Blood Makes Noise (2 page)

And nothing. He had known her better than any, and he had known her hardly at all.

His eyes dropped to the dresser, where they’d placed his suicide note, the handwriting and syntax better than his own, and he appreciated that.

“Answer me, goddamn you!”

He didn’t care anymore. Had stopped caring since she died eight months ago. He felt himself drifting. Away from this place. Toward a thought that made him smile. “Did it ever occur to either of you that my sister, of all women, could have taken it with her?”

Sighs. A cock of gunmetal. His favorite demon uncle: “I always had affection for you, Juanito, even if I never liked you very much.”

The last thing Juan Duarte thought, as oblivion tapped the back of his skull, was how much he hated that goddamn river.

T
he terrorist bomb that exploded outside a Recoleta café during that long year of bombs was unremarkable but for the fact that it misfired. Black powder packed so loosely it went off more like a firework than an instrument of political pressure. Still, when the police picked through the shattered glass and broken bamboo chairs, they found it had, despite its ineptitude, managed to claim one victim.

His name was Tomasso Villa, but everyone knew him as Tomi, a genial drunk who earned his gin money making deliveries for a Spanish doctor on Juncal. He’d stopped that afternoon for his single nonalcoholic drink of the day, an espresso, and was blown into bloody hieroglyphics for his trouble.

The satchel he had been carrying was ripped open and its contents cast haphazardly across the park fronting the café. When the Buenos Aires cops collected them, they found only lab reports, some correspondence…

…And six X-rays.

X-rays of a young, dead woman.

In Argentina a call at midnight is always a lover, but a call at four a.m. is always destiny.

I
t was a sound Michael Suslov never got used to.

After four years back in the capital, still it was a sound of childhood. Shrill, angry, coming to take your life away.

“Yes?” His voice croaked with sleep. The old-fashioned receiver was heavy in his hand—hard Bakelite thick enough to kill someone. Everything was old-fashioned here. It was a national obsession.

“Michael?”

Only two people in the world called him Michael: his wife, Karen, and Hector Cabanillas.

“Hector.”

“I apologize for the hour, Michael.” It was a bad sign when Hector started apologizing. “I must see you.”

He looked at the bedside clock—4:13 a.m.—and thought of telling Hector it was late, to go back to bed.

“Give me half an hour.”

Michael dressed, put some coffee on, sat in humid silence as it perked. The walls around him rang with the evening’s fight. It had been over a bridge invitation. A barbecue. Something.

He poured his coffee and stood at the window. It was open, and he could feel a muddy breeze blow through him. The back garden, laid out in tidy European rows by the house’s former, tidy European owners, glowed gunmetal under a sliver of moon. A dog barked somewhere.

Karen and he had always fought, even used to be proud of it—flash fires clearing the deadwood. But the fires were coming more often, and they lingered now, scorching the stalks beneath.

She was sleeping when he crouched beside the bed and whispered he had to leave. She mumbled something in her sleep. Michael smiled. When they still lived in Arlington, Karen had slept through a snow-heavy cedar branch crashing through their bedroom window.

At the first roadblock on Avenida del Libertador, Michael slowed the car, showed the peach-fuzzed militia soldier his diplomatic ID, and drove on. Sweat rose under his shirt. It was only a day before Thanksgiving back home, but in the backward seasons here at the bottom of the world, the capital already groaned under the hammer blows of summer. There were fewer roadblocks now than the last time he came this way. The generals were starting to relax, starting to believe that
this
coup might stick.

He could glimpse the Rio Plata now. Too big for a river, too small for an ocean, in winter it threatened grayly; in summer it lay fetid brown and coffin still. He followed it south to the Federal District and its buildings of state. Drowsy sycamores appeared on the streets, some pocked with age, others gunfire.

