Far South Read online

  ‘Sure, right away.’ I pocketed the cell phone.

  Me, an ex-cop, Ana, a dreadlock actress – signs and wonders – I was a bit in love with her, wasn’t I? I wanted what we’d had to be more than a one-night stand. And I’d ask Sara about the money. I’d been working for three days and I hadn’t seen a cent.

  I finished my coffee. I hooked the .45 onto my belt. I grabbed the folder of postcards and photographs. I locked my apartment and got the elevator to the basement garage of the apartment block. I was nervous in the dim light and the deep shadows, my nerve ends grating with the day’s first coffee. My car was in its parking space some twenty meters away from the elevator shaft. The bodywork of the black Ford Executive gleamed. Somehow that was a pleasant surprise to me. I’d half expected the car to be vandalized with some slogan painted on it… yet another warning for me to lay off the Fischer case.

  I tossed the folder on the passenger seat. I hesitated before I turned the key in the ignition. The image of Maria Dos Santos’s boyfriend was sharp and clear in my mind. I was too nervous. I turned the key and the car started. It didn’t explode.

  I reversed the Executive out of its parking space. I drove up the ramp from the garage, turned onto the street, and drove out on Route 60 to the Artists Colony.

  My father would be hoping that after I’d slept on our discussion, I would awake with the clear light of reason and make a sensible decision to go back to divorce cases and forget all about Fischer. But I was choosing these Temenos people – artists, actors, psychologists – over my father, the ex-cop, despite the fact that these were privileged people who had hardly ever done a day’s real work in their lives.

  After a leisurely drive down Route 60, and a bumpy ride down the long dirt road, I turned in through the gates of the Artists Colony. A dark red Dodge Ram was parked in the driveway of Sara Suarez’s house, just behind Fischer’s white Fiat van. I stopped beside the Ram. I got out of my car. The Ram was a pretty expensive pick up truck. It was dust covered. On the passenger side of the bench seat was a pile of files, papers, books. I assumed that this truck belonged to the theater producer, Clara Luz Weissman. If so, she had access to more money than I would have thought for someone in her line of business. Maybe she was very successful at it. Maybe she was just from a rich family, or had a rich husband to bankroll her.

  I walked up the pathway toward Sara Suarez’s house. The dogs were barking inside the house. I took a slow pace up to the front door to give Sara Suarez time to lock the dogs away… if they hadn’t already been corralled when the Dodge Ram driver had arrived. Security. Insecurity: it’s a constant issue in people’s lives.

  Sara opened the door just as I reached the terrace.

  ‘Come in,’ she said.

  I followed her into the living room.

  A dark-haired woman, slim, mid to late thirties, I thought, with big dark eyes stood next to Ana by the front window. She was taller than Ana by a lot but she still didn’t look how I imagined the driver of a Dodge Ram to be.

  ‘This is Clara,’ Sara said.

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ I said. ‘Juan Manuel…’

  ‘The investigator,’ Clara said.

  We exchanged a cheek kiss.

  All these people in the theater company had a quality of being hyper-real. I felt as if I was part of an audience witnessing them on a brightly lit stage. This whole investigation seemed so unreal all of a sudden, as if any one of these actors might disappear without trace as Gerardo Fischer had done. Come back as another character. Like a dream. It was disconcerting. Clara and I sat down opposite each other on the armchairs at either end of the sofa. Sara and Ana sat on the sofa.

  ‘Clara knows more about the history of the company than anyone else,’ Sara said. ‘She’s booked just about all of the performances…’

  ‘All over the world,’ Ana said. ‘She’s great.’

  The marks under Ana’s eyes were darker, her dreadlocks a total mess. I guess she wasn’t sleeping… thinking about Gerardo? That’s the way the mind works for people when someone close to them disappears. They stare at the clock. They listen for the ring on the telephone that never comes.

  ‘Just how long have you been the producer?’ I said to Clara.

  ‘Seven years.’

  ‘So you know everywhere Gerardo has been since then.’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘And Clara’s putting together an archive of everything that Gerardo has done over the past forty years,’ Sara said.

