Julian and I had gone to the Gran Cafe Tortini to meet her. It was on one of Avenida de Mayo’s busy corners and had been long favored by Argentina’s greatest artists and performers. Before more or less leaving the country, Borges had been a frequent visitor, along with a number of playwrights and actresses less well known to the outside world. The tavern had even gone so far as to commission wax figures of its most famous customers, so there was Borges, frozen in time, seated at a small table, in conversation with Carlos Gardel, the renowned tango singer, the great writer rendered so peacefully that I could hardly imagine him in the Argentina that now swirled around this serene representation of himself, the violence and the chaos, his beloved country very much in the turmoil my father had recommended that we see.
Marisol, so very punctual on all other occasions, was late. Her failure to appear shook Julian in a way that surprised me, and he’d begun to fidget and glance about.
“She’s always on time,” he said.
“She’s only five minutes late,” I reminded him.
“But she’s always on time.”
“I think you’re overreacting a little, Julian,” I said. “It’s only five minutes.”
“Yes,” Julian said pointedly, “but it’s five minutes in Argentina.”
He meant in a country where anything could happen, of course, where a couple could be seized in broad daylight at the obelisk, where in La Plata ten high school students could be kidnapped, raped, and tortured, as they had been some years before in what was known as “The Night of the Pencils.”
“Borges at first favored the junta,” I said, “but now he attacks it. Usually from Europe.”
“Where it’s safe,” Julian said. He peered out over the avenue, searching the morning crowds for Marisol.
“Sometimes that’s the only choice,” I said. “What would be the point of staying here?”
“To fight,” Julian answered in a way that made me wonder if he’d begun to entertain the romantic notion of adopting Argentina, making its struggle his struggle, Julian a one-man international brigade.
I might have said something to that effect, but then Marisol came rushing up from behind us, looking a bit in disarray, but with her customary energy and good cheer.
“Ah,” she said brightly, but with a smile that seemed painted on. “So we have arrived at the cultural center of the city.” She glanced toward the wax figures, Borges, blind, holding his cane, and with that glimpse, an uncharacteristic shadow passed over her. “He wrote once that ‘the present is alone,’” she said, then looked about at the other customers, most of them well dressed, smoking quietly, sipping coffee. “He was not so blind that he could not see the junta’s knife coming for him.”
Never until that moment had I seen a trace of mockery in Marisol, and although she quickly brushed it aside and assumed her apolitical station as a cheerful guide, her disdain for Argentina’s greatest living writer was clear.
“He wrote that kindness is not what a dagger wants,” Julian said, his gaze quite intense.
Marisol looked at him in a way that suggested she had never seen him in exactly the same light. “You are reading Borges?” she asked.
“After you quoted him in Recoleta, how could I not?” Julian said.
“What did you read last?” Marisol asked.
“A short story called ‘The Zahir,’” Julian answered.
Then he smiled softly and repeated a line from the story: “In the drawer of my writing table, among draft pages and old letters, the dagger dreams over and over its simple tiger’s dream.”
Tiger.
Dagger.
What in the name of heaven, I wondered as my train hurtled toward London, did any of it mean?
18
It was around noon when I arrived in London, several hours before I was scheduled to meet Hendricks at Durrants, the small hotel he’d recommended because it was near the American embassy. Durrants had often been used by American officials during the war, a time, spy novelists often pointed out, when the line between the good guys and the bad guys was clearly drawn.
London had changed considerably since my last visit, the influx of immigrants having put its mark on such places as Oxford Street, where Middle Eastern men now smoked hookahs in sidewalk cafes and women strolled about in full burkas. These were changes that gave the city a deeper sense of intrigue, or so it seemed. For I couldn’t be sure that my present view of London as a place of plots and counterplots came from the actual changes I noted in the city itself or from the troubling details that were emerging from Julian’s life-especially the preoccupation with betrayal that marked both his books and his conversation.
Durrants was on a side street not far from Hyde Park. By the time I got there, one of London’s famous drizzles had settled in, along with a touch of fog. Beyond the bar’s small windows, I could see black umbrellas sprouting like dark flowers on the street.
“You must be Philip.”
I turned from the window to see a man standing at my table.
“Walter Hendricks,” he said. “I trust your father is well?”
“As well as can be expected,” I told him.
“For a man his age, you mean,” Hendricks said with a knowing grin. “And mine, too, for that matter.”
Hendricks, however, appeared far less frail than my father. In fact, there was something rough-and-tumble about him, a sense that he could still handle other men with a sure hand. His accent was Southern, of the type that held the soft twang of the Appalachians rather than the rounded o’s of the Tidewater. Here was one whose ancestors had fought under Lee, rather than beside him, I thought, men who staggered back from Pickett’s charge to hear their general’s apology while trying hard not to notice that there was no blood on his sleek lapels.
“I would have expected you and Julian to have gone on the grand tour after college,” he said as he sat down opposite me. “Argentina always seemed to be an odd choice.” He smiled quite warmly. “‘The dusty places,’ your father used to call them. He had a soft spot for the people of those regions.” His smile grew into a soft chuckle. “I told him that he should spend some time in Timbuktu, where even the food tastes like dirt.”
“I’m sure he would have loved a posting like that,” I said in defense of my father. “To face that kind of reality.”
Hendricks’s laughter trailed away. “Not for long,” he said with the certainty of one who’d experienced such places. “No one likes that kind of reality for long.”
He glanced about the bar. “Have you ever been here?”
“No.”
He smiled. “Well, my guess is that many a plot was hatched in this place,” he said. We were sitting at a small, round table clearly meant to accommodate drinks only. “It wouldn’t surprise me if Reilly, Prince of Spies, once sat right in this corner, at this little table, and wondered if it might be possible to have Lenin assassinated.”
Even in such casual conversation, Hendricks’s eyes remained penetrating, the gaze of a man to whom one should not lie.
“I love history,” he added. “It’s the reason I retired to London, the sheer history of the place. I read history all the time. Probably as much as your father reads spy novels. He seemed to live in books back then.” He laughed. “He was reading The Thirty-Nine Steps the day I met him.”
“He doesn’t read now,” I said. “He watches old movies. Black-and-white mostly. From the forties.”
“Yes,” Hendricks said. “That would be his type.” His smile bore the usual indulgence that men of the world accord their dreamier compatriots, and in it I saw the most that was likely ever given to my father by the sturdier and far less idealistic souls who’d pulled the strings at Foggy Bottom. “Stories about lone heroes. That was what he wanted to be, I think.”
“But instead he lived his life behind a desk,” I said.
Hendricks nodded. “That’s true,” he admitted. “But I’m not sure your father would have functioned very effectively beyond a desk.”