He was below the equator. In South America. In Buenos Aires. Where he had been for the majority of the last two decades. The land of
pato, fútbol
, and rugby. Where they had undying love for Gardel, Guevara, Perón, Borges, and Mafalda.
He reached for the patch over his missing left eye, did this out of habit. The scars on his face, he didn’t mind. War wounds gave him character. But the missing eye. Where the bullet had shattered his sight and put him in a coma, a wound he wore and couldn’t stand the sight of.
He closed his good eye, moved his mind, tried to think of something beautiful, someplace peaceful. Montserrat. The emerald isle of Montserrat. Balmy breezes. Sunny skies. Abundant nature. Rolling green hills, plunging coastlines, and a simmering volcano.
Then he frowned.
He couldn’t think of Montserrat without thinking about his last ex-wife. He knew she was still living in Brades, working at her mother’s restaurant, helping her father run a sea charter.
He looked at his bed.
One of the women stirred. The youngest. She had worked in Plaza Dorrego at Todo Mundo for a while. A good place for foreigners to lose their wallets and purses. President Bush’s daughter had been robbed there while being guarded by the Secret Service. Medianoche’s young lover said she had been robbed twice, once as she left Dorrego and walked up Defensa, the other time as she stood at a bus stop on San Juan. Both times by boys who were no more than ten years old, killers with guns. They had taken all of her money, knew that women had started carrying their money inside their bras, had reached inside her bra and taken all she had. The last batch of ten-year-olds tried to get her to suck their prepubescent dicks. She wanted to work in a safer area, maybe Plaza Cortázar in Palermo Soho. Until that happened, she improvised. She had a little girl, a kid her mother was keeping.
Medianoche had found her photo on one of the many business cards stuck inside the phone booths on José Antonio Cabrera in Palermo Viejo. Cards for girls were inside every phone booth in Buenos Aires. Women dressed in thongs. Or school outfits. The colorful card she had posted said she had a big ass and was over eighteen. The first part was true, but he doubted the latter. She was a Lolita. Dark hair, just like the other women recuperating in his bed.
The second girl he had met at the Evita Museum. She had been a receptionist. She was the one who fed pigeons and went to mass at the San Isidro Cathedral, loved to hold hands and take trips to Ama lia Fortabat Art Collection, Museo de Bellas Artes, and MALBA. The wannabe aristocratic one who spent her spare time reading novels and cooking
Porteño
dishes. The type who wanted to be rich so she could despise the poor for not being rich.
The third had been in the lobby of the Hilton in Puerto Madero, a haven for tourists. New in the city. From Peru. Divorced twice. Trying to get away from bad relationships along with the violence and drugs in her homeland and make a better life for herself. She had been in the sunlight of the lobby, wearing a beautiful green dress and high heels, sipping coffee and eating a croissant, looking for a man who needed some company, a generous man who needed someone like her. She had worked at a
lavandería
in Barrio Norte, on her feet washing and ironing clothes twelve hours a day, but her employer was a mean woman and the pay was for shit.
Sex would be for sale as long as there was one person in need of sex and another desperate for cash. Maybe it would be for sale as long as there were two people in need of sex. By the hour or by marriage. There was always a price. By the hour, the deal was more honest.
He stared at the beautiful women. Three shapely Latinas. Women built the way a woman should be built. He’d never cared for skinny women. Slender, but not skinny. He was with a skinny woman once. A woman so lean that if she were flat on her back or on her belly, there was no difference. A woman was supposed to have breasts and a backside to keep a man oriented. Either that or have a THIS SIDE UP stamp across her breastless chest.
He took a deep breath and stared at the clock. It was two a.m.
He had time.
Medianoche slapped one of the silhouettes on her ass. Slapped her hard.
He commanded, “
Despertáte
.”
She knew what that meant. She knew what she was being paid to do.
“
Vamos, despertáte
.”
She crawled to him, put her head between his legs, took him inside her mouth. He moaned and lost control. It pulled him away from the bad memories, this therapy the cure for any level of PTSD he suffered. Medianoche ran his fingers through her brown hair, massaged her scalp. She set him on fire. She was slow, meticulous, the best he’d had in a while.
