The Tenth Witness (Henri Poincare Mystery) (19 page)

P
ART
III

twenty-six

I
went to Argentina.

The Hong Kong project wouldn’t begin paying for several months, not until Alec and I began consulting with the architects in Stuttgart. The Bruges public works department could be counted on to pay slowly, weeks after I completed work that wouldn’t begin until February. The Argentines, however, promised payment on receipt of my already completed specs for their dive platform. Alec was the one who worried over balance sheets and cash flows, and in the end he prevailed upon me to go.

“Look at it this way,” he said. “They fly you first class. You arrive one day, solidify our relationship with the generals, and leave the next day with a fat check. We pay off our bills, we pay ourselves for once, and all you sacrifice is a few days and some sleep.”

He had a point, notwithstanding the reputation of the Argentine government. Our work out there, Alec assured me, was attached to a cultural program reappraising South America’s colonial past.

I could live with that.

The forced concentration of a transatlantic flight helped me to think matters through. Zeligman had a long life, and who knew what enemies he’d made along the way. What if he
had
been murdered? The possibility alarmed me, of course. But I couldn’t explain why I should become involved, especially if the Bruges police had investigated and found nothing suspicious. They couldn’t have known about
Boża miłość
because they knew nothing of Gottlieb. That much I could do, tell them on my return. Beyond that, I wasn’t so sure. I had no training as an investigator. I had no facts. I had wisps, not even strands, to hold onto. Gottlieb was a phantom who’d disappeared after the war. He was connected to Drütte, and Drütte was connected to Liesel’s father. It was all tantalizing, but none of it advanced my one certain goal of learning more about Isaac. Yet if pushed, I would have placed Zeligman, Isaac, Gottlieb, and Otto von Kraus in the same pot.

What a strange soup it was.

My training as an engineer had taught me to distinguish primary problems from secondary ones. Solve for the primary, said my professors, and the secondary have a way of sorting themselves out. Finding Isaac was my first responsibility. The other business I would leave alone or risk, through diluting my efforts, failure in everything. On the long flight to Buenos Aires, I therefore resolved to locate and interview the remaining eight witnesses. If they had died or were scattered beyond my powers to reach them, I would reconstruct Isaac’s wartime life in other ways. I knew the Nazis had imprisoned him at Drütte. I would start there.

C
ALL
IT
a bad habit, but when I travel to a new country, I tend to avoid well-worn tourist paths and search out spots favored by locals. For example, by that point in my life I’d visited London half a dozen times yet hadn’t seen Westminster Abbey or the Tower because I was too busy drinking ale in neighborhood pubs and wandering the ancient market squares. Wise or not, it’s the way I prefer to travel, and I had made it into an art. I would arrive and walk for hours, watching everything, eating the food from street vendors, not saying much. Then with questions gathered through the day, I’d chat up the locals and before long would stitch together a promising itinerary. My goal was to travel
in
a place, not dance through the brochures describing it.

It wasn’t unusual, then, that on landing in Buenos Aires my radar would be tuned to the streets. I was well aware of Argentina’s troubles because of coverage in the European press. Two years before my visit, a military coup had ousted Isabel Perón, who according to the generals lacked the strength to defeat a leftist insurgency. Only a sustained campaign against the guerrillas and subversives of all stripes, many of them students, could save the nation.

What followed was a reprise of Germany in 1933 in which thugs called for patriots to stand tall, then inflicted a murderous, traumatizing order upon their countrymen. On the particular Thursday I landed in Buenos Aires, a media storm had descended to cover the World Cup soccer tournament. The generals enjoyed the attention, yet they showed no interest in putting a gentler face on the junta. Just days before, the Argentine ambassador in Paris had insisted that the French citizens gone missing in Buenos Aires, including a pair of nuns, were terrorists who deserved their fates. Even with the international press in town, police continued to raid homes at night, throwing hoods over suspected troublemakers and hauling them off.

When I cleared customs, I found a limousine driver holding a card with my name. We set off for my hotel, and I eased into my passable but rudimentary Spanish. It was all going well until I saw a large number of people walking down Avenida de Mayo. Police and army trucks had set up toward the end of the avenue, and I thought it strange that in a police state people would be walking
toward
a commotion.

