by Jerold Last
In the usual indirect fashion of speech we were to learn is common in Salta, the manager began with a five-minute speech that sounded like the Salta Chamber of Commerce prepared it for him. He began by telling us, “There didn’t used to be violent crime here in Salta like there is in the big cities of BA and Cordoba. These kinds of senseless crimes happen because of las drogas, mainly cocaina. This was a terrible tragedy.” He continued in this vein for several minutes.
Suzanne waited politely for the first break in his monologue before asking Carlos, the hotel manager, whether the police had interviewed him at the time of the murder.
Carlos was 40-something, short, plump, and soft looking, with thick glasses. He wore good slacks, a shirt and tie, and a sweater. “No. Why should they investigate what your father had done before he was killed if this was just a random act of violence? Or do you think it was more than that? Have you come here to investigate why he was killed? If that is the case I think we here at the hotel might be able to help you. We all knew and liked your father.”
“Thank you for telling us this,” Suzanne answered. “How do you think you and the rest of the hotel staff might be able to help us?”
Carlos looked a bit confused and nervous. “In any way we can.”
I asked him, “Do you remember anything about Suzanne’s father and his stay at the hotel?”
As it turned out, he remembered a good deal.
He was on a much more comfortable topic now and visibly relaxed. “Most of the Regidor’s guests are from Argentina, so any American was sure to be noticed. All of his requests for directions to places in town and where he should go to visit were remembered. This particular guest was also a very generous tipper by Hotel Regidor standards, so he was especially noticed by the staff.“
“Can you tell us any specific places he asked about visiting or whether he took any tours while he was here?” I asked.
“Rosa, the clerk at the desk, would be the one to ask that question,” he replied.
He excused himself for several minutes to talk with the desk clerk, after promising to be back in a moment and ordering another round of coffees for us while we waited. I asked Suzanne if she had seen either of the two men who’d followed us from Los Angeles since we started our business with the police and the hotel. She hadn’t. Nor had I.
Carlos, the manager, came back with a list and a smile. “Yes, I can tell you quite a bit about what he planned to see while he was here. He stayed with us for about a week, or a little longer, before his unfortunate incident. He booked tours at the agency on the square, across the street from where we are now.”
He pointed towards the Tastil Agency in a small shop about half a block away. “I just called them and got that information for you. He took the regular tours to Humahuaca and to Cachi, a specially arranged tour to Santa Rosa de Tastil, and a weekend tour to the vineyards and wineries of Cafayate. He also asked the clerk for directions to several specific locations in Salta. I’ve written as many as she could remember on this list. Please feel free to ask either of the clerks at the front desk or me any other questions you might think of at any time. You have already met Rosa at the desk; the night clerk is Pablo.”
By this time it was close to 7:00 in the evening and it had been two very long days getting here. We decided to go to our rooms, shower, take a nap, and go to dinner at 10 PM, where we could discuss what we had learned and plan our schedule for the next few days. We stopped at the desk to pick up our keys and passports and to complete our check-in. To our surprise we were given one key and the equivalent of the honeymoon suite on the second floor. On the way up in the elevator, Suzanne and I agreed that there might be many benefits if we allowed everyone to assume we were a couple rather than having to explain our real relationship, so up we went to Room 201.
The room was large, clean, and had a great view of the plaza. Our suitcases were already there as promised, my bag on the floor and Suzanne’s on a rack at the foot of the large bed. After we got into the room and closed the door, we looked at each other and laughed.
“Welcome to Salta,” she said. We worked out the logistics of bed and sofa and took a few hours of naps.
A brief cab ride from the hotel brought us to dinner at a folklorico restaurant recommended by Rosa. The cab zig-zagged through narrow dark streets in an industrial neighborhood to get to the restaurant. We were thoroughly lost by the time we got there. It was an excellent choice not to have tried walking there from the hotel. The lack of street lights and the absence of people walking on the street made this an ideal place for us to run into bad people doing bad things. This might also have been a bad place to bring Suzanne, but it was too late to worry about that now. I made a mental note to take a few simple precautions going home.
The restaurant was a large cavernous hall with a bar on one side, with long tables for dining in the rest of the room except for the stage. From where we sat at our table it was hard to see who was at the bar. I excused myself to go to the men’s room and casually studied the patrons at the bar as I walked through the restaurant. I was not surprised to recognize guy number two from the plane, not the one with light hair but the one with the hat and scar. He was talking with a tough looking Argentine sitting next to him at the bar. I thought I saw him handing something that looked like money to the man he was talking to, but it was done too quickly in the dimly lit bar for me to be sure.
Dinner was an authentic Argentine parrilla (mixed grill) consisting of all the parts of a cow you can imagine grilled over an open wood fire and served at the table with chimichurri as a condiment. Three different styles of steak, including lomo (sort of filet mignon + sirloin in one huge piece), matambre or vacio (flank steak), and bife de chorizo (rib steak) were served, all unseasoned except for a lot of salt added during the cooking. The steaks were served on a big platter accompanied by other parts of the cow, including its liver (higado), kidneys (rinones), sweetbreads (mollijas), sausage (chorizo), blood sausage (morcalla), and intestine (chinchulines), all grilled over the same fire as the steaks. We ate our fill and more, accompanied by a couple of bottles of Malbec wine from Cafayate, a red wine that reminded me of the French Beaujolais or the better Pinot Noirs from California. My favorites from the parilla platter were the mollijas, the sweetbreads. The chimichurri was good with everything, especially the steaks.