He slapped a second silhouette on the ass.
“
Despertáte
.”
She stirred, mumbled something in Castellano
,
then asked, “
¿Que hora es, mi amor?
”
He said, “
Son las dos
.”
She mumbled that she was tired. He slapped her ass harder, made her skin turn red.
“Despertáte
.”
He watched her as her drowsy frown changed to a generous smile.
She moaned, “
Cuando me pegás en el culo me ponés mojada.”
She told him he was a devil in bed, made her orgasm many times. His expression remained stern, glad that even on the other side of being middle-aged, some things hadn’t deteriorated, at least not as fast as other things. The knees that couldn’t stand as much pressure, the aches from working out that lasted longer. But on a good day, he was still stronger and faster than most twenty-year-old men. She crawled to him, kissed his arms. He put his hand in her hair as she sucked his nipples. The third girl pulled her hair from her face and joined in without having to be woken from her sexual exhaustion. She joined in, smiling, attentive.
Still he slapped her ass anyway. It didn’t matter if she liked it. He did. At times he could be as malicious, cagey, and wicked in his relations with women as they said Picasso had been.
She whispered, “
¿Qué pasó con tu ojo? ¿Y esa cicatriz en tu cara?
”
She asked him about his eye. Asked him about his scar.
He told her, “Never ask about my scar.”
She said, “
No entiendo inglés
.”
He repeated what he had said in Castellano.
He wanted to drag her to the patio and hold her over that railing, have her naked body dangling from the seventeenth floor while she cried and pissed on herself. Anyone else, he would have. She was curious, enthusiastic, competitive, wanted to earn a generous tip. Very beautiful. Beauty should not be defiled. Beauty should be embraced. He pulled her to him, kissed her, put her breast in his mouth. He bit her nipples, made her let out a sound of sexual pain.
“
Ooo, papi
.”
He called them his Tres Marías. Tres Marías was a constellation of three stars in a row in the southern hemisphere. Appropriate name for women who kept him so close to heaven.
He put one on all fours, went inside her slowly, made her moan, gasp in amazement.
Latin girls could move on the dance floor. All of that waist action. But when that fuck hole was filled with a real man’s dick, it didn’t move the way it could when it was empty.
A second María kissed him, gave him slow kisses, while a third María sucked his nipples.
This was the fountain of youth. This was where he didn’t feel his mortality.
When they were done,
the silhouettes cuddled like girlfriends at a slumber party. They had been strangers but had grown used to each other over the last week.
He stood and went into the living room. His wall was decorated with glass-framed photos of tango dancers. Dancers in front of the colorful buildings in La Boca. Dancers in San Telmo. Dancers on 9 de Julio. And one other framed photo. A photo of Olaudah Equiano.
He went into the kitchen, took a piece of leftover steak. Argentina had the best steak in the world. Medianoche took a Quilmes Cristal out of the refrigerator, sipped his lager and ate as he read the
Buenos Aires Herald
, an English-language paper, its front page telling this part of South America that the stock markets were falling like ninepins. The Spanish-language paper,
La Nación,
screamed:
OTRO DíA DE PÁNICO MUN-DIAL: EN LOS MERCADOS CRECE LA DESCONFIANZA.
Same message of panic and financial ruin, Russia among those with the worst loss ever.
They said that when the U.S.A. sneezed, the world caught a cold.
If that was true, the world was experiencing a case of international pneumonia.
Medianoche set the paper aside, washed down the beef as he opened the balcony door and stepped out into the brisk air. Cold air jolted him. He went back inside, opened the closet in the front room, took out his tenor sax. He carried the sax back outside, played “Last Night When We Were Young.” A chilling rain fell on his naked skin as he played that Frank Sinatra tune. Judy Garland had done it too, but Frank was the man. He looked down eighteen floors on the
avenidas
and
calles
. The city was old. Darkness hid all flaws. Like New York, it looked better at night. Las Vegas was a monstrosity that looked better at night. He looked better at night. He stopped playing his sax, abandoned Frank and looked out at the city, restlessness in his bones.