Something was up. I rolled down the window and could hear a woman chanting through a bullhorn, though I couldn’t make out the words.

“What’s that?” I asked.

The answer, Plaza de Mayo, came in a dead monotone.

I had time before my first meeting with Colonel Batista, my main contact with the Argentine government. “Let’s go,” I said.

The driver didn’t slow and didn’t turn. He glanced in the rearview mirror. “My instructions are to take you to the hotel, Señor, then return for your meeting with General Perez. Colonel Batista will take you for a helicopter tour of the river, and the two of you and the general will dine this evening.”

I told him I appreciated the plan, then repeated my request.

At the next stoplight, he pulled on the emergency brake and turned to me. “Why there? At this hour, the plaza is filled with the
madres.
It’s no place for tourists. We should go to the hotel.”

That settled it. “Let me get my bags from the trunk. I’ll walk to the plaza and take a taxi to the hotel—or directly to see Colonel Batista. I have the address. It’s no problem.”

The man implored me. “I’ll have trouble if I don’t drop you at the hotel. Take a taxi from there. It would be better for me.”

He was my age, dressed in the crisp uniform of his trade: black suit, white shirt, black cap, black shoes, black tie. Something dangerous, I knew, was brewing down the avenue. With my French passport, I could find out what it was and return to Paris unharmed. As an Argentine aiding my unscheduled stop, this driver might well be buried in his black suit. His fear was real. I was not ten minutes into my visit when I got my first bitter taste of Argentina.

We drove to the hotel.

It was a fabulous, ornate affair that rivaled the Peninsula Hotel of Hong Kong for opulence. I dropped my bags with a porter, leaving a card and advising him I’d register later. I climbed into the first taxi in the queue and gave my instructions. The driver was an unshaved man in a plaid, rumpled shirt. His cab smelled of stale sweat, and his only reaction to Plaza de Mayo was a raised eyebrow. Fifteen minutes later, he pulled to a curb and pointed east. “It’s the closest I’ll go. Three blocks that way. You can’t miss it.”

I walked in the direction of the flashing lights, toward the sound of more chanting. It was late June, winter in Argentina, the air cool. The crowds grew dense near the plaza—which, I’d learned from an in-flight magazine, was the natural and fitting spot for any sort of protest, for it packed into one place Argentina’s symbols of power: the great cathedral, the Bank of Argentina, the security secretariat, City Hall, and the Presidential Palace.

Walking slowed to a shuffle as the crowd backed up at a checkpoint that funneled people through metal detectors. Military police were snapping photographs, less nervous-making for me than for the locals, who had every reason to fear that government personnel would be attaching names to faces and opening files. Still, thousands came in support of the
madres.

The police presence was robust, both along the perimeter of the plaza and milling about the crowd itself.
What are they looking for?
I wondered.
Subversives?
I had no idea what a subversive looked like. I was surrounded by grandmothers holding the hands of schoolchildren, teenagers carrying books, old men walking their bicycles. To the generals, the entire country must have been suspect.

I shuffled along with a few hundred others until I saw a procession of women, many of them carrying placards with images of younger men and women, circling the Pirámide de Mayo. This, perhaps, was the most potent symbol of Argentine independence, the obelisk celebrating the May revolution of 1810 that broke the nation free of European control. The protesters covered their hair with white kerchiefs and walked behind a hand-painted sign strung between poles. It read, “Madres de la Plaza de Mayo.”

A woman was shouting into a bullhorn. “Tell us what has happened to our children. No matter what they’ve done, they deserve to be charged and tried. Let them face their accusers. Let their mothers visit with them in jail.” She passed the bullhorn. The next woman, older by thirty years, made the same plea:
Give us news.
And the next woman, and the next. Their children were disappearing. Years later, I learned that the generals had ordered the kidnapping, torture, and murder of two of the founding
madres,
along with a French nun.

This was my client, then, the Argentine government.

The mothers and grandmothers who circled the Pirámide began to sing a lullaby. I couldn’t imagine the fear these people endured as they nodded off each night, wondering if they’d wake to the rumble of boots on the stairway. I’d read reports of beatings, rapes, and plucked fingernails at the government’s infamous detention center, the old navy yard. Still, the mothers and grandmothers came.

