The VHF transmitter I had hidden in Román’s bicycle was tracked through triangulation by two antennas, which I had to set up. For reasons of safety and convenience, I put one in the attic office of the confitería and one in the kitchen of my apartment in San Telmo. This second one could get the signal properly only if it was fixed to a hanging basket of onions that allowed it to angle toward a north-facing window; when the onions sprouted, the green shoots reached out in the same direction, toward the light. The device was very powerful. It was miles away, but it sent its pulse every ten seconds to my apartment and the office.
For the first few days after I placed it, I was preoccupied with thoughts of what would happen if Román found the device. If he was working for the KGB, he would, of course, instantly recognize it for what it was. My hope was that he would suspect Argentine intelligence services first. Student subversives in Argentina were regularly surveilled by their own government, and Gerry had taken the precaution of custom-ordering my brand-new VHF telemetrics with a casing that resembled an older, more widely disseminated design, which was used by governments all over the world. But my position was inherently precarious. I was foreign, my Canadian cover aside; suspicion could naturally fall on me.
As Gerry had said, if things went bad, I could be killed. And yet, in the place where my fear should have been, there was a blank space. I felt that I had been living for a long time in a place beyond fear, where my life was contingent and didn’t amount to much anyway. Back home, I had known that if I was arrested at a dyke bar I would lose my job, and if I lost my job I would end up in a flophouse or worse. I went out anyway, because living was a dry waste if I didn’t. When I started working for Gerry and made enough money to keep some in the bank, I knew that if Gerry found out I went with girls, I would be fired twice over—the CIA did not pay out to homosexuals, because they were too easy to compromise. For a long time already, I had been half a step from the edge of a cliff. That was how I lived. I did not look over.
The bicycle didn’t move from the boardinghouse for the first three days, because it rained. There was a chill in the air on the morning of the fourth day, and I was dressing to go to the confitería when the signals came in that the bicycle was moving. I took my shoes back off and pulled a chair into the kitchen. The receiver was whirring on the floor, scratching out data on a roll of paper. This machine had been a bear to assemble—I had brought some of the parts with me, but had to get the rest from a wholesaler for office machines in the Centro and build it myself, as it wouldn’t have looked right for me to come through Ezeiza Airport with the whole thing ready to go in my suitcase. The paper was sized to fit an adding machine, but it worked.
I worked out the coordinates from a reference book. In an hour he was back where he’d started, and in three hours, with my map and handbook, I had figured the farthest point of his journey, the place where he had stopped and spent twenty minutes before turning around and heading home. It took a ruler and protractor, and my head ached. He had gone to La Boca, to a strip near the water. The machine confirmed that the bike was motionless again, back at the boardinghouse. Over the course of several weeks the machine recorded Román’s data and I worked it out at night, after my long afternoons in the confitería. He went to class, to La Taberna, to the law library. He went to Victoria’s apartment, the location of which she had mentioned during our English lesson. And he went, three times in two weeks, to a desolate industrial block in La Boca.
The day after his third trip, I took a bus to La Boca. It was raining again, a temperate mist that could not be warded off with an umbrella. I tied a scarf over my hair and put on a pair of glasses. The bus was old, creaking and shuddering at its many stops. When it passed La Bombonera, the soccer stadium, I hummed a rude song I’d heard about the prowess of the Boca Juniors. The view from the window was rows of bright buildings, small markets, and then the blocks of warehouses that lined a narrow river, the Riachuelo. The bus lingered for a long time at an intersection while an old man in a horse-drawn cart slowly crossed. On the next block, I pulled the cord and stepped down. It was raining harder; the city fell away on the far side of the Riachuelo, and dark clouds were banked up over the low buildings of Avellaneda. A line of tidy houses stood to my right, which reassured me. As long as the neighborhood was somewhat residential, I was less conspicuous. I turned left and walked for a few minutes past auto garages and small factories, Y HERMANOS and E HIJOS written proudly over several doors. The foul smell of tanneries drifted over the street. The block I was looking for was close to the water, and at the riverbank a few derelict fishing boats were casually tied up, like badly parked cars. There were two gray buildings on that block, both with small dark windows: one was marked WHOLESALE GARMENT COMPANY, and the other METALLURGY. The second sign was rusted; one of the windows in the front of the building was broken. Two stray dogs wandered companionably down the street. I walked to the end of the block and found the alley that gave access to the backs of the buildings.
No one passed. The longer no one passed, the more my heart hammered in my chest. I walked down the alley, a gravel track just wide enough for a small truck. Behind the garment shop, a card table and a couple of chairs suggested an outdoor staff lounge. The ashtray on the table was full. Quickly, feeling exposed, I carried one of the chairs over to the back of the metallurgy building and stood on it, peering inside.
“What do you need, miss?”
A woman in thick glasses and a worn dress was standing in the doorway of the garment factory, an unlit cigarette in her hand.
“Thinking of buying it,” I said cheerfully. “Well, my husband is.”
“Oh, I see.” She relaxed and lit her cigarette, but continued to watch me.
“It’s a mess,” I said, squinting through the window. What I could make out of the interior was a large, empty room, with a jumble of machinery on the right. Abandoned? I didn’t think so. On the left I saw an umbrella, propped against the wall.
“The boys over there are quite rude,” the woman said.
“Oh?”
“They hardly say hello. One nearly ran into me coming out of there, and he didn’t say a word.”
“Where are they?”
“I haven’t seen them today.”
I feigned irritation. “They were going to show me the building.” I shook my head, climbing down off the chair. I returned it to its spot and rummaged in my pocket, as if looking for a key. The woman finished her cigarette and adjusted her bobby pins.
“Well, good luck,” she said, and went back in.
I worked quickly in the empty alley with a pick, and the lock gave. I pushed the heavy door open and propped it behind me with a piece of a brick. The machinery on the right, I now saw, consisted mostly of old table saws and grinders, covered with a thick layer of dust. On a table pushed against one wall, a bright spot in the dim room: a red can of Coke, brand-new. There was a bright, sour smell of metal in the air. A track ran through the dust, as if something had been dragged across the floor. I followed it to a crate on the far side of the room and lifted the lid.
Inside was a bundle of wires and packages wrapped in plastic. The explosives from Paraguay. I stopped breathing entirely, then replaced the lid and got back to work.
The safest place for a bug was in the ceiling, which was crisscrossed with iron struts and the pipes of the ventilation system. I pulled on gloves and climbed up on the table with the bug I’d brought with me. Using a broom, I managed to place the bug on the top of a girder, just out of sight.
I hurried back to the bus. The rain had cleared, and the Riachuelo gleamed gray and blue. Halfway home, I alighted from the bus and called Gerry. “The Paraguay purchase is in La Boca,” I said, and he called me clever.