The Matador Murders (Roger and Suzanne South American Mystery Series Book 4)

by Jerold Last

  "Yes, I definitely should kill Andres Sanchez."

  Mr. X sipped some more of the scotch, admiring the rich liquid gold in the crystal glass. It was a single malt liquor, aged for 25 years. It was going to be very nice having a few luxuries like expensive booze at hand whenever the mood struck.

  "Yes, I definitely should kill Andres Sanchez, and the sooner, the better."

  Chapter 9. Santiago, Chile

  We took the LAN Chile direct flight from Montevideo to Santiago the next morning. It's the only direct flight (it doesn't stop in Buenos Aires en route) between the capital cities of Uruguay and Chile, and it is part of the consortium of airlines that gets us Frequent Flier miles on American airlines as a nice bonus. The plane took us over the Rio de la Plata as we left Montevideo, a lot of boring swamp and pampas as we flew over Argentina, then over the Andes as we flew into Chilean airspace. There was a spectacular view from the plane of the highest peak in the Andes, Mount Aconcagua, as we flew west towards Santiago from Mendoza Province in Argentina. Towering at 6,959 m (22,841 ft), this eternally snow-covered peak is the highest mountain in the Americas. Its snow is the source of the Aconcagua River in Chile.

  We were in Santiago clearing immigration and customs quickly with only carry-on bags by 10:30 AM. Eduardo flashed a Mercosur passport and waltzed on through while Suzanne and I had to show evidence that we had previously paid $100 cash each for a visa to enter Chile under the "Reciprocity Program". The little visas were stapled into our passports from when we had flown into Iquique the previous year on our last trip to South America in our pursuit of The Surreal Killer. The reciprocity referred to is a tax we charge Chileans (and pretty much everyone else in the world when they fly into the United states) for the privilege of enjoying our airport security as they visit the USA.

  The international terminal was a bright new building that exited directly to a parking lot, taxi stand, and buses. The rest of the airport in Santiago was also large and modern. Some of the other terminals still showed signs of damage from the major earthquake of 2010, especially at the ends of two of the terminals that we could see. Planes flew in and out freely and the runways were in good repair; only the less used terminals had not yet been completely restored to their former undamaged state pre-earthquake.

  “Do either of you mind if I volunteer to be the tour guide here?” asked Eduardo rhetorically as we walked from the international terminal to the nearby taxi stand. “I’ve spent a bit of time in Santiago over the last 20 years and know the city pretty well.”

  I was looking over a tourist guidebook at the time, which probably prompted his question. “Sure, that’s fine with us. We spent most of a day here last year on the way back from Iquique, so we’ve been to a few of the more touristic places and seen a little bit of the city. But we’d love to hear about the less touristic stuff and what makes Santiago different from all of the other South American capital cities we’ve been to like Montevideo, Lima, and Buenos Aires.”

  “Did you get to ride the Metro?”

  “No,” replied Suzanne.

  “We’ll fix that right after lunch,” replied Eduardo.

  We were going to take a taxi directly from the airport to the restaurant where we were to meet our first Chilean drug dealer courtesy of a timely intervention by Eduardo's Mossad colleagues. Suzanne and I climbed into a taxi with Eduardo in the shotgun seat taking charge. After he gave the driver our destination he turned towards us in the back of the cab. “First, the basics in a sentence or two: Chile is long and narrow, so Santiago sits in a narrow valley with the Andes on the west and the coastal range on the east. The Metropolitan area has a population of about 6 million people. There are too many cars, temperature inversions, and lots of sunlight. Does that remind you of anywhere you’ve been?”

  “Los Angeles?” answered Suzanne.

  That earned her a few points from our tourist guide. “Right, so smog is a big problem here. Another big problem, even more so than California, is earthquakes. Remember, they had a huge one a couple of years ago. So the buildings and roads are built to withstand earthquakes of 8 or more on the Richter scale. Some of the best earthquake engineering and construction in the world is done here in Chile.

  "Finally, traffic is a huge problem. The main north-south highway in Chile used to run right through the middle of Santiago, clogging up local traffic, which is bad enough without all of the cross-country trucks and cars thrown into the mix. Before the new highway was built, Santiago had a law that you could only drive a car in the city half of the days during the week. If your license plate ended with an odd number, you got the odd-numbered dates on the calendar, and if you had an even number as the last digit on your license plate you could drive in the city on the even-numbered dates. You’ll see the solution to that problem while we're driving into Santiago for lunch.”

  The highway from the airport to the city was crowded with commercial traffic, but traffic moved at a reasonable pace and we could view the sights through the cab's windows.

  “That Chilean expertise in engineering and construction of earthquake-proof structures came up with a fascinating solution, which we’re driving on now to get from the airport to the city. In 2005 they opened a 6-lane expressway (autopista) that was built and owned by private investors, which connects Northern Santiago from east to west running along the northern bank of the Mapocho River. It’s a 43 Km long high-speed highway, with electronic toll collection so you don’t have to even slow down as you pass the toll collection areas. It connects at both ends to the Chilean National Highway that runs north and south, and also allows high-speed highway access to key exits in downtown Santiago and at the Santiago Airport. So far, it sounds just like California, doesn’t it? But the Chileans found a truly creative solution to making it earthquake-proof and building it with little or no disruption to normal life in the city, at least in the most heavily urbanized and used districts.

