Like Flies from Afar

by K. Ferrari

  “It’s not that,” Alan dissimulated.

  “Don’t worry, they aren’t your present, they’re just going to give you your present,” his papa said, trying to calm him down. “This is the present,” he said, and handed a package to one of the girls.

  But when Alan and the three girls were about to go up to the bedroom, Mr. Machi leaned in toward the one he had given the package.

  “You better drain every drop out of him, got it?” he said with a mischievous wink.

  “Don’t you worry,” the girl answered, hanging back while Mr. Machi patted her ass, “everything will come out … just fine.”

  But not everything came out just fine, because half an hour later, Alejandro Wilkinson, Carlitos Pairetti, and Mr. Machi saw Alan come down in one of the elevators, alone. They saw his red eyes and pursed lips. They set down their glasses of cognac and their Montecristo cigars and watched him run off and hug another young man—thin and blond—who was waiting for him by the door, and who stroked his head as they embraced. They could read the lips of the thin, blond boy: it’s nothing, it’s over, everything will be fine. And seconds later, after their embrace went limp like a badly tied knot, Alan came back to the table, and everyone heard the dull thud of the pink fur handcuffs falling on its surface, and Alan saying, “Papa, I think these are yours.”

  18

  “IF I MAY, SIR,” Gladis said, entering the bedroom with the breakfast tray.

  The lady of the house had gone to Santa Fe again, to spend some time at her parents’, as she did every time she and the man of the house fought; the daughter, Luciana, had been living with her boyfriend for several months now; and Alan, the baby, well, the young man, really, had spent the night with one of his little friends. It was now or never.

  “Anything else, sir?” Gladis asked, hoping her message was clear, looking intently and shamelessly at the silk sheets concealing Mr. Machi’s nakedness and leaving the tray—coffee, toast, strawberry jam—on the bedside table.

  “Sugar,” Mr. Machi said, “don’t forget the sugar…”

  “Two?” Gladis asked, smiling with her perfect teeth, leaning over to scoop in one spoonful of sugar for each of the protuberances exposed to Mr. Machi’s view by the low-cut neckline of her uniform, her lack of a bra, and her posture over the nightstand.

  She’s a looker, this little Paraguayan, he thought, she’s putting it all out there.

  Nice tits, nice legs on this bunny.

  Gladis turned around to leave and, as was to be expected, dropped something so she could bend over to look for it.

  Nice ass too, Mr. Machi confirmed.

  “Come here,” he said. “I don’t want to have breakfast alone, have a seat here.” He patted the mattress with his hand.

  “Here, sir?” Gladis asked, feigning unease.

  “Here?” she asked again, passing her hand over the silk sheets, as though absentmindedly, to the place where she presumed Mr. Machi’s sex was waiting.

  “Ay, sorry,” she said, with a blush that was phonier than a three-dollar bill.

  “What will the lady say?” she added.

  “The lady isn’t home,” Mr. Machi said, smacking his lips, as Gladis, already half nude, slipped beneath the sheets. “And I don’t like to have breakfast alone. I can’t stand being by myself, you know?”

  She was a feisty one, the Paraguayan. She shouted loud, mixing Spanish and Guaraní, she scratched, she bit. Mr. Machi liked this scrappy little thing, the way she up and climbed into his bed, almost like she owned it. He liked her enough that he got the urge to try to tame her.

  “Get over here,” he ordered.

  He took her from behind. His heart rate sped up as his hips slapped her buttocks. Face pressed into the pillow, hands shackled to the bedstead by the furry pink handcuffs, Gladis shivered and moaned.

  Mr. Machi relished that groaning and the smack of his hips against her buttocks; the furious pumping of his heart echoed in his head like a charging cavalry. Maybe that’s why he didn’t hear the car pull up, or the tinkle of the keys, or the unmistakable clicking of heels. All he heard—amid moaning, smacking, and thuds—was the sound of the suitcase dropping to the floor.

  Then he heard—“In my own bed”—the voice of his wife, who had come back from Santa Fe. “Son of a bitch.”

  PART VI

  FANTASTICAL

  19

  HIS DOUBTS FAN OUT, stir up the fetid air full of familiar names, unconsidered possibilities. Mr. Machi finds potential enemies where before he had seen only rivals, nuisances, underlings.

