by K. Ferrari
“You’re missing a bullet here,” he says. “It’s been fired recently.” He’s arching his eyebrows, letting the bad cop peep back through.
“The gentleman has a license,” Sosa butts in, a good cop through and through. “He doesn’t have to explain anything.”
“A couple of dogs,” Mr. Machi claims, not especially sure why.
“I just scared ’em off,” he says.
“I don’t know where exactly, over there, I think, on the other side of the highway,” he ventures.
Sosa smiles.
Sánchez smiles.
Mr. Machi realizes that it’s time. He stops trembling, recovers his composure, and smiles in turn.
“Well now, officers,” he says.
And this is why, when he finally puts the BMW in gear—though his wallet is notably lighter, missing several hundred-peso bills, and his Glock is now tucked into Officer Sánchez’s belt next to his subpar regulation pistol—Mr. Machi feels like himself again. The two officers wave him off with copious apologies and offers of assistance with whatever he might need, but Mr. Machi, once more master of himself and a master to others, no longer hears them, and pulls off at top speed.
“I need to get this over with now,” he says, looking himself in the eyes in his rearview mirror.
But it’s not going to be that easy.
14
NOT EVEN TEN MINUTES have passed when he finds the perfect spot: isolated, no gawkers in sight, a barren plot of overgrown grass no one saw him drive to. All that’s left is to beat back his nausea and pull it out of the trunk. It.
It, Mr. Machi thinks. He doesn’t even let his brain circuits trace out the word corpse.
It.
Later, there will be time to figure out who is responsible, he thinks, but first, get rid of it and go home to get some rest.
But he’s got to open the trunk, drag it out, throw it in the grass. It, which, even if he won’t call it by its name, is a blood-drenched cadaver with its face ripped apart by a bullet.
A bullet, Mr. Machi thinks.
“You’re missing a bullet here,” he hears Sánchez say again. And again, he’s rigid with terror.
Impossible, he thinks.
Sánchez’s voice reverberates, clear as gin: “It’s been fired recently.”
Impossible, Mr. Machi thinks, no way they did it with my gun.
But why not? The questions bore through Mr. Machi’s lumbering arguments and tangle up into a giant ball that threatens to crush him. They took the car, didn’t they? Wasn’t the Glock always in the glove box?
Now the Glock is tucked into the belt of a police officer, he remembers. Maybe that’s a good thing.
When the dead guy shows up, how’s that pig gonna prove he’s not the one who iced him?
The idea amuses Mr. Machi.
Enough.
It’s time to stop thinking and put his shoulder to the wheel.
He opens his wallet and sucks up the last bit of what’s left in the bindle. The coke gives him the coolness he was missing, the courage he’s never had, and clears away something of his constantly growing weariness.
The place is promising. The hour, too, Mr. Machi thinks.
Now, he commands himself, and steps out of the BMW. Coasting on that same momentum, he opens the trunk, passes one arm under the body, and grabs the lapel of its blue suit jacket, trying not to look. After two tugs, the body is halfway out. He feels blood on his hands, tears in his eyes, and cold sweat on his forehead. A long-suppressed heave forces its way up his chest, but he manages to get it under control.
“Just a little more, Luisito,” he says, encouraging himself. And he gives it another pull.
The body won’t give.
Again.
Nothing.
What the fuck is it now? Mr. Machi wonders, pissed.
Must have got caught on something, he thinks.
He knows he has to look, that to dislodge whatever it is he’ll have to look at that faceless body in the blue suit, and then, no matter how stubbornly he persists in calling it it, it will be transformed into a man.
A dead man.
A dead man with a shredded face.
A dead man with a shredded face drenched in blood.
A dead man with a shredded face drenched in blood in the trunk of his car.
Mr. Machi quashes his vertigo and looks to see what it is that’s snagged in the trunk. And this time, his heaving overcomes all resistance and Mr. Machi collapses in the grass, vomits, vomits, and vomits.
When he manages to pull himself up off the ground, he brushes off his Scappino suit, now blotched with blood, puke, and earth.
