Blood Makes Noise (33 page)

“So now you’re a farmer,” Gina said.

“A real farmer wouldn’t have bought this truck.”

“How’s your foot?”

“Killing me.”

Out of Entrechaux, in daylight, they traveled down the volcanic side of Mont Ventoux, where the land became the south: brushy hills, cypress trees, people hanging out on doorsteps. The drive was slow, for there were lumbering harvesters everywhere. A provincial cop went past and didn’t brake and U-turn. There was nothing to do but accept the favor and keep on.

Michael closed his eyes and listened to the vibrations of the truck. When he opened them they were among castles ruined by time and villages by war.

“Where are we?”

“Near Avignon.”

It was getting dark. After a few kilometers he told her to take the next road. She did, and it fumbled along past once-grand estates. The farther they went, the creepier the road became, until Michael told her to stop.

They were in front of a mansion probably considered gentle in its time. Set back behind a wide garden run riot, its tall, latticed windows were mostly broken. “Pull into the drive.”

“Here?”

“We can stay.”

“Michael, it’s barely dark. I can keep driving. We’re nearly halfway to Spain.”

“No. We’ll stay here.”

They got out of the truck, Michael limping ahead, leading her up the front steps. The inside was empty but not as ruined as she expected. There was a smell of feral cats. “This way.”

He seemed to know where he was going and Gina followed, up marble steps into a grand suite lit purple with twilight. He stood in its center, pointed to a square of oak floor darker than the rest. “The bed would have been here.” He pointed to another, smaller square. “The chair, maybe, there.”

“Why are we here, Michael?”

He stared at imaginary furniture and told her of how, when Evita arrived in Paris as part of her 1947 European tour, she requested an audience with the pope. While it was arranged, she was brought here to wait. Her personal assistants left for Rome to prepare, and she was left with a small French staff of strangers. What no one realized was that until then, in her entire life, Evita had never spent a night alone.

There had always been brothers and sisters in her bed. Or men. And finally Perón. Even in Paris one of her maids slept with her. But when the sun went down in this room, she was alone. Later, the French staff reported that Eva Perón, First Lady of Argentina and one of the most powerful women in the world, had pushed a chair against the door and wept all night in terror.

He looked out at fading light through broken windows. Sparrows had begun their nightly insect hunt. “There are a thousand stories of her being arrogant, cunning, vengeful. This is the only story I know of her being scared.” He turned to Gina, and only half his face was lit in afterglow. “I’m sorry I brought you here. You’re right. We should have kept driving.”

She hadn’t noticed how red his eyes had become, the jitteriness in his hands. She reached out and took one. “Why don’t we bring her in so she isn’t lonely?”

They placed the box near where the bed would have been and lit the fireplace, cobwebs alighting and drifting through the room like Gaelic fairies. Gina pulled down the musty drapes into a heap, and they sat among them with the bread, meat, and grapes.

“Does she seem truly real to you, Michael? Something more than just a box?”

“Do you want to see her?”

Her voice faltered. “It never occurred to me.”

“It’s okay.” He stood and limped to the box. He worked at the bolts, but a few were determinedly frozen. He hit them with the base of a wine bottle and the screech was like grave robbing.

“Michael…”

But the lid was open. And against her will, Gina walked toward it. Michael’s shadow kept the contents in darkness, but as Gina came slowly alongside he stepped away and the firelight bathed her. “Oh my God…”

“Dr. Ara, the man who embalmed her, spent a year and a hundred thousand dollars doing it. Each night he slept in the room with her, so she wouldn’t be alone.”

After nineteen years moisture had stained the casket’s silk lining and the tip of her nose had broken off. “Month after month, he submerged her in baths of acetate and potassium nitrate. Month after month he injected into her formol, thymol, and pure alcohol in secret combinations only he knew. Month after month he coated her in thin layers of liquid plastic.”

Gina turned away. “How could they do that to someone?”

