by K. Ferrari
Again, he sets off in search of an opportune spot—secluded, isolated, unpeopled—where he can get rid of the thing once and for all and put an end to this nightmare. Mr. Machi drives aimlessly, unaware which streets he’s already passed through, lost in confusion, fear, and weariness, in the bottomless downward spiral of his own ineptitude. More than anything, he needs a couple of lines of blow—just the thought of it makes a tongue grow from his nose and start licking its lips.
Okay, let’s get a grip, he says to himself. We’re going to make a list of possible culprits. Forget how they did it. Forget why. We’re going to concentrate on who wants to hurt us. He susses things out like two people in conversation: as though Mr. Machi were talking to Luis, and as if Luis—given the circumstances—could be someone more than Mr. Machi.
Cesspit, he thinks, to begin with.
He’s cold-blooded. I’m the only one who could link him to the kid from Ciudadela, if they were ever to reopen the case. And there’s also the thing with Don Rogelio. Plus, Alejandro recommended him, and now that he’s dead—goddamn heart attack—maybe Cesspit feels like he doesn’t have to worry about betraying me anymore. Okay. But he doesn’t know about the fur handcuffs.
Then he thinks of his wife.
There’s been a lot of ups and downs over the years. If somebody’s fucking her and putting ideas in her head, Mirta’s capable of anything. Mr. Machi knows it, he’s pushed her into more than a few deviant acts, and she was happy to go along. Reminiscing, he even smiles as the words capable of anything flash in his mind.
Now: Patrón Casal, he thinks.
I fucked his wife and if that dipshit Eduardo ran his mouth, then all the boys would have found out. I doubt Patrón would have the balls for something like this, though … but then again, Patrón’s living in Peru now. Or Colombia. Or Venezuela, what do I know. And down there, a sicario’s easy to come by, he thinks. He doesn’t really know what the word sicario means, but he likes to use it; it sounds lethal, like something from an action flick.
Who else? he asks himself, and turns onto another dirt road.
Thrice he shakes his head no when his son’s name comes up on the list. Or the name of his son’s boyfriend. Again, he refuses to believe. But he knows it could be. Of course it could be.
A stray dog’s barking jerks him out of his ruminations. He slams on the brakes. In front of him, in the middle of an overgrown meadow, a dilapidated, abandoned shack catches his eye.
That’s the one, he thinks.
The rusty, broken gate screeches softly when Mr. Machi opens it to pull the BMW inside. Once there, he takes off his Scappino jacket, his Versace sunglasses, and his Rolex, rolls up his Armani sleeves, and opens up the trunk.
Just one more time, he thinks.
26
BETTER GET CRACKING NOW, he tells himself, once inside the abandoned property. He thinks in shorter and shorter sentences because doing so gives him the sense it’ll be easier to keep his revulsion under control.
He shortens the initial phrase: Get cracking now.
Cut, he thinks, and detach.
A mechanical task.
Impersonal.
Clean.
Like sawing through a board.
Or a piece of furniture.
Or a badly made doll, now worse for wear.
Get cracking, he repeats, again truncating the phrase, but when he grazes the corpse’s stiffened arm, his entire body contracts with a jerk that combines nausea and terror and uncontrollable shaking.
I need to get my mind on something else, Mr. Machi knows, bending over at the waist. And he reverts to his telegraph-style thinking.
Imagine, he thinks.
Come up with hypotheses.
Distance yourself from what you’re doing.
Avoidance, he thinks.
Manual versus intellectual labor.
He goes back to his list of suspects as he saws through the wrist, as blood and bits of flesh collect on the pink fur of the cuffs.
One of the girls? he asks himself.
Nobody likes to feel abandoned. Even if they know the rules of the game. Colorada? Nah, no way. More likely the other one. She got hung up on the powder something fierce.
“Powder,” Mr. Machi repeats aloud, and his nose starts watering.
Or Gladis, he thinks. The first thing she knew the morning we got caught fucking was I had to give her the pink slip and replace her with Herminia. I paid her a good severance, obviously. But with a black bitch, you never know. They got a chip on their shoulder, every last one of them.
