His Own Man (35 page)

He’d spoken as if the investors and their usual sordid games hadn’t been part of a larger scheme — in which he, Eric, had himself been involved.

“The banks never lose,” he went on. “Neither do we. We, the American government.… In my day, anyway. We never lost.”

His conclusion was as pitiful as it was unexpected: “Maybe that’s why we stand alone today … isolated as hell … unable to deal with a world that for the most part despises us.”

I allowed a good long moment to pass, so Eric could deal with his mea culpa and let it go in peace. Then I turned my focus back to Max, coming full circle, as it were. Fatigue was beginning to set in. Gripping as the topic was, I would have preferred to get out of that garage. It was getting late, moreover, and I still had a long stretch of highway ahead of me.

“That James Bond tactic you mentioned,” I said. “Can you tell me about it?”

He didn’t hesitate; he even seemed to relish the opportunity. I almost suggested that we return to the living room to hear the story in more comfortable surroundings, but I caught myself in time, sensing that in the mind of a man like Eric, absurd as it might sound, certain subjects
belonged
in that setting. Brazil and Germany, together once again, only this time as hostages in a La Jolla garage.

The challenge, as Eric explained to me then, had consisted of finding out the state of negotiations between the two countries, and where the corresponding documents might be located. On four occasions, the CIA had sent teams, disguised as plumbers, construction workers, or meter readers from the electric company, to comb the ambassador’s residence. They knew the documents had to be there, whether in hard copy or microfilm, since they’d turned the embassy’s office upside down more than once in the dead of night and found nothing.

As usually happens in urgent and desperate situations, the
hoped-for miracle came about by chance. When Max, in one of his conversations with Ray Thurston, mentioned for the second time the existence of a rare edition of Thomas Mann, which the ambassador never failed to carry along when traveling, a light-bulb went off in Eric’s head.
That could well be it
, he thought.

At first, not even he had faith in his hunch, it seemed so preposterous. He soon remembered, however, that the ambassador was a man from another era. And that his literary preference for authors like Maurice Leblanc and Conan Doyle, who often favored the obvious in formulating their puzzles, might well have inspired his choice of hiding place. His CIA colleagues had also rejected the tip, deeming it ridiculous. They hadn’t yet entered the age of state-of-the-art technology but could never have believed they were kept in check by such a childish ploy. As such, more than a few had fallen prey to the ambassador’s smokescreen — which would have held up had it not been for Max’s calamitous intervention. And Eric, for lack of a better option, had decided to investigate the possibility. The microfilm had been found tucked in the back cover of Thomas Mann’s masterpiece, on the eve of the ambassador’s departure. “We barely had time to copy it and slip the original back into its hiding place,” Eric concluded with great pride.

“But not even,” I asked, leaving aside the singular aspects of the operation, “not even after reading the documents were you able to prevent the countries’ negotiations from going through?”

“I did my part,” Eric answered laconically. “What happened afterward was out of my hands.”

Here he hesitated a minute, the way Colonel Vaz would every so often in conversation with me in Vienna. The halt wasn’t quite like the lumbering old bear’s, though it was just as solemn and imbued with a touch of sadness. It was, I realized then, the pause of the elephant heading to the graveyard to die — with nothing more to lose. Or hide.

Indeed, where would Eric go after La Jolla, if not to the
cemetery? Following in the footsteps of his far more illustrious neighbors? Yet unlike them, without the generous eulogy of a newspaper obituary? On the contrary, forgotten even by the agency that had turned its back on him?

“The Brazilian military wanted the atomic bomb,” he said at last. The grande dame was finally taking the stage. “The secret was somewhat of a joke,” he added. “We always knew the bomb was the driving force behind the agreement between Brazil and Germany. We, meaning the CIA. And we also knew that with the Germans, you wouldn’t get very far. With Westinghouse, on the other hand, who knows? A lot of easy money would come into play.… Loopholes might open, certain secrets could end up in the wrong hands.…”

There was nothing ironic about his tone. Quite the contrary. He hesitated, hoping to recount the facts as faithfully as possible. Who else could he talk to about such matters these days?

