A Certain Kind of Power Read online

  The tea room at the Alvear Hotel began to fill with the aged and infirm of Recoleta. The grey-haired women wore light dresses that hung down over their crepe-paper-thin, sun-blotched skin, with wrists and fingers encrusted by an excess of jewelry that appeared so heavy as to pin their arms to their sides. If not accompanied by women cut from the same expensive cloth, they were led by the arm by slow-moving gentlemen, grey hair swept back and held in place by gel, decked out in three-piece suits. Gentlemen who time had converted into mere human Zimmer frames for the use of their sprightlier better halves.

  The polished parquet flooring reflected the light from the chandeliers above them. Noises came from the kitchen. Mike sat at a table near the back of the tea room, cutlery and plates for two people set out before him. He glanced at the book that sat on the chair beside him and then to the doorway. Still not too late to get up and walk out. He looked at the book again. He could walk out now but if he did he would never have anywhere to go.

  He had not been seated long before the Doctor walked in, smoothing his hair down as if in apology for interrupting the gossip of the waiters who stood huddled by the buffet table. He sat down opposite Mike.

  “A bit fancy for you, Mike,” he said, arching his neck to take in the chandelier above him.

  “I haven’t been here for quite a while. I always thought it belonged to the Porteños that thought they were living in Paris. Last time I was here was a job for Lady Safra. I spent a week camped out on the ninth floor. I was never quite sure of the purpose of my detail, whether it was to keep her safe or make sure that she was unaware of the prostitutes that her male relatives were ferrying in and out at all hours of the day. A fantastic tipper though, either way.”

  “Can I get you another?” The Doctor asked, pointing at Mike’s coffee.

  “I’m OK.”

  The Doctor looked around for the waiters who had disappeared into the kitchen.

  “Nice obituary, really nice,” he said. “I got a sense of who Simon was.”

  Mike tilted his head to the side. The Doctor was being sincere.

  “That’s about all we can hope for, isn’t it? A nice obituary. That we’ve left enough of a mark on someone that they would take the time to put pen to paper. And though they could fill books with why we were the worst piece of shit they’ve ever come across, they ignore that and distil us to the best bits. Like watching the goals on the news at night without having to sit through the whole match.”

  Mike hoped the Doctor was wrong. He feared he wasn’t.

  “How are we now?”

  “I spoke with Donald Duck. The Planning Minister won’t last the week. They’re saying the whole government may come down. Donald’s confident that this won’t go any further for us. Poor old Decoud has now lost political relevance, there’ll be no more resources wasted on his death. A new government will have even less interest in pursuing this. That’s good. Still, won’t hurt to keep our heads down for a while.

  “On your client, as we would expect. No footage from the building’s security cameras. The electricity had been cut to the building for the previous week. Neighbors thought it was just the usual summer outages. They swapped out the doorman two weeks back. No one had seen the guy before and no one has seen him since. The security company claims not to know anything. I did find one interesting thing though. Appears Simon had a secretary, Cecilia Moya?”

  Mike nodded.

  “Before MinEx, she worked for Customs, out at the airport. Before that, the Ministry of Planning. Attractive girl from what I’ve seen. He wasn’t sleeping with her, was he?”

  Mike shrugged as if to say he didn’t know and he didn’t care.

  “Strange,” said the Doctor.

  Mike stared out the window, steeling himself.

  “I have something for you, Doctor,” he said.

  The Doctor’s face lit up. Mike reached beside him, took hold of the book that he had retrieved from Alex Harper’s office and placed it on the table between himself and the Doctor. The title, printed in gold inlaid text on the pale-blue cover read: A History of British Naval Battles 1785-1805.

  Mike had not known what reaction to expect. He had been trembling in nervous excitement since the Doctor had sat down. It wasn’t fear, more like the slight tremble he would feel on a cold morning on the river, before the first cast. It was a tremble more of expectation, of standing on the edge of the unknown. He studied the Doctor’s face. A resigned smile, a little forced, spread across his features. He reached out and took the book in his hands, opened it, and flicked through the pages as if seeing it for the first time. He closed the book and placed it back on the table between them. He sat back in his chair and placed his clasped hands on the table in front of him, a gesture of compliance, Mike hoped.

  “So you know,” he said. Mike sensed relief in his voice. As if he had been going down a trail alone and Mike had at last caught him up. “Where did you get this?”

  “I will get to that. But I have some questions of my own first,” said Mike.

  The Doctor nodded in acceptance.

  Mike had a thousand unordered questions and struggled to avoid every question erupting from him at once.

  When he had left the office of Jeremy Nason he had sat down at a nearby café and opened the book. Inside he had found the underlining and marking of words as he had seen in the copy of the same book that he had found face down on the Doctor’s coffee table. The Doctor was not translating the book for the Naval Museum. Nor was the book a facetious threat from Jeremy Wainwright. The book was their cipher for communicating, a perfect choice that would raise no suspicions if found in the possession of either. The proof that the Doctor was an informant for the British embassy and had been passed on from Jeffrey Wainwright to Alex Harper.

