A Certain Kind of Power

  A CERTAIN KIND OF POWER

  By Ryan Butta

  Copyright © 2019 Ryan Butta

  All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Time and events have been rearranged to suit the convenience of the story. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is coincidental. Many of the political scandals included in the book were reported at the time. Some were later proven to be true, others not.

  Cover design and ebook formatting by ebooklaunch.com

  This book is for Carolina, for believing in the absurd, the impossible, the ridiculous; in other words, me.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Acknowledgements

  “The Argentine feels that the universe is nothing but a manifestation of chance, the fortuitous concourse of Democritus’ atoms; philosophy does not interest him. Nor does ethics: the social realm, for him, is reduced to a conflict of individuals or classes or nations, in which everything is licit, save being ridiculed or defeated.”

  Jorge Luis Borges ‘Nota sobre (hacia) Bernard Shaw’,

  Otras Inquisiciones, 1952.

  CHAPTER 1

  Mike Costello looked skywards. The sun was a pale-yellow orb stamped on an uncorrupted blue. Below his feet the detritus of humanity that accumulated in the gutters swirled about him. Inside his sock, under the ball of his foot, Mike could feel the two folded twenty-peso notes that he had hidden there for insurance against robbery. The notes represented a cab ride home or at least to the nearest hospital.

  His body pulsed to the pounding of a bass drum that beat the air like an external heart. He could feel it deep inside his ears, a baseline to the swarming clamor that cascaded from the walls of the Fortress, an audio crush that mixed with the fevered chanting, police boot-steps and the thud and whir of a chopper that flew low overhead. And above it all the screams of street hawkers vying for the business of this alcohol-soaked, ragtag army.

  To Mike’s left, two policemen shoved a young man against a wall. The youth’s hands were clasped behind his ahead in submission. It didn’t save him from two practiced blows from a wooden truncheon to the back of his legs. He crumbled to a kneel. Mike turned away. It wasn’t his fight and he had his own legs to think about.

  Either side of him, groups of men swarmed the footpaths and spilled onto roads that had been closed to vehicle traffic. Some chanted songs, keeping time with fists punching the air. Others twirled shirts around their heads until they became a blur, bare torsos already glistening with sweat despite the low, winter temperatures.

  The smell of smoke and beer and cooking meats drew Mike to a makeshift stall where a man dressed in the dark crimson of the masses stood behind a collapsible table that looked like living up to its name at any second. Scarred hands cut rough slits into bread rolls before stuffing them with a chorizo sausage straight from the homemade charcoal grill. A splash of chimichurri sauce and the choripan was handed to a hungry customer in exchange for a few crumpled, notes. The money pocketed and the procedure repeated. A young child, perhaps the vendor’s son, stood behind the grill. A ripped square of cardboard served as a fan, which he used to coax a red glow from the coals with an artful beating of the air, one eye fixed on his father.

  “Cerveza?” Mike asked as he came to the head of the line. A gruff shake of the head the answer, the hands not stopping their assembly-line work. Mike needed a beer. If only to chase away the headache that had been building all day, demanding attention. He couldn’t even remember why he had opened the bottle last night, alone in his apartment, Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks for self-flagellating company. He took his food. A man with a home-inked tattoo that ran the length of his forearm shouldered past him.

  Mike rejoined the flow of humanity. At the barriers that led into the bowels of the Fortress a policeman stopped him with a raised hand. Mike spread his arms and legs, still holding his half-eaten choripan, and allowed himself to be patted down. He raised his shirt to show he wore no belt nor carried a knife or anything more lethal. The officer waved him through.

  Mike pushed the stub of his choripan into his mouth and shoved both hands deep into his pockets, clutching wallet in one hand and keys in the other, the only protection against the attention of pickpockets.

  A concrete tunnel carried the crowds into the stadium. Caged fluorescent lights threw a dull glow through the cobwebs and underground filth. The temperature felt a few degrees higher. And those few degrees were humid, heavy with human heat and sweat and swearing. The tunnel stank of beer, cigarettes, and the piss that snaked under his feet; yellow streams that flowed from beneath the shirtless, shiny backs either side of him as men relieved themselves. One shouted over his shoulder at his friends to go on ahead, another swore as he was shoved in the back.

  The stream of humanity shuffled along, and Mike emerged into the bright afternoon light. The vibrant green that carpeted the stadium greeted him and set in motion the familiar internal buzz of expectation, the tingle of skin, the reflexive opening and closing of his fists as if pumping the buzz throughout his body.

  Mike Costello had always been a football fan growing up in the States. Yes, he would concede there was more diving than a Jacques Cousteau Ocean Special, but football was in the Costello’s Sicilian genes. As a boy he had called it soccer, an attempt to assimilate with those classmates whose surnames didn’t end in O or weren’t prefixed with a Del or a Di. In Argentina he had slipped into the local lexicon and called it football ever since.

