A Certain Kind of Power Page 19

  “I meant I could wait six months, twelve maximum.”

  “Argentina moves in cycles; you need to work the cycle. What I said is do nothing in this cycle, you may get a better government in the next cycle. I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear on that.”

  “What about your famous fucking flush rate?”

  “That was never about a change of government, Simon. It was just a joke about how quickly the government was destroying the country.”

  The sentence hung over the table. Mike watched as Quinn tried to calm himself down. The meeting had begun to rot like the bags on Corrientes. He attempted to save it.

  “Your plan is good, Simon. Play it long. All I am saying is that at this very moment, be careful. It may be wise to cede some ground, start a small piece of work, drip some money through, just until things cool down a bit.”

  “And then in four years I can get my teeth into things? Is that what you’re saying?” said Quinn, the sarcasm bouncing around the room.

  Mike ignored the emotion. “You need to get past that. The strategy is the right one. You just need to tweak it. Be patient.”

  Quinn stood up, his chair teetering backwards then hitting the floor. He made no attempt to pick it up. He grabbed his folder and walked out of Café Orleans.

  Mike stayed sitting at his table. By any measure it had not gone well. But that was to be expected when he was tasked with the impossible. He started flipping through his mental files, searching for a client that he had advised to any kind of successful conclusion. There were only two categories; those that paid their way through and got results, and those that took the moral high ground and found that apart from the elevated view there was very little else in its favor.

  Mike had had enough. Quinn was an idiot, but he could make his own bad decisions. Fuck him. Alex wouldn’t be happy but fuck him too. He hadn’t come through on his end of the bargain either. Mike didn’t owe him anything. It was already November. Six months had passed since Mike decided to get out and he was no closer to Sicily. Fuck Simon Quinn. Fuck Alex Harper. Fuck Tomas fucking- Finklestein.

  He took a sip from his americano. A scraping of chairs on the floor drew his attention. He watched the man in the grey suit who had come in earlier move to the door, holding it open for his female companions. As the ladies left Café Orleans, Mike reflected on the similarities between their immediate future and his own. At least they’d got a free coffee. He consoled himself by imagining that their names were Fortune and Destiny.

  CHAPTER 25

  On Sunday Mike Costello made his way north to keep an appointment. Alex Harper had phoned the previous evening to invite him to morning drinks at the beach. He had good news. Big news he had said. It could only be about Mike’s apartment. The promise of good, big news was enough to convince Mike to brave the slow crawl of traffic up Libertador, one more in the exodus of people looking to escape the weekend’s forecast heat.

  At Palermo, opposite the Hippodrome, an ambulance, lights flashing, sirens wailing, forced his taxi to the side of the road. The driver allowed the ambulance to pass by. Then, like any driver deserving of the name, the cabbie pulled into the slip stream of the ambulance and hitched a ride through the morning traffic, a remora attached to a flashing, wailing hammerhead. Two motorcycles, in the style of presidential outriders, then attached themselves to Mike’s cab, forming a procession of opportunists whose path opened along the length of Libertador. When the chaos, recklessness, and complete disregard for good manners of his adopted city worked in his favor, Mike Costello was at his happiest.

  By the time he reached the suburb of Accassuso the cab had dropped off the back of the ambulance and the outriders had departed.

  It had been too long since he had come north, not since he had cut relations with the Doctor, an episode that still caused a diminutive burr of unknown portent to form inside him. He made a mental note to return soon.

  The cab found its turn off Libertador and moved through the residential area of Accassuso. Large gated houses populated by successful families whose children were more likely to play rugby and hockey than football. He was sure he would not find any Lanus fans this far north. Here expatriate embassy staff were housed so they could enjoy the sugar of Latin America. The local staff were left in the salt further south.

