A Certain Kind of Power Read online

  He took the steps up to the bar and he considered the journey that leads to this state of abandonment. At what point does it become too late to turn around?

  “Rusty nail,” said Mike, straddling a stool. “Lots of ice.” He watched as the bartender reached for the Drambuie on the shelf. Johnny Cash strummed the opening bars of “Personal Jesus” over the sound system. It gave the bar a gravitas it didn’t deserve.

  “Any particular whiskey, sir?” the bartender asked Mike over his shoulder.

  “Your cheapest,” said Mike. “If I wanted expensive whiskey I wouldn’t be mixing it.”

  He had returned from the game in a foul mood that had improved to a small degree once out of earshot of the stadium. He had ridden the taxi back to the city in silence. As he crossed the divide from southern Buenos Aires to central Buenos Aires he had let his mind wander to the Limay River, the ice-melt flow that wound its way around Bariloche far from Buenos Aires. He had fished it once, small dry flies floated down the riffling waters, the rhythm of the cast inducing a meditative state. He went back there often, in his mind, when the city became too much. Today it made no difference. His troubles were too deep to be washed away by the clear waters of the Limay.

  If he hadn’t already arranged to meet Alex Harper he would have been happy to sit at home with Dylan and another bottle and finish what he started last night.

  He looked at his watch. Harper was late. No surprise, but still annoying. The bartender placed his drink on a napkin in front of him. Cash was asking him to take second best. What else was there to take?

  Alex Harper worked at the British embassy. His cheap business card, one corner bent over from being stuffed in a wallet, standard diplomatic issue, said “Second Secretary”. Mike had been around enough embassies to know that second secretaries were never second secretaries.

  He had befriended Harper’s predecessor, another secretary, second or third he couldn’t remember, and the friendship had transferred to Harper without interruption. As second secretary, Harper had responsibility, among other things, for keeping an eye on the Argentine political scene. Any British company new to Argentina would seek out Alex Harper for his insights and opinions. Harper would give them the briefest of overviews and then suggest they speak with Mike. It was then up to Mike to turn the lead into a client.

  Harper never asked for money in return. His currency was information and Mike would honor the deal by answering Harper’s questions as best he could or providing his new clients with advice that may have been more in the interests of Her Majesty than their shareholders’. Mike always discharged his debt. Harper wasn’t a man that Mike wanted to owe anything to. The arrangement worked well, even if it meant frequent meetings with Alex Harper.

  Mike’s workload was light most weeks and he was grateful for any clients that Harper pushed his way. His was not a business that could be advertised. It was word of mouth, long lunches, and discreet referrals. No matter the professional standards he reached, clients were hesitant to recommend him to family and friends. He assumed proctologists faced the same business-development struggles.

  Mike heard Alex Harper before he saw him. It was still early in the evening and the bar was empty; no need to swivel on the stool to place a name to the heavy, careless footsteps that ascended the stairs behind him.

  “What the fuck are you drinking?” Alex said in way of greeting.

  “Rusty nail. Want one?”

  “No, I do fucking not.”

  Alex ordered a beer. “How was the game?” An audible intake of breath followed the question, as if he was trying to suck the words back into his mouth or maybe suppress a hiccup. It was a habit he had, a sentence followed by a sharp breath, sometimes mid-sentence. It gave the impression that he was breaststroking through his sentences, emerging for a gulp of air. Whatever its genesis, Mike found it annoying.

  “Next question,” ordered Mike.

  The two men drank in silence as the bar started to fill. Mike could feel Alex’s eyes on him as he drank—those heavy eyes that stared out from under drooping eyelids, giving Alex the appearance of permanent drowsiness. He always seemed to be looking up as if using his pupils to keep the eyelids open.

  A young couple came in and sat at the end of the bar.

  “First date,” said Mike, observing the attentive posturing of the young man.

  “What’s your story?” Alex asked, catching Mike off guard. He hadn’t come for this.

