Dark Tangos Read online

  DARK TANGOS

  LEWIS SHINER

  www.headofzeus.com

  Praise for Dark Tangos:

  “Dark Tangos is one hell of a book. I couldn’t believe how deftly Shiner mixed a novel of dance and romance with arrow-swift action and vivid characterization. The man’s a wizard, and the result of his wizardry is this wonderful, dark, engaging, and surprising novel.”

  —Joe R. Lansdale, author of The Bottoms

  “Delivers its grim story line with artistic mastery….Short and precise, the novel uses the elegance of tango to radiate sensuality throughout. This is an absorbing and surprisingly action-packed tale based in the ugly truths of Argentina’s history.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “Shiner plunges into the dark recent history of Argentina in this thriller that tells a gentle love story against a backdrop of sheer terror….Shiner gracefully and efficiently tells his moving tale within a tight frame.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “In the tradition of Graham Greene, Shiner has written not only a great entertainment, but a meditation on the true meaning of justice.”

  —Durham Herald-Sun

  “An intellectually powerful and socially interesting commentary on what happened in Argentina….What makes this a good example of the [political thriller] genre is that it does include the detail of the politics. Unlike many other authors who prefer more superficial plots with guns blazing and bombs exploding to keep us interested, this is a thinking person’s thriller with attitude. It’s well worth reading.”

  —David Marshall, Thinking About Books

  First published in the United States in 2011 by Subterranean Press

  This edition first published in the United Kingdom in 2019 by Head of Zeus Ltd

  Copyright © Lewis Shiner, 2019

  The moral right of Lewis Shiner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  9 7 5 3 1 2 4 6 8

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN (E) 9781789541229

  Cover Design: Ben Prior

  Author Photo: © Orla Swift

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  Contents

  Welcome Page

  Praise for Dark Tangos

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Dark Tangos

  Author’s Note

  Glossary

  By Lewis Shiner

  About the Author

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  I have used «guillemets» throughout to indicate dialogue originally spoken in Spanish. A glossary of Spanish and tango terms appears at the end of the book.

  The first time I saw her was in the chrome and cracked-plaster lobby of Universal’s Buenos Aires office. From where I stood, on the other side of the glass wall that separated our servers from the noise and dirt of the city, I got an impression of power and grace from the way she held herself, saw long, dark hair and a flash of gold at her ears and wrists.

  She was one more beautiful woman in a city full of beautiful women, and young, not much past thirty. Yet something made me look again. Maybe her nose, which was long and slightly crooked, as if it had been broken in the distant past and never properly set.

  She was deep in conversation with the receptionist, a young guy with a dark suit and a permanent five o’clock shadow. It seemed like he was not giving her what she wanted, though I couldn’t hear their words through the glass.

  She glanced up at me and I thought she would look away, bored or even annoyed by another wistful male gaze. Instead she let me see something else, a question, an urgency.

  I found myself, to my surprise, mouthing words to her in Spanish: «Can I help?»

  She gave me a rueful smile and a small, tilted shake of the head that said no, thanks. Then she turned back to the receptionist and I forced myself to walk away.

  *

  It was my first full day on the job. I’d been in the city for a week, moving into my tiny apartment, opening a bank account, putting a local chip in my cell phone, contacting old friends. I also called my favorite of the tango teachers I’d worked with on previous trips and scheduled some private classes. I drifted from one thing to the next as if in a dream, sometimes looking up to realize I didn’t remember the last ten minutes.

  In terms of time zones, Buenos Aires is only an hour ahead of North Carolina. What I was feeling was not jetlag but culture lag, life lag. I could focus my brain on no more than one thing at a time, and my feelings had shut down entirely. There had been too many shocks in a row, more than I could bounce back from.

  The Buenos Aires office existed in another era from Universal’s vast campus in Research Triangle Park. My cubicle had gray metal walls instead of taupe fabric. Bare fluorescent bulbs hummed from stained fixtures on tile ceilings instead of being tucked away in recesses. The background sounds came from cars and buses six floors below and not from piped-in white noise.

  I’d lost most of the morning tracking down a laptop and a port replicator, a mouse and monitor and keyboard, and I spent the afternoon getting my email ID and installing software. By suppertime I had managed to connect to the repositories in our upstate New York headquarters, check out my programs, and write exactly three lines of new code. I felt as pleased with myself as if I’d won a marathon, and about as exhausted.

  But that night, on the edge of sleep, I thought of her again.

  *

  My first trip to Buenos Aires had been in 2003, three years before. Universal had flown me down to meet the local programmers assigned to the governance software project. They would report to me in North Carolina, and I would get my choice of the most interesting parts to write myself.

