Blood Makes Noise (9 page)

On the way home they blew a tire and limped into the pampa town. It was Sunday morning, everyone in church but a few suspicious dogs circling the only gas pump. Michael got out, walked to the storefront, and pressed his face to the dusty glass. A kitchen was on the other side, quiet, the beginnings of a noontime meal on the counter. As he pulled his face away he saw the kid on a stool in the corner, planted absolutely still in profile, his gaze—as best Michael could see—fixed on the blank wall across from him.

Michael rapped on the pane, and the kid’s head pivoted, not startled, slowly toward him. He was maybe ten, good looking but for a brutal scar that ran ear to ear across his throat. His hair was lighter than most here, reddish.

“Tire. We need our tire fixed,” Michael said in Spanish. Something seemed off about the kid, who only after a beat rose from his stool and opened the door.

He put the tire in a barrel of water, felt for the leak’s bubbles. Karen had wandered down the dirt main street to the town’s tiny plaza. Michael stayed with the car, watched the kid watching the tire. When he looked up, Michael saw what was off. The eyes. The kid had the eyes of a tight, ruined adult. Michael smiled. The kid looked back down at the tire.

Michael pushed off the car and walked across the street to a weedy lot between two low adobe buildings. A small pile of stones stood there.

A shrine.

You saw them out here, rocks stacked together into an altar, and atop the altar a cardboard box containing sometimes Evita’s picture but this time a small, blonde-haired doll. On either side were heaped runny remains of a hundred candles. Fresh flowers carpeted the top.

They always seemed more pagan than Christian, these shrines, part of the obsessive spiritualism that was the glue of these empty places. A way to ward off Indian ghosts blowing over the land, to invoke the protection of Her.

She had come from a town like this, and in towns like this they would never forget Her. Always theirs to stroke and polish and call up against the frightening shapes that drifted through their lives.

A crow called. His eyes jerked into the great bowl above him and for an instant he felt his feet slip. It was just sky. Buckets of sky and a little land…

A stone had tumbled from the shrine. Michael bent down and replaced it. When he looked up, the kid was watching him.

A
memory:

His nose had filled with the smell of crushed June bugs. Sickly sweet, made sweeter still by the sweat of half a million people cheering shoulder to shoulder on the Avenida 9 de Julio—widest thoroughfare in the world and still they filled it for blocks, on stoops, atop cars, hanging from lampposts. It had been August 1951. Michael had been back in Argentina, now as a CIA officer, only two weeks and never had he seen crowds like this. In a moment it would be the first time he’d see Her.

They’d come down on a lark, Karen and he, and been swept into the center of the throng. They shouted to each other over the pounding
bombas
, the loose cannon blats of tubas, the echoing bursts of “
Perón! Perón!
” Around them the crowd jostled in a rage of tones: red ponchos from the northern mountain country; black bowlers from the Patagonian farmers; the loose, white cotton blouses of the urban working class. All bused in for free, the biggest street party ever, thrown by Papa Perón. Even the revered
Cabildo Abierto
of 1810, the open town meeting on this spot where the country had decided on separation from Spain, had drawn fewer people than this.

The day failed like the cue of a house manager, and spotlights brightened two five-story-tall posters of the president and his wife, Evita. They could feel the temperature in the crowd rise. A heavy tree branch, bowed with spectators, snapped like a rifle shot, spilling them into the sea of bobbing heads. Loudspeakers,
a hundred of them mounted along the avenue, began to blare the CGT union stomper “We Are the Peronista Boys.” The crowd picked up the tune, sang it robustly, and congratulated itself with whistles and howls. A piercing trumpet sounded, like a bullfight announcement, and Juan Perón, El Presidente, appeared on a mammoth stage decorated with the blue and white of the Argentine flag. The crowds erupted in “
Perón! Viva Perón!
”

Perón basked in the warmth of his audience. This was to be his greatest moment: nomination to the presidency for another term by acclamation. Raising his arms, he stood there alone on the dais. It wasn’t long before the cry began to rise, “
Where is Evita?
” Perón feigned surprise and announced that, of his wife’s many virtues, modesty was her greatest. However, she would be sent for.

