City of Knives

by William Bayer

  "That didn't matter so long as you followed the trail."

  "Oh! I get it! Once the intrepid female detective's on the case, just point her in the right direction and let her do her thing! She's Jewish, so she'll be happy to take our direction. That's how you saw me, right?"

  They'd reached the western end of the Avenue at Plaza de la Constitución.

  "May I please get out now?"

  "Take us back to Retiro," Marta told Rolo. Then to the woman: "You're not getting out until I'm satisfied."

  "What more do you want from me?"

  "What have you got on Viera and his people?"

  "We consider them enemies."

  "Pedraza too?"

  "Him and the crocs."

  "I interviewed Kessler."

  The woman was interested. "What'd you think of him?"

  "He's a psycho. Viera's smooth and charismatic. Charbonneau strikes me as slimy and dangerous. I don't know Ubaldo Méndez, but I know his daughter. They're both famously corrupt. As for Pedraza, I haven't met him yet, but I intend to. I've listened to a tape of him undergoing a mock interrogation with a dominatrix."

  "I'd like to hear that tape."

  "I bet you would. That's a pattern I've noticed with you people: you like to get things without giving anything in return."

  "I told you, we thought Viera or his people had Granic killed. We didn't have specifics. We only wanted you to examine that possibility."

  "You figured if I went at them, they'd try a cover-up." The woman nodded. "That still doesn't tell me why Viera would order Granic hit."

  "We think he had his reasons."

  "He was Granic's target, wasn't he? Pedraza was just a way to get at him."

  "How do you know that?" The woman snapped.

  "Maybe your Mr. Granic talked more than he should."

  The woman looked away. Marta studied her profile. There was something grim about the set of her face. Marta thought: Now she understands that Granic screwed up.

  "I want a direct number where I can reach you."

  The woman nodded, scribbled a number on a blank card.

  "A name wouldn't hurt."

  "You can call me Shoshana."

  "Nice name. Listen closely, Shoshana, so there's no misunderstanding. As I told you last time, I identify as an Argentine Jew. Not Israeli, but Argentine, an official of the Republic of Argentina. Unlike some, I don't have dual loyalty. Unlike your Señora Foigel and your Dr. Plotkin, I don't do special favors for foreign governments. Having said that, if an Argentine national's involved in a crime, I don't care whether he's a big deal politician or some screwball academic theorist—I'll work my butt off to bring him to justice. Any direct assistance you provide will be helpful and appreciated. But any more nonsense or manipulation, and you'll have a major diplomatic scandal to deal with. A scandal that will only help an ultra-nationalist like Viera. Am I clear?"

  "Very." Shoshana paused. "I'd like to say one thing."

  "Go ahead."

  "I want you to know that it's not 'the banality of evil' we're concerned with here. The people who committed the AMIA bombing are deeply evil."

  Marta nodded. "Pull over, Rolo. Time to let the lady out."

  "She won't have trouble finding a ride. Her taxi's just behind."

  They let her out at the corner just a block before the Obelisk.

  "Goodbye, Marta."

  "Goodbye, Shoshana. I'll think about what you said."

  "I'll think about your words too. I appreciate your being direct."

  "I always am."

  She slipped into the front seat beside Rolo.

  "You are something, Marta!" he said.

  "Think I handled her?"

  "You blasted her to hell and back."

  "Yeah...but she still didn't tell me anything I didn't already know?"

  "Perhaps she will."

  "I hope so. She sure seemed surprised I knew Viera was Granic's target. Something about the way she lit up after that makes me think she put it together the way we did that it was probably not Viera or Charbonneau who ordered Granic killed, but Pedraza, trying to protect Viera."

  "How can we prove that?"

  Marta shrugged. "Way I see it, if we can't prove a murder case, it might be enough to connect the dots in peoples' minds. If we can't prove a case against these guys, the least we can do is make sure their crimes don't pay off."

  "What're you talking about exactly?"

  "I think if it were to come out that Viera's connected to the crocs and to nutcases like Kessler and Pedraza, that would pretty much spell the end to his political career."

  "Justice via the press?"

