Far South Read online

  I flipped back to the page with Filomena’s picture. I seemed to be looking into another dimension, a parallel time. What had they done to her? What had he done to her? Had he been involved in this Filomena’s interrogation? This Filomena? What did I mean by that? My mother? The woman in this picture was my mother, my birth mother.

  Nausea. The room was tilted. The blank face of Matas over by the door. Maria Dos Santos, with her head bent, stared down at the file in my hands. Smoke curled from the tip of the cigarette between the fingers of her right hand that was now flat on the table. Maria Dos Santos glanced up at Casares. His complexion was like something out of a glossy magazine. She looked over her shoulder toward Matas, then at Rangel, not at me, but back at the file. Rangel’s breath was a steady rasp in his throat. His head was close to mine. He was looking over my shoulder at the file.

  ‘Juanma?’ Rangel said.

  Whose fucking name was that?

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said.

  It wasn’t, of course.

  My father? – my father must have told my mother that if I didn’t keep my mouth shut and give up the case, he was going to show me the file. This file. Told her that he was going to tell me that I wasn’t his son; that I wasn’t her son.

  It would destroy the last vestiges of the world she had constructed based on a normal family life with him, with me… whatever that was.

  He knew what it would do to her.

  But he needed to punish me.

  And what better way to do it than to disown me and destroy my entire identity. I’d betrayed him: by looking for Fischer, by going to Isabel in Buenos Aires, by bringing his business deal with Sandro Casares to light. By defying him when he told me to lay off the case. Juan Manuel Senior – I couldn’t say Pa – had known nothing about Fischer when I’d first talked to him but he’d found out from Arenas and Casares. And Juan Manuel Senior cared more about his son shaming him in front of the big man, Casares, than he did about me, or my mother. And why not? She wasn’t his wife any more. And I had reverted to type. Juan Manuel Senior had been in Casares’s SUV and when he’d seen me on the road where the drug and gun deal was going down, he knew that he’d failed to stop me looking for Fischer. I had corrupt DNA. The subversive genes that he’d brought into the bosom of his own family and nurtured, no doubt at his wife’s insistence, had betrayed him. Maybe he was right. There was something genetic about it.

  Inmaculada Concepción, his wife, wasn’t my real mother.

  This woman, Filomena – my real mother, right? – stared at me from the photograph: already the terror in her eyes for what she’d been through, and what she knew she was going to go through away from the momentary respite of having her picture taken. Did she suffer at the hands of the man who would steal her child and become my adoptive father? Did she know that she was about to lose her baby son to this man? What horror was that?

  I closed the file.

  ‘This Gerardo Fischer has caused a lot of trouble,’ Casares said.

  I’d never been who I had always thought I was. How about that? Juan Manuel Senior was not my father. Inmaculada Concepción was not my mother. But she’d brought me up with real love, hadn’t she?

  ‘I don’t care about what went on up on the mountain,’ I said. ‘That’s none of my business. But I’ll still keep looking for Fischer.’

  ‘You’re a stubborn man, Juan Manuel,’ Casares said.

  ‘If my mother’s hurt, I’ll kill you,’ I said.

  ‘Your mother’s already dead,’ Casares said. ‘No one’s going to touch the woman who adopted you. She’s one of us.’

  That hit me like a punch in the gut and he knew it. He stood up. This Casares with his permanent tan, his confident smile. This was his way of showing me that I wasn’t even worth killing. That he had no fear of me or the law or the press. He was showing me that he knew more about me than I’d known about myself. He’d just wiped away my whole identity. I still had no idea if Casares or Matas or Arenas had made Fischer disappear. Me, the not-cop. I didn’t even know who I was any more. And if Casares hadn’t had Fischer killed already, I might be doing Casares a favor by finding him.

  Maria took a slow drag on her cigarette, shifted sideways on the chair and stubbed it out in the half-full ashtray on the Formica-topped table.

  ‘Why don’t you all get the fuck out of here?’ I said. ‘Just get out.’

  ‘The police have everything under control,’ Casares said.

  Meaning that he was Teflon. But he fucking wasn’t, I was sure.

