Gerry and I had a talk on a pay phone. “I hear you don’t have much,” he said. The connection was bad, as if he were underwater.
“No,” I admitted. I had already mailed my first batch of transcripts from a postbox in the Centro, downtown. The senator spent a lot of his time railing against his enemies in an emotional shorthand that made it hard to tell whom he was talking about. He spent half his day dictating letters in his office, but he had done nothing for the last two weeks but reiterate things I already knew: that the army was squabbling with itself over how to mount a coup, that the faction called the Azules was ascendant, that a general named Juan Carlos Onganía was head of the Azules. Onganía was a conservative, as all the generals were, but he was a nationalist as well, and it was not clear how pro-American he might be in the final analysis. Confirmado magazine had published an opinion poll, based on what science I did not know, showing that the majority of Argentines were yearning and keening for the army men to take over. I had never heard such frank talk of coups. No one even bothered to look shocked. You hardly needed spies for this.
“What about our friend?” Gerry said, meaning Román.
“Nothing yet,” I said. “I’m getting closer to him. I met his girlfriend.”
“You must be charming them.”
“I’m trying.”
“When it happens,” he said, meaning the coup, “how fast can you get out?”
“A day.” A few hours to strip my apartment and the office in the confitería of anything of interest, a little more time to get myself to a ferry. Then three hours across the Río de la Plata and down the coast to Montevideo. This would be necessary because the first thing a new government does is sweep the old offices for bugs. I would have to evaporate when the time came. If I couldn’t get out that way, if they closed the port, then Nico would drive me up to Paraguay.
“Did you get the package?” Gerry said. That meant did I get my pay, which he had wired to a post office for me.
“Yes, thank you.”
March was the beginning of fall. The afternoons were still killingly hot, but the mornings were cooler, and a breeze sometimes came in through my open french doors. The optometrist two floors down had pulled me aside in the foyer and given me a scolding about keeping them open all night.
“This is a real country,” he kept saying, “not a playland.” He said it in English, and I wasn’t sure what he meant by “playland,” although of course I could grasp that he wanted me to keep my windows locked. I just couldn’t stand to do it, since the night breeze was the only way to cool the apartment.
On one of the last really hot days, I knocked off early from my equipment in the top room at the confitería and wandered for a few blocks, lost in thoughts of my favorite haunts. I missed the Bracken, and Calliope’s, and the basement of Bar 32. I was tempted to go to the place with the unmarked awning I had seen in San Telmo when I first arrived, to look for girls. But that was stupid, a fantasy, an intolerable risk. I stood for a few minutes at the corner of a park, having a cigarette under a date palm, thinking miserably about how long it had been since I had lain in the dark with someone I liked.
When the cigarette was done, I put out my self-pity like a light and walked two blocks to an ordinary bar where I could try to cool down. The tables in front were filled with expatriate Americans. After a while, a mod type from Houston started to flirt with me, a man with glasses and a double-breasted jacket in a ridiculous color that he had laid carefully over the back of a chair. His name was James. He bought me a fernet and did not, to my relief, try to explain to me what it was. Expat men had a mania for explaining the indigenous liquors.
“Did you know she built a miniature city out there?” he said after we’d had a couple of thick, black drinks. “On the pampas.”
“Who?” I murmured. It had gotten dark while we were talking, and I actually felt relaxed. He was good-looking; I thought I could guess what kind of boy he’d been in high school.
“Eva Perón,” he said. “A miniature city called the República de los Niños. With a tiny little post office and a tiny little Congress. They take busloads of kids out there to learn about democracy and weep over Evita.”
“Really?”
“I was there,” he said. “They don’t take care of it properly. There are rats.” He drank the last of his fernet and signaled to the waiter. “This stuff is like medicine.”
“It certainly clears out the lungs,” I said.
“Two more?”
“Two more,” I said, and the waiter pushed slowly off from the bar like it was the side of a pool. “My neighbor told me I have to be careful because this city is not a playland. You think that’s what he meant?”
“This is not the República de los Niños, that’s for sure.” He toasted me with his empty glass. “Hardly a república at all, really.”
I moved to go at eleven o’clock, and he followed me out to the sidewalk, offering to call me a cab, hanging on to my arm, then bundling me into a kiss for a moment beneath the awning. “I’ll take you out,” he muttered. “Tell me your name again.”
“Anne,” I said. I liked the way he smelled, and his touch was raising the hairs on my arms.