  "When the system fails, sometimes you have to use other means."

  "Doesn't sound like you, Marta."

  "I know. But three days ago, after I left Schell's office, I ran into the Memoria Activa demonstration in front of the Palace of Justice." She glanced away. "That got me thinking."

  "I told Isabel about your dream, the one of you swimming with swans."

  "What'd she say?"

  "She said the swans in your dream were probably a screen for something else—sharks, or maybe...crocodiles."

  Marta smiled. "Isabel's a smart therapist."

  She asked Rolo to drop her in front of the Residencia Europa so she could pack up her stuff and check out.

  "Want to spend the night at our place?"

  "That's sweet, Rolo, but I'm tired of hiding. It's still too soon to bring back Leon and Marina, but from now on I'm going to live in my own house."

  She packed, checked out of the hotel, then, in the twilight, carried her bag up the street to her building. Finding her apartment dusty, she pulled out her vacuum cleaner and vacuumed all the rooms. After that she straightened up Marina's bedroom, then lay down on her and Leon's bed and placed a call.

  The connection to Montevideo wasn't very good, the line crackling with bursts of static. But just hearing her mother's voice, and then Marina's, caused Marta to tear up.

  "Mommy! Can we come home soon?" Marina asked.

  "Yes, darling. Soon as it's safe."

  "I just finished my homework. Daddy and Grandma had a fight. Daddy started it. He called Montevideo a shit hole."

  Marta smiled. "He shouldn't use words like that!"

  "Grandma told him to leave if he didn't like it."

  "Did they make up?"

  "They're talking now in the living room."

  "Can you put Daddy on?"

  "Sure, just a minute."

  Waiting for Leon to come to the phone, she suddenly felt her loss. Till now she'd been so busy, so wrapped up in work, she hadn't had time to miss them.

  "Darling ?"

  "Leon! I hear you and Mother had a fight."

  "Just words. It's claustrophobic here. When can we come back?"

  "Things are looking promising. I'll know more in a couple days."

  "Can you send us Marina's homework assignments?"

  "I'll call the school in the morning, have them send them to you by express."

  They spoke a while longer, she talked to her mother again, then again to Marina, then she put down the phone, closed her eyes and allowed herself to sob.

  I hate those bastards for making me send them away! Time now to get a good night's sleep. In the morning, start pressuring again until I find the weak spot, then bring them down, every one of them...then bring my family home.

  Chapter Fourteen

  A SEASON IN HELL

  Later, when it was over, Beth Browder asked herself what kind of madness had possessed her. But in those early heady days of her live-in relationship with Charles and Lucinda Céspedes, she felt she was existing at a level of extremity and glamour beyond anything she'd ever imagined.

  It was a whirlwind of dancing, drugs and sex, and the whirl was so fast, so disorienting, her head seemed literally to spin. It was as if her view of herself and of the world had gone cockeyed.

  On their first outing as a threesome, they attended a birthda
y party for matinee idol Juan Sabino at the country home he shared with his wife, almond-eyed film star Juanita Courcelles.

  An outdoor dance floor had been erected over the terrace. Intricate fireworks rocketed across the sky. The guests were beautiful. The tango band was superb. Beth danced with half a dozen partners, then joined the Céspedes when they went skinny-dipping in the pool.

  "Tango's devouring, isn't it?" Lucinda whispered as they floated side by side on their backs. "I think of it as being like a big cat, say a cheetah or jaguar, that grabs you by the throat then won't let go."

  After their swim, in search of towels, the three of them stumbled into the middle of a candlelit group-sex scene in the pool house.

  Beth held back, even as Charles and Lucinda urged her to join in. There were limits after all. She was still getting used to frolicking with the two of them. But the chiaroscuro effect of the candlelight as it licked the flesh of lean young writhing bodies, endowed the scene with an essence that reminded her of a baroque painting, and that fascinated her even as it repelled.

  The following day, Lucinda took her to a custom shoemaker's shop where they purchased the latest in tango-wear—tango shoes with narrow leather bands that criss-crossed their legs, wrapping them a good eight inches above the ankles.