  Mike’s ride ended at Peru Beach. He had never tracked down the origin of the name, another of his investigative failings. For a city that had turned its back on the ocean, Peru Beach served as the substitute. If you sat at one of the many outside bars that populated the strip, on a raised wooden deck, protected from the sun by a plastic Coca-Cola-branded parasol, with the water at your back, you could almost forget that you were on the River Plate, and across those muddy, silted waters, only made visible by squinting, and only then on a clear day, sat Uruguay, a country blessed with golden beaches.

  Brazilian music pulsed out of speakers that had been stacked up outside the bars. Every few meters a different set of speakers and a different song. The result was confused noise with a samba beat.

  A decent crowd was already in at this early hour. They were a young crowd who came to kitesurf or to loll around in the sun. Black wetsuits were stripped back to well-toned waists, the intended impression being that they had just emerged from or were about to go for a surf. It left them looking like half-peeled, overripe bananas.

  If he had the time to stop and observe them for long enough Mike was confident he would find that they never did much else but drink and discuss their exploits, most likely invented. The behavior justified by the pretty young girls that sat around these itinerant kitesurfers, hanging on their every word. It served to remind Mike why he no longer came here. Peru Beach was a young man’s game.

  He found Alex Harper slouched at a red plastic table, a scrabble of names etched into the surface. A parasol offered some protection from the elements, though Alex had chosen to sit outside its sphere of protection, attempting to grill some color onto his body.

  Alex was nowhere near done. Bare-chested, his lily-white torso exposed to the South American sun, Alex wore only a pair of sunglasses, his mistresses, judging by the wide plastic frames and the red-and-white color. A wide-brimmed hat that would be more at home in the Australian outback completed the unusual look. A shady man in a sunny place thought Mike, rehashing a favorite phrase of a Texan client who had neither the IQ nor the library to have credited the author.

  By Alex’s side in much more sensible, middle-American style, Mike was surprised to see Greg Stelton.

  Alex’s first public appearance in Buenos Aires was the US embassy ball and the incident had become diplomatic folklore. Whether due to the free-flowing liquor, the fresh pampas air after the clog and grime of London, or just the freedom of escaping a wife and children, Alex Harper had been in good spirits. It was well into the evening, but still early enough so that even the visa-section staff had not yet left. A statuesque woman, whose sequined dress clung to her body in a failing attempt to cover the results of long hours under the elective-surgeon’s knife, made a tottering entrance in to the ball, balancing on heels that reached heights that her surgeon had not. In her hand, she clutched a bag so tiny that it could only have held her self-esteem. Alex had watched her remarkable entrance from across the room and for reasons that were never made clear, announced in a let’s-get-ready-to-rumble-kind of voice, “The stripper’s here!”. Though her face had lost all ability for the expression of emotion, it was reported that a single teardrop of humiliation had formed, one that Greg Stelton dried as he rushed to comfort his wife.

  Only some quick and contrite talking from Alex the next morning, in front of a hungover ambassador, had saved him from the ignominy of the shortest posting in Foreign Office history. That Stelton was an oily, as those in the oil and gas industry were known, and a yank to boot, no doubt helped.

  Mike greeted both men and sat himself down. He looked around the nearby tables, confirming his suspicion that only if he had come ten years ago could he have sai
d that he was old enough to be the father of most of the other drinkers. He was now well into grandfather territory. He ordered a beer from a passing waiter who lurched off to fetch it.

  “Glad you could make it, Mike. Greg you already know, I presume?”

  For a diplomat Alex had an awful memory, or at least pretended to.

  “Greg, good to see you again. How are things?” The two men shook hands.

  “Things are good, Mike,” said Greg in that enthusiastic way that one American greets another outside of the States, not wanting, for an instant, to let the other think that his expat experience is superior. “Been back in town for a few days and head south again tonight. Thought I’d do a bit of kitesurfing on my last day.”

  Mike noted to himself that Stelton had neither the equipment nor the physique.

  “The reason I have dragged you all the way up here, Mike, is that this is my farewell. I’m off,” said Alex, with a finality that hinted at some relief. Then with a smile, “As they say, it has all gone to shit.”

