City of Knives

by William Bayer

When Pereyra appeared confused, Marta decided to back off. Maybe she was wrong about the photos. But how could she be?

  She beckoned Rolo into the other room so they could talk.

  "Something's wrong here," she said. "These are the guys in Costas's computer sketches, right?"

  Rolo shrugged. "His sketches could be anybody. It's only if you drew in the scar and the mustache that you see a resemblance."

  "Okay, Costas' sketches were generic. But when I mention the fake photographs, Pereyra pretends he doesn't know what I'm talking about. Charbonneau and Viera did the same. What's the big deal? Why doesn't Pereyra own up to them? His lawyer could claim they were just a prank."

  "Could be these guys didn't commission them."

  "We'll go see Costas in the morning, settle this once and for all."

  She decided to concentrate on Galluci for a while. He was the bigger bully of the two, she felt, and therefore might be the easiest to break.

  She showed him the jar with the testicles.

  He grinned at her. "Scary, aren't they?"

  "Testicles never scared me," she said.

  "They're a joke. They're lamb's balls."

  "Lamb's or human, they probably won't taste good after so many years in the jar."

  He choked.

  "You owe me for stealing my watch, daring to wear my gun and for smashing my phone. But you know what you owe me for most, Galluci? For what you said about my daughter."

  He sputtered out an apology. Everything he'd said was just an act. Nobody got hurt. Like he'd told her yesterday, he and Pereyra were just passing on a message.

  "From whom?" she asked. "We know you guys are hired bullies. Who wanted the message sent?"

  Galluci showed her a weak smile. "You know I can't tell you that. It'd be my life if I did."

  "Figured you'd say that. Rolo wants to attach electrodes to your balls. He's sure that'll jog your memory."

  Galluci smirked. "La Incorrupta won't let him do it. And even if you did, whatever I told you wouldn't count."

  Now it was Marta's turn to smirk. "Don't be so sure about La Incorrupta. It'll be a pleasure to hear you scream."

  But, again, she was amazed at how little pleasure she was getting from having the upper hand over a man who'd treated her so atrociously.

  Maybe that's a good sign, she thought. It means these guys didn't really touch me.

  After an hour of pressure from Rolo, Pereyra was ready to talk. A nameless man, he said, someone they'd never seen before, approached them at Bar Rosa. He offered them two thousand pesos to scare Marta off her case. Accepting, they did what any experienced ex-cop would do: asked around her neighborhood, then followed when her husband drove her daughter to school.

  "I don't believe it was a nameless man," Rolo told him. "It was someone who knew you from when you and Galluci were cops. Whichever one of you tells us first will get favorable treatment. The one who holds out is the one who'll get fucked."

  Marta, who'd stayed quiet during the interrogation, started out of the room, was in the doorway when Pereyra called her back.

  "If we tell you we'll be killed," he said.

  "If you don't you'll go to prison. Know what it's like to be a cop in prison?" She showed him a look of pity. "You have a nice family, Pablo," she said gently. "They deserve better."

  There were tears in Pereyra's eyes. Like every bully he was a coward. She decided to play on that, give him an out.

  "Here's a way might be comfortable for you," she said. "I'll mention some names. When I say the right one, you'll nod. That way no one can say you talked."

  Pereyra agreed.

  "Charbonneau?" she asked.

  He smiled. "Guy like that would never talk to guys like us."

  "But you know who he is?"

  "Of course!"

  "Liliana Méndez?"

  Pereyra shrugged.

  "Ubaldo Méndez?"

  Pereyra hesitated, then nodded his head.

  "Does he work for Charbonneau?"

  "He's director of security for the Viera campaign."

  Now we're getting somewhere.

  "What about a soft-spoken middle-aged guy with soft grey wavy hair?"

  Pereyra shrugged again.

  "Who murdered Granic and Santini?"

  "We heard the crocs did that. We heard Granic was messing around with blackmail. He was using the whore, Santini, to trap someone else."

  "Who?"

  Pereyra shook his head. "I don't know."

  "Will you tell all this to a judge?"

  "I can't, Inspector. You know I can't."

