Blood Makes Noise (27 page)

Giancarlo gave up on the cigarette and pitched it aside. “You owe me.”

From the disintegrated wood casket they lifted the uncorrupted steel inner one. It wasn’t heavy, and Giancarlo and Michael hoisted it away as the Gypsy tried to return some dirt to the hole. Not that it would fool anyone. When the storm passed and the guards came sheepishly back, they’d see the disturbance. With any luck, that would be hours from now.

They slipped the steel container onto the truck bed and tied a tarp over it. The Gypsy followed them out, closed the service gate behind him, and they were all standing there, not feeling the rain. Giancarlo gave the Gypsy some bills, and he faded away.

“I’ll give you a ride in,” Michael said to Giancarlo.

“I’ll walk.”

“Then this is it. Thanks. For what you did in there.”

“Yeah, yeah, fuck you.”

Giancarlo tried another soggy cigarette, tossed it with disgust aside, and disappeared too into the wet, dead neighborhood.

Michael drove a few blocks to an inky shell of a nobody factory. He got out, took off his muddy clothes, and stood naked in the storm. He let the rain wash his body, let it roll over him longer than he had to, then put on clean clothes, started the truck, and with the storm thinning and the night plowing its meanest hour, headed for the city line.

A
t Milan airport Alejandro stole a Fiat and drove the ring road toward the city center. Air through the window cooled his face, which even now still generated occasional waves of heat. It had taken almost no effort to match Suslov’s scratchings in the desert to a graveyard in Italy. The cop in Nevada turned out to be FBI counterintelligence. They’d been following him since he entered the United States.

The cop made it clear that it was of little interest to them which side in Argentina’s war ended up with the Senora, just that they didn’t want an American ex-CIA officer caught at the center of it. If Alejandro had information on where she might be and evidence that Suslov might be trying to recover her, they were willing to allow him to continue to Italy and spare everyone a lot of trouble—on one condition: that he allowed the FBI to examine Her to determine the corpse’s authenticity before She returned to Argentina.

Alejandro had nodded and never asked why, during this offer, the other cops had been kept outside.

The sky was clear breezes but the cemetery ground was soaked with the night’s rain. Steam lifted off roofs as sunlight struck damp shingles.

She’d lain here fifteen years but she was gone now, just broken bits of worm-eaten outer casket sticking up through Lombard clay. The sense of violence and haste blackened his thoughts.

He could still do something about it.

There was a holstered Carabinieri hanging out bored near the spot, leaning on a tombstone, waiting for instructions. He’d eyed Alejandro a few times, but Alejandro was used to the double takes his face provoked lately. Alejandro ignored him, traced trammeled grass and mud back to a service door in the cemetery wall, where a lock hung broken. He swung it open, walked carefully over the weak gravel to the street. Even through the storm’s havoc his pampa eyes could detect human tracks, close together, shuffling. Carrying something.

Her.

This was a forgotten street and only one set of tire treads cut through the mud. A truck. Alejandro could tell at a glance the make was unusual. He squatted down, took its measurement with his fingers. Whatever had been loaded into the truck had scraped away some paint off the tailgate, and there were pale flecks of light blue dusting the ground. So a pale-blue truck with unusual tires.

Alejandro walked to a phone booth where he called the number given to him by his new American friend. Into a recording machine he left the paint color and tire dimensions, hung up, then quietly stole a police handy-talkie from a Carabinieri patrol car and slipped away.

On a rise at the bisection of the western autostrada, Alejandro sat atop his stolen Fiat and tuned the police radio. He had traveled west because he knew this was the way Suslov would run. Confuse the jurisdiction, make a fascist border—Spain, the last in Western Europe, and the only one that would have anything to do with him or his bloodstained masters.

Crows scattered on the tracks of plowed earth below. He pictured Suslov out there, making his run. Whatever Michael Suslov may have been in his Buenos Aires heyday, this was now a man at the end of the line, held together by nightmares and the charity
of a bar girl. That only confirmed to him how much this was all out of pocket. The choice of a disaster case like Suslov, the utter lack of even the smallest rumor of this operation from the scores of Montonero agents inside Casa Rosada, the end-run around the local Italian stiffs with a messy grave robbing. Hector Cabanillas had clearly hung his neck out on this one.

That evened things considerably. But Alejandro had his own concerns. If his former Peronist comrades caught wind of his movements, they might mount their own operation to track Evita. Time was not on Michael Suslov’s side, but neither was it on Alejandro’s.

Suslov had enough of a head start to make the border, but Alejandro had begun to grasp—from the files, from Rosa—the rhythms of the man. Trying to keep his mind together, he would pause, grasp at any anchor. No, he hadn’t made the border. Not yet.

The Americans had done their part. After receiving Alejandro’s phoned tire dimensions, they matched them to a limited production run of Pirelli radials used mostly on Bedford TJ–class trucks in the late ’50s, and had the Italians put out an all-points for any truck matching that description. The police radio in his lap spat Carabinieri slang, and Alejandro’s gaucho
paisano
was good enough he picked up a car stop on the west autostrada. A light blue, late ’50s model Bedford truck. One male. American.

Alejandro pushed off the hood and started the car, and slid it over crushed stone.