  The shoes were broken in that night at Club Noir. Since it was a weeknight, action at the club was slow. Poli Ríos closed the place at three a.m., then invited his remaining clients to a party at his loft in Puerto Madero.

  It was a large space on the top floor of an elongated brick building, one of several warehouses converted into chic condominiums. To Beth's delight, Poli also invited several of the most famous stage tango dancers in the city. After giving a private performance, the stars circulated among the guests. Beth danced with two men she'd seen perform in San Francisco. As she put it to the Céspedes, as they drove home at dawn: "It was like dancing with tango gods!"

  At the end of that first week, Lucinda loaned Beth a ball gown, then summoned a seamstress to the house to custom fit it. That evening the three of them, Beth and Lucinda in gowns sparkling with sequins, Charles in white tie and tails, attended a performance of Wagner's Die Walküre at the Teatro Colón, watching from first ring box seats as they sipped champagne.

  The opera house was magnificent—five tiers of balconies. The production was set in a retro environment of art deco structures, nineteen thirties period limousines and huge overpowering fascist era sculptures, with singers from Spain and Germany performing the starring roles.

  Reveling in the sets and metallic costumes, Beth closed her eyes to allow the great seething shimmering music to wash over her. It was the first time, she realized, she'd immersed herself in the Wagnerian universe, that strange mythic world of Nordic Gods, Goddesses, passions and betrayals.

  At the end of Act One, the famous incest scene between Siegmund and Sieglinde knocked her out not only by its beauty but also on account of its resonance with the Céspedes. Siegmund's sword blazed when he set it down beside the bed. Sieglinde's mirror-polished bra flashed lightning when she peeled it off. In the midst of the scene, Beth stole a glance at Charles and Lucinda, hands clasped, straining forward in their seats, eyes riveted to the stage.

  After that everything in the opera was anti-climactic until the finale when Wotan, punishing Brunhilde, surrounded her sleeping body with a magic ring of fire.

  Joining in the standing applause, Beth overheard Charles mutter something to Lucinda about "gesamtkunstwerk." On their way home, she asked Charles what that meant. He explained that it was a German word meaning "total artwork," the Wagnerian ideal in which story, music, voices, costumes and sets work together to create a powerful momentum that forces total attention.

  "It's our ideal," he told her, "making a world of our own into which we will allow nothing ugly to intrude." He glanced at Lucinda. "Isn't that right, sweetbird?"

  "Yes," Lucinda said, smiling at Beth. "A fine ideal too, especially in stuffy old Buenos Aires."

  They took her for the weekend to their estancia, a ten thousand acre country property. The main house was a sand-colored Arabian Nights fantasy palace complete with notched walls, pillars, arches, courtyard and tiled courtyard pool. The ceilings were hung with fabric vaulting giving the place the feel of a seraglio. On one side of the house was a long building used to stable polo ponies, on the other a matching garage filled with their late father's collection of vintage automobiles.

  Studying the cars, lined up and gorgeously restored, Beth wanted to caress them. Among her favorites: a grey Delahaye roadster, a lacquer-bright red Delage, and a huge silver-and-white Hispano-Suiza limousine, the most magnificent automobile she'd ever seen.

  Their father, Beth learned, had been killed three years before in a freak accident during a polo match. He left them the cars, the estancia, the house in Belgrano, along with a fortune in foreign bank deposits.

  "Polo's a blood sport," Lucinda told Beth. "Dad died on the field of battle. For him there could have been no better death. I just hope ours', Charles' and mine, will be equally grand."

  That night the Céspedes hosted a milonga attended by the local polo-playing gentry, a party that, in its decadent extravagance, exceeded anything Beth had yet experienced. Music was provided by a band bused in from Buenos Aires. The musicians all wore formal wear, while the dancers wore masks and matching black formal trousers, men and women alike bare to the waist except for the suspenders that held up their trousers.

  It was topless tango, breast-against-chest tango, the formal properties of the dance, torsos held straight while legs entwined and thrashed below, contrasting with moist bare-skin body contact above. Beth found it exceedingly erotic, far more so than if the dancers had been bottomless or naked.