Behind the sycamores lay Government House—Casa Rosada—until recently the home of the president, its century-old pink walls, originally colored with beef blood and lime, now stained with the gray shudder of five-hundred-pound bombs. The work of good Catholic boys in good Catholic airplanes taking it to heart when the pope excommunicated El Presidente. The pilots missed their man but killed four hundred civilians. Good Catholic bodies broken and strewn over the Plaza de Mayo.

He slowed for another roadblock near the burned-out basilica, one of the dozen churches torched by unionist mobs in revenge for the pope-inspired bombing of Casa Rosada. Squatters drifted in the gloom, their candles lonely, bobbing sparks.

Hector had asked Michael to meet him at the Confederación General del Trabajo workers’ union center on Azopardo. Michael
parked his car one street over and walked to the CGT’s art deco front door, tonight dark and silent. Not surprising. Once the powerful lightning rod that juiced, then mouthpieced, a working-class
descamisado
revolution, since the coup half its leaders were in hiding or across the river in Uruguay. The CGT of the moment was a distinctly low-key institution.

There were usually two of the generals’ armed hard bodies at the door, and their absence surprised Michael. What didn’t were the piles of wilting flowers stacked against the wall. Every morning the military took them away and by the next they were always back—roses, tulips, small handmade crucifixes—delivered by a legion of ancient women armed with feet so light, dedication so complete, the guards never saw them. A cycle played for three months now that ended every morning with still more laid against the wall. Their devotion not for this arrogant hunk of concrete, not for the CGT…

For Her.

Michael’s head snapped suddenly at the sound of boots. Two uniformed soldiers, rifles slung over shoulders, came into the light. Between them bobbed the short, gray head of Hector Cabanillas, deputy commander of Argentine military intelligence. Palace guardian. The new residents of the palace had taken a shine to quiet, measured Hector. But then, they always did.

“Michael.” The handshake was reliable, the smile playful under a wilderness of wrinkles. Hector had on the dark-blue suit that was his trademark, winter or summer. “I’m so glad you came.”

“It’s four in the morning, Hector.”

“I apologize, Michael.” He was apologizing again. Hector patted Michael’s arm affectionately. “Let’s get off the street, no?” He nodded to one of the soldiers, who produced a key for the door. Michael meditated on the soldier’s face: brighter, sharper than those of the typical grunts here, most of whom were illiterates
culled from the ferociously poor
Barrio Miserias.
Despite the olive uniforms, these were clearly Hector’s private reserve.

The entryway smelled of must. Michael knew people still worked here—army-installed yes-men caretaking the CGT workers’ union in name only. Still, it seemed crowded with stale ghosts.

Ghosts…

They took the stairs to the third floor, snapping gloomy lights as they went. Hector lagged cheerfully behind, favoring a crippled leg with his silver dog-headed cane. Before the war, Hector had been tortured by a previous regime until the cartilage in his knee disintegrated. Years and several governments later, that same torturer rose again to authority, had the cane handmade in London, and with a boyish lack of irony only Latins can truly manage, threw a lavish banquet and presented it to Hector. That regime was, of course, also long gone now, but Hector endured. Still the quiet, patient voice in dark alleys.

The third floor felt even more musty than the two below. This time it wasn’t an illusion; all the offices in the north end of the building had been cleared out three years ago. The thought chilled something in Michael.

At the end of the hall stood a sealed wooden door, its edges plugged with wax, yellowish and crumbly. Room 63. Hector, his soldiers, and Michael stopped before it. “We are waiting for one more,” Hector smiled.

He was short in coming, his bald pate clearing the landing, and the chill in Michael’s gut rolled into a snowball.

Dr. Pedro Ara, cultural attaché to the Spanish embassy, approached them on soundless loafers. His eyes went straight to the door and lingered, as if waiting for it to speak. Only after a long beat did they reluctantly shift and pass without enthusiasm over Hector, Michael, the soldiers.

“Is there no one here of rank?” Ara’s Madrilenian Spanish hummed with imperiousness.

