Blood Makes Noise Read online

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2013 Gregory Widen

  All rights reserved.

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

  Published by Thomas & Mercer

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781611098990

  ISBN-10: 1611098998

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012918814

  For my parents

  CONTENTS

  Start Reading

  PROLOGUE

  April 21, 1947

  April 9, 1953

  June 6, 1955

  MICHAEL

  November 23, 1955

  1.

  2.

  May 12, 1956

  3.

  4.

  5.

  June 9, 1956

  6.

  June 22, 1956

  7.

  8.

  August 23, 1956

  9.

  September 10, 1956

  10.

  11.

  September 13, 1956

  12.

  13.

  14.

  1957

  1962

  ALEJANDRO

  June 1, 1970

  15.

  16.

  August 15, 1971

  17.

  HER

  August 22, 1971

  18.

  August 29, 1971

  19.

  20.

  August 31, 1971

  21.

  September 1, 1971

  22.

  September 2, 1971

  23.

  24.

  September 3, 1971

  25.

  26.

  September 5, 1971

  27.

  28.

  29.

  September 7, 1971

  30.

  31.

  32.

  33.

  34.

  35.

  36.

  EPILOGUE

  June 21, 1973

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Based on True Events

  PROLOGUE

  April 21, 1947

  It was late, nearly midnight, and everyone else had left the bank hours ago. Home to wives, girlfriends, warm social dinners made more perfect in his mind because he had neither friends nor dinner invitations—just his last name on the front of the building and a hatred for this minor errand-boy assignment he’d been left with.

  His desk was large, prominently placed, and if you didn’t know better, you’d think this was a young man of responsibility. But everyone did know better—even, seemingly, the ancestral portraits glaring at him now.

  The bank was an old, family one. Never a fertile dynasty, theirs produced a single son each generation to carry on the family crime. But every gene pool has its shallow end, and this son was trusted with little but the time to concentrate on the growing shame that was becoming his inheritance.

  And so Otto Spoerri sat there, waiting, and threw crumpled paper balls at a wastebasket he never hit.

  The note, hand delivered that afternoon, was predictable enough. A wealthy foreign individual—unnamed of course, this being a Swiss bank—would send a representative at midnight—it was always midnight, wasn’t it?—to arrange a large, VIP safety deposit box. The representative undoubtedly would be some colorless suit straining under the weight of some monster or other’s fleeing, bloodstained fortune.

  At twenty past midnight he was dozing when there was an insistent rap at the rear glass doors. Otto got up and opened them on a broad-shouldered man in livery costume. “Herr Spoerri?”

  “Of course.” Who the hell else would be stuck here at this hour? The livery costume nodded, walked back to the idling limousine, and opened the rear door.

  From it emerged a beautiful woman in her late twenties. She wore mink, her blonde hair up in a fierce chignon. Otto Spoerri recognized the face immediately, and his surprise was sufficient enough to leave him momentarily without manners.

  “Are you the banker?” she asked in Spanish. Finally coming to attention, he took her hand and bent with a snap. “Senora. I am surprised. Please, welcome to Kredit Spoerri.”

  She nodded. He led her inside, offered a chair, muddled his university Spanish. “You needn’t have come in person, Senora. We accept transactions through intermediaries.”

  “Had I wanted intermediaries, Herr Spoerri, I would have sent them.”

  “Of course.”

  He laid out the relevant papers for her to complete. Eva Duarte Perón. Evita. First Lady of Argentina—a dictator’s wife but widely considered the real power—she was here on her grand European tour. In the utter dreariness and hunger of postwar Europe, the more dreary and starving the country, the more fabulous—if often clenched—the reception this cattle-rich nation’s First Lady had been given.

  But things had gone sour in Switzerland. The world’s recent insanity hadn’t lapped over this side of the mountains, and its people were neither hungry for Argentine beef nor amused by its demanding maiden. Otto could glimpse tomato stains clinging to the limousine’s finish, souvenirs from the Zurich crowds protesting her visit.

  “I apologize for the hour and whatever appointments I’ve kept you from. Are you married, Herr Spoerri?”

  “No, Senora.”

  “You do not love women?”

  “Perhaps too much, Senora.”

  “If you cannot love one woman, then you can love nothing.”

  “Wise advice, Senora.”

  “The marriage between my husband and I is the light of my nation.”

  Her bosom swelled under cashmere, and he wondered if it was my husband or my nation that did it.

  She sat back, crossed her legs, and took a cigarette from her purse. Otto struck his lighter and held it across the desk. She placed the cigarette in her mouth, bent forward, and, as the flame licked the end, turned the shaft between red lips and allowed her eyes to rest an instant on his.

  “Our standard procedure, Senora, is to issue you a completely private account number. With this—”

  “I would like a key.”

  “Senora?”

  “One key. Nothing more.”