Michael and Karen had rolled their eyes. Latin theatrics. The whole thing was an orchestrated CGT circus: people bused in, given time off and beer, just to cheer the president’s ego for renomination to a job no one else was allowed to contest anyway. What a peacock. Sending for his wife with such surprise. Michael looked at the faces around him. They might as well have been at a soccer match.

Then, as Michael began to gloat at his insight, to congratulate the crowd for being in on the joke, She appeared.

And everything changed.

A weird noise grew around them. It started as a gasp but fed on the surprise of its own sound, building into a guttural howl of excitement that rocked the avenue and blew into the night. Michael felt a chill shoot down his back and with it the realization that every flatfoot status report he’d read before coming down from Washington was wrong. This was no brain-dead peasantry led from the nose by beer and free bus tickets. That was an oligarch fantasy. There was juice in these people’s eyes, and for Her, he saw clearly now, there was
devotion.

She stood at the microphone, five foot five but looking taller in heels and bearing, dark-brown eyes flashing. Her
honey-colored hair piled fiercely atop her head as it always was in public. In private it was said she could sit on it. Her features were sharp and so was her voice as she began to speak: “Friends,
descamisados
, I stand before you, a humble, lowly servant.” There was a quarter-million worth of jewelry around that humble neck. She spoke in a kind of edgy trill. As if the searing commitment to Perón could rupture the body that held it. She played her part well, applauded the people’s nomination of her husband, made veiled threats against the entrenched oligarch, pledged again, hand over breast, to lay her life down a thousand times for Perón, Peronism, and Argentina.

Perón had yet to announce his vice-presidential running mate, and the crowd seized the moment, chanting “
Con Evita!
” and “
Evita con Perón!
” Evita beamed and drifted from the prepared speech for her finishing remarks: “I have always said I would rather be Evita than the wife of the president if this Evita could do anything for the pain of my country, and so now I say I would rather be Evita.”

A beat rolled through the street. Had she accepted their call for the vice presidency? Murmurs. Evita off the dais now. Perón at the microphone. No, she hadn’t. Voices now rising. Shouting. Interrupting Papa Perón. “
Evita! Evita!
”

And all at once the evening went off the script.

The crowd had taken on its own dynamic and knew it, making it impossible for Perón to continue with his acceptance speech, and the annoyance was clear now on his face. Espejo, the CGT’s chairman, tried to save the moment and, taking the microphone, asked Evita to accept.

And even down there on the street you could see it: a look between husband and wife. Perón had not nominated his wife for the vice presidency because it could simply never be. The army hated him but nothing like they hated his steamrolling wife. Evita as second-in-command they would never allow. But there was
something in her eyes. The way you could see Perón’s uncertainty reflected in them. She turned to the microphone, to the chants, not with defiance but inevitability.

“My beloved
descamisados
…” Her voice quavered, jacked on emotion. “I ask the comrades of the CGT, the women, children, and the workers gathered here, by the love which unites us, that for so important a decision in the life of this poor woman, you give me at least four days for consideration.”

The crowd refused, threatened strikes. Evita pleaded for a day, an evening, to decide.

“No! No!
Now!
”

The dais became full of arguing people—Espejo, Perón, other CGT functionaries—shouting at one another with confusion. And standing apart from them, in her own pool of light, the focus of the crowd’s love: Evita. In the back rooms they’d always known she was the real spirit of the movement. Now it was in the open for all to see, and her husband and his lackeys were reeling from the heat.

The crowd bellowed that it would not leave until she accepted. Newspapers were rolled and lit into torches, their sparks burning snowflakes on the avenue. Perón looked hopelessly adrift, mute and astonished by the power of his wife’s bond with her
descamisados.
Without any discussion between them, without even looking at him, she stepped up to the microphone.

“Comrades, I will do what the people say.”

They would have given their lives for her at that moment, would have marched into the fire of any enemy. They held her with their cheers, and Evita, lit by a thousand torches, with June bugs rocketing through spotlights, stood before them, threw back her head…

And laughed.