Trying to hold his mind together. Sure. Alejandro knew about that. There are secrets to it, Michael Suslov. Secrets.

The arrest had been routine, one of many that 1970 afternoon in Buenos Aires, rifle butts breaking down hundreds of doors. His face was not so different than the others dragged into the streets:
young, hair redder than most perhaps, that crazily stitched scar on his neck.

They were herded into the naval mechanical school and flung into temporary basement cells. It was on these damp, vomit-greased boards that Hector Cabanillas walked, looking past the mediocre faces of the doomed, seeking that one in a thousand…

Finding it in Alejandro.

There was the routine breaking of his body’s resistance, and Hector looked in only occasionally on the beatings, the air klaxons every ten minutes to prevent sleep, the mock executions with blank pistols that left blood dribbling from ruptured eardrums.

When they moved from body to mind, Hector sat in more often, never participating, cleaning eyeglasses with the end of his tie. There were interrogations where no real answer was possible, but failure to conjure one brought punishment. There were guards who offered cigarettes then urinated in his face, electrodes fastened to his testicles, teeth drilled slowly in rooms where sunlight never fell.

The usual.

It was a dull, necessary process, the stripping of the externals of a man, and it always ended the same, with a compliant, disoriented human being, without rancor, ready to walk that last tightrope, one side implosion and death, the other acceptance and rebirth.

They’d all long ago coughed away any secrets to Admiral Massera’s goons working their bodies, and the young man Alejandro was no different. He wept, shat his pants, but he knew little, was clearly not thought highly of by his Montonero chieftains. Fools. The boy’s talent was obvious in his gait, his conviction—even blood soaked—still serene, willingly releasing his body, his minor secrets, but holding tight to that essential that drove him. The Montonero guerrilla hierarchy were snobs who saw only a country bumpkin with a steady trigger finger. No matter. The
Montoneros’ loss would be the crippled intelligence officer’s gain. For it was not this boy’s petty secrets Hector wanted, it was his soul.

“What is your name?”

“You know my name.”

“But I want to hear it from you.”

It was Hector’s first visit to the man’s cell. Chilly down here, and he wore a thick overcoat, sitting on a chair provided by the guard, stroking his dog-headed cane.

“Alejandro Morales.” His clothes were rags; he stank of a thousand humiliations. Hector was used to it. There was plenty worse here. “What is
your
name?”

“Hector. And you and I have just made our first trade in this place.” Alejandro’s posture fascinated Hector. The young man could barely stand but insisted on doing so in Hector’s presence, leaning his back against the wall on unsteady legs. “Do you have any idea how long you have been here?”

“No.”

“Take a guess.”

“My whole life.”

The beatings of course continued, came each morning with breakfast. Hector came with lunch and never referred to the morning’s routine, though he personally prescribed the methods and degree of hurt. He dressed neatly for these lunches and neither smiled nor promised anything, but he was patient and arrived always punctually.

“You are a ward of the state, Alejandro. I am a representative of that state. We form a partnership here, you and I. Each is responsible for his role. This is a road we travel together, both determining the outcome.”

“What is it you want from me?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps you can help me find it.”

“Your thugs already got what I know on the Movement. You might as well shoot me and get it over with.”

“They are not my thugs, I may still get around to shooting you, and they never ask the same questions I do.”

“Like?”

“Did you love your mother, Alejandro?”

And the young man slid down the wall and sat on the floor.

He had the beatings lightened, just enough to remind Alejandro of their absolute control over his life. Their conversations continued, elliptical, and Hector had a blanket brought to help with the chill.

“I knew Her too, Alejandro.”

“What could you have possibly understood about Her?”

“That every nation is given one light, one shining instant, and She was ours. Before Her, after Her, we are just immigrant chaos at the bottom of the world. You think yourself so different from me, Alejandro, but our paths are very similar.”

“You despise Her. You and your government. You would destroy Her.”

“We despise what has been done in Her name. In the name of what She was. Your Montonero friends—who never met Her, never knew Her—for them She is but a vessel to stuff their college Marx and Mao into. Only you and I knew Her, Alejandro. Only you and I truly understand.”

“How do you know I met Her?”

“It is written on your soul.”

The boy had resolve, conditioning from a childhood of nightmare shadings, but he had need to talk of Her, to feed that glue of himself, and this was Hector’s opening. He decided to move to the next level.

He had Alejandro taken from the basement cell by moonlight and trucked to an abandoned, seventeenth-century Jesuit cemetery, where he was placed in a six-by-ten underground room. It had a single narrow window just above ground that they slid open only after dark, providing glimpses of crooked, bluish ruins. The beatings were stopped, Hector no longer visited, and each midnight a different officer would creep up to the tiny window and tell a ghost story—of pampa
mandingas
, witches—and the horror groans of the young man inside carried spookily over forgotten crypts.

The essence of Hector’s work was patience, and the creaking military bureaucracy above him was terminally short of it. Argentina’s smudgy war on its domestic enemies was an assembly-line affair, custom jobs not encouraged. The fact that this particular custom job had been IDed as the trigger on at least two high-ranking officer hits—one a colonel—made this government of military officers all the more anxious to get this kid’s breathing days over with. There was a limit to Hector’s leash, they reminded him. Get on with it.