  "And you know I can't let this go?"

  He nodded. Again there were tears in his eyes. "I can take some prison time," he said.

  Suddenly she was furious. "You're such a jerk, Pereyra. You just gave yourself away."

  "What'd you mean?"

  "'Some prison time.' What the hell does that mean? To me it means you've been promised something if Viera wins the sash."

  "I never said that."

  "Yes you did. What did old man Méndez promise you? Reinstatement in the Buenos Aires Provincial Police? A good paying security position in the office of the President?"

  He stared at her.

  "You and Galluci—you're both fools," she said. "Méndez lied to you. Viera's people will never give you anything. No one in their right mind would give responsible jobs to thugs like you. Liliana'll get something big, but not you. You're the kind they assign to prison guard duty in Patagonia."

  She laughed at him, a scornful laugh. "It's like this, Pablo—I don't have to report what you did to me yesterday. That means I'm the only one can save you. Not Ubaldo, not Viera's people—me! But you're too stupid to see that. Maybe Galluci's brighter. I'll go talk to him now, see if he wants to play."

  She didn't waste any time verbal-fencing with Galluci. She wanted to quickly make him furious.

  "Pereyra just squealed," she told him. "Old man Méndez hired you to scare me off. You got money and an offer of a good position if Viera wins the Presidency."

  "Bullshit! If he said that, I'll tear off his balls!"

  "I think it's more likely your fellow prisoners'll tear off yours," Rolo told him.

  Galluci stared at Marta. "What do you want?"

  "Tell everything to a judge. Everything!"

  "Gladly. I'm not going down for Méndez." He eyed her cagily. "Only thing is, Pereyra lied to you. It was his daughter, Liliana, gave us the order. Not her old man."

  Marta studied him. He was smirking again. She called Rolo into the next room.

  "They're smarter than I thought," she said. "Different stories. We'll never sort this out."

  "Let me put on some pressure. That'll sort it."

  She shook her head. "I'd love to say yes, considering what they did to me. But that'll only backfire on us. Also, there's a weakness to my case. I never really saw them, just caught little glimpses—a scar, a mustache and a ring. A good lawyer could get them off."

  "You can say you saw them clearly."

  Marta shook her head. "Sadly, I can't. And they know that about me. That's their advantage. In their minds to be La Incorrupta is to be a fool."

  "So what are we going to do?"

  "Organize a line-up, then bring in Costas, see if he can ID them. If he says they commissioned the phony photos, that'll put pressure on Viera. If Viera doesn't push for prosecution, he'll look like an idiot. 'The guy won't even defend the honor of his wife.' But if he does push, I'm betting Galluci and Pereyra won't want to take the fall. Then, maybe, we can flip them."

  "And what if Costas doesn't ID them?"

  She shook her head. "Then, dear cousin, we just may have to let them go."

  Chapter Ten

  PSYCHOANALYSIS

  For three weeks, Tomás Hudson had been anticipating a sequel to the terrifying phone message that had awaited him the night of his speech. One side of him craved the information his anonymous caller claimed to possess, while another dreaded having to dea
l with such a person.

  Moreover the phone message had left him depressed, bringing back the memory of his frustrating encounters with unhelpful bureaucrats from the time, years before, when he'd searched so desperately for Sarah Shahar. It was as if some important part of his life was still unfinished, and now, out of nowhere, an opportunity for closure had arrived.

  Tomás had never been in Café Sigi before. Though he lived and worked just four blocks away, it was a café he'd studiously avoided. Now, as instructed, he sat at a corner table waiting for his nameless caller to arrive.

  He peered about. The place looked to be a typical café on a sharp corner at the western edge of Villa Freud. There was the same espresso machine and aroma of freshly roasted coffee beans found in similar places throughout the city. Everything was unexceptional except the name, a play on the reputation of the neighborhood, and a large and very strange drawing of Sigmund Freud on the wall in which the founder's face was cleverly combined with the figure of a voluptuous naked woman. Café Sigi purported to be a hangout for psychoanalysts, yet Tomás didn't know a single one who came here.