  Meanwhile, everything is under surveillance, Isabel had said… It’s a little transaction that could lead to catching bigger fish. I could only hope that Casares was one of the fish they wanted to catch; that he wasn’t in with the fishermen.

  My job was still to find Gerardo Fischer.

  And maybe to find out just who the fuck I am.

  Maria reached for the adoption file.

  I snatched it back.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Maria’s mouth gaped open.

  I pulled out the picture of my real father, and my real mother.

  ‘You don’t need these,’ I said. ‘Or this.’

  I pulled out my birth certificate with my real name on it.

  ‘That’s company property,’ Maria said.

  ‘This is my property,’ I said.

  What Maria meant was that this file could get a lot of her family in trouble. She knew this and so did Matas and he would risk violence to get it back. Matas moved toward the table.

  Rangel was on his feet.

  ‘Wait,’ Casares said. ‘Let him keep the pictures.’

  I tossed the folder back at Maria.

  ‘I just want the photographs and the birth certificate,’ I said. ‘That’s all. You can keep the hard evidence, I don’t give a fuck.’

  Matas looked confused. I guess he wasn’t too bright. He glanced at Maria, at Rangel, at Casares and back to me.

  ‘Take your file and get out of here,’ I said.

  ‘Take the file, Maria,’ Casares said. ‘Juan Manuel has everything he needs now. I’m sure he won’t cause any more problems for us.’

  Maria lifted the file and dropped it back into her basket.

  Casares drifted toward the door.

  I wished that I could trust that Carlos and Ramón’s human rights group would take care of the Artemisia Adoption Agency and all the impounded records. But nothing was certain on that front. Not with a bastard like Casares who had so much legal and illegal influence to bring to bear on the courts and the cops.

  Matas kept the flat lenses of his mirror shades on me until Casares and Maria Dos Santos were out the door of the office and onto the fire escape; then he followed them out and closed the door behind him.

  ‘Juanma?’ Rangel said.

  ‘Whose name is that?’

  ‘Take it easy, man.’

  Rangel tried to put an arm around me but I shook him off.

  ‘I’m okay,’ I said. ‘I’m okay.’

  I didn’t want anyone touching me.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  I held the two photographs side by side: my father, and my mother. I put the father behind the mother, and then shuffled them so that the mother was behind the father, and then the mother in front again. I put the photographs in the inside pocket of my jacket.

  ‘I’m going for a drive.’

  ‘You want me to come with you?’ Rangel said.

  ‘No. I’m okay.’

  I stepped out of the door. The sun baked the stubble on my skull. No sign of Matas, Casares, or Maria Dos Santos down below on the street.

  A cop car, black and white, was parked on the corner. In the rear side-window was a poster of Fischer; on the passenger side of the windshield was a flyer of Fischer. On another cop car that cruised down the main drag, Fischer’s face stared out from the Missing Persons Bureau poster pasted to the cruiser’s windows. Was Casares using the story of Gerardo Fischer’s disappearance to tell the citizens of this
fair country that those who dig up the past would end up reliving the past we would all prefer had never happened?

  I wanted to tell my mother, my not-mother, Inmaculada Concepción, that it was okay, that it wasn’t her fault. But – I’m sorry – it was her fault, too. She never fucking told me.

  The sun burned into in my eyes.

  I was outside my office on the steel platform at the top of the stairway.

  Should I look for the grave of the people who were in the photographs in my pocket? Were there any graves to be found? Somewhere out there, maybe I had grandparents, maybe cousins, aunts, uncles. Who knew? I could look for them so my living relatives would know what had happened to me. Or I could remain unknown to them… a man without any family at all, a man without a past.

  How had I got here? Where was I? Oh yes.

  I grabbed the handrail for balance and walked down the steps to the street.

  My car was parked in the shade of the alley.

  I got in the black Ford and turned the key to start it.

  The light was so bright on the street. I was looking for something but I didn’t know what, like some kind of shadow at the periphery of my vision. Like the numbness inside me was now outside of me… but just out of sight. I had to go somewhere. I had to get out of this lakeside summer resort on the shores of the Lago Gran Paraíso.

  I wished that I could talk to Ana but I couldn’t face making a cell phone call and getting her voicemail again. I had a yen to go to the Temenos Artists Colony, up there, to Damien Kennedy’s house.

