by K. Ferrari
“I turned El Imperio into an empire!
“Despite my old man bellyaching about the factory and yours coming to offer me life lessons. I don’t know why I bother telling you all this, you’re even more clueless than they are.
“I’m still waiting for my goddamn whiskey.”
PART XII
ET CETERA
38
SOON, SOON, I’ll be leaving this nightmare behind me, Mr. Machi thinks, again behind the wheel of his black two-hundred-thousand-dollar bolt of lightning, which cuts across the filthy asphalt, leaving looks of astonishment and envy in its wake.
He pulls over on the side of the highway, takes out the Whave chain cutter, and in one clink gets the handcuffs off the hinge in his trunk. He throws them out to the middle of the road and stands there watching them get flattened, a stupid smug smile on his lips. Just as with with the pen from the Skylight, he is enjoying the sight of the fur handcuffs, which so terrified him just a few hours before—or was it less? or much more? Mr. Machi has lost track of time, and no white gold Rolex in the world could orient him now—being transformed into an inoffensive, amorphous, grayish mass beneath the wheels of cars and trucks.
Soon, soon, he reminds himself, still standing immobile, while the Dunas, the Peugeot 504s, and the Renault 19s do their work.
Then, behind him, in the BMW’s passenger seat, his cell phone rings. Mr. Machi gets in and looks at it, unnerved, as if a prehistoric animal, long extinct, has just climbed into his car. He lets it ring twice before he picks up.
“Machi,” he says.
“Did we say you were going to call me today?” he asks. “At this hour?”
“Okay,” he says, “I’ll be there in fifteen.”
He says, “Yeah, bag me up twenty grams.”
“But go by the club tonight for your payment,” he says. “I’m out of cash.”
The BMW takes off, swift as a bolt of lightning, and again turns off its intended route on this morning that seems to never end.
39
A LITTLE WHILE LATER, Mr. Machi drives on, a few lines warming his nose and cooling his thoughts. He starts unraveling his list of suspects.
Briefly, he laughs at his initial apprehensions.
The girls, for example. How was Colorada or the other one going to cook up a plot like this?
And Gladis? Even less likely.
He admits he would have liked to fuck the Paraguayan a few more times. Mr. Machi licks his lips and all at once it seems to him that the clouds crossing the azure sky have the shape of thick thighs and bouncy breasts.
Or Alan’s little boyfriend, he thinks. For God’s sake, like that faggot was ever going to pose some kind of threat!
Boyfriend, faggot, the words resound in Mr. Machi’s head, producing a deafening echo.
I gotta do something about that kid, he thinks, and shakes his head the way he always does when the vision of Alan hugging that slender blond with the lagging gait comes into his mind.
It couldn’t have been him, either. Of course not.
There had been a concatenation of coincidences, no doubt about it. His cell, for example. It’s working fine now. Scared the hell out of him before, and now it’s working fine.
Speaking of, he thinks.
Not stopping the car, he calls Cesspit.
“I need you at El Imperio this afternoon around six-ish, there’s a thing we gotta talk about,” he says as soon as his bloodhound responds.
“What happened today that you didn’t pick up when I called?” he asks.
And without giving Cesspit time to answer, he adds: “You can explain it to me this afternoon.”
Then he hangs up.
He drops the phone in the passenger seat and returns to the list.
The more Mr. Machi thinks about it, the clearer it is that he was never the target, that there was some kind of security lapse at El Imperio that someone took advantage of, and his car being involved was pure chance: right place, wrong time. Whatever was at the root of it, it wasn’t about him; it was about that thing he left lying in the meadow by an abandoned shack on the outskirts of Moreno.
Patrón Casal, he thinks.
No, he wouldn’t get his hands dirty over that whore of a wife. These soccer types know they’re asking for it with their pregame meetings and all that time on the road. One way or another, it’s a risk they’re willing to take.
Besides, how many times did that asshole leave El Imperio with one or two of Mariela Báez’s girls on his arm?
Mirta—but what would she have to gain from something like this? Not cash, anyway. Spoiled brats like her never give money a second thought.
