Far South

Far South

David Enrique Spellman

Partially funded by an Arts Council of Wales Creative Wales Award.

A complete catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the
British Library on request

The right of David Enrique Spellman to be identified as the author of this
work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988

Copyright © 2011 David Enrique Spellman

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior
permission of the publisher.

First published in 2011 by Serpent’s Tail,
an imprint of Profile Books Ltd
3A Exmouth House
Pine Street
London EC1R 0JH
www.serpentstail.com

ISBN 978 1 84668 810 2
eISBN 978 1 84765 772 5

Designed and typeset by sue@lambledesign.demon.co.uk
Printed by Clays, Bungay, Suffolk

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

You have in your hands extracts from the casebook of Juan Manuel Pérez, a private investigator, who was contracted to search for Gerardo Fischer, the founder and director of the Real and Present Theater Company. Fischer disappeared on January 9th 2006 from the Temenos artists’ colony in the hills near the town of Ciudad Azul, a lakeside resort on the western shore of the Lago Gran Paraíso, in the Sierras of Córdoba. Transcripts of witness statements, some written down later, have been interspersed with the casebook narrative, along with a thirty-page section of a graphic novel/diary that belongs to Damien Kennedy, the company’s set designer. More responses to Gerardo’s disappearance are available on the Far South Project website in text, film and image. The url-addresses or keywords are found in this book.

Gerardo Fischer left South America, as did many others under political threat, in the early seventies and spent much of his life traveling the world, with longer stays in Rome, Sydney and New York. In 2004, he returned to Argentina to put on new theater productions including his adaptation of Fernando Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet.

Our deepest thanks go to Juan Manuel Pérez for the materials from his casebook. This is his personal response to Gerardo’s disappearance and, as such, is as much his story as Gerardo’s.

Clara Luz Weissman,
Far South Project Coordinator.¹

1 http://bit.ly/farsouth1

I first heard of the disappearance of the Uruguayan theater director, Gerardo Fischer, not long after four p.m. on January 10th 2006. I was stuck in a traffic jam in the town of Ciudad Azul. Ciudad Azul is beautiful lakeside resort about seven hundred kilometers west of Buenos Aires, in the Sierras of Córdoba. The hotels fill up in the summer with people trying to escape the heat of the city. No chance of that today, the temperature must have been around thirty-five degrees. The sun on the black metal of my Ford Executive had heated it up like an oven.

My cell phone rang.

A woman’s voice: ‘Is this Juan Manuel Pérez?’

‘What can I do for you?’

‘Are you the Juan Manuel Pérez who used to work for the federal police?’

‘That’s right.’

‘This is Ana Valenzuela from the Temenos Artists Colony.’

I knew this woman. A few years previously, I’d been the investigating officer on two brutal robberies they’d had up there. And I’d put away a certain Pablo Arenas, and his nephew. Three bent local cops had sold Arenas the guns to do the robberies and had taken quiet money from him. They got jailed too.

And that was the end of my police career.

My car got trashed. I got death threats. Somebody – friend or friends to the cops we’d jailed – had decided to make life impossible for me. I kept getting assigned jobs that nobody else could be bothered to investigate. It was frustrating. Or I was paranoid. And I got a big mouth. Maybe I mouthed off once too often to the head of my division. I got fired. So these days, instead of robbery and homicide, I investigate cases that involve alimony and child support. Ana Valenzuela must have gotten my number from the ad I run in the local newspaper.

‘How can I help you?’ I said.

‘Gerardo Fischer, our theater director, is missing. You have to help us. Would you please come to the colony?’

‘How long has he been missing?’

‘Since yesterday afternoon.’

‘That’s not very long.’

‘His house… It was open… everything open… He’d never do that… He was due in rehearsal yesterday… and today… and nobody has seen him for… I don’t know… he’s gone.’

She was distressed. This much was clear.

‘Have you called the local police?’

‘I have. But they said they’d pass it on to the missing persons office.’

Of course they would. The department has some decent guys in the locality now, who genuinely protect people. But no way were they going to mobilize a search on a missing person case only just twenty-four hours after it was reported. This Gerardo Fischer might be in some local farmhouse with a mistress of his and might show up for dinner tonight.

But Ana Valenzuela was panicked. She obviously thought that this was a kidnapping. We do have them from time to time but not like in the big cities. Ana wanted something done now. Immediately. I could understand that.

‘Please, you have to come.’

‘Okay. I’ll be there as soon as I can.’

‘You know Sara Suarez’s house? Come there, okay?’

‘Okay.’ I rang off. I saved Ana’s number on my cell phone.

