“O.K.,” he said. “Have a good trip.”
Sully went back to scrutinizing the check-in line. A blond-haired woman
with swarthy skin caught his eye. The suspect could have dyed her hair;
the other specifics matched. He drifted toward her.
“Could I see your passport, madame,” he said.
The woman looked at him blankly.
“Votre passe port s’il vous plait, madame.”
“Bien stir. Vous me croyez etre anglaise? Je suis italienne, mais tous
mes amis pen sent que je suis allemande ou anglaise ou n’importe quoi.”
According to her passport, she resided in Milan, and Sully thought it
unlikely that an American could speak French with such an egregious
Italian accent.
No one else on line just then looked terribly promising. A dot-head
with two bawling children was ahead of the blond Italian. As far as
Sully was concerned, her kind couldn’t leave the country fast enough.
Chicken vindaloo was going to end up being the national dish at the rate
the goddamn dot-heads were immigrating. The Muslims were worse, of
course, but the dot-heads with their unpronounceable names were pretty
awful. Last year, when he’d dislocated his arm, the Indian doctor at
the clinic had flatly refused to give him a real painkiller. Like maybe
he was supposed to do some fakir-style mind control. If his arm wasn’t
half out of its socket, he would have punched the guy.
Sully glanced at the woman’s passport without interest and waved her and
her sniveling brood through. The dot-head whore even smelled like
saffron.
A young Russian with acne. Last name was German, so probably a Jew.
Mafiya? Not his problem just now.
An honest-to-goodness Frenchman and his wife, off to a vacation.
Another goddamn dot-head in a said. Gayatri was the name, and then
something unpronounceable. Curry cut.
None of the other men fit the profile: too old, too fat, too young, too
short.
Too bad. Maybe it wasn’t going to be his lucky day after all.
Anna settled into her coach-class seat, adjusting her said and mentally
repeating her name: Gayatri Chandragupta. It wouldn’t do to stumble
over it if anyone were to ask. She was wearing her long black hair
straight back, and when she’d caught a glimpse of her reflection in a
window, she hardly recognized herself.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR.
Buenos Aires
Anna looked anxiously through the plate glass of the American Express
office at sedate, tree-lined Plaza Libertador General San Martin. The
park, once a bull ring, once a slave market, was now dominated by the
great bronze statue of General Jose de San Martin astride his horse. The
sun blazed fiercely. Inside it was air-conditioned, ice-cold, and
quiet.
“Senorita Acampo?”
She turned to see a slender man in a close-fitting blue blazer, stylish
heavy black-framed glasses. “I am very sorry, senorita, but we cannot
locate this package.”
“I don’t understand.” She switched to Spanish so there would be no
mistake: “Esta registrado que lo recibio?”
“We received it, yes, madam, but it cannot be found.”
Maddening, but this at least was progress. The last employee had
adamantly denied a package had ever been received in her name.
“Are you saying it’s lost?”
A quick reflexive shrug like a nervous tic. “Our computers show it was
sent from Washington, D.C.” and received here yesterday, but after
that, I cannot say. If you’ll fill out this form, we’ll begin a search
throughout our system. If it’s not located, you’re entitled to full
replacement value.”
Damn it! It seemed unlikely to her that the envelope had been lost.
More likely it had been stolen. But by whom? And why? Who knew what
was inside? Who knew to look? Had Denneen given her up? She could
scarcely credit it. Possibly his phone was tapped, unknown to him. In
truth, there were too many potential explanations, and none of them
changed the basic fact: if it had been stolen, whoever had done it now
knew who she was–and why she was here.
The office of Interpol Argentina is located within the headquarters of
the Policia Federal Argentina on Suipacha. Interpol’s man in Buenos
Aires was Miguel Antonio Peralta, the Jefe Secaon Operaaones. A plaque
on his door read subcomisario departamento interpol. He was a round
shouldered, bulky man with a large, round head. Strands of black hair
matted across the top of his pate advertised his baldness instead of
disguising it.
