Blood Makes Noise (15 page)

The district
capitán
knew they were Yankees and called the embassy. The embassy duty officer called the ambassador, who called Norris, who called Lofton, who wasn’t home, so he came up himself.

Norris had to navigate broken furniture to get in. Michael and Karen were still in the kitchen. The cops had taken the gun, but no one had moved either of them. Michael was on the floor, rocking back and forth, keening softly.

Norris kept the cops back, ran interference when the
capitán
tried to question Michael. Insisted firmly that everyone in this room was part of the American embassy and therefore had diplomatic immunity. The US mission would handle it. The officer blustered but backed down, ordering his men, after crime scene photos were taken, to wrap Karen, which Norris gave permission for. They used a pink sheet. As she was lifted, Michael clawed wildly at them, howling as they carried her out, Norris holding him back.

“Get a hold of yourself, Mike.”

“
Don
’
t!
” Michael begged. “
Don’t give her to Ara!
”

“Ara? Christ, Mike, nobody’s giving her to him. She’s going to the police hospital.”

Lofton came later, and they took turns staying up with him. Lofton was jumpy and had trouble staying still. He’d wander back
and forth, wiping his hands on his trousers, mumbling, “Jesus, Mike…”

Norris called in a cleaning lady. She came with dawn and scrubbed Karen’s blood from the floor and wall. They pumped up Michael with Seconal and put him to bed. The
capitán
had left a cruiser out front, just to remind them whose beat this was. Norris added a marine guard from the embassy. He washed his face and met Lofton on the landing as they got ready to leave. It was Saturday morning, dead with it.

“Mike going to be okay?” Lofton asked. He looked hammered.

“He’ll sleep some. That’s enough. I’ll leave Casey on the door.”

“How far up the chain of command are we going with this?”

Norris shook his head. “I don’t want any more of Dulles’s SB clowns down here than I have to. Somebody busted in on the kid. Before I end up with the frat-boy hordes crawling all over me, I want to know exactly what this does or doesn’t have to do with the station.”

“The guy killed his pregnant wife, Bud. Point-fucking-blank. This isn’t going away.”

That first day Michael slept. He’d jerk awake, feel the flat dullness of the Seconal, and for a moment forget. But the world always came back on ground glass, and he would let himself fade away from it, away into sleep…

The second day Norris came back, gave him more pills, told to sleep more. Told him not to talk to anyone.

That was okay with Michael.

He got up that night on corpse legs, went downstairs to a house destroyed by someone and piled back haphazardly by cops. The son of a bitch had done it while his wife bled to death. While he…while he sat there…

He could see the embassy guard in front, a cruiser’s shadow in the alley.

Shadows…

They were plenty in the kitchen. But none of Karen. They had wrapped and scrubbed and taken it all away.

He went back upstairs, curled himself on the chilled bathroom tile, begged for death, and got still more sleep…

Tuesday he rose before dawn and his head was fire. Seconal crowded the edge of his vision and he took more to crowd it further. A guard was still on the door, but the cruiser was gone from the alley. He knew—if he could make himself walk—what he was going to do today.

Barely morning and only Wintergreen on the station front desk. Seeing Michael rattled him. “Go home, Spook. Get some rest, huh?” He talked slowly, as if to a mental patient. “I’m sorry about Karen, man. I liked her…Christ, Spook, what am I suppose to say?”

The TSD photo equipment boxes being sent to Milan substation today had already been brought out into the alcove for the courier.

“Get a coffee,” Michael said.

“What?”

“Get a coffee.” Just a pair of Seconal eyes, and Wintergreen got up.

“Sure.” He disappeared.

Michael brought Evita’s box out of the elevator and set it beside the TSD crates. He then went back to his desk and rifled a file cabinet for the station’s single .38 pistol. A cable was sitting on his in-box.

      
TOP SECRET SELF-RESTRICTED HANDLING EYES ONLY…

      
FROM: PETER NORTH AC/WH/5/

      
TO: FRANK SNIFF BUENOS AIRES STATION

      
SUBJECT: RYBAT BI LETTER

      
MESSAGE:

I HEARD. JESUS CHRIST, WONDER BOY, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?

Michael sat alone at Wintergreen’s desk, station .38 in his lap, and waited till the Hapag-Lloyd couriers arrived, wet from a rainstorm blowing outside.

“Got a pen?” Michael handed him one. The courier ticked off his manifest of transfer orders, including Billy Patterson’s fake, compared them to the boxes’ attached paperwork, and signed off.

Both the TSD crates and Evita’s box were locked inside metal containers and taped shut with US diplomatic seals for their trip on an H&L cargo ship to Europe.

