Post Life

He chain smoked out of the hospital room window. A nurse came in for his blood pressure, but he wasn't really ill. He lived out his sliver of freedom in the ship-like Navy hospital, watching television, smoking and drinking red wine, as though it could be his last drink, his last smoke -- he might never get out again. Incarcerated on charges of 'disappearing' people into the Rio de la Plata from a Coast Guard helicopter, he protests innocence. The victims included a French nun whose remains were found in a rusted oil barrel on a bank down the river. No physical evidence ties him to the crime, but rather the weight of testimony by a prominent Argentine journalist whose book detailed the so-called vuelos de muerta.

They discovered cancer of the throat. His holiday from the federal prison was extended indefinitely, which was preferable to all. The wheezing voice of the Mrs. The young daughter coming out of polite reverence, the feeling of injustice, his charm. He appreciates opera, and proposed to the Mrs. when they were both very young and incredibly good-looking.

Finally he is home, never returning to Ezeiza prison the former torture chamber, his case undecided but his life quietly led in the leafy north B.A. neighborhood, in a sunken house full of pools and Spanish antiques, until the courts or the undertaker take him. He is a prisoner in his own home but otherwise a free man.