  “My story? What do you mean? What’s anyone’s story?”

  “Wife? Family? You’ve never mentioned anything, but I presume there must have been something once. Man can’t get as bitter as you without some help.”

  Mike took a deep breath. He felt about two whiskies short of being able to go into that. He never spoke about it, if one didn’t count the internal conversations that formed the background chatter of his bad days. He liked that about socializing with diplomats, it was rare that talk strayed from themselves.

  “No one. Just me.”

  “Never any one?” Alex insisted.

  “Years ago,” he said.

  “Aha. Now we’re getting somewhere. And?” coaxed Alex in that way he did that made you open up even as you tried to hold it all back.

  “Emily Parisi,” Mike relented. “Met at college. Talked about marrying, starting a family. Her family was from Sicily. Promised I’d take her there on our honeymoon. Sicily,” he said, shaking his head. He missed Sicily. Which was odd as he had never been there. “She was one of five. Three sisters and a brother. Wanted a big family. The Italian way. But I was like any young guy. Restless, wanted to see the world first. Thought she’d always be there.”

  Harper sat staring ahead and allowed Mike to fill the silence between them. “I enrolled in the Peace Corps and got sent down to Peru. First night down there I thought, what have I done? I missed her so much. I decided that as soon as I’d finished my tour I’d go home and marry her. I started looking at arrangements to get to Sicily. To surprise her.

  “A month later, I got a phone call from her father. Said she had been killed in a traffic accident.” He raised his glass to his mouth, burying his head in the alcohol fumes. When he emerged he was in control again. “A “Traffic accident,’ he said. That always stuck with me. Not a car accident or bus accident. A “Traffic accident’ as if it were nothing more than a traffic jam or a traffic light. Oh, Emily.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Alex as he raised his glass to his mouth.

  What else could he say? Mike had been hearing apologies from the innocent for the last thirty years. He’d learned to forgive them for what they were. Fillers of a void that couldn’t be filled. Not by anything meaningful.

  He continued, more for himself now than his listener. “I thought about going home, but didn’t. Couldn’t face the funeral. Never forgiven myself for that. She deserved that I be there. I had abandoned her in life and I repeated the favor in death.” He swished the ice in his glass, drained it and pointed to the bottle of Glenlivet. The bartender poured a double, neat.

  “Never anyone else?” asked Alex.

  Mike shook his head. “No-one that didn’t come with a receipt. You think you’ll fall in love again, there’s always that expectation, this sense that we deserve to be loved. There’s someone for everyone. That’s the key, the some ‘one’, not plural, one.

  “You know who that one is. It’s that girl you think of at 3 a.m. when you’ve come home steaming drunk. You’re lying on your back, boots still on, focusing with everything you’ve got on that one bare light bulb, a wall unit doing its best to fight the night heat and you convincing yourself that if you can focus on that bulb, anchor yourself to that glow, you can stop the whole room from swirling. All you want to do is hear that girl, talk to her. She’s the one, Alex.

  “And every night you come home drunk, there she is. So you start drinking less until you start thinking about her in the daytime too and then you start drinking more.” It was no kind of answer, but it was what
he wanted to say.

  “You know it’s not the room that swirls? It’s the bed,” Alex said.

  Mike ignored the observation.

  “How did you end up down here?”

  “I finished my tour to Peru and went home. Looked for work. Did enough odd jobs to break even. Try explaining a year in South America to a recruiter. Everyone thought I’d been running drugs. Jorge Luis Borges, José Martí, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Benedetti, Chico Buarque, Caetano Veloso, Andrés Caicedo, Julio Cortázar, Víctor Jara. It’s as if they’d never picked up a pen. A century of cultural genius relegated to oblivion by one bloke with a porn-star moustache and a fleet of Cessnas.”

  The list of names made no impression on Alex’s face. He nodded out of the habit of the professional listener.

