A Certain Kind of Power Read online

“Mike, actually, nice to meet you,” said Mike extending his hand.

  “Simon Quinn. Likewise.”

  “Simon’s new. He’s managing the project out in Cordoba,” said Alex, playing his well-grooved part.

  “How long have you been in town for?” asked Mike.

  “Coming up three weeks.”

  “How have you found Cordoba?”

  “I haven’t even been out to site yet. There’s been trouble with some local community groups. Not too happy with us being there. I’m keen to go, but the advice for now is that my presence wouldn’t be helpful.”

  Mike stopped a passing waiter. “What are you drinking? My shout.”

  Simon held up his glass. “One more red won’t hurt.”

  Mike plucked a glass from the waiter’s tray and handed it to Simon along with a tumbler of whiskey to Alex. He grabbed a red wine for himself. “Here’s cheers and welcome to Argentina.” All three raised their glasses.

  “How about yourself, how long have you been living the dream down here?” asked Simon.

  “I don’t know about living the dream,” said Mike. “Coming up ten years now. It was only ever going to be two or three.”

  Alex placed a hand on Mike’s shoulder. “Mike came here to find love and make his fortune.”

  “How have you done?” asked Simon.

  “Single and broke.”

  “I hope you’re trying to make the fortune first. That should make finding the love a bit easier.”

  Alex said, “He’s being modest. Broke men don’t live in expensive apartments in the middle of Recoleta. Still just the one maid, Mike?”

  “Just the one. But if you want to talk about lifestyles, Simon, you should see Alex’s place. You would think he was the goddamn ambassador. A small ranch. You could run a decent herd of cattle in his backyard if the pool didn’t take up so much room.”

  “Nothing less than I deserve for risking life and limb for Queen and Country,” said Alex, enjoying the fact that the conversation had turned to his good fortune.

  “Risking your life? At these dangerous cocktail receptions?”

  “You know as well as I do, Mike, that the Argies would love to get their hands on the Falklands. They may have no aircraft, boats or troops up to the task, but you know what they say, where there’s a will and all that. I’m determined that the Falklands will not fall on my watch and if I’m well rewarded for that diligence of duty with a nice house, some blue sky and sunshine, weekends on a hacienda, a nice girl in the office, and, yes, the odd cocktail reception, then so be it. Not to mention how I suffered in London. You should’ve seen my girl there. Helen of Troy I used to call her. Had a face that could lunch a thousand chips.”

  Mike shook his head and grinned. He had heard the line before but still enjoyed it.

  Alex looked over Quinn’s shoulder. “Now, if you will excuse me gentlemen, I’ll leave you two to chat. I must go and make some people like me. And be careful, Simon. I fear that Mike here has gone native. Though I don’t think we have realized it yet as we keep inviting him to these things. And, Simon, if there is anything I can do for you, call me.”

  Mike swiveled to watch Alex move across the room. “One of the least diplomatic diplomats I’ve met.” Turning back to Simon he asked, “What have you made of Argentina so far?”

  “I’m loving it. First time in South America. I think I could get used to it. There’s a real European feel about it. Compared to some places I’ve been, I think I am going to enjoy the experience.”

  He has read the guidebooks, thought Mike. “I’m sure it will be an experience. My advice is to accept it for what it is. The old bitch won’t change.”

  “I’m sure I’ll be all right. I survived three years in the Ivory Coast. I think I can handle a country whose claim to fame is red wine and steak.”

  “It’s not a country, it’s a conversation. Remember that.”

  Quinn took a drink from his glass. “Please explain,” he invited.

  “There’s a lot of talk. Nothing gets done without it being talked about first. You’ll have to do a lot of talking. To your secretary, she’ll want to talk about her cat that died, the coffee lady will want to tell you about the niece that’s just started university, the guy that fixes your car is going to want to talk about his football team that got beaten in extra time because the referee was on the take, the taxi driver’s going to tell you what a basket case Argentina is and ask you how is it possible that a man with three languages and five degrees, and two of those post-graduate, who’s lived all over the world can end up driving a taxi in Buenos Aires. And he’ll take you the long way if it means he gets to finish the story and charge you for the pleasure. And all of them will want to talk politics.” Mike drew breath. “How’s your Spanish?”