“The only way not to think about money is to have it,” as Alejandro Wilkinson used to say.
To have it as long as you’ve lived, for as long as you’re going to live. Not so much money itself as the security money brings.
Anyway, Mr. Machi knows Mirta loves him. She’s a ball-breaker, sure, but she loves him. She wouldn’t do anything to hurt him.
On one side of the road is a stand selling knockoff sportswear. The kind of clothes his waiters must buy, or Gladis must buy for her kid. Adibas tracksuits, Mike shoes, Reebot T-shirts.
Mr. Machi stops the BMW alongside the vendor, cracks the window, and buys, with what’s left in his wallet, a pair of sneakers, size ten, a polo, and a combo windbreaker and track pants.
A few miles farther on, he stops on the shoulder and changes in the car without cutting the motor.
About time to get rid of that blood, vomit, and dirt, Mr. Machi thinks.
Then he curses a few times under his breath. This shit is getting expensive: besides the bribe for the two cops (and the Glock, which was a memento of Loco Wilkinson, damn it), besides the hacksaw and the Whave chain cutter, besides the time wasted and the irritation, he’s lost a fine-looking Scappino and a three-hundred-dollar Armani shirt. But there’s no way around it, once blood dries, you can’t get it out, as Mr. Machi knows from his days in the textile biz. The tie, luckily, is salvageable: an Italian silk number from his collection of almost three hundred. The rest of Machi’s threads get wadded into a ball and tossed into the sportswear bag.
Now, in his blue Adibas tracksuit, Mr. Machi thinks again about Old Man Heredia.
Another birdbrained idea, he thinks. The old man wouldn’t have the means.
Mr. Machi remembers his snub nose and cauliflower ears from years and years of punches and the friction of stiff laces from fourteen- or sixteen-ounce gloves; brown gloves on hard, grainy hands. He remembers his beer belly and the few teeth the sport hadn’t robbed him of, how they glowed such a pure white. He remembers the old man’s deep voice, the deliberate, indifferent way he used to talk when anything but boxing was the subject. Finally, he remembers his heartbreak when Martínez died. An enormous, consummate, perfect chagrin. A sorrow like losing a son, a last chance, a departing train. Something in Heredia’s life ended forever when Martínez killed himself. Mr. Machi knew that.
Still and all, it was ludicrous to suspect the old man, he thinks, not even bothering to finish the thought.
Anyway, he adds in automatic self-justification, it was just a little fixed fight, nothing out of the ordinary.
They can’t hang it on him, he thinks. Martínez was the one who decided to put a bullet in his dome. Every time you turn around, some boxer’s going to the pen or else getting his brains beat out. Is he gonna have to take the blame every time one of those lowlifes kicks the bucket?
Madness.
And with the notable absence of anonymous corpses in the trunk of his car, Mr. Machi feels a forgotten enthusiasm and joy springing up in the place where fear has lately dwelt. And he’s reasoning more clearly.
Philosophically, he thinks: it’s incredible what fear can do to your mind.
Incredible.
Pablo, for example—how could he ever have accused him? The poor bastard, all he knows how to do is serve food without fucking it up. Mr. Machi grins when he thinks how
Pipa’s now the one plowing that chick from Tucumán that Pablo lost his job over. Then he wonders who told him that and since when does he listen to gossip about his workers. Who the fuck cares. Mr. Machi smiles again, and that smile gives way to unforced laughter. He’s laughing out loud now. Hard. Cackling. Aside from seeing some old bag trip and fall down in the street, nothing tickles Mr. Machi more than when one guy steals another guy’s broad. Especially when the first guy was dumb enough to lose his job over said broad.
Behind the wheel, he feels his pulse steady, his breathing calm, his vision clear.
Incredible, the shit I had myself believing, he thinks, now that he’s feeling relieved.
The commies from the factory, for example—how long ago was all that? Thirty, thirty-two years?
“Give me a break!” he says indignantly, as if scolding a child.
