Far South

by David Enrique Spellman

  What was obvious here was that Fischer’s politics, or the politics of those with whom he kept company, were a little complicated. On the one hand, if he had been connected with trying to expose Priebke, he was obviously looking for justice, or punishment, for an ex-Nazi; while on the other hand, even if Isabel had found refuge in Israel, she was still critical enough of the Israeli government to get herself arrested in Tel Aviv after the Sabra and Shatila massacres in Lebanon.

  Why was it that Fischer had this folder with him, up here in a house that was a short-term rental, while he worked on a play? Was this material for something new but based on the past? Did this folder have any significance for his disappearance? There was plenty in it. Two postcards had been sent from Iguazu: spectacular views of the waterfalls where the borders of Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil all meet up. Away from the tourist villages, the area is notorious for arms deals, drug deals, and all kinds of shady business from contraband to prostitution.

  I couldn’t tell which of the Iguazu postcards had been sent first. They both had one-line cryptic messages.

  We’ve lost Araujo and Sadiq.

  The two boys plan on going to Buenos Aires.

  Neither was signed. Why did Isabel communicate by postcard?2 Was it because she was afraid of her messages being intercepted? No cell phones in those days. If this was around the time of the Jewish center bombings was there any connection?

  If Fischer had involved himself in digging in the dirt of an investigation into the bombings – which was still going on at this very moment within the prosecutors’ jurisdiction in Buenos Aires – which has a ten year history of being covered up, with a lot of money changing hands – maybe that had provided a motive for someone to make him disappear.

  I checked my watch. It was only just ten pm. I took out my cell phone and found Ana’s number.

  ‘Hello?’ she said.

  ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I’ve been looking at these postcards and diaries. Do you know who Isabel might be?’

  ‘Isabel? A friend of Gerardo’s? That could be Sara’s sister.’

  ‘Is she at Temenos?’

  Fischer’s postcards

  ‘Who? Isabel?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘No, she lives in Buenos Aires.’

  ‘I’ll ask Sara about her.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Hey, listen,’ I said. ‘You want to have a drink?’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Maybe another time, okay? I’m just so worried right now. I want to stay with Sara.’

  I let the air out of my lungs quietly.

  ‘Yeah, sure. Is Sara there now?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Ana said.

  ‘Can I speak to her?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Sara came on the line.

  ‘Can you give me your sister’s number in Buenos Aires?’ I said.

  ‘Isabel?’ Sara said.

  ‘Yeah. I picked up a folder at Fischer’s house with a lot of correspondence from her to him over the years and it might be useful to talk to her.’

  ‘Okay. But she’s away until late on Friday night.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Israel.’

  ‘Oh… does she know about Gerardo?’

  ‘Yes. I sent her an email right away.’

  ‘And she’s back on Friday?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  I could wait until Saturday before trying to talk to Isabel. What time would it be over there anyway, four in the morning?

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘Can we meet and talk about her a little? It might lead somewhere.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I think there’s a possibility that your Gerardo might have skipped out of his own accord. And it might be somehow connected with the past.’

  ‘You really think so?’

  I didn’t want to say that Fischer might have got himself involved in some murky political investigation that might have led to him being taken out of the picture. It’s better business to be optimistic with a client.

  ‘I think it’s a possibility worth investigating.’

  ‘But why wouldn’t he call us?’ Sara said.

  ‘Maybe to protect you. Sometimes it’s better if people don’t know what you’re doing. Cell phones are traceable, emails are traceable, laptops are traceable. Do you understand?’

  A long silence at the end of the line, then Sara spoke. ‘Oh… okay.’

  ‘I’ll come around after lunch tomorrow.’

  ‘That’s fine,’ Sara said.

  ‘Thanks.’

  I hung up.

  Priebke on the wall of Arenas’s house: Isabel was at the Olympic Hotel in Bariloche.

  I called up Rangel.

  ‘What happened with the car hire places and the bus companies?’