  “Nada,” Quinn replied.

  “For the best,” said Mike, unsurprised. “If you’d learnt anything it’d be useless here. All Castellano here.” He emphasized the “Shhh” made by the double L, a parody on the Argentine pronunciation. “They don’t even call it Spanish. They say there’s a historical reason why. Personally, I think it’s so they don’t confuse themselves with the Bolivians.”

  “Most people I’ve met have been happy to speak English. I haven’t had any trouble communicating with anyone.”

  “You don’t need the language for communicating with them. You need it for overhearing, for picking up gossip, for reading the papers. You need to keep yourself informed, don’t rely on people to tell you. Then you need to make sense of it. If it sounds logical, feasible, or reasonable then it’s more than likely false. The more absurd, ridiculous, and farfetched it sounds then the closer you are to the truth.”

  The band announced that they would be playing their last song. Nobody seemed disappointed as they started into a jazz version of “Billy Jean”. Mike snatched two more glasses of red as a waiter passed and handed one to Quinn.

  “The other thing you need to know about is the flush rate.”

  “The flush rate?”

  “It’s a measurement I use to gauge how fast the government is flushing the country down the toilet. The scale runs from one to ten. It’s often up around nine and never dips below five. The interesting thing about the flush rate is that no matter how high it goes it never hits ten. It never all comes tumbling down. I don’t know why that is. People are always saying, ‘This government won’t last, this will tip people over the edge, the people won’t put up with this’. Believe me, they always do. They always muddle through.

  “It’s like dividing a number by two. Always seemed logical to me that if you keep halving a number you’ll get to a point where there is nothing left to halve. But you never do get to zero. That still doesn’t make sense to me. No matter how hard they try to break the country, they never get to zero.

  “And don’t be fooled by the architecture and the avenues and this bullshit about the Paris of South America,” said Mike, aware of gathering steam but unable to locate the brake. “Buenos Aires is dirty, it’s grimy, it’s dangerous. It gets under your nails, you can smell it in your clothes, it makes your skin itch. She seduces you, draws you in and enthralls you, and then breaks your heart.”

  Quinn said, “Yet, you’re still here.”

  “Of course. I love it.” And he did, once, he thought.

  “And what is it that you do here, Mike?”

  A good question and Mike had spent the last ten years trying to find the right answer. Political Consultant, Risk Adviser, Security Manager at one time or another they had all appeared typed below his name in neat letters on the little business cards he had printed at the stationery shop below his office. He had given up trying to put a title to what he did. It would have been easier if he were a second secretary.

  “I try to help companies stay out of trouble.” As good a definition as he could come up with. He never let on that the emphasis was always on try.

  CHAPTER 4

  The morning was clear and bright and cold. Mike sat in the
back of the taxi and watched the Buenos Aires streetscape slide by. The morning traffic alternated between a crawl and a standstill giving Mike ample time to admire the streets. Edwardian-style buildings dominated. A few potted plants stood on small balconies that struggled to accommodate two people side-by-side. Sculpted balustrades and antique lamps of wrought iron clung to the facades. Chipped gargoyles studied the traffic below, no doubt grateful they had no place to go. The grand structures towered into the sky and cast shadows over the footpaths.

  The architecture and the scale of the buildings stood as a reminder of the immense wealth that Buenos Aires had once held. The pockmarked facades; angry, scrawled graffiti; half-clothed beggars sleeping in doorways; and the bags of uncollected rubbish piled high on the sidewalks reminded Mike that the days of abundance had gone the way of the great buffalo.