The hacksaw snags on bone. Mr. Machi is perspiring and the odor of his sweat mixed with vomit seems to rouse the mosquitoes, which emerge from the meadow in battalions, attacking his neck, his arms, his face.
“Goddamn motherfucker,” Mr. Machi says as he kills one, transforming it into a smudge of blood and grime between his hand and neck. And he doesn’t know if he’s cursing the mosquito, the snagged blade, the cadaver, or himself. He tries to free the hacksaw’s teeth from the splintered bone. Scraps of fabric and tendon make the operation more difficult.
And Don Rogelio’s kids?
It’s true that they did a good job covering up the old man’s death—a doctor Mr. Machi paid off chalked it up to cardiac arrest, and then the goons from Doctor Tango came over to work for him—and no one knew Cesspit had been involved. But the information could have gotten out. Same goes for the thing with the mortgage.
I’m getting paranoid, he thinks. Nothing really points to any of them. Or to Heredia. Or Noriega, either. Just because I’m out this way and they popped into my head doesn’t mean anything.
“Or does it?” Mr. Machi asks himself aloud, killing the thousandth of a million mosquitoes that are swarming him now like squadrons of Sea Harriers.
The thing is to keep your eyes on the clues.
Signs, he thinks.
Secret codes.
Hidden meanings.
Nothing is just a coincidence, a voice says—the voice of fear—inside Mr. Machi.
Why a blown tire?
What were they trying to say with the caltrops?
And hacking his phone, what’s with that? Who do they want to keep him from contacting?
What are they after?
The questions keep piling up. Why today? Does the date mean something?
Mr. Machi realizes he doesn’t know what day it is. Fatigue is blunting his memory and his senses.
Signs, he thinks again.
Signs, he repeats, and it’s like a revelation.
Then he sets to feverish work, forgetting the mosquitoes eating him for lunch and the disgust he should feel at handling the cadaver. He has to go over it inch by inch. He can’t chuck it until he’s sure there are no more clues left, nothing else that might point to him, like the handcuffs. Nothing he’s overlooked.
27
PROBLEM IS, everything he decides leads him into another predicament. Every answer spawns unforeseen questions. Now he’s seesawing. Does he look the body over while it’s still in the trunk—it’s a squeeze, it’s uncomfortable, but it makes for a safer getaway if need be—or does he pull the stiff out, lay it in the meadow, and examine it in detail stretched out on the rocky soil. It’s a risk, but Mr. Machi opts for a thorough inspection, and hurries to finish what he has started.
Me, who never cleaned a fish, never gutted a chicken, he thinks, staring nonplussed at the blood and flesh trapped beneath his fingernails. Finally he’s done it, the hand pulls away from the arm at the wrist, and they separate—in opposite directions—from the fur handcuffs that remain there, dangling useless from a hinge in the trunk.
Mr. Machi embraces the corpse like a brother and heaves it onto his chest. He feels the dead weight, the stiffness in the muscles, the flop of the faceless head against his shoulder. He drops it in a clearing in the meadow, some ten or twelve feet from the BMW. Then he goes back for the hand and leaves it off to one side, propped against a gray stone.
He pauses
a moment to take a deep breath, look down at his work, and suppress his disgust. He glances around, too. This is the peak moment of danger, he thinks. If someone shows up now, he won’t have time to react. The fear in Mr. Machi’s chest is growing, barely leaving room for revulsion. He walks over to the rusty gate and looks back at his handiwork, calming down when he sees nothing is visible through the overgrown grass.
He goes back to the body and starts his inspection. The scrupulous, blind inspection of a man with no notion of what he hopes to find. He goes through the pockets of the suit, the folds, the cuffs, stretches out the fingers of the other hand, the one still attached to the body, balled up into a fist. He looks at the shoes: soles, tongue, insoles. When he’s done studying the suit and the shoes, he strips everything else off. The corpse is naked now except for briefs, socks, and shirt. Mr. Machi studies the man’s underclothes. Disgust returns when he sees the shriveled, dead dick. In the breast pocket of the shirt he finds a ballpoint pen, and his fear revives: on the barrel of the pen, in flowing letters, are the name and logo of an early business venture of Mr. Machi’s, the predecessor to El Imperio: the Skylight Tango Bar.