My first thought was that this was going to be a paying job. My second thought was that it was going to be better than snooping around motel rooms trying to snap pictures of couples having sex. And the third, my gut instinct was that something was radically wrong up at the colony.

Could there be some connection between this Gerardo Fischer’s disappearance and the fact that Pablo Arenas, the man who had robbed the residents of the artists’ colony at gunpoint, had been released from jail not three weeks previously? It was possible. And I don’t like Arenas. Why should I? He got me kicked off the force.

But my car was at a standstill at the road works. The municipality was building a major new overpass along the edge of the town, close to Gran Paraíso Lake. A tractor-trailer was parked in the middle of the roadway. A huge concrete bridge strut hung in mid-air dangling from the arm of a crane.

I took off my shades and reached up to the rearview mirror to see how presentable I might be to a prospective client. A goatee in need of a trim, dark green shadows under my eyes, two days of stubble on my face and the stubble on my otherwise bald scalp made me look dingy. I guess I hadn’t been sleeping too well recently. I put the wraparound shades back on as if they might mask me. They didn’t. It was still me in the mirror, Juan Manuel Pérez. The not-cop.

Out beside the tractor-trailer, a construction foreman barked into a radio handset. The crane arm swung the concrete bridge strut over the construction site. The air conditioning fan whirred. The red stop sign didn’t change to green at the head of the line of cars. I had a copy of the local newspaper on the passenger seat, La Voz del Interior. I lit a cigarette and cast an eye over the front page. The newspaper was still full of the international fallout over President Kirchner’s canceling of Argentina’s debt to the IMF. It made him popular with me at any rate. Lower down the page was a report on a robbery from the military airport in Córdoba. Some cases of weapons had gone missing and an investigation was underway into the major security breach. Now that was something that the cops would have to move on fast. They’d commit a lot of manpower to that: far more than on a missing person case. I read as far as the third paragraph about some bogus catering service that had got a truck onto the base.

The tractor-trailer moved off. The crane began to lower the strut into place on the bridge site, the traffic sign turned to green, and the cars ahead of me inched forward through clouds of dust kicked up by the earth-moving machinery.

I got the Ford Executive in gear. I eased through the construction site. The road out of town was clear. I accelerated up the hill, going west, passed the cookie factories and the roadside barbecue restaurants. I turned down Route 60 toward the village of El Naranjo Campanil.

Open country, foothills of the Sierras, rolling hills with grass and rocks and scrubby trees, a roadside shrine to the Madonna. After ten kilometers, I turned off Route 60 and onto a dirt road. After six kilometers of washboard rises and washed-out cambers, dry streambeds and stands of trees, and easing around recently exposed rocks, I pulled in through the gate of the artists’ colony.

It was called Temenos. They called it that because Temenos in Greek means ‘sacred space.’ In Spanish, it’s an order, an imperative: it means ‘Fear us.’ You wouldn’t think many people would fear this bunch of artists. That had proved to be a serious mistake for two of the people who had tried to rob them. One of the would-be robbers was dead. Pablo Arenas had lost a finger and the piece of an ear. But now the son of a bitch had just been released from jail.

I let the cloud of dust settle behind my big black car. I took another look in the rearview mirror but I didn’t see any improvement in the way I looked. My mouth was stale. I got out of the car.

A furious barking of dogs came from inside Sara Suarez’s house. The house curtains twitched for a second and then the door opened. Sara came out onto the terrace. She was a stocky woman, about fifty-five years old, dressed in shorts and a kind of cotton smock. The young woman who’d called me, Ana Valenzuela, was behind her: dreadlocks piled up on top of her head; a cotton slip and surfer shorts. I lit a cigarette. Sara looked like I was bringing her the worst news she’d ever heard in her life. Ana was pale. And the dogs made me nervous.

‘Hi,’ I said when I reached the terrace.

‘Come in,’ Sara said.

The dogs barked behind a door to the living room.

‘We’ve talked to everybody on the property,’ Ana said. ‘Nobody’s seen him. Gerardo was due at rehearsal yesterday evening… and again this morning… and he never misses a rehearsal, ever. The least he would do is to let us know.’

‘What about friends of his off-site?’

‘We’ve called everyone we know,’ Sara said. ‘And we called the hospitals as well in case he’d been involved in some kind of accident.’

‘His house was left open,’ Ana said, ‘and when I went in there was no sign of him or his computer and we haven’t heard anything from him since yesterday morning.’

‘Any sign of a break in, robbery, anything like that?’

‘No,’ Ana said. ‘Just his laptop was missing, nothing else.’