  The decaying streets, rotting from the outside in, like gangrenous limbs, were the remains of a glory that refused to yield, a city that refused to accept its current state of poverty. She was a beautiful woman, who in aging is sustained by the memory of her youthful looks, the dances, the admiring glances, and the constant attention—holding on despite the knowledge that the past will never return. Regardless of her slow decay, Buenos Aires radiated a beauty and an arrogance in the face of the inevitable that bewitched Mike. He admired the city’s refusal to give in, but he would listen to her lies no more.

  The taxi banked by the curb. Mike glanced at the taximeter mounted on the dashboard. It read eighteen pesos. He handed over a twenty-peso note. The driver, eyeing Mike in the rearview mirror, held up a small tray and shook it. The rattle of one or two coins audible evidence that he had no change.

  “Keep it,” Mike said as he opened the door.

  He stood on the pavement and watched the taxi pull away before turning and entering the nondescript building that was home to his preferred law firm— though “law firm” was too grand a term for the claustrophobic office that his lawyer chose to work from. The brass plaque on the outside of the office with the words “Estudio Finklestein and Knight” was the grandest aspect of the operation, though less so now that the inlaid letters had tarnished to a dark green.

  Inside, the office name-partner, Tomas Finklestein, sat behind a wooden desk, piled high and loose with an assortment of files and reference books. His thermos of hot water and pewter gourd filled with mate, the metal straw poking up out of the green leaves like a miniature periscope, stood within easy reach of Finklestein’s hand. A strip of orange peel floated in the hot water. Steam rose towards the ceiling.

  Mate, the national drink, the staple of staples. Finklestein once told Mike that an Argentine could go three days without steak, two days without mate and a day without talking. Unlike other humans, they could go weeks without sleep.

  Finklestein came out from behind his desk and greeted Mike with a kiss on the cheek and a firm hand on his shoulder. It was a traditional greeting between men who knew each other’s secrets. Even so Mike still flinched at the rub of stubble on stubble.

  Finklestein returned to his seat and offered Mike the mate gourd. Mike declined with a raised hand. He wasn’t averse to the tea, he just didn’t like to run the hygienic risk of sharing Finklestein’s genetic matter. The kiss was risk enough.

  It took five years after Mike had first hired Tomas for him to admit that the “Knight” on the name plaque was a piece of marketing fiction to give his firm an air of English respectability. Five years of Mike asking after the whereabouts of his partner only to learn that Tomas Finklestein worked in a partnership of one. However, this suited Mike’s needs.

  Case by case, Mike developed a thread of trust, no thicker than gossamer, in Tomas. Mike would tell friends that it wasn’t that he trusted Finklestein that made him useful, it was that he knew when not to trust him. It was an important difference. Finklestein was someone Mike relied upon to do the legwork of going down to whatever public agency held the files that Mike needed and sifting through hundreds of boxes of documents and index cards where the entrails of Argentina were stored.

  When Mike had come to purchase his apartment he had entrusted the paperwork to Tomas, and Tomas bit by bit had become to Mike what every good lawyer in Argentina was to their client; a consigliere, an adviser whose advice and services wandered along the outlines of the law but were not adverse to meandering into the realms of the everyday, the psychological, and even the romantic.

  Having taken the decision to sell his apartment, Mike had phoned and instructed Tomas to begin preparing the papers. He did so with little understanding of what papers would need to be prepared or what the preparation would entail, only knowing that without a doubt papers, forests of them perhaps, would need to be prepared. The purchase of the property had run to five boxes of files and folders, and for a fee Tomas was happy to organize for their safekeeping in his office. Mike assumed that they were hidden somewhere in the piles that were forming like stalagmites from the office floor, his adviser’s desk, and from every flat surface on offer inside the office.

  “Ah, here it is,” Tomas said, poking his balding head crowned with an audacious combover around the pile of folders, a single sheet held in his right hand while his left pulled his wire framed glasses down the bridge of his nose, allowing him to peer over the rim at Mike.