  When the waiter approached to take his order, Tomás asked if it were true that analysts frequented the place. The waiter nodded gravely. "Oh, yes, Señor," he said. "The doctors usually come in around six o'clock to chatter and read from their green books."

  Tomás smiled at the waiter's double-entendre. Not only was "green book" slang for dirty book, but the volumes of the standard Spanish language edition of Freud were uniformly bound in green.

  After waiting half an hour, Tomás grew impatient. The caller, who claimed to possess the name of Sarah's denouncer, was late. He finished the last of his coffee, glanced at his watch. Perhaps, he thought, he shouldn't have come. After all, he had no intention of paying the man a single peso.

  But then why am I here?

  He knew the answer. He wanted to look into the man's face, his eyes, to see how low a human being could sink.

  He had heard stories of such people. There was a tale making the rounds about a retired cop who offered to sell back stolen possessions to the survivors of people he himself had robbed and disappeared. Another about a torturer who'd cheerfully invited one of his victims out for an apology steak dinner...as if an apology from such a person would have any meaning. And then there were the chantas, scam-artists who falsely claimed to possess the names of an orphan's birth parents, the location of a disappeared person's grave, or the identity of a survivor's torturer or denouncer.

  Peering around the café, he noticed two men sitting together puffing on pipes while stroking their beards. Caricature psychoanalysts! The city was filled with such actors: bogus blind men, pseudo-Borgeses, stumbling around the National Library flaunting white canes, and dozens of Carlos Gardel impersonators, wearing jauntily cocked fedoras, slicked-down black hair and elongated smiles, mouthing tangos to recordings in front of cafés.

  Forty minutes! Time to go!

  Tomás had already risen when he spotted a man hurriedly approaching with a nervous grin—a short man with wide hips, pale skin, squirrelly eyes and a dusty little mustache.

  Tomás stared at the man as he sat down without even waiting for a nod.

  "Yes, I'm the one you've been waiting for. Sorry to be late. Those damn colectivos! 'Buenos Aires me mata!'" He grinned at Tomás. "You may call me Tony," he said.

  'Buenos Aires me mata!' The city is killing me! Thousands of people employed that expression every day. It was such a commonplace, that, in this context, a meeting to discuss the price Tomás would have to pay to learn the name of the man or woman who, in effect, had sentenced Sarah to death, it took on a vile taint.

  He studied Tony as he chattered on, about traffic, the economy, lawlessness in the streets. When the waiter came over, and Tony ordered a sweet roll and coffee, Tomás got a side look at his receding chin and poorly shaved jowls. Then when Tony turned toward him again and he caught a whiff of cheap sausage on his breath, everything about him—the mustiness, halitosis, pear-shaped physique—struck him as being of a piece.

  "...it's been ten years since I left government service. The pension's so puny no one could live on it. So I took up a new profession—matrimonial investigator. Interesting work, and not that much different from what I did before."

  Tony grinned. "Suppose a gentleman of quality meets an attractive lady and is considering a matrimonial commitment? Put yourself in his position, Doctor. Wouldn't you want to know as much as possible about your prospective betrothed? Her financial resources. Venereal diseases. The number of persons," Tony tittered, "of either sex with whom she may have been intimate. I conduct a full and discreet background investigation. Based on my report, the gentleman decides whether or not to propose."

  He told Tomás that during the early 1980s, he'd worked in the office of Special Investigations attached to the Ministry of Defense. He was not a field agent, he made clear, merely an office worker, a paper shuffler.

  "A report would cross my desk, an accusation. If I found it credible, I'd assign an investigator. He would report back his findings, and, depending on my analysis, the person, man or woman, would be picked up for questioning."

  Tomás knew exactly what Tony was talking about: a foursome of tough guys would arrive in a beige Ford Falcon sedan, haul a man or woman away to the Naval Mechanics School...and most likely that person would never be seen again.

  "So you were just a cog in an infernal machine?" Tomás asked.

  "Yes, and a pivotal one too! In a position to know most everything about a case—the name of the accused, the name of the accuser, the investigator's report, and, of course, the results of the official questioning. I understood that one day such information could be of value, so I kept private records, names, dates, final dispositions. A good thing too, since later, as you are surely aware, many of the official files were," again he showed his knowing little grin, "'misplaced'.