  Temenos – sacred space – fear us.

  I had a yen to snoop around Damien Kennedy’s personal belongings to see if there was any indication of why he might have lied to me about Francesca Damiani, other than the fact that their relationship was none of my fucking business; and about why they might have gone to Uruguay, and whether it had anything to do with the disappearance of Gerardo Fischer, the man who liked to strip away people’s masks.

  What a theater director! Orchestrating people’s lives like God, or the Devil. What a fucking genius!

  I drove out to the lakeside. I got caught in the traffic by the new flyover connection to the main highway to Córdoba. Three earth-moving machines pushed dry dirt into two-meter high piles, tall cranes swung nets full of concrete sacks and re-bar from one side of the site to the other, unseen jackhammers rattled from behind plywood walls that were topped with razor wire. The sun blazed down on the two lines of saloon cars and SUVs and pick-up trucks: one line inching single file through the orange and white striped barrels that marked the road through the construction zone.

  I had a green light. The front end of the Ford Executive lifted and bucked over the dusty makeshift causeway. I eased between a cement-truck on my right whose mixer gently rotated and a row of I-shaped concrete beams some ten meters long. The traffic signal for the oncoming vehicles was about thirty meters away to my left. The lead vehicle for the stationary traffic was a yellow Dodge pick-up that seemed to belong to a construction company, the second car was a silver Hyundai saloon, the third a red Toyota Camry, and the fourth was a white GM truck with a closed cab and matching white box behind.

  I slammed my palms onto the steering wheel.

  ‘Hi, Pa!’

  He couldn’t hear me, of course. I was in my car with the air conditioning on and the construction noise drowned out the sound of the engines: he was in the driver’s seat of the white cab with Pablo Arenas beside him, still fifty meters away but the distance was closing. He saw me through his windshield. He looked to the right and left, said something to Arenas and now they were both looking at me. They weren’t moving. They couldn’t go back and they couldn’t go forward. I slowed down and that meant the traffic behind me slowed down, too.

  The signal for oncoming traffic was still red when I came to a stop.

  Juan Manuel Senior and Pablo Arenas kept looking at each other, looking at me. I glanced in the rearview mirror. A young redheaded woman in the battered Ford behind me had a puzzled frown on her face. Her car stopped behind my rear bumper. Car horns started to blare from both lines of stalled traffic.

  What had Isabel said?

  ‘We believe that it will leave Ciudad Azul early tomorrow afternoon.’

  I reached back under my jacket and pulled out the M1911 from the holster on my belt. It was pretty solid in my hand.

  Juan Manuel Senior’s eyes widened and his jaw fell a little. He was unshaven. His skin was a little grey. Arenas was at his shoulder. His face was still mottled by his bruises. I pointed at the driver’s side window with the gun barrel and indicated that I wanted it lowered. Juan Manuel Senior lowered it.

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Juanma, what are you doing?’

  We had an audience now. Construction workers with hardhats and some drivers of the cars behind mine who had got out to see why they were being held up. The blare of car horns was counterpoint to the jackhammer and the heavy diesel engines of the caterpillar-tracked earthmovers.

  Juan Manuel Senior raised his hands palms toward me.

  ‘Take it easy, Juanma.’

  ‘That’s not my fucking name.’

  I had this heavy black gun in my hand that could stop this shipment here and now. I knew how to use it. I had been a policeman. I thought of Isabel: a woman who had been a pacifist in 1982 during the Israeli invasion of the Lebanon and who might yet be a pacifist now. She’d had enough information to stop this shipment and she wasn’t going to.

  Bigger fish.

  With the M1911, I waved to Arenas and Juan Manuel Senior and tossed the unfired weapon onto the passenger seat. I put the car in gear and drove down the now empty road in front of me. I guess I was shaking a little. I didn’t even look in the rearview mirror. I hoped that I’d made the right decision. I would never know.

  I drove down Route 60. I passed the shrine to the Madonna… the Immaculate Conception. I turned off the main highway and onto the dirt road toward El Campanil. I let the big black Ford Executive buck over the washboard cambers and through the dry potholes and around the rocks that were exposed in the middle of the rutted road.