What next? he asks himself.
Enough, he says to himself, enough.
The cadaver’s right hand is shackled to the BMW. Mr. Machi recognizes the object choking off the dead man’s wrist. An innocent toy, a fantasy plaything, a secret little trinket.
Secret, he thinks. This changes everything. It means, for example, that Pereyra couldn’t have done it alone, because he didn’t know. There had to be someone else in the mix. An ally. Maybe a girl.
This changes everything, he repeats to himself.
The questions explode in his chest behind his blood-soaked shirt and vomit-flecked suit. Mr. Machi pushes the body back inside the trunk. And closes the lid.
Secret, he thinks.
The possibilities open up like a fan, and the air they stir up is putrid.
PART V
SIRENS
15
THAT’S HOW IT IS, sooner or later he drops you on your ass. He likes to change it up constantly, doesn’t matter what you offer him or how much you put up with, sooner or later it’s: adios, you’re done.
But hey, it was good while it lasted, right? Or something. Live by the sword, die by the sword. Or maybe dead men tell no tales, I don’t know, just pick the cliché that works.
I mean, when I decided I wasn’t gonna go on being the girl he just slipped it to now and again in his office or in the changing rooms at El Imperio, that I was gonna be The Lover, I knew I’d have to push Colorada aside, and when I did it, and I didn’t look back, then, well, I don’t know …
My problem is coke. I started snorting it up by the ton, the good shit, with Machi, and now I got a taste for it, big-time.
Anyway, things were tough with Colorada, she’s not like the rest of us—firm legs, tight ass, but flat as a board—no, she’s got a rack like two melons and a crazy head of hair, and with that mouth, she looks like, I don’t know, Angelina Jolie or something. And she doesn’t get uptight: she likes to get fucked, she likes to party, I don’t know, everything … She had Machi wrapped around her finger.
And that’s where I wanted to be. I mean, all I had ever asked for was some dinners out and a few lines of blow. I wanted better: a new car, a new place, I don’t know, aim high, right.
So when the trip to Mar del Plata came up, I didn’t think twice, I got it in my head that this was my moment. Colorada’s no dummy, she saw it coming. Later on Machi told me what she said: Let’s go by ourselves, what are you gonna invite her for, we’ll pick up some other chick once we get there. But I was talking his ear off about how I wanted to eat Colorada’s pussy in front of him, like just imagine how I’m gonna make her squirm with these purple bangs. Shit like that, I don’t know.
So we take off for Mar del Plata and we arrive three hours later. I was already getting him hot while we were on the road, moaning, putting on a show, I was feeling up Colorada’s tits and licking my lips, I don’t know. And when we stopped to do a few lines when we were getting close to Atalaya, Colorada went to the bathroom and I took my shot and crawled up into the passenger seat, and as soon as we took off I was touching him while he drove, getting him ready, I don’t know.
Right, so that night we go to the casino and we make a little scratch. We’re shitfaced when we make it back to the hotel and Machi’s popped like two Viagras, not to mention all the coke. He’s on fire. Right, so he puts
it in Colorada, basically I stick to the sidelines, a little rubbing and touching, I don’t know, suck his cock a few seconds, but more than anything I was waiting for my shot. And I didn’t have to wait long.
Machi went off to pour a whiskey and I grabbed Colorada around the waist.
Come here, I said to her, now it’s my turn.
And when he turned around with his whiskey, we were already all over each other, sixty-nining like crazy. I was playing it cool, but it was the first time I was ever with a chick, at first it grossed me out a little bit, but hey, I don’t know, you get used to it and it’s pretty hot. The problem is I get to a point where I want someone to stick it in me, you know?
Anyway, we go on like that for an hour, licking and fingering each other. And Machi starts jacking off like a madman and drinking his whiskey. And snorting coke. And my nose starts watering.
Until finally he says, Stop, stop, I feel like I’m gonna have a heart attack, my chest is hurting and my arm’s falling asleep.
That was when I saw the opportunity I was waiting for.
