Parker received me in his office as though he didn’t know me or had forgotten me; to make the meeting more professional, a blond receptionist was taking notes of what we said. The young woman’s name was Ginger, and she had little braces on her front teeth that made her look like a teenager just out of high school. They served me a cup of green tea and some ginger cookies that tasted of cat piss. The sitar of the great Ravi Shankar was playing on Ginger’s computer; we were in India even though you could hear police sirens and the arrogant buzz of New York through the windows. I summarized the situation for them: I was worried; a colleague from the department, Professor Brown, had died in a strange accident, and I was convinced that the FBI was keeping tabs on me.
“I think they entered my house while I was out.”
“Naturally, they aren’t going to come while you’re in,” said Parker, and the receptionist laughed at her boss’s joke with a dry little cough.
The FBI regularly carried out nocturnal raids without warrants. There was no need to be alarmed, it could be a routine inspection of the houses of everyone who had a relationship with Ida Brown.
From what was known, the FBI was indeed going after a series of attacks in the nation’s universities. They’d started a while ago, but connections were only now starting to be established between the different isolated accidents. What was the relationship between those events? That was unknown. Ida might belong to the series, and maybe the FBI had left that track open in case some little bird took the bait. They might believe that it was an attack, or that she died while handling a bomb. No hypothesis was being closed off. He asked me for more details; anything could help him in his investigation, even the dullest piece of information. When I started to speak, Parker asked Ginger to leave us on our own and took notes on a pad. I gave him an outline of the situation since I’d first arrived in January and told him that, like all of the professors in the department, I’d received a routine visit from the police trying to learn details about the case. But then, yesterday, Inspector O’Connor from the Trenton police and some kind of Latino FBI agent were waiting for me outside a class, and when I got home I found signs that they’d gone through my papers. He only seemed interested in the reference to the Latino agent. He asked for more information, and I told him that he’d barely spoken, that he’d only been there listening to my conversation with O’Connor. Also that, at the end, he’d made it clear to me that they were the ones asking the questions. Parker wrote down a couple of lines on his notepad and gave me a breakdown of the situation.
The police were confused; they didn’t know if the attacks were connected or if it was a simple coincidence. In general, the victims of the attacks were distinguished scholars, scientists specializing in biology or mathematical logic. Ida seemed to be outside that target range. “But you never know,” he concluded. “It could be a lunatic or it could be pure chance.”
Parker was going to request access to the FBI files. I had to sign off with my permission. He wanted to make it clear to me that, without the cooperation of the security forces, his job couldn’t exist. “There are two United States,” said Parker. “One, visible, the country in which I’m a voting citizen, the founding fathers’ democratic republic. And another one, underground, with an unchecked central power that eliminates everything that puts national security at risk.” He had to make his negotiations and cooperate with that dark power so that they wouldn’t squash him like a mosquito. They knew he was working on the case about the black soldiers murdered in Iraq, but it didn’t matter to them: the army was another world, and they were the boys from internal affairs. “I come from Argentina,” I told him, “I know how these things go. Half of the population works for the information services and the other half is being monitored.”
Parker was going to obtain permission to read phone transcripts and classified information and to consult the records of the case, but I had to tell him why I was so interested in the matter and why I had hired him.
It was clear to me that I couldn’t explain it. I’d been obsessed with the woman, and it was because of my obsession that I’d turned to a private detective. I told him, without getting into details, that Ida was a friend, a renowned intellectual, and her reputation was in jeopardy; the university’s administration had washed its hands of her, but for me it wasn’t all the same thing if she’d died in a stupid traffic accident or in some other way.
“It isn’t the same thing? Why? For the professor’s curriculum?” He looked at me ironically. “There must be something more.”
“I had a history with her, but I hid it from the police.”
“Ah, fine,” he said, and wrote something down on his notepad. “And they know about it, of course. Was she married?”
“No, she wasn’t married.”
“Did any colleague know about the situation?”
“I don’t think so.”
“And why had I hidden our affair?”
“She didn’t want anyone to find out, and I respected her decision.”
“Ooh la la,” he said, amused.
Suddenly I understood that Parker was a typical American ex-cop, ruthless, cynical, and patriotic. Was there anything else he needed to know? he asked, and so I moved cautiously, not going too far into facts or theories.
“They spoke to my doctor in Buenos Aires,” I said, and that surprised him.