‘He owned the house?’

‘No, he was just staying there while we developed a new play based on Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet,’ Ana said.

I like to read. I’ve got a good library at home. I know that book. I didn’t see how they could ever adapt anything from it. But that wasn’t my business.

‘His car?’

‘Still in the parking lot,’ Sara said.

That wasn’t a good sign.

‘Let’s hope a friend came by to pick him up. Maybe they’ve gone for a ride somewhere and he’ll just turn up.’

Ana and Sara exchanged a glance of panic.

‘Don’t worry. We’ll go down to his house, now… take a look around.’

‘You go with him, Ana,’ Sara said. ‘I’ll stay here by the phone.’

‘Look. I hate to bring this up but… I’m not a cop anymore. I work privately now. Do you understand?’

‘Don’t worry,’ Sara said. ‘We can cover your fees, I’m sure.’

I nodded.

‘I’m a little expensive. I’ll need a retainer fee of one thousand US dollars up front to cover my time and expenses.’

‘That’s fine,’ Sara said.

‘In cash, if that’s not inconvenient.’

Sara and Ana exchanged another glance.

‘It will take a couple of days,’ Sara said.

‘That’s okay.’

It might take time to raise a thousand dollars in cash and this Gerardo Fischer might have turned up by then. If he did turn up, I needn’t charge them the full amount. But I didn’t want to say that.

‘We can deal with the details tomorrow,’ I said.

‘Shall we go to the house?’ Ana said.

‘Yeah, let’s go.’

A red dirt trail led downhill from the terrace behind Sara’s house. Ana Valenzuela led me through Temenos. She was small, about a meter and a half, no more, but her tight white t-shirt clung to the curves of her body. She had a colored sarong tied around her waist. Her skin was a golden brown and her natural blonde hair caught the light so it showed up on her arms, a little downy around her upper lip, but not unattractive. On her left forearm she had some kind of oriental letters tattooed in blue.

It was still hot to be walking under the late afternoon sun despite the breeze in the hills. The Artists Colony was made up of small houses built on little plots of land among rocky outcrops and small areas of pine and eucalyptus. A large meeting hall or theater stood on a piece of flat land near the center of the property. We kept going downhill until we reached Gerardo Fischer’s house. It was a low one-story affair with steel grills on the door, shutters on the windows, and a low, stone wall around the perimeter of the plot. Ana unlocked the padlocks and the mortise locks and we went into the kitchen. It was cooler in here. There was no living room as such. I saw no obvious signs of any break-in or violence. Why would I? She said on the phone that she’d found the place wide open.

‘What time did you say it was, when you found out he was missing?’

‘About two-thirty,’ Ana said. ‘I’d just been to the river. I was still in a swimsuit and a sarong…’

I could imagine her in a swimsuit, her dreadlocks all wet.

‘I was just passing by,’ she said, ‘when I saw that the steel grid over the kitchen door was wide open. That was unusual. Gerardo should have been taking his siesta… but why hadn’t he locked up first? I came in through the gate. I just knew that something was wrong.’

The kitchen was empty. The windows were wide open. I went along the corridor to the bedroom. The bed was unmade. The upper sheet was all twisted. The pillows had fallen off. I went over to the window. Down below in the orchard, the hammock was empty. It was hanging between two plum trees. A gray pampas fox was eating the fruit that had fallen into the dry grass between the roots of the trees.

A fox eating fruit, I thought, how come?

I called out: ‘Gerardo!’

The fox raised its head. It looked straight at me. I felt this crawling-like static across my skin and my shoulders. My mouth was dry. Everything felt wrong. I saw that Gerardo’s laptop wasn’t on the desk by the bedroom window. I thought, he’s missing. Disappeared. All these terrible thoughts in my head: if Gerardo’s been kidnapped, who would pay the ransom? Gerardo has no family. I don’t know where his money comes from. Then again, Gerardo always seemed to have money: money to move from country to country whenever he wanted. Maybe he was involved in some business I know nothing about?

I never knew him to do any drugs. No marijuana. No coke. Nothing. A criminal would have been better off kidnapping me, because my parents have money. The sweat turned cold on my skin. The terrible anxiety at not finding him just flooded into me.

I love him so dearly… like… what? I don’t know. It was the work he did with me… he made me bring things out on stage I had no idea I was capable of doing. He’s so much older than me but he always related to me in the theater space with so much respect. I love him… I mean… but he’s about the same age as my father, you know. There’s such a difference between them: my father’s a businessman, he makes a lot of money, and Gerardo only just about makes a living as the director of the company… Gerardo lived in exile during the years of the dictatorship while my father never seemed to have been affected by it at all. I think my father knew people in the junta… but I’m not going to talk about that… Gerardo was gone. I wanted to call someone with my cell phone. Get some advice. Sara up at the colony. She’s always so practical. Pragmatic.