Finished, the courier turned back to Michael, still at the desk with his blown-out eyes, and sighed for the both of them. “Shitty day, huh?”

“You have no idea.”

After they left with Evita, Michael wrote two notes. The first he telegrammed to an order of nuns in Milan, Italy. The second he
tacked to Norris’s door:
I
’
m burying my wife. I
’
ll be back…when I’m back.

He hadn’t eaten in three days and stopped for a roll on the corner to settle his stomach. It didn’t. Barbara DeVries was passing when he came out. “I’m sorry, Mike.” He kept walking, was opening his car door, when she leaned in close. “Honestly, I never thought you’d have the guts.”

He drove a block, stopped, and vomited in the gutter.

It was in Palermo Park, near the pond, that Hector met him. “A tragedy, Michael.”

“Yes. It is, Hector.”

Michael took out the .38 and leveled it at the intelligence chief’s bad eye. “General Olivar. His throat wasn’t cut by a jealous husband, was it?”

“No, Michael.”

“Peronists?”

“Almost certainly.”

“And Olivar was watching your Senora. Before Moori Koenig.”

“Yes. I should have told you. I’m sorry.”

“You can’t imagine the comfort that apology is to me right now.”

Hector shook his head with something that could pass for sadness. “I cared a great deal for Carmelina, Michael. This sickens my heart.”

It had all been flat and compartmentalized in his mind that day till the sound of her nickname. The one just for the three of them, and it was molten copper on his soul. His eyes filled with tears and he shoved them aside with his open palm. “You fucking bastard.”

Hector’s gaze never went to the gun, his voice a calm that made the .38 feel stupid. “We used each other, Michael. And that is the way of the world with us. But I had affection for you,
and none less for Carmelina. I never meant for any of this to happen.”

You could almost believe it.

And the crazy fucking thing was, who could Michael talk to? Who could he ever share this with? Whose shoulder could he lay just a fraction of this on, just enough to keep his mind from exploding?

Who except Hector?

Under its own power the gun began to shake, lower, and he was jerking with ragged sobs now, as Hector stepped forward and embraced him. “It’s all right, Michael. Go ahead, for both of us. The Senora has been a curse for all that have touched her. You needn’t worry of her anymore. I’ll finish it. I’ll throw her into the river if I must.”

Michael pulled away from him. “It’s taken care of.”

A look of uncertainty. “What do you mean?”

“Courier picked her up this morning.”

Just a strobe of Hector’s mind flying. Considering. “As we had originally planned. I just assumed…after all this…”

“She’ll be safe.”

A breeze, a faraway cry of winter off the Andes, crept about their feet. “Where, Michael?”

Michael took a long time to answer, then didn’t answer at all. He turned and walked toward the car.

“Michael, I must know. I…we…cannot just…” Hector following him now, “
Michael!
”

Michael spun around and shoved the .38 against Hector’s face. “She’s mine. Do you understand? Mine. If you ask me again, if I ever see you anywhere, ever, I’ll kill you. Is that clear?”

“You’re upset, Michael. You don’t know what you’re doing.”

Michael lowered the gun and stared at the deputy head of intelligence. “I know, Hector. For the first time in this goddamn
country, I know.” He slammed Hector then, hard on the side of the mouth. The crippled spook fell to the dirt.

“I think that about finishes it with us.”

That next morning Michael Suslov began a thirty-hour trip to Mendocino, California, with another crate: the body of his wife. From Sonoma County Airport, Michael Suslov rode in the hearse, first to the church, then to the family plot in Fort Bragg. At the funeral service Michael Suslov stood and prayed and wept and, having almost nothing to say to Karen’s family, said mostly nothing. When her younger brothers hissed they’d kill him if he came through here again, Michael Suslov nodded.

Before leaving Buenos Aires, Michael had visited a document forger he knew operating in an unmarked storefront on the wrong side of Retiro, near the Villa 31 shantytown, who he had make a fake US passport in the name of Gary Phillips.

Now “Gary Phillips,” a week after burying his wife, drove to San Francisco and boarded a round-trip flight to Italy.

Gary Phillips looked a lot worse than his picture, looked even more terrible twenty-eight hours later when he landed in Rome. There, Gary Phillips rented a van and drove to the Dun & Bradstreet corporate building on Via dei Valtorta in Milan, where the CIA substation was located. It was a warm day, a happy day, because it was somebody’s birthday and the offices were sweet with sponge cake.

The station duty officer that waited on him looked as if he’d been partying most of the afternoon, and Michael thought the CIA substation in Milan must be a nice place to work. The duty officer checked his ID and copy of the transport order and released the box.