  ‘No Fischer, and no one who looked like Fischer to the people who would give me answers to the questions I had. Then again, maybe he used a false name.’

  ‘Thanks. See you in the morning.’

  I looked around the empty apartment: the art books on the coffee table, the deep pile white carpet, the panoramic window with its view over the lake. No Ana or Maria Dos Santos. A pity that. I guessed that I’d be drinking alone for the night. I didn’t really feel like reading. I had an afternoon date to talk business with Sara.

  Arenas had got under my skin.

  First thing in the morning I’d have to go to see my old man.

  Extract from the casebook of Juan Manuel Pérez

  January 11th 2006

  Hours: 09:00 to 11:30

  Last night I dreamed I was in Lebanon. My girlfriend – a dream girlfriend… I’d never met her in my everyday life… maybe she looked a little like Maria Dos Santos – had been shot in the shoulder by some gangster and then the gangster had been arrested by some cops that I knew. An ambulance came and took my girlfriend to the hospital. For some reason, I had to cross the city with a male friend in order to go see her. This was in the middle of the civil war in Beirut. Two things I had to transport across the city: a bottle of excellent white wine, and the hand and forearm of a female mannequin that was decorated with rings and bracelets that had all been made with precious stones. The plaster hand served two purposes: one was to safeguard my girlfriend’s jewelry; the other was that the mannequin arm would help in the healing of her shoulder. I don’t know how. This was a dream, dream logic. I wrapped up the plaster arm in linen and hid it in the belly of my girlfriend’s teddy bear. I re-stuffed the bear and sewed it up. I took off with this male friend of mine. The streets were a running battle: some Islamic militiamen fired rocket propelled grenades into a house and dragged out the women of a rival faction. One of the fighters was about to rape a woman in a headscarf. I was horrified. The woman had some scarring on her face from previous battles. I was powerless to stop the assault on her. I thought, he’s doing that because for him the woman isn’t a Muslim… she’s part of a different sect to him: a Druze or a Shiite. So she’s an infidel. An apostate, she deserves death. I wanted to help out, but my friend grabbed me by the arm and said, ‘This isn’t our fight.’ A bus came by, a kind of Ford people carrier, and my friend forced me to get on the bus. I was still traumatized by the attempted rape and I was worried that we’d get kidnapped if we got on the bus but he insisted we’d be safe. There were some Muslim women in headscarves on the bus so I thought that he was probably right. It was shocking that a semblance of normal life was going on – a city bus picking up passengers at a regular bus stop – while this civil war was in full spate in the city streets. I woke up as we arrived at our destination. Those postcards must have affected me.

  I showered and cleaned my teeth; put on a clean white shirt and a light brown linen suit.

  When I picked up the holster with the M1911, the story of Arenas and his jammed gun played on my mind. I went into my study, cleared a space on the Formica-topped table, laid out a cloth and disassembled the gun. I can do that in a flat thirty-nine seconds.
I opened up my cleaning kit: nylon brush, copper brush, a patch rod, patches solvent, rag and oil. I wiped the barrel down with the rag and ran a patch through with some solvent. I wiped off the frame and ran a rag through the mag chamber. I oiled the slots in the slide and set it aside. I rubbed a thin film of oil onto the barrel and the locking lugs; a little onto the recoil guide rod; and with the oil having run down the length of the slide slots, I reassembled the weapon in a flat forty-five seconds. I emptied the magazine, lining up the rounds at the top of the cloth. I released the mag spring and wiped it down, ran a rag over the magazine, inside and out – it was pretty clean – and reassembled it. I haven’t use the gun much in a long time. I reloaded the magazine and snapped it back into the stock. I repacked the cleaning kit. I checked the weapon and clipped the hip holster onto my belt. It shouldn’t jam.

  Over coffee and medialunas at the local bar, I called Rangel at the office.

  ‘I’m going to talk to this Sara Suarez at the Artists Colony. But first of all, I want to pay a visit to my father.’

  ‘That bastard Arenas poured poison in your ear, my friend.’

