The Buenos Aires Quintet

by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

  ‘Are you listening, Pascuali? A pair of wet panties, Pascuali. Hello?’

  ‘Sorry, I thought I was seeing a reincarnation. Goyeneche the Polack died, didn’t he?’

  ‘The tango singer? Yes, of course.’

  ‘Well, I thought I just saw him. At any rate, I know that old singer guy who just went by. I know him from somewhere. What were you saying?’

  ‘I was saying that what was stuffed in the stiff’s mouth was a pair of wet panties.’

  ‘Wet from saliva, I guess.’

  From saliva, Inspector Pascuali repeats to himself, sitting in front of his computer back at the police station. The details he called up appear on the screen. Abraham Gratowsky, born Warsaw in 1913. Immigrated to Argentina in 1943. Concert violin player. Artists’ agent. Boyfriend and manager of Gilda Laplace from 1949 to 1963. Current address: The Pauline Sisters Old-Age Pensioners’ Home. Criminal record: none. After he has read the notes, someone presses the right buttons and the dead man’s life is delivered neatly printed into Pascuali’s hands. He takes the pages back to his desk, and sits forward in his chair to read them through again. His lips move as he makes mental notes. Then he leans back in his chair and mutters to himself: ‘Gilda Laplace.’

  He remembers how his mother used to be fascinated by the actress, and his eyes moisten with the damp fog of time.

  Adriana Varela, her eye make-up blotched and all her paper handkerchiefs thrown into the waste-paper basket. Norman is a hapless witness to her grief, and shrugs apologetically as Carvalho and Alma enter the dressing-room.

  ‘What’s the matter with her?’

  ‘Someone killed the Great Gratowsky’

  In his ignorance, Carvalho asks: ‘Was he a magician?’

  Norman is indignant that this foreigner does not know someone so famous in Argentina.

  ‘In the fifties and sixties, he was one of our best-known agents. He was still highly thought of. By those who still have a memory, that is.’

  Adriana’s memory summons up the image of herself as a youngster. She starts to sing a classic tango:

  When fortune, that sad bitch

  Lying and betraying

  Leaves you out in the cold

  In the stalls sit the pretend judges of a pretend talent contest. One of them is an already ancient Gratowsky. He likes what he hears. He leans over to the man who makes all the decisions and whispers in his ear: ‘I can’t bear women who sing tangos, especially the old ones that Gardel or Rivero made famous, but this girl is different.’

  ‘Are you listening to me, Norman? The Great Gratowsky gave me his seal of approval. When I’d finished, I saw the judge turn and say something to him. He smiled, then stood up and clambered on to the stage. He came towards me, hands outstretched. I took them in mine – they were lined and old, but still oh so elegant. He seemed even more abashed than me. He said: “You’re too young to know who I am. I’m called the Great Gratowsky. I can spot a star among a million constellations. And you’re going to be a big star.” After that, he was always like a godfather to me. He wasn’t in the business any more, but the talent spotters listened to him. I went to see him several times in that horrible old people’s home.’

  ‘Don’t cry, sweetheart, please don’t cry! You’re just like a tango. Don’t become a walking tango, please! The old man lives, he lives in your memory. What more do you want? How many people have gone for good? How many of them don’t even live on in someone’s memory?’

  Carvalho cannot contain himself any longer: ‘Tango!’

  The dressing-room mirror reflects Adriana’s features: she has recovered completely by now, and is busy putting the final touches to her lips. She stares into the glass at the image of Carvalho behind her, and behind him Alma and Norman’s vaguely encouraging presence.

  ‘Pepe, I have a job for you. I want you to get on to it straight away. I want you to find out who killed the Great Gratowsky’

  ‘I don’t know if I can take the case. I might be going back to Spain. The circle is complete. All that’s left to decide is not down to me.’

  He is staring at Alma, who reacts uncomfortably, as if she does not like what she is hearing.

  ‘There are some loose ends. Too many of them.’

  ‘All that’s left is what to do with the Captain and what my uncle sees fit to tell us.’

