City of Knives

by William Bayer

  The Céspedes were unfailingly polite with these pick-ups, acting neither snobbish nor superior. They would speak to them softly, offer them a ride, subtly bring up the matter of sex, then entice them back to the house where they would take them to their bedroom, make love with them, and, in the morning, provide café con leche, bread and jam, then politely ease them into a waiting prepaid cab.

  Only after these objects-of-their-desire left, did they dissect them. They'd summon Beth to their room, then hilariously describe the goings-on, awkward gestures, naive remarks, while acknowledging how well these strangers had slaked their need.

  Beth was appalled. She told Charles and Lucinda she would have nothing to do with such antics. She took to locking her bedroom door when these strangers were in the house. The game was just too dangerous, she said.

  "But we always take precautions," Charles assured her.

  "You're talking about STD. I'm thinking about a knife in the belly."

  "Oh, pooh!" Lucinda retorted. "You North Americans! You don't understand us at all. We make love with these people. We hook up for pleasure. No one would break that compact here."

  "We trust our instincts," Charles added. "We know how to tell good people from bad."

  "Look at the way we took you in, gave you the run of our house!"

  "Come on! I'm a university professor!" Beth reminded them.

  They hooted at her.

  "Right, an intellectual!" Charles said. "We're certainly safe with one of those!"

  "You just showed yourself a terrible snob, you know?" Lucinda gently pointed out.

  "What you don't yet understand," Charles said, "is how delicious these members of the lower orders can be. They have excellent personal hygiene."

  "Cute ten peso haircuts."

  "Cheap toilet-water scents."

  "Rough hands."

  "Fascinating slang."

  "The boy we brought home last night he kept calling his penis 'my ladle'." Lucinda giggled as she quoted him. "As in 'may I dip my ladle into your tureen.' It was hilarious!"

  "We had a lesbian in the other night. She kept saying to Lucinda: 'Let's play tortillas.' You know like patty cakes. That was her word for frottage."

  Amused and chastened, Beth agreed to tag along that night as they trolled.

  "But no commitment," she warned them. "I'll just hang out, then play it by ear."

  At midnight, when they started driving around the docks of La Boca, Beth grew frightened. She'd been warned by Sabina that this was one of the roughest neighborhoods in the city.

  Noting her fear, they drove back down to Puerto Madero, the area at the port where Poli Ríos had his loft. Here they parked in the shadows waiting to intercept an appropriately attractive waiter or busboy from one of the many restaurants situated on the ground floor of the development.

  They finally settled on a boy whom Lucinda picked out on account of what she termed "the marvelous savage planes of his face."

  "Probably Bolivian," she said. "For sure there's Indian blood running in those veins."

  Having chosen him, Lucinda was delegated to fetch him. She got out of the Facel Vega, called to the young man. When he stopped, she approached and started a conversation. Unable to hear the exchange, Beth observed their gestures. A couple minutes later the boy got into the back seat beside her.

  He smiled shyly at her. Beth smiled shyly back.

  "I think we make a truly lovely foursome," Lucinda commented from the front.

  The boy, whose features did indeed look savage in repose but turned sweet when he smiled, reached out for Beth's hand.

  That's when Beth understood that Lucinda had likely lured him by telling him her gringa friend needed a date.

  She gave the boy her hand, was surprised when he started wiggling his middle finger in her palm. Though intended as titillation, the gesture annoyed her. When she withdrew her hand the boy appeared hurt.

  "I can't do this," she told Lucinda in English.

  "Oh, come on," Lucinda snapped. "You told us how you picked up that DreamDance guy in San Francisco."

  "That was at a tango club."

  "So this is Puerto Madero."

  "Come on, be a sport," Charles urged.

  She gave the boy another look. Well, he is kinda cute....

  In the end, she decided she'd only be able to go through with it if she could dance with the boy a while first. There was something about tango, the foreplay aspect of the dance, that could make an anonymous encounter permissible.

  But when she asked the boy if he danced tango, he shook his head dismissively.

  "Nah!" he said. "I'm into techno and rap."

  That did it. She couldn't bring herself to continue. Without tango as a prelude, she told herself, she simply could not go to bed with him.

  When they reached the house, she excused herself and ran upstairs. There she pressed her ear to her bedroom door, listening as the Céspedes and their pick-up talked a while, then mounted to the master bedroom.

  "You know what gringas are like," she heard Lucinda say loud so Beth would overhear. "Believe me, we'll have more fun without her."

  Beth heard the familiar click as they closed their bedroom door to shut her out.

  In the morning she didn't come downstairs until she heard the taxi drive away. When she did appear, she found Charles and Lucinda at the breakfast table staring at her with smug grins.

  "Man, did you ever miss a good time!" Charles told her.

  "Not my scene," she replied. "It might've worked for me if we could have danced a little first."

  "One thing we've learned from our adventures," Charles said, "is not to impose our preferences. Pick-ups are people too, you know. You've just got to go with the flow."

  She peered at him. He was dead serious. A pick-up, he'd just informed her, was not simply an "object-of-desire;" he or she was also a human being. Well, she thought, what a profound insight! Who'd have thought it?

