buenos aires
september 1976
Jonathan buried his hands in his pockets and drew up his shoulders as he crossed Avenida del Libertador. A cold wind snapped against his uniform jacket. He was on his second tour in the Southern Command—a light mission of efficiency advising for Operation Condor, the US-backed coordination of intelligence among South American nations—and the Argentine armed forces had begun to get a handle on guerrilla activity since his last visit. But as he entered the plaza, a prickle ran down his spine. He swiveled, prepared for an exploding car bomb or Molotov cocktail.
“¡Vamos, vamos, Argentina!” Two ragged kids sang a soccer chant, laughing as they pelted paper bang-snaps on the pavement.
“Hey,” Jonathan snatched one of the youngsters by his bicep. “Behave yourselves.” He thrust the kid toward a nearby Argentine military officer, but the boy fled, detonating his last fistful of poppers on the sidewalk with a sharp smatter of blasts.
Jonathan froze. In a flash, he was back in a rice field in Vietnam in the pouring rain, enemy fire crackling in the distance and seven miles of wet grass to go before his men—ridden with gangrene and dysentery—could pitch tents on anything resembling dry land.
He lifted one of his waterlogged boots and backpedaled, gaining his bearings a moment too late. He crashed into a woman on the street, who stumbled across the sidewalk and fell to the ground. Mortified, Jonathan approached her to help her up. She had a fully made-up face, fresh haircut, and a high-quality wool coat that reached her narrow ankles. The glint of a designer watch peeked out from its sleeve. She inspected the heel of her shoe, then swung her thick hair over her shoulder and looked up at him with chestnut-colored eyes that were narrowly set.
“¿Estás bien?” she asked.
“I’m the one who should be asking you that,” he replied in Spanish.
“I’m fine. It’s just my shoe.” She worked futilely to reposition the partially detached heel of her pump. “I won’t be able to walk on it now.”
“Where are you headed?”
“There.” She motioned toward a bistro with muted interior lighting at the edge of the plaza.
He offered his arm and she took it, leaning her weight on him as she hobbled toward the entrance of the restaurant.
“I’m Helena,” she said.
“Jonathan,” he replied as they entered the bistro. “I’m very sorry about that.”
“It’s fine.” She shimmied onto a barstool and looked around, her expression an open door.
“Are you waiting for someone?” he asked.
“Some of my friends. We’re meeting here for drinks.”
“I can stay until they arrive.”
Helena glanced at the ring on his left hand and slipped off her coat. “I suppose it’s the least you can do.”
Jonathan perched on the barstool next to her as she ordered a drink.
“You seem sad,” she said.
“Beg your pardon?” Her attention quenched something parched within him. An unexpected wave of self-pity crashed down. Before she could reply, a group of Argentine soldiers lumbered into the restaurant and sidled up to the bar next to them. To Jonathan’s surprise, Helena slid from her stool to greet them.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” she reprimanded the commanding officer, who looked to be in his midforties. “This nice yanqui kept me company while you all were out keeping the peace. Where’s Camila?”
“I’m right here.” A fashionable young woman in a fur coat trailed after the men, kissing Helena’s cheek as the bartender took a round of drink orders. “Who’s this handsome Americano?”
“The one who ruined my favorite pump?” said Helena. She introduced Jonathan to her friend, then to each of the other officers, and finally tipped her head to briefly rest it on the shoulder of the officers’ commander. “And this is my cousin, Ricardo.”
Ricardo shook Jonathan’s hand. “Mucho gusto.”
Jonathan suddenly didn’t want to leave. He wanted the warmth of the camaraderie he lacked with American colleagues from his own intelligence unit, most of whom had slowly left the country as Congress drew down foreign missions in the wake of Vietnam. He watched Helena now, who pruned the cellophane flags on the toothpick from her drink, twirling it between her fingers, and he wanted to be near her the way he’d once wanted to be near Vivian, before her depression had consumed her. Before she’d stopped touching him, before their marriage had become nothing more than an obsession with the absence of a child.
Ricardo sized Jonathan up, then glanced back and forth between him and Helena. He took the barstool beside Jonathan, clapped him on the back, and turned to the bartender. “A drink for her gringo friend.” Then, in perfect English, he said to Jonathan, “You look like you need one, amigo. What will you have?”
Jonathan thanked him and ordered a drink, reverting to Spanish. The other men’s glances were subtle, but they were paying close attention to their commander’s interactions. A somber dinner crowd began filing in, and the other officers scattered to find tables, leaving Jonathan and Ricardo alone with Helena and Camila. The women excused themselves to the restroom.
“So what are you doing here, then?” Ricardo asked, sipping the whiskey the bartender set down in front of him.
