Exactly one week after my wife left me in Buenos Aires—she told me she was flying to see her sick mom in San Francisco, but I hadn’t heard from her since and her mom, she told me the night we met, had died when she was a teenager—I had my first encounter with the one-armed Kazakh DJ, Miroslav. I had seen him around the neighborhood, and when Caitlin and I used to go out, before things turned bad, we frequently ran into him. Sometimes literally: he was known to tool around the barrio on an assortment of borrowed mopeds, and because of his singular appendage he could be a reckless driver. Everyone we knew, it seemed, had a different story about him. According to Caitlin’s co-worker Carmela, Miroslav lost his arm while on vacation in Vilnius, when a car bomb detonated outside his hotel room. Hector claimed his father had been a member of the NKVD and had become close to Stalin personally. Frederick reported that he’d heard the Kazakh was not, in fact, from Kazakhstan but Baltimore, and he actually spoke English just fine, so don’t let his thick accent fool you otherwise.
We were at a supermercado across the street from one of the discothèques where, I presumed, Miroslav deejayed, and he was intoxicated. That might have explained the peculiar wardrobe: a mesh tank top, Bermuda shorts, flip flops—incongruous for even an Argentinean winter. Then again, as a DJ he worked in sweaty, cramped quarters, and perhaps he preferred to stay well ventilated. Though I couldn’t help notice he was stumbling around, he appeared to be a nice enough fellow, unhinged but unthreatening—until, as I placed my tortillas and soda pop on the check-out conveyor belt, he pulled an antiquated Tokarev pistol on me, cocked it, and told me I had to follow him. Someone very important wanted to meet with me.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “you must have mistaken me for someone else.”