The Convert's Song (11 page)

Facundo nodded. His furry eyebrows rose. He closed his eyes to concentrate. He murmured “How about that” and
“Epah.”

Pescatore ended with the warning from the FBI attaché.

“Out of the blue, boom! He tells me to shut it down or I’m going to jail,” Pescatore said. Averting his gaze from Facundo, he added, “I’m thinking I need to take his advice and leave town for a while.”

Facundo sighed. “Tony is a good man. He has had bad experiences with his bureaucracy. It sounds like he’s following orders and trying to reduce any focus on Americans. I don’t think they would arrest you. At worst, they might haul you in for another interrogation.”

“I’m not looking forward to that.”

“What I find interesting is the authorities have succeeded in keeping this business about Raymond a total secret. Let me understand: We do not know for a fact that it was your friend who called from the French phone?”

“No. But hardly anybody else had that number except you.”

“What do we know about the dismantled cell in Bolivia?”

“Me, nothing. Furukawa said the Bolivian government barely talks to the Bureau. Or the Agency.”

Facundo closed his eyes. He seemed winded. Pescatore waited until he opened them to pour him a glass of water. Facundo drank gratefully. He said, “And you think Raymond’s purpose in calling you was…”

Pescatore folded his arms and crossed his legs at the ankles. “I’d like to think he called to warn me about what was going to happen. And I’m not saying that just because he used to be my best friend.”

“You have mixed feelings now.”

“Very mixed. Thanks to him, I’ve gotten locked up, beat down, shot, threatened, and practically kicked out of Argentina. But I’m trying to analyze it like you would. First of all, I assume it was Raymond who alerted somebody in Bolivia and called me. The night I saw him, he was torn up about something. Whether he ran into me on purpose or by accident, maybe he was sizing me up. Figuring out if he could use me to get out of his predicament. With Raymond, it’s pretty much all about Raymond.”

“If he is still an informant, someone could have pushed him forward.”

“Like Tony said, if he’s working for the Americans, why bother with me?”

“Individuals like this often have relationships with more than one government. There are intelligence services that for reasons of politics or tradecraft would want to sound the alarm indirectly. Using someone like Raymond.”

Pescatore’s gaze strayed to the television. An elderly bearded man in a yarmulke spoke into the microphones.

“Your assessment is largely psychological,” Facundo said. “You have a unique knowledge of the subject. It is valuable and raises larger questions: Who is this interesting personage? Who is he affiliated with?”

“At first I thought Hezbollah and Iran did it and he’s with them,” Pescatore said. “After all, they hit Argentina twice before. Iran was the prime suspect for me. But I’m starting to wonder.”

“Why?” Facundo’s expression was approving but noncommittal.

“For one thing, he’s Lebanese Sunni, not Shiite.”

“There have been Sunnis recruited or manipulated by Iran.”

“But Ortega, the cop, was in Pakistan with the Sunni al-Qaeda-type networks.”

“Go on.”

“This attack was big, like the Iranian Quds Force would do. But the style seems different. Taking over a soft target, shooting everybody up all crazy. That’s more like al-Qaeda. And the car bomb failed. And they brought in suicide bombers at the last minute. For a state-sponsored op, that’s a lot of hiccups.”

“The Iranians have global reach, but in many cases they are inept and undisciplined. If it wasn’t them, who was it?”

Pescatore was reminded of the times he had testified in court, gaining confidence as the questions gathered momentum. He answered, “Like you’ve told me: Most attacks are simpler and more amateurish than people think. So couldn’t it be a bunch of radicalized criminals who come together on their own? They develop the plot, and then Ortega, and maybe Raymond, get them help and personnel from al-Qaeda groups overseas.”

“And why do they strike in Bolivia and Argentina, of all places?”

“This is the territory they know. Opportunism.”

