There was a space-age ice cream parlor just off the Plaza del Congreso with a low white counter that swirled sinuously past the vats of ice cream, a subtle pearlized sheen in the plastic. Abstract shapes in mint green and tangerine and beige decorated the walls. There was a line out the door. I arrived early for my meeting with Nico, ordered a scoop of chocolate and a scoop of dulce de leche, and took the dripping cone out to the broad plaza. It was two blocks long, dusty and hot, with the national Congress looming at one end like a battleship at anchor. In front of it, a stone monument hefted a crowd of bronze figures toward the yellowing sky. I could make out a woman at the top, in a war helmet, raising a torch or a knife. A flock of pigeons excitedly traversed a dry pool that spread out from the base. A couple of small children were flinging bread to the birds, balancing on the concrete margin, while their parents watched from benches.
I chose a spot in the shade of the squat, jolly-looking palo borracho trees and tried to finish my ice cream without getting it all over my blouse. I cleaned my fingers with a napkin and opened the newspaper from my bag, pretending to read.
I took stock of the people nearby. Two women on a bench with a baby I dismissed immediately, along with a pair of teenagers creeping their hands under each other’s shirts. A priest slept with a black hat over his face. A man in a pink shirt and a chocolate-brown tie loitered near the rosebushes along Avenida Rivadavia, sunglasses on, sweat stains spreading from beneath his arms. I watched him check his watch a few times, pick at his nails, bend to tighten the laces on his shoes. Ten minutes went by before I realized he was loitering there for the purpose of watching the teenagers on the bench, the girl with her skirt hiked up and her leg slung over the boy’s lap, the boy rubbing her ankle under its white sock with a kind of fixed hysteria, the fingers of his other hand digging under her patent leather belt. I read the comics again.
Nico materialized from the knot of traffic on the far side of the square at 7:15 and made his way toward me slowly, smiling, fanning himself with his hat. He was flushed, his skin pink against the dark mustache, and he was squinting across the raised dust of the square as if there were no person on earth he could be more delighted to see than myself. When he stopped in front of my bench, he put the hat on for a moment only so he could doff it with a gentlemanly sweep of his hand.
“This weather is like standing in a puddle of piss,” he said.
I watched his eyes move over my head to the glare of Rivadavia behind me, where the man in the brown tie was still standing in his voyeuristic stupor by the rosebushes. “He’s harmless,” I said. “Not police.”
Nico laughed and slumped down beside me on the bench, which creaked. His trousers made the zzp-zzp sound of nylon. “Someone has painted Evita vive on the ass of that statue,” he said, pointing to a bronze casting of The Thinker, streaked white by pigeons.
I laughed. “He seems concerned about it,” I said, looking at the statue’s furrowed brow.
“He’s worried about the state of the nation.” Nico spread his arms along the back of the bench and cleared his throat. “I’ve made some progress. We’ve got a few ideas. The phone jacks, like you said. We can get into two offices that way: the scheduling secretary’s on the second floor and the senator from Buenos Aires Province on the third, because they’ve got work orders in. But there’s one more, the big fish—well, the second-biggest fish—and you can’t get in his office with some bullshit about the phone lines because he has them all checked every two months. He’s paranoid!” He grinned. “You know who.”
I searched his face. He looked very pleased with himself. “Not Perette?” The vice president, a post which also served as president of the Senate. A lawyer and a bulldog, with a touch of LBJ about him, I thought. Rampaging through the Senate and clearly enjoying himself.
“Yes. He’s the treasure we will work tirelessly to bring you.” He winked. “We may have to make him a gift. Some new furniture, a picture for his wall.”
“He checks his phone lines, but not his furniture?”
“Phone lines are suspicious by their nature. Furniture is not.”
“And he’ll take a present from Aliadas, will he? He doesn’t seem paranoid enough.”
“It won’t be from the company,” he said.
A flower seller appeared, proffering a basket of single roses, apparently sensing a smoldering romance between Nico and me, despite the gap of twenty years between us. He waved her away.
“It will be an English landscape drawing,” he said. “Beautiful, original. Signed. It would be damaged terribly if anyone were to take the backing off the frame.”
I laughed. “That’s a pretty simple trick.”
“Sometimes the simplest tricks are the best.”
I conceded that this was true and pulled my cigarettes from my purse. Nico flipped open a silver Zippo. I lit the cigarette and thought a bit more about the plausibility of an expensive landscape drawing hiding a bug in the office of Carlos Perette. “So who will give it to him?”
“A wealthy lady,” he said. “One of the patronesses of the Teatro Colón. She’s a friend of mine. This week she will discover that she is overcome with passion for him, and will send him a gift, and he will hang it in his office, of course, because his wife would never have it in the house.”
“She sounds like a good friend.”
“Truly, she is an excellent woman.”
I stretched my legs out, trying to air my overheated limbs, and began to feel successful. The Congreso building at the end of the square looked vulnerable and pompous, easily duped. “Well, I think that might work,” I said. “I heard of a diplomat once who found a bug like mine between the pages of a book in his study, and the housekeeper told him it was a trap for poisoning silverfish, and he believed it.”
Nico guffawed. One of the children at the edge of the fountain leaped down into the basin and charged into the flock of pigeons, screeching, and the birds labored into the air.
“You see that windmill?” Nico said. Across the street from the Congreso Nacional, on the corner of Callao and Rivadavia, there was a building in the French style—grand, with curving art nouveau windows and a façade darkened by the passing of traffic. A tower rose from the corner that faced the plaza, and at the base where the tower diverged from the roof there was a windmill, just the blades, fixed there like a bow tie. “That’s the Confitería del Molino. It’s a pastry shop like a palace. Senators and deputies go there to eat sweets, and it has an attic with a few offices in it that nobody uses. That’s your base of operations.”
I searched out the top-floor windows that faced the Congreso, each one fitted with a tiny balcony. “They don’t use it?”
“No one goes up there. I’m paying a few pesos a month to rent one of the rooms at the top as an office. It’s full of mouse shit, I’m sorry to say.”
“I’m more concerned about interference.” The bugs operated by radio signal. The plastic discs were inert until I activated them by aiming a microwave transmitter at them, from a distance of up to one-quarter of a mile. Then they transmitted a signal back to me and my transceiver, and I recorded the audio on a reel-to-reel. I had taken a few test runs in my apartment with the equipment, and found that there was an anarchic universe of shortwave activity in Buenos Aires, most of it centered around the port. I had to do some recalibrating to avoid it, the hiss and chatter of cabs and policemen and tankers unloading in Puerto Madero.
“There’s the key,” Nico said, prying one brass key loose from the ring he kept in his pocket. “But I’ll have to show you how to get up there, what stairs to take—and the door jams as well, there’s a trick.” He settled himself back on the bench. “The key only ever gets you halfway there. The rest is always tricks.”