A Certain Kind of Power Read online

  Mike shook his head in surprise. Surprise that he was surprised. He’d known the Doctor for over six years and it was rare that a meeting went by when he didn’t learn something new.

  “What are we going to learn?”

  “Two concerned citizens discussing our next environmental challenge and the rape of our lands by a foreign invader. Who knows where that conversation might lead in the hands of a capable interrogator.”

  “Journalist,” Mike corrected him.

  The Doctor nodded in agreement.

  “I will put it to the client and let you know.”

  The Doctor’s product was always good, if a little expensive, compared with the other peddlers of information that he sometimes consulted. It wasn’t all that he had promised the client, but if Quinn had any complaints he could track him down in Sicily.

  Mike drained the last of his coffee. “I have the dollars for you. I need to stop off at the cueva and change some for myself. Shall we?”

  On the street, the snow had stopped falling but the biting cold remained. Mike smiled as he felt a real winter’s embrace. They headed right on Alvear. Before Alvear intersected with Callao they turned off into a small shopping arcade. Artefacts that could have been one hundred years old, or off the plane from China that very morning, filled the shop windows. Knives with carved, cattle-horn handles, silver-plated dinner sets, paintings of the Argentine Pampas, hand-plaited stock whips, hand-woven gaucho hats. Mementos from Borges’ Argentina if it had ever existed.

  Mike had frequented the arcade for the past four years and had never seen a customer in any of the six stores that lined the corridor. Now that he thought on it he couldn’t remember seeing the shops open. Shop fronts in every sense of the word. At the end of the arcade, in the middle of the corridor, stood a detached shop, the cueva.

  The cuevas were as Argentine as tango, though more international in outlook and less melancholic. Small, hole-in-the-wall establishments where you could change US dollars for Argentine pesos or vice versa. Whereas banks were forced to change money at a fictional rate set by government intervention, or intimidation, the cuevas were free to set the exchange rates that the market dictated. Free in the sense that anyone breaking the law is free.

  To the right of the entrance to the cueva, on a shabby bar stool, slouched a man, half sitting, half standing, one leg bent back beneath the stool, clad in black jeans and a black jacket. Beneath the jacket a faded T-shirt. Off-duty policeman supplementing an income. He nodded at Mike and the Doctor and they returned the familiar greeting. The man held his hand up, palm outwards indicating that the pair should wait.

  The Doctor retrieved his cell phone from his pocket and checked for messages. Mike studied an over-sized, silver-plated set of BBQ utensils that were displayed in an unattended shop window. Handy for barbecuing mammoth.

  The rattling of the door of the detached store announced an imminent exit and caused Mike to forget about mammoths. The Doctor to put away his phone. The door opened and an old lady, the wrong side of eighty by Mike’s judgement, high heels, a Kubanka hat and a full-length brown, fur coat, emerged. In her hand, a leash attached to a full-grown, dappled, greyhound. The door closed behind her, a rattle of shades and locks, and she progressed like royalty down the arcade without a glance or greeting for Mike or the Doctor.

  Mike stepped to the door and pressed the buzzer.

  “Come in,” ordered a male voice from the other side.

  Both men entered. The inside of the cueva resembled a second-hand clothes store. Dresses, jackets, jeans, T-shirts, even bras and underwear were hung from any available space around the store, which was no bigger than a shipping container. Wooden squash racquets draped in knitted scarves were propped up in shoes that had gone rigid from inactivity, or perhaps the cold. Books were piled high on any available flat space. In the corner stood a desk, an oasis of neatness and order.

  A young woman, no more than thirty, her tied back in a tight pony tail, sat at the desk. In front of her a machine for counting currency. She did not look up as Mike and the Doctor entered and continued to feed stacks of notes, sometimes Argentine sometimes American, into the machine, re-feeding the notes that refused to go through the first time. She then recorded the flashing red number that appeared on the front of the machine in a leather-bound ledger. Behind her a white-haired man dressed in faded jeans and a leather jacket, retrieved the counted stacks and arranged them on another desk. Some stacks went into envelopes, others into brown, leather shoulder bags.

  Without stopping his parceling he greeted Mike and the Doctor. “Good to see you boys again.” He used the word muchachos. Mike enjoyed being referred to as a boy, despite his obvious seniority to the speaker.

  “What can I do for you today?”

  Mike spoke. “We need to change some money.” Erasing any doubt that they were there for the clothes.

  “What are you buying? Argentine or US?”

  Mike again. “Changing US for Argentine. What’s the rate?”

  “How much are you changing?”

  “Hundred dollars,” replied Mike.

  “Five thirty,” the man said, without looking up from the bundle of notes he was binding, his hand looping the rubber band around the bundle like a spider trussing up a fly.

  “If I change two hundred?”

  “I can give you five thirty-two.” Still without looking up from his work.

  “And four hundred?”

  “Five thirty-four. And that goes for four hundred, four thousand or forty thousand. That’s the best I can do. The official rate is three thirteen. There’s a HSBC about a block away if you’d like to take your business there. I hear the wait in line is only three hours this morning.”

