A couple of afternoons later, Mick phoned. Me being out at the time again exploring the fabulous beauty of Belle Époque Buenos Aires, the Briton left a message to meet. Not where we’d first crossed. No. At an address I suspected housed some likely blind tiger. One west of my apartment. Maybe it was in Once. All the times I’ve visited Buenos Aires I’ve barely been cognizant of respective neighborhoods. Except for Boca. The locals, especially trendy girls, had such demarcations ingrained in them.
Vast a metropolis as BA is, when done through targeted explorations the city is quite walkable. Its melded blocks contrast nicely against distinct enclaves.
I spent little time nor exerted much effort in government or commercial zones. Not one to be cowed or impressed amid edifices initially erected to serve the people but now exist to make them bow.
Saw a Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo delegation march near La Casa Rosada. These silent demonstrations of dignified women’s persistence remain terrific reminders. Their appearances continually goad the ruling elect of its responsibility to account for the approximately 30,000 Argentines made to vanish through the 1976-83 dictatorship.
Revenge isn’t the motive. Mothers as well as grandmothers just want answers.
In this Argentine governments have been exceptionally derelict.
Mick set our second meeting at midnight. Our first meeting, quite impromptu, occurred at three a.m. I learned quick BA got cracking late. First visit to BA, I decided early evening naps until 10 or 11 (a k a “dinnertime”) a necessity before hitting the bricks. These surrenders to Nod made staying awake and aware until 5 or 6 or coffee easier.
Instead of rendezvousing inside a chamber of BA social bedlam, Mick chose a sedate spot. Any more sedate it would’ve been somnolent. New moon hued paneling enclosed us. Where picture windows ought’ve let patrons peer onto the sidewalk or nighttime passersby gape inside were instead shielded by heavy green blackout curtains. Two bartenders in coal black pants and dazzlingly bright white long-sleeve shirts mixed then glided from around a regal bar to serve patrons. Behind them shelves of high-end spirits gleamed brightly against a mirrored background.
Well-spaced square tables created discrete islands. Each could accommodate up to four seated beachcombers.
The only sounds lower than the ambient Argentine orchestrations were other patrons’ sotto conversations. It was a mature crowd demurely though expensively attired. Among these nobs I probably sat somewhere in the middle. Mick definitely skewed young there.
He’d observed my appraisal. Then Mick informed me this one of the refined lairs in which he conducted business. Where we’d first met, well, that served as one of his favorite BA playgrounds in which to collect his rewards for those efforts.
I remarked about the unlikelihood of needing to barter or bargaining for a few packs of cigarettes inside our present premises. Though our acquaintance was short, this instance produced one of the few times I watched Mick step away from his eager confidence. My reference made him grimace.
He admitted most of those patrons frequenting this den beside us, particularly the older more rightward leaning ogres, would never acknowledge the clear disparities riving Argentina. Rather than solve inequities, they’d burrow into class refuge. Safely cosseted, they’d declare the less fortunate lazy then leave it up to their merciful and benevolent God to somehow save them.
As good as any example of justifying turning blind eyes as I’d ever heard. Probably best declaimed after four or five glasses of a crushingly bracing malt.
Neither Mick or I was a Scotch man. Following the room’s dominant shade, we drank Frank Sinatra’s favorite brand. Mick preferred the Tennessee stuff to expected Brit nips because in his mind what issued from those bottles went farther than Scotch insofar as getting things done; moving forward, as it were. Scotch allowed its imbibers to contemplate. “The nectar of the gods,” on the other hand, ignited action.
The analogy pleased me. Simple me also found it a perfect partner to beer chasers. But let me agree with Mick on this: the whiskey we drank didn’t generate profundity like Scotch.
Over several glasses we volleyed conversation. He liked I was cultured as well as educated. He would’ve liked to have loaded up on both, but that England shunted him elsewhere along different roads. Short on intellect as he believed himself, Mick nurtured instincts that sharpened him. It let him see opportunities. Of the sort that we were to discuss.