  “It is usual to have an authorization list of who may have access to the box. It provides security against—”

  “No list. Just a single key. The key, only the key, is my authorization. It will, however, be a very special key.”

  “All our keys at Kredit Spoerri are special, Senora.”

  “I am quite sure. But this key is already made. It is manufactured to such a temperance that if a false one is placed in the lock it will disintegrate instantly.”

  “I’m not sure I am aware of such a lock.”

  “It too has already been made and will be installed in the box.”

  “An outside lock? No security list? I’m afraid such an arrangement is unprecedented.”

  She took a breath from her cigarette and rested her elbow on the chair’s armrest, cocking the smoldering end off the side of her cheek. “Of course.”

  What a woman, with her harlot lips and shopgirl swagger, the heat of an absolute confidence that dried his eyes. A woman who’d come to a country that despised her, waded through seething crowds and splashing fruit, all to sit in the city’s oldest bank at midnight and calmly wait for what she wanted, turning the cigarette between
moist lips, and the contest was over before she ever walked in—over the day she was born.

  “Such an arrangement is probably against Swiss banking law.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “I’d be putting myself personally at risk.”

  He watched as his words were dismembered and eaten by smoke.

  “Yes.”

  And he thought of her in bed. Imagined that focus pounding itself down on him. As if divining his thoughts, she leaned forward. “I will deal only with you, Herr Spoerri. There will be no statements sent to me—if I need information I will contact you alone. My name will be on no records. There will be only our friendship, our understanding, and the key, for which I will pay handsomely, also to you.”

  “Why should I do this?”

  “Because you are a young man in an old man’s bank. A young man with dreams of a different future. I would like to be a part of that future.”

  Smiling from a place unmapped, she handed back the sheaf of government deposit forms—blank.

  “If I may view my deposit box now, Herr Spoerri.”

  And he lingered, jealous of the moment, listening to the rustling of her stockings, then stood with proper Spoerri formality. “This way, Senora Perón, please.”

  Her limo driver brought in the leather cases, nearly a dozen, and in private Evita and he transferred the contents to their new home and sealed it all with the custom locking mechanism, carried in a shiny aluminum attaché.

  Otto knew he would never tell his father, or the bank, that the box was Eva Perón’s. He printed up the single sheet with the number and laid it in her warm palm. She left then, and he had waited for her return. There followed hand-delivered notes, short, fragrant sentences. But Eva Perón herself never appeared again. In five years she was dead and the box remained, untouched, and he grew older, coming to the vault sometimes, sitting there, thinking of it and her.

  Her legacy had plenty of company. This was a room full of midnights: tax evaders, gangsters, Nazis—many dead, like her, their reeking fortunes marooned under the devil’s quilt of secrecy that was his family’s crime. His nation’s.

  April 9, 1953

  Juan Duarte never liked the river, and now it lay outside his window, scaly with moonlight, taunting him. It was his first memory of this cursed city and would likely be his last. A bitter wind off its surface rattled his reflection—the same wind that had taken his sister, coming for him. Juan drew in a tired breath and dreamed of floating away. To his village, its hopeless roads. They had danced circles in the dust as children there, his sister and he. They had needed only each other…

  “Where is it?”

  Juan recognized the voice without turning. Bluff and baritone, with the crack of jackboots. Juan’s eyes stayed on the window. “I don’t know.”

  He wished he sounded tougher, for once confident in the presence of the peacock. Instead his voice was only sad.

  “Come, Juan, be reasonable”—spoken with a reasonable voice. This would be the peacock’s shadow, announced—always—with the tap of his dog-headed cane; everyone’s favorite demon uncle. “You’re among family. How can you keep secrets from your own blood?”

  “I tell you, I don’t know.” A gust of wind jarred his reflection: pencil mustache and hair pressed flat with brilliantine. A dandy.

  “Liar! She…” The baritone peacock again, his voice breaking on that word as it broke every time he uttered it since…

  “She was your sister. She told you everything.”

  And nothing. He had known her better than any, and he had known her hardly at all.

  His eyes dropped to the dresser, where they’d placed his suicide note, the handwriting and syntax better than his own, and he appreciated that.

  “Answer me, goddamn you!”

  He didn’t care anymore. Had stopped caring since she died eight months ago. He felt himself drifting. Away from this place. Toward a thought that made him smile. “Did it ever occur to either of you that my sister, of all women, could have taken it with her?”

  Sighs. A cock of gunmetal. His favorite demon uncle: “I always had affection for you, Juanito, even if I never liked you very much.”

  The last thing Juan Duarte thought, as oblivion tapped the back of his skull, was how much he hated that goddamn river.

  June 6, 1955

  The terrorist bomb that exploded outside a Recoleta café during that long year of bombs was unremarkable but for the fact that it misfired. Black powder packed so loosely it went off more like a firework than an instrument of political pressure. Still, when the police picked through the shattered glass and broken bamboo chairs, they found it had, despite its ineptitude, managed to claim one victim.