  Mike retrieved two rolls of dollars from his jacket pocket. The larger roll he handed over to the Doctor who disappeared it as if he had spent a lifetime conjuring. The smaller roll Mike gave to the amateur banker who took the dollars and handed them to his assistant. She fed them through her machine and confirmed the amount then punched her calculator hard, as if the velocity of its output correlated to the force of the inputs. She opened a drawer that was packed tight with Argentine currency and began feeding notes through the machine, double-checking each bundle of hundred-peso notes. Satisfied that the amount was correct she handed the bundle to her boss without looking at him. He counted them again by hand, lubricating his thumb with spit. Mike grimaced at this hygienic infringement. The man produced a rubber band from his pocket, secured it around the bundle and handed it to Mike.

  “A pleasure doing business with you, sir.”

  Mike accepted the pesos, opened the bundle, split it in two and placed half of the notes in his shoulder bag and half in his jacket pocket.

  “Like a good Argentine,” the man commented, approval in his voice.

  Mike laughed. “Not quite.”

  How’s business in the banking industry?” he asked, bestowing an unearned prestige upon the cueva’s illegal activity.

  “Unfortunately, it’s good. Everyone wants to buy dollars. I can’t get enough dollars. You’re the only person buying pesos. It’s this government. They’re ruining the country. I thought this Roncelli had a chance to change things, now he’s gone too.”

  “Roncelli was too good an economist to be the minister for economy,” said the Doctor. “Has he definitely gone?”

  “They announced it not long ago. Irreconcilable differences,” the banker said, pointing to a small television that balanced on a stack of books.

  “What will happen now?” asked Mike.

  “They will print more money and the more money they print the more people will come through my door and change their money for dollars and the more money they will need to print. At least Roncelli had a plan.”

  “I’m sure the government has a plan,” said the Doctor, with a healthy dose of sarcasm in his voice.

  “They’re thugs not economists. Their plan to fight inflation is to force companies to lower prices any way
they can. When that approach fails, they’ll start buying companies up and call it anti-inflationary measures.”

  Mike looked at the Doctor. “Best let him get on with it. Sounds like he’s going to be busy.”

  They said their goodbyes and exited the cueva, nodding a farewell to the slouching guard, and made their way up the arcade.

  “He’s right you know,” said the Doctor breaking the silence.

  “About what?”

  “About buying up companies. I’ve heard rumors along the same lines.”

  “Pure speculation?” asked Mike.

  “No, you can have this for free. If inflation keeps heading north the government will look at taking over key industries to put a lid on prices. That way they can set any price they like, run them at a loss just to keep their voter base happy.”

  Mike thought this over as they came out onto the footpath. He never ruled anything out. He stored it all away to be cross-referenced with the other rumors, lies, vendettas, and innuendo he came across. By doing so he could put together a patchwork of possibilities of what might happen, one day, soon or a long way into the future. Never anything more and never with any real degree of certainty. It was like collecting shadows and pinning them to a corkboard.

  “We should start seeding him,” said the Doctor, a distant look in his eye as if mentally riffling through his old files of tactics and actions.

  “Who?”

  “Decoud. Get your client to start making small deposits into his campaign funds. I can try to get the details for you.”

  “You want MinEx to start funding Decoud?”

  “Not funding. Seeding. Just small amounts that won’t be noticed. We may need to use it at some point in the future. At the right time we can leak the payments to the press, make it look like he is on the MinEx payroll. It is a highly effective mechanism for discrediting someone, or for influencing them.”

  It sounded a lot like blackmail to Mike. “Let’s just wait and see what the interview turns up first.”

  CHAPTER 9

  “Good afternoon, Sr. Costello,” said the doorman with submissive formality, leaning against his broom handle. He had stopped sweeping to allow Mike to pass through the narrow corridor that ran from the door of the building back to the elevators. Mike nodded a silent greeting and turned left before the elevators, preferring to take the stairs up the two levels to his office.

  He shared the level with one other office that was nothing more than a closed door on the other side of the floor. He had never seen anyone come or go, never heard any noise from behind the door. Last summer when he had enquired about renting it, desperate to escape the fierce summer sun that beat through his office windows in the afternoon, the landlord had said that it was not available. If it ever became available, he would let Mike know.

  He retrieved his keychain from his pocket and shuffled through the bronzed keys looking for the lighter bronze that identified the key for the top lock. He slipped it in and with a slight wiggle felt the bolt slide back. Before he could identify the key for the second lock he heard footsteps approaching the other side of the door, a rattle and click, and the door swung open to reveal his secretary, Andrea Crespo. “Secretary” was an injustice for her role was more diverse than taking care of secretarial duties, though she did manage that with aplomb.

  He had hired Andrea when he took on the office space and, like most of his corporate clients, he had hired her for her looks, though Mike’s intention, unlike his clients’, had been to avoid carnal temptation.

  Andrea would arrive every morning, briefcase in hand, as if she were still the lawyer off to argue a case at the Comodoro Py law courts, where she had started her career. She had specialized in commercial law, postgraduate studies at the University of Palermo. The background checks he had run on her told the story of a career of rapid rise and promotions through the trial courts and then a sudden plateau.

