A Certain Kind of Power Page 5

  Mike had found this kindness. In the people who had taken him in, the ones that shared their stories with him, those that had helped him to understand this complex place. These were not the people of the Peronist Party. No, whatever the government had in mind for those hundred and fifty million dollars, it was not for these people.

  • • •

  Guido’s was an Italian bar that had started life as a night-time refuge for taxi drivers changing shift or wanting a place to sit and talk through a slow period. The front door, painted a vibrant red, was always wide open, as were the two windows that opened on to the tree-lined sidewalk. In summer these trees provided a green canopy that embraced the street in cooling shade. Today the branches were bare of leaves, resembling arched, arthritic fingers, coming together above the traffic like those of an old man in thought.

  Inside Guido’s the walls and ceilings were hung with photos of Hollywood movie stars, filthy jokes in Spanish and Italian printed on tiles, football jerseys of Italian and Argentine club teams, and photos of Guido himself, arm wrapped around the shoulders of people who Mike presumed had been famous at some point in time. Anita Eckberg bathed in a fountain.

  The bathrooms were wallpapered with pornographic playing cards. Guido had once confided to Mike that he had done it to stop customers bringing their kids in to the restaurant. The pornography was a crude but effective deterrent and one that ensured that even the adults didn’t linger too long in the restrooms in case they be accused of going for business and staying for pleasure.

  “Mr. Mike, please take your seat,” said Guido, arms opened wide, head tilted to the side. He claimed to be Calabrian. Mike was unsure if he was born in Calabria or his family had come from Calabria. It was a distinction that locals didn’t bother to make.

  Mike took a seat by the front window at a small, wooden table covered in a red-and-white-check tablecloth. He placed his shoulder bag on the ground beside him.

  “Mr. Mike, please tell me that you are waiting for a pretty girl. Every time you come, you are eating with that English man. What a waste! I don’t make food to be shared between two men. It breaks my heart to see this.” He held both hands to his chest to prevent further damage.

  “I’m afraid it is just Alex today, Guido,” Mike said, raising his hands in apology. Of course, he would prefer to be having lunch with a pretty girl. Who wouldn’t? But after the lunch there would be the complaining, the fights, the power struggles, the hysterics, the you don’t love me, you love me too much, and all the other bullshit.

  “I don’t understand you, Mr. Mike. So many girls in this city. You need a good Italian girl.” He looked confused. “What can I get you to start?”

  “A red wine is fine.” A good Italian girl was just what he needed. A Sicilian maybe.

  From his seat Mike could see across the street. A wall of green vegetation extended from behind the few parked cars that lined the curb. Beyond the wall were the grounds of the zoo. A taxi pulled up opposite and double parked. Mike watched as Alex Harper extricated himself from the taxi, yelled something at the driver, and slammed the door. The taxi lingered as if the driver were deciding whether to continue the argument.

  Alex came headlong into Guido’s. “Where are all the bloody coins in this city?” he asked Mike as soon as he spotted him.

  His suit, as always, hung from his frame, as though it had been thrown on him from a distance, the collar crumpled and doubled under. A red rash glowed on his neck where the collar met skin. Dandruff lay heavy and visible on his shoulders, as if he had received a generous dusting of finely grated parmesan. One shoe was untied. He off took his jacket and slapped it on the back of his chair, sat down, unbuttoned his sleeves, and rolled them up. He sniffed hard, rubbed the back of his hand across his nose, looked around, and announced, “Wine!”

  The difference between the man who now sat before him and the gregarious diplomat that had introduced him to Simon Quinn at the embassy cocktail party could not have been starker. These professional chameleons had an ability to blend into whatever surrounding they were thrown into. The problem was that you could never determine their original color.

  “The unions,” Mike said. He could hear the tiredness in his own voice.

  Alex looked at him, confused.

  “The Bus Drivers’ Union. Reason there are no coins. The transport minister is demanding a bigger cut go straight to his office. Every Friday afternoon, some lackey from the minister’s office drives around Buenos Aires and collects the minister’s cut. They take it all back to the ministry, or wherever the collection point is. Because this money comes from bus fares, it’s in coins. Previously, the unions would convert the coins into notes before the collect. The union isn’t happy about the raise. So now they just hand over bags of coins to the ministry. The ministry can’t go to the bank, that’d be laundering, so they have to sit on the coins.”

  “That makes sense. I read this morning that the trains are letting people travel for free because no one has any coins. No such fucking luck with the taxis. They are loving it. Have you noticed that they never round down?”

  A waiter placed two glasses of wine on the table. The two men touched glasses and drank.

  “How are you doing, Alex?” He had no real interest in hearing Alex’s problems, he had enough of his own. Ten years’ worth. But lunches went better when Alex had first rights to the whining.

  “I think you’ve got the right idea, Mike. I’m ready to leave, too. I really am. Have you seen the cutbacks in our public service? Twenty years’ service and this is what it comes to, left hoping for a decent redundancy. My fault, too—that’s what hurts. I should have gone into business. All my mates did. Not me, I wanted to save the fucking world. I tell you what, they’re not sitting around waiting for a redundancy now, they’re fucking rolling in it. My mates, that is. And what’ve they done? Sold toothpaste or something. I could have done that, would have been good at it, too. Would have paid a lot better than this. Can’t even survive on this wage at home. I have to leave my family and live halfway around the world just to earn something.”