Seems two otherwise legit businessmen from his old country had a problem. Their aboveboard enterprise had the misfortune of earning too much money. Inland revenue wasn’t just going to take its bite, but chomp.
Back in England, Mick was known by certain people. Nice people, he assured me. But people sometimes involved in dubious transactions among perhaps unsavory figures. Put that way such people could’ve occupied any number of Wall Street brokerages.
Sure. I could’ve mentioned researching some boring tax reducing stratagems but then realized the two characters’ sterling might’ve been just a skosh tarnished. Their money problem was this: nobody minded making the money. It would’ve been a bother explaining from where that cash derived. And how long had it been amassed before being declared.
It pleased me cutting to the chase. Mick’s guys had come to Argentina to sniff around for presto-chango investment propositions. Then as now, Argentina is a black hole for returns. If it weren’t for the International Monetary Fund …
What Mick’s Brit pals needed was a convincing front that wouldn’t be rightly regarded as stink to high hell phony. Mining, ranching, and farming were out. In order to keep as many global financial wolves at bay, Argentina had already mortgaged those wealth streams among the Australians, French, and Chinese. No more slices of those pies to go around. Manufacturing? Name one industrial export product bearing a “Hecho en Argentina” label. The nation’s industrial sector only exerted itself to protect domestic employment. There were already too many underemployed and unemployed Argentines seething throughout the country. One more would’ve been one more too many.
Although we’d only touched on it lightly during our first get-together, a possible movie angle stirred Mick. That surprised me. Smart as he was, it shouldn’t have.
Mick didn’t have all the particulars aligned. Maybe he misheard or misinterpreted “feature writer” for “scriptwriter.” My BA sojourn was a glorified winter junket write-off ostensibly intending to rifle the nation’s film archives in search of “abandoned treasure.” Specifically silent movies.
Or whatever other Argentine-centric topic popped up that my byline might head. Like the submarine.
Rumors had circulated (Notice how rumors always circulate? Or swirl? They never leap and bound. Why is that?) that somewhere along the country’s southern Atlantic Coast, a World War II German U-boat had been unmasked. “Unmasked?” Whatever that meant.
Off the bat it sounded like early clickbait before the Internet. Admittedly, though, it was also just the sort of goose chase to draw me outside BA. Had the season been summer, the farthest I might’ve roused myself to investigate involved pulchritude sunning themselves at beachside resorts in Pinamar or Mar del Plata. Okay. Since I’m an adult, Mar del Plata.
Too much gray on this head for Pinamar.
Although BA sits at a temperate southern latitude, Amazon Basin jungle heat and moisture can tumble into the Rio Plata estuary. BA spreads along the river’s south bank. During these inversions, the moderate metropolitan region soaks up a hot wet rag atmosphere. Hence, beating it to the beach. Pinamar for randy youths or Mar del Plata for mature hedonists.
The calendar revived me. Again, while spring revitalized the Northern Hemisphere, the first pushes of autumnal cooling crept up the South. Besides, there were several leads I felt needed pursuing before Antarctica started pushing winter north. Some movie leads that might’ve borne film historian attention.
Why, maybe even a monograph!
During the flickers’ era, movie prints that had been distributed overseas rarely returned to their originating studios. After initial viewings these reels were then regarded as disposable commodities. If they retained any value it stemmed from the silver nitrate which then comprised the films’ frames. A process existed to extract the silver. Naturally this reclamation destroyed the movie. Few, if any, at the time could ever have imagined the future worth of such ephemeral entertainments.
Which might’ve been just as well all things considered. After a while, stored under the wrong conditions, silver nitrate sometimes self-combusted. Safety film, the successor to silver nitrate reels, was developed after untold numbers of silent films had either been plundered, disintegrated, immolated or simply lost. Therefore, even after safety film’s introduction, awarding with it opportunities to transfer silents onto safer reels, that is preserve good deals of Hollywood history, well, that rescue had passed.
