I had drunk too much coffee after dinner and I stayed awake thinking about the idea. I had presumed that when a policy became public in Argentina you automatically knew that the opposite, or something close to the opposite, would happen. You learned to read every public statement placing a negative in the sentences which did not have one, and deleting the negative from the sentences which did. Everything was bluster and high-flown rhetoric, and nothing meant anything. The greatness of Argentina meant the nothingness of Argentina. For wealth, read poverty. For the future, read the past. For privatization, read corruption and economic shortsightedness. It had never occurred to me that this could change, and I realized, in spite of all the meetings I had attended in the past year or two, all the faxes and newspaper articles and press releases, that something new was happening in Argentina and I had not noticed it. My mind was so fixed on the past, on the dictatorship and the war and the ridiculous figure of Menem, that I had missed something that I was myself part of. I realized that since I had met Pablo, I had not seen enough of Susan or Donald, and I had not been discussing what was going on in Argentina. I thought that I should see more of them when I went back to the city, and see my contacts in the various ministries to make sure that I was not deluding myself, to make sure that things had changed.

In the morning as I was paying for my phone calls at the reception desk I saw Federico Arenas. I felt afraid. He had often come into my mind, but I had not been in touch with him since the day I handed him the money. He walked over and put his arm around me and asked me to come and have coffee with him. I told him I had a flight to catch. Catch the next one, he said. It sounded like a threat.

Things were different now, he said, as we sat at a table in the room where the staff were cleaning up after breakfast. You have to work for a living, he said. Every move you make is watched, everything is countersigned. It’s a new country. He asked me about work, and I told him what I had been doing. I think, he said, that the Europeans will invest more than the Americans in the privatization. I nodded. He moved his face close to mine across the table and whispered that I had missed out on a few sensational deals, a few real aces. I couldn’t work with you, he said. You’re the wrong type, ready to go to pieces. You have no nerve. But it’s all over, there’ll be no more deals like that again, big or small.