Mr. Machi sits next to the corpse—on the ground, hidden by the grass, devoured by mosquitoes—and trembles. He looks into the void and trembles. Without letting go of the ballpoint, which seems, in some twisted and ungraspable way, to incriminate him, he shakes and shivers. Finally he cries, hugging his knees. And shakes some more.
When Mr. Machi has his body back under control, he dries his tears a little and pries open his own clenched fist to slip the pen into the pocket of his Armani.
I can’t give up yet, he thinks. He looks at his hands, stained with blood and dirt. I must have left traces all over the clothes that thing is wearing, he thinks. He strips the cadaver of its remaining garments and puts all the clothing in a pile. He folds the socks, the briefs, the shirt, the pants. He’s folding the blue blazer when another voice in his head pipes up. As if the faded blue fabric were calling to him, Hey, you and me got some unfinished business. Or something like that. There’s a message here, Machi knows, or rather intuits, but what?
He looks again.
What, he asks, what?
He stretches the suit out next to the corpse.
What? Again he looks it over, and then the obvious leaps out at him, the first thing he should have seen: the tag on the suit says MACHITEX.
This’ll never end, he thinks.
He multiplies whatever evidence he must have left on the corpse’s clothes by the tag from the factory he used to own and the result is: he’s got to burn it.
Burn it, yeah, but not here. So he finishes folding the blazer, sets it with the rest of the clothing, and lays it in the car, as though the trunk of the BMW were a drawer in an armoire. Which he then shuts.
28
BEFORE LEAVING, he picks the hand up off the rock. He looks at it with curiosity, with a kind of scientific distance: he looks at the palm, the knuckles, tries to calculate its age based on the wrinkles in the fingers. For the first time since he found the body, Mr. Machi wonders about the dead man’s identity. He compares the dead hand with his own.
Until yesterday, that nude, dead thing had a name. A name he would answer to if someone shouted it in the street. He had his likes and dislikes. A family, friends, memories. He must have enjoyed certain music, certain colors, a certain type of woman. Someone must have loved him. And someone must have wanted to see him end up like he is now. Mr. Machi asks himself if they might have ever met. Either way, he sums things up to himself, laying the hand over the cold, inert torso lying in the grass, he’s dead now and I’m alive, so I better hightail it out of here.
Hopefully they won’t find you too soon, he thinks, talking to the cadaver. You’d have to start stinking and someone would have to pass by this very spot. Someone who wouldn’t just assume it was the stench of some rotten animal, someone curious enough to come over and take a look. But that probably won’t happen. With a little luck, I mean. And with even more luck, you’ll get eaten by street dogs and that’ll be the last anyone sees of you.
Same as when he came in, the busted, rusty gate screeches as Mr. Machi opens it. He gets in the BMW and looks through the window one last time. He makes sure the grass covers the scene. Everything looks normal, even the half-open gate.
“See you ’round, dude,” he says aloud, and waits a few seconds for the impossible response before putting the car in first and taking off. A few minutes later and the BMW is crossing the Acceso Oeste like a black bolt of lightning, leaving looks of astonishment and envy in its wake.
The sun shines—unpleasant, overbearing—and Mr. Machi puts his Versaces back on. He feels, in spite of it all, that things are starting to return to normal.
PART IX
THAT SHAKE LIKE MADMEN
29
“WE NEED NAMES, Machi, understand?” Romero had said.
When you saw him, skinny, dark-skinned, with a beak like a toucan and greasy curled hair, he didn’t look so dangerous. But Mr. Machi, the young Mr. Machi from 1974, knew that yeah, he was dangerous, that there wasn’t much distance between showing up in his magazine on a list of the General’s enemies and showing up in a trench with a bullet through the nape of your neck. Not much at all.