  His name was Tomasso Villa, but everyone knew him as Tomi, a genial drunk who earned his gin money making deliveries for a Spanish doctor on Juncal. He’d stopped that afternoon for his single nonalcoholic drink of the day, an espresso, and was blown into bloody hieroglyphics for his trouble.

  The satchel he had been carrying was ripped open and its contents cast haphazardly across the park fronting the café. When the Buenos Aires cops collected them, they found only lab reports, some correspondence…

  …And six X-rays.

  X-rays of a young, dead woman.

  In Argentina a call at midnight is always a lover, but a call at four a.m. is always destiny.

  November 23, 1955

  1.

  It was a sound Michael Suslov never got used to.

  After four years back in the capital, still it was a sound of childhood. Shrill, angry, coming to take your life away.

  “Yes?” His voice croaked with sleep. The old-fashioned receiver was heavy in his hand—hard Bakelite thick enough to kill someone. Everything was old-fashioned here. It was a national obsession.

  “Michael?”

  Only two people in the world called him Michael: his wife, Karen, and Hector Cabanillas.

  “Hector.”

  “I apologize for the hour, Michael.” It was a bad sign when Hector started apologizing. “I must see you.”

  He looked at the bedside clock—4:13 a.m.—and thought of telling Hector it was late, to go back to bed.

  “Give me half an hour.”

  Michael dressed, put some coffee on, sat in humid silence as it perked. The walls around him rang with the evening’s fight. It had been over a bridge invitation. A barbecue. Something.

  He poured his coffee and stood at the window. It was open, and he could feel a muddy breeze blow through him. The back garden, laid out in tidy European rows by the house’s former, tidy European owners, glowed gunmetal under a sliver of moon. A dog barked somewhere.

  Karen and he had always fought, even used to be proud of it—flash fires clearing the deadwood. But the fires were coming more often, and they lingered now, scorching the stalks beneath.

  She was sleeping when he crouched beside the bed and whispered he had to leave. She mumbled something in her sleep. Michael smiled. When they still lived in Arlington, Karen had slept through a snow-heavy cedar branch crashing through their bedroom window.

  At the first roadblock on Avenida del Libertador, Michael slowed the car, showed the peach-fuzzed militia soldier his diplomatic ID, and drove on. Sweat rose under his shirt. It was only a day before Thanksgiving back home, but in the backward seasons here at the bottom of the world, the capital already groaned under the hammer blows of summer. There were fewer roadblocks now than the last time he came this way. The generals were starting to relax, starting to believe that this coup might stick.

  He could glimpse the Rio Plata now. Too big for a river, too small for an ocean, in winter it threatened grayly; in summer it lay fetid brown and coffin still. He followed it south to the Federal District and its buildings of state. Drowsy sycamores appeared on the streets, some pocked with age, others gunfire.

  Behind the sycamores lay Government House—Casa Rosada—until recently the home of the president, its century-old pink walls, originally colored
with beef blood and lime, now stained with the gray shudder of five-hundred-pound bombs. The work of good Catholic boys in good Catholic airplanes taking it to heart when the pope excommunicated El Presidente. The pilots missed their man but killed four hundred civilians. Good Catholic bodies broken and strewn over the Plaza de Mayo.

  He slowed for another roadblock near the burned-out basilica, one of the dozen churches torched by unionist mobs in revenge for the pope-inspired bombing of Casa Rosada. Squatters drifted in the gloom, their candles lonely, bobbing sparks.

  Hector had asked Michael to meet him at the Confederación General del Trabajo workers’ union center on Azopardo. Michael parked his car one street over and walked to the CGT’s art deco front door, tonight dark and silent. Not surprising. Once the powerful lightning rod that juiced, then mouthpieced, a working-class descamisado revolution, since the coup half its leaders were in hiding or across the river in Uruguay. The CGT of the moment was a distinctly low-key institution.

  There were usually two of the generals’ armed hard bodies at the door, and their absence surprised Michael. What didn’t were the piles of wilting flowers stacked against the wall. Every morning the military took them away and by the next they were always back—roses, tulips, small handmade crucifixes—delivered by a legion of ancient women armed with feet so light, dedication so complete, the guards never saw them. A cycle played for three months now that ended every morning with still more laid against the wall. Their devotion not for this arrogant hunk of concrete, not for the CGT…

  For Her.

  Michael’s head snapped suddenly at the sound of boots. Two uniformed soldiers, rifles slung over shoulders, came into the light. Between them bobbed the short, gray head of Hector Cabanillas, deputy commander of Argentine military intelligence. Palace guardian. The new residents of the palace had taken a shine to quiet, measured Hector. But then, they always did.

  “Michael.” The handshake was reliable, the smile playful under a wilderness of wrinkles. Hector had on the dark-blue suit that was his trademark, winter or summer. “I’m so glad you came.”