  I arrived at the end of September, as spring was lighting up the monochrome streets. In what spare time I had, I wandered the city and let the strangeness settle on my skin like the dust and grit in the air. It reminded me of Paris, but a younger Paris, sprawled across wide avenues dotted with plane trees and purple jacarandas and the swollen trunks of palos borrachos. Most of the grey stone buildings had gone up between 1875 and World War II, when Argentina was one of the ten richest nations on the planet. The architectural style was massive and European, with wrought-iron grilles and balconies full of flowering plants, arches and domes and the occasional red-tiled roof that gave everything a Spanish accent. And now primary-colored storefronts erupted from the ground floors, even as sprays of black graffiti on the endless corrugated metal security doors provided a reminder that the days of first-world status were long gone.

  The sidewalks swarmed with pedestrians, men in dark suits and women in black dresses and heels. Despite the formality of the clothes, it was a city where both sexes greeted each other with a hug and a kiss on the cheek. It was a city with one of the highest literacy rates in the world, where newspaper kiosks sold the novels of Borges and Cortázar, and bookstores lined Avenida Corrientes. It was also a city where the homeless slept in doorways and the weight of 13 million people stretched the city’s resources to the br
eaking point. Cartoneros went through the trash on the streets for scrap cardboard and plastic to recycle, and crafters in the plazas made stunning art from cans and bottles and folded subway tickets. And it was a city of tango music, bandoneones and violins and pianos, the heart-wrenching melodies that evoked the giant, echoing ballrooms of the 1930s, and the insistent rhythms that whispered of seduction.

  My first morning in the city, groggy and stale from ten hours on an airplane, I wandered into the flea market at Plaza Dorrego and saw an older man dancing tango, not in the clichéd fedora and ascot, but bareheaded in a loose white shirt, his long gray hair slicked back, a dark-skinned and eagle-beaked son of indigenous Americans named Luis Ortega, though everybody called him Don Güicho. I saw the joy in his dancing and the pleasure in the eyes of his partner and I was hooked.

  Back in the States, I found out that there had been tango all around me without my knowing it. I convinced Lauren to take classes with me, and while the first months were frustrating, there were milongas once or twice a week where I could glimpse the grace and sensuality that had spoken to me in Buenos Aires. Like all principiantes, we started with open embrace, looking like teenagers at a junior high school prom. But it was close embrace that held the magic for me, where tango became a three-minute love affair, intense, passionate, hypnotic—if I could get past my self-consciousness enough to enjoy it.

  I took Lauren with me to Buenos Aires the next September. We went directly to Plaza Dorrego, where we found Don Güicho and convinced him to give us private lessons.

  Unfortunately, the second life it gave our marriage didn’t last. Lauren dropped out of the classes, though she came to Buenos Aires again with me in 2005. After that she was through with dancing entirely and by the next summer she was through with me.

  That had been in June, three months before I arrived in Buenos Aires to stay. She came home from work one day and informed me that she was putting our marriage “on hiatus.” I was reasonably sure she was having an affair, though somehow that issue failed to come up in the polite negotiations that followed. Lauren was the director of Durham Regional Hospital, making twice what I did, so logic dictated that she keep the house and the mortgage payments while I found a place over a friend’s garage. I took only a few favorite pieces of the furniture I had repaired and refinished over the years because that was all I had room for. I kept half the savings in case of emergencies and she agreed to pay for Sam’s last year of college. The rest of what was mine, including my books and my woodworking tools, went into storage.

  The dislocation had been profound. I’d been moving all my life, and when we’d bought that house I’d sworn that this was it, that the only way I would leave would be feet first. Some days I missed the house more than I missed the marriage.

  I was three weeks into the separation when my manager at Universal called me into her office to tell me that my job had “relocated” overseas. It was as if she’d come in that morning and been unable to find it, or discovered a farewell note next to the coffeemaker. I had the option of moving to Buenos Aires with it, or I could quit, which meant I couldn’t even collect unemployment. If I chose Buenos Aires, I would be paid the same number of Argentine pesos that I was currently making in dollars, coming to somewhat less than a third of my US salary.

  The timing was remarkable, in that way disasters have of finding each other. Even without my telling her about Lauren, she seemed to know how little I had left to lose. I said that I needed a couple of days to think about Argentina, but in truth I’d known all along that I would go.

  *

  My second day on the job, Bahadur Singh invited me to lunch. He was my immediate boss and the manager for all the sixth floor programmers. We were fellow outsiders to the easygoing Latin attitude toward time and deadlines, and over years of long distance phone calls we’d found enough other things in common to sustain a friendship.

  Bahadur was from the Punjab via Bangalore, a Sikh with lineage going back to the eighteenth century. For him, the move to Buenos Aires had been a promotion too substantial to refuse, though now that he was here he regretted it. There were not many Indians in Buenos Aires and fewer Sikhs. The winters were far colder than he had anticipated and the meat-and-leather culture of Argentina took a constant toll on his sensibilities. He was still struggling with his Spanish and was relieved to be able to speak English with me.

  I told him about the woman I’d seen in the lobby. “I don’t know why she made such an impression on me.”

