“This will be splendid,” he said.
Tarp was uneasy about the gun. He had it in the flight bag, but he thought it might be safer worn under his arm. Any question he had about it was removed some minutes after he went into the compartment, when his companion removed his own coat, shook out a sporting newspaper, and sat by the window with a cigar. He was wearing an enormous automatic under his arm.
“Cigar?” he said amiably to Tarp.
“I don’t smoke.”
“Mistake. Keeps off viruses.”
His cigar would have kept off anything. Tarp went into the corridor and watched the Santiago suburbs groan by. A solemn child was waving at the train. Tarp waved back, but the child’s seriousness did not change. A dog watched him. Two women watched, so still they might have been frozen. He saw another child, standing under a wall with a faded message urging power to Perón, the child and the message like the national hope and the national ghost. Tarp supposed that he could have seen these things anywhere, but his ideas of Argentina were much colored by what he knew of the country’s past — its seedy fascism during World War Two, its sanctification of Perón’s wives. Thus, Tarp saw his preconceptions: a sad, rather baffled country where things had been done slightly wrong, not wrong enough to bring revolution, but a little wrong again and again and again, so that now it had its shaky military junta, its memories of Perón and Evita, and the Falklands war like a hangover.
“You really do not smoke?” his companion said. He had come out of their compartment to join Tarp in the corridor.
“No.”
“But you used to smoke, eh?”
“A little.”
“And you gave it up because of the propaganda, eh?”
“No.”
“Of course you did. Where are you from, Paraguay?”
“France.”
The man was instantly suspicious. Argentina had wasted a century trying to be France, an effort that made it both envious and paranoid. On the other hand, the man was certainly aware of France’s help in the Falklands (here, the Malvinas) war. Thus, he was both suspicious and grateful, or about as amiable as a panhandler.
“You sound like a Paraguayan.”
“France.”
“What do you think of Argentina?”
Tarp had bought an American travel book to read on the plane. He knew what the correct answer to the question was. “It is the best country in South America.”
The man nodded. “It is our gift for facing reality. The other countries, they are dreamers, madmen, idiots, whatever — one way or another, they do not face reality.”
In Santiago, Tarp had already heard a couple of songs about the Malvinas war. They were nostalgic and patriotic. They did not, in his view, face reality.
He sat in the dining car, inevitably, with the same men and two others much like him. They were younger than Tarp, rather hearty, almost swaggerers. Machismo ran very deep here, and with it a suggestion of sexual uneasiness and a resulting overplaying of the sexual hand: men were too much men; women were so feminine they made the teeth ache. These men were loud and rather pleasant, except that they used the word faggot for everything humane and different. The British who had conquered the Malvinas were faggots; liberals were faggots; newspaper editorial writers were faggots; Americans were faggots.
“What do you do?” his compartment mate said.
“I’m a salesman.”
They all thought that was good. What did he sell?
“Computers.”
Computers were fantastic, they all agreed.
When the meal was over, Tarp had not touched his huge steak.
“Not good enough?” one said. “Mine was fantastic!”
“Argentine beef is the best in the world!” said another.
“I’m a vegetarian,” Tarp said.
He might as well have told them he was a faggot.
When he awoke in the morning, they were barreling through the outermost fringe of Buenos Aires. As he stepped around his sleepy companion so that he could shave and dress, he watched the landscape urbanize itself. It looked like Italy, he thought: put Mussolini’s name where Perón’s appeared and it could be suburban Naples thirty years ago.
“Buenos Aires is a beautiful city,” the other man said with unnecessary force.
“So they say.”
“See for yourself.”
He gestured toward the slum beyond the window. Then, looking at the scene, he said, “Soon.” Tarp smiled and took the Luger out of its paper bag and checked it over, making sure that the ammunition fit it before he put it away in the flight bag. The other man looked at him with something approaching approval, as if he had made up for some of his losses of the night before.
Tarp stepped down from the train into a cool bath of morning air that smelled as sweet as a park full of flowers. He walked out of the huge old European station into streets where men in coveralls were hosing and sweeping in brilliant early sunlight. The air had just that edge of coolness that tells one it is not quite yet the warm season, or that the warm season has not quite ended. Yet the air was clean, almost pure, and it was possible to look for blocks down broad streets and see everything sharp-edged, handsome, pleasing because the air was thin. It was the kind of morning to make him smile.
Yes, it all looked very European to him. Handshakes in the street, fashionable women, nineteenth-century architecture. Like Turin or Lucerne; like parts of Paris, the later but not quite modern parts. He had coffee and wonderfully fresh, crusty croissants and watched people go by.
He found a small hotel beyond the city center and followed the desk clerk’s directions to a men’s shop, where he bought an Italianate sport coat and several shirts. He went to the Foreign Press Club to present his Agence-Presse Europa card and they told him he would have to get an authorization from the Ministry for News and Information; he followed their directions and found a room where, after being routed to three wrong offices, a man entered his name in a record and where he was given a very official piece of pasteboard that proclaimed him an “acceptable journalist.”
“You are going to write about Argentina?” the official asked.
“I am working on a book.”
“About Argentina?”
“About sport. Diversions. In our time, everything is play. I am writing a book about how people play.” The ghost-written articles that had been published in Europe over the Selous name were all about sports.
“What will you write about in Argentina? Football? We missed the World Cup?” His native paranoia was showing.
“Trout fishing.”
The man nodded. He seemed suddenly relieved. He looked at Tarp’s press card, then at the “acceptable journalist” card he was about to sign, then up at Tarp. “There is no trout fishing around Buenos Aires, you know.”
“I know.” He did know, as a matter of fact, just as he knew where the fishing was in Switzerland and Yugoslavia and off the Bahía coast. “Lago Nahuel Huapí. Bariloche.”
“Patagonia.” The man seemed pleased with both of them. He held out the signed card. “If you need any help, making contacts, for example, please feel free to call on me. We want the foreign press to form the right opinions — the truth, of course — about Argentina.”
Juaquin Schneider was not a difficult man to find. He had an eighty-acre industrial park outside Buenos Aires, and his chemical plant took up most of the acreage. The name Schneider was painted in a special shade of blue on all the chemical tanks; the same blue and the same letters were on a large but tasteful sign at the entrance to the complex, as well as on the door and on objects in the offices — matchbooks, pens. The grounds around the plant were beautifully tailored.