  ‘Maybe. But I need to broach the subject with Pa.’

  ‘Your call.’ Rangel hung up.

  I got in the Ford Executive and I drove out to Route 60, and then the thirty kilometers or so to my father’s property near San Pedro. Pa has a small farm in a valley reachable by an all but washed-out dirt road. The farm is bordered by stands of pine that surround the open paddocks for his five horses. Pa divorced my mother fifteen years ago. He left her the family house in Ciudad Azul and bought this little spread up in the hills where he set up with his horses; and with his new woman, Costanza, for whom I’d had no kind word to say for about seven years after they got together. I’ve kind of got used to her now. Costanza is ten years younger than my mother – which put her in her late forties – and just because she had bottle blond hair, a nose job, and silicone breasts, the cosmetic surgery didn’t automatically make her a monster. Fuck it, so many women do that, now. There’s a cosmetic surgeon on every street corner in Buenos Aires and every other in Ciudad Azul. And, despite it all, Costanza still looked like a countrywoman. And she could ride, which my father likes a lot.

  I turned off the dirt road, rattled over a wooden bridge over the stream that is the southern boundary of the property, passed a shrine to the Madonna on my right, and turned left again down to the main gate where I parked the big black Ford. The wall around the house is about ten feet high. The green paint on the main gates is blistered and flaked, and some of the slats are rotten and need replacing. I lifted the right door handle and pushed. The gate scraped across the dry earth. I lifted it shut behind me.

  The fruit on Pa’s cherry trees and plum trees were ripe. He keeps the lawn cut short on the slope down to the stream that runs along the bottom of the garden. Across the stream, in the next paddock, a mature pair of bay thoroughbreds, and their three close-to-full-grown offspring, lifted their heads to inspect me from a distance; and then dipped them again to continue their grazing.

  Pa came around the side of the house to see who’d driven up and opened the gate. He’s proud of this flat-roofed ranch house from the nineteenth century. Wisteria climbs the walls. The windows have the original wooden shutters that have been kept in far better condition than the gate and they’ve been strengthened by the addition of iron bars for the windows.

  Pa raised a hand to me. The cuff of his plaid shirt, worn over a white t-shirt, flopped back on his forearm. His wheat-colored cotton pants bunched at the ankles over his leather sandals. He’s a wiry man, a deep brown color from the sun, deep wrinkles, bald with a chiseled off chin that’s shadowed with pale gray stubble. In that tanned face his eyes are a deadly blue. I’m taller and thicker set than him. Better fed in my childhood, I guess. And I wish I had those woman-killer eyes of his. My own eyes are dark. I must take after my mother in that.

  ‘Juanma! To what do we owe the honor?’ he called.

  Costanza appeared behind him, her blond hair tied up with a wide blue hair band, her denim shorts cut high on her tanned thighs, and her yellow cotton blouse stretched over those sculptured breasts.

  ‘Hi,’ she called.

  I reminded myself to be nice to her. She’s nice to my father, isn’t she?

  ‘A matecito, Juanma?’ my father said.

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  We went round into the shade close to the stone barbecue that he’d built into the farmhouse wall. We sat down at the black cast iron garden table. A black and silver thermos stood next to Pa’s leather covered mate gourd. Costanza reached for her cigarettes and lit one while my father adjusted the long silver tube in the yerba with his fist and poured the hot water into the gourd. It’s always his job, preparing the brew. He has to be in control.

  ‘You’re working?’ Pa lifted his chin toward my open jacket, his glance on the butt of the automatic in the leather hip holster beneath it.

  ‘Up at that artists colony, you know the one… Temenos… one of those people has gone missing.’

  He passed the full gourd over to me, bubbles foaming on top of it.

  Bitter, not too bitter.

  ‘How missing?’

  ‘House open… and man and computer gone.’

  He shrugged.

  ‘I talked to Pablo Arenas,’ I said.

  ‘Arenas?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘The guy you put away.’

