by Lewis Shiner
For Lauren I had a different lie. I told her that Watkins had heard what had happened and wanted to meet me in person. I didn’t have to come down too hard on what it might mean for my career—careers were something she understood very well. The hard part was talking her out of going along. I convinced her that Watkins needed to see that I was able to get around on my own.
The flight was hellish, delayed for two hours due to bad weather, overcrowded, with nowhere to put my feet up. A mixture of rain and sleet was falling when we finally landed at La Guardia and it continued throughout the afternoon. I dropped my suitcase at the hotel and barely had time to wash my face and ice my feet for ten minutes before catching a cab to the Universal offices on Madison Avenue.
I found myself reflexively comparing the city to Buenos Aires. New York loomed over me, the huge, impersonal buildings dwarfing the dark streets, the grim people shouldering past me in silence. I’m homesick, I thought.
It was my first trip to corporate headquarters and I was not at my best. My suit hung off me, my face was gaunt, and I leaned heavily on my cane. Everyone around me had the right haircut and thousand dollar shoes, and I looked like I’d been tortured.
I wondered how much of the money the company had saved through layoffs in North Carolina had gone into upkeep for the Manhattan offices. Everything gleamed. The amber-lit water sculpture in the ground floor lobby made gentle shushing sounds. The metal detectors that guarded the banks of elevators were so high tech as to be nearly unobtrusive.
I arrived fifteen minutes early, breathing deeply and taking my pulse. Sweat was trying to break across my forehead and the admin stared at me suspiciously. She was in her fifties, brisk and humorless, and she must have taken me for a junkie.
She called Watkins at 6:15 to remind him, then told me, needlessly, that he was running late. She hoped he wouldn’t have to cancel. I reminded her that I had flown up from Durham specifically for the meeting.
At 6:25 a large man with thinning red hair and a yellowish suit emerged from the office. One side of his mouth twitched in a nervous tic. He said nothing as he went straight to the elevators and slammed the down button with the flat of his hand.
A moment later, Watkins came out to greet me. He was in his sixties, thin and tan, radiating health and prosperity. His hair was short and intermittently gray. His suit must have cost ten times what mine did and it sat on him as comfortably as jeans and a polo shirt. “Rob?” he said. “Jim Watkins.” I felt an electrical energy in his grip. It was not a happy association. “Come on in.”
He closed the door behind us. The office was long and narrow, the long wall all glass and looking out over the city as the last light faded. His desk was at one end, a sofa and armchairs at the other. He headed for the couch and sat comfortably at one end, one leg up on the cushions. I sat in an armchair and said, “I hate to ask this, but would you mind if I put my feet up? I’m really not in very good shape yet.”
“Make yourself at home. Were you in an accident?”
“Not an accident,” I said. “I was tortured.”
“In Buenos Aires?”
“Yes.”
“Recently?”
“In November.”
He looked genuinely shocked. “My God, it never ends down there. Were they caught?”
“By the police, you mean? The police were involved in it.”
He nodded somberly. “I guess that was a stupid question on my part. I should have known better. Why did they come after you?”
“I think it was because of the file that Isabel sent you.”
“I’m sorry, what file?”
I had retrieved the file from my email and printed a copy, just in case. I took it out of my breast pocket, unfolded it, and handed it to him.
“Isabel was supposed to have sent this to me?” he said.
“That’s what she told me.”
“Where did this come from?”
“Do you remember Marco Suarez? They took him too, and killed him. He had it hidden in his desk. Obviously he put this together after the fact, but the details are pretty convincing.”
He flipped through the pages. “So they did it anyway,” he said.
“They?”
He dropped the printout on the coffee table next to my feet. “You obviously know most of this already. If I talk to you about it, it’s Universal Systems Confidential. Okay?”
He meant that I could be fired if I talked about it outside the company. “I understand,” I said.
“The CIA was very involved in Latin American in the seventies, as I’m sure you know. Castro had them in a panic, and Allende and all the others.” He pronounced Allende the Argentine way, ah-shen-day, giving me a pang. “They had huge amounts of money available to support anti-communist regimes. They approached me about working with the Videla government to…negotiate some lucrative contracts with them.”
“Bribe them, you mean.”
“Yes. I was convinced we could do it without money changing hands, so I refused. Clearly they found somebody else who was willing.”
“You didn’t have any scruples about working with a dictator? With the disappearances and the torture and the murder?”
He took a few seconds to answer. “The military was always careful to maintain deniability. And we honestly didn’t know how bad it was. Those were different times. Back then, people thought of communists the way they think of terrorists now. Anything seemed justified to stop them.”
“So who was it? Who did the CIA get to?”
He didn’t answer.
“It was Isabel, wasn’t it?” I said. “That’s why she never sent you the file. But how did she have access to the money?”
Not looking at me, as if he were only thinking out loud, he said, “Her first job was in accounting.”
Suddenly things started to make sense. Cesarino had taken me because of his obsession with Mateo. Somehow Isabel had known about my connection to him. It wasn’t about the contabilidad file at all, which was why the man in the coveralls never asked about it. Cesarino already had it, thanks to La Reina. He’d killed Miguel Suarez to protect her cover, not because he was afraid for himself. She would also have given him details to use in the interrogation, like the business with my father.