  Lucinda offered her view of the party on their way back to the capital:

  "We masked our faces, covered our legs, exposed our chests, making every coupling anonymous. That way all of us, all good dancers, made ourselves interchangeable."

  Interchangeability along with gesamtkunstwerk seemed to be a conscious theme in their lives. Worlds overlapped, people fit together in different ways, yet everything was connected in a closed self-referential circle. It was all, it seemed, part of a personal philosophy that regulated the way they lived. Beth didn't fully understand it, but hoped eventually that she would. She had come to Buenos Aires to immerse herself in tango, perhaps find her Mr. DD in the process. But now she found herself immersed in something far more fascinating and perverse.

  She did not participate in their fencing lessons, but watched from the side of the long, mirrored dining room/ballet studio, as their fencing master, lean, bald and very strict, supervised their practice. She observed Charles and Lucinda as they moved rapidly up and down the long room, thrusting and parrying, giving out with grunts and yells, always, after making hits, whipping off their masks, exposing flushed faces contorted by stress yet painted with wild grins.

  They loved combat. Even their lovemaking was combative, punctuated with scratching and slaps. It struck Beth that their fencing matches, the ebb and flow of victories and defeats, were part of some kind of lifelong sibling battle for supremacy.

  Beth joined in their kickboxing class, held in a second-floor gym above a furniture store in Recoleta. The instructor was a Filipino, kind and serious. Fellow students ranged from high school kids to young professionals. After getting floored a couple of times, Beth sat out the remainder of the class. Charles and Lucinda, she noted, practiced carefully with others, but when paired, attacked one another with vigor.

  On the way home they gently mocked her for her cowardice.

  "What's the matter?" Lucinda asked. "Couple of measly spills and you cut and run?"

  "She's not used to rough play," Charles said. "What she needs is some toughening up."

  Back at the house, Lucinda challenged her to a boxing match. "Not kickboxing, but the old-fashioned kind. Straight punching the way prizefighters do."

  Beth, after c
onsiderable taunting, realized there was no getting out of it, that they'd keep after her until she showed them she had heart.

  The match took place in the dining room/ballet studio, she and Lucinda wearing headgear and regulation gloves.

  Charles, assigning himself referee, insisted they fight bare to the waist.

  "I hate sports bras. Please take the damn things off!"

  "Let's play along," Lucinda whispered, amused, stripping off her bra. "His fantasy is we'll be fighting over him!"

  They went at it for three rounds, danced around one another, jabbing, lightly punching and recoiling, laughing as from time to time they clinched then danced a few tango steps together before Charles, annoyed, pulled them apart.

  In the final round, Lucinda's eyes turned steely as she began to slug away. Beth, not wanting to be hit in the face, retreated and covered up. Then, after Lucinda punched herself out, Beth advanced and threw a couple of hard punches herself, one of which connected, giving Lucinda a bloody nose.

  "No más! It's a tie!" Charles shouted, clanging the dinner bell he'd used to mark the rounds. "I can't bear to see my beauties hurt!" he said, throwing his arms around them, raising their arms high to signify they shared the victory.

  Afterwards there was a smell of mingled sweat in the room. Stimulated by the aroma, Lucinda went at Beth as soon as Charles blanched her nose.

  "Don't you want me to shower first?" Beth asked.

  "I want to have you just the way you are!"

  Charles laughed. "You two together are so hot!"

  The three of them tumbled together onto the fencing mat on the floor. As always, the Céspedes requited her. To amuse her, they spoke of her as if she weren't there, as if she were some love object available for their use — a position which, Beth understood, she would find unbearably humiliating in "real life," but which, in this hot-house atmosphere, she found intensely pleasureful.

  There were things they did that scared her, games they played which she could not bring herself to join. The most frightening of these was what they called their "quests"—late-night trolling expeditions to the seedier quarters of the city in which their handsome faces and snazzy vintage Facel Vega were the lures by which they summoned fresh partners for anonymous sex. Working class boys, adventurous girls, waiters and bellhops walking home from work, even street whores and male hustlers they found on the streets surrounding the tourist hotels—all were potential quarry.