Sometimes preservation got lucky. A trove of silents had recently been unearthed in the Yukon. Rather than ship these back to the States, then theater owners just buried them in the Canadian permafrost. And 80 years later, staffers from Film Board Canada learned of this. Inquisitive, and being Canadians probably earnest too, they prospected to find a different kind of gold.
Or the unknown needle in the disregarded haystack. In distant Ruritania, film historian rummaging around dust-laden shelves of some jerkwater Sloboviaville’s cinema might’ve by chance disinterred numerous reels of silents judged forever lost.
And of course, the best. Several years after this chronicle inside the same repository which had dirtied my clothes and set off sneezing fits, German cineastes uncovered missing reels from the Fritz Lang classic Metropolis. When the German newsweekly Die Zeit gave the discovery button-busting coverage I had to wonder how close had I been? Or had I even been close?
But Mick and his moneymen were not interested in contributing to cinema. They were solely interested in maybe finding ways to make it seem as if they had. By coming to Argentina, these fellows walked into the right tapped out mine.
A few nights after our second meeting, Mick introduced me to the “financiers.” A pair of doughy Liverpool ham-n-eggers whose enterprise had gone “BOOM!” with Monopoly money transformed into pound sterling. Their weighty business attire suited England not Argentina. The Scousers’ accents so broke my ears I could’ve mistaken them for Scots.
We’d gathered for lunch in a meat and more meat parilla. A neighborhood restaurant locals frequented. The kind whose walls were heavy with Carlos Gardel photos just in case anyone wondered whose singing wafted through the room.
In between blatted responses, the Scousers filled their maws in manners determined to leave no trace of the one kilo of beef Mick had ordered for each. Not even a greasy spot. Watching those two inexorably devour, I don’t even know why I bothered ordering a salad.
After brief pleasantries which culminated in my ascertaining how many zeros might’ve followed the crooked number indicating their questionable earnings, I laid out what I then could. In the interim between sipping Tennessee whiskey and that moment, I’d slapped together a treatment. Copies went to all three.
No one bothered even skimming. They preferred a verbal brief.
Before summarizing, I emphasized since the Scousers hoped to erect falsities in Argentina, the Potemkin part ought to be easy. Given the country’s economic straits, they could expect a whiteout of memos and invoices, ledger entries, and disbursement receipts acknowledging payments of this, that, and the other thing. A paper trail done on the cheap.
Oh, and an honorarium for a completed script by me. No negotiations regarding that!
All the scheme would require was mordita. The bite that delivers currency upon palms. And the minor costs to facilitate what never would occur in Argentina. Paying fractal amounts consisting of several zeros to the decimal point’s right was cheaper than funding then producing an actual movie anywhere, much less Argentina.
Tossing it to Mick before grabbing it back, I assured the Scousers that this absolute stranger with whom I’d just made party time acquaintance a number nights ago in an off-the-hook club knew people in BA who could assemble the most convincing indisputable records this side of Hitler’s diaries. In Spanish, yes, but then translated into the most astringent British CPA English possible.
What will give the endeavor further, deeper, verisimilitude, I assured them, was the project falling through. This was, after all, Argentina. A country where sometimes even broken clocks weren’t right twice a day.
A phantom cast and crew engaged. Locations sought and found via zooming by them at 110 kph. Warehouses momentarily masquerading as “rented” sound stages. Then poof! This happened. Then that happened. Enough to invoke the conjured production’s invented insurance’s act of God or force majeure clauses. That was the end. Money spent. Money gone. Inland revenue/outland revenue, whichever, would have stacks of paper – records officially stamped and everything! – to verify the failed venture.
Afterwards, the only question remained which Cayman Island bank would their Liverpool money enrich?
I sold this verbal prestidigitation so hard that years later I’m still disappointed none of those Brits softly exclaimed, “Blimey … !”
Then I unspooled the tale.
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