“I like your analysis, the way you look at all the angles. But for me, Iran and Hezbollah are the ones who did it. They have the history, the regional infrastructure, the—”

Esther walked into the room. Her high heels clicked. She stared at Pescatore and her father, tight-lipped. Facundo gazed skyward.

“I know what you are going to say, dear,” he said. “I feel stupendous.”

“Valentín, he really needs to eat his lunch and rest.” Esther ignored her father in a burlesque of exasperation.

“Absolutely,” Pescatore said.

“Thank you for your eternal vigilance, my dear,” Facundo murmured.

She blew him a stone-faced kiss and left.

“So Facundo,” Pescatore began. “About what Furukawa said. I’ve been thinking, maybe a leave of absence—”

“Where’s the damned remote?” Facundo pawed the sheets around him. “I know that girl, her family. Claudia Rabinovich. She lost her father and her son, poor thing.”

Pescatore noticed that a dark-haired woman had taken the speaker’s podium at the memorial service on television. He recognized her—in her forties, long bony features, a frozen stare—from TV and newspaper reports. Her family owned the delicatessen in the Almacén mall. On the morning of the attack, her teenage son had been working at the entrance, seating customers. Claudia Rabinovich had been with her father in a back office doing the books. She tried to send a fax from the office, but the machine malfunctioned. She left to send the fax from a nearby store. Her father went out to the front to help his grandson with the Friday lunch rush. The two suicide bombers charged in minutes later.

Facundo grunted, leaning perilously sideways to retrieve the remote control. People around Rabinovich wiped their eyes. A contingent of government officials on the stage, huddling together as if for warmth or safety, looked uncomfortable. The volume came up.

“I find myself here today, on this stage, surrounded by the police,” the woman thundered. “Surrounded by all these representatives of the Interior Ministry, the security services, the presidential palace, the judiciary, the congress. But I do not feel safe.
We
do not feel safe. Listen to me well, ladies and gentlemen of the government.
We do not feel safe.
”

Applause. Insults shouted at politicians. Rabinovich pointed at the cordon of uniforms, at officials. She zeroed in on a Cabinet minister in charge of national security. He wore a trench coat. He had a ski tan, puffy lips and reinforced cheekbones supplied by a cosmetic surgeon, the thick sideburns favored by provincial politicos. He looked solemnly into the middle distance, as if he were giving her words deep thought. But his eyelids fluttered. Clearly, he was wishing for an escape hatch. The camera zoomed in on Rabinovich.

“We do not feel safe, because you are liars! We do not feel safe, because you are traitors! We do not feel safe, because you are criminals!”

Her wounded eloquence sent a chill through Pescatore. She recited a catalog of notorious crimes and cover-ups, including the unsolved attacks of the 1990s, and listed the contradictions and mysteries surrounding the attack at El Almacén: Were the police uniforms worn by the terrorists real or fake? Was the plot foreign or domestic? Pescatore marveled once again at what great speakers the Argentines were, regardless of age, class or education. They were fast, sharp, theatrical, funny, merciless. He loved to hear them talk.

The crowd echoed the refrain: “We do not feel safe!”

A man in a fedora, a leader of the Jewish community, leaned out of the crush of dignitaries. He patted the woman’s shoulder and whispered.

“Oh, leave her in peace, you stooge,” Facundo hissed. “Go tend your sleazy bank.”

Rabinovich shook the man off, eyes blazing, voice reverberating.

“We do not feel safe! Because, by commission or omission, one way or another, you are all part of a monstrous system of corruption, impunity, cruelty, hatred, and, finally, terrorism! We do not feel safe! Because you have the blood of my father and my son, of our fathers and sons, our mothers and daughters, on your hands!”

She turned away abruptly. She wavered on her feet, steadied by people around her. The applause went on and on.

“God,” Pescatore said. “She called those goons everything except pretty. I hope she has security.”

Facundo killed the volume. “No one is going to hurt her.”

The strangled disgust in his tone surprised Pescatore. “No?”