  It was unbelievable to Mike. Unbelievable that he had never seen it. Were there any signs that he missed? He couldn’t be sure. But didn’t it mean something that he had put it together in the end? Or was it just luck? Maybe he had made his own luck. Even knowing that the connection was real, knowing everything he did of the history of his adopted country, it made no sense to Mike that Julian Martinelli, an ex-Argentine navy officer would be willing to help the British government.

  Mike raised his coffee to his lips, dousing any emotion that may try to escape. He needed to remain calm.

  “Alex Harper used me to manipulate Simon Quinn and MinEx,” he started. “As the domestic situation deteriorated, Alex feared that the government would resort to raising the specter of taking back the Falklands. For that to be a credible promise they needed a navy that was armed and operable. Alex had information that the Inter-American Development bank loan was to be laundered through MinEx. The government’s objective was to use that money to re-arm the Argentine navy with the purchase of materials from China.”

  “Very good, Mike.”

  “And the submarines that were already purchased?”

  “Rendered inoperable by our people here once they arrived. Alex was very helpful in that. Just a simple case of disabling the operating software.”

  “Why would you collaborate with the British to hobble your own navy?”

  Laughter echoed around the room as the Doctor rocked back in his chair. He turned his head sideways as if checking to see if anyone else shared in his mirth.

  “You are always so close, Mike, aren’t you? But that last piece just alludes you. I suppose it can’t hurt to share the whole picture with you for once. It will give you something to reflect on when you are on that beach in Sicily.”

  At the mention of Sicily, Mike realized what should have been obvious from the time he discovered the cipher book. Mike would have been a topic of discussion between Alex and the Doctor. How they must have laughed at him. He felt the humiliation rising in his throat.

  “These bastards in government did not want to re-arm the navy for the defense of our nation, so that we can do the job that the constitution entrusts to us. They wanted to re-arm the navy so that they could s
end us to a war that we could never win, so that they could gain sympathy at home and abroad, so they could consolidate their rotten power, and distract the masses with an act of phony nationalism.”

  An incredible piece of justification. “So you collaborated with the enemy to stop the funds reaching the government.”

  “In the beginning, yes. We were once at war with the British but where our interests align then we are allies.”

  “What do you mean in the beginning?”

  “Our initial aim was to stop the IDB money being funneled back to the government. But then the situation changed, bigger opportunities presented themselves.”

  Mike’s mind raced, trying to catch up with the Doctor’s words. What bigger opportunities? Images shifted and blurred in his mind, conversations replayed, fast forwarded, analyzed, re-interpreted but through new lenses, one where anything was possible, one where the possibilities were not limited to his own morality or experience.

  “You planned this whole fucking thing from the start. You knew how this would play out.”

  The Doctor smiled. “You give me too much credit, Mike. I reacted to opportunities that presented themselves. That is all.”

  “You sent me to Cordoba.”

  “No, I told you to send Simon. You went yourself. You were fortunate that I had asked them to spare Simon’s face. I must be going soft.”

  “There were no Truckers Union thugs. More of Alex Harper’s bullshit.”

  “I prefer to call it misinformation, Mike. Our goal was to stop MinEx providing the government with the money they needed. But then the government made a mistake that I took advantage of.”

  “When they killed Decoud?”

  “The government did not kill Decoud. Decoud killed himself.”

  “But the nurse said—”

  “The nurse said what I paid him to say, Mike.” The patience was gone from the Doctor’s voice. “Decoud called me before he came to Buenos Aires. He had discovered that the government was inflating the prices of the contract and intending to funnel it back to themselves. I encouraged him to go to the media. The government got wind of it and threatened to expose him as being on their payroll. They had been seeding him for months, small payments into his campaign accounts and he never knew it. It would have been the end of everything he had worked for if that got out. He would have been humiliated. He took the only option left to him.”

  “And that was the government’s mistake? Paying Decoud?”

  “No. Claiming that Decoud’s death wasn’t suicide. Trying to use it to their advantage, trying to pin in it on MinEx.”

  “You knew that Simon would want to fight them,” said Mike, catching up. “And that I would help him.”

  “And a wonderful job you both did, Mike,” said the Doctor. “Once I had the recording of Lopez claiming credit for the murder of Decoud and threatening you with the same, a much larger opportunity presented itself. I just needed you to convince Simon to release the recording.”

  “The government would never let Simon release the tape, you must have known they would kill him first.”

  “That did cross my mind,” the Doctor said. “The government has history. But that was not our first thought. We hoped that if Simon released the tape it may bring down the government if we could mobilize enough support in the street. A new government may be more amenable to our views.”

  “Bullshit. You knew they would kill him. You killed him,” said Mike. He could have been speaking to himself. “You set him up as the enemy of the government, you enabled him knowing full well what would happen to him.”

  The old navy intelligence officer paused. The mouth that had held back so many secrets tensed, as if he were about to elaborate. No words came and the moment passed. He said, “You played your part too, remember, Mike.”

  “And Montevideo. The British embassy.”

  The Doctor nodded again, seeming to take no pleasure in this deceit. “I did that for you. If you were out of the country the government couldn’t accuse you of anything. I am going soft.”

