As he left the Ministry of Labor building where Eva Perón lay in state, Hi had no idea that he was being followed. Walking through the damp heart of Buenos Aires, Argentina, that evening, the handsome, thirty-three-year-old North American knew only that he was heartsick and cold. It was not Hi's first winter in the southern hemisphere, yet bone-chilling weather in August still struck him as weird. But then a lot of things were going to strike Hi as weird in that winter of '52.

Hi headed east on Avenida Corrientes, as did the dark-featured man in a pinstriped suit who was tailing him. Under his overcoat Hi wore a three-piece suit from El Sastre, the finest men's shop in Lima, Peru. He had bought the suit just for the funeral--if there was ever going to be one. It had been a week since Eva's death, and though Argentines were observing a thirty-day period of mourning, and though lines still formed for blocks, till late every evening, to see Eva's corpse, Buenos Aires's businesses had begun to reopen. Among them was Cuco's, one of numerous cabarets on Corrientes, where ten years earlier Hi and Eva first met.

She was María Eva Duarte back then, twenty-three, a poor girl from the town of Junín, in the big city trying to make it as an actress. Hi, also twenty-three, headquartered in Lima, had flown down to Buenos Aires after the first of his Amazonian expeditions. He needed some fun, and Buenos Aires, he had heard, was the Paris of Latin America. "When you get there," said an Argentine diplomat whom Hi met at a party in Lima, "go to Cuco's and meet my friend Cuco Rivera." With a smile the Argentine added, "Tell him Hermenegildo sent you, and Cuco will line you up good."

That sounded all right to Hi. On his first night in Buenos Aires in that spring of '42, he took a taxi from his hotel to Cuco's. It was a run-of-the-mill cabaret, most of its patrons well-dressed porteños ("port dwellers," as citizens of B.A. call themselves), quietly conversing while a young lady in a black silk dress sang in a way that seemed somehow confusing to the piano player who was accompanying her.

Hi looked sharp in his Brooks Brothers suit as he sat down at a table for two. Ordering a scotch, he asked the dour, middle-aged waiter if Cuco was around. The waiter said no, that "the rascal" would be around later. Hi assumed that the appellation was good-natured. It wasn't. Hi asked him to tell Cuco, if he got there soon, that "a friend of Herman and Gildo" wanted to meet him.

"A friend of who?" asked the waiter.

"Oh, just tell him a friend of some friends." Hi wasn't even sure if it was Herman or Gildo he had met at that party in Lima.

The waiter shrugged and left. Hi turned his attention to the pretty brunette who was singing. She didn't sing well at all. But watching her, Hi was reminded of a college course in aesthetics that he took as a sophomore. The professor, a man who was ugly as sin, posed the question, "What is beauty?" This lady wasn't gorgeous, some might say she was average, but Hi couldn't take his eyes off of her. Beauty, Hi realized that night, is that off of which you can't take your eyes. He wanted to know more about her. And he wished he could rewrite his term paper.

When the waiter returned with his drink, Hi asked him the lady's name. "Eva something," the waiter told him indifferently. "She doesn't really work here."

"Oh. This is amateur night?"

"No, I mean she is only working this evening."

Eva Duarte in fact was a desperate, unemployed actress doing yet another odd job: standing in for an acquaintance, the club's regular singer, who was sick with a cold caught from Cuco. Eva had come earlier that day from her dingy pensión, where the rent was past due, and begged Cuco to let her sing a few songs that night, for whatever he was willing to pay. Cuco, forty-five, a tall thin philanderer with most of his charm in his wallet, didn't need much convincing. He could easily have found a real singer, but he wanted to see more of Eva. She didn't want to see more of him, but didn't let him know it. In her struggle to eke out an existence without losing her integrity, Eva was learning to handle guys like Cuco who wanted favors in return for employment.

As Hi sat alone and listened to her sing, the other patrons conversing, Eva appreciated his undivided attention. And she found Hi very attractive. As she sang, her eyes frequently met his. Before she was through, it was as if she were singing only to him. She even sang him a song in rote English.

Ten years later, walking once again into Cuco's, Hi found that the dimly lit cabaret looked almost the same (it had become a bit seedy), with assorted patrons having their little conversations--all centering, it seemed, on "Perón." But Hi didn't come there to find conversation. Nor to ask about Cuco, whom he fortunately never did meet. (Cuco was dead anyway, bludgeoned to death in 1948 by a cuckolded pasaperro, or professional dog walker.) Hi sat down at the bar next to no one and ordered a scotch on the rocks.

As he drank, Hi thought back to the moment when Eva Duarte came and sat down at his table, after finishing her songs and going backstage. Hi had sent her a note via the waiter, inviting her to join him for a drink. It didn't take her long to respond.

