Far South

by David Enrique Spellman

  ‘I have to ask you this. Have you noticed any strangers poking around?’

  That brought back memories of Pablo Arenas for both of us: the robberies, the brutal beatings, the killing… back then she’d been one of the colony residents that I’d had to interview. They’d all been shaken up. Some of them had been relieved it wasn’t their houses that had been robbed: that it wasn’t they who’d had to face the robbers. But it had left most of the colony residents, Ana included, angry, shaky, but most of all, the robberies had brought them together. They wanted to look out for one another. Ana was fiercely protective of her friends. I admired that in her. She was pretty, too. But I was a cop with a job to do. No chance to explore anything more friendly with her.

  ‘No. No one I can think of.’

  ‘I’m going to take a look around the house.’ I went down the corridor: two bedrooms, one on either side. I went into the one on the right, Gerardo’s bedroom, the master bedroom. Just like Ana said, the pillows were still on the floor. The bed was rumpled with no sign of any kind of struggle, amorous or otherwise. I checked the bottom sheet for stains. Nothing.

  Three books lay on the bedside cabinet: Ricardo Piglia’s Assumed Name, a collection of short stories from 1975; Juan Rulfo’s novel, Pedro Páramo; and Illuminations, a collection of essays by Walter Benjamin. I knew the first two books but not the third. I flipped through the pages of all three books in case there might be a note tucked in among them. There wasn’t. I opened the door of the bedside cabinet. Empty. So I tried the wardrobe: a sports jacket, a raincoat; two pairs of trousers, one cotton, one linen; a small pile of dirty laundry; some socks on one of the three shelves. I checked the pockets of the jacket, coat and pants but there was nothing, not even a dirty tissue or an old train ticket. But Fischer might have packed a bag and left these things. Maybe he’d just been careless and left the doors and windows open knowing that Ana would arrive just after he’d left so she could lock up for him.

  I couldn’t see anything else of any interest in this room.

  I looked under the bed just for good measure but there was nothing there either but a few dust balls clinging to dead hair.

  In the spare bedroom, the metal-framed bed wasn’t even made up. It was little better than a camping cot with a thin foam mattress. Nothing under the mattress, nor under the bed. I knelt down and opened that bedside cabinet: nothing. It was a house for guests, a rental place, and Fischer seemed to travel light.

  I opened the closet just inside the bedroom door: old adventure books for children, dusty, untouched for years; a pile of magazines; a pencil case with some colored crayons and crumbled shavings. I closed the door. I quit the small bedroom, went down the corridor and through the door onto the terrace.

  The terrace faced north and was lit up by the bright sun. I ran my hand above the dry-stone wall that kept people from falling off the terrace and onto the overgrown lawn three meters below. Directly opposite the open window of the master bedroom, a single stone had been dislodged from the wall. I went to the end of the terrace and down the steps to where the stone and some crumbled mortar remnants were lying in the grass. The uncut grass from the bottom of the wall to the hammock might have been bent down by footfalls. Could Fischer have dislodged the stone as he jumped off the terrace into the orchard, and then ran toward the trees at the perimeter of the property? Why hadn’t he gone down the steps? Or had the stone been dislodged by a struggle on the terrace.

  I followed what might have been the faint evidence of footmarks in the grass as far as the hammock. There was no sign of the footmarks continuing any further than that, but the ground was less grassy in this part of the garden, just hard-packed dirt, so scuffs and traces might not show. At the edge of the orchard, a grove of trees led down to the stream below. I ducked under the rope that tied the hammock to one of the plum trees. Lots of fallen fruit lay around the roots. I guess this had been what Ana’s fox had been eating. Where the orchard ended at a stand of eucalyptus and pine, the branches had been broken and the earth scuffed up. That was recent, too. But all this breakage could have happened more than a week ago. No rain in the last few days. Just dry thunder. I skirted the stand of trees and made my way down to the streambed by the small path that was closer to the house. The streambed was dry, mostly rocks. Spiny shrubs, silica-sparkle in the dry dirt. Impossible to tell whether anyone had been through there or not. If Gerardo Fischer had been frightened by an intruder, he might have grabbed his laptop, slipped out the bedroom window, jumped the terrace wall and dragged a rock off the top of the wall as he tumbled into the garden. He could have run toward the hammock and veered off into the woods, broken through the tree line, skittered down to the streambed and kept on running until he reached the road. He could have gone anywhere from there.

