The Foreign Girls

by Sergio Olguin

  He woke up somewhere that looked like a hospital room: iron bed, oxygen tube, a machine to check vital signs, an IV stand. He was on his own. Bright white lights heightened the sensation of being in hospital. Was he actually in one then? Had he been arrested? Where was Five? A man appeared, about sixty, almost bald, well dressed.

  “How do you feel?” he asked.

  The only answer that came to mind was weak, but he didn’t say it. He made a gesture of resignation.

  “You’ve lost a lot of blood, but that’s all. The bullet didn’t hit any vital organs. It could have been much worse.”

  Three closed his eyes. He didn’t feel like talking to the doctor, if that was in fact what this man was. When he opened them again, Five was standing there, watching him.

  “You were asleep.” The other man settled into a chair.

  “Where am I?” Three asked and tried to sit up, but found he couldn’t.

  “In a safe place, with a doctor and even a nurse. An old one, but you can’t have everything.”

  “Where?”

  “In San Miguel de Tucumán.”

  “When do we have to do the job?”

  “Relax. Sometime soon. Doctor Zero doesn’t want any mistakes. The longer we wait to do it, the longer we wait to get paid. Same goes for him.”

  “Who contracted us?”

  “You know very well we never get told that.”

  “I’m curious to know who wants the same thing I want.”

  “That’s what I don’t understand: why Doctor Zero wants you to do it. Work and pleasure should never be mixed.”

  “Doctor Zero knows I’m effective.”

  Five stood up. He wore a certain derisive smile that annoyed Three, as if Five were a master from whom he had to learn.

  “I’ll come and get you tomorrow morning. I reckon we’re going to have to do the job in Yacanto del Valle, or perhaps here. There’s your bag with your things. There’s a new set of clothes, too.”

  He didn’t say goodbye when he went, just left. Moments later the nurse appeared, an old woman with indigenous features and a surly expression. She was carrying a tray with food that looked like the kind you get in hospital. She helped him stand up to go to the bathroom. Back in the room, Peratta looked through his bag. There was his gun. There, too, was the thong. He touched it lightly, a gentle caress.

  10 The Robson Archives

  I

  “You’re a literary character, aren’t you?” Juan Robson asked as he welcomed Verónica to his apartment in the centre of San Miguel de Tucumán. Everything was tidy and polished. It didn’t look like a man’s home: the walls were covered with little paintings, the coffee table laden with ornaments.

  “A character? I don’t think so… As far as I know, I’m made of flesh and blood.”

  “You mean nobody’s ever told you?” said Robson, addressing her in the formal third person.

  “No, nobody. Please let’s not be formal, you can use vos.”

  “Baron Rosenthal! The unforgettable villain in Salgari’s The Tigers of Mompracem. He was Sandokan’s enemy. Both of them were in love with Mariana, the Pearl of Labuan. But nobody reads Salgari any more.”

  “Well actually I did once meet someone who’d read a lot of Salgari, but he never told me about the coincidence of my name and that character’s. Perhaps he’d forgotten it.”

  They sat in the armchairs and chatted for a while: Verónica about what she was investigating, and Robson about how he had assembled his archive.

  “I started out in journalism at the end of the 1950s. I’ve been cutting out and saving crime stories ever since. In the 1980s a newspaper offered to buy the whole archive, but I didn’t want to sell. This is my life. Everything is easier now with the digital revolution, but in my day owning the information meant having an advantage.”

  “Newspapers have their own archives.”

  “Yes, of course. But they don’t always work very well. Anyway, one moves workplace and it’s better to have all the information to hand, no? Equally, when a colleague needs something, my doors are open.”

  “Did you retire a long time ago?”

  “Seven years ago, when my wife fell ill. I decided to leave journalism and take care of her. Later, when she died, I no longer felt like going back to writing.”

  Robson led her to another room, where the walls were covered from ceiling to floor with shelves. There was a table in the middle and a ladder which made it possible to reach the highest shelves. On one side was a wider shelf, bearing a photocopier.

  “Someone I worked with gave it to me more than ten years ago. And it’s very useful, as you’ll soon see. The cases are organized by year. If a crime was committed in 1975 and the trial didn’t take place until 1980, you have to go back to the start – 1975. Murders, robbery, fraud: there’s every kind of crime in these fifteen thousand envelopes. You don’t need to open them to know what’s inside. Each one is labelled. So you need to look for ‘rape’ and ‘death’. But once you find it, you’ll have to look at the cutting inside to see if it refers to Yacanto del Valle or another part of the country.”

  “I’ve got my work cut out.”

  “I’ll help you. I don’t have anything better to do.”

  The first thing Verónica did was search for the case of Bibiana Ponce. She made a note of a few points that interested her, although much of the information was repeated from one article to the next. Only one mentioned Aráoz as a suspect.

  Then she began a more systematic search, from the most recently published articles back to the year 2000. After a whole afternoon of this, she had thirty-two rapes followed by femicides. In the environs of Yacanto there had been two: Bibiana Ponce and a girl from Santiago del Estero found on a construction site. According to the news cutting, the men responsible had been two builders who were quickly arrested.

