Far South

by David Enrique Spellman

  ‘He don’t know shit,’ I said to Rangel.

  ‘I’m not so sure.’

  ‘How come?’

  Rangel shrugged.

  ‘Who was that in the picture with Arenas? Do you know him?’

  ‘Not personally, no.’

  ‘But you know who it is?’

  ‘Sure. Erich Priebke.’

  ‘Who’s Erich Priebke?’

  ‘Erich Priebke,’ Rangel said, ‘one time Nazi, born 1913, extradited to Italy in 1995 – after years of living in hiding in Patagonia – to stand trial for the murders of 335 Italians, executed in reprisals for an ambush on the German SS in Rome in 1944. They found the bodies in a cave at the Fosse Ardeatine outside Rome, and the Italians had been looking for Priebke ever since.’

  ‘But they found him.’

  ‘They tracked him down to the Olympic Hotel in Bariloche. He was running a ski resort in Patagonia. It took years to extradite him. He had a lot of friends in the police force and the judiciary down there. And even in Italy it was difficult to prosecute Priebke. He still had a lot of friends in high places. They got him in some sort of house arrest. You couldn’t have been more than thirteen or fourteen when they finally nailed him.’

  ‘So that picture was Arenas and Priebke?’

  ‘Standing outside the Olympic Hotel in Bariloche. I’d say it was taken not long before we shipped him off to Italy.’

  ‘Son of a bitch.’

  If Pablo Arenas, or any of his friends or associates, guys like Priebke, had gotten their hands on Fischer, it would be good news if we heard a ransom demand very soon. Still, who knew? I just hoped that Fischer was out visiting a woman somewhere around the hills and he would eventually turn up. Why couldn’t I believe that? Because no one around here would leave the house unlocked. It was as simple as that.

  My father involved with a man who had photo ops with Nazis: I didn’t want to think about that. I just wanted Fischer to turn up so I could forget all about Arenas and his dirty associates.

  ‘You know what,’ I said. ‘I’d like to talk some more to that Maria Dos Santos.’

  ‘Yeah, I’d like to talk to her, too,’ Rangel said,

  ‘I’d like to talk to her alone.’

  ‘I can imagine.’

  ‘I’m sure you can.’

  ‘You want a cigarette?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Maybe Fischer will just turn up.’ Rangel had that resigned looked on his face that made the bags under his eyes droop, his moustache droop, his red and spider-veined jowls droop.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said.

  ‘Me neither,’ Rangel said.

  ‘Do me a favor. Can you check on all the bus companies in town and find out if Gerardo Fischer has bought a ticket to any place?’

  ‘Sure,’ Rangel said.

  ‘And the car hire companies, too. Fischer’s car is still in the colony’s parking lot.’

  ‘Will do.’

  ‘You really think Arenas got something to do with it?’

  Rangel shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t discount it.’

  I backed the car down the driveway.

  Maybe Arenas had been playing a little cat and mouse with us.

  But I still didn’t much relish talking to my father.

  Extract from the casebook of Juan Manuel Pérez

  January 10th 2006

  Hours: 21:00 to 24:00

  I have a nice apartment in Ciudad Azul that overlooks the lake. It’s got four bedrooms, a living room, a big kitchen and a dining room. One of the bedrooms I’ve converted into a study. It’s full of books. As a kid I spent all my allowance on books: crime books mostly, but not just. My old man and the old lady always complained about the piles of books beside my bed. Now I’ve got a library. But my apartment is too big. My wife chose it. My ex-wife, that is. When I had all that trouble in the police department that led to me losing my job, I guess I wasn’t such a pleasant guy to live with. Add to that a second miscarriage, and our marital plans all seemed to go awry. Teresa was a Porteña, and still is. She missed the city, she said. So she moved back to Buenos Aires. I miss her from time to time but the apartment is quiet now and doesn’t echo with screaming rows, or plates breaking, or low-level bickering. It’s a relief in a way. I bring a woman here once in while but no one I’ve ever wanted to ask to stay for more than the odd night. I guess I’m still in mourning. But I must be a glutton for grief. Why else would I set up a private investigation agency in Ciudad Azul of all places? I guess it seemed so easy when I left the force: I still knew a lot of cops who liked me. I still knew a lot of criminals, too. That’s useful in this job. This job is about information: true and false information. True information that incriminates cheating lovers. And false information for the sideline I have in arranging bogus business trips for executives who want to escape from their wives for a week, or a weekend, or a month. I provide tickets, hotel reservations and documents for imaginary conferences in any city in the Americas. The wife – or husband if the client is a woman executive – would never suspect their beloved spouse is hidden away with a lover in Rio or Miami or Santiago or New York. Those jobs pay really well. But they don’t come by so often. Maybe Gerardo Fischer had employed a business rival of mine who wasn’t so good at his job. Not really. I didn’t think so.