  “You had a darshan of her,” Bahadur said. “That’s when you don’t just passively observe someone, you really see into them, yes?” He pointed his index and middle fingers at his eyes. “It’s a gift from the Divine.”

  “It was just that there was some kind of mystery there.”

  “Yeah, right, Rob. That and the fact that she was a knockout.” Bahadur loved US slang, which he picked up by watching too many DVDs alone in his apartment.

  I shrugged and looked at my plate and he laughed.

  We were sitting in a hole-in-the-wall café on the ground floor below the office, little more than an oven and a few tables on a linoleum floor. There was a glass case with cold cuts, bread, empanadas, and fresh fruit.

  Through the windows I could see Avenida 9 de Julio, the widest street in the world. The cars, most of them taxis, ignored the painted lines and swarmed into any available space. A few blocks to the right was el Obelisco, the city’s best known symbol, so blatantly phallic that the year before, the city government had covered it with a 200-foot pink condom for the duration of World AIDS Day.

  El Obelisco sat on a concrete island in the intersection of 9 de Julio and Corrientes. Corrientes was the aorta of Buenos Aires, running from the heart of the microcentro, where I sat, past theaters and bookstores and nightclubs and restaurants, past the US-style Abasto shopping mall, dying out finally near the huge Chacarita cemetery. It was always red in my mind, red for the illuminated plastic signs for Linea B of the subway that runs beneath it, for the neon lighting up the gray buildings, for the taillights of the cars headed east «hacia el bajo,» toward the Rio de la Plata that forms the northeastern border of the city and the country.

  Spring had come again, though the overdressed porteños that I could see on the sidewalks were slow to admit it. They’d insulated themselves with long scarves and high boots, sweaters and cashmere overcoats. I myself had compromised with the dressier Buenos Aires standards, wearing a long-sleeved soft cotton shirt, khakis, and a knit tie. Bahadur tended toward jeans and rugby shirts. He was tall and lean and fit, with a curly black beard and gentle eyes. He’d had on a different colored turban every time I’d seen him and that day he was in navy blue.

  He was eating a slice of the tarta de verduras, a pie stuffed with hard-boiled eggs and acelga, the Swiss chard that Argentines used in place of spinach. I had gone for the empanadas de choclo, filled with a corn and cream sauce that had a famous tango named after it.

  A woman’s voice said, «Mind if I join you?»

  I looked up and saw Isabel, the director of the Buenos Aires office. She was in her early fifties, a few years older than me, compact, olive-skinned, with a scattering of white in her short black hair. Her eyes sat close together and it gave her a certain intensity of expression. She had a generous mouth and an easy smile, and she made it clear that I didn’t want to know what happened when the smile went away. Her nickname, which she encouraged, was La Reina, the Queen.

  «¿Como no?» I said, and stood up so she could squeeze past me.

  «You settling in okay?» she asked. «Bahadur isn’t trying to talk you into any of his crazy chanting shit, is he?»

  «It’s not crazy, it’s kirtan,» Bahadur said. «It’s quite beautiful, some of it. If you have the patience for it.»

  Isabel had a big laugh, not something you heard much from Universal’s upper management in the US. We talked about the governance project, and then about my apartment in the old San Telmo district, which she considered a dangero
us part of town. She brought up the Boca Juniors futbol team and I had to tell her that I was not a sports fan, my father having forced me to play games I had no aptitude for as a kid.

  After a silence, she said, «Tell me, Beto, how bad is it in the US?»

  I’d told everyone to call me Beto, short for Roberto, rather than my English name. It was one more way to put distance between me and my old life in the States.

  «It’s hard to know the truth,» I told her. «They don’t keep statistics on everyone who’s unemployed, only on the ones who are getting benefits, and those run out after six months.»

  «It’s the same here,» Bahadur said. «They had an official unemployment rate of twenty percent not that long ago and you know it was really twice that. Now they say it’s gone down, but you still see the homeless everywhere.»

  I said, «All I know is a lot of my friends are out of work and not finding anything. And Universal is laying people off, like everyone else.»

  «Which is why you’re here, no?» Isabel said.

  I shrugged. «It was a good opportunity for me. I love Buenos Aires. I always wondered how it would be to live here.»

  «I think maybe you’re being diplomatic. That’s not a bad thing. Still, you wonder where all this is going to end up. I know Jim would not be laying people off if there was any other way. You never met Jim, did you?»

  I shook my head. She was talking about James W. Watkins, the Senior Vice President for Software Development at Universal, one of the most powerful men in the company. It was a little-known fact that Watkins’ first assignment for the company was in Buenos Aires, back in 1975. He spent seven years as director, doubling the size of the staff as well as the revenue, before getting promoted to the Anaheim office. He was at the top of the chain of command that included the three of us, and he had a reputation for being a decent guy who kept his door open to his employees.