  This was not all truth. On the surface, Alex had indeed left his family in the UK so as not to interrupt his boys’ schooling. Mike suspected other reasons behind the decision.

  “I need to get out, Mike. How did you get out?”

  “I can remember the exact moment. Every three months our congress would send down a senator to see how US tax payers’ money was being spent on the war on drugs. As liaison officer I was responsible for briefings on the coca-eradication programs. I’d take them out, fly them over the coca areas that we’d fumigated or chopped out, show them the local units that we were training up.

  “This one guy comes down, from Texas I think; we give him the full tour and are back at the embassy. Everyone is there for the final debrief and he says, ‘Y’all are doing a great job. I’m impressed with what you have achieved. My only question is, if we succeed in eradicating all the coca, aren’t we going to piss off a bunch of chocolate drinkers around the world?”

  Alex laughed. “That is when you decided you’d had enough?”

  “No, that came a few seconds later when I realized that no one in the room had the balls to call this guy an asshole. I couldn’t handle that sycophantic, bullshit culture. Nothing strips the guts out of a man like seeking approval from people he despises. In the end, other events overtook me. One day I was in, the next day I was out.”

  “No redundancy?”

  “They looked after me, but it felt like hush money. Didn’t touch it for a long time, then one day I stopped caring.”

  “I’m going to start looking around. I’m going mad here. I’ve got another eighteen months left, then reassignment. I dodged Iraq last time. I can’t keep dodging it forever. I’m not going there. I need to find something else.”

  Mike had no doubt that Alex had already planned his next move. The ability to plot your way around the globe, from one posting to another, the here and now perpetually s
ubjugated to the potential of the future, was the essence of professional diplomacy.

  The waitress returned with four small plates of antipasti. One of the pleasures of Guido’s being that there was no need to order. You got what you were given.

  “I may not be leaving as soon as I had hoped,” Mike confessed. “It appears that there are some administrative issues to be resolved before I can sell the apartment. I am not sure exactly what the problem is at this stage. No doubt it will be expensive.” Whether lawyer’s fees, fines, bribes, or other miscellaneous costs, nobody ever escaped from under the AFIP microscope without money changing hands. “Which leads me to my next point. If the offer is still on the table I would like to take on MinEx as a client. What do you know about the project?”

  A fleeting smile passed over Alex’s bloodless lips. “You’d know more than I do. You know more than Simon. He has no idea about this place.”

  “None of us do. Thankfully we don’t have to in our line of business. We only have to know more than the client.”

  “How do these guys get these jobs? Companies with money to burn. Could pick anyone in the world to send down and they pick people with absolutely no idea.”

  “They could pick you, you mean?”

  “Well at least I speak the fucking language. That’s a start.”

  Mike soaked up some sauce from his plate with a crust of bread. “What are your thoughts on this deal they’ve got with the government?”

  “A hundred and fifty million dollars. Big enough to be interesting, not too big to be scandalous. A sum that could disappear in the hands of the transport minister in the blink of an eye.”

  “Transport aren’t handling it, Planning is.”

  “That is a nest that we do try to avoid.”

  “What do you need from me, Alex?”

  The waiter retrieved the empty plates and returned with two mains of pasta. The lunchtime buzz hummed through the room, accompanied by a background score of forks being dragged across plates.

  “I have one goal here and that is to protect our interests in the Falklands. How do I do that? We keep a low profile. I make sure that as far as the Argentines are concerned, all things British are out of sight and out of mind.”

  “Sounds easier said than done.”

  Alex signaled the waiter for more wine. “What I don’t need is a British company paying bribes to the Argentine government. Ever noticed something about the scandals down here? It’s always foreign companies corrupting the honest locals, forcing honest politicians to take bribes. All I need from you is to keep an eye on Simon. Make sure he is not tempted to cut any corners or grease any wheels. I don’t need him pissing anyone off and making problems for me.”

  “Why can’t you tell him all this yourself, Alex?”

  “Because corruption is like inflation down here, Mike. It doesn’t exist. So it wouldn’t look good if it got out that I was advising British companies against getting caught up in something that doesn’t exist.”

  CHAPTER 7

  A layer of the city’s best grime coated the faded, cracked, black upholstery that attempted to cover the back seat of the taxi. Miscellaneous debris of previous passengers littered the floor. Mike kicked an empty McDonald’s drink container further under the driver’s seat and wondered how much time he had spent in taxis in his lifetime. Still, better than fighting the Buenos Aires traffic himself and cheaper than paying for parking.

  The radio transmitted a preview of that night’s game, River versus Boca, the first game of the pre-season. It was a peculiarity of the Argentine football league that they ran two competitions each year. Between seasons a three-week pre-season tournament. There was no off season, just a rolling feast of football that the cynical would say was designed to keep the masses distracted.