I thought, well, she’ll know what to do.

I took out the cell phone. No signal, of course.

I thought, should I lock up the house and find a place where I can call? Or wait for Gerardo to get back? He’s not coming back. I knew that. I went into the bedroom again. Crossed to the window. The fox had gone from under the hammock. Maybe Gerardo had turned into a fox and disappeared… I wish…

‘How old is Gerardo?’ I said.

‘Close to sixty, I guess,’ Ana said.

I couldn’t see this young woman, at most in her late twenties, with dreadlocks and tattoos sleeping with a sixty-year-old guy… but you never know.

‘Is there anyone who might have a grudge against him among the people here?’

Ana’s blue eyes fixed on me. She shifted back on the kitchen chair.

‘I don’t think so.’ She shook her head. Maybe there was someone but she didn’t want to say.

‘I have to ask you this. Have you noticed any strangers poking around?’

That brought back memories of Pablo Arenas for both of us: the robberies, the brutal beatings, the killing… back then she’d been one of the colony residents that I’d had to interview. They’d all been shaken up. Some of them had been relieved it wasn’t their houses that had been robbed: that it wasn’t they who’d had to face the robbers. But it had left most of the colony residents, Ana included, angry, shaky, but most of all, the robberies had brought them together. They wanted to look out for one another. Ana was fiercely protective of her friends. I admired that in her. She was pretty, too. But I was a cop with a job to do. No chance to explore anything more friendly with her.

‘No. No one I can think of.’

‘I’m going to take a look around the house.’ I went down the corridor: two bedrooms, one on either side. I went into the one on the right, Gerardo’s bedroom, the master bedroom. Just like Ana said, the pillows were still on the floor. The bed was rumpled with no sign of any kind of struggle, amorous or otherwise. I checked the bottom sheet for stains. Nothing.

Three books lay on the bedside cabinet: Ricardo Piglia’s Assumed Name, a collection of short stories from 1975; Juan Rulfo’s novel, Pedro Páramo; and Illuminations, a collection of essays by Walter Benjamin. I knew the first two books but not the third. I flipped through the pages of all three books in case there might be a note tucked in among them. There wasn’t. I opened the door of the bedside cabinet. Empty. So I tried the wardrobe: a sports jacket, a raincoat; two pairs of trousers, one cotton, one linen; a small pile of dirty laundry; some socks on one of the three shelves. I checked the pockets of the jacket, coat and pants but there was nothing, not even a dirty tissue or an old train ticket. But Fischer might have packed a bag and left these things. Maybe he’d just been careless and left the doors and windows open knowing that Ana would arrive just after he’d left so she could lock up for him.

I couldn’t see anything else of any interest in this room.

I looked under the bed just for good measure but there was nothing there either but a few dust balls clinging to dead hair.

In the spare bedroom, the metal-framed bed wasn’t even made up. It was little better than a camping cot with a thin foam mattress. Nothing under the mattress, nor under the bed. I knelt down and opened that bedside cabinet: nothing. It was a house for guests, a rental place, and Fischer seemed to travel light.

I opened the closet just inside the bedroom door: old adventure books for children, dusty, untouched for years; a pile of magazines; a pencil case with some colored crayons and crumbled shavings. I closed the door. I quit the small bedroom, went down the corridor and through the door onto the terrace.

The terrace faced north and was lit up by the bright sun. I ran my hand above the dry-stone wall that kept people from falling off the terrace and onto the overgrown lawn three meters below. Directly opposite the open window of the master bedroom, a single stone had been dislodged from the wall. I went to the end of the terrace and down the steps to where the stone and some crumbled mortar remnants were lying in the grass. The uncut grass from the bottom of the wall to the hammock might have been bent down by footfalls. Could Fischer have dislodged the stone as he jumped off the terrace into the orchard, and then ran toward the trees at the perimeter of the property? Why hadn’t he gone down the steps? Or had the stone been dislodged by a struggle on the terrace.