  Mike continued his story. “I joined the army. Did that for a few years. Marching around at 6 a.m. and showering with a bunch of guys was never my thing. Then a position came up at our embassy in Peru. Liaising with local military, encouraging cooperation, curbing the excesses. Did some work with your guys there.”

  He noticed his drink was empty again. He called for another.

  “I did that for a while. Hated every day of it. No one grows up wanting to work for government. All this talk about serving your country. They’d be serving drinks if they weren’t serving their country.” He paused to receive his whiskey. “After I left I did a bit of work up in Colombia, spent some time in Brazil.”

  Mike stared at the reflection of himself in the mirror behind the bar. “I always felt that I would do something great in life. Does everyone feel that? Probably,” he answered himself.

  “Life is what you make it, Mike.”

  Mike looked at him without turning his head. “In my experience life is a ménage a trois with fortune and destiny, Alex. And they’re both wearing strap-ons.”

  “I never felt that,” said Alex. “But I never sat around to wait for them to come knocking. There are two types of people, Mike. Those that let the world change them and those that change the world. Passion. That’s all you need.”

  Mike let out a sigh that covered the bar. “We’ve all got passion and talent,” he said. “Unfortunately, the two never coincide. What we are passionate about we have no talent for and no passion for what we are talented at.” The words came out as a recrimination. He had intended it as an observation.

  “What brought you here? Your passion or your talent?”

  “Neither. I found I had a value here. Had the language skills and I understood how things worked. People valued that. The same people that had excluded me in the US, or had treated me like shit at the embassy, here they needed me.

  “I could operate at the margins, I could contribute. I enjoyed that feeling of being needed. Never mind that I had to come to the end of the world to find it. No one cared where I’d studied or what family name I dragged around behind me. Amid this chaos people were looking for a face they could trust, an English-speaker, a guide who could make sense of the ridiculous. And that is what I offer, that’s what’s on the label. To know more, to understand more. It’s neither a passion nor a talent, it’s just a way of surviving.”

  “And it had to be here?”

  “Argentina’s always been a good place to hide. When you lose all notions of democracy, decency, civility, and humanity then the scraps that do survive become precious. Those scraps have a value far beyond the whole that is found elsewhere. Argentines understand that. They have an appreciation for life that we can never have. They see things in a way that I will never see. I thought I could learn to fit in here, to see life as they see it, but it’s impossible. I’ve had enough of not fitting in, Alex.”

  “So, you’re going home?” said Alex, as if they had arrived at the whole point of the night.

  Mike shrugged. “I don’t even know what home means anymore. Last time I went home they were serving salads at McDonald’s.” He shook his head at the memory. “May as well go to a whorehouse for a hug.”

  He often thought about going home, back to the States. It wasn’t the leaving that scared him, it was the arriving. Arriving back with nothing to show for it. Years spent away and for what? Columbus returned home with the New World in his pocket. Mike had a bag of stories and a few dubious friends.

  He filled his mouth with whiskey and swallowed. “There’s a thin piece of thread that keeps you tied to home, Alex. You stay away long enough and one day it just snaps. There’s no going back. Home no longer means anything when that thread snaps. No, I’m not going home. I’m going to Sicily.” The words came out unplanned, a surprise to even himself. As individual words they had been floating around in his head all afternoon. Now in the fog of whiskey had they arranged themselves into a sentence that seemed logical. “Do what I should have done years ago. Start again.”

  “What’s the difference between Sicily or the States? You’re still leaving with nothing. You’re quitting.”

  “I’m not quitting. I’m starting again. There’s a difference.”

  “The thought of starting again fills me with horror.”

  “I’ll do it right this time. I know everything there is to know about starting again.”

  “When?”

  “Soon as I sell my apartment. With that I’ll have enough money to set myself up.”

  Alex had started smiling the way he always did right before he offered something that would benefit Alex Harper. “Before you rush off and leave us, are you free Wednesday night? We’re having a little fiesta at the embassy. I have a client for you.”