  ‘It’s a bit daunting,’ Clara said. ‘It’s so fragmented. But it’s like the history of the company.’

  ‘You keep it up here in the Sierras?’ I asked.

  She shook her head.

  ‘All of the raw material, you know, like the playbills, reviews, his writings, I have in Buenos Aires,’ she said. ‘But I’ve transcribed a few things and I’ve scanned a lot that’s now on my computer…’

  ‘Maybe I should see this.’

  ‘What have you found out here?’ Clara said.

  ‘So far, very little.’ This was a small lie.

  ‘I think we need to be more active in the search.’

  ‘Oh… What did you have in mind?’ I couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of my voice. Clara gave me the hard stare. Then she reached down to the briefcase at the side of her chair. She flipped open the leather flap and pulled out a sheaf of printed notices.

  ‘I thought we should post these all over the area.’

  She handed me one of the papers.

  HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN?

  There was a rather poor photograph.

  GERARDO FISCHER IS MISSING

  IF YOU HAVE ANY IDEA AS TO HIS WHEREABOUTS

  PLEASE CONTACT CLARA LUZ WEISSMAN

  There was a phone number and an email address below it.

  ‘I’m going to set up a website, too,’ Clara said, ‘where people can post messages.’

  I nodded. I was happy that my phone number wasn’t on the flyers. I would not have to answer any bogus calls of false sightings or fake information from people looking for a reward. Also, it wouldn’t draw anyone’s attention to the fact that I was still involved with the case. My father and Arenas might even think that I’d given it up. What was sure is that with all these posters plastered over the region, some newspaperman would certainly want to pick up on the story. ‘Theater Director Disappears.’ And then the police would be asked some questions. Someone from the police department would then have to come and investigate. This was sure. They would eventually have got around to this missing person case anyway but I imagined that they would be more focused on bigger things that were missing like the cases of small arms taken from the military base in Córdoba. But then again, if some cops saw an opportunity to use Gerardo Fischer as a means for advancement through the ranks… because now, as my father said, it was politically expedient to show that the police force was cleaning itself up… these cops would declare to the press just how much was being done to find Fischer’s whereabouts, and they would start to ask questions about why he had disappeared. They might put it down to a simple ransom case… but really, based on what my father had told me, I’d say it had all the potential to blow up into a major media event with every political, criminal and commercial interest in the province and beyond, trying to make some kind of capital out of it. And Fischer might end up dead because he’d have become too much of a liability to keep hidden in the event of a major kidnapping manhunt.

  ‘I’m going to coordinate the campaign,’ Clara said. ‘I’ll pass on any information I get to you, and you can do the same for me.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  You’re going to coordinate the campaign? I thought. Fine. If this was a simple kidnapping, and the kidnappers didn’t know who to ask for a ransom, they’d have a name and a phone number and an email address now, provided by Clara Luz Weissman. Whoever else was looking for Gerardo Fischer would be alerted to the fact that these people, at least, had no idea of where Fischer might be. If my f
ather or Arenas’s or Matas’s goons should ask, I could say with all honesty that this leaflet campaign had nothing to do with me.

  ‘Is that it?’ I said. ‘Would you prefer that I drop the case, now; let you get on with it?’

  Ana’s eyes hardened on me.

  ‘Please, no,’ Clara said. ‘We just want to be involved in the search. We can all help, can’t we?’

  ‘I guess,’ I said.

  The silence was a little uncomfortable. I looked at Sara.

  ‘I hate to bring this up right now,’ I said. ‘Would it be possible to get the first payment out of the way?’

  Sara looked a little shocked.

  ‘Yes, yes of course,’ she said. ‘I have the money right here.’

  Extract from the casebook of Juan Manuel Pérez

  January 13th 2006

  Hours: 10:30 to 11:30

  With a thousand US dollars in cash in my wallet, I felt a lot less nervous.

  Of course I could work with Clara. I sat close to her as she opened up her laptop. She had an electronic folder on the desktop that was simply entitled Gerardo. When she opened that up, there seemed to be around thirty subfolders. She double-clicked on the first.