I followed what might have been the faint evidence of footmarks in the grass as far as the hammock. There was no sign of the footmarks continuing any further than that, but the ground was less grassy in this part of the garden, just hard-packed dirt, so scuffs and traces might not show. At the edge of the orchard, a grove of trees led down to the stream below. I ducked under the rope that tied the hammock to one of the plum trees. Lots of fallen fruit lay around the roots. I guess this had been what Ana’s fox had been eating. Where the orchard ended at a stand of eucalyptus and pine, the branches had been broken and the earth scuffed up. That was recent, too. But all this breakage could have happened more than a week ago. No rain in the last few days. Just dry thunder. I skirted the stand of trees and made my way down to the streambed by the small path that was closer to the house. The streambed was dry, mostly rocks. Spiny shrubs, silica-sparkle in the dry dirt. Impossible to tell whether anyone had been through there or not. If Gerardo Fischer had been frightened by an intruder, he might have grabbed his laptop, slipped out the bedroom window, jumped the terrace wall and dragged a rock off the top of the wall as he tumbled into the garden. He could have run toward the hammock and veered off into the woods, broken through the tree line, skittered down to the streambed and kept on running until he reached the road. He could have gone anywhere from there.

If Gerardo had got away from someone chasing him, any minute now, he would probably call Ana or Sara to let them know where he was; unless someone really had been chasing him, and they’d caught him. They could be holding him for ransom or they might have killed him. But why would they want to kill him? Up in the eucalyptus trees that overlooked the orchard, the black shapes of vultures squatted in the branches, heads bent between humped wings. No corpse around here or they would already be bothering it. If he’d been killed for his laptop – and around here people can get killed for less – his body might have been dumped anywhere out there in the wilderness: maybe by the side of some dirt road deep in the hills. If someone wanted a ransom, they’d be in touch pretty soon.

But right now, Gerardo Fischer might just be with some woman in a neighboring holiday home. He still might turn up. I wanted to believe that for Ana’s sake. Somehow, I didn’t.

I made my way back up the path from the streambed to the orchard. Ana was sitting on the side of the hammock, easing it a little, back and forth.

‘Are you okay?’ I asked.

She nodded. She was so tiny. She stood up. I’m not a really tall guy but her dreadlocks only reached up as far as about elbow-height on me. We climbed back up the steps to the terrace and into the house. This could still be just a missing person case no matter how worried Ana was. I told her that. I could see that she wanted to believe it but she didn’t. I wanted to give Gerardo time to show up if he was going to show up. I was still enough of a cop for that. But Ana was so spooked I knew she was convinced that Gerardo Fischer had been kidnapped.

I went back into the house, along the corridor and into the kitchen. Ana sat down next to the table. I opened the single kitchen cabinet. Nothing but a few boxes of pasta, cans of tomatoes, olive oil, a pack of yerba mate, onions, potatoes, flour, and an unopened bottle of wine: a decent Malbec, from Mendoza.

On Ana’s side of the table was a drawer with a round wooden knob, probably a cutlery drawer.

‘Do you mind?’ I said.

Ana got up from the table. I opened the drawer: no cutlery, some string, a corkscrew, some old ballpoint pens on a cardboard folder, and a set of car keys.

‘Is this a spare set?’ I asked Ana.

‘I don’t know,’ she said.

‘We’ll take them. I want to check on the car.’ I pocketed the keys. I was about to close the drawer but I stopped. Maybe the cardboard folder contained invoices, records of what he’d bought, evidence of where he’d been during the past few days… or last few weeks. I slid the folder out of the drawer and opened it on the tabletop. It wasn’t an invoice book. It was some kind of notebook. It was pretty thin, and not all the pages had been used up. The pages were covered in a tiny crabbed calligraphy. I’d have to use a magnifying glass to be able to read the words. From what I could make out, some of the entries were in diary form. The rest seemed to be just random thoughts and notes. A lot of the entries had something to do with the Middle East. Among the scratches I could at least recognize the words Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine… I didn’t have time to read it now.

Inside the back cover of the folder, in a kind of pocket, was a packet of postcards and a few old photographs of people – from the 1980s by the look of the clothes – and a Jewish New Years greeting card – that wasn’t too recent either. Nothing in the book seemed at all recent. I held the pages open for Ana to look at.

‘Is this Gerardo’s handwriting?’

Ana nodded. ‘I think so.’

‘You know this book?’

She shook her head.

‘I’m going to keep this, just for a short time. There might be something useful in here.’

‘Okay,’ Ana said.

If Gerardo Fischer suddenly showed up, as still he might, he might not be too pleased that I’d been poking through his personal writings. I could deal with that. I’m a curious son of a bitch.

‘Why don’t we lock up?’ I said.

Ana picked up the house keys from the table, her small white hand closed around them: the tattoos on her forearm deep blue against her pale skin, her dreadlocks swaying forward. I could really go for a woman who looked like that; at least to get to know her a little better. Under the grape arbor, outside the kitchen, Ana turned a separate key in each lock of the steel-grilled gate.