  A sick feeling spun through Mike’s stomach, his fingers, wrapped tight around his coffee cup, his skin itched, irritated at every point of contact with his clothing. The Doctor was right. Mike was culpable. He hadn’t seen what was happening and all the while he was leading his client to his death. He was a player, a bit part player on a stage that he never recognized he was on, repeating lines that had been written for him without ever recognizing their meaning or intent. He may as well have thrown Quinn from the balcony himself.

  Mike felt the Doctor’s eyes on him, he seemed to be reading Mike’s mind. “Don’t beat yourself up, Mike. How were you to know? Sometimes there is no big picture, no master plan to discover. Life is just a series of moments that exists outside the limits of philosophy and ethics. It is such a small way to live, within the bounds of these concepts, trying to justify every action to satisfy some moral fabric that doesn’t even exist. You do not have to be good to do good, Mike. Why should anything be off limits in the pursuit of your own objectives? Do you know why you will never fit in here? Because you refuse to let go of this moral framework that has no place here. You insist on judging yourself by a code that doesn’t exist. You limit yourself to the course of action that is justifiable. Imagine the possibilities if nothing needed to be justified? If every option were open? That is freedom. That is power. A certain kind of power that you will never know, Mike.”

  The Doctor placed his hand on the book that still lay on the table between them. Before he could slide it towards him Mike’s hand shot out with a speed that surprised them both and claimed the book.

  “Not so fast, Doctor. Your story may play well to yourself. But I wonder how it would play in the press or in front of a court.” Mike clicked his tongue. “I am not sure it would do very well.” He waggled the book in the air. “I am going to keep this for now. And when I call, you had better fucking pick up, when I have a question you better have the fucking answer, when I need a hole you better have a fucking shovel.”

  The Doctor stared back at him, his head tilted, unsure if Mike was joking or not. The Doctor appeared a foreigner on the low ground. Deciding that Mike wasn’t joking he said, “The book proves nothing. You are out of your depth, Mike. Get on the plane and go. You don’t belong here. You never will.” He pushed back from the table and stood to leave. He took three steps towards the door before the sound of his own voice stopped him short. He turned back to where Mike still sat, his telephone in hand and coming from the speaker the Doctor’s recorded words: We were once at war with the British but where our interests align then we are allies.

  No more favors. It felt good to do the fucking.

  CHAPTER 40

  The travel agency was a small affair located on the corner of Posadas and Montevideo. Posters advertising exotic holiday destinations covered the front window. Mike approached from the opposite sidewalk. From a radio on the counter of a laundromat the Intoxicados were singing of the necessity of hating before you could begin to love. A lyric for Buenos Aires and one Mike only now understood. He stopped at the traffic light, waited for the street to fill with cars, then crossed. The little green man was still under suspicion.

  Some mornings as he passed by the agency on his way to the Dos Escudos café Mike would stop and examine the fifteen-day options for cruising down the Danube or the six-week odyssey through the Stans—Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. Whenever he thought his job was difficult, he spared a thought for the tourism ministers of the Stans.

  How many times had he walked past this door and thought of Sicily?

  This morning he pushed through the glass door. A bell tinkled above him alerting the pleasant-faced girl at the desk at the back of the shop. The girl recognized him and waved him in. The agency also represented the Buquebus.

  “Good morning, Sr. Costello,” she said. “Off to Uruguay, are we?”

  “No, no, not Uruguay,” he said. “I’d like
to look into options to Sicily.”

  The girl’s face went blank. “Here in Argentina?” she asked, her fingers pecking at the keyboard in front of her, the letters worn off the keys.

  “Sicily. Italy,” Mike clarified. “The island off Italy.”

  Her brow furrowed as she renewed her attack on the keyboard. “Here we go. We don’t get many requests for Sicily,” she said in apology of her own ignorance. “Let me bring up some options for you. Just yourself traveling?”

  Mike nodded.

  “One way or return?”

  Forgetting that he had been fired, Finklestein had rung the day before to advise that the Mareva Injunction had been lifted from Mike’s apartment. Finklestein was happy to take the credit for it though Mike suspected Jeremy Nason was the real reason. Finklestein also had a potential buyer who was willing to offer, if not Mike’s asking price, a reasonable approximation and one that Mike should accept in this current housing market. Mike had no doubt that Finklestein himself was behind the offer. Mike had declined. Argentina hadn’t changed, he knew she never would. Wasn’t that what he himself had told Quinn? He had refused to hear it himself though. To hope for her to change was madness just as it was madness to think that he could exist at the edge, swim without getting wet, mold her to his own desires. Even to love her as she is without letting go of all he had loved before was impossible.

  “Return,” Mike said.

  He waited as the girl went through the administrative process of the purchase. Half an hour later she printed out the tickets and sealed them in a neat envelope. Mike paid for the tickets in cash and placed the envelope in his jacket pocket.

  He walked out of the travel agency and on to the street. A beggar sat against the window of a laundromat, hand outstretched, a look of drugged distance in her eyes. The skin on her exposed legs was scabbed and caked with filth. Mike paused and looked at the pathetic, upturned face.

  “At least do something to earn it,” he said. “Bang a drum or juggle or whistle.” The girl stared back at him, her hand still raised.