Read Online Needle in a Haystack by Ernesto Mallo - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Ernesto Mallo
Tags: General, Historical, Thrillers, History, Mystery, Travel, Mystery; Thriller & Suspense, Political, South America, Argentina, Latin America, International Mystery & Crime, Thrillers & Suspense, Spies & Politics, Americas
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am seated, trying to bore through the darkness and, finally, the desert is a mirror in which I see every person I’ve ever known. Very clear and distinct. All the emotions I’ve ever experienced come to me, one after the other, with no respite, while the moon tears apart the night like a barracuda does a fish. Alchemy, transmutation: I am the desert and the desert is me. And suddenly I am howling at that very moon. Outside, the sun glares and filters its rays with fury into the room where I think I’m a horse, a fox, a bat. I ask myself: What are you? Are you a horse, a fox or a mouse?
He wakes up, drowning in his own sweat. He gets up, stumbles out of the room. On the sofa Eva sleeps. She has carefully folded up her new clothes and neatly placed them on a chair. A long arm dangles out of the blanket. He moves closer, gently touches her hand. Only to assure himself that she’s not part of the dream, of the desert, that she is really there, alive. She is there.
9
One o’clock. Florida high street. Hustle and bustle. The galloping inflation unleashed upon 1979 infects everyone. Office workers, financial traders and beggars alike are all prey to the frenetic uncertainty. Those with money rush to spend it, for soon it will not be worth the paper it’s printed on. Those without money will never have any.
Although winter chills prevail, as the elderly are only too aware, there’s a feeling, but only a feeling, of spring in the air. Not for Amancio, though, who is buried up to his eyeballs in debt. What really worries him is his debt with Biterman: the Jew could lift the lid on his financial shenanigans at any moment. Amancio has fraudulently guaranteed several different loans against the same assets, each time craftily hiding his outstanding obligations. So the cheques he signed for Biterman could prove to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Everything else he signed can only lead to civil court orders, which drag on at their own slow pace and can take up to ten years to resolve with the right delaying tactics, and even then there’s a strong chance that the whole matter will come to nothing. But the cheques can send him straight to a penal court. If
Biterman decides to declare him bankrupt, the whole pack of creditors will set upon him. This in turn will bring about his total ruin and, most probably, send him to Devoto jail. Amancio wakes up punctually at five o’clock every morning imagining such a scenario in a panic of fear and revulsion. The Jew has to be stopped in his tracks somehow and a brilliant idea as to how suddenly comes to Amancio: Giribaldi.
Throughout his youth, in his free time between Military College, his activities with the Tacuara far-right movement, Father Meinvielle’s anti-semitic lectures at the Huemul bookshop and Sunday mass, Giri played scrum-half for Atalya, with Amancio a three-quarter. They became friends over post-match beers, visits to brothels in Carupá, parties at the Atlético de San Isidro rugby club or the Rowing Club, where these young rabble-rousers, smoking and dressed in tuxedos, stood around flexing their muscles. The girls from the Jesús María, Anunciata and Malinkrodt convent schools loved to lead the lads on, but were instinctively repulsed by the idea of taking things further. Thus the boys left the parties horny and smarting, spilling onto the street as a gang ready for a fight. They would look for one, and find one: there was always some unsuspecting idiot to take their frustration out on, burn off some of the testosterone the girls had brought to the boil. Naturally, Giri was mob leader. Nobody had asked him to be, he just assumed the role by being the biggest and cruellest lout of them all, and because no one in the group dared stand up to him. Whenever anyone protested, Giri would stop him dead with his steely stare, enough to remind any upstart how brutally he dealt with street-fight victims.
Giri had calmed down these days, a married man and an
He wakes up, drowning in his own sweat. He gets up, stumbles out of the room. On the sofa Eva sleeps. She has carefully folded up her new clothes and neatly placed them on a chair. A long arm dangles out of the blanket. He moves closer, gently touches her hand. Only to assure himself that she’s not part of the dream, of the desert, that she is really there, alive. She is there.
9
One o’clock. Florida high street. Hustle and bustle. The galloping inflation unleashed upon 1979 infects everyone. Office workers, financial traders and beggars alike are all prey to the frenetic uncertainty. Those with money rush to spend it, for soon it will not be worth the paper it’s printed on. Those without money will never have any.
Although winter chills prevail, as the elderly are only too aware, there’s a feeling, but only a feeling, of spring in the air. Not for Amancio, though, who is buried up to his eyeballs in debt. What really worries him is his debt with Biterman: the Jew could lift the lid on his financial shenanigans at any moment. Amancio has fraudulently guaranteed several different loans against the same assets, each time craftily hiding his outstanding obligations. So the cheques he signed for Biterman could prove to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Everything else he signed can only lead to civil court orders, which drag on at their own slow pace and can take up to ten years to resolve with the right delaying tactics, and even then there’s a strong chance that the whole matter will come to nothing. But the cheques can send him straight to a penal court. If
Biterman decides to declare him bankrupt, the whole pack of creditors will set upon him. This in turn will bring about his total ruin and, most probably, send him to Devoto jail. Amancio wakes up punctually at five o’clock every morning imagining such a scenario in a panic of fear and revulsion. The Jew has to be stopped in his tracks somehow and a brilliant idea as to how suddenly comes to Amancio: Giribaldi.
Throughout his youth, in his free time between Military College, his activities with the Tacuara far-right movement, Father Meinvielle’s anti-semitic lectures at the Huemul bookshop and Sunday mass, Giri played scrum-half for Atalya, with Amancio a three-quarter. They became friends over post-match beers, visits to brothels in Carupá, parties at the Atlético de San Isidro rugby club or the Rowing Club, where these young rabble-rousers, smoking and dressed in tuxedos, stood around flexing their muscles. The girls from the Jesús María, Anunciata and Malinkrodt convent schools loved to lead the lads on, but were instinctively repulsed by the idea of taking things further. Thus the boys left the parties horny and smarting, spilling onto the street as a gang ready for a fight. They would look for one, and find one: there was always some unsuspecting idiot to take their frustration out on, burn off some of the testosterone the girls had brought to the boil. Naturally, Giri was mob leader. Nobody had asked him to be, he just assumed the role by being the biggest and cruellest lout of them all, and because no one in the group dared stand up to him. Whenever anyone protested, Giri would stop him dead with his steely stare, enough to remind any upstart how brutally he dealt with street-fight victims.
Giri had calmed down these days, a married man and an
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