  ‘I’ve grouped all the reviews I could find into these PDF files,’ she said. ‘It’s a huge job of scanning.’

  I wasn’t interested in his reviews. They weren’t going to help me find Gerardo Fischer. Clara clicked on the next folder, ran the mouse down a set of documents.

  ‘These are articles about his work. The pros are grouped by number, like this, 01, 02 etc, and the cons are grouped by date. People either like Gerardo a lot, or they hate him. I don’t think anyone in the theater world would hate him enough to kidnap him or to… no… that’s impossible.’

  I pointed to a folder marked letters.

  ‘What have you got in here?’

  She double clicked on the icon.

  ‘These are letters that Gerardo sent and kept copies of on his own computer. We have scans of some of his original letters that were kept by friends. And some of the letters and postcards that Gerardo kept in his journals or in folders.’

  ‘I found a folder with a notebook and some postcards and pictures in the house he rented,’ I said.

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Yeah. I brought it with me.’

  ‘Can I see it?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘It’s his, not mine.’

  ‘We’ll need to scan it,’ Clara said.

  ‘The postcards come from Israel, Italy, Iguazu, Bariloche.’

  ‘Bariloche?’ Clara said.

  ‘This Priebke business. He was involved with that, wasn’t he?’

  ‘It came out of what was going on in the eighties in Italy,’ Clara said. ‘It was before my time with the company obviously, but some things I know connected with the plays he developed back then.’

  ‘Damien Kennedy told me something about that time,’ I said, ‘up to the end of the story with Francesca Damiani. Kennedy said he lost touch with Fischer after that until very recently. Is there any way that Kennedy might know something that he’d be reluctant to tell me?’

  ‘Damien came back a few months ago. It’s true he blamed Gerardo for his losing Francesca Damiani, that’s kind of a legend in the company, but really… I can’t see Damien doing anything to Gerardo over that. Damien’s one of us.’

  ‘There’s a big gap in what I know about Gerardo between Francesca’s disappearance and Damien’s reappearance.’

  ‘It was just after he did the play on Francesco Bono, the Alchemist,’ Clara said.

  ‘Damien mentioned this,’ I said.

  ‘When he was researching the play, Gerardo came across a whole network of occultists who were happy to talk to him about Bono, alchemy and the Porta Magica. Crazy people. Right wing Italians, aristocrats, rich people. During the Second World War they’d been cosseted by the Nazis. Some of them had made connections with Himmler’s special SS groups; the ones that met in Bavarian castles. The ones who practiced rituals to contact Secret Masters that they thought could be brought to this dimension through esoteric doorways that had been discovered by alchemists during the time of the Renaissance. In the late seventies and early eighties there’d been a resurgence in interest in the occult. So it wasn’t so difficult to find people who were still involved in this kind of thing.’

  ‘Gerardo believed in all this?’ I asked.

  ‘Gerardo didn’t ridicule the idea. These people were a source of information for him about the play. He wanted them to trust him, be sympathetic to him and his work. Gerardo would say anything to ingratiate himself with a subject, no matter how bald the lie. Whether these people had the power to contact some weird occult forces or not, the earthly forces they’d contacted in the past were manifestly evil. If they’d been in contact with some kinds of spirits, I don’t think they’d be so benevolent either. One of these doorways between dimensions, according to the occultists, was the Porta Magica. It’s been reconstructed on Piazza Vittorio in the center of Rome.’

  ‘This I know about from Damien,’ I said.

  ‘Another portal was supposedly in the chapel of Sansevero in Naples,’ Ana said, ‘where medical experiments were said to have been carried out on slaves belonging to a certain Raimondo de Sangro in the eighteenth century. In some perverse way, these occultist Nazis believed they were the heirs of Raimondo, using inferior human beings to carry out their medical experiments.’

  I nodded. There wasn’t anything to say to that.

  ‘Some of these Italian aristocrats,’ Clara said, ‘who still hold positions of influence with the government, and maybe the Vatican, helped Nazis to escape from Europe after the war. This is well documented. A number of these people still have contacts with postwar fascist groups like Ordine Nuovo and P2.’