  The police consult the label hanging from the handle: ‘Murder at Corrientes 348’. He pulls open the drawer of the mortuary store and shows the body to a couple of around fifty. The woman’s hormones suggest a great struggle between male and female. Alongside this hard-edged woman, the man is a let-down. The surgeon unzips the plastic body bag and the dead man’s face appears. The woman stares coldly at the old man’s features, closes her eyes and nods: ‘It’s Papa.’

  The man agrees: ‘Papa.’

  ‘Señora...’

  ‘Gratowsky. I didn’t want to lose my maiden name.’

  The man agrees again: ‘No. She never wanted to lose her maiden name.’

  ‘Do you have to repeat everything I say even in circumstances like this?’

  ‘Repeat everything you say? Do I do that?’

  He is trying to bring a touch of humour where none applies. The woman’s expression is harsh rather than grieving. The forensic expert tries to build a bridge of sympathy between the two of them.

  ‘In successful marriages, couples end up not only looking like each other but thinking and talking like each other.’

  The woman casts a scornful glance at her husband.

  ‘You mean I’m this jerk?’

  The police expert looks from one to the other in search of similarities, then looks down at the dead body.

  ‘No, it’s strange. In fact, your husband looks more like your father. I’ve never seen a son-in-law so similar to his father-in-law.’

  The woman goes on repeating insults against the smartass forensic expert all the way home on the bus, all through a brief, uncomfortable supper, and into their gloomy bedroom. Everything looks grubby and old, as if waiting for an unlikely face-lift. The woman sits on the bed, and removes her stockings, sloughing them off like cast-off skins. She stares down at her swollen feet, massages the varicose veins on her calves. A grimace of disgust appears on her harsh face, directed either at herself or at the world in general. Her husband comes into the room. He looks simple and contented. He is carrying a framed photograph, which he hands with a flourish to his wife.

  ‘Ruth, your father.’

  She gives him a dirty look, and her expression stays the same as she stares down at the photograph. It is from forty years earlier. It shows a middle-aged man, still young and forceful-looking, with a younger woman who is posing like a film star. In the background is someone who is her twin sister, a paler version of her. Ruth throws the photo on the bed.

  ‘The dummy and his whore. Couldn’t you find a photograph of him with my mother?’

  She defies her husband, eyes blazing. He is crushed, and she goes in for the kill.

  ‘You men are all the same.’

  Don Vito is in full flow. Carvalho waits patiently for him to finish, swivelling round in his desk chair.

  ‘It might be too much to say that the Great Gratowsky and I were like brothers, but first cousins, definitely. He used my services several times – he was a real skirt-chaser, and skirts always mean problems. Men always feel they have to find themselves by looking up as many skirts as possible.’

  ‘Even if they are Scottish kilts?’

  ‘That depends on the Scots person underneath. But the love of the Great Gratowsky’s life was Gilda Laplace.’

  Gilda Laplace was part of Argentine folklore when he was a child: Perón, Evita, Hugo del Carril, Gilda Laplace.

  ‘She still works as a TV presenter. I saw some of her films in Spain when I was a teenager; she always seemed really beautiful to me.’
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  ‘She had a twin sister, who was just as pretty. They worked together for ten years: “The Laplace Sisters”. They sang, danced, made films, worked in the theatre and in radio dramas. Then Lidia Laplace vanished from the limelight. She went back to her private life. In fact, everyone knew it was Gilda who had the real talent.’

  ‘Was she called Gilda in honour of Rita Hay worth?’

  ‘No, poor thing. What else could she do? Her real name was Hermenegilda.’

  ‘You start with the artistic lot: theatre, television, film people. I’ll look into the family and the Laplace sisters. For as long as I’m still in Buenos Aires – 1 could be leaving tomorrow, next week or never at this rate.’

  Don Vito has his hand on his heart, and breathes out the words with a sigh: ‘You will never leave Buenos Aires, even if you do go away from it. Oh, and by the way, after all we’ve achieved together, after risking our necks so many times, do you mind if I keep the office? I’ll even keep your name on the door. Your presence is guaranteed in my life and in the memory of private detection in Buenos Aires!’