  "About 2.7 Km of that autopista runs through a tunnel built next to the river, and another 4 Km runs through another tunnel built, quite literally, below the riverbed. The trick they used to build a highway and a tunnel through a crowded city was to move the river out of the way. I mean that quite literally. They deepened a narrow channel in the riverbed and diverted the entire flow of the river through the channel by putting a huge concrete floor and concrete wall under and next to the river's new channel. The new channel occupied about a fourth of the original riverbed. The remaining three fourths of the old riverbed and sections of the riverbank on the north side became the construction zone. The tunnels were built first, with huge concrete walls on both sides and a concrete floor on the bottom of each concrete tube. That, plus some tricks to allow the foundation to move with respect to the ground, made the tunnels earthquake proof.

  "Then they refilled the riverbed with all of the rock and gravel they had removed to make room for the tunnels, and built some more stretches of high-speed highway to and from and between the tunnels in the old riverbed. The new road is built below the existing street level, so doesn't interfere with local traffic. There are exits at regular intervals that connect to major city streets or other highways in the city. This was done over a period of several years with little impact or disturbance of people's lives, even those who lived near the river. The river is narrower and deeper than it used to be, but now occupies more than two thirds of the width of the old riverbed with a huge, but invisible, concrete wall keeping it in its new channel and off the highway."

  The view from the taxi of the local farmland between the airport and Santiago's urban sprawl reminded me of California's Central Valley. Lush green irrigated farms dominated the landscape, which was flat and heavily cultivated. The peaks of the Andes Mountains towered over the east side of the valley. The west side of the valley allowed occasional glimpses of the coastal range of mountains among the farms and vineyards. Just about every hillside was completely planted in avocado trees (Paltas in Chilean Spanish), and the trees marched up and down the hillsides in
neat orderly rows.

  A few miles further and we were clearly entering the urban sprawl of Santiago. The outskirts of the sprawl were like the edges of most big cities in the USA. The Metropolitan area featured lots of older buildings, mostly run down and seedy looking, light industry, and an impression of no zoning and little planning of the area. Santiago itself is a sprawling big modern city with high-rise buildings, commercial structures, hotels, and apartments lining the highway. The commercial buildings, which compete for the highest and the most architecturally dramatic, seem to all have huge signs identifying the local corporate headquarters of one or another of the familiar European and United States multinational corporations.

  Alongside the autopista on the wide avenues and narrower streets were a continual stream of cars, buses, and motorbikes in start and stop traffic jams. There were a lot of people walking and occasional Metro signs.

  Eduardo had done his homework and pulled some strings, so our first stop was a lunch date with Bernardo O'Higgins, who his pals in The Mossad had located and persuaded to cooperate with us. In return, we had promised that we would not get involved in any way with, or interfere with, the drug trade in Chile unless it was directly related to the events we were investigating in Uruguay.

  Lunch was at a famous seafood restaurant in the center of Santiago called Donde Augusto? (Where is Augusto?). The origins of the name are obscure, but are thought by many to be a jibe at the former Dictator, Augusto Pinochet. The restaurant was upstairs above a large complex of older buildings that constituted The Mercado Central, The Central Market, where locals came to buy their fresh seafood and produce that had been trucked in from the coast and heartland earlier in the morning.

  Eduardo explained our choice of restaurant, "Donde Augusto is famous for serving the freshest fish and seafood in Santiago. Nothing too fancy, just fresh and well prepared. It's dark inside and very busy so we'll be completely anonymous here while we meet a big time drug dealer. Until we have a better idea of who the good guys and who the bad guys are, it makes sense to keep a low profile and be careful who we're seen with."

  We walked through an enormous indoor produce market to get to the staircase leading to the restaurant. Fresh fruits, vegetables, and seafood were offered from numerous vendors in stalls and shops between us and the restaurant. The seafood was more impressive than any market I had ever seen before. Fish of every conceivable color, shape, and size; eels; shellfish including multiple varieties of crab, clam, and mussel; seaweed and other sea plants; abalone; lobster; sea urchins of multiple shapes, colors, and sizes; and several items I didn’t recognize and couldn’t identify formed lanes and cross-alleys along the way. I did recognize a few items, especially among the shellfish and a couple of varieties of sea urchin, from the Curanto, the seafood and meat stew I had enjoyed so much at a backyard barbeque we had attended in Iquique during our previous visit to Chile. Even more impressive: Just about everything for sale was still alive or thoroughly iced down and obviously fresh that morning. The market was crowded and noisy. People were buying the stuff as fast as it was put out for sale. The quantities being bought made it obvious that most people purchased fresh seafood daily at this central market for dinner rather than eating imported and processed seafood out of a freezer or a can.

  Eduardo had apparently been briefed on how to recognize O'Higgins. He was sitting alone at a table for four and was obviously waiting for us. As we walked over he stood up and glanced at Eduardo and me, taking some kind of mental photograph so he'd be able to recognize us anywhere. Suzanne merited a longer, seemingly appreciative, look from him.