I wondered if the CIA man in the kitchen had been one of Isabel’s old friends.
My heart was thrashing wildly in my chest and I couldn’t get my breath. I got up and paced around the room without my cane. The pain in my feet made my hatred burn brighter.
“What happens now?” I said, as calmly as possible.
“There will be consequences for her,” Watkins said.
“What kind of consequences?”
“I appreciate what you’ve been through,” he said. “This is a matter that I will deal with through the proper channels.”
“You have no fucking idea what I’ve been through,” I said, gripping the back of the chair I’d been sitting in. “And this is a matter that needs to be public knowledge.”
Watkins had been threatened by tougher customers than a scrawny, beat-up old programmer with bad feet. I hadn’t even managed to annoy him.
“Two things to think about,” he said. “One, this is very old news. Nobody cares about Argentina, or what happened there in the seventies. Two, I believe you’re aware of the consequences of violating company confidentiality.”
“So you’re going to slap her wrist and hush it up.”
“Thanks for taking the trouble to come to me with this.” He stood up. “The brief I got from my assistant said the company has completely covered all your medical expenses and disability leave, though it didn’t say anything about the cause of your injuries. Anyway, I want you to know we were glad to do it. Employee loyalty is one of Universal’s greatest strengths and we know how to reward it.”
He offered the printout to me and I took it. He could read me well enough to see that I didn’t want to shake hands.
“I wish I had more time to spend with you, bu
t I am literally booked solid until ten tonight.” He walked past me and opened the door, and there was nothing for me to do except to go. As I limped past him, he gently touched my arm and said, “I’m truly sorry for what happened to you.”
I stopped to look in his face. I saw nothing there but sympathy and regret. I nodded stiffly.
“Take care,” he said.
Another man in a suit sat in the outer office, waiting to take my place.
*
Rather than take a chance that I might lose my nerve, I flagged a cab and went straight to the New York Times building. The receptionist found a reporter from the business section who was willing to listen to me.
She was about forty, with short red hair and a round, Irish face. She listened to the bare outline of the story there in the lobby, then looked at her watch and said, “I haven’t had dinner yet. How about you?”
She took me to a nearby deconsecrated church, complete with stained glass, that had become a pizza joint. She took extensive notes while I talked and asked a lot of pointed questions. By the time she had the whole story, we’d finished our food and she was rubbing her jaw.
“It’s a dynamite story,” she said. “Pulitzer material, if it’s done right. But there’s a problem.”
I had already figured this out from her questions. “Evidence.”
“Exactly. I don’t doubt anything you’ve said. I mean, no offense, look at you. The problem is, the people who tortured you are dead. The crime scene is cold and the cops have closed the case as drug business. This spreadsheet here, as you’ve told me, is obviously ex post facto and there’s no provenance for it at all. Nobody at Universal is going to talk about this. It’s a one-source story with no corroboration.”
“So the truth just…disappears.”
“The stuff we know that we can’t print would curdle your milk. It’s one of the many frustrations of this job. Along with watching my entire industry die. Who’s going to be left to force these people to keep up even a pretence of honesty?”
She closed her notebook. “I’m going to see what I can find out. It’s possible I can jar something loose. But I wouldn’t get my hopes up.”
“You need to know that there’s a danger for me in this. If Universal finds out I’ve talked to you, they’ll fire me. I’m okay with that if the story gets published, but I would hate to lose my job and my pension and my medical coverage for nothing.”
“Understood. I can’t make any promises, except that I will be discreet.”
She gave me her card and took all my contact information. When she left me she said, just as Watkins had, “Take care.”
*
Lauren was dumbfounded when I told her I was going back to Buenos Aires.
“You’re not recovered yet,” she said. “You’ve still got a ways to go physically and you’ve barely started on the psychological end of it.”
It was the first week in March. The Bartlett pear trees had erupted in white blossoms and the redbuds were scattering purple petals all over the ground. Time for change.
I said, “Buenos Aires has more psychiatrists per capita than any place on Earth. And they’ve got experience in exactly this kind of thing.”
“This is about Elena, right?”
“No,” I said. “I’m sure you’re right. She’ll have moved on by now.”
“Then why? Why, Rob?”
“I just have to,” I said.
*
My landlady had rented my old apartment, which was just as well. The memories would have overwhelmed me. She had another place, more modern, a block down Humberto Primo. Yes, she assured me, there were hardwood floors where I could practice my dancing. She would have my boxes there waiting.
Bahadur had still not heard about his transfer. “Maybe it’s not going to happen,” he said. “And I’ll be stuck here. It will be good to have you back. Nobody here speaks English worth two craps. Yes? ‘Worth two craps?’ ”
I wrote Don Güicho when I had my plans in place. I would arrive on Sunday, March 18, going from the end of one winter to the beginning of another. Don Güicho didn’t respond, but then he’d never been comfortable with email.