  “How curious,” said Robson, who had started the other way round: with the earliest cases and going up to the present day. “I’ve found a case similar to the one you’re investigating: in 1962 two young Austrian nurses who had come to do social work with indigenous communities in Quilmes were found dead at the side of Route 307. They hadn’t intended to be in Yacanto del Valle – their car had broken down and they were planning to continue their journey the next day. They were raped and murdered. The perpetrators were never identified.”

  Robson handled the paper cuttings with the delicacy and precision of someone who had spent a lot of time ordering them.

  “It says something else: the person who wrote the article – which has no byline – recommends that women not travel alone on country roads. That this could, and I quote, ‘awaken the base instincts of confused men’.”

  “Confused?”

  “In another case I’ve found, from 1965, concerning a girl who was raped and stabbed to death, the writer wonders if this might not be a classic case of crime passionnel. I’ll read you the end: ‘What must the girl have done to provoke such fury and savagery in a man?’”

  “That’s disgraceful. In the first case, is there any other useful information?”

  “Nothing that seems relevant. I’ll make a copy for you.”

  Robson photocopied the articles and made them both coffee. It was dark by the time Verónica called Federico. He was in a bar near Robson’s home.

  “What are you doing there? I mean, I gave you the key to my cousin’s house and the GPS coordinates.”

  “I get bored on my own in a weekend house. After I dropped you at the journalist’s place I met a guy who works in the courts and photocopied the Ponce case file for me. So I looked for a nice little bar and sat down to read it. The time flew by.”

  Federico came to collect her and they went for dinner. They picked a pizzeria with pretensions of something better – a lot of plants, a lot of light and food that tasted of nothing. They arrived at Severo’s house a little after ten o’clock. Only then did Verónica realize there were too many memories there. They should have gone to a hotel. She poured
herself a triple measure of Johnnie Walker and hid herself away in the room she had used on the previous visit. After drinking the whisky she spent much of the night staring at the ceiling, fighting her insomnia and the itchiness that persisted in her legs and arms.

  II

  She got up before Federico. On the coffee table were two enormous folders of photocopies, a block of notepaper and a glass of wine. Federico must have stayed up reading.

  Just as she was making coffee, he appeared, greeting her with a kiss on the cheek. He was fresh from the shower and smelled of shampoo and aftershave.

  “I see you got stuck into the Bibiana Ponce case,” Verónica said, handing him a cup of coffee. Federico went to the fridge and took out some cheese.

  “Yes, I read the whole dossier. Fortunately – or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it – it wasn’t very long.”

  “Two whole folders’ worth?”

  “Four hundred sheets aren’t much, bearing in mind that the case was six years ago, that nobody has yet been charged and that half of Yacanto del Valle gave evidence.”

  “Draw any conclusions?”

  “I’ve got bad news for you: nobody names El Gringo Aráoz. And obviously he doesn’t appear giving evidence. Are you sure the sister wasn’t mistaken?”

  “She was very clear, quite emphatic. And, going on what Mariano told me, this guy has a history of violence and taking things too far.”

  “Well, society itself allows the children of the elite to go wild as long as they don’t kill anyone. It’s a tacit agreement. Drive fast, get drunk, get together with your buddies to beat the shit out of some poor unsuspecting person, grope a girl. No member of the privileged classes is going to do time for something like that. They only draw a line at premeditated murder. If you knock down five children because you’re drunk and high on drugs, you’re forgiven. If you deliberately kill someone, justice stirs.”

  “Not always.”

  “Of course, because then all kinds of other variables come into play: power, corruption, the ability of a good lawyer to extricate you from your predicament. But the system is predicated on your not killing. If Aráoz committed a homicide and you pushed hard enough, he could go to prison.”

  “Thanks for your optimism.”

  “I’m beginning to doubt that the guy could be guilty of killing the Ponce girl. Is it just me, or is this breakfast the closest you and I have come to married life?”

  “Given that we don’t have sex … yes, it’s the closest.”

  “In spite of everything, there are a couple of interesting witness statements in the dossier which, either through neglect or intention, nobody considered worthy of further investigation.”

  “And there’s the lawyer the grandmother hired. What about him?”

  “Waste of space. He must have scraped through his law exams. I called him yesterday because he doesn’t live in Yacanto del Valle any more. I asked him about Aráoz – he didn’t know him. According to him, they put together a great case.”

  “Just with no convictions.”

  “Let me talk you through the stuff I found. A friend of Bibiana, Roxana Lombardo, testifies that she used to go out dancing with the victim. That the previous week they had been invited to a party and that she, Roxana, had persuaded Bibiana not to go. The reason? Because you shouldn’t get together with people who don’t even say hello if you see them in the street afterwards. Who doesn’t say hello?”

  “Rich kids to poor kids, married men to single girls.”

