Flashback

Chapter Nine

August, 1947, a hotel in Buenos Aires

He had been told the city was wintering, but Cory lay in his hotel room cursing the heat. Through the shuttered window came birdsong, bicycle bells, and the occasional drill of an automobile. The hotel itself was quiet. Its owner, an old Spanish prostitute, strictly observed siesta between one o’clock and four. It was now 3:16 p.m., and, in the stillness, Cory was at the edge of panic. He fiddled with the long key around his neck. Each touch made him think of the tomb it would open.

At 3:39 p.m., a knock.

Cory rolled from the bed, tensed as its old coils pinged, and looked at his cane.

To me.

The factor did not obey his thought. His intention lacked clarity.

‘To me,’ he growled.

Still, the cane did not move.

Another knock.

Finally, he took the cane. Icons appeared beneath his thumb. He selected the symbol that represented projectile response and the factor transformed in his grip until he was holding a pearl-grey gun. He put the barrel to the centre of the door and stood against the wall, beyond the doorframe.

He struggled to get in character: Simon Wilberforce, English, a local agent for the Shell Oil Company. Rather. What.

‘Um… duermo,’ he said in his British accent. ‘Salga por favor.’

‘Lisandro, Señor Wilberforce.’

Cory relaxed. He returned his gun to its cane form and opened the door on the grinning boy. As usual, Lisandro wore a mismatched ensemble of his older brothers’ clothes. ‘¿Qué desea usted, Lisandro?’

‘Hay una camisa roja en la ventana, como me dijiste. Me llevó un buen rato llegar hasta allí..’ He offered his palm.

Cory gave him a peso but kept his finger on the coin. ‘What do you say?’

‘Thank you, Mr Will-for.’

‘Wil-ber-force.’

‘Wil-ber-force.’

‘Good lad.’ Cory released the coin. ‘Tomorrow, we’ll start on some verbs.’

Nice touch, he thought. Wilberforce had worked at Rutherford Boys’ School during the war.

Cory untied the string that passed through his hanging jacket—he had stayed in too many of these hotels to expect a wardrobe—and brushed the cockroaches from its armpits.

‘Tomorrow more hungry than today, Mr Wilberforce.’

Dirt cracked around Lisandro’s mouth as he smiled. Cory had sufficient anxiety to loose a curt remark, to remind him that Mr Wilberforce was an elder, not a friend, but the boy’s charm had flanked him. Cory tried on his new Dorfzaun panama hat. He pinched the brim. ‘What do you think? Too Mark Twain?’

‘Usted esta enojado, Señor Wilberforce. You pretty.’

‘Handsome, Lisandro. Not pretty.’ He smiled. The moment grew long, and he put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. ‘About the verbs. In all honesty, I won’t be coming back tomorrow. I’ll be gone. Debo irme. Lo siento.. Understand?’

Lisandro pouted.

Cory took a thousand peso clip from his belt buckle, tugged out a note, and placed it over the one peso coin. Lisandro stared at it with wonder.

‘Please pay the señora. You can keep the rest. Buy something for your mother.’

‘I buy her house!’

Cory left the room and strolled along the gloomy corridor. His semi-brogue shoes—white bodies, tan heels and toes—made hollow clonks on the floor. He swung about the balustrade, ready to take the stairs two at a time, when Lisandro called, ‘Cheerio, Mr Wilberforce!’

‘Cheerio, Lisandro!’

He raised his hat and clattered down the stairs. Siesta be damned.

Tierra Argentina, land of silver, and this jewel on her eastern hip: Cory loved both. He strode through the San Telmo district, where, on his first visit, he had lingered hours over the bright collision of architectures: Spanish colonial style with Italian flourish and a nod to French Classicism. The Dutch painter, Mondrian was three years dead in 1947, but Buenos Aires held a colourful requiem. Even the streets were geometrically arranged. He skirted a pair of strutting porteños and their bandoneón accompanist. At points, the eyes of fellow European travellers marked his as though they were Geoffroy’s cats making remote acquaintance through the grasses of the pampas. He savoured the boutiques, smiled at prostitutes and declined the split coconuts with twisted straws. He moved, imperially slim, through the tea-like odour of chewed coca leaves and the fall scent of cigars. The vigour of the city awed him, yet this was siesta, the quiet time.

