‘Tell me what you think. Then I will tell you if you are right. That is all I can do, you understand.’
A statement, not a question. The landscape, or lack of it, scuds past in an unidentifiable blur. Jonny exhales, a curious mixture of relief and disappointment. That’s why they put him in a hood. That’s why he’s been boxed into a moving car. He can’t work out where he’s going nor who he’s with, but it is for his own protection as much as anything else.
‘How do I know I can trust you?’
‘You don’t,’ the man replies. ‘But what other choice do you have?’
‘Is that what you told all your other prisoners too? That they could trust you? That you were flying them to their freedom? Not just to fling them out of the plane once you were far enough over the sea?’
The questions he’s long prepared suddenly stick in Jonny’s throat, words so bitter he can almost taste them. He swallows, again and again, but the lump just grows more acrid.
For that wasn’t the only alleged deception of the so-called Flights of Death. But he can’t bear to voice the others. Some prisoners were said to have been so weak from torture they had to be helped on board by military doctors, doctors that even went on to give them an injection, saying it was a vaccine to protect them from diseases in their new home. Those same doctors went on to strip them, tie their hands and feet for good measure, before shoving them out into the open air.
‘Yes,’ the man answers softly. ‘But in truth, it wasn’t necessary. 39By then, they were broken. They couldn’t fight, even if they had wanted to. And neither could we.’
‘Because —’ Jonny has to stop, clear his throat, start again. ‘Because you had already tortured them almost to death?’
‘At the detention centres. Yes. And because we lived beside them there too —’
‘Lived beside them?’ Jonny parrots. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Our quarters were directly below the cells. Prisoners and commanders would pass each other on the stairs on the way back and forth to the torture chambers. We were expected to eat lunch in between sessions. Like it was just another day at the office. Or we would end up on the wrong floor. We would be imprisoned for dissent ourselves.’
Jonny shakes his head. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘You can’t,’ the man replies softly. ‘No one can. It is incomprehensible. But that is how it happened. Week after week, month after month. We were prisoners too.’
‘No, you weren’t.’ Jonny’s retort comes out a little louder than he intended. ‘You may have been under orders, but only criminals could actually have carried them out. And if your conscience started getting in the way why not just finish them off in the detention centres? Why fly them out to sea?’
When the man turns, matching the agility and speed of the car’s well-oiled engine, his eyes glitter as brightly as the buttons on the front his starched uniform.
‘To make them disappear.’
‘To make them disappear,’ Jonny echoes softly, mesmerised by the gleam in the man’s eyes – are they sparkling with tears? The Disappeared. Los Desaparecidos. The thousands of bodies that still haven’t been recovered, making it ever harder to prove what happened to them in the first place.
This is the thought that snaps him back to the pages of his lost notebook.
40‘A body was found on the beach in La Plata two weeks ago,’ he says. ‘What do you know about that?’
The man cocks his head. ‘Well, what does it look like?’
Jonny balks, his picture of the crime scene swimming into gruesome focus inside his head. ‘Look like?’
‘A body washes up on an Argentinian beach without a head, legs or fingerprints. What does it look like, to you?’
‘Well,’ Jonny ventures, ‘I guess it looks like someone was trying very hard to make sure the body cannot be identified.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘No face or fingerprints. No head, so no dental records, and no hair – you can even work stuff out from that these days. The fact the body washed up at all is a stroke of bad luck for whoever did it.’
‘What else does it look like?’
‘Well, it could be a drug cartel killing. Those guys aren’t exactly known to show mercy, are they?’
‘True.’ The man nods. ‘But how do you send your opposition a message without being clear where it is coming from?’
An overhead highway light suddenly illuminates in a quicksilver flash the salty tracks streaked over the man’s cheeks. Rather than finding a portrait of evil in the front seat, Jonny is astonished to find a picture of despair – and a far younger picture than he was expecting. He takes in the forehead lined with anguish rather than age, the slump as opposed to a hunch in the shoulders, the elegant hands clutched together in the lap. This man must have been little more than a teenager when he flew those planes.