  Still, there’s something that doesn’t add up. Which of those enemies lurking in the shadows could organize, let alone execute, a plan like this? Stealing his car, resetting the odometer, taking his Glock and shooting some guy in the face with it, then chaining him up in the trunk with the same pair of handcuffs he used for his sexual high jinks? Not only does Pereyra not know about the fur handcuffs, he would never go in for something so convoluted: he’d just pop a bullet in Machi, end of story. And for the rest: who has the power, the brains? Whoever it was, they couldn’t have done it alone. There had to be someone else involved.

  But again: who?

  And how?

  Maybe they paid off that nameless gorilla who watches the garage at El Imperio?

  Maybe they paid off Cesspit?

  Unless, conjectures Mr. Machi, and every door he opens leads to new layers of confusion and dread, they took the BMW while he was at home? El Barrio has private security, sure, but they could have bribed one of the guards. Or maybe it was someone they’d never suspect. Someone close to him. A family member, for example.

  He needs to make sure the handcuffs weren’t just a coincidence, something left there without thinking. The stiff is in the trunk of his car, okay. That could just mean that, one way or another—say, if the gorilla was in the mix—the culprits got access to the cars in the El Imperio garage. Offing the guy with Mr. Machi’s weapon didn’t necessarily make it personal: maybe whoever stole the BMW and reset the odometer(!)—wonder if they brought the stiff from somewhere far away?—knew the Glock was in the glove box, and that was the whole reason they took the car. Maybe it was just a question of opportunity and none of it had anything to do with him, Mr. Machi thinks, and he holds on to that idea.

  Until he comes back to the handcuffs …

  He doesn’t remember them being in the BMW. He thinks he left them in the desk drawer at home. But he can’t trust his recollections just now. He’s nervous, he feels hemmed in, stuck in a dream or some other kind of irreality. But the stink of his own vomit tells him it’s real.

  Where? Mr. Machi asks himself.

  Who? he asks himself.

  He asks himself how.

  And why.

  Last of all, Mr. Machi, a businessman above all else, can’t stop wondering: What did they expect to get out of planting a body in his trunk?

  Enough, he thinks then, like a person switching off a motor that’s running hot and is about to blow; he sets aside his doubts, goes through the contacts in his cell phone, and dials home. He calls without thinking it through.

  “Hola.” His wife’s voice comes through, resonant of several glasses of whiskey, an early-morning Xanax, various cigarettes.

  “Mirta,” Mr. Machi says, “I need you to go into the drawer in my—”

  But the woman interrupts him: “Where are you?”

  “I’ll tell you later. I need you to look—”

  “I’m asking you, where are you, Luis?” the woman interrupts him again.

  “Not now, Mirta, this is important. I need—”

  “I don’t give a fuck, Luis,” the woman says, on the offensive. “You woke me up, you made me cook you breakfast, and you said you were on your way. Now where are you?”

  Behind her voice he hears the grating of a lighter, a short puff, and then silence as, almost certainly, a curtain of blue smoke rises in front of the woman’s face.

  “Look, Mirta, we’re in the middle
of some shit right now.”

  “I’m not in the middle of anything,” the woman says.

  “This is serious, Mirta. I wouldn’t call you if there was any other way to take care of this. Now shut up and hear me out: I need you to go to my desk and—”

  But the woman realizes she’s holding the reins for once and she’s not about to let them go.

  “I’m not in the middle of anything,” she repeats, followed by a long, nervous drag, “and if you don’t tell me where you are, Luis, I’m hanging up, period.”

  “I don’t know where the fuck I am, Mirta. I need you to focus on—” Mr. Machi is nearly screaming when he hears the click.

  Click.

  She hung up on me, he thinks. The bitch hung up on me.

  The one time I need her to listen and she hangs up on me.

  The one time.

  Bitch, he thinks.

  He asks himself who he can call to find out if the fur handcuffs are at home. With Mirta off the list, and since Alan hasn’t spoken to him in months, he doesn’t have many options left.