I don’t think so, nasty boy, I said to him in the most sensual voice I could muster. And I went crawling over to my purse.
It’s all that coke and Viagra you’ve been taking, I said as I took out the pink fur handcuffs.
And you’ve been watching us and jerking off for an hour, I said, crawling over toward him.
But now I’m going to make you sit still for a moment, I said, and cuffed his hands behind the chair while I knelt between his legs, letting my bangs tickle his dick.
Besides, a heart attack would have put the other arm to sleep, nasty boy, I said before I put his dick in my mouth.
16
PATRÓN CASAL had gotten a contract to take over as director of football down in Peru. After more than two years’ experience with his beloved Central and a couple of tries on the home turf in Vélez and Colón, the gig with Deportivo Espejo popped up. It was the perfect opportunity to play in the big leagues. And the money was right, too, way more than they’d offered him to go back to Central, which was his other option.
Everyone who worked at El Imperio heard him finalize the details. It was around midnight, we’d ended our dinner with whiskey and cigars, Machi had promised us after-dinner trim, then Patrón Casal’s cell phone rings.
“Excuse me,” he says, “I need to take a call.”
And we all heard the other people offer toasts and laugh at the roughnecks’ table Machi had set up to celebrate.
“If we make it to the quarterfinals, I want to do something special for all the guys,” Casal said, “and if we beat Libertadores, we’re talking half a mil extra.”
The Peruvians from Deportivo Espejo said yes to everything. They were committed to getting a coach with a strong personality and a killer instinct, and they were backed by the ample cash the Montesinos family had to launder.
“It’s done,” Casal said when he returned to the roughnecks’ table—Carlitos Pairetti was there, Bamba, Tito Mariani, Marcos Feldman, Alejandro Wilkinson—and every one of us saw them toasting and clapping him on the back to congratulate him. And after midnight we heard Mr. Machi say, in all that cigar smoke, over the clinking of whiskey tumblers, how happy he was for his cousin.
And he repeated my cousin several times, though we knew he was just first cousin to Machi’s wife, Mirta, and Machi, in any case, was more a motorsports man. He could probably tell you the times for every one of Fontanita’s races or all the stories about Pairetti in the Orange Thunder, but he couldn’t give a fuck about soccer. Boxing, sure, he had a little side business there.
But obviously, having big shots like Patrón or Bamba around was good for El Imperio. Soccer and tango. Tango and motorsports. Power and tango. Tango and whores. Those were the reasons for the guests, the reiterated toasts, the interminable after-dinner chitchat.
After a while the table got even rowdier and started ordering champagne.
“Don’t forget to tell the media this is where you worked out the contract, cousin,” we heard Mr. Machi say.
“Bamba, you can mention it next time you’re on TV,” Feldman added slyly.
They were on their third round of champagne when we heard Mr. Machi propose one last toast.
“To my cousin—what am I saying!—to my brother from another mother, Eugenio Casal,” he said. Moved, or else drunk, El Patrón embraced him.
“You don’t know how happy I am,” Mr. Machi said, hugging him back. And that must have been true. Soon enough, that very same Saturday, all of us at El Imperio found out though.
At four in the afternoon, Patrón Casal took off for Peru. Three hours hadn’t passed when we saw his wife, Claudia, a beautiful woman with ivory-white skin, show up with Mr. Machi and take the stairs up to his office. And if there was anyone who’d managed to ignore her moans and his panting for an hour, well, when the phone rang in reception afterward, the gossip spread through the place like a trail of gunpowder. Eduardo, another hanger-on from the family, picked up. A thirty-year-old nitwit, a good-for-nothing nephew, his sister’s kid, Mr. Machi keeps him around doing odd jobs.
“Send me up a bottle of Luigi Bosca, chop-chop,” Mr. Machi ordered.
And maybe Eduardo, a spoiled little pushover who can’t keep his trap shut, went up there a little too quick.