Michael studied Evita’s face a moment, then shut the lid. “She belongs to the people.”

“How could the
people
have done that?”

“They did it from the beginning. From the first day they saw her. They lifted her and changed her and made her theirs. They never cared who she really was. They don’t now. Men have fought and died for her, and who she really was doesn’t matter at all. In fact it’s probably better for them that she’s dead. Now the only sound she can make is what they put in her mouth.”

“Is there anything left of her?”

“Everything. That was Ara’s genius. Everything but the blood.”

Gina went back and sat among the drapes. “She’s nothing but a flag to them.”

“Yes.”

“And to you?”

“A flag of a different kind.”

“What kind, Michael?”

He stepped carefully back to their makeshift bed and lowered himself. “A promise.”

“A flag for a promise?”

“A flag for one promise kept.”

Gina stared into the flames. “You knew her.”

“A part of her.”

“I think we die twice. The first time is physical. The second is when the memory of us dies. When the people who loved us for who we were are gone. That’s when we’re truly dead.” She turned to him. “Everyone who knew her as a person is dying. One day you could be the last.”

“And when I die?”

“Then she’ll be truly nothing but a stuffed flag.”

I
t was dark but the air still gusted a hot madness that cracked Hector’s nose membranes. For the second time he wiped blood from them, standing there in Juan Perón’s library at the villa at 6 Calle de Navalmanzano. Outside, Madrid was rising and looking for dinner. It was a thick book in Hector’s hands,
History of South American Horses
, horses being one of the general’s obsessions, and the only one that seemed to raise him anymore.

“My first cavalry horse. A criollo. There’s a picture in there of it. God, I loved that horse. A wonderful book, no?”

Hector looked in the direction of the voice and found an oil painting of the General. Commissioned at the height of his vitality and popularity, he was an imposing man, ramrod straight in brown uniform and presidential sash.

The man sitting beneath the portrait wore a stained Hawaiian shirt, faded slacks, and no shoes. His voice was weak, and gray tufts of hair bushed from his nose. “Yes,” Hector said to General Juan Perón, “it’s a lovely book.”

“You never rode, Hector?”

“I was weak as a child.”

“Ha! Weak like a snake!”

Hector closed the book and returned it to the shelf.

“They say I cannot ride anymore,” Perón said. “What good am I? Seventy-eight and now I drink tea for whiskey, eat soup for beef, sleep with a bar dancer for…” Still, after all these years, he couldn’t bring himself to utter her name.

“Good enough to be president again.”

“Bah. A nation of imbeciles. They eat themselves until there is only a mouth left, and now the mouth wants me, a man who has not set foot in that cursed land for sixteen years.”

“The junta has agreed to elections. The Peronists—your Peronists—will win. You will return as their true leader, bringing peace to your home.”

“Spain is my home now. I expected to die here. I may still.”

“You will return with
Her
.”

Perón’s eyes reflexively rose to the attic they were enlarging for her arrival. The man was a ruin. A shell. He rose late, was in bed by nine, spent his days wandering an unfashionable villa given him by Franco, his old friend who had not bothered to visit in the years Perón had been here. “Yes,” Perón said quietly, gazing through the ceiling into the attic, “the mouth must ultimately have its fill. Even of the dead.”

Isabel, the third wife, entered. “Darling, Lopez Rega says you must unfasten your trousers. For your digestion.” Perón complied, right in front of them, and Hector knew Perón was finished. Anything he might have been once had drained away years ago in this mausoleum. A turn or two in the revolving door and he’d be gone—replaced, Hector knew, by his ratlike ambitious wife, Isabel. Isabel and Lopez Rega, of course.

Perón sat there like furniture stuffing, his pants unfastened and lying in peeled flanks. You could glimpse underwear, urine-stained. Their leader. This was not stability before Hector but merely a pause before deeper chaos. Still, one nightmare at a time…

Later that night, Isabel—bar dancer, future First Lady—roamed the darkened villa with a candelabra, singing incantations of power. An entourage of maids and cousins followed her in a train, and Hector watched them from the upstairs gallery, a sinister glowworm, the light rising and falling through the house.