Hi tried now to remember where he and Eva sat. As Hi turned to look over the room, Hernán Soto, sipping alone at a table, tried to hide his face by holding his cigarette up in front of it. It was Soto, a swarthy, compact, thirty-eight-year-old fellow with a black moustache, who had tailed Hi from the ministry building. Soto couldn't help fearing that Hi, whose eyes fleetingly fell upon him, might somehow recognize him, though Soto knew that that was impossible.

No, Hi couldn't pinpoint the table or spot. But as he turned back to his drink and his thoughts of Evita, he remembered the Spanish conversation as if he had tape-recorded it.

"I'm Eva."

"I'm Hi."

"Hi, Hi."

"Hi."

"You are North American?"

"Yeah."

"Why aren't you fighting in the war?"

"Got a clubfoot. You wouldn't know it, though."

"I would like to see it sometime."

"You show me your feet, I'll show you mine."

"What do you do, Hi?"

"I look for lost cities."

"Really? How many have you found?"

"None so far. I'll tell you all about it later. I work out of Lima. Came down to B.A. for a breather. What I do is no picnic."

"Nothing is. As you say in English, 'It's a jungle out there.'"

"That's pretty good. How much English do you know?"

"I know lots of slang words."

"Know any real dirty ones?"

"Sure. Want to hear one?"

They would talk dirty later. For the moment, Eva briefly described her life--the impoverished childhood, the dream of becoming a film star, the reality of occasional bit parts in stage and radio plays, her one-night charade as a singer--but the whole thing depressed her, so she preferred to hear about Hi. He told her how he had majored in business administration at the University of Florida, class of '41, in preparation for one day heading Hickenlooper Foods, the large Florida corporation that his father Edgar and late German-born mother Erika had built from a burger stand in Apalachicola. As for the war, Hi was 4F, though his clubfoot, as he told Eva, was hardly noticable. Indeed people unaware of the foot simply noticed--if it registered at all--a slight spring in Hi's gait. Aside from that deformity, Hi was a fine physical specimen, and would have served proudly had Uncle Sam wanted him. His fluent German--learned mostly from his garrulous immigrant mother, his father being first generation and indifferent to Deutsch--might have come in handy in military intelligence work. Hi would have pushed for it, but Edgar, though a patriot, had plans for his son that could not be delayed for some military desk job. Hi acquiesced, and his language proficiency, as far as he knew, was never discussed at the draft board.

Edgar's plans for his son did not include the corporate life either. Not yet. That still lay far in Hi's future, which was just fine with Hi. The young college graduate had an enviable mission, ordained by his father, before becoming a CEO. For Edgar, as a result of having participated, as a teenage hired hand, in the discovery in 1911 of the ruins of Peru's Machu Picchu, had an abiding if quixotic desire to make an archeological name for himself. Now a wealthy man, Edgar had the financial resources to mount the necessary South American expeditions, if only his son Hi--who at UF had dutifully taken courses in archeology and Spanish--could actually go find some ruins.

Needing a break after his first long, futile foray into the Amazon rain forest, Hi had come down to see Buenos Aires, and fate--or "Herman and Gildo"--had brought him to Cuco's and Eva. Hi and Eva would have a two-year affair. Hi was wildly in love. He wanted to marry her. He wanted to give her all she could ever want, or at least try to. And Eva loved Hi. But she met someone else, and had to make a difficult choice. She left Hi for a politicking Argentine colonel. Hi was crushed. She was the first thing he ever really wanted that he couldn't have. There was no getting over her. For the next eight years, as Eva rose to be Argentina's first lady, she had haunted Hi's mind. Now she was dead, and would haunt him forever.

As Hi sat at the bar in Cuco's remembering the past, a pretty hooker in her twenties sat down next to him. Hi glanced at her as she smiled at him. "Hi. My name is Pilar," she said. "Want a date?"

Hi stoically looked her over. "I had two wild and wonderful years with Eva Duarte," Hi said, "and you want to know if I want a date?"

Pilar's smile disappeared. As she started to get up, Hi, regretting his remark, gently put a hand on her arm. "Sorry," he said. "I'm having a pretty bad time. Tell you what." Hi took some bills from his wallet and handed them to her. "I know you have to make a living. If it's okay with you, let's just skip the service rendered." Pilar was thrilled by the amount of money. "No hard feelings," Hi said.

"You know, too much drinking can do that," Pilar said helpfully.

"No, that's not what I meant."

"You are so generous with your money!"

"It's my dad's money, really. He's got plenty of it."

"Where is your dad?"

"Apalachicola. That's in Florida."

"The United States? Your father is too far away."

Pilar kissed Hi's cheek and got up. The bartender stepped over to Hi as Pilar moved away, looking for another possible date.

"A whore who knows geography," Hi remarked. "I ought to go around the world with her."

"Would you like a refill?"

"Make it a double."