He was going to investigate, see one of his contacts. He wanted to warn me that they would only let him investigate in the dead files, that is, there wouldn’t be information about ongoing witnesses (that is, living people). They didn’t want the information to turn into some kind of blackmail.
They were very serious in their search, according to Parker. The Latino man, John Menéndez, was chief of Special Investigations, director of the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. He was an ace, the best of all of them, and it was unusual for him to have mobilized personally. He must think there was some loose end between Ida and the series of attacks. In short, he would take the case, and he’d keep me informed. There was no need for me to give him an advance; he preferred for me to pay him by the week.
I left my office after noon. I’d made plans to meet Elizabeth in Central Park rather than at her house, as if I thought they were following me and was adhering to security measures. At one time in Argentina everyone did this, even the most careless; terror forces people to imitate their pursuers and act with stealth. Schedule meetings in open spaces where you could escape, never wait for anyone longer than three minutes, take a walk around the block to make sure you weren’t being followed, never write down phone numbers, travel by subway as much as possible. It didn’t do any good. The greatest urban guerrilla operation in Argentina—the attack on an army arsenal battalion in Monte Chingolo—was led by an infiltrator from the intelligence services, whose friends called him The Bear…
I didn’t stay at The Leo House this time, as if by changing places I could deceive the secret police. I saw them in every direction, and anyone who paused on a corner made me think they were following me. They had questioned Elizabeth about me as well. A routine matter. She reacted haughtily when the FBI worker asked whether I’d traveled to Cuba. “Of course,” she said, “they published his first book in Havana, but that was thousands of years ago now…” The two polite, formal agents said nothing but wrote down the information. “They write while standing up,” Elizabeth said, “they must use a shorthand technique or just scribble nonsense to show you they’re working seriously.”
She was a woman who never let herself be pushed over. She had a way of speaking and dressing that denoted her social class, and she lived in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the city. Her adoptive family had raised her in Brooklyn, but she’d gotten into Columbia with a scholarship and that helped her assimilate into the New York intellectual elite. There’s no journey longer than the path from the slums of Brooklyn to the cliques of Upper Manhattan, she told me once.
I sat on a bench to eat a hot dog and started tossing crumbs to the little birds. It was March, and you could feel spring in the air. A boy, about five years old, stopped on one side and started watching me. Then he asked me if the ketchup was bad for the birds. “I don’t think so,” I told him. “They’re used to everything. In the winter they eat the trash stuck to subway grates.” That made him laugh. “Boogers?” he said. “Gum?” No, not gum, they might get stuck. A giggle. I asked if he wanted a piece of the hot dog. He thanked me very formally and told me that he wasn’t allowed to accept food from strangers. His father was about to take him to his grandmother’s house, and she would feed him a whole bunch of things. “I feed the birds too sometimes,” he said. He seemed very shy. There was a pause, and then he looked at me with a faraway expression. “I know you,” he said, “you’re my mom’s friend.”
He was Jimmy Archer, Elizabeth’s son, but I’d never seen him before. “I’m Emilio,” I said. “Yes, I know,” he said. He wouldn’t mind giving a few crumbs to the birds as long as there wasn’t any ketchup on them. I tore off a piece of bread for him and he began throwing the little crumbs methodically in wider and wider circles. Immediately several birds started fluttering around and fighting over the crumbs.
“Are they killing each other?” he asked in his tense little voice. No, not at all, just playing. And why do pigeons sometimes turn up dead on the ground? They fall asleep and fall out of the trees. He watched the skirmish pensively. According to him, crows were murderous birds. Crows? He nodded his head. It scared him a bit to think that a crow might be able to get into his room at night. You can’t see them. Then, as if by magic, he produced a baseball from his jacket and suggested that we play. I could stay sitting there: that was my catcher’s box. He moved away and threw me a very fast ball with lots of spin. I returned it and he got back into position once again, with one leg raised and both hands together, holding the ball up to his cheek before he threw the pitch.
At that moment a robust man with an oblong face appeared along one of the pathways in the park. He looked like a replica of Jimmy on a giant scale and had the same anxious expression in his eyes. He was smoking a coffee-colored cigarette and wore his white hair tied back in a ponytail with a rubber band. As though everyone had come to an agreement, Elizabeth arrived at that moment. The man seemed not to see her and was talking to the boy.
“I got held up in traffic, Jimmy, sorry,” he said, in a way that sounded like a threat.
“It’s… okay,” said the boy, with a brief, fearful pause in the click of his response.
The man with the ponytail looked at Elizabeth.