When he looked up, Lopez Rega, Isabel’s spiritual advisor, stood beside him. He was a short, brutish man with the hot eyes of a demon. He preferred to stroll the house in silk pajamas and stank of lavender toilet water. It was Lopez Rega who now screened all the General’s letters, decided whom he saw and whom he didn’t, prescribed the General’s diet, read his bowel movements; the one who led endless séances to call spirits to Perón’s side. Claiming to be in daily contact with the archangel Gabriel, he drew up complicated horoscopes only he could interpret. It was Isabel who first brought him into the house, but it was Rega—all Rega—who stayed.

“Dr. Ara is coming,” Rega said. Even normal sentences had a way of sounding perverse and obscene in his mouth.

“The embalmer,” Hector answered.

“He’s much more than that.” Lopez Rega’s eyes fell to the glowworm, snaking its way through the dining room. “Isabel shall usher in a new age for our nation. I have seen it in the stars, read it in the leaves, seen it in my own dreams.”

“And the General?”

“All this through the greatness of General Perón, of course.”

Of course.

“She will need not only support but tools to help this dream come to pass.” Rega’s lips quivered when he spoke in a manner that made Hector avert his eyes.

“Tools?”

“Money.”

“She will be First Lady of a great nation.”

“A nation broke. Defeated…”

Lopez Rega thought a moment. “You liked Evita.”

“I like everyone I work for, Lopez.”

“You admired her.”

“Yes.”

“Even though she stole.”

“Even though everything.”

Down below, Isabel’s childlike songs echoed strangely, and Hector thought of graveyard interrogations.

“Don’t you ever still wonder, Hector, after all these years, where she put it?”

H
e isn’t taking the highways. We have men watching all the westbounds. They stop any trucks that fit your profile.”

The Surete Nationale officer stood at a map of the area. He was speaking French, and it was Wintergreen who translated for Lofton, sitting there in a chair, staring at a map of highways and the clouds of lesser roads between highways.

“He’s taking the country roads.” Lofton’s words went up and back along the language chain.

“It would take him days that way to reach Spain.”

“He has days.”

“All the local provincial police have been notified.”

“Have they set up roadblocks?”

“We cannot stop all of France.”

Lofton stared glumly at the map, then smiled brightly at the French police official. “Thank you, Captain. I appreciate your help. I know you and your men are doing everything possible.” The captain nodded. “Master Wintergreen, why don’t you and I take a stroll in the delightful southern French sunshine.”

They did. Lofton stopped a dozen yards from the police station and sighed. “Am I correct in detecting a certain lack of urgency on the part of our frog comrades?”

“An American guilty of American crimes, dead Italians or no, I’m sure a part of our police captain would just as soon see Suslov make Spain. It’d be out of their hair.”

“Do you think he’ll make it?”

“Suslov?…No.”

“How’s our bloodhound?”

“Off sniffing his own trails.”

“Has he checked in?”

“Of course not. He’s switched to a motorbike, but there’s a transmitter in the radio we gave him. He’s still on a leash.”

“Homing transmitters. Haven’t done one of those since…”

“Buenos Aires.” Lofton looked at his feet and was somewhere else a moment. “They’re smaller now,” Wintergreen added, “the transmitters.”

When Lofton looked up, his bloodshot eyes were somewhere else. “Do you ever have second thoughts? About all of this?”

“Not really.”

“Me neither, son.” Lofton turned and started back for the police station. “Though I was rather hoping you would.”

You could smell the ash in the fireplace and know they had been here the night before. You could see the imprint of two bodies left behind in the wadded drapes, and that meant Michael had brought the woman with him into France. Alejandro had understood Michael would have to stop at this place, one of
Her
places. And of course he would have brought a woman—he seemed always to keep women near—to prevent his mind from completely melting down.