Tarp drove out to look at the industrial park. It all seemed too easy. There were other Schneiders in Buenos Aires, and he hired a detective to follow up three of them, explaining that his wife was having an affair with somebody named Schneider. If the piece of paper in the dead man’s pocket in Havana was genuine, then he supposed this Schneider was the obvious one, although the connection between plutonium and agricultural chemicals was not obvious at all. A day’s nosing around Buenos Aires turned up nothing to change the profile of Schneider as a rich, powerful man who had made his money in fertilizers.
“Schneider?” The speaker was one of many new acquaintances, a red-faced Englishman named Grice in the Foreign Press Club bar. Grice boasted that he had ridden out the Malvinas war better than the Argentine navy had, right here at this bar, and he knew more about what was what in the country than the government did. Or so he said. “Of course I know Schneider. Know of Schneider, I mean. Very rich. Up to his oxters in agribusiness, although the real brains were his wife’s. A Jewess, naturally. Dead now. Sure, I know who Schneider is. Why?”
“I am a little interested in him.” Tarp had to remember to speak English with a slight French accent.
“Why? Let me be frank with you, my French friend, old copain, old ally — I don’t give out information for free, you know; if it’s a story, I want a share. There’s actually a news service back in London that expects to hear from me once in a way.”
“I cannot give away my story.”
“Well, ’course not. No.” The Englishman pulled at his nose with a thumb and finger as if he were popping his ears after a dive. “You ready for another?” He meant that he was ready to be bought another beer, which he downed with the gusto of a Falstaff.
“My pleasure,” Tarp said.
“That’s the spirit! Well, you have to understand, Frenchy, I need a little before we’re done — human interest, anything of that sort — you’re not into dirt, are you? Not one of the American supermarket rags, are you? ‘Princess Di Pregnant by UFO,’ that sort of tripe? I mean, we all have our standards, even poor old Grice. Well, this beer has bought you a swallow or two more of information, all right? On account, as it were? Dear me, I hope we’re speaking the same language, you and I. Well, at any rate, about Schneider: he’s second-generation Argentine, one of the fifty wealthiest sods in the country. Or was, three or four years ago. Papa came from Deutschland in the Weimar days — got out in time, I mean, before Hitler. Not a Jew, for all the present Schneider married one. But the old man — I mean, the one who emigrated from Weimar — was a nobody; it’s the present Schneider who built the fortune.” He drank, banged his big glass down — empty again — and stared at Tarp, his face flaming. “Not a man to mess about with.”
“Mess about?”
Grice looked around, waited until the barman had moved away. He may have been doing it all for effect. “The death squads. You hear things. That he’s one of the backers, you know?” His breath was warm and rich with the beer. “Squads have been lying low of late, at least around Buenos Aires. But he was in it up to the oxters, see?”
“Anything proven?”
Grice fiddled with his empty glass. Tarp ordered him another. Grice still looked unhappy. “Look, chum, we got to have an understanding, you and me. What’s the split if you get a story?”
“Ten percent,” Tarp said with Gallic caution.
“No, no.” Grice grasped the fresh glass as if it were a lifeline. “I need stories, Frenchy, not a cut! What do I get in the story department?”
Tarp thought. “First look at my rough draft?”
Grice beamed at him. “Now you’re talking, Frenchy!” He drank and left a mustache of foam on his sandy mustache. “And don’t try to cross me up, love; I’ve got friends at Reuters could see to it that your stories never got relayed correctly back to Paris ever again. All right, so now we’re partners, are we? Good. Well, let me see. ‘Anything proven,’ you were asking.” He chortled. He had a fat man’s laugh — throaty, big, shaking the whole torso. “Proven? In Argentina?” He slapped Tarp’s shoulder. “Buy me another pint, I’ll tell you what the system is down here.”
When Tarp took the fat man to his apartment at two in the morning, he had learned a lot of sometimes scandalous detail, but little of importance that was radically different from what he had found in newspapers and magazines. Schneider was a widower; Schneider had a beautiful daughter; Schneider was a rightist with ties to the military.
The only really useful thing he’d learned from Grice was that Schneider had just returned from Cuba.
Chapter 12
In order to see Schneider personally, he had to go through an outer perimeter of secretaries and mindlessly smiling young men with MBAs from American universities. A day of it was enough for him, and Grice laughed at him when they met at the bar that evening. Grice rubbed his thumb and two fingers together. “Chai, mon ami,” he said. “Chai.”
Chai was the word for tea wherever tea was drunk, but it was also a word for “tea money” — bribes.
“Ah, baksheesh,” he said.
“You got it, chum. How’s our story coming today?”
The payments started, it appeared, at the Ministry of News and Information, so back he went next morning to the same official who had issued his journalist’s card. His name was Kinsella, but he spoke only Spanish and was as Argentinian as the dry dust of Patagonia. He was a balding, slack-looking man in his thirties with a sandy mustache and the blue eyes of the Kinsella who had first come to Argentina in the nineteenth century.
Kinsella rested his head on one hand, absentmindedly pulling reddish hairs over the baldest place. He frowned at a piece of paper that lay in the circle of light on his desk. It was a dark day, and Tarp felt that he was receding into a Victorian murk, along with the city and its ideas.
Kinsella sighed. “You are requesting an interview with Juaquin Schneider.” He sounded more than a little surprised, as if such a thing had never happened to him before.
“That is correct.”
“You told me you were here because of the fishing. I remember mentioning Bariloche to you.”
“I believe it was I who mentioned Bariloche.”
“Why do you argue with me?” Kinsella looked annoyed. He put his face down into the circle of light as if he wanted Tarp to see its unhappy expression. “You are not a very tactful man.”
“Forgive me.”
“A journalist should be tactful. Especially if he has some idea of meeting a man like Juaquin Schneider.” He shook his head. “You said you were going to write about fishing.”
“Is that important?”
“Would I be mentioning it if it was not?”
“Is it your business to pass on everything I do?”
“Of course. What do you suppose my function is? This isn’t the United States, you know. We don’t want journalists running around like wild dogs, pestering people. You said you were here to write about fishing.”
“I said I was writing a book about diversions. I assume Señor Schneider has diversions.”
Kinsella put his hand over his forehead again and leaned on the elbow. “Señor Schneider’s office is not inclined to favor your request.”
“How do you know?”
“They called me twice yesterday. They said you were being a pest.”
“I thought I was going through channels. I did not realize that I should go through you.”
Kinsella looked at him. Kinsella already looked tired, as if his workday was ending, not beginning. “Señor Schneider is an immensely wealthy man.”