The Foreign Girls

by Sergio Olguin

  Vilna had already interviewed the head of the departmental police; he had spoken to the father of the detained officer (a retired chief superintendent and former chief of the provincial police); he had spoken to sources inside the police force and a member of the provincial Supreme Court who advanced him, off the record, a rejection of the prosecution ordered by the presiding judge.

  He was pretty clear about what had happened. There was obviously a link between the detained police officers and the Bolivian drug trafficker, but he would focus instead on the savage internal battle being waged for leadership of the police in Argentina’s north-west. Up until then there hadn’t been many cases of drug trafficking, but if the police forces of Salta and Tucumán fell into the hands of factions opposed to the current leadership, it was likely that all the north would be infected by narcos coming from Colombia and Peru.

  His meeting with the vice-governor was essentially a formality. Perhaps he would give him the name of a couple of politicians who might have vested interests in all this. And since party loyalties were very labile, it wouldn’t surprise Vilna if they were members of the ruling party itself.

  He was getting ready for breakfast when his phone rang. It was Patricia Beltrán, the editor of Society. She must be ringing to chivvy him about the piece. The old bag started work early.

  “Are you watching the news?” Beltrán asked him, by way of a greeting.

  “I was reading the local newspapers.”

  “Put on the TV. You’ve got a set in your room, haven’t you? Or get it on the internet.”

  “Has something happened with the police officers? Look, I’m on to some good stuff. I mean I’ve got some good material.”

  Beltrán resisted the opportunity to mock him, explaining:

  “Two tourists have been found dead in Yacanto del Valle, really close to where you are. An Italian and a Norwegian, both women.”

  “Do we know who they were?”

  “So far we’ve got nothing. There are all kinds of theories, ranging from that they were at an orgy and overdid the drugs to that they were two girls investigating modern slavery on large estates.”

  “I’m more persuaded by the first theory. Do you need me to arrange any contacts at this end?”

  “No, darling, what I need is for you to go and cover what’s happening in Yacanto del Valle.”

  “Impossible, Pato, I’m working on the cover story.”

  “Forget the policemen. That’s two pages in your section. Now the lead story in the next edition is the tourists’ murder. All the magazines will be covering it, and we can’t look like we live on Mars. The TV channels have been broadcasting from there with a crappy connection, but I heard they’ve already sent crews up from Buenos Aires.”

  “Pato, I don’t do crime. Send Kloster or whoever you’ve got on coffee duty this week.”

  “Darling, do you think I’m ringing you at this time of day because I suddenly felt an urge to screw up your life? I’ve just been on the phone to Goicochea. He wants this story on the cover and, given that you’re there in Tucumán, he wants you to do it.”

  “But I’ve got no contacts in the police.”

  “My love, you’re not an engine that runs on contacts, you’re a journalist. Go there, stick your nose in wherever you can, sniff out the shit and tell us what it smells like. Journalism, darling, pure journalism. I’ll call you in the afternoon when you’re in Yacanto del Valle and I’m in the fucking newsroom.”

  And the line went dead.

  Vilna cancelled his meeting with the vice-governor and revised his notes for the piece that had been going to be the magazine’s lead and was now slashed to 1,400 words. And, as if that wasn’t bad enough, he had to go and investigate the murder of the two foreign girls. He paid for his room and set off for Yacanto del Valle in his rented car, in a blinding rage.

  IV

  Verónica was driving with her eyes fixed on the road, her body tense, breathing deeply, mind empty. If she had opened her mouth, relaxed her back or wiped a hand over her face, she might have exploded like a piñata and crashed the car in which she was travelling at eighty miles an hour. In any case, her body had already imploded. Inside, her stomach, her heart, her muscles and arteries were broken.

  She had been at the hotel in Cafayate when she got the news that Frida and Petra were dead. She had sent them an email as soon as she arrived in Cafayate, a few hours after leaving Yacanto del Valle. By then she was regretting her impetuous departure and didn’t want to let too much time go by without them knowing, somehow or other. In fact, she had sent two emails. One, copied to both of them, read:

  Dear Frida and Petra,

  You must be thinking you ran into a madwoman, or worse. Every so often I need to pull off some melodramatic gesture and make a stage exit worthy of Sarah Bernhardt. I needed some space. I’ve just arrived in Cafayate all on my own and I miss you. If you don’t think I’m a hysteric (or at least not a dangerous hysteric) and you would like to continue discovering the glories of Argentina together, I’m here waiting for you. I’m planning to stay for a few days. I hope we see each other again soon.

  Kisses from your mad friend.

  And she also sent an email for Frida alone:

  Hello, Hello,

  When I was twelve years old I went on a school leavers’ trip to Córdoba (the province Petra is always talking about). There was a boy from school I loved, and he must have liked me too because on one of the outings he took the opportunity to kiss me on the mouth. My first kiss. So what did I do? Ran off up the mountain, the poor boy running behind me. God knows what he must have thought – that I was going to report him to the teacher, or throw myself off when I got to the top. I don’t really know why I was running. Out of fear, out of happiness, out of madness. The theory I find most convincing is that, when desire becomes reality, I tend to run away. I don’t entirely understand what happened between us, nor do I think it’s really important to be clear about it, but I ran off just as I did at the age of twelve. I don’t want you to come running after me. But it might be nice if we saw each other again at some point in our journey (you can take that literally, or as a metaphor for life).