The best enemy—Romano liked to say, liked to write in El Caudillo—is a dead enemy.
“The Fatherland will make it up to you, Machi,” he added with a severe expression on his thin, angular face. “We know you’re no Peronist and you just took over the factory, plus we never had any problems with your father. And plus we know you guys aren’t Reds, or Jews, or internationalist one-world-government types. You hear what I’m getting at, right?”
“One more thing,” Inspector Almirón said to him later on the phone, as if the two conversations were one and the same. “What’s good for us is good for your factory. Or do you want another strike like the one in December? How much did you lose on that one, Machi? Wasn’t that when Don Luis had his heart attack? Just think…”
And though in fact it was an aneurysm and not a heart attack, the young Mr. Machi knew it was true, that the bullshit textile workers’ strike was what put his father out of commission and obliged him to step into the king’s shoes. He’d had to abandon the comfort of the bar—which his father, Don Luis, now managed—and take over running the factory.
“We’re looking for names—people in your factory, at your friends’ businesses, names you might know from the bar, from the nightlife. We understand each other, right?” Romero said, and something was slightly menacing in his tone.
“The more you produce, the more money you make,” Inspector Almirón’s voice chimed in, finishing the thought days later, “and, look, a peaceful society is a productive society, right? With no Reds around fucking things up.”
No doubt about it: the best enemy was a dead enemy.
And so, in part for convenience’s sake, in part out of fear, the young Mr. Machi scribbled down a few names, six or seven, on a sheet of paper. Class warriors, they called themselves, Trotskyites from the PCT or PRT or God knows what mishmash of letters, and a couple more who called themselves Peronists—we’re the Peronist Underground, they said, but they sure seemed like Reds—guys that were making life hard for him. Ball-breakers, not like the union bosses. With those guys, it was easy to make problems go away: a nice fat envelope and basta.
“Communist scum, Machi, you hear me? That’s who we want. Rabble-rousers,” said Romero—skinny, dark-skinned, with a beak like a toucan—seated in front of him.
“Think it over” were the last words conveyed on the phone by the faceless voice of Inspector Almirón a few days later.
And the young Mr. Machi thought it over. A few names on a piece of paper. That was all: a piece of paper, six or seven names, who cares? The next few days, at the gates to the factory, there were noises, squealing brakes, slamming doors, a gunshot or two. But naturally, no one saw or heard a thing. Weeks later, on a Mo
nday, the factory had to put a notice in the paper looking for workers. And the list of those “brought to justice” appeared in the pages of El Caudillo.
When Don Luis started asking questions, the young Mr. Machi told him to stick to worrying about the bar. As for power—it turned out he liked it.
30
“DOLE THEM OUT RIGHT and they’ll end up owing you two or three times over,” Coco Noriega told him long before he offered him the gig.
“They’re a business expense,” Alejandro Wilkinson had agreed.
“You rarely do one without an ulterior motive in mind,” his father-in-law said.
“And they’re not just for friends,” his father told him.
Mr. Machi had listened to all of them, at various times, and had taken note of what they had to say. It wasn’t often they agreed, and that gave him a lot to think about. So when, in the mid-eighties, he became a stockholder in the Artigas Clinic, partly with his own funds and partly as a front man for Coco Noriega, who was minister of the interior at the time, he decided to put into practice the complex Theory of Favors he had been developing.
Carlos Amante, the line cook, one of his most loyal employees, had a son who was some kind of gimp. A nasty disease, complicated, hard to treat. The first thing Mr. Machi did when he came on at Artigas was tell the guy he could go to the clinic whenever he felt like it, that all he had to do was say Mr. Machi’s name and they’d take care of him gratis. He told him he’d heard about the hard times he was going through with his kid’s condition, and that El Imperio was one big family.
Now Carlos owed him a favor.
The second thing he did was call Artigas and make it clear that if Carlos Amante went there, they were to tell him sorry, his name wasn’t on any list. Let the guy piss and moan, then wait awhile, then call him.