My subscription search engines mostly harvest data about Americans and Canadians. Given that our own government can’t distinguish between hardened criminals and terrified mothers, it’s not surprising that it’s difficult to get good information from south of the border.
I did the best I could, looking for people named “Palurdo” up and down both Americas. There were none.
I looked for earthquake damage in Tocopilla, where Jacobo Palurdo’s childhood church had been destroyed. Tocopilla suffered constantly from earthquakes. There’d even been two this past spring, and there’d been a biggish one in 2007. That made it plausible that all traces of the Palurdo family had been destroyed when their parish church was ripped apart.
Elisa’s story bothered me. Not that she was lying—although maybe she was. It just seemed strange that when Hector went to Tocopilla, not one person remembered a family named Palurdo. It wasn’t a big town, only 24,000, and if he’d explored the barrios and the city government records, some other person with that name, or someone remembering the family, would pop up. Hector’s grandmother had cleaned houses for the wealthy; she’d done exquisite needlework. She’d made something for a rich person’s child that would stick in the memory. Maybe Hector had seemed like an outsider and people were afraid to tell him what they knew.
I hunted for records of those who’d been disappeared and murdered under the Pinochet regime. Those were patchy, but I didn’t find Filomena’s name. Finally I made a big sweep: Filomena and Chile. That gave me a St. Filomena, from the nineteenth century, some hotels named for her, and dozens of hits for a Filomena Quintana.
Quintana was very much alive. Her bio, in Spanish, was hard for me to read, but she was sixty-two, so a contemporary of Jacobo Palurdo. She hadn’t grown up in Tocopilla, but in Valparaíso, which was apparently an important city both economically and politically. She’d attended university at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, where she’d studied political economy, had worked for the Aguilar Mining Company and made the transition to television in the 1990s.
Despite her age and television’s insistence on youth, she had a large following on a Chilean cable show. I clicked on some of her YouTube clips. She was a striking woman, who carried herself with confidence. Her shoulder-length blond hair was streaked with silver. Her eyes were an unusual green with brown flecks—not one’s stereotype of the dark South American.
As an Italian speaker, I could sort of follow her talks, but it was a strain to keep up. In one, she startled me by holding up a copy of Atlas Shrugged in Spanish—La Rebelión de Atlas. She seemed to be exhorting her viewers to read it for an understanding of how a human being should live a fulfilling life.
I scrolled through the web hits until I found an English-language entry: she’d been interviewed by Global Media, on one of their political talk shows, Digging Up the Deep State. I’ve watched it occasionally, fascinated by their carefully balanced presenters—one an anorectic blond woman, Stevie something, the other a very dark African-American man, Horace something else.
Quintana appeared with Larry Nieland, the Chicago Nobel Laureate who’d spoken at the SLICK meeting where poor Leo got into an argument with the equally unfortunate Simon.
Quintana laid a fleeting hand on Nieland’s arm, saying to Stevie and Horace, “Larry was my professor, my mentor. He brought me to Chicago for a memorable year of study. Such an education. Yes, we discussed monetary theory, but mostly I had to learn baseball, which is not popular in Chile as it is in Venezuela or Colombia. And then I must learn to hate Cubs and love White Sox.”
Everyone laughed, Stevie opening her mouth so wide her cheekbones pushed her eyes half-shut. Compared with their usual conspiracy theory-laden interviews, this was fluff for Horace and Stevie. They bring up everything from how climate Nazis are spreading fear in order to bankrupt the American oil industry, to allegations of cover-ups of the secret work liberals do to promote mass shootings because “they want to take away your guns,” as Stevie would solemnly tell Horace. “That’s right, Stevie,” Horace would respond, equally solemn. “They actually create these shootings and blame them on gun owners. Or they stage shootings with actors so they can make people frightened of guns.”
That thought made me dig into the Deep State archive for Horace and Stevie’s coverage of the massacre at Horsethief Canyon. Global’s Wichita, Kansas, affiliate had had a camera at the Meet-Up. I watched some of the footage; they’d had a camera going when the gunfire opened, but it was so sickening that I couldn’t keep watching.
I turned to something even more upsetting: Deep State’s coverage of Arthur Morton’s trial. Horace and Stevie were in full throttle, showing Morton’s childhood home, the farm with dust rising from the ground, barns, and other outbuildings exhibiting signs of neglect six years after Sea-2-Sea had bought the land.
“This is what happens when we let people with a globalist agenda set our foreign policy,” Horace said. “Good decent people like the Morton family get swallowed alive.”
They had a cute graphic for that segment, of a python squeezing its tail around a mock-up of the Morton farm, then swallowing the outbuildings and the people.
Stevie and Horace questioned whether radicals like Lydia and Hector really belonged in a family place like Horsethief Canyon. Families got together for picnics and music. They didn’t want someone pushing politics down their throats.
“Really,” Horace said, “you could make a case that the kind of speeches people like Hector made goaded the Morton boy into pulling the trigger.”
It’s not enough that we’re awash in weapons as a country, but TV personalities actually find excuses for mass killers. I left the site, wishing I could make a more forceful exit. I miss the days when you could slam down a phone to end an annoying conversation.
I packed up my office, but before going home, I drove downtown to the Park District headquarters: Lydia’s disappearance wasn’t the only worrying business I was trying to sort out; there were also the murders of Leo Prinz and Simon Lensky.
The Park District planned to relocate into an actual park on the Southwest Side, but until that building was finished they were housed in the old Time-Life Building, within spitting distance of the city’s most expensive shopping. Chicago’s power elite like their creature comforts—really, who doesn’t? How would Taggett and his buddies adjust to neighborhood diners instead of Gold Coast bistros?
In the Park District office, I told a woman at the information counter what I was looking for. She slowly wrote it down and handed it to another clerk, who disappeared with it into the bank. Patronage-rich fiefdoms like the Park District build support by employing two people per task.
After a few minutes, the phone on the information counter rang. The clerk grunted a few times, then told me that none of the Forty-seventh Street drawings were available for public viewing. “Until a plan has been put together, the public can’t view them.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “I was in the meeting where SLICK presented them to the public only last week.”
The clerk shook her head. “You probably saw some community group’s ideas on the subject, but that development is definitely only in the idea stage.”