  Mike wondered how this related to the big news but didn’t press for confirmation. “The girlfriend?” guessed Mike, confident that whatever Alex had told him had already been shared with Stelton.

  “Ex-girlfriend,” corrected Alex. “Last week she came to me, beaming she was, great news, Alex! I’m pregnant! The little bitch.”

  “Did you share your medical history with her?”

  “Of course not. If she knew I’d been lying to her she would have had my balls. My lie preceded hers so I could say nothing. We celebrated in fact, had a wonderful night. The next morning, I spoke with the Ambo, came clean, and asked to be reassigned. The Foreign Office is a bit like the Catholic Church in that respect. They don’t mind what you do, if you confess. They don’t like being caught unawares; not good for business. After I explained my situation and assured him that there was no way the child was mine, the Ambo agreed that it would be best if I made a discreet exit.”

  “When do you leave?” asked Mike.

  “Tomorrow morning.”

  “Back to London?”

  Alex leant forward, a sucking, liquid sound audible as he unstuck his back from the plastic chair. “No. I’m afraid not. Wouldn’t be welcome there.”

  “Wife?” asked Mike, guessing again.

  “Ex-wife.”

  “So you told her?”

  “Do we ever need to, Mike? They sense these things. I can see you’ve never married.” A comment that perhaps wasn’t meant to hurt but found a mark anyway. “If you need me, I’ll be in Iraq.”

  “Iraq?” asked Mike, finding it hard to believe, despite his lack of experience, that any matrimonial danger could justify the move.

  “I’ll be safe out there. Compound life. Nothing gets in, nothing gets out.”

  Mike wasn’t sure if Alex was referring to his wife or Al Qaeda. He had always seemed to have an irrational fear of his wife.

  Greg Stelton who had sat half-listening, eyes fixed on the river, got to his feet and shook off the morning’s drinking. He raised his wrist to within inches of his face to look at his watch. “Right, that’s me. Class time. You guys going to hang around?” He looked at Alex, who made no signs of moving. “Of course. Wish me luck.”

  No one did and he moved off towards the waterfront where young instructors with bodies that looked nothing like Greg Stelton’s readied enormous kites and strapped frightened-looking people into harnesses, ready to be flung into the River Plate.

  “You’ve seen the papers this morning,” Alex stated as fact.

  Mike had seen the papers. He had also heard the news on the radio on the drive up. The Ministry of Planning had been doing the press rounds, defending their decision to suspend MinEx’s project for an indefinite period of time. He’d told Simon that he should have started some work. On hearing the news Mike had felt the satisfaction of being due an “I told you so.”

  “I spoke with Simon, yesterday afternoon. He’d just come back from Planning.”

  “Anything else to add?”

  Mike considered the question. Unsure how much Alex knew, unsure how much to tell him.

  “The official line is what you’ve seen in the papers. MinEx have technically failed to employ any locals so they are in breach of their contract. There is a requirement for seventy-five percent of the workforce to be Cordobes.

  “Planning’s view is that as work hasn’t begun and nobody is getting paid then nobody is employed. Worse still, the Ministry of Work is now taking an interest and has ordered MinEx into a forced conciliation process with the Ministry of Planning.”

  “What does that entail?” asked Alex, his disdain for detail evident in his voice.

  Mike tried anyway. “Forced conciliation is an instrument used to solve industrial disputes. It’s a bit of a misnomer. The conciliation itself isn’t enforced, the payment of wages to the affected workers is. And for the duration of the dispute. You can imagine how it plays out. Courts are underfunded, understaffed, and the judges prefer a blind eye to blind justice. Disputes can run for years.”

  Alex nodded and smiled his thin, watery smile. “I’m none the wiser.”

  No, but you are better informed, thought Mike.

  Alex proffered his own summary. “The Planning Ministry has suspended the project because MinEx stopped work on the project. And they’re getting paid for doing it.” He laughed at the absurdity of it.

  “To be fair, the project was never stopped, Alex. It was going through due process.”