You know damn good and well they rubbed those fuckers out, Romero and Almirón weren’t the type to forgive. And who’s going to cook up this kind of complicated scheme to avenge them thirty-some years later? Not even the Reds are that vindictive. Besides, Cesspit can smell them from a mile off: he knows how they walk, how they move their hands, their tone of voice.
Madness, he repeats, at the very moment when a green sign rises up in his field of vision, announcing the exit he needs to take to reach his next destination, the last before he returns home.
He turns without slowing down.
That’s why I drive a two-hundred-thousand-dollar machine, he thinks.
40
LAST STOP, Mr. Machi thinks, not knowing if this is true or just an expression of desire as he parks at the shopping center, where he seems to remember there’s a branch of a chain bookstore. The only book and CD store in the area. He tries to remember if they know him, if he’s ever set foot inside the place. He doesn’t think so.
He doesn’t like bookstores, and he only goes to shopping centers on trips to Miami: Aventura, Sawgrass, Zambrano’s, those are malls. Malls, he thinks, like the Yankees call them. Sears, Marshalls, JCPenney, those are real stores.
He’s certain he’s never been to this place before.
Better that way, he thinks.
He feels a little ridiculous wearing his Adibas tracksuit with Versace glasses, so he slips them into one of the pockets. He wonders if anyone will notice his bootleg clothes, but more or less at the same time, he decides it doesn’t matter. He knows perfectly well what he’s there for.
“You take cards, right?” he asks the counter girl, a blond in her twenties, who answers indifferently, not looking up from her magazine, “Yes: Mastercard, Amex, and Visa, minimum purchase seventy pesos.”
Mr. Machi sees her as a chance to confirm that he’s made it through this shit, that he’s back to being himself. He taps the counter three times with his index finger and uses a tone he finds pleasing, one he recognizes himself in.
“I’m talking to you, sweet cheeks,” he says.
“Yes?” the girl responds, marking her page in the magazine, leaving it open with front and back covers facing up—Is it true that Mariano Trossini left his wife because he was cheating on her with another dancer from his show?—like a butterfly of ass-kissing celebrity worship about to rise up and take flight.
“Credit cards, you take them?”
“Yes, I just told you. Mastercard, Amex, and Visa, minimum purchase seventy pesos.”
“Right,” Mr. Machi says, his tone growing more and more commanding, “but what you didn’t say was sir, and you didn’t ask me what I need. Can we start there?” He’s sure he’s hit the mark, that he’s on the right road, back in his habitual role. And that this counter girl should have understood what that role was from the start.
“Yes, sir, please accept my apologies,” the girl agrees, placing her magazine under the counter. As if she understands all of a sudden that it’s unthinkable to read while attending to a customer of this kind.
“What are you looking for? How can I help you?”
And she repeats: “Sir.”
He smiles, pleased, Mr. Machi does, contented. He realizes he’s standing tall again and that he’s master of the situation. He coughs two or three times, just to hear his own cough, just to make the girl wait. Then he savors her attitude, sedulous and servile. It takes her a while to understand which book he’s looking for, with the confused and fragmentary information he can give her.
Ten minutes later, she finds it, and asks if he needs anything else, hoping the response will be no.
“Yeah, give me another book that might interest Luciana,” Mr. Machi replies. And waits.
The counter girl hesitates. How can she know what kind of books this guy’s daughter likes?
“By the same author?” she ventures, embarrassed to find she doesn’t even know how to pronounce the name.
Seeing her embarrassment, Mr. Machi grows larger still, girds himself, and the words flow out as though dictated by his own personal demiurge.
“For ten minutes I’ve been telling you what Luciana reads, doll, now give me another book that might interest her.”
“Of course, sir.” The counter girl excuses herself, and calls a psychologist friend and collates results from a web search with the stock at the bookstore.
And so, along with The Order of Things, Mr. Machi takes Writing Degree Zero by Barthes and two Sidney Sheldon novels for Mirta. He also buys a DVD of a show from Madonna’s most recent tour for Alan, and two CDs for himself: one by Ricardo Arjona and one by Diego Torres.