I wanted a photo, just one, to remember it all. I pulled my Minolta from a satchel and drew the lens in on a woman who could have been anyone’s grandmother anywhere. Freda, perhaps. Deep creases ran from the corners of her mouth to her chin. She was thick and bent at the waist, aided by a woman half her age, both of them wearing kerchiefs. They circled the monument that celebrated the nation’s birth. As I framed the shot, people standing near me stepped away. I’d thought I had little to fear as a foreign national. But the moment I snapped the photo, two men grabbed my arms and hustled me to a perimeter post, by an idling van.

I wanted no part of that van, not if Liesel or my parents wanted to see me again. Four more policemen approached. One cut the strap to my camera and opened it, exposing the film, which he then ripped from its sprockets.

“Identification!”

I presented my passport.

“A Frenchman? What does a Frenchman want at Plaza de Mayo? Are you a photojournalist? Are you preparing some trashy exposé of our country? What are you doing here? What!”

I could barely follow his rapid-fire Spanish. My interrogator, a man in his mid-thirties, had a clean-shaven, intelligent face and wore at his belt all the instruments of authority: gun, club, cuffs, pepper spray, bullets. The leather was shiny; the lead tips of the bullets, dull. I glanced at my camera, which a second policeman had stashed into a bag with a half-eaten sandwich and a glossy magazine festooned with images of large-breasted women.

Exactly how much trouble am I in?
I thought. I tried finding out in a language other than Spanish.

“
Español!
” the man roared.

I reached for a letter from the Ministry of Antiquities, printed on stationery with an embossed federal stamp. It had arrived in Munich,
par avion,
the day before I left: instructions, in Spanish, for customs agents to give me every courtesy and expedited treatment so that I could pursue business important to the state. Though Colonel Batista was my main contact, the letter was signed by his superior, General Perez.

The policeman read the letter, looked at me, and read it again. The mothers, meanwhile, had begun another lullaby, something about the seasons—how they know just when to come because the one true God,
el Dios,
loves his children and brings sweetness, in time, to those who wait.

“You have business in Argentina?”

I nodded.

“You have business
here?
In Plaza de Mayo?”

“My business is later this afternoon. Now I’m a tourist,” I said. “My guidebooks say, come to Plaza de Mayo if you want to know the soul of the country. It’s supposed to be the most beautiful plaza in all Buenos Aires. However—” I pointed to my exposed film on the ground. “I’ll have to start over with photographs. Perhaps it’s not the right day for photos? My Spanish is not so good. Can you tell me, what are all these women celebrating?”

The man listened closely for cracks in my story. He reviewed the letter of introduction a final time: “It is our mistake, Señor. And no, this is not the right day to be taking photos. You’ll find a tourism shop on Avenida de Mayo, one hundred meters that way. Just there.” He pointed. “They’ll have all the photos you need. My sincere apologies.”

I smiled at the news. “I assume there’s no need to mention this to General Perez? He and I are having dinner this evening.”

The policeman blanched. “No, not necessary. But give him my regards.”

I reached into my jacket for a pen and slip of paper. “That would be my pleasure. Please, give me your name.”

He thought the better of it and waved me off. “We’re too busy for this. One of my men will escort you to the tourism shop. Enjoy your stay in Buenos Aires.”

I pointed to the bag with my Minolta. “If you would.”

The policeman said: “Manuel, give the man his fucking camera.”

twenty-seven

“E
l Preciado
. . . It will be our grandest success, Señor Poincaré! One billion in gold and silver coins, if we’ve read the ship’s manifest correctly. And a statue, a life-sized golden statue, of the Virgin Mother!”

What surprised me more than General Perez’s office with its intricate cornice moldings and Persian rugs was that the general wore a suit, not a uniform, though his staff, all in army green, addressed him as General. The Ministry of Antiquities occupied the upper floors of an ornate government building three blocks west of Plaza de Mayo. I had seen buildings like it in many European cities. Indeed, Buenos Aires itself had the hybrid feel of this office, part old world and part new. I was seduced by its cafés and handsome parks, its many invitations to sit and talk. Yet what I had seen of the
madres
demonstrated nothing if not the bitter truth that talk in this city was dangerous.