  This Fischer investigation could pay my bills for a few months maybe, if he didn’t show up. Maybe it was in my interest that he didn’t show up. But somehow, I liked the people at Temenos. Decent people. Artists. I liked putting away the son of a bitch who had terrorized this Melissa Auerbach, and Ramón and Carlos and Miriam. Maybe I had a soft spot for gays. Maybe I was a closet case. Probably not. That made me think about Ana. She’s very cute. And the Temenos world didn’t seem as horribly corrupt as mine. I might be wrong.

  I sat at the desk in my study, pushed back the books and my laptop computer to clear a nice white space and I opened the folder I’d found in Fischer’s kitchen table. I took out the notebook. It fell open at a yellowed newspaper cutting that dated from July 1994. It was about the bombing of the AMIA Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires in 1994. Over eighty people had been killed, and hundreds injured. It had been the worst bombing ever in Argentina. I read the report. This case was back in the news right now. Since Kirchner had come to power, he called the investigation a national disgrace. The new prosecutors were still trying to find out who was responsible for it. It was a murky business, implications of a cover up: people in the government of the time, the police… even the main judge in the new proceedings had been impeached and removed, and yet another appointed.

  Fischer had made some notes on the page below the old cutting about the AMIA bombing. I got out a magnifying glass and held it over the scratchy lines.

  Some connection with Iran? Hizbullah? Revenge for Mussawi’s killing in Lebanon. Local assistance from some members of the Buenos Aires police force? Or the Argentine Secret Service? How much of this is true? How much money has been changing hands between Lebanon or Iran or Syria and Argentina? And how much obfuscation has been bought down at street level?

  A few pages toward the front of Fischer’s book, there was another newspaper cutting. This one was on the Israeli embassy bombing in Buenos Aires in 1992: a truck bomb, 29 dead, over two hundred wounded, many of them children from a school close by the embassy. No notes there. Just a few jottings on characters for some plays: a short piece on Antigone; another on Elektra. Was Fischer using the cuttings as research for these plays? There didn’t seem to be any connection. And these theatrical notes weren’t getting me any closer to finding him.

  From the back of the folder, I opened the paper packet with the set of postcards and pictures that Fischer had presumably collected over a number of years. Not all of the pictures were dated. Some of the postcards were. I spread them over the surface of my desk. I picked up a Jewish New Year’s card with the words

  L’SHANAH TOVAH

  printed across it and beneath it what I thought of as a kin
d of altar that you’d see in a synagogue, the place where they keep the scrolls of the Torah. Inside the card a message was printed in English:

  Wishing you happiness

  And good health

  Throughout the coming year

  The rest was written in good Spanish and signed from Melanie and Joe. It wasn’t meant to be just for Fischer but for Melanie and Joe’s ‘Dear Friends.’ Maybe it was to the whole theater company. There was no envelope to indicate where it had been sent. Gerardo or the company might have got it in Buenos Aires, Montevideo or Rome. The card had been printed in Cleveland, Ohio, but it could just as easily have been bought in a store in any city in the United States from New York to San Francisco. Thanks be to God, they’d written, we can celebrate being alive and in good health for the coming year.