  “I’m not interested in clients, Alex. I told you, soon as I sell my apartment I’m out of here.”

  “Come along anyway, it can serve as your leaving party.”

  Mike stood, braced himself with one hand on his stool, drained his glass and placed it on the bar. “In that case, I’ll see you Wednesday, Alex.”

  CHAPTER 3

  The female officer handed Mike a small plastic tray. She wore an orange vest over a dark uniform; badges and insignia decorated the sleeves; a stiff peaked cap sat askew on her head. Her uniform blurred the lines between private security and police. At the officer’s request, Mike produced his wallet, the keys to his apartment, and his phone and placed them in the tray. A male officer on the other side of the full-body scanner waved him through. The machine made no complaint despite the loose coins in the pocket of his trousers and his metal belt buckle. He wondered if it functioned.

  The male officer blocked his way, spreading his arms wide and signaled that Mike should do the same. He obliged, and the officer made a series of quick, vertical sweeping motions with a hand-held metal detector. A disappointed grunt signaled that the inspection was over. Mike collected his wallet and keys. His phone had been sequestered by the female officer who had locked it in a small safe in the wall. In exchange she handed Mike a number scribbled on a scrap of paper.

  “Which way through to the cocktail reception?”

  Both officers glanced at him, ignored the question and continued the conversation that Mike’s arrival had interrupted.

  He climbed the stairs passing a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II. At the top of the stairs he turned right and entered a long hall with several rooms branching off on either side. Led by the trill of conversation, in Spanish or English he could not tell, he entered the second door on the right.

  Once inside, the room opened into a large reception area. Well-dressed guests—smart business the invite had stipulated—milled around, broken out into small groups of four or five, conversational cells dividing and reforming around topics of mutual or no interest.

  The space seemed too large for the gathering or maybe he was early and it would fill. Wait staff, flitted from group to group, white-gloved hands aloft, balancing platters of food and trays of glasses filled with red wine or whiskey. A waiter passed within range and Mike snared a red. Typical embassy do, no beer.

  He looked around the room, hoping not to recognize any of t
he guests. He studied the high, carved wooden ceiling and the crystal chandeliers that hung low over the room, more interested in the architecture than conversation.

  In the corner in and around some potted palms a three-piece jazz band played quietly. The melody seemed familiar, but Mike couldn’t make out the words, or even the language coming from the singer. It might have been “Fever”.

  A voice from across the room reached him.

  Alex Harper broke away from his group and crossed the floor to where Mike stood. “Glad you could make it, Mike.”

  Mike smiled in a way that showed that he wasn’t as glad. “What are we celebrating, by the way? In case anybody asks me.”

  “Thirty-five years since we sunk the Belgrano.” He held up a hand in mock defense. “Just joking, of course. We have the mayor of the City of London with us. This is for him.”

  “And my leaving party.”

  “Yes, that too. But first there is someone I need you to meet.”

  “I am not interested in meeting any clients, Alex, or hearing any stories. I am here for the booze.”

  “Come on just a quick chat, he’s a good guy. You’ll like him.”

  “I hope not.”

  “And don’t be so morbid, remember it’s a party. Maybe tone down your views on Argentina. I don’t want to scare him off.”

  Alex led the way across the room acknowledging individuals in each group, moving with the confidence of a host that didn’t have to pay the bill or clean up afterwards.

  They approached a man standing alone in the corner. He had his back turned, hands in his pockets, staring out the bay windows. His suit was a little too big for his shoulders, a man who chose on color rather than fit. His shoes were polished to a sparkling black. His physique was unremarkable, though he possessed an air of fitness, no doubt from 5 a.m. bike rides in hotel gyms. Short hair, styled for ease of care rather than aesthetics. The man spun around to face Mike and Alex as they approached.

  “I wanted to introduce you to someone, Simon. This is the infamous Michael Costello.”