The Convert's Song (5 page)

The sight set off a delayed comprehension of the horror into which he had hurled himself, a kind of hyperawareness. Beyond the arm, sunlight illuminated a rectangular banner advertising a skin product. The ad showed an attractive couple jogging on a beach, tanned and sculpted and sensual. He heard the moans of the wounded, the sobs of the frightened. He noticed that music was still playing in the store. The song was La Mosca’s “Todos Tenemos un Amor” (“We All Have a Love”), a good-time party tune heavy on drums and brass.

Facundo and Biondani were conferring in whispers.

“Where to?” Facundo asked. His back was pressed against the wall as he tried to catch his breath. Sweat streamed out of his hair.

Biondani crouched over his police radio. A minute passed. He kept listening. His mouth tightened with disgust.

“What?” Facundo rasped.

“Now a car bomb,” Biondani muttered. “At a school.”

“Where?”

“Out past Belgrano…a Jewish school.”

Facundo bolted upright. “Which one? Which one?”

“I don’t know. I just hear transmissions about a car bomb and the explosives squad.”

Facundo frantically patted his coat pockets, fumbling for his cell phone. Pescatore remembered that Facundo’s grandson went to a school in that general area. Facundo made a choking sound. Pescatore saw with alarm that he had turned deathly pale. The big man’s face contorted. His gun slid from his hand. He grabbed his left shoulder. He sagged down the wall, tilting sideways, eyes rolling up, unconscious.

They wrestled off Facundo’s overcoat and tie and checked his pulse.

“My God,” Biondani said. “It looks like a heart attack.”

“We have to get him out of here.”

For the first time since arriving on the scene, Pescatore experienced pure fear. He and Biondani organized themselves and retraced their steps to the entrance. Pescatore drag-carried Facundo over his shoulders, thankful that he was in shape and built low to the ground. Biondani backed alongside them with his gun at the ready, watching for threats, helping to the extent he could. Their progress was slow, but they made it.

In the chaos of the street, they realized that Facundo would not be the top priority among multiple casualties mutilated by explosions and shredded by automatic-weapons fire. Biondani managed to commandeer a police sedan, and Pescatore rode with Facundo to a hospital.

Late that night, Pescatore sat in a crowded hospital waiting room with Facundo’s grandson.

Facundo had suffered a major heart attack. He was in an intensive care ward jammed with victims of the carnage at the shopping mall. His daughter Esther was at his bedside.

Pescatore was reading to David. He wanted to keep the boy calm and distract him from the nonstop television coverage of the attacks. At the same time, Pescatore was trying to listen to the news. He had chosen seats in the corner farthest from the television, which blared on an overhead mount connected to a pillar. Rummaging in a basket of magazines, he had found a tattered book of comics about a girl named Mafalda, a nationally beloved character.

Although sleepy, David was engrossed in the book. He climbed back and forth between his blue plastic chair and Pescatore’s lap. The boy was round-cheeked and sturdily built, and he wore a River Plate soccer jersey. He had his grandfather’s unruly hair and alert eyes.

“Mafalda’s having a dream,” Pescatore explained. “These two little guys with the funny hats, they’re aliens on another planet, see? In her dream, they’re talking in their language about Earth. That’s our planet where we live.”

“The
bestiaplaneta
?” David asked, pointing at the word on the page.

“Yes. The aliens call Earth the Beast Planet.”

“Why?”

“We’re like animals to them.”

“Dogs?”

“Well, not exactly animals. Like cavemen. So this alien says: ‘They’re having a big fight down there on the Beast Planet. Poor Beast Planet.’ The aliens feel sorry for us dummies on Earth. Because we’re always having some big stupid fight. See?”

A wall clock showed that it was midnight. People in the waiting room congregated below the television. Turning pages, Pescatore listened to the top-of-the-hour headlines. The death toll was in the hundreds. The worst casualties had been caused by two suicide bombers attacking a kosher delicatessen at El Almacén. The authorities had identified half a dozen attackers, all dead. The attempted car bombing at the school had failed. Unsurprisingly, there was confusion and suspicion about basic details.

As he strained to hear the TV, Pescatore realized that David was asking him a question.