Cory found a restaurant and ate a grilled local fish called abadejo along with an Argentine wine whose sharpness he countered with a Heineken. Anxious to leave, he rubbed his fingers at the waiter before the beer was empty.

‘Quisiera la cuenta, por favor.’

‘Quedate aqui, amigo. Va a llover.’

Cory craned to see the sky beyond the awning. It was slate-coloured and close. The wind had increased.

‘Then I’ll buy a brolly.’

The waiter shrugged.

The rain caught him within a mile. Soon, Cory’s hat was battered and his jacket crushed and heavy. He ducked beneath the awning of a grocer and stood dripping on the apples and potatoes while the street shivered with water. A thin lady stopped at his elbow. She wiped her fingertips on her apron.

‘Las desgracias nunca vienen solas.’

Cory smiled. ‘¿Tiene un paraguas? Se lo pagare.’

The woman narrowed her eyes. Her features were almost oriental, and Cory wondered if she descended from the indigenous Guaraní, who had walked the pampas before the time of the conquistadores. She clacked through a beaded archway and returned with a cloth umbrella. It was tatty and decorated with dragons. ‘Umbrayla, Englishman.’

Cory did not haggle. He gave her a note and re-entered the rain before she could overcome her surprise and shout her thanks. This was not, he knew, good tradecraft. Here he was, bright as a beacon in the empty streets of Buenos Aires carrying a faux-Chinese parasol. Cory smiled at the memory of his mentor, Blake. How much he would have given to travel this Buenos Airean street in a 1947 downpour—in 1947 by God. This was a golden age for the States. Given time, it would bankrupt the Soviet Union and live out its last days as a patrician superpower.

By Cory’s time, the republic would be in pieces. He well remembered the public debates of his childhood. They had been led by old, white men behind lecterns stamped with the Seal of Georgia. The debates concerned the undoing of a centuries-old compact, made when the pressure to unite the states had been equal to that of continents colliding. By Cory’s teenage years, waters had fouled, cities starved, and blood was bad. Talk was suspended, then sense. A posse hanged Cory’s uncle and blinded his father. His mother was sodomised, so a friend told him. The transitional government moved his family to a camp on the Rio Grande run by charities from Europe and China, but the cholera was there too and Cory was back in Georgia before winter, lying about his age, saddling up for the militia. He became a sharpshooter and fought at Chicago.

Cory angled the umbrella to look for a street sign. This was it. On the opposite side of the plaza, high on a building, a red shirt hung in the rain. Lisandro had been correct. After twenty days without contact, there was a message waiting for him at the dead drop.

Five feral cats watched him through the gate of the Cementerio de la Recoleta. The rain had stopped. His umbrella was furled but his suit had not dried. He opened the gate and stepped over water-filled bowls that, on his last visit, had contained kitchen scraps. A tabby drove its forehead into his leg as he surveyed the cemetery. It was almost empty of visitors, occupied two city blocks and was grassless and consciously urban. It looked like a trap.

Minutes later, when he found the tiny mausoleum, he saw that there was a vermillion rose on its lintel. On his last visit, the rose had pointed east. Today it pointed west.

Never the twain shall meet, he thought, removing his hat.

He took the long key from around his neck, pushed it into the lock, twisted, and felt the resistance give. The door shuddered open. Inside, the mausoleum was sparsely appointed. The altar held a dry bouquet of wildflowers, a tallow candle, and a cross. Cory lifted the candle and took the note. He read it voraciously.

…beneath a Jacaranda tree…

…the whetstone…

There was a sound behind him, a swish of rat tail through a puddle, perhaps, but he feared that the discovery of the note had compromised his situational awareness. Someone was standing at the door. Cory struggled to sense the stranger’s electrical signature. It was a skill he had yet to master; the human-shaped ghost was fainter than an afterimage.

Cory reached inside his jacket and removed a cigarette lighter. In a flash of solvent, the note was nothing. He drew his cane from the folds of the umbrella, and, turning,

(Transform, he thought, clear in his intention.)

aimed the gun at the intruder.

‘Amigo, Señor Will-for!’ cried Lisandro.