If Fischer had been sleeping with her, he was one lucky old man.

Ana and I walked back up the hill under the fierce sun.

‘There’s no one that Gerardo might be seeing who could have come up here and taken him off on a trip for a couple of days?’

‘He never misses rehearsals,’ Ana said. ‘And he hasn’t called us.’

I nodded.

‘What state of mind was he in the last time you saw him?’

‘State of mind?’

‘Yes, was he agitated, nervous, distracted?’

‘It’s difficult to imagine Gerardo distracted,’ she said.

‘He didn’t seem scared at all?’

‘No, but he doesn’t really show what he’s feeling… if he doesn’t want to. Especially not fear.’

‘Did he have anything to be afraid of?’

‘Up here? After the robberies? Don’t we all have something to be afraid of?’

‘Okay. So nothing unusual about his state of mind?’

She shook her head.

We walked along in silence until we reached the parking lot.

‘It’s that one,’ Ana said. ‘His car.’

She pointed to a Fiat Fiorino. The small white van was covered in dust. I found the key opened the driver’s side door. It wasn’t too messy in there. I popped open the glove compartment: documents for the car, a small pack of tissues, some old cassette tapes, Arvo Pärt, a Bach Cantata, and Gerardo Gandini’s Flores Negras. In the back of the van were a thin mattress, some literary magazines in English, a coil of rope neatly tied off, and a car jack. I locked up the van.

We walked back to Sara’s house. It was cool inside and the dogs were locked away, maybe in her study. She had some mate ready. Ana and I sat down on the easy chairs in there. I put the folder down on the arm of the chair.

‘Are you in the theater company, too?’ I said to Sara.

‘No, I’m not.’

‘Are you a writer, a painter?’

‘I’m a psychologist. Everybody up here just puts up with me. They don’t really consider me an artist, you know, but psychology is an art, isn’t it?’

‘Psychology an art? I never would have thought that.’

‘Well, I mean… psychiatry, psychosis, that’s hard science, up to a point… maybe if you have to prescribe medication. But understanding the mind itself? Consciousness? Nobody has ever explained consciousness… or what it is, have they?’

‘I guess I never tried.’

‘A lot of people have tried, but the best you get is a model and then you find out that the model is limited… like everything else in the scientific world. There aren’t any answers… there’s always more to discover… until you find you can’t know… we’ll never know.’

‘Is that what you’re doing up here, a study on consciousness?’

Sara laughed.

‘Not at all. I’m writing a thesis for a doctorate: “The Psychological Impact of Immigration to Argentina on European Jews and their descendants”.’

‘Was Gerardo helping you with that?’

‘It’s difficult to pin down Gerardo for a long interview.’

The dogs started snarling and barking from behind the door.

‘Do the dogs disturb you?’ she said. ‘You shouldn’t worry. They’re under control.’

‘I’m glad.’

‘I like to feel secure… since the robberies. My dogs give me that.’

‘It’s okay.’

‘And now Gerardo has disappeared.’

‘How did you find out he’d disappeared?’

‘Ana.’ Sara waved a hand at her. ‘It was about three o’clock. I was on the shady side of the terrace, watering the plants.’

‘How long have you been at the colony?’

‘Since the Saturday before Christmas. All the cottages are full. Everyone is up here to escape the heat of Buenos Aires. Everyone in the village knows we’re here because regular deliveries have started again: drinking water, vegetables, bread.’

‘You think someone in the village is responsible for Gerardo’s disappearance?’

‘I don’t know. It crossed my mind. When I saw Ana hurrying up the path, breathless, close to tears, I knew something terrible had happened. “Gerardo’s missing,” she said. The way she said it, flat, it gave me the chills even in that heat. I thought: Oh my God, not again. I couldn’t help thinking about those robberies a few years ago; how we were just getting over them, feeling safe again at the colony.’

‘What did you do when you found out that Gerardo was missing?’

‘I just told myself that I had to stay calm because there were a hundred or more possibilities that might have happened to Gerardo and many hundreds more of which I couldn’t even conceive and all of them would be better than him being kidnapped; or almost any of them. Then for a moment I wondered if Gerardo might be capable of suicide.’

‘You think that’s possible?’