Jonny stares into those glittering eyes as a beat passes between them.
‘I think we both know what it really looks like,’ he finally says. ‘Especially you. It looks exactly like an attempted disappearance. And it looks like the victim was never intended to be identified, let alone found.’
41An elegant finger trembles as the man lifts it to his eye, wipes a tear away with an infinitesimal nod. Jonny only realises he’s been holding his breath when it all comes streaming out in one go. Answering questions on record about the original death flights is headline enough. But linking them with this most recent discovery of human remains on a city beach is an even bigger deal. Suddenly Jonny can barely conceive of it.
‘Just so I’m clear,’ he begins again. ‘You’re telling me that fifteen years after the end of the Dirty War, someone – no, some people – have gone to the trouble of deliberately dismembering someone and then shoving the pieces out of a plane? Or making it look exactly like they have? Why? Do you even know who the victim is?’
‘You will have to find that out for yourself. You are already looking in the right places. I would not have found you otherwise.’
‘So you didn’t fly this particular plane, is what you’re saying —’
‘No!’ Jonny flinches as a fist suddenly shoots towards the dashboard. ‘No. I did not.’
‘So how do you know exactly what happened here?’
‘It is not enough that I am telling you I once did?’
Jonny finds himself grappling again with the prospect of an almost unthinkable scoop. Getting a former Argentinian military pilot on record testifying to the horrors of the Dirty War is worth multiple international front pages. The current political amnesty might protect this man from prosecution and jail time, but it’s hardly an invitation to provide the details of every unspeakable crime. And the current military leadership views any expression of responsibility or regret as the ultimate betrayal. Most former commanders would rather die than break the oath of silence. So why is this man admitting it to him? And what has it got to do with the body on the beach?
‘It’s more than enough,’ he replies hesitantly. ‘I’m sure you know that it’ll be the first time that any military officer has done so 42publicly. You said you regretted it, and you’ve regretted it every day since. Is that why you’ve finally decided to speak out?’
‘No,’ the man replies softly. ‘In fact I do not wish to do that at all.’
Jonny blanches. ‘Why, because you’ll be put on trial for genocide? You said that’s why I was here. You said exactly that.’
The man lets out a brittle little laugh. ‘And you think that once you’ve printed your story, justice will prevail, because in the end, it always does? Tell me, Jonny Murphy from the International Tribune – yes of course I know your name. How many flights do you think it takes to disappear thousands of people? How many planes, how many pilots, how many guards, how many torturers? Hundreds? Thousands?’
‘It takes an army,’ Jonny replies quietly. ‘That’s the worst part of all. You were part of a state-sponsored military machine made to silence people.’
‘So why do you think I am talking to you about it?’
‘Well, if you think I am going to print your last will and testament, I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong place.’
‘Indeed, that is not what I want from the International Tribune.’
So what do you want, then? Jonny wonders. And why are you telling me? A little voice adds in his inner ear. A black thought slithers out from the darkest corners of his mind. This man clearly knows a whole lot more about Jonny than Jonny knows about him. This man knows exactly what Jonny has been doing, where he has been doing it, and who he’s been doing it with. So what else does he know about Jonny? Has he come to Jonny because he knows he hasn’t been wholly truthful in the past?
‘Sometimes machines break,’ the man is continuing. ‘You just have to find out why.’
‘This isn’t about some kind of mechanical failure,’ Jonny shoots back, trying to recover himself. ‘This involves real people, actual human beings, not component parts —’
43‘Claro,’ the man interrupts softly, eyes shining. And suddenly something altogether different snags inside Jonny’s mind. The man sighs, so long and deep, a little thrum echoes around the inside of the car.
‘Ya esta,’ he adds. ‘That’s enough. My job here is done.’
‘Oh no.’ Jonny shakes his head. ‘We’re not even close to being done —’
But then the rest of his sentence dead-ends into nothing as a blow thuds into the side of his head.