“What’s up, little guy?” Pescatore asked.

“Did the terrorists kill my grandfather?”

The boy regarded him like a miniature prosecutor.
This kid is too sharp,
Pescatore thought.

“No, David. Don’t worry. Your grandfather got sick, that’s all. Your mom’s with him. Your grandfather’s too tough for the terrorists. He’s like a big bear. Pretty soon he’ll wake up, and he’ll be hungry. Like this.”

Pescatore mimicked a bear awaking with a sleepy roar. The boy’s laugh was bubbly and melodic. Pescatore leaned his head back against the wall and extended his right leg gingerly. The hamstring throbbed with pain. He must have hurt it carrying Facundo. He saw Esther, small-boned and sweet-faced, coming down the hall.

She told him her father was stable. “He’ll need cardiac surgery. But he won’t be ready for a while. As you can imagine, all the surgeons in the city are occupied anyway. What a barbarity.”

“Sounds like he’s going to make it.”

“He is alive thanks to you. Thanks to you, Valentín. It’s late. You should go home and rest.”

“I’m fine.”

“Please, it makes no sense for you to spend the night here.”

Pescatore glanced at the boy. He was reading industriously.

“Esther. Facundo, all of you, have treated me like family since I got here. I don’t have anybody else in this city. This is the place I need to be.”

In the end, she convinced him to go home. They agreed that he would sleep and return to give her a break the next day. She hugged him, sobbing silently.

“He’ll be fine,” he said. “This thing had such an impact on Facundo, I think it literally broke his heart. But he’s real strong. He’ll be fine.”

On the way home, Fabián drove him past checkpoints and police convoys. The pedestrians and people in café windows looked stunned: inhabitants of a wounded city.

At his apartment, Pescatore changed into jeans and a green U.S. Border Patrol sweatshirt. He ate a leftover slice of pizza and turned on the television news. There was commentary about the long-dreaded third attack on the Jewish community and the fact that the terrorists had also targeted non-Jews by striking El Almacén. A long-winded politician interviewed in a governmental corridor blamed the United States and Israel for setting the stage for the attacks with draconian policies and imperialistic wars. Pescatore raised his middle finger and held it aloft until the politician was done.

The news reports said that “initial lines of investigation” pointed at al-Qaeda terrorists. Pescatore thought that was strange. Iran and Hezbollah had done the attacks in the 1990s. As far as he knew, their Shiite networks had a far bigger presence in Latin America than the remnants and offshoots of al-Qaeda. And no one had mentioned the arrests in Bolivia that Facundo had told him about. There had to be a link to the attacks in Buenos Aires.

At about four a.m., Pescatore was still wide awake. He remembered that a bottle of Jack Daniel’s had been sitting in a cupboard for months. He put ice in a glass and got to work making himself sleepy.

Two drinks later, the television broadcast a report about the failed attack at the school. The rolling bomb was a Renault Trafic van. It had sped past unarmed security guards and up a driveway toward the campus. A federal police officer assigned to guard the school had just finished a coffee break in the cafeteria. He emerged from the building at the top of the hill and saw the onrushing van and the pursuing guards. Instead of running for cover, the police officer walked out into the middle of the driveway. Witnesses described how he planted himself in a firing stance, took aim, and emptied his gun into the approaching van’s windshield. The vehicle ran him over before coming to a stop. But the bomb did not go off. The driver died from bullet wounds. The only other casualty was the police officer.

The anchorwoman’s voice broke while she read the story. Pescatore got up abruptly, lurching a little. He took his drink out onto the patio, favoring his sore right leg. He leaned on the railing. The wind was cold.

A police helicopter appeared above, rotors clattering, and descended toward the rooftops. He wondered if they were hunting terrorists in his neighborhood. The helicopter hovered, ascended again, and glided north along the riverfront.

The landscape below was shrouded in darkness. He knew it well: Libertador Avenue, the park, the train tracks, the shantytown, the highway, the dock cranes and container yards of the port, the town of Colonia del Sacramento barely visible on the Uruguayan coast across the river.

“Oh you motherfuckers,” he said into the night above the city. “You evil motherfuckers.”