“No one is going to hurt her. You know why? She’s brave, magnificent. But she’s impotent. Next year, and the year after, and the year after that, there will be more anniversaries. More rallies. And she will speak. The same speech, more or less. Because nothing will have changed. At best, tangential arrests, meaningless indictments. Every year, she will give that speech. And nothing will change. For the people who did it, for the system that permitted it, she is a symbol of their impunity.”

Facundo glowered. Pescatore raised a soothing hand.

“Who’s going to solve it?” Facundo demanded. “Who cares? Dario is trying, but there’s only so far he can go. The official version is written.”

“Maybe the Americans, the Israelis…”

“There were no American victims. The Americans care only because of this Raymond matter. The Israelis will do what they can, but it is not their top priority, I assure you. Listen to me, Valentín. Unless someone does something extraordinary, in twenty years Claudia Rabinovich will be like the families of the AMIA. Or like the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Walking in circles, looking for justice, losing their way.”

Pescatore imagined a gray-haired, bent-over Claudia Rabinovich at the microphones.

“That’s terrible,” he said.

Facundo had run out of steam. He took a catnap. Pescatore watched the rain falling outside the windows and on the screen.

Facundo stirred.

“What did you say before?” he asked hoarsely. “About Furukawa?”

“He wants me to get on a plane right away. Go home.”

“Ah.”

“He was pretty insistent.”

“Ah.”

“Made it sound like I’m in big trouble if I don’t.”

Facundo’s eyes fastened on him. “And what do you want to do?”

Tell him,
Pescatore thought.
Tell him you made up your mind. Time to get out of Dodge. You’re real sorry, but you need to put serious distance between you and Raymond and this god-awful mess. You hereby resign. You turn in your badge. Tell him.

Pescatore heard himself answer: “I’m not going home.”

Facundo waited. Pescatore continued, “I know Raymond better than anybody. Sooner or later, I’ll find him. Or he’ll find me. Meanwhile, I want to reconstruct the parts of his life I don’t know about. That will help explain the attacks. I’m not gonna sit waiting for the FBI to throw me a bone. I want to work this case.”

Pescatore concluded that his decision had been worth it just to see the elation on Facundo’s face. Still, he had the distinct notion that he had run to the edge of a cliff, stopped in time to save himself, then jumped anyway.

Facundo rubbed his hands together.

“And how,” he asked, “do you propose we go about doing that?”

T
hey left for the jungle before dawn.

Belhaj slept. Enclosed in a sensory cocoon of sunglasses and the earbuds of her iPhone, she curled up against her door behind the driver’s seat. The pose brought out her curves encased in a fitted fatigue jacket. Pescatore dozed intermittently against the opposite window.

The ride unfolded as if in a dream. The road climbed through the mountains toward the sunrise. Then it descended rapidly into the rain forest. The tapestry of hallucinatory beauty came alive with the day. The Toyota Land Cruiser raced downhill through cloud banks and sunshine, drizzle and rainbows. The asphalt got bumpier. The vehicle rattled and whined. The heat and humidity rose. The vegetation turned tropical: vines, spatters of flowers, canopies of green.

The spry little driver turned up the air conditioner. He pointed across the security officer from the French embassy, a fellow Bolivian with a razor-sharp part in his hair and a machine gun worn on a strap.

“Coca,” the driver said.

Pescatore saw a tarpaulin covered with kelly-green leaves go by. He assumed that coca drying in the sun right by the road had to be the legal variety; the drug laws were complex in Bolivia.

The past twenty hours had been a blur. At the hospital in Buenos Aires, Pescatore and Facundo had agreed that Pescatore would continue the investigation however he could. Facundo would work sources by phone and e-mail after his surgery. His daughter in Miami, who handled his agency’s finances, would keep paying Pescatore with the usual transfers to the bank in San Diego and wire him expense money if necessary. In addition, Facundo told him to go to the
cueva
and collect eight thousand dollars. Pescatore now carried the cash stuffed into the pockets of his black military-style vest like a smuggler.