Because then we found out—we couldn’t not find out—that when the bottle of wine reached the office, Mr. Machi still had his shirt unbuttoned over his quivering chest, that Claudia Casal’s back—as she lay there facedown on the desk—was glimmering with drops of sweat, and that a pair of pink fur handcuffs were still wrapped around her ivory-white wrists.
17
HOW MANY TIMES had he told his father, his godfather Alejandro, his uncle Carlos, that he wasn’t like them.
The little shit believes in love, the three of them joked, with giggles all around, and Alan blushed and said it wasn’t that, they didn’t understand, it didn’t matter. They would never understand.
“I’m not like you,” he repeated, biting his lips with irritation, “I don’t need the same things you people do.”
“Say what you want,” Alejandro Wilkinson told him that Christmas, when he was just four months away from turning fifteen, “but it’s a done deal: your next birthday you’re getting three of the finest hookers Argentina can offer.”
“I’ll talk with Mariela,” Pairetti added.
“I’ll cover the tab,” Mr. Machi concluded.
And they laughed, the three of them, when Alan repeated that they didn’t understand him.
“Okay, fine, we’ll go to dinner then,” they said to calm him down.
And the night before Alan’s birthday, they stopped by the boxing gym where he trained—he hits like a mule, Mr. Machi boasted—and they told him they had a table reserved at the restaurant in the Fajina hotel. A man’s dinner, they said. And Alan enjoyed everything until the dessert came.
“Coffee?” Mr. Machi asked. All three—the birthday boy, his godfather, and his so-called uncle—said yes. They talked about boxing for a while.
“I already told you, Alan, in boxing, the big bucks go to the promoters and the bookies,” Alejandro said. “You don’t believe me, ask your old man.”
They all laughed, even Alan, who didn’t get the joke.
And when they’d finished their round of coffees and started in on the whiskey, Mariela Báez’s yellow Hyundai Galloper showed up, and the diva stepped out with three other girls. The dessert to the dessert. The birthday present. As promised.
“My God, Luis, look how big this boy’s getting,” Mariela said to Mr. Machi by way of greeting.
Let’s talk about Mariela Báez. Her fifteen minutes of fame lasted a decade—the nineties—from her debut on a Sunday talk show to her getting fat to the death of her boyfriend. Her first time on the small screen was in the “Goddess of the Beach” feature on Mariano Trossini’s show Summer Rhythm. That introduction summed up Mariela’s entire career: ass, tits, a huge mouth,
and beguiling eyes. For three and a half minutes or so they would show her: first strolling down the beach with two white sarongs, one tied around her waist and the other around her chest, in marked contrast with her jet-black hair; then in a green thong, her hands barely covering her bare breasts, while Trossini and his chorus of mental defectives made comments like “She’s got a great future in front of her,” stressing the words in front of her as the waves pounded Mariela’s grand tumescent breasts.
Later, she made the rounds of every third-rate comedy with a role for a bimbo au naturel and a good number of variety shows to boot. In ’97 she hooked up with a dance-hall singer named Ramiro. Then her career took a brief musical turn and she even recorded a CD.
“This is the bam-cha-ka, this is the rhythm of love,” Mariela sang, and swayed her hips.
But in June of 2000, at the height of his career, Ramiro flipped his truck and died on the way back from a concert.
It was a tough blow for Mariela. She went to the USA to mourn, and when she returned, she found her day had passed and she couldn’t get a job in media. Little by little, she started representing other girls: dancers, strippers, escorts.
Now, somewhere in her thirties, she was a kind of madam at a club called Show Business and the main purveyor of kittens at all price points for El Imperio.
“They’ve got a little present for you,” she said, stroking the teenager’s cheek. “They’re gonna give it to you upstairs.”
“No. Papa, tell me you didn’t,” Alan said.
The three girls giggled. The three men, too. Mariela caressed Alan again and asked him if he didn’t like the girls she’d brought him. Like some flesh-peddling goddess, she’d made them in her own image. They were different versions of her, fifteen years younger. Besides their hair color, little distinguished them from what Mariela had been in her heyday on Trossini’s show: the same curves, the provocative stare, the same big mouth and beguiling eyes, one after another.