I went to a few tango practicas before I left the States. By this point I rarely needed the cane. I danced for an hour each time and though my feet hurt afterward, it was no different in kind from the pain I always felt after dancing. My old friends and partners were full of questions and I had to tell them I wasn’t ready to talk about it yet.
The tangos themselves were amazing, profoundly emotional experiences that sometimes left me blinking back tears. I felt no self-consciousness, only the power of the music moving through me. They were the tangos oscuros that Don Güicho had talked about, an exquisite sadness. I didn’t explicitly think about Elena while I was dancing and yet she was an inescapable part of every step.
*
Riding from Ezeiza Airport into Buenos Aires in the cool of the dying summer, I knew I’d made the right decision. I’d loaded up on Valium for the flight and managed to sleep for much of it.
It was good to hear the music of spoken Spanish instead of the harsh, flat vowels of English, to hear the tango station playing in the cab, to see the familiar sights of the long freeway drive through the decaying perimeter of the city. Despite the foreignness, despite the danger, it was where I needed to be.
The hardest part was going through the boxes that Elena had packed from the old apartment. I imagined she might have left me a note, or some kind of token. Instead I found the shirts she had worn that still smelled of her. I put all the clothes into plastic bags and left them at the laundry around the corner.
La Reina threw a party for me on Wednesday, my first day back at work. My eyes kept returning to her, trying to reconcile this competent, powerful, laughing woman with the betrayal that had destroyed me.
During my lunch hour on Thursday, I stood on the street outside the office and called the Citibank in Calle Florida on my new cell phone. I asked for Osvaldo Lacunza and gave his secretary my name. I didn’t know if he would take my call. If Elena had told him that she and I were through, he would have no reason to.
He did pick up. «I can’t talk on this line,» he said. «I can meet you somewhere near here for a few minutes this afternoon. There’s a magazine kiosk in front of the bank. Can you be there at three?»
This was the shopping district I had come to many times, with Elena and on my own, a pedestrian mall full of high-end stores selling electronics and appliances, books and CDs, shoes and leather coats. That afternoon, as always, it was mobbed—with tourists, with well-dressed porteños, with musicians and hustlers of various stripes, all of them glancing repeatedly at the overcast and threatening sky.
I got there early and Osvaldo came out of the bank at 3:15, prompt by Buenos Aires standards. He looked me over and then embraced me gently. «You look better,» he said. «How do you feel?»
«I have headaches sometimes. Sometimes bad. Other than that I’m okay, thanks to you. I don’t want to keep you, and I hate to ask you another favor, but there’s no one else I can go to.»
«Ask me.»
«There’s a woman named Isabel Salcedo, who is the head of the Buenos Aires office of Universal Systems. I think she worked for the CIA during la dictadura. I think she may be working for them now. I thought you might know, or know somebody who would know, if this is true.»
«It’s true. In the seventies she delivered money from the CIA to the government. Or rather, Marco Suarez delivered it for her. It came either to me or to Cesarino. In return, Universal got contracts worth a lot of money. Millions and millions of dollars. That was what we did in those days. Argentina was once one of the richest countries in the world. We put a faucet in that wealth and all the US companies came by with buckets and we filled the buckets up for them and they took the money away.
«Does she still work for the CIA? I don’t know. I wouldn’t think she’s very active these days. However. She came to Universal from the School of
the Americas in Panama. You know what I’m talking about? The school for dictators and assassins. You don’t walk away from that.»
I said, «I think she’s the one who betrayed me to Cesarino.»
Osvaldo nodded. «I had the opportunity to converse with Cesarino before he died.» His casualness impressed me. I wondered if I could ever learn to be that cold. «He said that Isabel called him and wanted him to take care of you and some Indian guy. Cesarino refused. Then she told him that you could lead him to Mateo.»
So there it was. My eyes went briefly out of focus as the anger and fear and memories of pain washed over me.
Osvaldo put both hands on my shoulders. «Listen to me. Now that you know this, it’s best if you forget it. Isabel is a very dangerous person. I’m sure she assumes you have learned your lesson. If you show her otherwise, she will find a way to kill you. She might even do it herself.»
«I know,» I said. It would have been less than gracious to say I had no life left, given that I owed him what life I had.
«Bueno,» he said. «If you need anything else, you know where to find me.»
*
That night I had my first lesson with Don Güicho since I’d gotten back. I arrived at Saverio’s early, as usual, and refused the usual cup of coffee. Don Güicho held our embrace for a long time. «And how are you now, my friend? Are you okay?»
I shrugged. «I’m okay.» In fact my head was clear enough, the pain no more than a lurking threat.
Brisa gave me a long hug and stroked my cheek, near the burn scar, with the back of her hand. Her compassion made my eyes water and I had to turn away.
In the studio I changed my shoes and Don Güicho put on Pugliese. I took my time finding my embrace with Brisa and waited for the music to tell me when to take my first step. I danced the way I had at the practicas in North Carolina, mostly walking to the music, not doing much of anything fancy. Don Güicho didn’t stop me and at the end of the song Brisa said, «You dance differently now. Don Güicho, doesn’t he dance differently?»
«You dance like a porteño now,» Don Güicho said. «Congratulations, Beto.»