  If Gerardo had got away from someone chasing him, any minute now, he would probably call Ana or Sara to let them know where he was; unless someone really had been chasing him, and they’d caught him. They could be holding him for ransom or they might have killed him. But why would they want to kill him? Up in the eucalyptus trees that overlooked the orchard, the black shapes of vultures squatted in the branches, heads bent between humped wings. No corpse around here or they would already be bothering it. If he’d been killed for his laptop – and around here people can get killed for less – his body might have been dumped anywhere out there in the wilderness: maybe by the side of some dirt road deep in the hills. If someone wanted a ransom, they’d be in touch pretty soon.

  But right now, Gerardo Fischer might just be with some woman in a neighboring holiday home. He still might turn up. I wanted to believe that for Ana’s sake. Somehow, I didn’t.

  I made my way back up the path from the streambed to the orchard. Ana was sitting on the side of the hammock, easing it a little, back and forth.

  ‘Are you okay?’ I asked.

  She nodded. She was so tiny. She stood up. I’m not a really tall guy but her dreadlocks only reached up as far as about elbow-height on me. We climbed back up the steps to the terrace and into the house. This could still be just a missing person case no matter how worried Ana was. I told her that. I could see that she wanted to believe it but she didn’t. I wanted to give Gerardo time to show up if he was going to show up. I was still enough of a cop for that. But Ana was so spooked I knew she was convinced that Gerardo Fischer had been kidnapped.

  I went back into the house, along the corridor and into the kitchen. Ana sat down next to the table. I opened the single kitchen cabinet. Nothing but a few boxes of pasta, cans of tomatoes, olive oil, a pack of yerba mate, onions, potatoes, flour, and an unopened bottle of wine: a decent Malbec, from Mendoza.

  On Ana’s side of the table was a drawer with a round wooden knob, probably a cutlery drawer.

  ‘Do you mind?’ I said.

  Ana got up from the table. I opened the drawer: no cutlery, some string, a corkscrew, some old ballpoint pens on a cardboard folder, and a set of car keys.

  ‘Is this a spare set?’ I asked Ana.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  ‘We’ll take them. I want to check on the car.’ I pocketed the keys. I was about to close the drawer but I stopped. Maybe the cardboard folder contained invoices, records of what he’d bought, evidence of where he’d been during the past few days… or last few weeks. I slid the folder out of the drawer and opened it on the tabletop. It wasn’t an invoice book. It was some kind of notebook. It was pretty thin, and not all the pages had been used up. The pages were covered in a tiny crabbed calligraphy. I’d have to use a magnifying glass to be able to read the words. From what I could make out, some of the entries were in diary form. The rest seemed to be just random thoughts and notes. A lot of the entries had something to do with the Middle East. Among the scratches I could at least recognize the words Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine… I didn’t have time to read it now.

  Inside the back cover of the folder, in a kind of pocket, was a packet of postcards and a few old photographs of pe
ople – from the 1980s by the look of the clothes – and a Jewish New Years greeting card – that wasn’t too recent either. Nothing in the book seemed at all recent. I held the pages open for Ana to look at.

  ‘Is this Gerardo’s handwriting?’

  Ana nodded. ‘I think so.’

  ‘You know this book?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘I’m going to keep this, just for a short time. There might be something useful in here.’

  ‘Okay,’ Ana said.

  If Gerardo Fischer suddenly showed up, as still he might, he might not be too pleased that I’d been poking through his personal writings. I could deal with that. I’m a curious son of a bitch.

  ‘Why don’t we lock up?’ I said.

  Ana picked up the house keys from the table, her small white hand closed around them: the tattoos on her forearm deep blue against her pale skin, her dreadlocks swaying forward. I could really go for a woman who looked like that; at least to get to know her a little better. Under the grape arbor, outside the kitchen, Ana turned a separate key in each lock of the steel-grilled gate.