“I’ll take you out,” he said again.
“Oh, I don’t go out,” I said.
“How long are you in Buenos Aires?”
“Hard to say.”
“Come up to my room,” he said. “It’s just there.” He pointed down a narrow street. “I have a bottle of gin and a bag of ice. Isn’t it too hot to walk home?” He was tugging at my unraveling hair with one hand, untucking my blouse with the other. He was speaking close to my ear, so I could feel his breath on my neck. I had a weakness for that.
He lived up a narrow staircase, in an apartment that was bigger than I expected. When he turned on the lights, his expression was so hopeful and open that I took my shoes off right away. He had a good profile. I wheeled around his living room for a few minutes in bare feet with the gin and tonic he made me, joking about his furniture. It had been a long time since I had gone home with a man, and I felt like I was reverting to an old script, a script I’d learned from novels and films like every other girl: waiting for him to cross the room, watching him nervously refresh his drink. And then later, being small and breathless, and seeing that he liked it. With women I always felt a bit like we were the first two people to ever do what we were doing, that we were inventing it, that we decided in each transaction who we were.
I woke the next morning at eight, sweating in the overly bright bedroom, and put my clothes back on while he snored gently. It took twenty minutes to find a cab in the street outside.
I was hungry and thirsty, and my knees were shaking when I reached my own apartment at the top of the landing. The phone was ringing inside. I fumbled with my keys, trying to focus my mind through an incipient hangover, wondering if it was James calling. Had I left something at his apartment? Maybe he was angry with me for leaving. I lurched through the door finally and got the phone off the hook.
“Hello?” I said.
“Buen día,” said a low female voice.
Of course it wasn’t James; I hadn’t given him this number. I felt more clearheaded. “¿Quién es?” I said.
“Victoria,” said the voice, and then, in carefully accented English, “I want to practice English. You teach me.”
She had said that before, that she wanted English lessons. I hadn’t thought she meant it. It seemed like one of those things people said to be polite.
“I have an exam,” she said, each word slow and emphatic.
“All right,” I said. I glanced at the clock on the wall: it was a quarter to nine. I wanted to go back to bed.
“Gracias,” she said, and then slowly in English, “I will like to talk to you. Thank you, thank you.”
Gerry dismissed Victoria. “Fine, chat up his girlfriend,” he said. “But we need more on him. We need to know where he’s going, what his plan is, where his friends are. How are you going to get it?”
“I have an idea,” I said. I was thinking of the row of bicycles I had seen chained up outside Román’s boardinghouse.
In order to carry out my idea, I had to modify one of the telemetric tracking devices I’d brought. It was the newest, top-of-the-line, best on the market. The army had been testing them on coyotes in the Nevada desert. It was small, a transmitter that weighed only three and a half ounces, a lovely little thing, but the shape was wrong. I had to take it out of the casing, rewire it so I could move the antenna, and jury-rig the casing back together at my kitchen table with a travel-sized soldering kit. It took me most of an afternoon. That was a Tuesday. I knew that Román had an early lecture on Wednesday mornings; I had heard him complaining about it with Juan José. He would be asleep by midnight. For all his sociability, he was a good student with disciplined habits.
I killed time until 4:00 AM, drinking coffee and reading a novel, then put the telemetric device in my pocketbook and went out in a dark dress and soft-soled shoes.
There were no streetlights in front of the boardinghouse. I approached from the corner, glancing up at the windows; they were all dark. If I was interrupted, I would bolt. I was a fast runner, and the gloom of the street was so thick that my chances of getting away were good. I gripped an adjustable wrench in my pocket.
A weak yellow light shone from the door of the boardinghouse. I walked past quickly, without glancing over. Román’s bicycle, the familiar black frame with a red pinstripe that I had seen chained up in front of La Taberna, was at the end of the row, under an oak tree that had covered the sidewalk in fallen leaves. I moved cautiously, trying not to rustle too much. I was grateful for the dark, but it was hard to see the bike seat. I worked by touch for a few seconds, found the bolt that held it on and loosened it with the wrench. It took a few hard twists to pull the seat free. Beginning to sweat, breathing through my nose, I dropped the telemetric tracking device into the tube frame of the bike and fastened the seat in place over it.
It was done. I turned and walked away, hands in my pockets, pleased. The wrench had warmed in my hand. There was light in the sky, and the breeze that came before the dawn drifted down the street, cooling my hot face.