“There was a group within your military that thought of nothing but the bomb. An influential bunch, close to the president. And there were, naturally, those who defended the use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. But those guys represented a majority solely at your Foreign Ministry.”

His eyes were gleaming again. It was obvious the subject fascinated him.

“The military’s argument was simple and to some extent made sense. They’d come to the conclusion that they’d done us a favor by overthrowing the Goulart regime. A
legally constituted
government, as they kept reminding us whenever they could. And that this favor might yet hatch additional plots in other countries in the region. As in fact had been the case in Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, and Peru in subsequent years.”

He looked at me. He would have preferred that I draw my own conclusions and spare him from further embarrassment. Despite understanding his reasons, I decided to let the words come from his mouth.

“If we wanted further results elsewhere, though,” he continued, eyes fixed on me, “we would have to pay the price. The chain of events had its cost.”

And he went ahead, while I wondered how far his delirium would take him. Because imagining that a small contingent of Brazilian Fascists had been responsible for the series of coups in a number of South American countries was as unrealistic as denying that these same countries were capable of destroying themselves without outside help. Buying this story served, at best, to feed another fantasy — that the CIA had had a limited role in spawning these disasters.

Oblivious of my thoughts, Eric kept going. “ ‘Besides the US and the Soviet Union,’ alleged the Brazilian military, ‘didn’t England and France have bombs? Wasn’t India almost there?’ ” Eric paused briefly. “Ultimately, there was zero support for the Brazilian bomb. The matter was never even broached with our president, which infuriated your military, put your ambassador in Washington in a jam, and left Westinghouse high and dry.”

After a good laugh, he grew serious again and added, “The Brazilians refused to understand
our
position: the last thing we needed, at that stage, was a nuclear country in our backyard. Not to mention the arms race that would inevitably ensue in the region. The Argentineans, the Mexicans, the Venezuelans, everyone would want their own bomb.”

Eric leaned toward me, as if someone in La Jolla might hear us in that closed garage, surrounded though we were by shelves and boxes, and said, “Thus the complication Bonn represented. Because things snowballed when that German of yours became president. Ernesto Geisel … And your ambassador in Montevideo presented to the president’s staff the nuclear project he’d been trying to cook up unsuccessfully for years with Bonn.… That’s when things got rough. Because, after our resounding
no
, Germany came back with a disturbing
maybe
.”

Another pause. “Regardless of how strongly we believed the German nuclear technology would prove ineffective, we were worried. First, because we weren’t one hundred percent sure it
wouldn’t
work. Second … second, because we had no way of pressuring your government. That was when we began to realize the danger in dealing with excessively closed regimes.”

Ah … now we were getting somewhere.

“The widely proclaimed Brazilian political thaw began there. But it was born in Washington, long before it surfaced in the minds of Brasilia’s supposed wise men. Because, with the military in power, we had no access to the key decision makers. And for matters of this magnitude, lobbying wasn’t an option. There were no governors, senators, congressmen, investors, journalists, or others we could pressure. We tried to swap out one general for another, during one of those ‘preelection’ phases of yours, and failed. True, the fact that our candidate was a perfect idiot didn’t help much. But we had little choice, considering the available options.…”

We both laughed at this, him lightly, me with a clenched heart. We’d finally found common ground, Eric and I. Albeit narrow. But it had been worth the wait. Eric began to perk up again.

“For the first time since we’d become a world power, for the first time since we’d called the shots wherever we wanted, except behind the Iron Curtain, our hands were tied. Leaving
out Cuba, which by that stage was just a pebble in our shoe (and had more to do with elections in Florida than with Fidel and his proselytizing), our hands were tied in our own backyard. Tied by our own doing, with our foolproof nylon rope! For having helped put that bunch of incompetent jackasses in power … pardon my language, it’s the bourbon talking.…” He corrected himself: “I mean, the vodka.”

That was too easy. The producers of the big show had put up their circus ring around us, after which — two decades later — they’d decided to stage their show elsewhere. Without giving so much as a second thought to the revolt that would soon tear down the tattered tent they’d left behind.

