There was a message to ring a contact in the Ministry for the Economy as soon as I came in. He told me when I phoned him that a few serious investors from the United States were on their way to Buenos Aires and would arrive around lunchtime, then they were going to catch a flight to Comodoro Rivadavia, the center of the oil industry, and take a look around, have a few meetings, and be generally reassured that they were not going to waste their money. The government had had plans to look after them, but the plans had fallen through. He asked me if I would take care of them, he was sorry for the short notice, and he was ringing on the off chance that I was free. I said I would, as long as it was made clear that I was operating from an outside agency and not on behalf of the government. I might want to work for these guys in the future. He said that was fine: the government would pay the bill, but I could remain independent. A few years ago, he said, such an idea would have been high treason, but now everything was changing. I said that I would take him to lunch when I came back and tell him everything that happened. He gave me the names and flight numbers and the details of arrangements which had already been made. I drove home, to collect some clean clothes and let Pablo know that I would be away for a few days, and then I phoned a taxi to take me to the airport. As I waited, I looked into Jack and Mart’s bedroom to make sure they were not there. I saw the array of Mart’s pills on the bedside table, plastic bottles of all different sizes and colors, maybe fifteen or twenty of them. I stood at the door and looked at them for a while, wondering what it would be like to be about to die, to know that you could go at any time and had no chance of surviving.

I met the investors in the airport and traveled south with them and stayed in the same hotel. I remained three days down there, translating and going to meetings.

On the second night I had a quiet dinner with the investors and I learned something I did not know before. One of the Americans spelled it out for me: the privatization was going to be smooth and successful, there would be not a whiff of scandal surrounding it, everybody would be happy at the end of the day, both the government and the foreign investors. These men seemed to view Argentina as a normal country, like France or Germany, they were not surprised or overwhelmed by what was happening. It was something I had always believed impossible, I had always thought that the idea of selling off the oil industry would be dropped, or would be a fiasco, that no one would take it seriously, that everybody was operating at cross-purposes. But now, just a year before the event, according to the three men I had dinner with, everything was in place, and nothing could go wrong. You can do business with Argentina, one of them told me.