below street level. And they had communal swimming pools, if they had swimming pools at all.
The houses the embassy leased in San Isidro were nice, and came with a garden, a quincho— outdoor barbecue—and a swimming pool. This was important if you had kids, and the Mastersons had three. The schools were better in San Isidro, and the shopping, and Avenida Libertador was lined with nice shops and lots of good restaurants. And of course there were easy-access garages for what the State Department called Privately Owned Vehicles.
The Masterson POV was a dark green 2004 Chrysler Town & Country van. With three kids, all with bicycles, you needed something that large. But it was big, and Betsy didn’t even like to think about trying to park what the Mastersons called “the Bus” in an underground garage in the city.
When she went to Buenos Aires, to have lunch with Jack or whatever, she never used a garage. The Bus had diplomat license plates, and that meant you could park anywhere you wanted. You couldn’t be ticketed or towed. Or even stopped for speeding. Diplomatic immunity.
The price for the house and the nice shops, good restaurants, and better schools of San Isidro was the twice-a-day thirty—sometimes forty-five—minute ride through the insane traffic on Libertador to the embassy. But Jack paid that.
Her bartender—one of four tending the oval bar island—came up with a bottle of Lagarde in one hand and a fresh glass in the other. He asked with a raised eyebrow if she wanted the new glass.
“This is fine, thank you,” Betsy said in Spanish.
The bartender filled her glass almost to the brim.
I probably shouldn’t have done that, she thought. The way they pour in here, two glasses is half a bottle, and with half a bottle in me I’m probably going to say something— however well deserved—to Jack that I’ll regret later.
But she picked the glass up carefully and took a good swallow from it.
She looked up at the two enormous television screens mounted high on the wall for the bar patrons. One of them showed a soccer game—what Argentines, as well as most of the world, called “football”—and the other was tuned to a news channel.
There was no sound that she could hear.
Typical Argentina, she thought unkindly. Rather than make a decision to provide the audio to one channel, which would annoy the watchers of the other, compromise by turning both off. That way, nobody should be annoyed.
She didn’t really understand the football, so she turned her attention to the news. There was another demonstration at the American embassy. Hordes of people banging on drums and kitchen pots, and waving banners, including several of Che Guevara—which for some reason really annoyed Jack—being held behind barriers by the Mounted Police.
That’s probably why Jack’s late. He couldn’t get out of the embassy. But he could have called.
The image of a distinguished-looking, gray-bearded man in a business suit standing before a microphone came on the screen. Betsy recognized him as the prominent businessman whose college-aged son had been a high-profile kidnapping victim. As the demands for ransom went higher and higher, the kidnappers had cut off the boy’s fingers, one by one, and sent them to his father to prove he was still alive. Shortly after the father paid, the boy’s body—shot in the head—was found. The father was now one of the biggest thorns in the side of the President and his administration.
Kidnapping—sometimes with the participation of the cops—was big business in Argentina. The Buenos Aires Herald, the American-owned English-language newspaper, had that morning run the story of the kidnapping of a thirteen-year-old girl, thought to be sold into prostitution.
Such a beautiful country with such ugly problems.
The image shifted to one of a second-rate American movie star being herded through a horde of fans at the Ezeiza airport.
Betsy took a healthy swallow of the merlot, checked the entrance again for signs of her husband, and returned her attention to the TV screen.
Ten minutes later—well, enough’s enough. To hell with him. Let him stand on the curb and try to flag a taxi down. I’m sorry it’s not raining— she laid her American Express card on the bar, caught the bartender’s eye, and pointed at the card. He smiled, and nodded, and walked to the cash register.
When he laid the tab on the bar before her, she saw that the two glasses of the really nice merlot and the very nice plate of mixed cheeses and crackers came to $24.50 in Argentine pesos.