  At Rosh Hashanah, Jewish believers maintain that God decides who gets to live and who gets to die for the next year and I guess that Fischer and most of the company made it through when that card was written. I wondered if 2006 in the Christian Era was the year when Fischer’s name had been crossed off the list in the Book of Life. I had no inkling one way or the other. Wishing people health and long life: given that a lot of the other postcards were from the late seventies and early eighties, the greeting card seemed particularly poignant.

  I put three postcards from Israel down on my desk. Each one had that crude coloring where the sky is too blue, the blonds too blond, and the foliage a messy green. There were no addresses on them and the messages were scrawled right across the backs of the cards, which meant that they must have been mailed inside envelopes. They could have been sent to any country in the world – there were no envelopes to indicate which – wherever it was that Fischer was living at that time. The first of the postcards I looked at was dated 12th June 1982. It was a picture of a lot of guys with bushy hair and sideburns, some of them dressed in fatigues, all leaning on the hoods of cars beside an olive grove and a barbed wire fence; with the words The Good Fence Metulla in red on a white background and below those words in English and Hebrew was a bible quote in red: And they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation neither shall they learn war any more.

  On the back was a message.

  12th June 1982

  Dear Francesca,

  I’m working with a medical team here in Metulla. Just north of us, the situation in Lebanon is atrocious. Every day hundreds of refugees come through the gate to receive treatment for bullet wounds, shrapnel wounds, terrible burns. It’s impossible to work out who is fighting whom and for what. The PLO is attacking the Lebanese Army and Christian villages. Christian Phalangists are shelling PLO refugee camps. Druze and Shia all have their militia groups and are driving ‘disloyal elements’ out of their villages and areas of influence, or simply shooting them dead. This is what I’ve heard. The refugees tell us that whole neighborhoods of Beirut are in flames. At least for now, Israel has a peace accord with Egypt but Lebanon seems like hell on earth. I receive little news from Buenos Aires. I believe my family is still well, but every time I receive a letter from them, I’m terrified to open it. My whole world seems to be at war. I’m doing what I can here because back home… what’s there to do? I miss you, Francesca. Maybe some time I can come to see you in Italy.

  Love,

  Isabel

  It was bizarre reading these words with hindsight, here in my office in 2006, when I knew that in June 1982, the Argentine armed forces were fighting against the British in the Malvinas. Every kid watched that on TV. I was only six years old and I remember marching around with my toy rifle and firing at imaginary British sailors on the lake. Here in these postcards were chronicles of another war. How was Fischer involved in that? Should it have any bearing on his disappearance now?

  The second postcard from Israel that I’d plucked from the folder had a picture on the front of two blond women on Atarim Square in Tel Aviv. The architecture was ugly. Maybe at the time it was supposed to be chic and modern. Back then it was worth someone printing a postcard to sell to admirers of the new development on the Tel Aviv seafront. The card was dated September 30th 1982.

  Dear Francesca

  Last Saturday saw the biggest demonstration ever against the policies of the government in its war in Lebanon. Four hundred thousand of us were in the streets of Tel Aviv. We are all of us in shock that Sharon allowed the massacre of so many civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in West Beirut by the Christian Phalangists. How can anyone be called Christian who systematically murders so many people? And the Israeli army stood by and watched it happen. Encouraged it? If I feel safe here on Israeli soil, it’s because I feel like I am living in a fortress state whose armies periodically venture outside to wreak destruction on the neighboring states. This will never lead to peace in the region. And in Lebanon, each faction is still intent on murdering the sympathizers of every other faction. It’s like gang warfare with heavy weapons supplied by rival regional powers: Syria, Israel, Iran. The peace movement is growing. So many people on the streets. Even if at times I feel like I should get out of this state that is headed by warmongers, I still feel that I should be here in Israel. This is my adopted country and we all have a right to be here whatever happened in the past, and I must help in the struggle for justice for Israelis and Palestinians both. At least I can demonstrate on the streets here without fear of being picked up and tortured. But I feel so powerless against the atrocities being committed in my name in Lebanon. I hope all is well with you in Italy. Write me soon.