  “A game, Mike. It’s all just a game. And I warn you that you are playing against the masters.” Alex looked out over the River Plate. A small rivulet of sweat made its way down his chest. Red creases scored his stomach and folds of loose skin were beginning to turn a newborn pink.

  “I’m going to miss these bastards, Mike. We should be thankful that they do spend all their time at the psychologists trying to work out if they’re Italians or French or British; that their vision is always inward, fixed on the pampas and not on foreign shores. For if it wasn’t so, believe me, they’d create like the Italians, philosophize like the French, and pillage like the English. They’d be the end of us all.”

  He turned his attention back to Mike. “What has Quinn had to say about all this?”

  Incandescent with rage, was the phrase that Mike considered using. When he opened his mouth, a more reserved “perturbed” escaped. It sounded ridiculous even to him.

  “Perturbed? I didn’t think anyone got perturbed any more. I can imagine he was fucking furious.” A sharp inward suck of breath caught the laugh that followed his words. “Though he shouldn’t be, what did he expect? I told you before. I don’t know how they pick these people. No fucking idea at all. They get down here, cock it all up, and then get sent home.”

  Mike chose not to point out the similarities with the speaker’s own situation.

  Alex looked back out over the water. Mike followed his gaze to where a Greg Stelton-shaped figure struggled against a giant kite, suffering the indignity of being lifted and dumped into the River Plate, like an oversized and reluctant teabag.

  “Have you spoken to Planning?” asked Mike.

  “I’m in contact with them on a few issues. During those conversations, they did raise their concerns about MinEx’s behavior.”

  “There’s nothing you can do, from your side? I think I have done about all I can.”

  “Believe me, that MinEx are even still here is testament to the fact that I have done all I can do.” The kind of statement that diplomats threw out, grandiose, self-important, impossible to verify, and pointless to dispute.

  “What about your guys in Trade? Don’t they have someone here in the embassy?” Mike recalled meeting someone a few years back whose face and name had managed to erase itself. A forgettable figure lost among the bland faces of the diplomatic cocktail circuit.

  Alex let out a laugh of disdain, the contempt of one public service for another. “If I thought it would have done any good I would have
introduced Quinn to the esteemed trade commissioner a long time ago and let him deal with it.”

  “No good?” asked Mike.

  “Never have I met a man who knew so little about so much,” Alex said in his usual charitable way. “The kind of man who expects to find a conundrum in the percussion section.”

  “What would you do if you were in Simon’s position?”

  Alex leant forward, ever the diplomat, eager to give his opinion oblivious to the disinterestedness of his audience. Mike couldn’t give a fuck about Simon Quinn or MinEx. But he was quite happy to lead Harper further away from the fact that Mike was no longer willing to be their chaperone, wiping their ass every time they shit themselves.

  Alex took off his glasses and used the heel of his hand to rub away the rings of sweat that had formed around his eyes.

  “I would have found a better country in which to dig a hole.”

  Mike conceded it was a fair point. But that was not Simon’s decision to make.

  “And I would not have taken a hundred and fifty million off a government that is desperate for money.”

  “That’s what I don’t understand,” said Mike, giving voice to a misgiving that had been circling his mind, increasing in volume with each circuit. “Why is the government so keen to get their hands on this money? What do they need it for?”

  Alex laughed. “That’s what I like about you, Mike. You’ve made your home around the edges, dipping in and out but never diving in. I respect that. You know where to draw the line. Of course, it means that you never see the big picture. But I envy you that. Who would want to see the big picture? The big picture is just a stinking, rotten carcass that you can never unsee.”

  Mike sat and filled his eyes with the river. He had been coming to the same conclusion himself. But Alex was wrong to think there was anything enviable in this. Mike was tired of being peripheral to events, to seeing movements from the corner of his eye, to be dealing with shadows, to having the shit beaten out of him and no clue by who or why. That was the real reason he was leaving. He drew a long breath and pursued his original line of questioning.