T
hieves from a nearby public housing project once broke into Pescatore’s house at night when he was a child. His family slept through the burglary.

A few months later, intruders from the same project armed with baseball bats beat to death a family in their beds near his home. Coincidentally, Pescatore’s uncle Rocco led the investigation. During questioning, his detectives threw a suspect out of a second-floor window of the police station. The two cases fused in Pescatore’s mind. He became obsessed with the idea that he had heard the burglars but failed to wake up and protect his family from annihilation. His sleep had been troubled ever since. He often shuddered awake, heart pounding, trying to figure out if what he had heard was imaginary or real.

On Saturday, he finally fell asleep before dawn. He collapsed onto his bed, still dressed. When he awoke, gray daylight gleamed in the low skylight and the glass door to the patio. He had slept three or four hours. He stayed on his stomach. He felt obliterated.

He had woken up because he thought he heard something. But he wasn’t too worried. The roof was a symphony of flapping, chirping, creaking and dripping caused by birds, bats and the elements. He listened lazily, eager to return to oblivion. He needed more sleep.

Then he heard a distinct noise. A footstep? And another. Maybe metal on metal.

His shoulder holster was on a chair by the patio door. Out of reach. He would have to roll out of bed and lunge for the gun.

Get a grip,
he told himself.
Maybe it’s nothing.

Still motionless, he closed his eyes and concentrated. His heart thudded against the mattress. The furtive sounds multiplied. Breathing, rustling, footfalls. No doubt about it. Someone—more than one person—was creeping down the hall toward his bedroom. They must have picked the lock or forced the doorman to give up a key.

Eyes open now, facedown, he visualized his move: roll, lunge, draw.

Interrupting his calculations, a shadow flickered across his peripheral vision on the left. There was someone on the patio too.

Goddamn it,
he thought,
they’re coming at me from different angles. Like professionals. Like cops…

The hesitation saved his life. His room erupted in sound and fury.

“Police police police don’t move son-of-a-bitch don’t move or you’re dead your mother’s cunt!”

There were half a dozen raiders hulking in body armor and ski masks. Some stormed in the bedroom door, others aimed weapons from the patio, their red laser sights spattering the glass. They screamed orders, curses and threats in a murderous chorus.

“Easy,” he declared, his cheek still on the pillow. “I’m an American investigator. Be aware that there’s a pistol—”

Gloved hands wrenched him up off the bed. They cuffed his wrists behind his back and slammed him to the floor. They yanked his sweatshirt up over his face like a backward hood, rendering him sightless and helpless. A signature technique. Argentine police routinely covered the faces of suspects with their own shirts or jackets, leaving prisoners to sit at crime scenes trussed in improvised masks. The idea was to preserve the integrity of lineups by concealing suspects’ identities. He had always seen it as a badass message:
We caught this sorry bastard. We can do anything we want to him now. Fuck with us and this can happen to you someday.

Voices and boots invaded his apartment. Radios squawked. Doors banged, drawers crashed, silverware jangled. What the hell was going on?

“Bingo, Commander,” a triumphant voice called in the living room. “The phone.”

“Well done,
pibe.
”

He could have sworn his phone was on his night table by the bed. He could see variations of light and shadow through the sweatshirt. Someone was standing guard over him. Against his better judgment, Pescatore decided to speak up.

“Excuse me,” he said through the fabric over his mouth. “I think there’s been some kind of confusion. I am an American citizen. My passport is in the top drawer of the dresser. I am a private investigator and—”

A boot lashed into his left thigh. He writhed in pain. Through clenched teeth he snarled: “Cheap shot monkey-ass punk bitch!”

“Shut your mouth, shitty terrorist.”

The owner of the voice sounded large. His breath smelled of coffee, laced perhaps with a finger of pre-raid brandy.

Pescatore was overwhelmed by the kick, the traumatic awakening, and, most of all, disbelief: the officer had called him a terrorist. These guys were door-breakers, head-bashers, trigger-pullers, and, if the target survived, deliverymen. No use engaging in dialogue. After a few minutes, his captors shoved shoes onto his feet. They hustled him downstairs, the air chilling his exposed torso, and into a vehicle. Sirens wailed: a small convoy. They turned left on Libertador Avenue.