  Goodbye, Scandinavian Blonde,

  V.

  She had also written to Paula with an account of the party. Not a very detailed one, but she felt that it was all she could tell her friend.

  Two days later she sent them both another email:

  My darlings,

  I’m still stranded here in Cafayate. Turns out good wine and a glorious landscape exert a stronger pull than a sadistic lover. If you come this way don’t be mean or resentful, but let me know. I want to push on to Salta City, but can’t extricate myself alone. Come and liberate me!

  That morning, minutes before she got the call from Ramiro, she had switched on the TV and her laptop. She zapped through the channels without stopping on any news programmes. She settled on a music channel that was playing videos from the end of the nineties, bringing back memories from her first job: Alanis Morissette, Jamiroquai, The Cranberries. She decided to write another email to Paula, the third since she had been on vacation. That was when the phone rang and Ramiro’s ghostly voice made her feel sure something terrible had happened.

  And it had.

  Both dead. Petra and Frida. Ramiro wanted to come and fetch her from Cafayate. She refused – she would leave straightaway. After ending the call, Verónica sat staring at the television without seeing it. Then she picked up the remote control and found a news channel where they were talking about the crime. There were still no live images, the screen showing a nocturnal mountain scene. Presumably that was where the bodies had been found. A local journalist came on, speaking down a telephone line. Verónica couldn’t understand what was being said, but she clearly heard the girls’ names and surnames. She turned off the TV. The silence was absolute. As if split in two, she heard herself say “The bastards killed them.” She didn’t say “some bastards”, but “the”, as if part of her
mind might already have identified the killers. She thought of calling Paula. Her hands were shaking. She managed to write a few lines. The next image she would remember from the morning was of herself in the car, on the way to Yacanto del Valle.

  On reaching the roundabout at the entrance to the town, she turned in and saw Ramiro waiting for her, standing beside his pickup. Verónica pulled alongside, got out of the car and let him hold her. She still felt broken inside, her body tense.

  “What happened, Ramiro, what happened?”

  He told her the girls had left the party alone, that they appeared to have been accosted by a gang. The bodies had been found only the night before. They had been raped and murdered, but not much else was known. A district attorney was already in Yacanto del Valle, and experts from the police forensics department. The attorney, Ramiro said, wanted to talk to her.

  “Where are they? The girls’ bodies, where did they take them?”

  “They’re in the morgue at the hospital in Coronel Berti.”

  Yacanto del Valle, Los Cercos and Coronel Berti were three neighbouring towns within the same district which shared some facilities, including the Coronel Berti Acute Hospital, about four miles away from Yacanto del Valle. Verónica told him she wanted to see the bodies. Ramiro raised a weak objection before agreeing to take her there in the pickup. They left her car beside the road and went straight to the hospital.

  There they found police officers and the district attorney, Raúl Decaux. Ramiro explained to Decaux who Verónica was and the DA nodded, as if he already knew of her. Decaux authorized her to see the bodies and accompanied her himself, along with Officer Benítez, from the station at Yacanto del Valle, and a doctor in charge of the morgue.

  Verónica was trembling from the cold. First she studied Petra’s face, the sense of calm that initially emanated from it contradicted by a dark mark on her left cheekbone. Then she saw Frida, her blonde hair falling over naked shoulders. There were more bruises here, too, on her neck. In both cases she did the same thing: stroked the girls’ heads and kissed their foreheads before the doctor covered them again.

  Her body was still shaking.

  She left the morgue without hearing what Decaux was saying to her.

  From the door of the hospital she saw the silhouette of a person leaning against a car: it was Federico.

  Verónica wanted to walk towards him, but she couldn’t move. It was Federico who came to her and wrapped her in an embrace. Then her body went limp and the broken mechanism fell apart. It broke into a thousand pieces. Verónica wept in Federico’s arms. It was a cry like an animal’s howl. A cry combining tears, mucus and words that didn’t want to come out, words which were stifled before they could be articulated. She managed to say “They’re dead,” as if he didn’t yet know that. Federico said nothing. He simply held her, to keep her from falling to the ground.

  V

  Small towns made him uneasy. An outsider always stood out, whereas in the city he could go unnoticed. His chance of success was directly related to his capacity not to be seen. If someone noticed his presence, he was marked. His job was to arrive, kill, leave. The invisible man. In the city, that was easy; he had done it many times without the barest description of him ever coming out. Now he had two problems: nobody was doing intelligence for him, and he was more exposed. He had to operate with a lot of care. Not arouse suspicion.

  He didn’t get off the bus in Yacanto del Valle but in the next town, Los Cercos, a small place with only a couple of hotels and enough shops to satisfy the needs of the people living there. There were no tourist-friendly bars, just an old store where the men still arrived on horseback and played cards as the sun set.