  "I can tell you all sorts of things about your friends," Tony continued, "things that would probably surprise you. I know who did what to whom, and sometimes I even know why. But back in those regrettable days the 'why' wasn't regarded as very important. A pity because, when you think about it, the 'why' really should have been the most important thing. Why someone accused someone else, I mean, because often the reason was not always especially patriotic. Someone felt slighted, held a grudge, or coveted another man's wife. Or someone simply wanted to expand his quarters into the apartment next door. Or the neighbor was too noisy...and you know how difficult it is to have an obstreperous neighbor removed. Or plain everyday human spite! I can tell you, Doctor, I learned a good deal about human frailty during my years in government service. Perhaps more than a man should know, lest he grow cynical and lose faith in his fellows."

  Tony picked up the remainder of his sweet roll, stuffed it into his mouth.

  "Be that as it may," he said, chewing. "We didn't meet today to discuss philosophy. So now that you know my background, you must ask yourself: 'Do I too wish to acquire this kind of knowledge?' Some say: 'Better to let sleeping dogs lie.' I can sympathize with that. I did not come today to 'sell' you, sir. I'm not trying to palm off a used car. I came simply to give you an opportunity. Should you choose to reject it, I will understand. Should you accept, we need only negotiate terms. A simple business transaction, like so many made here in the city every day. So, should you be interested in pursuing the matter, kindly place the following notice in the Friday 'Personals' section of La Nacíon: 'Doctor H. wishes to delve further.' I will see it, know it is from you, and arrange to meet you again." He wiped his mouth. "I should mention there's a time limit. My offer expires four weeks from today. If I don't find the specified notice within that time, I'll assume you have no further interest and won't intrude upon you again."

  Tony stood. "Good! I believe we understand one another. I shall await your decision. Good afternoon, Doctor. Please stay a while, enjoy another coffee, while I hurry off to catch my bus."

  Three da
ys later, Tomás drove through noon traffic to the Palermo Tennis Club to meet his son, the club tennis pro. The initiative had come from Tomás. He had something important to discuss, he'd said. "Then please join me at the club for lunch," Javier Hudson had replied.

  It had been more than a month since the two had met, or even spoken on the phone. Their estrangement was not the result of a quarrel, but of an unpleasant tension that arose whenever they got together. Tomás had tried many times to bridge the gap, most recently by sending Javier an invitation to his speech at the Institute. And though it had hurt him that Javier had not shown up, he did not blame the boy. Rather, he placed the blame upon himself, believing the root of his problem with Javier was his reaction to the young man's uncanny resemblance to Sarah.

  He recognized that this resemblance bothered him more than he cared to admit. Every time he saw Javier the old sense of loss was evoked, even more strongly now than when Javier was young. In those days, when Tomás visited him in Boston where he'd placed him with Sarah's parents, Javier's face, still immature, merely suggested Sarah's. But now that he was fully grown, his face had become hers in male guise.

  And yet, he thought, I should be thrilled to see her living on in him.

  Javier was waiting for him in the club lobby. The boy, now twenty-seven, Sarah's age when she'd been disappeared, greeted him warmly with a firm handshake followed by a devoted son's embrace. This latter gesture made Tomás feel awkward.

  For God's sakes, he thought, what the matter with me? He's my own boy, my flesh and blood!

  He resolved to take this problem the following day to Carlos Peña, with whom he'd already booked an appointment to talk through the issues raised by Tony's offer.

  "Come, father. I've reserved a table for us on the terrace. Also a court for us at two p.m. I thought after lunch, if you felt like it, we might bat a few balls around."

  "Sounds like fun," Tomás said. "But I didn't bring tennis clothes or a racket."

  "I'll fix you up. We've got extra stuff for guests."

  The long flagstone terrace, shaded by an arbor covered by a web of jasmine, overlooked the club's center court. White-jacketed waiters served members, most wearing tennis togs, eating, talking, laughing, sipping drinks, taking in the embracing autumn air.