  “The Saturday they kill Bibiana, Roxana meets her early and they can’t decide where to go, so they split up. Roxana goes to a dance in Coronel Berti, and she doesn’t know where Bibiana went.”

  “To a party like the one Nicolás had. But that party wasn’t exactly an orgy. There were guys ranging from twenty-something to forty-something and girls who looked pretty young. I must have been the oldest. But the same applies to a lot of places where women don’t get killed or murdered.”

  After breakfast they headed towards the centre of town. Federico planned to go to the courts. He wanted to see if there were any outstanding criminal charges against Aráoz, and also wanted to meet Severo Rosenthal on business connected to Rosenthal and Associates. Verónica was going to continue combing the archive at Juan Robson’s apartment.

  On the way, they bought the most recent edition of Nuestro Tiempo, with the tourist murders on the cover. Verónica quickly flicked through it to check they hadn’t published photos of the corpses, and thankfully Patricia had kept her word. The central piece, by Álex Vilna, was flanked by two columns – by a psychologist and a criminologist – and an interview with a forensic scientist based in Buenos Aires who answered some technical questions.

  She read the main piece. Vilna was taking at face value the theory of a double crime committed in the context of a black magic ritual. The girls had been selected at random, kidnapped and taken to an unknown place to be abused and murdered. The magazine had gone to press before Vilna had a chance to include confirmation of Pae Daniel’s arrest; it didn’t even give his name, although it did mention a Brazilian “Umbanda chief” who lived in the area being accused of the crime. It seemed that the district attorney or someone from his office had passed him information, albeit partial. TV channel beats weekly magazine, thought Verónica. It wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. The article wasn’t bad, it just didn’t contribute anything new, and certainly nothing different to the story currently being told on television. She was also struck that the article described the murders as “femicides”. That wasn’t Vilna. She detected Patricia’s hand in that.

  Glancing through the rest of the magazine, she saw there was another article by Vilna, a double-page spread from San Miguel de Tucumán. A “narco police” case. Álex must have had to work harder this week than in the rest of the year put together, Verónica said to herself.

  III

  Robson was waiting for her with maté. Verónica hadn’t drunk it for a long time. She hated the ritual – the gourd passed around the partakers and refilled with hot water each time – so in the office she only occasionally joined in.

  “Do you like it bitter?”

  “However it comes is fine by me.”

  Robson had worked late into the night and managed to reach the beginning of the 1980s. In those twenty years he had found seven cases in the area around Yacanto del Valle. As well as the Austrian nurses, there was a twenty-four-year-old woman, a teacher in a rural school who had been found raped, strangled and partially scalped in 1968. In 1971, the body of a thirty-one-year-old woman, married with two children, was discovered on waste ground; she had also been raped and strangled, her face disfigured. In 1973 a woman’s body, burned and with evidence of sexual assault, was found in a ditch. Confirming her identity had proved impossible. The case that had got the most attention was that of a fifteen-year-old girl who went missing on an outing in 1975. She was raped and found dead in a gully. She seemed to have fallen in and hit her head while trying to escape. In 1977 a body was found lying behind a church. It belonged to a woman aged twenty. She had been burned with cigarettes, one eye gouged out, her jaw smashed. As she was said to be a guerrilla in the ERP, the People’s Republican Army, this was described as an “act of war” (on whose part? Against whom?) and the news quickly disappeared from the media.

  “The cases from 1968, 1971 and 1975 were solved. Nothing links the people responsible for those three crimes: they’re from different social, cultural and age groups. Given how many years have passed, one imagines that the guilty parties have already been freed or died. If they are free, they may have reoffended.”

  “I’ve noted down six cases, and you said there were seven.”

  “I was keeping this one until last. It’s the most interesting of all. Claudia Rinaldi, a girl of twenty-one, raped and killed with a lethal dose of cocaine in 1982. She turns up at the side of a country road. News reports from that time talk about an orgy. Argentines are st
ill living in a dictatorship at this point and in the framework of a Catholic society that puts the blame on women. So everyone wanted to think of this woman as a prostitute. Never mind that the autopsy said she had been raped. Nobody was found guilty. One article talks about a rich kids’ party. Two days later, an editorial in the same newspaper points the finger at fantasists who invent stories and see conspiracies, besmirching a generation of wholesome and patriotic youths.”

  “Using patriotism as a defence already sounds nasty.”

  “It’s the language of the time. As I said, nobody went on trial. Now, skip to 1984: a Tucumanian human rights association tries to bring a case against some members of the military involved in the kidnap and disappearance of eight workers from a factory on the outskirts of San Miguel de Tucumán. There’s evidence from a political prisoner stating that one of those soldiers had been torturing and raping female detainees since the time of Operation Independencia. The witness adds that the same soldier raped and murdered a young woman in 1982, and that politics and ideology played no part whatsoever in that incident. That’s the girl whose body turned up on the outskirts of Yacanto del Valle. The girl the press pretended was a hooker, thus justifying their indifference towards the crime. The man accused of those crimes was Guillermo Aráoz.”