  I looked around at the restaurant's spacious interior. Old fashioned tables with faux-wooden plastic tops, modern plastic chairs with metal legs, yellow lighting inside fancy lamps with globes surrounding the bulbs, more light streaming in through high windows in the rectangular structure. High metal beams attached to steel pillars supporting the roof. There was a bar in the middle of the restaurant with a large mirror and a red and yellow neon sign with the restaurant's name. Definitely funky, but set up to feed a lot of people efficiently.

  Our host, Bernardo, was a stocky Chilean about 5 feet, 8 inches tall and perhaps 190 pounds with a swarthy complexion and some apparent indigenous ancestry. He had dark hair, brown eyes, and an overall expression of thoughtful brooding. He greeted us with a smile and a courtly bow for Suzanne, firm handshakes for the rest of us. He spoke fluent, if somewhat accented, English. We started with small talk---was this our first visit to Santiago, what were our impressions, some recommendations of what to order as the waiter approached our table. Based upon his recommendation Suzanne and I ordered "locos", cooked pieces of the local abalone, as our main course and an appetizer of the local crab baked with cheese and a nice sauce. This was all complemented with a shared bottle of Chilean white wine and the ubiquitous agua con gas (carbonated bottled water).

  With the arrival of the substantial appetizers, wine, and bread accompanied by the Chilean version of salsa, called Pebre, we got into a more serious discussion. Eduardo took the lead in this conversation, and deliberately made his voice sound tough.

  "What can you tell us about how the drug industry works in Uruguay, especially with regard to its connections with Chile? We need to understand how things are organized and who the key players in Uruguay are. This is all background to a murder investigation. We'll stay out of the drug part unless there's a direct connection to the killings."

  "Yes," replied the drug dealer in a conciliatory tone while looking Eduardo directly in the eye, "I was told that was what you needed to know, and that you and your friends could be trusted. I'll be frank with you, and will let you know what I can't tell you rather than try to lie to you. About 75-80% of the drugs used in Uruguay come through Argentina. Even if the source of the drugs is Peru or the large cartels to the north in Colombia and Ecuador, any drugs entering Uruguay from Argentina are under the direct control of the Argentine crime syndicates. The remaining 20-25% of the drugs being sold and used in Uruguay come from here, Brazil, and Paraguay. I can't tell you specific names of our colleagues in Cordoba or Buenos Aires. Any drugs being shipped directly to Montevideo from Chile travel by ship from Valparaiso or by commercial airline flights.

  "There seem to be two separate gangs involved in the drug trade presently, an older established group we've dealt with for many years and some newcomers who just appeared on the scene in the last couple of months. The older group receives all of its drugs by ship, and we deal directly with the bottom of their organization, not the top leaders. I can give you one name here, Carlos Cavernas. The other group operates on a much smaller scale, millions of dollars of product a year rather than tens of millions, and gets its supply of drugs flown in on demand. This is a much smaller operation, and they had to initially establish a line of credit with us, so we have dealt with the top leadership. The only name I can give you is Sanchez, but I don't know any more than his last name and that he is somehow affiliated with a large bank in Montevideo.

  The waiter arrived to deliver our main courses and O'Higgins stopped his narrative immediately. "I suggest a short break to enjoy this excellent food, then we can get back to the questions."

  The abalone was good, the crab dish superb, the Pebre spicy, the bread mediocre but an excellent tool for sopping up sauce or eating the Pebre, and the wine was a very nice young fruity Riesling that complemented all of the dishes without competing with them.

  The dishes were cleared, desserts and coffee were ordered, and we got back to the serious conversation.

  Eduardo leaned forward towards Bernardo, "So there are two different gangs in Montevideo. I assume they compete for customers. Where does the muscle come from, local or imported?"

  Bernardo frowned, thought for a bit, and then replied directly to Eduardo, "The older group uses local talent. If they need specialized skills that aren't readily available in Uruguay they hire experts from Argentina. The newer group seems to have difficulty recruiting locally. So
me of their muscle comes from the Montevideo area but some of it is borrowed from us. They pay premium wages, so it is not hard for them to recruit part-time muscle here. I get the impression that it isn't a coherent gang, but rather that there are one or more wealthy opportunistic risk takers who have created a leadership structure and capitalized a "corporation". I would guess that most of the low level employees are day labor hired for a specific task and that there is a lot of turnover."

  "Quite frankly, I'm surprised at how much help you're giving us," commented Eduardo in a much friendlier tone. "May I ask why?"

  "I have two reasons," O'Higgins replied sincerely. "First, and foremost, your handlers here in Santiago made me an offer I couldn't refuse; essentially, they threatened to put me out of business if I didn't give you whatever help you asked for. My other reason is that you will probably help me, even if it is unintentional. I'll make a lot more money if the market in Montevideo is stabilized. I don't care who wins their little drug war, but with your intervention I hope that one or the other side will win control of that market."

  "May I ask a question?" Suzanne asked the drug dealer, looking him directly in the eye.