“Be careful, Valentín,” Facundo had said. “There are generally two kinds of terrorists: furious madmen and cold mercenaries. I think we are dealing with both.”

As Pescatore left the hospital, it occurred to him that Tony Furukawa, like Pescatore himself, was not comfortable telling outright lies. The FBI agent had said that Fatima Belhaj was in Bolivia—“as far as I know.” Pescatore jumped in a cab. Sure enough, he found the French investigator at her hotel preparing to check out; her flight to Bolivia was not scheduled to leave until that evening. His breathless arrival did not faze her. They talked over coffee on the hotel’s executive floor overlooking Plaza San Martin and La Torre de los Ingleses, the Big Ben–style clock tower that—like polo and rugby—was a relic of British influence.

Pescatore had rehearsed a pitch in his head. He expected rebuttals and counterattacks. Belhaj surprised him by accepting on the spot.

“An excellent idea,” she said. “We keep working together. I do not understand the logic of the FBI. I told Tony you are a resource that must not be discarded.”

She told Pescatore why she was rushing to Bolivia. Although the Bolivians were keeping things quiet, the French embassy in La Paz had identified the tipster who had alerted authorities about the terrorist cell after receiving a call from France. The tipster had agreed to talk to Belhaj.

Pescatore blinked awake. The Land Cruiser had stopped in a police checkpoint beneath a wooden structure bridging the highway. The officers searching vehicles seemed cast from a toy-soldier mold: warrior faces, compact bodies in fatigues. They surrounded an ancient truck piled high with pineapples. The hood and doors were open. The officers appeared to be tearing the innards out of the dashboard. A group of female passengers stood to one side. They were Quechuas or Aymaras. They wore long dresses and straw hats decorated with ribbons.

An officer in a crisp uniform approached the Land Cruiser. The brim of his cap was low. After glancing at the foreign passports and embassy credentials, he waved them on. The driver and the embassy security man exchanged sotto voce comments about how only a fool would cross the police antidrug commandos known as the Leopards; they didn’t play games and they could chase you through the jungle forever.

“Refreshed?” Belhaj asked Pescatore with a demure yawn. She pushed her sunglasses up into her hair.

“All good. Does this lady know I’m coming along, and who I am?”

“You are a colleague from Buenos Aires,
tout court.
If she asks your nationality, tell her. Otherwise, discretion is best.”

“Okay,” he said. “What are you listening to?”

“Abd al Malik. An enlightened French Muslim rap artist.” She offered the earbuds. “The song is called ‘Gibraltar.’”

He listened. “Cool. With that fast piano and drum, it’s like spoken-word jazz.”

“It is about a young man at the Strait of Gibraltar.”

“Yeah, I think I got it. A black guy. He’s going through all kinds of changes. First he’s crying, then he’s singing in a bar, right? Then he’s yelling, all happy. He goes to the beautiful kingdom of Morocco.”

She nodded, studying him quizzically. “Now you tell me you secretly speak French?”

“Not really. But I did take it in school. Ten years. I spoke Spanish already. My father, he thought French was classy. Raymond speaks it better than I do.”

“Valentín Pescatore,” she said, shaking her curls, accentuating the last syllable of the last name.
“Toujours plein de surprises.”

They had barely talked since Buenos Aires, where she had cut short the conversation to catch her flight. Pescatore had flown out hours later, entrusting the care of his apartment to Facundo’s daughter. He tensed up in the immigration departure line at the Ezeiza airport, but the inspectors didn’t give him a second look. He didn’t know if that meant Furukawa had exaggerated, that someone had put in a good word, or neither of the above. He was so relieved about not getting arrested—and exhilarated about being back in the game—that it took a while to realize that his prospects for returning to Argentina were uncertain. In the Bolivian city of Cochabamba, he had found a note from Belhaj at the hotel instructing him to be ready at five a.m.