  What about calling Eduardo and telling him to go to the house? he wonders. But he knows he’s not going to do it. Because for that dipshit to make it to his house from the apartment Mr. Machi rents him next to El Imperio will take at least an hour, and he’s got to ditch the thing in the trunk before then, whether or not the handcuffs are his.

  But where? Mr. Machi asks himself.

  Who? he asks himself.

  He asks himself how.

  And why.

  Never, not even once, amid the avalanche of questions piling up in his mind, has it occurred to him to wonder who the dead man is.

  Enough, he finally decides, I’ll figure it all out later, right now I’m going to buy a saw and get this over with. And he spits on the floorboard.

  20

  ONCE AGAIN HE’S passing through those indistinguishable suburban streets, drawing attention to himself, he realizes, leaving witnesses, but he can’t find a way out of that interminable dreamlike maze, the downward spiral he was sucked into as soon as he blew a tire on the BMW and walked around to the trunk and looked. If he knew what one was, he would think of a Möbius strip.

  Though the vacant lot where he vomited earlier would be perfect, he knows if he buys the saw near there, he won’t be able to go back and dump the body. He’s got to buy the saw in one place and get rid of the thing in another, somewhere far away.

  Where?

  Mr. Machi, who’s not used to hesitating, who rarely faces questions, feels there’s no bottom to the pit he’s fallen into.

  He circles through those nameless unmarked streets. How do you find your way if every house, every tree, every corner, even every dog that barks as you pass is identical? How do you find a hardware store without asking? He can’t just keep going, adding more and more witnesses to the list—especially if, as he drives, his attention isn’t focused on finding the store, but on figuring out how things came to this?

  Could it be he’s confused, and the handcuffs were in the car, forgotten after some one-night stand? Could it be, was there the slightest chance that it was actually a second pair, just like his, chaining up the faceless dead guy in his trunk, purely by coincidence? If Mr. Machi knew it, he would think of the word probabilistics.

  What’s happening to me is weird, and it would be even weirder to think that all this was just down to chance, he thinks. Yet, weirder still is the thought that there’s a plot against me.

  Why? What’s the point? He presses on with the questions to evade the phantom whisper in his ear that tells him this is no chain of coincidences, that someone put that thing in his trunk because they wanted to fuck him up good.

  A sign with green letters—GARÓFALO BROTHERS HARDWARE—pulls him away from these questions that suck away at him like ticks. The BMW’s tires squeal when he hits the breaks. Mr. Machi emerges without cutting the engine or closing the door. He’s already almost inside, a whirlwind, when—to the astonishment of the older woman waiting behind the counter, who’s gawking at him, looking like one more piece of furniture—he turns on his heels, kills the motor, locks his car.

  The last thing I need is someone stealing it, he thinks. Someone stealing it again.

  Now, standing at the counter, he says hello and asks for a saw.

  “I got to cut a chain,” he says.

  “My kid’s bicycle chain,” he feels obliged to add.

  The older woman introduces herself. Says her name is Susana. Susana Garófalo, she says. Same as the name of the store. Her brother, the one with his name on the sign, is asleep, she says. She asks if he’s got the bicycle with him, or, if not, where it is. If she could take a look at the chain, maybe she could tell him which saw was best.

  “You’re not from ’round here, are you, sir?” she asks. She doesn’t trust him. Or so it seems to Mr. Machi.

  “Look, Ms. Garófalo,” he starts to say. The Versace sunglasses that obscure his gaze make him seem even more distant to her.

  “Susana, please,” she says, this old bag who may have once been a woman and not a furnishing in a hardware store on the outskirts of town.

  “Susana,” Mr. Machi concedes, impatient to make his purchase and leave, trying to keep his impatience under wraps, “the chain’s not too thick, but it’s tough … just give me the best saw you’ve got, okay? How much?”

  “I can see money’s not an issue for you, Señor … what’d you say your name was?” The woman is feeling him out.

  Mr. Machi wavers between irritation and horror, and the first, helped along by impatience, triumphs. “I didn’t say, Ms. Susana. Now would you be so kind as to give me the saw? I’m in a little bit of a rush,” says Mr. Machi, pulling out his wallet.

  “Ms.?” the older woman says. “I’m not your grandmother. You can call me Susana.”