  “Married,” was her one-word explanation when Mike had quizzed her about this. “Divorce,” was her symmetric answer to why she wanted to return to work. That one word served as an effective barricade to any further progress down that laneway of conversation. Mike had hired her on the spot, one of the few decisions he had taken in Argentina which he hadn’t yet come to regret.

  Andrea was perfect; overqualified and underemployed, someone who was as happy to prepare coffee for client meetings as track down hidden assets, though she was much more competent at the second skill. She had a keen sense for people and Mike had lost count of the times that her warnings had rung true. Her supporting evidence for her conclusions was never more than “a woman’s intuition”. Mike suspected the real reason was that she was smarter than him.

  The office was small with an open space occupied by two desks, his own on one side and Andrea’s opposite. He had rented the office because he needed an address to put on his business card, a place for mail to be sent to, and a telephone line where calls could be taken. He would never imagine entertaining a client there and he always insisted on going to the client’s office rather than reveal to them the decrepit, cramped heart of his power.

  There was a tiny kitchen just big enough to prepare a cup of coffee and a functioning bathroom, though too close to the main office so that Mike would always wait until he was alone if he needed it for anything serious. The walls of the office were decorated with three framed black-and-white photos of Buenos Aires street scenes: jacarandas, a candlelit café, steps leading down to the metro tunnels. Mike had seen them in the window of a shop around the corner from his office and purchased them on the spot. Andrea had rebuked him and said he had overpaid. They seemed to capture a nostalgic mood of Buenos Aires that he had spent the intervening period trying to locate, but apart from those three pictures on his office wall he never did.

  Mike moved to the picture behind his desk, pushed it upwards and lifted it from the wall then placed it on the desk behind him. He turned back to the wall and punched in the combination to the wall safe. The door swung open and he retrieved the bundle of Argentine pesos from his jacket and deposited them in the safe. He closed the safe and returned the framed photo to its place. All this he did in plain sight of Andrea who kept up a steady tapping at her keyboard, eyes averted.

  Without looking up she said, “Finklestein called for you. Wants you to call him back. Has news for you.” Andrea had a way of pronouncing “Finklestein” that left no doubt of her opinion of him. She reserved the same tone for when she asked him if the Doctor had provided a receipt for his latest expenditure.

  “Did he say what about?” asked Mike, a note of caution in his voice. He still hadn’t told Andrea about his plans to relocate. It was a conversation he wanted to leave until the very last minute. Perhaps by phone. From the airport.

  “He didn’t say.”

  Mike sat down at his desk and dialed his lawyer. He glanced up at the clock on the wall and watched it until Finklestein picked up.

  “Tomas, hello, it’s Mike.”

  Finklestein’s voice came scurrying down the line with excitement. “I have some news for you, Mr. Costello.”

  “Go ahead,” said Mike. Andrea had not stopped typing but nor had she stopped listening, though he was certain she couldn’t hear Finklestein’s voice.

  “I have managed to get to the bottom of this little mystery we were presented with. I am pleased to say that it has nothing to do with the AFIP. Well, not nothing, what I told you before is correct. They placed the freeze on your assets. However, it was done by them, not for them. It seems that they were fulfilling a request. Your apartment has been placed under a Mareva Injunction.”

  The term was familiar to Mike. He had worked jobs in the past where he was commissioned to identify assets that could be targeted with a Mareva Injunction that froze the assets and allowed them to be seized. But why would anyone be going after his apartment? And who?

  “I see,” said Mike, keeping control of his voice, not wanting to alert Andrea. “What’s to be done?”

 
; “We must dig deeper to find out who is behind this. Once we discover that then we would look to make a deal, I imagine. Shall I move ahead?”

  A pause as he waited for Mike’s answer.

  “I am not paying you any more money.”

  “I will try to keep it under the original budget.”

  “Go ahead then.”

  “Good. I am sending you the bill for the fifteen now. If there are any other costs I will add it to your monthly account.”

  “Just get it done, Tomas.”

  Mike hung up the phone and glanced at the clock again. “Six minutes, Andrea.” Andrea stopped typing and produced a small notebook. She opened it and scribbled down the time. It was the only way Mike could keep a semblance of control on Finklestein’s billing. He billed in fifteen-minute blocks and was notoriously slow to write three-lined emails. Mike preferred calls with a strict record kept.

  “Everything OK?” asked Andrea, her senses too keen for Mike’s liking.

  It seemed like leaving Argentina was going to be harder than he thought; she had her hooks in.

  “Everything is perfect.”

  Andrea pursed her mouth, raised an eyebrow but kept on typing.

  CHAPTER 10

  At 7 p.m. on Wednesday night the small restaurant on the corner block of Vicente Lopez and Ayacucho was empty of customers, save for one table in the back corner of the restaurant. Mike Costello sat alone, one eye on the menu, the other on the door. Outside the words “Rodi Bar” were carved into a discreet wooden sign that hung from two thin ropes attached to wrought-metal hooks.

  Mike looked up as he heard the door swing open and Simon Quinn bustled into the warmth provided by the open grill fires that were burning behind the counter.