Entertainment during and after dinner was Andean music played on the panpipes, drum, 12-string guitar, smaller guitars, and flutes, sung by a Peruvian group. One of the native stringed instruments was particularly interesting – the body was made out of an armadillo shell, and it sounded very much like a lute. The musicians were all costumed authentically and were very talented. According to the program on the table, which gave tourists the background they needed to appreciate the performance, the costumes were typical of the traditional Andean dress still worn by native people today. The women wore full, richly hued, multi-layered skirts, which they swirled about as an integral partner in the dance. Their blouses were richly embroidered, as were their sashes and shawls.
The music was loud and the dinner crowd was definitely into the food, wine, and music. The abundant food and wine lent a definite flavor to the musical entertainment. The audience was transported to a historical Argentina of gauchos and Indians. It may have been as mythical a recreation of history as a western movie in Hollywood, but it was what the audience wanted to see and hear. The panpipes evoked the sounds of the wind on the high Andes mountain altiplano. The songs being sung were mostly melancholy and spoke in both Spanish and Quechua of loneliness and lost love. Similarly to the urban tango music of BA, the love stories were told in music.
I caught a word here and there, but had a lot more trouble deciphering Spanish words being sung than the same words being spoken. I stopped trying to understand the words and just let the music carry me to wherever it was going. The music itself was complex and melodious. The entire sensory experience of beef, wine, and music was thoroughly enjoyable, even if I didn’t
understand most of the words. It was easy to understand the popularity of this restaurant for both locals and tourists. Suzanne was listening carefully to the songs and occasionally translating for my benefit. She seemed to be entranced by the music while her hands beat an imaginary drum keeping time with the rhythm.
An almost equal mix of locals and obvious tourists in the restaurant were enjoying the musical connection between Salta and Andean South America to the north, especially Peru and Bolivia. This connection dated back historically to the fifteenth century conquest of all of Andean South America by the Incas.
It was getting late, we were well fed and well wined, and it was time to return to the hotel. Suzanne paid the check and we got up to leave the restaurant. As we passed the bar I pointed out guy number two sitting there, and told Suzanne all about what I’d seen going on earlier. We left the restaurant and started looking for a taxi for the trip back to the hotel. None were there in front of the place, so we decided to walk a few blocks to the main boulevard where we could find a cruising taxi passing by or one in front of a hotel.
We started walking down a dark, deserted poorly paved street. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end and warned me of danger. Suddenly two Argentine-looking guys, who could have been straight out of central casting at a movie studio, came out of an alley in front of us. The first one was the tough looking man who’d been sitting next to guy number two in the bar. It was pretty easy to guess who’d hired him and why. He brandished a large hunting knife in a very threatening manner, but didn’t say anything to us. I was bigger, but unarmed. This was obviously not the time for me to begin a discussion of what they wanted.
I shoved Suzanne out of the way then went in on the guy with the knife as fast as I could, so he didn’t have enough time to react. I used a karate chop to the top of his shoulder to break his clavicle. As an added bonus, I hit him hard enough to break the scapula with the same blow. I turned to the second hoodlum while he was still trying to figure out what was going on. After all, his friend had a knife and I wasn’t armed. Things weren’t going according to their plan and he hadn’t reacted yet. Hoodlum number two got a short and unpleasant lesson in Jiu-Jitsu as I took him down with a leg sweep. As soon as he was on the ground I grabbed his arm, put my left foot into his armpit area, yanked hard, and dislocated his right arm at the shoulder.
Neither of the two hoodlums had any desire to continue the fight. I picked up the knife for disposal at our first convenient opportunity. This was not the time to dial 911, or whatever the police emergency number was in Salta. It was a great time to get to a major street where there were people and lights in case these guys had friends. I helped Suzanne to her feet and apologized for the push. We left the two moaning would-be assailants. The nearest cross street where we could find the safety of people and lights was still two blocks away. We started walking towards the cross street and talking to help ward off the adrenaline rush.
“That was quite a demonstration of your martial arts skills,” Suzanne said wryly. “Are you always that violent when two guys come at you with knives?”
“Yes, if my major goal is to protect someone else. Otherwise I would have stayed there to ask the one with the knife who hired them or who they were working for. My best guess is that they wouldn’t have known anything other than some gringo they didn’t know hired them an hour ago in a bar, and that he looked like any other gringo. I don’t think they really were going to hurt us. They let us see them before they attacked us, so their job was probably to just to scare us a little bit. At this point they get to go to the hospital and get fixed, and won’t be bothering us again. If they’re smart they can claim they were wrestling and only fooling around when things got out of hand. That way it was just an accident, so there won’t be any reports to the police. Hopefully, the guy who hired them will get the message that scare tactics aren’t going to work with us and we can walk around here in town reasonably safely.”