  If Fischer had been sleeping with her, he was one lucky old man.

  Ana and I walked back up the hill under the fierce sun.

  ‘There’s no one that Gerardo might be seeing who could have come up here and taken him off on a trip for a couple of days?’

  ‘He never misses rehearsals,’ Ana said. ‘And he hasn’t called us.’

  I nodded.

  ‘What state of mind was he in the last time you saw him?’

  ‘State of mind?’

  ‘Yes, was he agitated, nervous, distracted?’

  ‘It’s difficult to imagine Gerardo distracted,’ she said.

  ‘He didn’t seem scared at all?’

  ‘No, but he doesn’t really show what he’s feeling… if he doesn’t want to. Especially not fear.’

  ‘Did he have anything to be afraid of?’

  ‘Up here? After the robberies? Don’t we all have something to be afraid of?’

  ‘Okay. So nothing unusual about his state of mind?’

  She shook her head.

  We walked along in silence until we reached the parking lot.

  ‘It’s that one,’ Ana said. ‘His car.’

  She pointed to a Fiat Fiorino. The small white van was covered in dust. I found the key opened the driver’s side door. It wasn’t too messy in there. I popped open the glove compartment: documents for the car, a small pack of tissues, some old cassette tapes, Arvo Pärt, a Bach Cantata, and Gerardo Gandini’s Flores Negras. In the back of the van were a thin mattress, some literary magazines in English, a coil of rope neatly tied off, and a car jack. I locked up the van.

  We walked back to Sara’s house. It was cool inside and the dogs were locked away, maybe in her study. She had some mate ready. Ana and I sat down on the easy chairs in there. I put the folder down on the arm of the chair.

  ‘Are you in the theater company, too?’ I said to Sara.

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘Are you a writer, a painter?’

  ‘I’m a psychologist. Everybody up here just puts up with me. They don’t really consider me an artist, you know, but psychology is an art, isn’t it?’

  ‘Psychology an art? I never would have thought that.’

  ‘Well, I mean… psychiatry, psychosis, that’s hard science, up to a point… maybe if you have to prescribe medication. But understanding the mind itself? Consciousness? Nobody has ever explained consciousness… or what it is, have they?’

  ‘I guess I never tried.’

  ‘A lot of people have tried, but the best you get is a model and then you find out that the model is limited… like everything else in the scientific world. There aren’t any answers… there’s always more to discover… until you find you can’t know… we’ll never know.’

  ‘Is that what you’re doing up here, a study on consciousness?’

  Sara laughed.

  ‘Not at all. I’m writing a thesis for a doctorate: “The Psychological Impact of Immigration to Argentina on European Jews and their descendants”.’

  ‘Was Gerardo helping you with that?’

  ‘It’s difficult to pin down Gerardo for a long interview.’

  The dogs started snarling and barking from behind the door.

  ‘Do the dogs disturb you?’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t worry. They’re under control.’

  ‘I’m glad.’

  ‘I like to feel secure… since the robberies. My dogs give me that.’

  ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘And now Gerardo has disappeared.’

  ‘How did you find out he’d disappeared?’

  ‘Ana.’ Sara waved a hand at her. ‘It was about three o’clock. I was on the shady side of the terrace, watering the plants.’

  ‘How long have you been at the colony?’

  ‘Since the Saturday before Christmas. All the cottages are full. Everyone is up here to escape the heat of Buenos Aires. Everyone in the village knows we’re here because regular deliveries have started again: drinking water, vegetables, bread.’

  ‘You think someone in the village is responsible for Gerardo’s disappearance?’

  ‘I don’t know. It crossed my mind. When I saw Ana hurrying up the path, breathless, close to tears, I knew something terrible had happened. “Gerardo’s missing,” she said. The way she said it, flat, it gave me the chills even in that heat. I thought: Oh my God, not again. I couldn’t help thinking about those robberies a few years ago; how we were just getting over them, feeling safe again at the colony.’

  ‘What did you do when you found out that Gerardo was missing?’

  ‘I just told myself that I had to stay calm because there were a hundred or more possibilities that might have happened to Gerardo and many hundreds more of which I couldn’t even conceive and all of them would be better than him being kidnapped; or almost any of them. Then for a moment I wondered if Gerardo might be capable of suicide.’