Belhaj lowered her sunglasses and gazed out the window. She asked, “Do you know Bolivia?”

“Not really,” Pescatore said. “I did a case with Facundo. We spent a couple of days guarding a guy, a Bolivian on the run from dopers. He told me this jungle produces like a quarter of the cocaine in the world. I guess that’s how most people around here make a living.”

Belhaj nodded. “Our police services keep an eye because most of the cocaine goes to Europe. Through Argentina or Brazil.”

“The president of the country used to be a coca farmer. He kicked out the DEA, so that pretty much tells you what you need to know about him.”

Eventually, the Land Cruiser turned off the main highway. A narrow, semi-paved road became a tunnel through dense foliage. The vehicle slithered in a yellow slop of puddles, gravel and mud. They passed huts, a tethered cow, women washing laundry in a stream. It rained. The driver rounded a curve and came to an abrupt halt. Pescatore saw police officers in the uniforms of the Leopards. They stood with rifles at the ready, covering officers holding machetes who swarmed on a hillside. The Leopards clambered up and down the steep slope with casual agility, using vines and trees as handholds, steadying their comrades in rough spots. Smoke and flames rose from the treetops at the crest of the hill.

The security man said the police had set fire to a clandestine lab for producing coca base paste. The Land Cruiser advanced slowly. Three handcuffed prisoners sat at the roadside. Two were barefoot, unkempt and emaciated, their cheeks distended by wads of coca.

“I think they are
pisacocas,
” Belhaj said in Pescatore’s ear. She had slid over to look through his window. “The ones who step on the coca to make paste. Like they used to make the wine in France.”

The third prisoner looked meaner and better fed and wore boots. He glared at a police officer who was inspecting an old rifle. The police and the suspects were all stained with yellow mud. The security man said the prisoner in boots had probably been a sentry guarding the lab with the rifle.

“A Mauser,” the security man said. “Durable weapon. Accurate. The favorite of the
cocaleros.
Along with dynamite.”

“Dynamite?” Pescatore asked.

“They throw dynamite around like firecrackers. Many of them were miners before. They migrated from the mountains. From tin to coca.”

The sun was shining by the time they reached their destination, a village with wide muddy streets and low wooden buildings. Pescatore climbed out of the vehicle into a murk of heat. He imagined Raymond walking these streets where pigs rooted in gutters, where clouds of flies hovered over jumbo bottles of Coke and Fanta on the tables of outdoor eateries. Raymond had established alliances, set up deals, and made a lot of money in the Chapare jungle. What a place. Raymond was leading him a long way from home.

They entered an open-air meeting hall with a corrugated metal roof on poles. A rally was in progress: a meeting of a union representing coca growers, the
cocaleros.
The speakers stood on a stage adorned with banners and a poster of the Bolivian president, the former
cocalero
leader, smiling in indigenous ceremonial garb, his chest swathed with flower necklaces. The audience stood or sat in folding chairs. Children wandered, played and slept. The security man went toward the stage. Belhaj and Pescatore waited by a waist-high wall. Men squatted or leaned along the wall, faces stolid beneath caps. They chewed coca, the wads swelling their cheeks. Their knockoff windbreakers and warm-up jackets were adorned with the names of European soccer teams or English phrases such as
Daytona City
and
Western Traditional.

A stocky woman was giving a speech. Her black hair was intricately braided, her skirt red, purple and orange. She spoke in Quechua. Her high, reedy cadence built to a crescendo, eliciting dutiful cheers. She pumped her fist in the air.

Shifting to accented Spanish, the woman shouted:
“¡Viva la coca!
¡Muerte a los Yanquis! ¡Viva la coca! ¡Muerte a los Yanquis!”

The crowd echoed the chant. Pescatore leaned close to Belhaj.

“I understood that,” he muttered. “‘Death to the Americans.’ You hear that shit?”