  ‘Yes, Kennedy told me some of this.’

  That sense of theatricality that had begun when I walked into the room intensified: the edges of the table and chairs were sharper, Clara’s lipstick and eye shadow garish; Ana’s dreadlocks alive, the darkness below her eyes a deeper shade of green; Sara’s cheeks redsveined. The skittering of the dogs’ claws in the next room sensitized the hairs above the vertebrae in my neck.

  ‘Gerardo lived close to the Fosse Ardeatine,’ Clara said. ‘I know he went there. He’d heard stories that Priebke, the officer responsible for the massacre there, had gone to Argentina. And Gerardo knew about the Nazis in Bariloche through Miriam and Dieter. You know Miriam, right?’

  I nodded. ‘She told me in some detail about the mass executions.’

  ‘The thing is,’ Clara said, ‘in the seventies and early eighties, even in Argentina, not many people knew the real identities of these people in Bariloche. They all had assumed names, false papers. And no one wanted to find out about them. And even if you did know about them as Dieter and Miriam did, and so Gerardo, too, what could you do? These ex-Nazis all supported the military dictatorships. They were vehemently anti-communist so they were obvious allies for the military against the godless revolutionaries. Even Isabelita, the president of Argentina, and her secretary, Jose Lopez Rega, were occultists, too, remember. This is common knowledge. They consulted astrologers about every decision, God knows what else. Whether Isabelita, and the Nazis, and the Triple A, had anything to do with the powers of darkness or not, what they were doing was patently evil: they killed and tortured their enemies… and a lot of innocent people, too. But nothing changed for the Nazis in Bariloche when Isabelita was thrown out. Videla and Galtieri and the rest of the generals in power during the Dirty War saw them as allies, too.’

  The image that arose in my mind… of my mother on the night of her breakdown… was as real to me then as Clara’s face in front of mine. Clara was talking about a chain of command that began with people like Arenas and my father and continued up to heads of state. Arenas and my father were the foot soldiers. Maybe Arenas, maybe my father, got some kudos in being buddies with ex-SS men.

  ‘I
suppose,’ Clara said, ‘the occultists who were talking to Gerardo in Italy thought that he was sympathetic to their cause. He was spending time with them. He was interested in their occult ideas. He was Argentine. Francesca was very seductive. She was a Christian esotericist, an Argentine nationalist. They felt free to talk about the colony in Bariloche, and the unfortunate incident at the Fosse Ardeatine where the SS had killed those three hundred Italians that they called subversives and communists.’

  ‘But Gerardo already knew about Priebke,’ I said, ‘through Dieter and Miriam.’

  ‘Yes,’ Clara said. ‘But Gerardo said nothing. He was an exile from the dictatorships. He was powerless to do anything in Italy at that time. With the fall of the dictatorships, and the restoration of democracy in the late eighties, Gerardo recognized that there might be an opportunity to flush out the Nazis. The democracy was still fragile. What guarantee was there that it was going to last? Gerardo was in Rome. He had his theater company. He was working. Then in 1992, Hizbullah, a Shiite terrorist group backed by Iran, bombed the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires…’

  ‘You know it was Hizbullah?’ I said.

  ‘Look,’ Clara said, ‘it was a truck bomb, Lebanese style; twenty-nine dead, two hundred wounded, including children from a school nearby. And in this letter from Sara’s sister, Isabel…’ Clara clicked on a document. ‘She says that she’s sure that the killers had help from right wing Peronists, some of them inside the police force and the military; Nazi sympathizers who hated Jews and who wanted a way to strike against the new democracy while the direct finger of accusation obviously pointed at Hizbullah.’

  I read the letter.

  ‘Gerardo,’ Clara said, ‘thought that there was nothing to be gained by going back to Argentina. If the responsibility for the bombing was being covered up, what could he do to identify the killers, or to expose their Argentine allies if he’d lived in exile for so long. But if nothing else, Gerardo had a sense of theater. Isabel, in Israel, had contacts in New York. That’s when Gerardo came to the United States. That’s where I met him.’