  ‘Don’t make me cry, Don Vito. I’m going to see Gratowsky’s daughter. Talk to my uncle about the office. He owns the apartment.’

  He is already on the stairs when he hears his partner’s shouted last words: ‘It’s so central, you see.’

  Isaac and Ruth Gratowsky, a neighbour informs Carvalho. Her name has swallowed his up, and even though she is not at home and Isaac is, her presence fills the apartment. The living-room gives off an air of increasingly hard times that Carvalho immediately recognizes: the end of something, the end of everything. Isaac recalls his father-in-law dreamily:

  ‘An insurance policy? I knew that deep down he loved her. Sometimes – but promise you’ll never breathe a word to Ruth – sometimes I used to go and visit him. On my own. She would never have agreed to it. But he was always pleased to see me. We old folk appreciate visits.’

  ‘But your wife hates them.’

  ‘My wife is a very special person. She doesn’t trust anyone, and I can understand that: life made her that way. She never forgave her father for abandoning her and her mother and going off with Gilda Laplace – and all the others, because he was a real ladies’ man. When he saw what he wanted, he was quick on the draw’

  ‘Still nowadays?’

  ‘You bet!’

  He lowers his voice, as if the skinny presence of Ruth was fluttering somewhere around them.

  ‘Sometimes we used to go out to a brothel together. But don’t tell Ruth. She’s very tough. Very complicated. She works as a masseuse, and she is allergic to the creams she has to use. Poor thing. She’s scared she’ll have to quit.’

  Ruth Gratowsky in a white overcoat, hands smeared with cream, is bending professionally over a female body and pummelling its back. Her face betrays no emotions, but the hands work knowingly up and down the back, buttocks, thighs and shoulders of the anonymous but shapely body. A bit overweight perhaps. Ruth Gratowsky’s voice is as strong as her hands:

  ‘If I’m doing it too hard, tell me.’

  ‘No, that’s the way I like it. Keep going.’

  The massage comes to an end. After a brief flash of nudity, the woman puts on her bathrobe. Ruth wipes her hands clean, and a frightened look appears in her eyes when she sees that red blotches have reappeared on her skin. Her customer leaves the room, but not before she has stuffed some notes into Ruth’s overcoat.

  ‘Thanks a lot, Señora Fersanti. You’re always so kind.’

  Left alone, Ruth peers desperately at her hands. She looks up to the skies as if searching for someone to blame, and from the skies comes a voice: ‘Ruth Gratowsky, you are wanted in reception.’

  Carvalho is glancing in through a half-open door. One woman is applying make-up to another, in a way that reminds him of a dentist’s, because the person receiving the treatment is lying almost flat in a chair like those in a dental surgery. The make-up girl is rhythmically patting the other woman’s double chins. Carvalho watches fascinated, but his curiosity is cut short when an unknown hand slams the door shut. The hand belongs to Ruth Gratowsky, who frowns at him.

  ‘You wanted to see me?’

  ‘Ruth Gratowsky?’

  ‘Who else would it be? It was Ruth Gratowsky you asked for, wasn’t it?’

  Carvalho nods and offers her a chair.

  ‘Why don’t you sit down, make yourself at home.’

  Carvalho himself sits down, and after a moment’s reflection, Ruth does the same.

  ‘First of all, let me express my deepest sympathy’

  ‘D’you mind telling me what your sympathy is for?’

  ‘So you’re from the Bette Davis school. At least you talk like Bette Davis. I was offering sympathy for a daughter who has just lost her father.’

  ‘I lost my father forty years ago. He abandoned my mother and me in this city while he went off to play at being the Great Gratowsky’

  ‘So can I feel sympathy with you for that?’

  ‘Why? Do you know how it feels to have a father abandon you forty years ago? Not in Buenos Aires of course, from your accent you’re a Spaniard.’