  He thought of asking in the store if they knew of anyone who needed a day labourer, trying to pass himself off as someone looking for work in the town or the surrounding fields, but it wouldn’t seem very credible, given his appearance (nothing special, but he was much better dressed than the locals) and his Buenos Aires accent, that he would have ventured so far from the capital to look for work. They would immediately suspect he had come here fleeing justice. And what would on any other occasion have been a wrong assumption was, in this case, the truth.

  When he sat down at a table, the few locals present looked him over with a certain indifference. There was little light in the place, the windows were small and the floor seemed to be earth. A man stepped out from behind the bar to take his order. A gin. The man looked at him with greater curiosity than the others. He filled a glass to overflowing and asked him:

  “Is everywhere full in Yacanto?”

  “I couldn’t tell you.”

  “We were just talking about the little gringas who got murdered. They told me every television station from Buenos Aires is coming here. Are you a journalist?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Do they know yet who killed those women?”

  Danilo Peratta shook his head. He was trying to understand what the owner was talking about.

  “I bet it was the vagrants you get round here. A lot of seasonal workers from El Chaco, from Santiago.”

  Peratta was listening out for the names of places in which he might find Verónica. He thought she was in Yacanto del Valle or had perhaps already left for Cafayate. If she was following the itinerary they had reconstructed from her internet searches of hotels and dates, after Cafayate she would go to Salta. The provincial capital might be the ideal place to complete his mission: he could move about with more anonymity, the downside being that it would also be harder to find her.

  First, he planned to go to Yacanto del Valle, walk around the town a bit. But before that, he needed to leave his bag in one of the hotels in Los Cercos. He looked for the cheapest one and asked for a room for the night.

  There were two ways to get to Yacanto del Valle: taking the provincial highway, or using a back road that was more like a dirt track. He preferred to take the least busy option, even if it meant attracting more attention. He doubted he would run into anyone who might remember him afterwards. And if they did remember him, so what? Sooner or later they would know he was responsible for the murder of Verónica Rosenthal. And he didn’t care about that.

  He arrived in Yacanto del Valle shortly before midday, found a bar and sat by the window. From there he could watch the square and the people moving through it. Peratta needed to know what was happening in the town. He was used to taking action, so it felt strange to sit drinking coffee, watching and listening. The few people who were in the bar, including the waiter and the barman, were all glued to the news on television. Two foreign tourists had been murdered.

  Danilo Peratta wasn’t at all happy to see Yacanto del Valle become the focus of national attention. That meant there were bound to be police here, as well as journalists. But if there were journalists around town, they weren’t much in evidence. Presumably the outside broadcasting vans had either not yet arrived or were wherever the bodies had been found.

  He paid and walked to the only hotel Verónica had looked at on the internet. Unlike Cafayate or Salta, there was just one in Yacanto del Valle, the Posada de Don Humberto. He walked up and down the block a couple of times; stopped for a few minutes on the corner. Finally he went in, walking straight to the reception desk, where there was a man who smiled at him.

  “Good morning, how can I help you?”

  “Hello, good morning. I’m a journalist from Buenos Aires and I’m looking for a colleague, Verónica Rosenthal. She was going to be staying here for a few days.”

  The man at the reception desk nodded as though considering something. Finally he said:

  “I’m sorry, but I’m afraid we can’t give out information about people who are staying or have stayed at the hotel.”

  So she was staying or had stayed at the hotel. He needed to find a way to get the man to be more specific.

  “I understand. It’s just that we’re working together, and I wanted to give her some information about the crime involving the touri
sts.”

  The man at reception gave him a strange look. Why was the bastard so cagey?

  “Look, she left here a few days ago. Leave me your number and I promise I’ll try to get in touch with her and pass your number on.”

  “No, that’s fine. She must already be in Cafayate,” he hazarded to see if the receptionist would bite, but he said nothing further.

  Peratta left the hotel with the thought of heading towards that town in Salta. First, he needed to get his bag from the hotel in Los Cercos. He checked the bus times. One was leaving for Cafayate at 3 p.m.

  He was hungry. There was a grill opposite the hotel. He’d have some lunch, then go to Los Cercos before returning to Yacanto to get the bus.

  Taking a window seat with a view of the street, he could see the hotel entrance perfectly. There wasn’t much movement in and out. So he was extremely surprised to see a car arrive and Verónica Rosenthal and a man get out of it, both carrying bags. It looked like they were planning to stay at the hotel. Perhaps, after all, the tourists’ murder might come in handy and serve him up the journalist on a plate.

  VI

  The accumulated tension of the last few days sent Federico to sleep on the plane to Tucumán. It wasn’t a restful sleep but one of those states in which noises from the outside world mingle with what’s happening in the dream. And it felt less like dreaming than an oneiric elaboration on what he had been thinking. He and Verónica were sitting on a cafe terrace beside the sea. She was carefree, but he was worried because he had to look after her. He felt like a bodyguard but didn’t know what to do or how to react. And that was how he felt in real life too: he didn’t know how to protect her. Thwarting professional assassins wasn’t his speciality. He had put himself in an uncomfortable position – one of failure, in all likelihood. That was something he couldn’t allow to happen. Failing meant endangering Verónica’s life. Should he ask for help, then? From the local police? Hire a bodyguard?