“He’s afraid of me but talks to a stranger in the park.”
“He isn’t a stranger,” she explained, and the two of them moved off toward the trees, talking in heated voices.
I stood up and turned away, letting them work out the issue. The boy looked at the ground with a desolate air and then I saw him going over toward his father. From time to time he turned his face to look back at me.
Elizabeth sat down with me on the bench. The man was her ex-husband, the boy’s father. They’d lived with him for several years; he was a flawed writer, but very successful. “He had a Pancho Villa mustache when I met him,” she said. She should have been suspicious, he made himself out to be a tough guy, he was always acting. We walked back through the park, and I told her about my meeting with Parker. She didn’t think I needed to worry. All inhabitants of New York (except black people) received those kinds of visits from the FBI. The black people they don’t bother to visit, they just kill them or lock them up straight away, she said… “We’d feel more comfortable if they did investigate us.”
We reached her house, and I installed myself there for a couple of days. Living with the flawed writer, Elizabeth had become an expert on flaws. She had a plan to publish an anthology of classic stories by great authors, edited and revised. She’d made a list of the defects in masterworks: Hemingway’s “The Killers” (too explicit at the end with the Swede); Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” (there’s an unjustified change in perspective); Vladimir Nabokov’s “Signs and Symbols” (the second phone call is redundant); Borges’s “The Form of the Sword” (the ending with Moon’s explanation was superfluous). As for the book I’d published, if it were up to her she would have cut all of the short stories except for “The Jeweler” (and in that story she would have gone further with the account of the girl and her father escaping from the police on cross-country highways).
In the afternoon, when Elizabeth went to her office, I settled down to work in the New York Public Library on 42nd Street. I requested books from the nineteenth century and magazines from far away, opened my notebooks, and tried to forget about my worries while the silence and the lamps with their green glass shades brought me some consolation and—as they had so many times in my life—dissolved the anxieties of the present.
On the Pampa, Hudson had met a man with the aspect of a hermit, who lived alone in a ruin in the middle of the plains; he was English by birth but had gone to South America at a young age, “and he had taken kindly to the semi-barbarous life of the gauchos, and had imbibed all their peculiar notions, one of which was that human life is not worth very much. ‘What does it matter,’ the country folk often say, and shrug their shoulders, when told of a comrade’s death; ‘so many beautiful horses die!’”
A couple of days later—on Friday of that week, according to my notes—I had another meeting with Parker. The common feature in all the attacks was a letter bomb addressed to a scholar or researcher from the scientific and academic world. Based on the features of the attacks and the places they’d occurred, it would have been difficult for a single individual to have carried them all out. The FBI postulates the existence of an anarchist group, possibly an eco-terrorist cell. They didn’t believe Ida’s case belonged to that series, even though her death was very suspicious. Unless, he added, she was part of the group and had died while activating a bomb that she intended to deploy (or transport). All of the bombs had inscriptions in the metal with the initials FC. They’d searched unsuccessfully for similar names or initials in workshops, factories, and hardware suppliers. These were homemade bombs, made with recycled materials, very difficult to trace, and for this reason people were starting to call the presumed attacker Mr. Recycler. They’d been unable to find digital traces or trails after any of the attacks that could lead them toward determining an identity. The packages were always tied up with sisal twine and sealed with a nickel, but their origin couldn’t be pinpointed, and it was thought that this Recycler might be manufacturing them personally. They all had a one-dollar Eugene O’Neill stamp. Did that mean anything to me? “O’Neill, well, he was a bit of an anarchist, he’d spent a long time in Argentina at the turn of the century, living in Berisso, a working-class neighborhood near La Plata.” It all seemed very strange. “It is very strange,” said Parker. The attacks were all the same, letter bombs addressed to figures in the scientific world; they were all homemade devices made out of scrap materials and surplus from industrial elements, and they all had the Eugene O’Neill stamp. Only the targets, the repetition of the stamps, and the inscrutable metal plates with the letters FC indicated that it was a series. Menéndez was attempting to decipher the physical evidence recovered from among the remains of the explosions. There were no traces, no clear trails, and he initially deduced that the suspect was an airplane mechanic who worked in a home studio in the basement of his house. The sophisticated use of certain metal alloys similar to those employed in aviation caused him to order an inspection of hangars, airplane factories, junkyards with aeronautic material, but with no results.