  ‘He’s robbed them twice up there. Maybe things always go in threes.’

  Pa pushed out his lower lip. I sucked at the silver tube.

  ‘He’s done his time. Why you got a hard-on for Arenas?’

  ‘He got me thrown off the force.’

  ‘You getting paid to do this work?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Pa nodded.

  ‘Anyone ask for money yet? For this guy.’

  ‘Not that I know of… I don’t even know who might pay a ransom for him. No family to speak of… doesn’t seem to have much money.’

  ‘Or if he just took off with a woman… or if he got involved in an accident somewhere…’

  ‘The house was open,’ I said.

  ‘Right,’ Pa said.

  I sipped at the brew. Costanza smoked her cigarette.

  ‘Arenas says he knows you.’

  ‘I know Arenas.’

  Now it was my turn to say nothing. I finished the brew and passed the gourd back to my father. He took the thermos and filled up the gourd again. He passed it over to Costanza. She took it from him, crossed her legs, drew on her cigarette, blew out smoke, posed with the cigarette, and sucked at the silver tube. I waited for my father to say something. But he didn’t say anything.

  ‘You think Arenas might have anything to do with it?’

  My father shook his head, not in denial, simply an expression that he wasn’t interested. I wanted to ask him what he knew about Arenas and why he knew him but I also knew that my father wasn’t going to tell me or he already would have said something.

  ‘You know Arenas has a picture of himself with this Nazi war criminal, Erich Priebke, on his wall. The SS guy we extradited to stand trial in Italy back in the nineties.’

  Pa shrugged.

  ‘Who else wants to see this guy gone?’

  I shook my head: my turn to be inscrutable. A possibility of murder, that’s what my father was implying. But he wouldn’t be drawn on Arenas.

  ‘Maybe he just skipped out,’ Pa said.

  ‘I’d like to see Fischer’s police records. He must have a record somewhere if he went into exile in the seventies. We kept records on every potential subversive. It would be good to see Arenas’s file again, too. I don’t remember a lot about it but the strange thing is, I know I saw that Arenas had a record of being in the Triple A; but there was no mention of anything to do with Priebke. Maybe there was some other stuff missing, too. Or maybe there are some things in his file that I didn’t pay any mind because the robbery case was so cut and
dried. I’d like to see it again.’

  My father shook his head. ‘Difficult. You’re not a well loved man in the precinct.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘I’ll do what I can for you.’

  I sat upright in the garden seat. I couldn’t believe what I’d just heard.

  ‘Just leave it to me,’ he said. ‘I’ll find out if anything is going on.’

  I knew better than to push it any further.

  ‘The colts are looking good,’ I said. ‘They’re coming along fine.’

  ‘Costanza is already excited about breaking them in.’

  ‘They’ll be a good ride.’

  My father smiled, a look of love on his face. Costanza poured water from the thermos into the gourd, and offered it to him to drink.

  I got up from the table.

  ‘I gotta go.’

  ‘Come back soon, Juanma,’ my father said.

  ‘Bye, Juanma,’ Costanza said.

  ‘Bye.’

  Across in the paddock, the bay mare whinnied.

  I let myself out of the gate, got in the car and drove back towards Ciudad Azul.

  Extract from the casebook of Juan Manuel Pérez

  January 11th 2006

  Hours: 11:30 to 12:00

  On the road from San Pedro to Ciudad Azul, I pulled off Route 60 and drove through the village of San Sebastian. I passed the local police station and followed the main road up towards Plaza Lavalle. I glanced at the hardware store and the pharmacy on my left and then I passed by the laundry. I felt a rush of adrenalin when I saw Maria Dos Santos, all hair and hips in a light summer dress. She tottered on her high heels toward a bus stop. She had a sky blue and white-striped shopping basket slung on her left shoulder. I slowed the car. When Maria reached the bus stand and stopped walking, I touched my foot on the gas, then braked and pulled up just in front of her. I pressed the button to lower the passenger side window.

  ‘Hi, Maria,’ I called out.