  He adopted Lanus as his team soon after arriving in Buenos Aires. The football club formed in January 1915. It appealed to Mike that while Europe tore itself apart on the battlefields of France, a world away the men of Lanus were gathering to form a sporting club.

  If Mike had been born in Argentina he was sure he would have been born in the graffitied, gritty, contrarian streets of Lanus. He felt an affinity for the working-class people of the southern suburb with graffitied walls topped with fragments of broken glass, glorious filthy dive bars, cracked asphalt streets decorated with burnt-out car shells, and a standing warning on walking alone after dark. He identified with those who lived and died within blocks of where they were born.

  In those first years in Argentina, Mike attended the Lanus home fixtures as often as he could, catching the number 37 bus from the city out to the Lanus station and making the march to the stadium. He rode the bus south from the city center, packed in shoulder to shoulder, often standing for the trip, alongside fellow supporters, his getaway at the end of the week. He didn’t
explain his little obsession to any of his friends or clients, who just looked at him puzzled when he turned down their offer of a weekend at the polo farm or when he made an informed remark about the southern suburb that most residents of Buenos Aires, the porteños, had heard of but never visited. Lanus felt like his little secret, a piece of Buenos Aires where he felt at home.

  Today was the last game of the season. The team had not had a good year. Week after week, Mike watched from different city bars as Lanus put in another woeful performance, cementing their position at the bottom of the league ladder. He had tired of hurling abuse at the screen, feeling the pitiful eyes of the waiters on him even as he overheard their whispered conversations, questioning each other as to who would be mad enough to follow Lanus. But today was unmissable. Lanus versus Banfield.

  The “Classic of the South”, as it was known, was an intense, heated, dangerous, violent rivalry fueled by hatred, alcohol and proximity (Banfield’s stadium was four short kilometers from the Fortress). For Lanus, victory today would still mean finishing last, but they would prevent Banfield, the league leader, from securing the title, for this weekend at least—a satisfaction almost as great as winning the league itself. A loss would mean watching Banfield celebrate their title at the Fortress.

  Crimson clad zealots pushed their way to lucky spots; anonymous places on the terraces from where historic victories had been watched, opponents humiliated. Mike shouldered his way to the end of the pitch and climbed the concrete terraces behind the goal. The organized fans, the hinchada, packed in here at every game. Lost in the anonymity of this crimson tumult, Mike had found identity.

  Mike jostled his way into the crowd, bobbing his head to the chants though not confident with either his voice or sense of rhythm to join the jumping mass. He turned and looked around the stadium, it was a heaving sea of crimson flags, flares, white smoke, arcing projectiles and thousands of bobbing heads as the fans jumped and sang in unison. Beneath his feet Mike could feel the concrete and steel of the stadium flex and tremble under the force of their fanaticism. This is what he had come for. The proximity to the zeal, to place himself at the center of this organized chaos and mayhem and absorb and savor it, to feel its current run, like low-voltage electricity, over the surface of his skin. That it could at any moment overflow into violence and destruction, as he had witnessed before, added to the addiction.

  In the middle of the terrace just a few rows back, Mike made out a large figure draped in a crimson cape that hung over a matching shirt and blue jeans. Dark-caramel skin and black hair, long, hanging down to the waist. Mike smiled at the sight of el Indio, the Indian, and leader of the Lanus hinchada.

  Indio appeared content, ready. By now the illegal tickets would have been sold, the counterfeit merchandise hawked at the traffic lights around the stadium, the threats to “win or else” delivered to both the players and coaching staff alike. The police had been paid off, both at the commanding level at the local station and a little extra for the guys on the ground at the stadium; the weapons and alcohol had been smuggled into the stadium; and Indio’s army of soldiers were positioned around the stadium, warmed with the drink and attuned to react to any command that Indio chose to give.

  The shrill of the referee’s whistle and the encouraging, enveloping roar of the home crowd that signaled the start of the game ripped Mike’s attention back to the field. Banfield’s first attacking probe ended with the ball straining against the back of the net in front of Mike, thanks to Banfield’s diminutive number 9. A ferocious strike from what, even to Mike, staring into the afternoon sun, was an outrageous offside position. Fifty thousand pairs of eyeballs lasered in on the linesman who stood still, his flag solemn and limp, hanging by his side. The goal stood.

  Silence pulsed around the stadium before a cacophony of whistles and abuse erupted; flares, shoes torn from sockless feet and other objects, rained down on the field. A few meters in front of Mike, fans scaled the mesh fencing that had been erected to keep them off the pitch. Those that couldn’t scale the fencing hooked their fingers through the mesh and leant back, faces raised to the skies, hands hauling against the mesh, complicating the efforts of those trying to go over the top.

  The man beside Mike flung his full coterie of local insults onto the pitch with a healthy portion of spittle for company. There were the usual insults about the pussy of the referee’s grandmother, mother, and sister.