Their guess was that it could be a cell with five or six members; they’d made no public statement, and the pacing of the attacks was very erratic. Everyone believed it was a group except for Menéndez, who maintained that it was a single individual. For that reason, he’d started interviewing serial killers locked up in prisons around the country, trying to grasp some common logic in the acts he was investigating. There wasn’t much that could be deduced from those conversations: essentially, they acted on impulses they couldn’t control, which led them to stalk their victims in parks, in schools, in public bathrooms. Usually, “the serials” (as they were called) tended to increase the pace of their hunting and demand some excessive or ridiculous compensation in order to stop committing their crimes, and they usually got caught because they would always return to their crime scene; that is, they repeated so faithfully that it was possible to guess the place where they would carry out their next act.
He didn’t believe it was a group or a cell because, according to him, all groups disintegrate sooner or later and spawn their own informers, and even secret cults were infiltrated by the police. Menéndez himself had acted undercover in a Mexican narco group from Tijuana when he was an advanced Political Science student at the Hoover Institution on War and Revolution in Stanford, California. He was Chicano and lived in two worlds, Mexican like his father and American like his mother, and he knew how to cross from one reality to another.
I went out for a drink with Parker at a bar facing Washington Square; the place was annexed onto his office and he usually received his clients there. Everyone greeted him when they saw him come in, and he set to arguing with the bartender about the outcome of the basketball playoffs. They were Knicks fans but paid no attention to their preferences when it was game time. That year Michael Jordan and the Bulls were winning the series, so betting on them was like knowing the lottery number before the drawing. All the same, Parker put himself down for $500 against Chicago (30 to 1 odds) and in favor of the Philadelphia 76ers.
We sat down at a table by the window that looked out onto Washington Square. A woman with a megaphone in the small central square was talking at a small group of homeless people about the need to quit drugs and alcohol and, at the same, promoting an anti-drug tonic called Soul Coke.
Sports is the primary industry in this country, according to Parker, and Jordan, who’d returned to the NBA after several months’ retirement, had more power than General Motors. But, for Parker, race-car drivers were the real sports idols. They make a lot of money because they live in perpetual danger, and audiences go to Indianapolis or Daytona to see accidents. He paused, pensive, as though imagining that this should have been his life. When you get into one of those machines, you don’t know if in two hours you’ll come out alive or in a pulp.
They brought orange juice for Parker and whiskey for me; they also gave us peanuts and French fries. Then, as though delivering information to a husband who was having his unfaithful wife followed, Parker started laying out the information on Ida from the FBI files. She had no stable habits, and if someone wanted to kill her, they would’ve had a problem due to her irregularity. She often walked from her house to campus along Prospect Avenue. But sometimes she drove there and sometimes she waited for the university shuttle on the corner of Nassau and Harrison Street. She always carried the trash out to the dumpster in the driveway of her house in the professors’ neighborhood; sometimes she got into her car and took the trash away, leaving it in the bins at the edge of the soccer stadium. Of course, they knew that trash is a starting point for an investigation as there are always traces: calendars, medical prescriptions, handwritten notes. If I was interested, he had a list of the drugs she took, legal or illegal. A list of her phone calls. A selection of her most personal emails, of the places she visited most frequently. The times when she walked along the avenue to the campus entrance on Washington Road and then went to the library (always, every morning) to devote several hours to research or classwork. In the afternoons she was in her office. She’d used her pension funds to buy an apartment in the Village. She’d attended a conference in China and met privately with professors and students from Peking University. The FBI had a summary of their conversation. She had inadvisable sexual habits, frequenting dark rooms, swingers’ clubs, and S/M spots. So they had the complete blueprint of Ida’s life, as if they’d taken an X-ray. Did they have this information about all citizens? But it wasn’t information; only the bones are visible in X-rays. She couldn’t travel to Cuba because the State Department denied her permission. Sometimes she ate at the university bar, chicken sandwiches. They had a list of the films she’d rented from the video store over the last two years, the list of books she’d requested at the library, the list of her purchases from the supermarket, her bank statements. They had a record of her outgoing phone calls and the faxes she sent. She’d participated in demonstrations for peace, for abortion rights, for racial equality, for Latino access to legal documentation, for lifting the Cuban embargo. She’d been a member of the groups that protested against the war in Iraq. In the last few months of the year 1994, she’d been seen once a week in the Hyatt Hotel on Route One with Don D’Amato. He himself had revealed that fact to the police.