It couldn’t be of course. Perón knew the military would destroy itself destroying him before they’d allow it. So, nine days later,
in a voice hoarse and broken, Evita announced over the radio her renouncement of the nomination. She wouldn’t have served anyway. Soon after that night—her greatest night—Evita began to die.

J
uly came, drifted. Russians threatened Hungary, and the backward winter finally announced itself in August. Days were short, their unborn child grew, the embassy radiators began ticking on, squeaky with disuse.

After most of a morning at his cover job in the commercial attaché office, half-listening to corporate flacks looking for import licenses, Michael made his way upstairs to the station and tried to catch up on field reports. The SPR survey he’d finally completed turned up a couple of possibilities, only one of which had bitten after a planned accidental meeting. Yuri Kraganov, forty-four, married, bored, a cultural liaison with the Sovs, and 100 percent spook. They’d had a few meals, Yuri and Michael, attended an opera at the Teatro Colon one night—wives along—and spent an afternoon at El Tigre sailing a borrowed boat. Some laughs, no dark-alley talk. The SB desk was encouraging, but Michael was starting to wonder who was working whom.

A paper airplane thumped his scalp.

Michael opened it:
Hector the Gimp buzzed. Phone him pronto—your loyal servant, Wintergreen.

The embassy guard was at his station, feet up, nose down in a
National Geographic.
“Run out of comics?” Michael asked, approaching.

“Improving my mind.”

“I didn’t know you subscribed.”

“Stole it from Miller. When they start putting naked
white
girls in here, then I’ll subscribe.”

“Hector called the security desk?”

“Well, he didn’t use his real name, but I recognized the voice.”

“How would you know his voice?”

“I know everything around here, Spook.”

“When did he call?”

“I don’t know. Hour or so.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Jeez, you were upstairs or somethin’.”

“Why didn’t you come
find
me?”

“Oh, I’m sorry, did I accidentally leave my apartment this morning with
secretary
stamped on my forehead?”

As Michael sighed and started back, Wintergreen’s voice lowered, his eyes still fixed on topless Nubians. “If I’d called downstairs to the commercial attaché office, I would’ve had to use the intercom.” Wintergreen’s gaze lifted briefly in the direction of the station secretarial support staff and, implicitly, Norris.

Michael got it. “Okay, I owe you.”

“Yeah, yeah, you and everybody else.”

Hector had never called Michael at work before, and the feeling was strange.

It was one o’clock, Buenos Aires slow out the window. The streets would be lousy now with
olor Porteño
, the smell of grilling steaks. Every citizen, from Recoleta aristocrats to sewer workers crouched over sidewalk barbecues, would devour their two-pound
bife
and afterward stumble, bloated, for a piece of shade and a siesta till four o’clock. Michael looked at his watch. If he called Casa Rosada now there’d be no one there to pick up. He’d go out, get some lunch himself, and try Hector later in the afternoon.

Hector was waiting for him on the sidewalk.

At the streetcar stop. Quiet against the wall, just a voice first at his back.

“Michael.”

Hector liked the privacy of being public and did most of his dry work in cafés and nightclubs. But today he wanted to go for a ride in Michael’s car. To Palermo Park. A quiet spot, near the pond.

“What’s on your mind?” Michael asked. It was a clear day, broken patches of light falling through twitchy leaves. Hector tried a smile, gave up on it.

“Shall we have a walk?”

It was cool here. Michael rolled down his shirtsleeves. Hector set off along the pond’s edge, favoring his cane. A horse came down the bridle path, passed, and they were alone.

“I wanted you to know first, Michael. This morning General Olivar died.”

Not a junta member but a boy with brains on the fast track up. He was young, maybe forty.

“How?”

“Olivar was many things, but discreet was not among them. A jealous husband found the general with his wife and…well…”

That helpless Latin gesture.
Y’know, men
…

“Shot him?” Michael asked.

“Cut his throat.”

“Jesus.”

Argentines loved cutting throats. The Lore of the Gaucho.

“You won’t read about this. I doubt even Norris knows.”