His cellular buzzed. A text message. It was time.
He put away his sax and took another bite of his steak. He hadn’t been big on steak, not before Argentina. He had gone to La Caballeriza. A place that was serious about their bovine. So serious that their menu described the cow, its breed and weight, told the bovine’s diet, introduced his meal like he was going to take it out to tango the night away. Lean cows that were raised in open
pampas
, not given growth hormones like in the United States. In North America, most of the food had growth hormones, hormones that had created an obese nation. He had ordered, taken one bite, and now it was all about the Argentine steak.
He washed his face, flossed, trimmed the hairs of his nostrils, same on his ears.
He stared at his face.
He nodded, clenched his teeth. Remembered the last moments in Charlotte, North Carolina, when he didn’t have a hole where his eye used to reside. Lost his fucking eye because of some motherfucking kid. He should’ve put a bullet in that whore’s head as soon as he walked in the door. But he was the one who had been gunned down. He had come out of a coma in a hospital in North Carolina, his headache severe, his face in bandages, a bullet removed from his head, his left eye and a sector of his memory gone.
He went to his closet. Tailored clothing, all lined in Kevlar. High-fashion attire from Miguel Caballero, Limited, of Bogotá, Colombia. The most violent country in South America produced the Armani of bulletproof clothing. Inside his closet were tailored sports coats, raincoats, Windbreakers, and dinner jackets. The same clothing presidents, dignitaries, and paranoid executives wore. Trench coats, business suits, suede jackets, and denim casuals. An antiballistic polo shirt cost four thousand dollars and could stop an Uzi or a knife. Same for his leather jackets. Every article of clothing could be worn out to dinner or to a full-on battle. Comfortable. Fashionable. Flexible.
He put on his suit, dark shirt, and dark tie.
He stared out the window. He knew Buenos Aires, knew her rhythm. Knew that right now black-and-yellow taxis were speeding toward the swingers clubs, Reina Loba or Anchorena, where the masses would swap partners until sunrise.
There was a lot of swinging in Tango City.
He put on his dark trench coat, adjusted his black fedora, slipped his dark gun inside a darker holster. In the mirror he saw the reflection of the perfect gentleman.
A dozen years ago, his goatee was black with a few strands of gray hair.
Now it was gray with a few strands of black hair.
He opened the medicine cabinet. Took out a small container. Unscrewed the top. Stared at the white powder. It had been a long time. Too long. He put some powder in the web of his hand. Wanted that rush. But not now. Not when he was working.
Medianoche put the powder back inside the small container.
He took out another small box. Opened it. His eye looked down upon an eye. Ocular prosthesis. He stared at what he hated. That memory played like an infinite loop.
Losing an eye. Some surgeon digging around the inside of his head with a scalpel.
He removed his eye patch. Inserted the convex shell made of cryolite glass. He looked at himself in the mirror. Not since he lived on the isle of Montserrat had he worn an ocular prosthesis. Not since he was married. His third marriage, to Gracelyn Furlonge. Petite and beautiful, owning an Irish surname like most of the natives on the island.
He took the prosthesis back out of his eye socket, cleaned it, put it back in its box. He put his eye patch back on, adjusted it. Medianoche. Midnight. He moved on. Went into the living room. He opened an envelope and pulled out a stack of pictures. Pictures taken in Atlántida, Piriápolis, and the latest in Montevideo; the latter was a major slave trade port, where African slaves were unloaded, then sent to work slave mines in Peru and Bolivia. The men in the photos were white Uruguayans. Men walking through the Tristan Narvaja street fair. Those same men walking down 18 de Julio, the street that marked Uruguay’s Independence Day. Not their widest street, but the most popular.
El paisito
. That was what some Uruguayans called themselves. Next photos were on the beaches of Punta del Este and José Ignacio. Most of the photos were shots of the men from Uruguay. The protectors and couriers of the package. In every picture was the black briefcase. This was what an American named Hopkins was paying to obtain.
Everyone was after the prize.