I finished my whiskey and ordered another. What sort of jealousy was this retrospective jealousy, tied to a woman who was dead? And D’Amato with his wooden leg, his boundless appetites… He would leave the leg leaning against a wall and stretch out on the bed with his stump exposed… “Why all of those details?”
“Routine,” said Parker. “They call it a profile, but it’s hard to deduce actions and decisions based on that alone; it’s just the framework, the map of a life. Ida was a classic rebellious student during her years at Berkeley, flirting with the Black Panthers, visiting the Puerto Rican Macheteros in jail, but there was no evidence of clandestine activities. To the FBI, that might be proof that she really was part of an anarchist group that carried out illegal activities.”
“Of course, a lack of evidence can be a kind of evidence,” I said.
“Terrorists,” said Parker, “lead much more normal lives than all of the normal men who think of them as obvious bloodthirsty monsters. In short,” he added, “Ida Brown may be guilty or may be a victim, and the FBI prefers to play it as if nothing has happened, in order to catch the attacker or an accomplice off guard.”
Maybe she was part of the peripheral support around the alleged terrorist organization and died while handling a bomb that she intended to send (even if she didn’t know it was a bomb). It might also have been an accident; there was evidence that she sometimes carried a can of gasoline in her car because she was afraid of running out of gas in the middle of the road, and it could have exploded with a spark from the car’s electrical system. Strange, isn’t it? But there were glass shards on the car floor, and the FBI was basically sticking to the theory that is was an accident. The investigation into Ida was on standby and depended on whatever information might be found as the fence was tightening in around Recycler. If it really was tightening. The FBI had already spent two million dollars and had questioned more than five thousand people. The fifty or sixty suspects, arrested rather blindly, had been set free after “severe” interrogation. The anonymous tips were revealed to be false or slanderous at the point of verification. The phone calls placed on the day after each attack, attempting to claim responsibility, had originated from unstable people or agitators or pranksters. And the two or three pale youths—binge watchers of TV shows about scientists who mysteriously disappeared (The Big Secret) or about murderers who terrorized small country towns (Twin Peaks)—who had spontaneously appointed themselves prisoners received no punishment for their imaginary crimes except the psychiatric wing of federal prison.
The investigation was in a deadlock. They were waiting for the terrorists to make a move. It seemed impossible to them that a group—or an isolated individual—could keep going for all those years with no support or contacts on the surface. Maybe that’s what they were attempting to do with Ida. Maybe they recruited her to work on secondary tasks; it could even be that she didn’t know about the consequences of the relationship. They asked her to take a package to the post office and she did it. Menéndez maintained his order that information be controlled to the maximum extent. The FBI wants controlled publicity in this matter: they use counter-information and deliberate leaks because they don’t want to give the perpetrators the notoriety they seek. (The FBI had maintained a low profile. It kept secret the fact that it was investigating a serial bomber, reasoning that the less the public knew, the easier its job.)
Typically, these kinds of acts aren’t carried out because of their direct targets but rather because of their effect in the news. Terrorism was weaponized propaganda, a broadcast medium like any other, he said with a tired air, bringing the interview to an end. We parted ways and I paid Parker two thousand dollars—“cash up front”—to continue the investigation.
At Penn Station I got onto the train that would take me back, a feeling of emptiness in my chest as if I was the protagonist in some sentimental fiction. I’d bought a flask of whiskey and put it in a brown paper bag, taking a swig from time to time. The train car was half empty; it was almost four in the afternoon, and it seemed like the only people traveling at that hour were the old and dying or teenagers escaping from school and going to Trenton to kill time. I remember that I tried to write down a few details from my conversation with Parker, but my state of mind and the motion of the car made the notes almost illegible, and it’s impossible now to decipher what I wrote that day between the jolting of the train and the slow accumulation of alcohol that distorted my handwriting and ideas. “Intelligence isn’t a secondary sexual trait, as gymnasts and frauds say; quite the opposite, sex is contingent on the purity of the mind.” Purity of the mind? Those are the idiotic things I write down when I’m desperate, and that sentence is the only one I could reconstruct from two-and-a-half pages of mishmash in an epileptic scrawl. Along one edge, however, there was a carefully columned list. “Buy oranges, mineral water, light bulbs, go to Gramercy Park. The wooden leg, the hair dyed the color of a rat, he wears suspenders!” I think I dozed off. When I awoke there were only two kids left in the car, with hoods covering their heads, listening to Walkmans and talking on cell phones, miserable and conceited. And why, after all, was she interested in D’Amato? Did she only have affairs with colleagues? She used them like a pen full of roosters. I burned with rage, thinking about her standing in the low light of the bedroom, looking down at D’Amato’s naked body lying on the bed with his stump and his scars. I couldn’t get it out of my head. I pictured her in bed, in one of her dirtiest positions, and D’Amato role-playing as an ex-soldier driven mad by war, a cripple (!) breaking into the hotel room. What bothered me most of all was that apostrophe in his last name, a useless mark that accentuated his overblown personality as if he believed himself to be D’Artagnan when, physically, he was Porthos. Grand, imperious, eager. He’d received the medal of honor in Korea. He’d worked on the campaign for Wallace, the American leftist candidate in the fifties, and when things turned south under McCarthyism had taken refuge in academia. He started out on the Marxist campus of Minnesota and while there wrote his extraordinary work on Melville. He was the son of Italian immigrants. “He’d received the medal of honor in Korea.” And what of it?