  Then, stepping fully into her role as salesperson, she continues: “I said the thing about the money because I saw your car and I imagined a man in your position might be interested in a Whave chain cutter I have. It’s not the cheapest option, but—”

  “Give it to me,” Mr. Machi says, cutting off any opportunity for dialogue, then pays and dashes out with the box—emblazoned with white letters forming the word Whave—under his arm.

  Wherever he ends up dropping the body, he decides, it better be as far from that bitch as possible.

  He gets into the BMW, puts it in gear, takes off, and retraces his route back to the Panamericana: a black bolt of lightning crossing the filthy asphalt once more. Only forty minutes have passed.

  21

  MR. MACHI heads back and reaches the Acceso Oeste. He drives and drives, not thinking of anything, just letting himself go. As if being there behind the wheel—the supple leather he selected himself, the dull roar of the motor, the relaxing route—makes all the rest of it disappear, puts everything back into place. As if driving his two-hundred-thousand-dollar car creates a parallel universe, one without dead bodies whose faces have been torn to pieces by a bullet.

  Exit signs flit past, one after the other—ITUZAINGÓ, PADUA, MERLO—and Mr. Machi drives on without thinking, free for the moment from worries or fears. But the illusion is fragile. Anything could shatter it. And something does, inevitably. A trifle. There’s a quiver in the pocket of his Scappino suit, and Mr. Machi takes a moment to realize it’s his cell phone, not ringing, just vibrating, one, two, three times. The questions come back into his head—who, how, why—along with uncertainty and the desperate urge to get rid of it. That thing.

  PASO DEL REY.

  A few minutes later, the pocket of the Scappino vibrates again.

  Who the motherfucking fuck is it now, Mr. Machi thinks, hands on the wheel and eyes on the road. Somehow he knows it can only be bad news. More bad news.

  But what? he wonders.

  And why is his phone vibrating instead of ringing? he wonders, trying to take cover in mundane conundrums the same way, seconds before, he did in the graceful handling of the BMW.


  MORENO.

  Again. The vibration returns, one, two, three times.

  LA REJA.

  I know my way around here. Old Man Heredia’s gym was out here, Mr. Machi recalls, and Coco Noriega’s place was a little farther on.

  Coco Noriega, he thinks, long time since I saw him. That’s a relationship to cultivate, a tie worth strengthening. When I get out of this shit I’ll send him a couple of invites to El Imperio for next week, Mr. Machi decides. Those government contacts, one or two in every administration, have been as valuable as any other deal I’ve made these past twenty-two years, he gloats. I gotta admit, Alejandro Wilkinson was right about that.

  “You need friends in politics, Luis, now more than ever,” he told him in November of ’83, when Mr. Machi opened the Skylight with the insurance money from the bar, just before he changed the name of the place to El Imperio. “Guys like me, like Almirón, like Romero, we aren’t enough anymore.”

  “But you’re a friend,” Mr. Machi protested. And he meant it.

  “That’s not what I’m saying,” Wilkinson answered. “I know we’re friends, real friends, not people who take advantage of each other. But cops, even army guys, they aren’t going to do the trick anymore. We’re facing down years and years of constitutional democracy. The rule of law, get it? Trust me, you’ll need new allies.”

  And so it was. With the patience of a goldsmith, as the years went by, Mr. Machi did everything he had to do to get those people in his pocket. He even pursued what Alejandro Wilkinson would have called symbolically valuable friendships with guys like Rodolfo Schenkler. When Rodolfo got out of the pen after serving a sentence for killing his father, then re-created himself as the lawyer in charge of the most prestigious human rights organization in the country, Mr. Machi made sure the man was a frequent guest at El Imperio.

  So, guys like that: congressmen, ministers, secretaries, lobbyists.

  It was thanks to these contacts that he heard in advance about certain devaluations, and got his slice of a number of ancillary ventures in healthcare in the early days of the democracy, buying low and selling high to the state throughout the nineties; thanks to them, he got his money out just days before the corralito; thanks to them, he managed to keep working despite the laws and ordinances they’d been ramming up his ass ever since all those little shits got burned to a crisp at that rock show in Once, even though the fire exits and emergency systems in El Imperio couldn’t pass a routine inspection.