  Mike stood detached from the mayhem around him, an isolated observer until a missile thrown from higher up in the terraces arced over his head, and a light shower of liquid rained from the beer cup and interrupted his enjoyment. He rubbed a thumb across the droplets of amber liquid that lay on his arm and raised it to his nose. He was pissed. On and off. He wiped his arm dry on his jeans.

  Play restarted, Lanus controlled the ball well and applied pressure to the Banfield defense. The attacking intent served to calm the crowd somewhat, until Banfield intercepted a sloppy pass and counterattacked in a crisp, neat transition that illustrated the difference in skill between the two teams. No amount of passion or bitter hatred would bridge that gap today.

  Banfield glided downfield and the Lanus goalkeeper rushed out and shut down the play, diving on the ball at the attacker’s feet before a shot could be loosed. The Banfield striker launched himself over the prone keeper in dramatic style, landed and completed three well-practiced rolls inside the 18-yard box before curling up into a writhing ball of agony and misery. The theatrics were greeted by a hysterical howl that lapped around the stadium. The referee, hair slicked back, shorts a little too high, ran towards the Lanus goal, whistle in mouth, his outstretched hand pointing to the penalty spot. The high-pitched whistles and jeers of derision transformed into a more sinister roar of battle as the referee’s decision registered.

  Mike looked at Indio who nodded his head. A discreet signal, that would not be picked up by the commercial-television cameras, that triggered a wave of young, drunk, angry, shirtless men storming to the perimeter fence, the first row already halfway up the mesh. Mike looked and wondered. What would happen if he joined the throng, screamed, let out the anger, frustration, and thwarted dreams that festered inside him? The thought passed, and he stood still and allowed the hinchada to rush by him.

  On the pitch the players had confronted the referee, hands flapping in the face of the unfortunate official. The offended players were so intent on remonstrating that they were unaware of their own rioting fans.

  The police that lined the sides of the pitch, dressed in full riot gear with Indio’s contribution to their pensions no doubt tucked deep in their back pockets, remained seated, riot shields laying unattended on the ground beside them.

  In front of Mike the first hooligan had cleared the perimeter fence and hit the ground running; a speeding, crimson arrow aimed at the heart of the Lanus players that had encircled the referee. The hooligan arrived with a drunken, flying karate kick that found its mark in the back of the number 8 who crumpled under the unexpected attack.

  The players turned on the fan and retaliated in defense of their team mate. As they did so, they at last registered the crimson tide of their own supporters bearing down on them. Prioritizing their own well-being over any thoughts of admirable defense of their colleague, the players fled in all directions like a ball of sardines that had discovered a yellowfin tuna in their midst.

  The quicker players were successful in reaching the safety of the players’ tunnel while the slower ones were cornered and herded into isolated groups and set upon by rabid balls of fans in a flurry of fists and feet. Mike watched clear-eyed as the hooligans stripped players of their uniforms. One player emerged dressed only in underwear and boots, blood streaming from his mouth and ears. He received a final kick to the ass, and more abuse as he was ejected from the ring of vengeance.

  The message was clear. These players were not fit to wear the colors. This wasn’t the consequence of today’s dismal showing. This was for the season of mediocrity that had
culminated in the humiliation of allowing Banfield to be crowned champions in the Fortress.

  Mike’s eyes scanned the stadium. At the opposite end of the pitch a small group of supporters, clad in the green and white of Banfield, jumped and chanted, flares firing off into the afternoon sky. He could feel their elation as a physical vibration through the air. On their flank a line of riot police held back a small group of Lanus supporters who were trying to get at the Banfield fans.

  Another group of crimson-clad thugs had broken into the members’ stand and were pulling at the plastics seats as if hauling a body from a burning vehicle. A chair came free, brandished skyward before being thrown down onto the field. No specific target, destruction the objective.

  Mike sat down on the concrete steps. He smelt of beer and cigarettes. And piss. Smoke from the flares stung his eyes. He now remembered why he had opened that bottle last night. Yesterday was his birthday. The tenth one since he had arrived in Argentina. He looked around at the scenes playing out before him. He slumped to his haunches and held his head. Life was short and getting shorter.

  CHAPTER 2

  On the sidewalk outside bar Danzon an old woman slumped against the wall, her bare feet and legs extending out in front of her. The minutely wrinkled skin of her face hung across sharp-edged cheekbones. Two eyes that looked like bullet holes in a paper target peered out. Filthy rags served as clothes, poor protection from the Arctic winds blowing from the south. Her bony hand extended in a silent plea. A small bowl waited by her cracked heels with a few coins.

  Mike stopped, reached for his wallet and pulled out a five-peso note. He dropped the money into the bowl and looked at the woman. She pounced on it with alarming speed and smuggled it away inside her rags. He could smell the neglect that hung tight to her unwashed body.

  “Don’t waste it on food,” he said. “Go and get yourself a drink or something stronger.” Charity with strings was no charity at all.