What would a terrorist cell be like in the United States? Maybe Ida let herself get carried away in her theoretical anti-capitalism and came into contact with an anarchist group. I knew of many similar cases in Argentina. A contact, meetings, trivial supporting tasks. The periphery of the organization, the ones who were active on the surface. Offering your house, signing leases, or providing your address to receive mail. Little acts like getting weapons out of a house surrounded by the police; Julia, my first girlfriend, had done that after the police assassinated Emilio Jáuregui during a demonstration in Buenos Aires. Entering the house as if she was a family friend and leaving with a grenade inside her little leather handbag. They’d asked her to take a package to the post office, perhaps. Or maybe there was someone with her in the car.
One night in La Plata, in 1963 or 1964 when I was studying at the university, I came back to the boarding house where I lived and there, inside my room, sitting in the dark, I unexpectedly encountered Nacho Uribe. A classmate from college. He was studying philosophy. We were both in the student union, had mobilized in the ARI (Agrupación Reformista Independiente), which was where everyone who wasn’t in the Communist Party went (that’s why we called ourselves independent), and were members of Reforma Universitaria. It caught me off guard, Nacho was waiting for me, he was passing through, he said, and wanted to see me. In the dark? It was strange, we didn’t share that kind of confidence, we’d been together at some assembly, had studied for Ancient Philosophy together, had traded notes, had first met in Agoglia’s class on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. We sometimes got coffee, and we greeted each other in line at the university dining hall. And nothing more than that, but now here he was.
It was winter, and he had his face buried in the lapels of his jacket. He’d come in because the police were looking for him; they’d been carrying out an action in Berisso, outside the refrigeration plant, and the police had surrounded them. He’d escaped and found himself near my house. Could he stay the night? He didn’t want to go back to his house or show himself, and he didn’t think it would occur to anyone to look for him here. He’d entered without anyone seeing him, the door downstairs was always open, and my room was at the top of the stairs. He sat there in the dark, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt as if he were someone else, different from the dapper young man who went to class in a suit and tie. We stayed there all night, drinking yerba mate and talking. He’d killed an officer. Why did he tell me that? He placed a Ballester–Molina pistol on the table, wrapped in a yellow flannel. He’d seen civil police in the train station, secret service types. He’d walked around the Gimnasia stadium to blend in with people; that Friday Gimnasia was playing River and his plan was to mingle in with the fans, but there was a great deal of surveillance at the field as well. He needed me to call a phone number and say that Santiaguito was fine and had left the hospital. Better do it from a public phone. I went down and walked to the service station on Calle 2 and dialed the number just as he’d told me, but no one answered. I bought some cold cuts and bread and went back to the boarding house. His hands shook as he lit his cigarettes. The officer was a black guy from El Chaco, from Corrientes, who knows. A foot soldier. He’d gotten separated from his formation and Nacho chanced upon him in a dead-end road. He was unarmed, one of the riot squad, he had the tin badge. “But what could I do,” said Nacho, “it was him or me.” Finally in the morning Nacho left, planning to walk to Los Hornos and get out that way. And he asked me to hold onto “that,” the revolver wrapped in yellow flannel. He supposed nothing could happen to him now, in the light of day. A while later, a girl, obviously disguised in a blonde wig and dark glasses, said she’d come to pick up Nacho’s book, and she took the gun. That’s what it meant to be on the periphery. Being part of the logistical support. They’d created the FAL, one of the first armed groups, and they took the detachment at Campo de Mayo some time later. I never saw him again, but I found out that the military had abducted and executed him fifteen years later.