Jonathan wasn’t sure whether he meant in the bar or in Argentina, so he gave Ricardo a brief explanation of his assignment at the embassy: the paper-pushing he did with Fort Leavenworth to enroll Argentine service members into US military schools—mostly fixing the damn fax machine—and the security program he helped administer to ensure that the US assistance provided for Operation Condor was carried out defensibly.
“It’s a shame Perón left them all so ungovernable,” said Ricardo. “You must be counting down the days to get back home to your wife and kids.”
Jonathan rested the edge of the beer bottle on his lips and tipped it toward the ceiling. It was a solitary mission, but nowhere near as challenging as returning home to Vivian. Her spiraling grief over these past few years had inflicted him with the permanent burden of suppressing his own.
“You’re married, aren’t you?” asked Ricardo.
“Yes.” Jonathan looked down at the bar. “No kids yet, though. We’re—my wife and I are going to adopt.”
“How very benevolent of you.” Ricardo leaned in. Jonathan was relieved when Helena emerged from the restroom in one stocking foot.
“Camila’s his secretary,” said Helena, once she’d settled onto the barstool.
“It’s no business of mine,” Jonathan replied.
“Your Spanish is very good. Where did you learn?”
“In Texas. When I was kid.”
Sé bueno, his Oaxacan babysitter would warn him and his brother, Greg, when their parents were gone for weeks at a time on Baptist mission trips. Jonathan did try to be good. When he enlisted out of high school and left home for advanced infantry training and airborne school at Fort Bragg, he tried. All the months through special operations training, when he polished the Spanish he’d learned as a child, he tried. And the summer he met Vivian at the church fair, when he was a second lieutenant and she was a pretty girl from Virginia in a cotton blouse tied chastely around her torso, eager to do the things that shouldn’t be done outside of the sacrament of marriage, he tried.
He took a sip of his beer. Even now, still, he tried to be a good man, though he feared he’d never achieve it.
Once they’d finished their drinks, Ricardo gave Jonathan his card. He patted him on the back again with his left hand, offering his right. “Nice meeting you, soldier,” he said. “Come by and see me sometime soon. I’ll take you to lunch.”
Helena looked at Jonathan expectantly. He helped her with her coat in an odd gesture that fell somewhere between chivalry and charity. The fur collar brushed against her soft white neck as she slipped her arms through.
“See you soon, Captain,” said Helena.
* * *
The pebbled driveway crunched beneath the jeep’s tires as the vehicle slowed and came to a stop. Behind the wrought iron gate, a manicured lawn fringed the white columns of the prestigious Escuela—the Navy’s school of mechanics. Jonathan waited in the passenger seat as the boyish Argentine private got out from behind the wheel and approached an officer on the other side of the fence to open the gate. The private parked the jeep in the back of the building, escorted Jonathan inside, and waited as he signed the register. When Jonathan’s Argentine counterpart appeared, the man’s face brightened with recognition.
“Yanquis,” the tall officer chuckled, clapping Jonathan’s shoulder as they shook hands. It was Adolfo, one of Ricardo’s men—Helena had introduced them in the restaurant back when Jonathan first arrived. “Mucho gusto. What, are you making the rounds here? With a driver? Lucky you.” He glanced at the private, who’d been assigned to Jonathan through the defense attaché office. “Are you auditioning to be his personal assistant?”
The private reddened. Jonathan smirked.
“Good to see you, Lieutenant,” said Jonathan. “Just a couple of site visits today. A quick stop here first, then over to Olimpo this afternoon.”
“Then a pile of paperwork, I bet,” said Adolfo. “Come, sit. Have a quick coffee.”
He led Jonathan across the mosaic-tiled lobby to the officers’ lounge, leaving the private lingering in the entryway, and handed his FMK-3 to his aid. At a leather-top writing table with two guest chairs, Adolfo settled in across from Jonathan and hitched one ankle over the opposite knee. He ran his slim index finger across his forehead, sweeping aside hair that looked slightly overdue for a trim. He pulled a soft pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket and raised it, both an offering and a request for permission. Jonathan shook his head but gestured for him to proceed.
“How’s everything going here?” asked Jonathan.
Adolfo shrugged, lighting his cigarette. “What can I say? We’re doing what we can. Much more with the media now. That’s going well. And SIDE has had some nice successes.” The Secretaría de Inteligéncia del Estado, Argentina’s secret police, had been working with Chile and Uruguay to target socialist politicians, reporters, and other high-profile enemies throughout the southern cone. “But we’re still fighting off Marxists every day. Chasing terrorists into exile if we can’t catch them.”
A young woman set two espressos down in front of them. Adolfo dropped a sugar cube into his cup. Jonathan lifted his and took a sip.