‘I don’t think so. But how can anyone tell what might drive him to an overdose, or to shoot himself… or whatever? At least a kidnapping would be better than that. We’d get him back in one piece after paying out a little money. Or a lot of money. “We’re going to start with the cops,” I said to Ana. Then I went into the house and I dialed from my landline. I explained to the desk sergeant what had happened and I asked if anyone had reported any accident or arrests, anything. Nothing. The desk sergeant just told me to call back the next morning and he’d file a missing persons report. “Wait until tomorrow,” the desk sergeant said. “Then we can list him as a missing person.” “Yes, of course,” I said to him. I mean, what was the point of arguing? “He’ll turn up,” I said to Ana. “No, he won’t,” Ana said. And then she burst into tears. I put my arm around her but she was inconsolable. I suggested calling you. You helped us a lot after those robberies up here. I thought you were still a federal cop but Ana had seen your ad in the newspaper… she knew that you ran some kind of investigation agency, now. So that’s how come we called you. You’re a decent guy. I trust you.’

‘Thanks,’ I said.

‘I trust you, too,’ Ana said.

She’s a very beautiful young woman.

‘If Fischer shows up, no matter what time of the day or night, you let me know right away, okay?’

I got up and tucked the folder under my arm.

‘We will,’ Ana said.

I really wanted to get to know Ana better but right now I thought that I ought to keep my mind on finding Fischer. If Fischer had been kidnapped, it would make sense to talk to some people in the area who were in the kidnapping business.

Pablo Arenas knew the kidnapping business very well. He was a veteran of the Dirty War. He’d been in the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance. He’d robbed the colony twice. Maybe his kind of trouble came in threes. If Arenas had Fischer, it would be better to talk to Arenas soon. Very soon. Like immediately. But I wouldn’t visit Arenas alone.

‘Right now,’ I said to Ana, ‘I need to call my partner at the office. I have some ideas I need to follow up on with him: routine checks, but they might just turn up something useful, okay?’

Ana nodded.

‘Try not to worry now. We’ll find Gerardo, I’m sure.’

They accompanied me out to the terrace and across the parking lot to my car.

I leaned down to kiss Sara and then Ana on the cheek.

Through the dusty windshield, I watched them walk back across the parking lot toward Sara’s house. I opened the glove compartment and took out the hip holster with my .45 caliber Colt automatic. I hooked it onto my belt. The M1911 is a heavy weapon but I like the heft. The design has hardly changed since before the First World War in Europe. It has a lot of stopping power.

I got out the cell phone and called my partner, Rangel.

‘Can you meet me in thirty minutes at the grocery market on Route 60 next to the Alfajores factory?’

‘Sure, why?’ Rangel said.

‘We’re going to see Pablo Arenas.’

‘Don’t you have some kind of history with that guy?’

‘I’ll fill you in on the way,’ I said.

I hung up.

I started the car and backed it around to get down the drive of the Artists Colony. I headed down the dirt road toward Route 60. Knowing the criminal talent in this area, Arenas was a good bet for a kidnapping and ransom case. That said, it was doubtful that even if Arenas had kidnapped Fischer he would have brought Fischer to his house. Still, a visit to Arenas would be a simple way for the word to get around the criminal world that I was looking for Fischer and I could help negotiate a deal for him. After all, I wasn’t a cop any more.

Rangel was already at the grocery market when I arrived. He was leaning against the hood of his gray Volkswagen. When I pulled up, he ambled over. Rangel’s belly, framed by his open suit jacket, overhung the belt of his pants and his chins had begun to hide the knot of his tie. He clutched a can of Coca Cola in one hand and a cigarette in the other. His face was red and sweaty and his thinning hair was plastered across his tanned skull. His moustache was neatly trimmed. How could a guy in this condition have a wife and two kids?

‘You just come from a funeral?’ I said.

‘I thought maybe we were going to one.’

‘Yours if you don’t get in shape.’

‘Fuck you.’ He flicked his butt toward a garbage bin in the grocery car park and got into the passenger seat of my car. We drove down toward San Sebastian, which was about twelve kilometers away.

‘So what’s the deal with Pablo Arenas?’ Rangel said.

‘He’s just out of jail. Probably hungry.’

‘He’s a political type, right?’

‘Argentine Anticommunist Alliance. Recent conviction for armed robbery. Previous in Bariloche and Buenos Aires Province.’

‘You put him away for robbery?’

‘Correct. Flamboyant son of a bitch, three years ago, he arrived in a Ford Falcon outside the house of this Melissa Auerbach, a German woman staying up there. Three guys got out of the Falcon. Two of them had ski masks, the third had one of these rubber masks, you know… full head… like a werewolf.’

‘A werewolf?’ Rangel said. ‘The Rocky Horror Show. This was Arenas?’

‘No. His nephew. This guy was young… built. And he had a tattoo.’

‘Distinguishing marks, right?’