  River versus Boca was the haves and the have nots. Mike saw from the small, souvenir pennant that hung from the rear-view mirror that the driver had an interest in the game.

  “You think they have a chance tonight?”

  “Not a hope! If we win, then they’re out. They’ll never let that happen. There’s too much money in play. Did you see who they’ve put in to referee it? The same prick that fucked us last year.” He slapped the steering wheel with an open palm. “It’s all arreglado.”

  Arreglado. Organized, set up, stitched up, fixed. Mike had heard the word used to describe election results, Supreme Court appointments, murder-trial verdicts, corruption-trial verdicts, two World Cup finals, beauty pageants, and the lottery. Anything where authority had a say. He’d heard it said that nothing in Argentina could be fixed because everything was fixed. Yet every taxi driver had a thousand fixes for the country. Mike often thought that Argentina’s real troubles lay in the fact that those who should be running the country were spending their days driving cabs.

  The taxi inched through the streets, approaching the destination the circumference of a wheel at a time, allowing the drivers’ grievances to be aired for what he wrongly assumed were Mike’s sympathetic ears. Congestion was bad with the Plaza de Mayo filled by the usual unions, paid thugs who were employed, and deployed, by the president’s political apparatus.

  Mike sat back, closed his eyes, and thought about floating down the Limay River, casting nymphs to willing brown trout.

  The taxi came to a stop on Juana Manso. With no time to go through the ritual of discovering that the driver had no change, Mike over-tipped him and wished him well for the game. He closed the door on the hard-luck story that his words set off.

  He had a good feeling about this meeting. Simon Quinn had called him. He needed help and he had been primed by Alex Harper to believe that Mike was the man to deliver it.

  It begun to rain and he scurried across the street and sheltered in the foyer of the MinEx building. He could have made time yesterday but felt it gave him an advantage to appear busy. Business development wasn’t that different from dating.

  He flicked shut his notebook and called the elevator, riding it up to level five. The door opened onto a floor with glass doors to his left and right, both embossed with the MinEx logo and the slogan, in English, “Sustainability and Safety: It’s Our Culture”. Mike grimaced to himself. MinEx, a serious company.

  He pushed on the door to the left where he could see the reception desk was attended. The glass door flexed and squeaked under his hand but didn’t give. The receptionist saw him and buzzed him in.

  “How can I help you, sir?” she asked in accented English.

  “Mike Costello, here to see Simon Quinn,” Mike replied in Spanish. He resented being spoken to in English, offended at the assumption that he was like all the other gringos. On more than one occasion he had exited a restaurant after being handed the English menu.

  “Certainly, sir. Please take a seat and I will let Mr. Quinn know you are here.”

  Mike took a seat and studied the reception area. Large, glossy photos hung from the walls. They showed mining operations from around the world, large holes gouged out of the earth, the photographer struggling to capture beauty in the excavations. In between pictures were corporate affirmations of MinEx’s responsibility and sustainability. Handsome, wholesome values until they got in the way of profit—that had been Mike’s experience.

  “Mr. Costello?” Mike looked up. “Is this your first time in the building?”

  Mike nodded in the affirmative.

  “You will need to take the safety induction. Just a couple of minutes, then Mr. Quinn will be with you.”

  It was pointless to protest the induction, as pointless as the induction itself, an exercise to reinforce those wholesome corporate values again. Statistically he had already survived the most dangerous part of the meeting, the taxi ride. He used his thumb to flick through the induction booklet provided before signing that all was understood and if an accident were to befall him it would be his responsibility. He returned his signed booklet to the receptionist who accepted it without looking at him.

  “Mr. Quinn will see you no
w.” She swiveled in her chair and pointed a well-manicured nail down the corridor that ran away behind her. “Down the hall and last door on the right.”

  Simon Quinn sat behind his desk, pen in hand, signing documents. He seemed smaller than Mike remembered, though that may have been because Simon was seated or because Mike was sober. Simon’s head was of a form that shouldn’t be shaved, and Mike imagined the dilemma that must have played out in front of the mirror as Simon weighed up baldness against skull shape. Despite this, Mike recognized in his posture an assuredness that Mike himself had once possessed.

  “Signing your life away, Simon?”

  Simon looked up and smiled. “I bloody hope not. Good to see you Mike, please take a seat. I’ll just be a second.” He applied a few more signatures, straightened the remaining papers in the pile on his left and focused his attention Mike. “Thanks for coming by, Mike, I appreciate it.”

  Mike noted that Simon had lost his British accent, probably from living abroad. Mike’s own accent had lost the burrs and rough edges of his native speech as he planed it down to a form that the non-native English speaker could easily understand. He had found it easier to change his own way of speaking rather than repeat a word ad nauseum before giving up in frustration.

  “Apologies for being late. The usual unrest on the streets, someone or other is always striking. Or protesting. Or protesting about strikes. Judging by the lack of police and the look of the thugs these ones seemed to be pro-government.”

  “As long it’s nothing to do with us.”

  “Likely to do with the minister for economy.”

  “A show of support?”

  “Yes, though not for the minister. For the president.”

  “What has the minister done to upset the president?”