A group of troops entered the building, filling the lobby with the sounds of their boots and loud banter. Adolfo straightened, peering at the soldiers as they headed up the stairway on the far side of the building.
“What’s upstairs?” asked Jonathan.
Adolfo settled back in his chair and took a drag. “La capucha. Our biggest holding cell.”
Once they’d finished their coffees, Adolfo stood up. “We’ve got some small munitions that need to be transported to the federal police building. I’m sure your assistant won’t mind helping.”
Jonathan shook his hand, thanked him, and said goodbye.
Outside, the private lifted four milk crates of leather restraints and batteries and loaded them into the back of the jeep. At their destination, an officer waited on the street to direct the jeep into the Olimpo garage, the federal police department’s automotive depot. As the private set down the crates on the concrete floor inside, Jonathan looked around at the parked military vehicles, inoperative tramcars, and pallets of auto-maintenance supplies. It was quiet, near empty. The officer escorted them up the ramp to the first floor, where a small metal table sat outside a series of closed doors.
“We have six guards assigned to two shifts, each with shift supervisors,” he said. “Space for twenty or thirty prisoners, maybe more. We just had a transfer, so the numbers are down.”
Jonathan’s eyes passed over the concrete wall of doors.
“We’ve seen the dregs, lately,” he went on. “Maybe that’s a good thing, I don’t know. We had one in here the other day—ERP, I think—and he was like this.” The officer sliced the side of his flattened hand across his own kneecaps. “No legs. I’m not even kidding you. Still out there trying to start a revolution.”
Jonathan waited out the anticipation of laughter.
“And another one—weapons smuggler, I think. We feed them well before they’re transferred. Less questions that way. They’re treated like royalty, considering they’re terrorists. They should get what they deserve. Instead they get us, the lucky bastards. Last week they had fig jam. It’s a blasted five-star hotel.”
Jonathan chuckled as the officer motioned toward the interrogation room. He took note of the picana electrica, standard voltage, and inspected a box of sodium pentothal vials.
The sky was turning pink when the private dropped Jonathan off near the embassy. From his residence, he called Ricardo’s office.
“Captain,” Camila sung through the receiver once Jonathan had introduced himself. “You’re lucky you caught us. He’s just getting ready to leave for the day. Helena told me about the new shoes you bought her. How was your dinner last week?”
Jonathan cleared his throat. “I’m just calling to make an appointment with Ricardo.”
“Well, then.” There was a flipping of pages. “He’s free next Tuesday after lunch.”
Jonathan rolled a ballpoint pen across a notepad on the nightstand. “Nothing sooner?”
“He’s headed out for the day now. If you don’t want to wait, why don’t you meet him at the bistro in twenty minutes?”
“That’s great. Thank you, Camila.” He hung up and put on his coat.
He made his way to the restaurant near the plaza on foot. Ricardo was already at the bar, seated in front of a full glass of whiskey. He greeted Jonathan, then motioned to the bartender to bring a second one. Jonathan didn’t object.
“How’s everything with you?” he asked once he’d settled on the stool beside Ricardo.
“Eh. Another day. We made some arrests across town.” Ricardo sighed. “A few of them resisted. It didn’t end well.”
The liquor was bitter on his tongue. “Sorry to hear it.”
They both sipped in silence for a few moments.
“I have a nephew,” Ricardo said finally. “Pedro. My brother’s kid. He’s interested in the exchange program at the Command and General Staff School in the States. He’s a good candidate. You handle those enrollments, no?”
Jonathan straightened on the stool, then turned his head and looked directly into Ricardo’s eyes. Suddenly they were teammates exchanging batons, assessing each other’s capacity to carry weight.
“I do,” said Jonathan.
Ricardo turned toward the colorful row of liquor bottles behind the bar. “He’s interested in advanced military studies. Command and leadership specifically. He wants to be a general someday.”
“Big ambitions.”
“I wonder, do you think that could happen for him?”
Jonathan took a second sip of whiskey. It tasted much better than the first. There were still vacancies to be filled in Fort Leavenworth and the nephew of a high-ranking officer seemed as promising an applicant as any for the international program.
“If he’s a good candidate,” Jonathan said truthfully, “then I don’t see why not.”
Ricardo nodded. “I appreciate that, Captain. It’s good to keep young people in this country on the right track. Half of them don’t understand the meaning of patriotism.”
“You’re not alone there. Back home we just pardoned a hundred thousand draft-evaders.”
Ricardo glanced over at Jonathan and lifted his glass. “Well, here’s to those of us who still show up to the fight.”
Jonathan clinked his whiskey glass against Ricardo’s.