The ride was quick and familiar. As the vehicle bounced up a driveway, the smell of stables confirmed his expectations. He had been taken to the federal police site near his running track, the compound that housed the mounted patrol and the antiterrorism unit.

They removed the handcuffs, pulled the sweatshirt down off his face, and left him in a cell. It was dimly lit and had a cement bench built into the wall. The smell of disinfectant was stronger than the smell of urine. He assumed they would let him sit and stew for a while, for both the psychological impact and to give themselves time to examine the material from the search.

Not that he was in a hurry. He wished he did not know as much as he did about the repertoire of tortures utilized by Latin American security forces in general and Argentine ones in particular. Right now, the fear was worse than the pain, but it looked like that equation was about to change. He took deep breaths and tried to focus.

He had become a suspect in the attack at El Almacén. Perhaps a mix-up caused by the fact that he and Facundo had barged into the crime scene with guns in their hands. But they had been with an intelligence officer. It couldn’t be that hard to clear things up. Unless there was something more sinister going on.

The terrorists had worn police uniforms. That raised scenarios ranging from an unwitting inside source to direct involvement. Police and soldiers with ultra-right, anti-Jewish ideologies had been implicated in past attacks. And the police were good at framing people by planting guns, concocting decoy conspiracies, coaching false witnesses with case files. An American would be a perfect
perejil.
A fall guy.

At first, he resisted the temptation to sleep. When Pescatore was a kid, Uncle Rocco had told him something that he later confirmed as a Border Patrol agent: the guilty slept like babies in custody. After about an hour, though, he decided to rest a bit. He glanced around for any sign of rats, then slid to a corner of the bench and reclined. His body ached, especially his left thigh and right hamstring.

Stay awake or you’ll look guilty,
he told himself as he nodded off.

They rousted him right away, as if they had been waiting for him to sleep. In the interrogation room, they cuffed his right wrist to the table.

The interrogator was about what Pescatore had expected. And not in a good way. Barrel chest and hard gut in a navy-blue uniform turtleneck. Balding, moonfaced, long sideburns ending at powerful jaws. An officer in a tactical jumpsuit stood by the door. A youthful plainclothesman with a military-style, side-combed haircut sat behind a laptop. His underfed features and mustache reminded Pescatore of a film character named Ferribotte, a dignified Sicilian thief, from an Italian heist comedy of the 1950s that his father had liked.

Pescatore resisted the impulse to launch into a tirade about how innocent he was. The interrogator studied documents and glanced at his colleague’s computer screen. He raised his formidable chin to examine Pescatore from beneath low lids. In a baritone voice that he seemed to enjoy bouncing off the walls, the interrogator started with an overture.

“There’s an old policeman’s saying: As time passes, the truth flees. I understand you say you were once a police officer. And you claim to be an investigator now. I assume that helps you appreciate my situation. I have two hundred cadavers, hundreds of wounded, a country in shock, enormous repercussions. And you. What I don’t have is time. I want you to answer my questions quickly and directly. Do we understand each other?”

“Absolutely. I’m here to help. I don’t know why I’m under arrest, and I haven’t done anything wrong, but I want to catch whoever—”

“You see? Already we begin badly.” The interrogator rolled his eyes, glancing around like an exasperated headmaster opting for corporal punishment. “I said ‘quickly and directly.’ Let’s start again. My name is Inspector Francisco Mendizábal Wright. Please state your name.”

Pescatore gave dutiful answers to basic questions. He fought down panic and anger rising from his stomach. The young sidekick tapped at his keyboard.

“Very well.” Mendizábal went back into the jaw-up, slit-eyed pose. “You say you want to help. I give you that opportunity. Explain your role in the terrorist network functioning here, in Bolivia and in France, and everything you know about the preparation and execution of the attacks.”

“Inspector, I had nothing to do with it. I have never been to France or Bolivia. I was at the attack scene at El Almacén because I was assisting my employer, Facundo Hyman of Villa Crespo Investigations, and a SIDE officer named Biondani.”