  She spared Charles her sarcasm. She could tell from the way they regarded her that she'd failed them in an important way. Evidently she lacked the courage to be an urban stalker who prowls the night-city for prey. At heart she was too bourgeois, too cowardly to keep up. They liked her well enough, had corrupted her to a point, but now they could see she'd met an invisible wall which she could not bring herself to scale.

  Meeting their stares, she saw them clearly too. Initially enamored by their beauty and decadence, they had seemed perfect companions. After all, she'd come to B.A. to work through her notion that through tango she might get in touch with something dark and illicit within.

  Caught up by their intensity, she'd ignored numerous warning signs: their Nietzschean operatic vision; careless sense of entitlement; the cult they made of blood sports, of sex with strangers and of tango as a game of conquest and betrayal. Lately, too, she'd caught glimpses of meanness: their notion that humans could, like plumbing parts, be easily interchanged; extreme right-wing political views dropped lightly into an otherwise inane conversation; unsolicited confessions of a fascination with cruelty and death.

  And so she stared at them and they at her in silence across the breakfast table, aware that their world views were different, aware too that most likely their time of intimacy was nearing its end.

  There would be one more major event and it would be the breaking point, a party they were invited to on an island in the delta of the Rio Paraná.

  They drove to the town of Tigre in silent darkness, then boarded a waiting speedboat that whisked them through a maze of rivers and canals. Some of these waterways were so narrow the bordering trees formed arches overhead and branches brushed the sides of the boat as they passed through.

  They arrived finally at a large house on a private island that reminded Beth of villas she'd seen on the French Riviera—a grand, luxuriously-detailed Palladian structure surrounded by terraces and superbly tended gardens.

  She was used to the Céspedes' tango friends, attractive young people their age who danced be
autifully and gossiped endlessly about sex, fashion and celebrities. But several of the guests at this party struck her as different. The middle-aged host gave her a stern smile, and the older guests had a special kind of glow in their eyes, a glow Beth associated with zealotry.

  Charles offered her a marijuana cigarette from his father's gold and lapis lazuli cigarette case. She and Lucinda each took one, which he then lit, with customary gallantry, with a matching lighter. The three of them then sprawled out together, Charles in the middle, Beth and Lucinda on his either side, on a couch set against a wall from which they could observe the passing scene.

  People glided through the rooms, speaking mostly sotto voce, creating a mood fraught with intrigue. She couldn't hear much of what they said, but occasionally, even in her marijuana haze, an occasional word or phrase caught her ear.

  A distinguished looking older man in a white dinner jacket used the term "our enemies" while speaking to a younger man sporting a military haircut. Then she overheard the younger man speak of "the cleansing nature of violence."

  When Beth turned quizzically to the Céspedes, she found Charles resting with his eyes half-closed, while Lucinda, puffing slowly on her toke, stared off aimlessly into space.

  Beth's sense that there was a mood of intrigue in the room, grew as she stood and began to circulate. Stepping outside to escape the smoke, she found herself on a terrace overlooking the water. The sky above was ablaze with stars, but as her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she noticed a half dozen quiet men, dressed totally in black, posted about, rifles in their hands, guarding the house.

  Re-entering the villa, she woke up Charles.

  "Jesus! There're guys with guns outside!"

  Charles shrugged. "Guess they want to keep the party private." He shut his eyes again.

  Exploring some more, it occurred to Beth that there were actually two parties going on at the same time—one, in which she seemed to be included, of well-dressed, relaxed, good-looking young people sipping drinks and smoking grass, and a second party of older people, sober and intense, holding themselves aloof from the first group, forming small separate circles of their own.

  As Beth circulated she received querying glances from these older types. And though she tried to blend in, she didn't feel she was successful. People would stop talking when she came near, smile at her, tighten their lips, then whisper about her after she passed: "I haven't seen her before. Who's she with?"

  The bartender, wearing a white mess jacket with gold epaulets, displayed a stiff military bearing. When she tried to talk to him, he was polite but non-communicative. Moving on, passing a pair of women, she overheard one use the expression "la hora de la espada," the time of the sword. They stopped talking until she passed.

  Observing some of these older, serious people drifting toward the rear of the house, she followed only to find herself confronting a closed set of double doors. One of the ninja type guards from outside stood in front. Beth smiled at him. When he didn't return her smile, she looked away. She could smell cigar smoke wafting out, could hear a deep male voice speaking within. But no matter how hard she strained, the words were too muffled for her to make them out.

  Suddenly one of the doors opened. A man she'd seen earlier came out, whispered something to the guard, then strode away. Through the open doorway, Beth caught a glimpse of a scene that stuck with her through the rest of the evening. A tall, lean somewhat stooped middle-aged man was standing before several others who were seated. He was speaking while holding some kind of elongated object in his hands that Beth thought could be a knife. Behind him she saw a large painting on the wall of a husky man in uniform standing in what looked to be an alpine setting. She peered in, trying to see more, but just then someone inside pulled the door firmly shut. The guard sternly observed her as she shrugged, then moved back to the front room where she found Charles and Lucinda sprawled out in the same positions as before.