  Finklestein’s voice always carried a hushed note of excitement that never quite gelled with his demeanor. He had a face that was harder to love than other people’s children. And it always wore a grim look. It was grim when he told Mike about the weekend he had spent with his family in San Pedro; it was grim when he discussed the birthday party he was planning for his children; it was grim when he spoke of his time studying in London; it was grim when he spoke about the future of Argentina. Mike had arrived at the conclusion that to be a lawyer in Argentina was grim business, day after day forced to look upon the inner workings of the country, an oncologist examining the cancer-riddled body of a patient with no hope of a cure.

  “I knew it was here somewhere.” His look of grimness morphed momentarily to brooding as he prepared Mike for what the document said. “Not good,” he said to himself, re-reading the document, as if last time he looked it had been good news.

  Mike sat in silence awaiting the information.

  “I looked into the situation of your apartment. Or at least I tried to. Your assets have become of interest to the AFIP. I am sure you have seen what has been going on in the papers.”

  Mike felt his intestines knot. The AFIP was Argentina’s tax authority. It had an insatiable appetite for the property of others. They needed no justification, but in recent weeks the AFIP was dressing up its actions with a cloak of legitimacy, justifying the repossession of property as a means of collecting unpaid taxes. That the properties were then sold at knockdown prices to friends of the government was not polite conversation.

  “I haven’t been advised of any issues,” offered Mike, knowing that that meant nothing at all.

  “Nor would you expect to be,” said Tomas with an impatient wave of his hand. “I’ve had trouble finding out what the issue is. All I could find was that they had been flagged. Luckily for you—well, not luckily, that is why you pay me—I have a friend at the AFIP. He didn’t have much more to add for now. A freeze has been placed on your assets. He couldn’t say by who or for what reason, he didn’t have that kind of access. I have asked him to look into it further for you.” Tomas sat back in his chair and pushed his glasses back to their original position. “Of course, this favor will not be free. He is asking for fifteen thousand. Dollars.”

  “Fifteen thousand?” Mike repeated, his voice rising to match the elevated number. “I’m not comfortable paying a bribe, Tomas.”

  “Facilitation payment, Mike. It’s not a bribe. Very different.”

  “Either way, I don’t have fifteen thousand dollars to hand. I will have once I sell the house. But not now.”

  “Then I am afraid there is nothing to be done.”

  “Can
’t you help me out, Tomas? We’ve known each other a long time.”

  “We have. And in all that time have I ever done you a favor out of the goodness of my heart? It would not be wise on my behalf to start now.”

  Mike scratched his head in frustration. He clenched his jaw and shook his head. The politer option to screaming out “fuck!” and taking a wild, satisfying swipe that would send Finklestein’s stacked paper towers flying across the room. Mike changed topic to avert an outburst.

  “What are your thoughts on this?”

  “I presume it is tax related. Though why they would freeze your assets rather than repossess strikes me as strange,” Finklestein offered.

  “I don’t pay any taxes. You know that. You structured everything through Uruguay to evade the taxes.”

  “Avoid. Avoid taxes, Mike,” Finklestein chastised. “And keep your voice down, please.”

  Tomas placed his elbows on his desk and brought his fingertips together.

  “It could have something to do with the taxes that we avoided when you purchased the property,” he said in a low voice, as if testing how this information would be received by his client.

  A memory of walking through downtown Buenos Aires with a suitcase packed with bundles of American dollars came to Mike’s mind. In an office even smaller than the one in which he now sat he had exchanged the suitcase for the deeds to his apartment. Finklestein assured him that that was how things were done.

  “You said that was legal.”

  “It is. But you only avoid paying the taxes if you own the property. You never mentioned anything about wanting to sell one day. If I may ask, what has brought this on now?”

  Mike dug into his pocket and produced a folded square of paper. Mike felt calmer just feeling the paper in his hands. He had waited until his secretary had gone out for coffee and printed it off in his office that morning. He had come across the article while searching for cheap flights to Sicily. It was a sign. The first bit of good luck he had had in five years. He spread the paper out on the desk and pushed it across to Finklestein.