, get over here…”
“Me?” the kid in the yellow tank top asked, perplexed. With that freckled face and those frightened eyes, he couldn’t have been a day over twenty. On his yellow tank top, under the face of Che Guevara, was the legend BETTER TO LIVE ON YOUR FEET THAN TO DIE ON YOUR KNEES.
“Yeah, you, motherfucker,” Pereyra said.
The kid in the yellow tank top was sitting with two of his friends. They were drinking beers and talking about some girls they had met in the last town over. They were traveling in a dinged-up Gol, and their backpacks were on the ground. Wilkinson smiled, shook his head, and chewed. He thought about the exquisite taste of the sweetbreads and the pleasures of going on the road with Pereyra, who had just pulled out a .45, aimed it between Che Guevara’s eyes, and repeated the words: “I said, get over here.”
Frightened, the kid blubbered the word please while his friends beat a retreat, knocking over a beer bottle that fell to the floor and broke, and the owner of the roadhouse pleaded for calm.
“You shut your beak, this ain’t about you,” Pereyra ordered.
Then, to the kid in the yellow tank top:
“Stop there.”
In the brief silence, nothing could be heard but the clanking of Alejandro Wilkinson’s flatware.
“You know who that motherfucker is that you got on your shirt?” Pereyra asked.
“Please, mister…”
“Don’t ‘please, mister’ me, fuckhead, do you know or not?”
“No, no. I mean, yeah. Yeah, I know: it’s Che, but…”
“You read what it says there on that piece of shit muscle shirt you got on?”
“It … yeah … uh…”
“Cool, motherfucker. Then I’ll give you ten seconds to choose: live on your knees or die on your feet. Ten, nine, eight…”
“But, mister…”
“Seven, six…”
The kid in the yellow tank top’s blubbering turned to sobs as Wilkinson, entertained, wolfed down the last bit of sweetbreads and walked to the cash register to pay.
“Five, four…”
“C-come on … please…”
“Three, two…”
“No, please,” he got out before kneeling down.
“See, what’d I tell you, Alejandro, look … These pussies ain’t got a fucking clue. And what about your gay-ass friends? Where’d they run off to? Huh?”
Wilkinson nodded. He put down the money for the sweetbreads, the wine, the beers that the kid in the yellow tank top and his friends hadn’t paid for, and laid a crisp hundred on the counter for a tip.
“For your service, and your discretion,” he explained.
“Of course, sir,” the proprietor said, stuffing the cash into the pocket of a filthy, badly tied apron, “at your service.”
“Enough, faggot,” Pereyra said, pressing his toe into the kid in the Che tank top, who was still kneeling on the ground sobbing. “Stop, you already picked…”
The kid went on sniffling awhile, then stood up slowly, a tremor traveling through his entire body. When he was up, stil
l crying, and tried to utter the word mister again, Pereyra stopped him.
“You chose to live, faggot,” he said, then shot him once in each knee.
The shots even gave Alejandro Wilkinson a jolt; he hadn’t seen them coming. Anxious, he thought: I’ve created a monster. The last thing this animal needed was a guy like Machi to have his back. Who’ll stop him now? But he didn’t let his worry show.
“You’re off the rails, Pereyra,” he said, splitting his sides. “Let’s go or we won’t make it to Misiones.”
“Yeah, let’s go,” Pereyra said, shrouded in smoke from a freshly lit cigarette.
“You hear that fucker squeal?” he said when they were getting into the car.
A few steps away, on the ground, beneath the kid in the yellow tank top, who was screaming like a madman, a puddle of blood grew and grew.
And grew.
10
“WHAT DO YOU WANT HERE?” Don Rogelio said. He had a place, Doctor Tango, along the same lines as El Imperio, and there had been some—how to put it—disagreement between the two concerning clientele.
“Don Rogelio’s old-school, he won’t listen, he doesn’t get it, he doesn’t want to hear it,” Mr. Machi had complained a few hours before, like a whiny teenager. “He’s not the type you can talk to.”
“If he’s not someone you can talk to, then that’s my line, sir,” Cesspit Pereyra said.
“I don’t know, the old man’s an institution,” Mr. Machi said hesitantly, “and he’s got some heavyweights of his own, you know…”
There was scorn and perplexity in the smile that spread beneath Pereyra’s tufted mustache. Heavyweights? he thought. Who does this dumb fuck think he’s talking to?
But what he said was: “I think I can handle this, sir.”
“Look, Cesspit, keep it clean, I don’t want any trouble. I’m looking for an arrangement, something where the both of us can get our slice,” Mr. Machi added.