Belhaj made an impatient clicking noise with her mouth. She wanted him to keep his patriotic indignation to himself.

Pescatore looked around again. As he had watched them trudging beneath bales and pedaling rusty bikes, he had felt sympathy for the people of the Chapare. Although many were involved in the drug racket at some level, it was hard to compare them to the psycho cartel gunslingers he had tangled with in the past. Bolivia seemed pretty medieval; the coca farmers were literally peons. But the chant had annoyed and alarmed him. He was the only Yanqui in the vicinity.

Okay, coca lady, I see what time it is,
he thought.
I need to get myself a gun.

The embassy security man returned with a willowy brown-haired woman in her thirties. She did not look like a migrant from the mountains—unless her family had owned a mine. As she walked through the crowd, she exchanged smiles and pleasantries. She greeted Belhaj quietly and hurried them to the Land Cruiser. They rode to a small compound that a sign announced was the headquarters of the Legal Center for Conflict Mediation and Social Justice.

The sweaty office had windows with bars but no glass, and cinder-block walls. Their host was named Amélie Hidalgo Florian. Belhaj had told Pescatore that she was a lawyer who directed the nonprofit funded by the United Nations and the European Union. Her center provided free legal services and mediated between the
cocaleros
and the government. Hidalgo served tea. She poured herself a cup from a different pitcher.

“Mine is coca tea,” she said in French, adding sardonically, “I wouldn’t want you to fail a drug test and cause a scandal in the French police.”

Hidalgo continued in Spanish. Pescatore was not surprised to learn that she was half Belgian. It explained her name, the light complexion combined with strong-lined Andean features, the connection to the French embassy. She cultivated a down-to-earth look. No makeup. She wore sandals, torn jeans, a white cotton shirt. She had the bearing of a dancer or a model. Her hand rested at the base of her throat, fingers touching her chiseled collarbone, as she answered questions. Her straight hair was pulled back in a short ponytail. She came from money and privilege and was attractive in a hard-bitten way. He could see her appealing to Raymond’s appetites.

It’s a girl in every port with this guy,
Pescatore thought.

Hidalgo had met Raymond seven years ago, when his drug business was taking off. He had come up to her at a coffee bar in Cochabamba and introduced himself as Ramón Verdugo, an Argentine businessman.

“I live here,” Hidalgo told them, gesturing over her shoulder at the compound. “But now and then I spend weekends in Cochabamba. This character sat next to me and struck up a conversation. Something about the best cappuccino in Bolivia. Smooth and sleazy. Then Suleiman Kharroubi, a bona fide gangster, comes in to meet him. Ramón invited me to dinner with them. I told him that was impossible. I didn’t know who he was, but I knew what he was. He found that amusing.”

Hidalgo knew a lot about the drug traffickers who operated in the jungle and Cochabamba and Santa Cruz, the cities flanking the Chapare. The mafias regarded her as a useful player on the chessboard because of her legal assistance to coca growers and her probes of abuse by the security forces. Although she made a point of criticizing the drug lords too, they left her alone. The drug lords, coca growers and government all considered her a neutral arbiter.

During the next two years, Hidalgo ran into Raymond at places popular with foreigners and the elite in Cochabamba. He visited her office in the Chapare. It became a ritual. He always asked her out; she always fended him off.

“He called me the queen of the jungle,” she said. “What a talker. Intelligent, yes. He liked music and literature and film. I don’t think he had anyone else to talk to about such things. When he found out my mother was Belgian, he would sometimes speak French. And he told me about the underworld. He liked to drop hints, show off. His group was muscling in. The traditional smuggling strategy is a shotgun approach: peasants carry loads of base paste on remote trails or in hidden compartments. Enough make it out of the valley for the bosses to profit. Ramón’s gang changed that. They went industrial. They did their own refining. They paid off police chiefs and moved truckloads straight down the main highway.”