Hector stepped forward. “I am Hector Cabanillas, representative of the government.”

“There is no government.” The accent was leased from dead aristocracy, composed to humiliate those like Hector, their New World dialects marked by the cadences of immigrants. Hector let it go, his face the mask of the ever-patient host.

“I have complete authority to speak for Casa Rosada.”

“So Casa Rosada finally speaks.”

“This is Michael Suslov, of the American embassy.”

Michael had been introduced to Ara before, by other people in other places, but the good doctor’s eyes showed no recognition. Michael was low rung, a twenty-eight-year-old diplomatic nobody. Ara was more than a senior rep; he was the social track’s magician, its dwarfish undertaker. It was Ara’s career that landed him in the capital, but it was his hobby—his obsession—that gave him access to the most rarefied circles of the oligarchy. That obsession now brought him to the third floor of the CGT.

He didn’t shake Michael’s hand.

Hector nodded to the soldiers, who removed bayonets from their belts and began prying the wax from the doorjamb. It peeled and fell in crumbly strips that skittered on the tile floor. Hector brought forward a key, but the lock had frozen. As the boys in olive went to work on the door, Michael stared at Ara.

What a strange-looking bastard, he thought. With his puckered chin, his elfin ears, his ubiquitousness—like a bad dream, perched on the edge of every night here. The station had vetted him a dozen times, and the conviction held that he wasn’t a spook. He was just…Ara.

The soldiers tore out the hinges and the door came down, drawbridge-like, onto their forearms.

And Michael knew.

Knew the moment the smell, a wakened dragon, snicked through them. Mold, carbonized incense, lilacs.

Ara shouldered past Michael to the room’s threshold of darkness and breathed deeply the scent of things dead, things changed—and his face took on a kind of beatific satisfaction. A soldier snapped his flashlight. Ara pushed it gently aside. “No. Candles.”

Hector nodded, and the soldier produced one. Michael wondered if candles were standard combat equipment or if Hector had anticipated this, understood the moment. A match struck the wick, and with candle held high, they crossed into the room.

A few feet inside stood a pair of tall votives. Ara took the candle from the soldier and touched the two others with an air of private ceremony. The room rose and sharpened. It was large and windowless, with a high ceiling of pressed tin. The walls were empty but for a pair of curtains framing a portrait of the Virgin. At the room’s center was a raised pedestal draped in the blue and white of the Argentine flag. They stood around it now: Michael and Ara, Hector and the two soldiers with intelligent eyes.

“Remove the flag, please,” Hector said. Voices had fallen to whispers. The soldiers reached for either end.

“—With care.”

A soft tug, and silk slid silently away, revealing beneath it…

Her.

Dust shivered in amber glare.

Michael had been prepared for nearly anything: a corpse, a wasted shell, a shrunken effigy. But not what lay before him. Blonde hair glistening in dancing light. Smooth porcelain skin. This was Her. Eva Duarte Perón.

Evita.

In life she’d shattered the pointless cycles of Argentine politics, flung open the gates of history to the great ignored, and ruled them as their pampa Cinderella. This bastard of a cow baron’s toady, the kept daughter of a kept mother of a kept town, rocketed into history on the shoulders of a dream-crazy mob that sang of
her, named stars after her, and on her death, at a still-beautiful thirty-three, choked and paralyzed a country with grief.

This was Her.

A hundred and sixty thousand people signed petitions urging the pope to declare her a saint. Santa Evita, who fed the mob and exploited it ruthlessly. Even in death, her corpse carried within it such imagined power her husband had it sealed away here, in a $30,000 bronze casket with an inch-thick clear-crystal cover, at the bosom of the building that had once been the heart of her obsession.

She seemed so small now.

Michael conjured their only conversation. The strange words passed between them. It tugged unexpectedly, and he wondered if it showed. Michael tried to place those words now in the tiny mouth before him. They wouldn’t fit.