The interrogator stared at him. Pescatore considered a problem:
Biondani
might be a code name or an alias, a common practice in spy services. Plus, the relationship between police and intelligence agencies was none too friendly. Even if they tracked down Biondani, he had met Pescatore only once and in chaotic circumstances.

“Look,” Pescatore said. “This officer, he was introduced to me as Biondani. He knows my boss, Facundo Hyman. Everybody knows Facundo. The U.S. embassy, the Israeli embassy, your force. How could I be—”

“Shut up!” The baritone echoed in the small room. “You are the worst kind of scum. The coward who makes the plans, who sets it up, but doesn’t have the balls to pull a trigger himself.”

“You are totally mistaken.”

“You come all the way from your shitty country to slaughter people here. Sneaky arrogant American. You think you can get away with anything because of this shitty passport.”

Mendizábal picked up and slammed down his passport.

“Inspector, listen: The idea you would accuse me of having anything to do with this makes me physically sick.”

Pescatore had a flashback to El Almacén: the bloody broken glass, the fleeing shoppers, the arm. He closed his eyes. He was shaking.

“Spare me your girlish tears. Explain why you were in telephonic contact with the terrorists.”

The Ferribotte-looking investigator glanced up from his laptop. Pescatore wondered if Mendizábal was bluffing about the phone calls.

“I haven’t phoned any terrorists. Almost all my calls are work-related. Unless someone I have dealt with for work is secretly a terrorist.”

Mendizábal sighed operatically.

“To be precise.” He put a small silver cell phone on the table and flipped open the display screen. “Your phone shows—”

“That’s not my phone! That’s not even my—”

Mendizábal shot out of his chair. He grabbed Pescatore by the collar of his sweatshirt and pulled him in to a big descending fist. The punch slammed into his brow, rocking him back, straining his handcuffed arm. The interrogator leaned over the table, his movements measured and precise, to administer a pair of vicious follow-up blows.

Pescatore rode the pain, a roaring noise in his ears, blood in his mouth. The enraged face floated in front of him, distorted and oblong, a moon in a space cloud. His vision blurred. He was going to pass out.

He had fucked up. It
was
his phone.

In his haste, he hadn’t recognized it. He had bought the phone on his second or third day in Buenos Aires. He remembered downloading the ringtone: the refrain from “Evil Ways” by Santana. A private joke. While living with Isabel, he had often sung “Evil Ways” when he returned from work, the verse about coming home to a dark house and cold pots.

A week after Pescatore’s arrival, Facundo had given him the latest model of the iPhone. Pescatore had stored the cheap local phone in a drawer and rarely used it again.

“I was mistaken,” he muttered. “I can confirm that is my phone.”

“Where were we?” Mendizábal said. A bead of sweat slid along his temple and down a jowl. “You received three calls from terrorists in France on Tuesday.”

“I wasn’t here Tuesday,” Pescatore said through lacerated and swollen lips. “I was in Rosario on business. That phone never moved. I never knew about any calls; I wasn’t here to answer. You can verify that. The phone hasn’t been used for months. Hardly anyone has the number…”

He trailed off. He looked down. One person had the number: Raymond. Pescatore had given it to him to avoid giving him a number connected to Facundo’s company.

Raymond had the number. The old friend who had materialized out of nowhere. The smooth-singing, fast-talking mystery man. The Muslim convert.

“Yes, no one called that phone for months,” Mendizábal snarled. “Radio silence. We have seen it before. The phone is a dedicated secure line. A call is placed to trigger the operation. No conversation, just a call. Three days later, there is an attack. You present yourself at the scene, pretending to help the authorities. We have seen that before too. The pyromaniac fireman. The Carapintadas with an ambulance.”

Pescatore was suffocating. He remembered the case of the Carapintadas, or “Painted Faces”: they were fascist army commandos who had been caught at the scene of the attack on the Jewish center in 1994 posing as volunteer paramedics with a fake ambulance. Their presence was a mysterious detail in the unsolved case. If someone overseas linked to the attack at El Almacén had called Pescatore’s phone, things added up to make him look bad.

“Who called you from France?”

“I have no idea.”