  Love

  Isabel

  The last of the postcards that had originated in Israel was a picture of the ruins at Masada. The message on the back of that card was bleak. It was written to Gerardo and it was much more recent. There was no date and the card was a little beaten up but the content suggested it had been written within the last few years.

  Dear Gerardo,

  Thank you for your card wishing me peace. The truth is that it’s in no one’s interest to have peace in the Middle East: not the Israeli government, not Hizbullah, not Hamas, not the Syrians, and not all the various gangster factions in Lebanon that grew out of the civil war. The PLO wants to get rid of the Israelis, and so do all the other Islamic groups, even if they hate every other Arab faction with as much passion or more. The Iranians have no interest in peace because they want to lead the Islamic world against the Israelis and the Americans. The Americans have no interest in peace because they want to keep control of Middle Eastern oil. Having failed to convert post-Saddam Iraq into something resembling Texas, the next best thing is a state of perpetual war among all the factions: Shiite, Sunni, Kurd, or any gang of sycophants that can hang on to power and guarantee the oil supply. The Middle East will continue to be in a state of warfare because it is willed by all parties: Islamic Jihadists, the world’s oil and military interests, Shiite Islamic revolutionaries, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Qaeda, NATO to maintain control of Afghanistan and Pakistan, Russia to keep control of Chechnya, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, China to maintain control of Xinjiang. And oil, and oil, and oil. Who wants peace? Nobody. While we are all at war then all of these interests are being served economically and ideologically.

  Perpetual warfare is the natural state.

  Love,

  Isabel

  Perpetual Warfare? That was one pissed off woman.

  I sifted among the pile again.

  I pulled out a card from Bariloche.

  Arenas? Priebke?

  The postcard was in Isabel’s handwriting: it was an old postcard from the early nineties.

  Dear Gerardo

  We brought the American here today. I think we’ve found the long lost relative we’ve been looking for. We couldn’t get reservations at the Olympic Hotel which was disappointing. We’re in a place close by and it’s a little frustrating that we can see the place where we wanted to stay but we were told that it was totally booked up with deleg
ates for a private conference. The delegates and their wives seem to be very well off. We’ve seen number of officers in uniform, too. We’re sending a photograph of a well-connected gentleman we met up here. He’s been very kind to us. The American wants to talk to the manager of the Olympic. Maybe when the conference is over. We’re so excited to be here in the Andes. Do let Melanie and Joe know that we’ll be staying on for a few weeks more.

  Love

  Isa

  This had to be connected. So Isabel had come back to Argentina after the fall of the dictatorship and had gone to Bariloche to take a look at the Olympic Hotel. It had to be connected to this Priebke guy.

  Who was the American?

  Behind the postcard was a photograph of a gray-haired man wearing shades and in fatigues. He stood beside a lake that was surrounded by mountains, which were probably the Andes. There was nothing written on the back of the photograph. Whoever was in the photograph, the man in fatigues, I had no idea. It wasn’t Priebke. He looked nothing like the man in the photograph at Pablo Arenas’s house. Was he the one who had helped Isabel identify Priebke?

  Fischer must have known who this man was to have a photograph of him, and Fischer was involved with Isabel and her companion, and whoever or whatever they were searching for. But did it necessarily involve Arenas? Or did Arenas become involved later after Priebke had been flushed out of hiding and extradited?

  What was the link with the Jewish New Year’s card from the United States? Maybe nothing. Isabel would have mailed the first two postcards from Israel to this Francesca who was in Italy, and Fischer had kept them for all these years. That would make Fischer something of an obsessive: not necessarily surprising considering that he was a playwright who had kept writing and producing plays for around forty years so far. There had to be a streak of obsession there somewhere.

  And if Fischer had been in Italy, a possible link that would tie him to Priebke in Bariloche would be the massacre at those caves in Rome: for which, Rangel said, Priebke had been extradited. But why would Fischer become involved in the hunt for Erich Priebke? Why should it have any relevance to his disappearance now over ten years later?