‘A snake around a dagger.’

‘Old school,’ Rangel said.

‘Right, and the other two guys, one of them was a skinny kid in jogging pants and a Los Angeles Raiders tee shirt; the third guy in a track suit was short and fat and a good deal older and he was the main guy, the boss. He was the main son of a bitch.’

‘Arenas?’

‘Right.’ I’d told this story a lot back then: to the judge and jury mostly. ‘Nobody was around. It was sunset. These three sons of bitches were on this old woman’s porch and they had guns… handguns. They went up onto the porch and just knocked on the door. This Melissa thought it was one of their people, you know, artist or writer or something… she opened the door and she’s faced with these three guys in masks and the fat guy put a gun muzzle to her forehead and pushed her back in the house.’

‘And how old is this woman?’

‘About sixty. Hippy type, all wrinkled and brown… and she hennas her hair and she wears these flowing colored smocks that hide her weight. Get the picture?’

‘Sure.’

‘So they were all in her house and it’s just like one big room for living and eating and the kitchen and an open stairway that goes up to the loft where she sleeps. Melissa saw that the fat guy was really calm but the two young guys were real jittery. She thought they were local. They seemed to be looking for something in particular but they said nothing. She got her purse and opened it and emptied all the money in it onto the dining table. The kid in the werewolf mask grabbed it and pocketed it. The other young guy in the jogging suit was shaking. He held the gun pointed at Melissa and his hand was shaking. She was terrified that he was going to shoot her out of fear. Melissa was still holding her purse open. The old guy, Arenas, plucked out the credit card and pocketed it.

‘He said to her, “You got more money?”

‘Melissa said, “No.” So the bastard smacked Melissa across the cheek with his pistol. You should have seen the mark it left: livid, red mark on her white cheek. I saw it.’

‘A sixty-year-old woman.’ Rangel interlocked his fingers behind his head, leaned back. ‘Cute son of a bitch.’

‘Yeah. After that she was terrified of getting badly hurt. “Wait,” she said to him. Melissa went over to the stairs that led to the loft. She shifted a tile at the side of the stair stringer. She pulled out a small wad of new bills, about two thousand pesos.

‘The old guy said, “This all you got?”

‘Melissa said, “Yes, I swear.”

‘So then the old guy asked her where she’s from.

‘“Germany,” she said.

‘You know what he told her? “I like Germans,” the old guy said. Can you believe that?’

Rangel just shrugged at me.

‘The one in the werewolf mask was holding his gun sideways like some hip-hop gangster from a Hollywood movie, and the skinny kid in the ski mask was still shaking.

‘“Don’t call the police for at least an hour,” the old guy said, “or someone will come back here to see you, you understand?”

‘Melissa understood. “Okay, let’s go,” the old guy said and the two young guys backed out of the door and the old guy followed them. She heard the car start up and she went to the window. She saw that it was a rust-colored Ford Falcon with a busted taillight. She was still too terrified to call the police. Then she saw the Falcon go back over the hill and drive away.

‘Melissa ran down to her friend’s house after an hour. They called the cops, the local cops, but the cops just said it must have been some criminals from Buenos Aires up for the summer. They did come to take a look around but then they just shrugged and drove off.’

‘And the guys in the masks came back?’ Rangel said.

‘Two weeks later, the same three guys and the same car, in the late evening, just like before. But this time they went to a neighboring property: the house of one Ramón Gorriti. He has two people living with him, Carlos Brescia and his mother, Miriam. They were on the porch. Ramón, who is Carlos’s lover, was in the garden. He was just watering the plants.’

‘Carlos’s lover?’ Rangel sounded surprised.

‘Yeah.’

‘He’s gay?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And Miriam is Carlos’s mother?’

‘Yeah, she’s real old, and she hasn’t been well and Carlos had brought her to the property to look after her for a while.’

‘Wait a minute. Carlos brings his mother to live with him and his gay lover?’

‘Yeah.’

‘How does she like it?’

‘She’s fine with it.’

‘How old is she?’

‘She’s seventy-something.’

Rangel shook his head. ‘This fucking country…’

‘So Carlos and his mother were on the porch. She was on the swing-seat and Carlos had his bench and his weights out there. He was doing his reps: barbell flies, bench presses, squats… you should see this guy work out.’

‘In front of his own mother?’

‘Yeah… in front of his mother, in the shade, the fresh air, the evening breeze, the red sunset, what the fuck? Do you have to keep interrupting?’

‘Sorry,’ Rangel said. He looked horrified, his puffy eyes glazed and mouth open like some kind of bottom-dwelling fish.