“Gift wrap it,” he says, “and I want each item in its own bag.”
He exits the store while the young blond counter girl’s various sirs—yes, sir; of course, sir; anything else I can help you with, sir; we hope to see you again soon, sir—soothe his ears like a lingering caress.
41
BEFORE GOING BACK to the BMW, Mr. Machi stops in at the restroom to powder his nose.
Now, yes.
Sitting in the bucket seat he himself chose the leather for, which feels like a young girl’s ass, he tears open the packages of books and CDs and uses the wrappings for the Scappino suit and the Armani shirt ruined by bloodstains, vomit, and dirt, and stuffs them both back in the bag the tracksuit, polo shirt, and sneakers came in. He stuffs the six bags from the bookstore in on top, dumps inside the lukewarm, leftover Coke, puts the plastic bottle inside, too, and ties the whole package in a knot.
He gets out of the BMW, walks unhurriedly, and looks.
A few blocks away, he finds some dogshit still loose enough to serve his purposes. He smiles with an almost childish mischief before smearing the bag. Then he wrinkles his nose, hurries over to the nearest tree, and drops the bag beside it.
The sun is shining up high, and its light is of a filthy splendor vaguely reminiscent of marble, of melted butter, of bone, or of wool on the body of a dying sheep.
“No one’s gonna go snooping in that filth,” Mr. Machi thinks, and slips back on his sunglasses.
It’s close to being over, he thinks.
PART XIII
THAT JUST BROKE THE JUG
42
THE ENTRANCE TO the subdivision where the Machi family resides looks like an enormous golf course dotted with the odd mansion. The perimeter, hedged by high green privet trimmed meticulously by an army of gardeners twice a week, has a guard shack every twelve yards. They spend, they spend big, the residents of El Barrio—they like calling it that, El Barrio, it gives them a feeling of simplicity, of sincerity, a countrified touch, as if this were paradise regained—on watchmen, cameras, alarms … on the fiction of security.
“You just can’t live in Buenos Aires anymore,” the neighbors in El Barrio often say to their friends who still reside in presumptuous urban palaces in neighborhoods like Las Cañitas or Barrio Parque. “When you least expect it, some son of a bitch could put a bullet in your head at a stoplight.”
“Plus,” the women usually add, “the kids have got their friends here, they’re growing up in contact with nature,”
and then they point at their frolicking children.
They frolic, the children of those parents who can’t live in Buenos Aires anymore for fear that some son of a bitch, some black son of a bitch, will blow out their brains at a stoplight. They frolic on lawns meticulously mowed every three days by an army of gardeners. They frolic with other kids, identical to them, the little friends their parents handpick. They frolic, watched over by strategically placed cameras.
Security cameras, lookouts, armed guards, swimming pools, and hundreds of gardeners manicuring the grass: the return to nature in El Barrio.
Due west of the privet hedge is the gate, two automatic doors with three security guards watching over them.
Mr. Machi hits the button for the gate and nods in greeting to the sentry who walks over.
He revs the BMW restlessly.
“Good morning, Señor Luis, Señora Mirta left a message that—” the guard manages to say before Mr. Machi interrupts him, not listening—“later, later”—and speeds off in a way unbecoming of the high-priced tranquility of El Barrio.
Get home, he thinks, just get home.
43
AS SOON AS he enters his house, Mr. Machi feels that his troubles are over, that all that’s left of his little problem is a strange, dark anecdote to retell in three or four years’ time, one that no one from his inner circle will believe. He laughs off his fears, his suspicions, his worries that his lucky star might have gone dark.
I’m a fortunate guy, he thinks. If I hadn’t run over the caltrops, if I hadn’t blown a tire, who knows when I’d have figured out that the thing—in his thoughts, it’s still just a thing—was back there.
He imagines someone finding it when he took the BMW for a wash, and something of his earlier jitteriness returns. But the anxiety is fleeting. He’s in his home, and that thing is in a vacant lot behind an abandoned house in La Reja he couldn’t find his way back to even at gunpoint after all that morning’s twists and turns.