  As they drove back to Belgrano, the couple shrugged when she asked them about the host and turned silent when she told them what she'd seen.

  "There's something we've been meaning to tell you," Charles said, changing the subject.

  "What's that?"

  "Lucinda and I are going to conceive a child."

  Well, there's a real conversation-stopper!

  "We've been discussing this for some time. We know it sounds bizarre, but we have our hearts set on it."

  "Have you...tried yet?" Beth asked.

  "We have. And it appears we may have been successful."

  Jesus! She didn't know what to say. Congratulations didn't seem quite in order.

  "He'll be our love-child," Lucinda said. "A superman."

  Superman? What the hell are they talking about?

  "Our contribution to the nation," Charles explained, "a precursor of a new race here, a race of men and women destined to be the salvation of our country."

  "It's the least we can do," Lucinda added. "Argentina has been very good to us."

  Beth knew then that they were mad. For the first time since she'd met them she felt real fear. She'd realized all along that there was something deeply strange about them: their attachment to black leather clothing; the huge, empty unfurnished rooms in their house; their narcissistic delight in their physical beauty; the militant way they danced. But nothing had prepared her for this latest revelation—their intention to produce a child who would be a "precursor" for some kind of master race.

  And then, suddenly, in light of the strange goings-on she'd observed at the party, the pieces started falling into place. Not only were they mad, wealthy, incestuous siblings, but they were dangerous as well—fellow-travelers, it seemed, of some kind of right-wing group, perhaps killers and torturers left over from the former military regime scheming to take over the country again and install a new proto-fascist government.

  Cued by Beth's silence, Charles and Lucinda changed the subject again. As they drove on, Lucinda placed her arm about Beth's shoulder, while Charles spoke delightedly of the erotic romp the three of them would engage in as soon as they reached the house.

  Beth felt herself begin to tremble. It was time to leave them, way past time. Yes, she knew, she must leave them, the sooner the better too...or else risk being sucked ever further into their vortex.

  Chapter Fifteen

  THE IMMACULATES

  The phone rang just before 3 a.m.

  "Inspector Abecasis, This is Tanya Vargas, Raúl's mother."

  Marta sat up straight. "Yes, Dr. Vargas?"

  "Raúl's been badly beaten. He's here in the Emergency wing at Alemán. He's been asking for you. Please come now if you can. I know he'd appreciate it."

  She cursed as she sped through the night streets: Bastards! Bastards!

  Her anger and hurt made her realize she had more than a soft spot for Raúl; that she loved him like a younger brother.

  My fault. I fed him that story, used him to settle my scores...and now he's paid the price.

  She knew Hospital Alemán well, arguably the finest private hospital in the city. She flashed her police ID, parked in the emergency vehicles area, rushed into the building. Three minutes later she was standing beside Raúl's parents, Drs. Hugo and Tanya Vargas, as they gazed down at the ruined face and body of their son.

  The beating must have been horrific. The lower portion of Raúl's face was swathed in bandages. The area around his eyes was so swollen she could barely make out his pupils. Both his hands were in casts, and there was a tube in his chest.

  Raúl attempted to wink at her as she bent to kiss him.

  "I'm so sorry," she whispered.

  "Collapsed right lung," Hugo Vargas told her. He looked like a shrink, Marta thought, with his grey goatee and heavy black rimmed spectacles. "They broke four of his ribs. Also his nose, jaw and both hands. He'll recover, but he's in a lot of pain."

  "That's why I'm grinning," Raúl muttered.

  "Who did this?"

  Raúl shook his head. He received a call, he
told her, from a polite, soft-spoken man who said he had important information pertaining to his recent story about the Investigator, the Politician and the Goons. Raúl arranged to meet him at midnight at an all-night gas station in Almagro. He waited in the gas station café for half an hour before deciding to leave. Nothing unusual about being stood up; prospective informants often lost their nerve. He was on his Kawasaki, pausing at a red light a block away, when a car pulled up on his right. The driver rolled down his window, called to him by name. "Follow me," he said, in the soft-spoken voice of the man he was supposed to meet.

  "Normally I'd have refused," Raúl said. "But he looked harmless and spoke politely, so I followed him. Big mistake."

  The car led him through a maze of streets, then into a dead end alley near Chacabuco Park. He was dismounting from his motorcycle when he was attacked from behind by three other men. Two held his arms while a third tightened a blindfold over his eyes. Then they threw him down hard against a wall.

  He heard some whispering, then laughter, then two of the men held him up again. He felt someone lightly stroking his cheeks as if to let him know what he was in for. Then the beating began, administered slowly and methodically by a guy wearing boxing gloves.

  "First he went for my ribs, then my face. I can't tell you anything about him except that he stank of cologne. He never said a word. I heard his heavy breathing, people giggling in the distance...my own cries and whimpers. When he was finished I heard a car start up, then someone driving off on my motorcycle. There was silence again, then suddenly they used a brick or something to smash my hands."

  Marta winced. "Tell me about the cologne?"

  "Strong. Smelled like someone used chemicals to try and recreate the scent of violets, but they went too far and screwed it up."