His wood-veneered office was jammed with tributes to Interpol’s work.
Plaques and commemorative plates from grateful police forces around the
world crowded the walls, along with crucifixes and diplomas and images
of saints and a framed apostolic benediction on his family from the Pope
himself. An antique silver-framed sepia photograph of his policeman
father was almost as prominent.
Peralta’s lizard eyes were sleepy behind his perfectly round
tortoiseshell glasses. A holstered pistol sat atop his gleaming bare
desk, the leather holster old but lovingly cared for. He was genial and
flawlessly courteous. “You know we are always eager to help in the
cause of justice,” he said.
“And as my assistant explained, we at CBS find ourselves in a rather
competitive situation right now,” Anna said. “The people at Dateline
are apparently on the verge of locating and exposing this man. If they
reach him first, so be it. But I didn’t get where I am today by being a
pushover. I’m working with an Argentine field producer who thinks we
can get the story, with a little assistance from you.”
“In Argentina, football–soccer, I think you say–is our national sport.
I gather network TV plays that role in the States.”
“You could say that.” Anna rewarded him with a wide smile, and crossed
her legs. “And I’m not at all putting down my colleagues at Dateline.
But we both know what sort of story they’ll do, because it’ll be the
same old tune. Argentina as a backward country that harbors these bad,
bad people. They’ll do something very exploitative, very cheap. We’re
not like that. What we have in mind is much more sophisticated and I
think much more accurate. We want to capture the new Argentina. A
place where people like yourself have been seeing that justice is done.
A place with modern law enforcement, yet respect for democracy”–she
wiggled a hand vaguely–“and like that.” Another wide smile. “And
certainly your efforts would be handsomely compensated with a
consultant’s fee. So, Mr. Peralta. Can we work together?”
Peralta’s smile was thin. “Certainly if you have proof that Josef
Strasser is living in Buenos Aires, you must only to tell me. Produce
the evidence.” He jabbed the air with a silver Cross pen to emphasize
how simple it all was. “That is all.”
“Mr. Peralta. Someone is going to do this story, whether it’s my team
or the competition.” Anna’s smile faded. “The only question is how the
story will be done. Whether it’s a story of one of your successes, or
one of your failures. Come on, you must have a file of leads on
Strasser some sort of indication that he’s here,” Anna said. “I mean,
you don’t doubt he’s living in Buenos Aires, do you?”
Peralta leaned back in his chair, which squeaked. “Ms. Reyes,” he
said, his tone that of a man with a delicious piece of gossip to impart,
“a few years ago my office received a credible tip from a woman living
in Belgrano, one of our wealthiest suburbs. She had seen Alois Brunner,
the SS Hauptsturmfuhrer, on the street, coming out of a neighboring
house. Immediately we have a round-the-clock surveillance on this man’s
house. Indeed she was correct, the old man’s face matched our file
photos of Brunner. We moved in on the gentleman. Indignant, he produced
his old German passport, you know, imprinted with the eagles of the
Third Reich and a big J, for (ew. The man’s name was Katz.” Peralta
came forward in his chair until he was upright again. “So how do you
apologize to a man like this, who had been in the camps?”
“Yes,” Anna agreed equably, “that must have been terribly embarrassing.
But our intelligence on Strasser is solid. Dateline is filming their
second-unit footage background shots even as we speak. They must be
very confident.”
“Dateline, 60 Minutes, 20/20 I am familiar with these investigative
programs. If you people were so very sure Josef Strasser was, as you
Americans like to say, alive and living in Argentina, you would have
found him long ago, no?” His lizard eyes were fixed on her.
She could not tell him the truth that her interest was not in his Nazi
past, but in what he may have been involved in when he parted company
with his Fuhrer, and joined forces with the invisible architects of the
postwar era. “Then where would you suggest I begin looking?”
“Impossible to answer! If we knew there was a war criminal living here,
we would arrest him. But I must tell you, there are no more.” He
dropped his pen onto his desk definitively.