Suzanne obviously had something else on her mind and wasn’t too happy about whatever it was. “Thank you very much for protecting me. I really appreciate that it was clearly your first thought. Obviously you expected something like that attack to happen. You did a good job of sending the message you wanted to send, and of convincing me that you’re the right man for this job. But I could do very well without your sexist attitude. You should know I’m able to take care of myself if I have to.”
“All I saw when the guy came out of the alley was that knife. My first instinct was to get you out of harm’s way,” I answered defensively.
She stood up very straight and let me have it with both barrels. “Next time you might want to remember the black belt in Tai Kwan Do I’ve earned. I’m pretty quick and very well trained in karate. You don’t have to worry about me first in a fight and I shouldn’t be the reason we can’t do something because it’s too risky. I can help you in a lot of ways down here, not just translating Spanish.”
I tried to plead my case one more time. “I have to admit I didn’t forget your karate skills, I just didn’t know how they would translate to a street fight. I was afraid to find out the hard way whether you would freeze when there was a knife in your face. A lot of highly trained people do the first time.”
Clearly, my arguments weren’t persuasive. “I won’t. I’ve already had the experience and didn’t freeze. I’ll tell you about it some other time.”
It was clearly time for me to concede the issue. After all, she was the boss for this trip and had the right to make the final decisions. And, on top of that, she was probably correct and I had been sexist in my unilateral decision making. “All right, you want to get into the next fight. I’ll make a mental note not to try to be the hero if this happens again.”
Suzanne was still obviously quite upset with me and tried as hard as she could to make sure she’d delivered her message. “There’s a lot more going on here than my wanting to get into a fight. I don’t want to be just the client who hired the detective and I don’t want you to be the employee who does all of the work here. One thing that is very important to me is to feel like I’m actively participating in solving my father’s murder case. Everything in my life has just felt wrong since I got the news about Dad’s death. I haven’t been able to concentrate at work and I haven’t been sleeping well since then. This whole trip to Salta and hiring you is something I needed to do so I can eventually get on with my life. I can’t stand it that I know his killers are still running around out there unpunished. Something has to be done about it and I need to be part of the solution.”
I looked closely at her and said as sincerely as I could, “I can respect that and I’ll try very hard to keep you actively involved in whatever we do from here on.”
I could see her relax. Apparently I’d finally managed to tell her what she’d been waiting to hear. She continued by analyzing the events that had just occurred. “OK. We learned a lot tonight. I think we can assume those two men from the plane followed us here from California to find out what we knew, and whether we knew enough to pose a risk to whoever killed my father. We’re definitely getting on their nerves or they wouldn’t have tried to attack us with hired help. We’ve seen, and can recognize, the two men who followed us here from Los Angeles, which is probably why they decided to hire local help to attack us. The hoodlum with the knife seemed to be a stranger to guy number two when you saw them at the bar, so there probably isn’t anyone else from the Los Angeles drug gang here. It’s possible that what set this off was our visit to the police earlier today, but I don’t think so. The only other thing we’ve done since we left Los Angeles is we came to Salta. The answers we’re looking for probably start here.”
“I learned a lot too,” I replied. “I’ll try to do a better job of working together from here on.”
Chapter6.Salta, Day 1
We were awake, dressed, and eating breakfast in the hotel dining room by 8:30. The hotel breakfast was typical for Argentina, croissants or plain rolls with butter and jam acc
ompanied by weak coffee that had been boiled for far too long The coffee was served traditionally as half coffee and half hot milk in a fairly small cup without refills. Nobody asked how I preferred my coffee. The conclusion was obvious. Salta desperately needs a new Starbucks right on the plaza. We were ready to go in less than 15 minutes.
Based upon the places in town Rosa the desk clerk remembered Suzanne’s father asking for directions to, and upon the tours he’d taken outside of Salta, we constructed an itinerary for our time in Salta. The first destination was a local restaurant Robert Foster had asked directions to, the Casa de Empanadas (The Empanada House). A long walk to the Casa de Empanadas would kill two birds with one stone. We could ask the staff if they remembered Suzanne’s father, and whether he’d met anyone there. More importantly perhaps, we’d also get a real breakfast to supplement the mediocre croissant each of us had eaten at the hotel.
It took us about half an hour to walk from the Central Square to the empanada restaurant. Along the way we passed three large churches, several houses, a lot of apartments, many small shops, and several mini-parks with statues of long dead military heroes. Several statues commemorated General Guemes, a local hero of the War of Independence from Spain, which liberated all of South America early in the 19th Century. Guemes led an army that fought long and well against the Spanish soldiers coming south by land from Lima, Peru, the seat of Spanish power in colonial Latin America. Guemes’ army, which was essentially a militia comprised of the local gauchos (cowboys) fighting a guerilla war, successfully prevented several attempted invasions of Argentina by trained Spanish army soldiers over the course of the entire War of Independence.
