I met with Nico Fermetti in his kitchen on a Thursday evening after dinner, the two of us sitting in chairs pulled up to a Formica table with a chrome band around the edge. The surface was bubbled and bleached in places from cigarette burns, the pocks in the plastic left over after the ash had been scrubbed out. Nico’s wife hovered at the stove, which he didn’t seem to mind. I didn’t like it. I saw no reason to trust her, and she was clearly suspicious of me. I couldn’t guess who Nico had told her I was.
I had brought my things in a small, gray hard case, which I kept beside my chair. Señora Fermetti silently offered me a cup of instant coffee with hot milk. I thanked her, although she’d already turned her back, and then burned my lips on the drink and set it down. Argentines never seemed to have this problem. I’d spent the two weeks I’d been in-country with the roof of my mouth perpetually scalded.
“Let’s see the toys, Anne,” Nico said.
“She has to go,” I said, in English.
“Puf,” he said, waving his hand dismissively.
“It’s a rule,” I said.
Nico was very tall, well over six feet with a long torso that sloped down to a heavy gut. He had a large bald head and a dark mustache, and bad posture that might put people at ease. He was the contact Gerry had told me about. Officially, he was a foreman for a massive construction firm called Aliadas S.A. Unofficially, he was the man that the president of Aliadas S.A. called if he had a problem. Nico knew everyone and could fix anything. He had spent his life in this working-class neighborhood in Buenos Aires, which meant that he knew every union from the ground up, and he had built houses for the rich for twenty years, which meant he knew the old-money families who summered in Punta del Este and Mar del Plata, the core of the Buenos Aires elite. The president of Aliadas was friendly with the CIA because Communists haunted his dreams. He lived in fear of the nationalization of his company, and some said that as rumors of a coup began to circulate he had started to import rifles from Brazil to his ranch in Corrientes. In defense of his interests, he offered the time and expertise of Nico Fermetti to the CIA.
Nico sighed and murmured a few words to his wife. She looked at me hatefully and went out to the living room. I heard the TV snap on, and then the sound of a mournful full-throated male warble. The singer was popular, but I couldn’t remember his name.
“You’re very casual,” I said to Nico, still in English. I could just see the edge of his wife’s gray permanent through the doorway. The angel Gabriel watched me balefully from a framed print above her wingback chair.
“This is my home,” he said.
I lifted the hard case onto the table and snapped it open. I let it sit there open for a moment. I was proud of the bugs. I packed them carefully and lingered over them, and I enjoyed the effect they had on the few people I could show them to. There were nearly three dozen of them, wrapped in cotton batting, beside my other equipment—my transceiver and soldering kit and the extra rolls of wire.
“No bigger than buttons,” Nico said.
I lifted out the six on top. Each membrane was the size of a quarter, with a half-wavelength antenna of four and a quarter inches.
“You could sew it into a jacket, it’s so small,” he said. He looked yearningly at them. I set one in his open palm. “It weighs nothing,” he said, waving his hand gently up and down. “These days, my God, the technology.”
“They’re simple,” I said. “The basic design is twenty years old already.”
“My children must all study electronics,” he said.
The coffee had cooled enough to drink. I sipped it and watched him turn the object over in his thick hands. I had dreams sometimes that I was walking through a mansion decorated with crumbling plaster moldings of fruit and vines and flowers, and there were bugs glowing through the baseboards in rows, pulsing.
“I have thirty-five of them,” I said. “They can be set two inches deep behind wood or plaster. You can go three or four inches behind plastic. They told me you have access to the buildings.”
“I have access to everything,” he said. Aliadas had the contracts for every federal and city building, and Nico could map the wiring of the light switches in the Congreso Nacional for you, or tell you how recently the bathrooms in the presidential palace had been painted, if you gave him a few hours to make phone calls. Nico’s apartment was modest, perched in a three-story building on a side street in Barracas, but there were small touches that gave him away as a big man. The television was color. Lladró pieces lined the walnut-stained mantel in the living room, pastel sculptures of young women engaged in clean-looking farmwork: girl in kerchief with goose, girl in bonnet with goat. In the place of honor, at a startling twelve inches tall, was a clown weighed down with dinner-plate buttons and a ruff, playing a mandolin. I knew how much those cost, and they had to be shipped in from Spain wrapped in yards of quilted padding. The señora’s purchases, of course, and most likely the reason she was willing to tolerate visits like mine at all.
“We’ve had some success with dummy phone jacks,” I said. “You hide the bug behind the plate.”
“Marvelous!” He laughed delightedly.
“You’re too loud,” called his wife from the other room in Spanish. “The neighbors will complain.” He ignored her. “Where are you living?” he said.
“I have a flat in San Telmo.”