“Eric, don’t you find this all just a bit much?” I asked. “An entire continent transformed into a blank screen, on which you all drew whatever scenes you wanted? Isn’t that a gross oversimplification of a reality —”

“But that’s exactly what happened,” he retorted, laughing. “On a larger scale than we were used to, of course. When we intervened in other countries’ internal affairs. As occurred routinely in Central America, starting with the Panama Canal, Guatemala, et cetera. Putty in our hands, that’s what South America became at one point, whether you like hearing that or not. Putty in our hands … And it couldn’t have been any other way. The Cuban crisis had ceased to exist, Allende had been overthrown, and the threat of subversion was no longer an issue for us. There were other challenges now. And the main one entailed doing away with centralized nationalist governments.”

The irritation coming over me was reminiscent of the conversation I’d had with Max twenty years earlier in Alto da Boa Vista, about this very subject. Eric must have picked up on something in my facial expression, for he became somewhat conciliatory.

“It’s not that the student movements against the military, the marches, the protests, the courage of the press, and so forth,
didn’t matter. Of course they did. But the decisions were all made in Washington in terms of the big picture. Because the details …”

“The details were up to us.”

“Right.”

“And Max? Where did he fit in all this?” I finally asked.

Eric smiled sympathetically. “As you’ve probably guessed by now, I never actually liked the son of a bitch.”

Had he noticed the unease that had taken hold of me? Probably. Because rather than coming across as aggressive, the line had sounded affectionate. As if Eric were turning to Max to draw us together. After all, he knew very well that my ties to Max were more personal (and went back farther) than those that connected me to João Vaz. The colonel had opened Eric’s door to me. But the person who’d opened Eric’s heart, insofar as he could be said to have one, was Max.

“He intrigued me,” Eric acknowledged. “He didn’t seem to fit in anywhere.”

He watched me for a minute, then went on. “Not with us, when he helped train the Uruguayan police with your corporals and sergeants; or in your embassy, where he was always butting heads with Carlos Câmara. Certainly not in Vaz’s poker circle, from what our mutual friend told me. When it came down to it, the only person who actually liked him was Ray.” He patted the box again, as if Raymond Thurston could hear him from within. “It’s not that Max changed his personality to suit each environment, which was a virtual requirement in the game we all played. But there was something peculiar about him. He didn’t seem comfortable in any of his skins.”

Eric shook his head briefly before continuing. “I never quite understood what he was after. He didn’t seem to believe in anything, except maybe in himself. Even so, I have my doubts … To believe in ourselves, we have to be grounded in some kind of reality, goddammit! I wouldn’t have been able to keep going otherwise.”

Eric seemed genuinely puzzled by Max. Yet he regained his posture and asked, “So where does your friend find himself these days?”

“Moscow,” I replied. “He’s the ambassador there.”

“
In Moscow?
” Eric responded in awe. “Not bad.”

“Not bad at all,” I agreed. “With any luck, he’ll end up in Washington again.”

“That was where we were destined to meet again, Max and I,” Eric said. “Six or seven years after he left Montevideo. One night, a few months after my so-called
retirement
, when I was still living in Washington, gauging my future prospects, I went with my wife and two other couples to the Cellar Door, a jazz club in Georgetown. The club isn’t around anymore. Buddy Rich always used to play there. So did Dexter Gordon, whenever he came to Washington … At some point, I went to the men’s room. And on the way back, I passed by Max. I recognized him despite the beard he’d grown in the meantime. Max is the type of person who doesn’t go unnoticed, even though nothing about his appearance stands out. Have you ever noticed that? Curious, isn’t it?”

I hadn’t thought about it, but it made sense.

“He was alone, sitting on a stool with his back to the bar, his eyes on the musicians. I took a few steps in his direction and stopped almost in front of him. The room was dark, but the bar less so. He didn’t recognize me right away, even though it hadn’t been that many years since we’d last seen one another. He was surprised when he realized it was me. And greeted me effusively, which was nice. I thought he’d held a grudge from his time in Montevideo. But he looked quite happy.