  ‘You think that’s possible?’

  ‘I don’t think so. But how can anyone tell what might drive him to an overdose, or to shoot himself… or whatever? At least a kidnapping would be better than that. We’d get him back in one piece after paying out a little money. Or a lot of money. “We’re going to start with the cops,” I said to Ana. Then I went into the house and I dialed from my landline. I explained to the desk sergeant what had happened and I asked if anyone had reported any accident or arrests, anything. Nothing. The desk sergeant just told me to call back the next morning and he’d file a missing persons report. “Wait until tomorrow,” the desk sergeant said. “Then we can list him as a missing person.” “Yes, of course,” I said to him. I mean, what was the point of arguing? “He’ll turn up,” I said to Ana. “No, he won’t,” Ana said. And then she burst into tears. I put my arm around her but she was inconsolable. I suggested calling you. You helped us a lot after those robberies up here. I thought you were still a federal cop but Ana had seen your ad in the newspaper… she knew that you ran some kind of investigation agency, now. So that’s how come we called you. You’re a decent guy. I trust you.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  ‘I trust you, too,’ Ana said.

  She’s a very beautiful young woman.

  ‘If Fischer shows up, no matter what time of the day or night, you let me know right away, okay?’

  I got up and tucked the folder under my arm.

  ‘We will,’ Ana said.

  I really wanted to get to know Ana better but right now I thought that I ought to keep my mind on finding Fischer. If Fischer had been kidnapped, it would make sense to talk to some people in the area who were in the kidnapping business.

  Pablo Arenas knew the kidnapping business very well. He was a veteran of the Dirty War. He’d been in the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance. He’d robbed the colony twice. Maybe his kind of trouble came in threes. If Arenas had Fischer, it would be better to talk to Arenas soon. Very soon. Like imm
ediately. But I wouldn’t visit Arenas alone.

  ‘Right now,’ I said to Ana, ‘I need to call my partner at the office. I have some ideas I need to follow up on with him: routine checks, but they might just turn up something useful, okay?’

  Ana nodded.

  ‘Try not to worry now. We’ll find Gerardo, I’m sure.’

  They accompanied me out to the terrace and across the parking lot to my car.

  I leaned down to kiss Sara and then Ana on the cheek.

  Through the dusty windshield, I watched them walk back across the parking lot toward Sara’s house. I opened the glove compartment and took out the hip holster with my .45 caliber Colt automatic. I hooked it onto my belt. The M1911 is a heavy weapon but I like the heft. The design has hardly changed since before the First World War in Europe. It has a lot of stopping power.

  I got out the cell phone and called my partner, Rangel.

  ‘Can you meet me in thirty minutes at the grocery market on Route 60 next to the Alfajores factory?’

  ‘Sure, why?’ Rangel said.

  ‘We’re going to see Pablo Arenas.’

  ‘Don’t you have some kind of history with that guy?’

  ‘I’ll fill you in on the way,’ I said.

  I hung up.

  Extract from the casebook of Juan Manuel Pérez

  January 10th 2006

  Hours: 18:50 to 19:20

  I started the car and backed it around to get down the drive of the Artists Colony. I headed down the dirt road toward Route 60. Knowing the criminal talent in this area, Arenas was a good bet for a kidnapping and ransom case. That said, it was doubtful that even if Arenas had kidnapped Fischer he would have brought Fischer to his house. Still, a visit to Arenas would be a simple way for the word to get around the criminal world that I was looking for Fischer and I could help negotiate a deal for him. After all, I wasn’t a cop any more.

  Rangel was already at the grocery market when I arrived. He was leaning against the hood of his gray Volkswagen. When I pulled up, he ambled over. Rangel’s belly, framed by his open suit jacket, overhung the belt of his pants and his chins had begun to hide the knot of his tie. He clutched a can of Coca Cola in one hand and a cigarette in the other. His face was red and sweaty and his thinning hair was plastered across his tanned skull. His moustache was neatly trimmed. How could a guy in this condition have a wife and two kids?