“They give you a nice salary?” he said, raising his eyebrows. San Telmo was an expensive neighborhood.
“A dollar goes pretty far,” I said, evading. Inflation was at 30 percent. He glanced up at me, and I realized that it was rude to mention the weakness of the peso. “It’s a small apartment,” I added quickly.
He set the bug down on the table, measured it with his hands, and then lit a cigarette. He gazed into the bug, as if the membrane were an eye. “This is my new girlfriend,” he said.
“I’m glad you like it,” I said, glancing at the clock. It was getting late, and the buses ran less and less regularly as midnight approached. I returned the bug to its layer of batting. Nico stared thoughtfully at the hard case. “Well,” he said. “Tomorrow I’ll make calls. I’ll find out what work orders we have in. Then I’ll talk to you. We’ll meet at the Plaza del Congreso tomorrow evening, all right? It’s too hot to be inside. Seven o’clock, at the corner of Montevideo and Rivadavia.”
“Okay,” I said.
“You can find your way back?” he said.
“Of course,” I said. I leaned toward the door to the living room and smiled brightly at the señora. “Thank you so much for welcoming me into your home,” I said in Spanish. She gave me a contemptuous look. Nico walked me to the door, kissed me on the cheek, and sent me out into the underlit hallway.
“Seven,” he said.
I stood a long time waiting for the elevator, which did not come. Someone had probably left the gate unlatched on the ground floor, which meant the wood-paneled cubicle would sulk in the narrow lobby until someone came by to reset the latch. I made my way down the stairs in near-total darkness.
It was ten o’clock and had been dark for less than ninety minutes. The sky was still violet above the low white buildings across the street. It was late January, the height of the South American summer, and even in the dark the sidewalks radiated heat. I paused in front of the building to search my handbag for a cigarette, and this tiny effort instantly started me sweating again, the silk of my blouse clinging to my spine. Back home, my radiators had become temperamental, and I had been trying to warm my bedroom with a kerosene heater that I worried might gas me in my sleep. In Buenos Aires the temperature hadn’t dropped below eighty degrees in a week, and the shock to my system was considerable. In the afternoons, when the heat was most intense, I took naps in the bathtub in my San Telmo apartment. The air of the city, laden with the pollen of jacaranda and palo borracho and diesel from idling buses, had given me a persistent cough that I was aggravating with imported American cigarettes.
Nico might be all right. His wife might be all right too, for that matter. She was, after all, very scrupulously showing me exactly what she thought of me. That kind of honesty put my mind at ease. I looked up at the windows of their apartment, lit and slatted with venetian blinds—yellow light from the kitchen, blue from the living room where the señora was still watching television. What had Gerry said? “When Nico helps you, he really helps you.” A negative corollary hanging there, unsaid.
I had to prepare for my work at the Universidad Central, one of the largest public universities in Buenos Aires. Gerry had briefed me. The CIA had been getting reports for years that the KGB was recruiting among the Marxist students. Marx was au courant, a strange handmaiden to Freud in the echoing hallways of the UC. Most of the Communists among the students were harmless, but some were KGB, and in the last six months there had been signs that Moscow had issued orders to activate. I had been given extra money to pay the foreign student fees at the Facultad de Psicología. I was enrolled in two courses for the fall semester. I marveled that after all this time, and under these circumstances, I was going to college.
I walked along Alvarado, mapping and remapping my route back to the bus that had dropped me off. Most of the streetlights in Barracas were out. Most of the streetlights across the city were out quite a lot of the time. In Barracas there was little to relieve the darkness but the light from ground-floor windows, and many households had already gone to bed. At the corner of Vieytes a shop was still open, and the proprietor and I regarded each other with muted surprise—a woman walking alone so late, a shopkeeper with his gate still up after the dinner hour. It was one of the makeshift, all-purpose shops common outside the Centro, the front room of a house made over with a counter and a few racks of packaged sweets, a shelf of flour and oil and newspapers, crates of Quilmes beer stacked beside the door that led to the parlor behind. A scene of domestic harmony was just visible through the doorway: a dog lying on a hook rug in front of a television. I felt a twinge of loneliness. The shopkeeper and I nodded solemnly at each other as I passed.
Always know where you are. The bus came quickly, and I ascended into the light. If you were left alone here, on this corner you’re passing with trees on one side and a long whitewashed warehouse stretching away into the dark on the other—could you find your way home again? Gerry encouraged me to think this way, to constantly worry at the fabric of my composure. To always have two plans. If the bus broke down at this corner, I would follow the Avenida 9 de Julio north a long way to the Autopista 25 de Mayo, and from there it was only six blocks to my apartment at the corner of Chacabuco and Carlos Calvo.
I knew where I was. I could find my way home again, forward or backward, in any direction.