  Inmaculada Concepción was not my mother. Had she really been in on this revelation by Casares and Juan Manuel Senior? Or had Casares just said that to twist a broken bottle in the wound he’d opened?

  My real mother and father were dead and I had their pictures in my jacket pocket. I pulled in to the parking lot of the Temenos Artists Colony. It was empty.

  No Dodge Ram.

  No white Fiat van.

  How come no van? I got out of the Ford.

  I walked past Sara’s house.

  No sound of any dogs.

  No wind to lift the branches of the eucalypts or the pines.

  They’d all gone, the whole company.

  I took out my cell phone and dialed.

  ‘Hello, Ma.’

  ‘Juanma, where are you? Are you okay?’

  ‘I’m fine. And you?’

  ‘Come and see me, Juanma.’

  ‘Soon, Ma. I got a few things to do. I just wanted to make sure that you’re okay.’

  ‘I’m okay. Have you seen your father?’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ve sorted everything out with him.’

  ‘Oh, thank God, Juanma,’ she said. ‘I was so worried about you.’

  ‘It’s alright,’ I said.

  A long silence.

  ‘He told you, didn’t he?’ she said.

  ‘Yeah, he told me. But it doesn’t matter, okay?’

  That was a total lie and we both knew it.

  ‘Come and see me, Juanma, please,’ she said. ‘Come now.’

  ‘Don’t do anything stupid, Ma, you understand? You don’t need to get drunk, do anything… we can work this out, okay? I’ll come and see you when… when I get back…’

  ‘Where you going?’

  ‘I have to go to Montevideo.’

  She was crying now.

  ‘Oh, Juanma… I’m so sorry…’

 
‘Look after yourself, Ma, okay?’

  ‘Come over, now, Juanma, I want to see you.’

  ‘I can’t right now. I’m in the middle of something.’

  Silence.

  ‘God bless you, Juanma,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll see you soon.’

  I hung up. I slipped the cell phone in my pocket.

  I wish Ana had been around.

  I took out the photographs from my jacket pocket. I looked into the terrified face of my mother, my real mother; the face of my real father was like a holiday snap.

  What was I doing up here on this mountainside?

  I heard a motor. The white Fiat van was coming up the hill.

  Fischer?

  No.

  It was the American guy, Dean Mills, the old biker with the silvery hair, a bit jowly under the lenses of his shades, heavy body under his denim shirt. He pulled up, switched off the engine and got out of the van. He leaned on his cane.

  ‘Everyone’s gone to Buenos Aires,’ he said. ‘I’m meeting them there tomorrow morning.’

  ‘I came to look around,’ I said.

  Mills shook his head.

  ‘Still looking for Fischer?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Mills limped to the edge of the parking lot and looked back across the valley to the ridgelines of the Sierras.

  ‘You won’t find him. Not unless he wants you to.’

  My shoes ground against the dusty gravel; puffs of dust settled on the shiny leather.

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘Gerardo,’ he said.

  ‘You mean you know where he is?’

  ‘I don’t know where he is,’ Mills said. ‘You really think he’s been kidnapped or killed?’

  ‘That’s why they hired me. To find out.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘So what do you think?’

  ‘Look. Gerardo… what he does… what he’s always done… Let’s just say… well, what he likes to do… is to set in motion forces that are… unpredictable, volatile. He’s always done that, hasn’t he? In Argentina, in Italy, in New York, wherever…’

  Mills took off his shades; he let them dangle beside his good leg. He squinted out into the sun’s rays that slanted across the valley from the Sierras.

  ‘Gerardo has a theory,’ Mills said. ‘You can read it in his book, Los Delincuentes, it’s there in black and white since 1968: he wants to make theater that crosses into everyday life… that wakes people up. That’s what he says. He likes to draw people into the theater, into the company even, and show them there’s no distinction between theater and normal life; that so-called normal life is nothing but theater. Back then, he predicted that the extent to which we were all being conned all the time was going to escalate: newspapers, television… he couldn’t know just how… but look… websites, businesses, banks and governments. He couldn’t have known exactly how back then… but he saw it coming. He’s a sharp guy.’