  ‘My father had a proper sense of the ridiculous, and never abandoned anyone in his life. Not even a mangy old cat we had at home called Negrín.’

  ‘Was it a black cat then?’

  ‘No. His name was in honour of a Spanish Republican leader, Juan Negrín. But you wouldn’t have heard of him.’

  ‘I can’t even remember the names of our own politicians. What’s our president called?’

  ‘Menem, I think. Is that right?’

  Ruth gives a sigh and says defiantly to Carvalho: ‘Detective? Insurance inspector?’

  Carvalho puts on his broadest, most disarming smile.

  ‘Private detective.’

  Ruth gets up at once. For her, the conversation is over, and she is about to stride off when Carvalho’s voice pulls her up short.

  ‘A private detective who could cause you problems cashing in the insurance policy your father left you.’

  The phantom of a vanishing dream flickers in Ruth’s eyes, and all of a sudden Carvalho feels sad and truly sympathetic. He mutters an apology and leaves.

  One by one, Don Evaristo surveys all the components of Carvalho’s living-room-cum-office, as if drawing up a mental inventory of all the changes his nephew has made. He also has one ear pricked for the lengthy phone call Carvalho is making to Barcelona, as if calculating how much it is going to cost, and whether the detective is likely to return to Spain without paying it. From the conversation, it seems as though someone has come back.

  ‘So Charo is going to stay? She’s going to start a business? I don’t know, Biscuter. I don’t know. There are lots of loose ends to tie up.’

  The conversation goes on and on to no purpose, in Don Evaristo’s view. People have lost all respect for the telephone, he thinks, and talk and talk without realizing that beyond the person they are talking to, in the basements of the telephone companies there are Lilliputian accountants rubbing their hands with glee at the profits they are making thanks to all these blabbermouths. He had never exactly thought of his nephew as a blabbermouth, but now there he is, his lips stuck to the mouthpiece and one arm folded over his head like a chimpanzee, as if he were trying to build a protective wall round himself.

  ‘No, Biscuter, there’s no way I can tell you.’

  So if he can’t tell him, what more is there to say? Don Evaristo pretends to drift off to sleep, to avoid having to listen to his nephew and to the endless chatter from Don Vito, but in reality he is keeping a weather eye open on the people coming and going in the office, until finally he sees Raúl outside the door and then coming towards him slowly, unkempt and cold – cold with him, his own father – even though he does bend and aim a kiss in the general direction of his cheek. Even Carvalho h
as put the phone down to see how their re-encounter goes, and Alma appears from the room next door, where she has been closeted with Font y Rius and Silverstein. Alma has shed floods of tears from eyes that look drowned in too many conflicting emotions, and is waiting for the old man to say something. No one looks at him, but they are all waiting for him to say something.

  ‘The Day of Judgement,’ is what he eventually does say, knowing they all wanted to hear more. ‘So our Berta didn’t die after all.’

  Then he adds, sarcastically: ‘Of course, how could your great leader die?’

  By now he cannot interrupt the outpouring of his anguished feelings.

  ‘At my age I don’t have to apologize for anything. I didn’t ask you to take on the Argentine army, the whole of Argentine society or the CIA, which was determined not to lose the Cold War anywhere in the world, and especially not here in America. I didn’t ask you to play the fool. I had to deal with the consequences of something I had nothing to do with. Is that clear? That’s why I am not going to apologize to anyone. I did things as I saw fit, just as you had done. I was able to do something to save your lives, but I had to pay the price.’

  ‘Eva María?’

  Don Evaristo has stood up, and now raises himself to his full height to confront his son face to face.

  ‘She was a means to an end – to saving her and saving the rest of you. When I met Captain Gorostizaga...’

  ‘Doreste.’

  ‘Dorwhatever! What does it matter what his real name is? I used my influence – it will make you laugh, but it worked better than all your intellectuals, priests or human rights people put together – and I managed to reach the Captain.’

  ‘What influence did you have?’

  ‘Milk.’

  By now he is sitting down again, and his tired eyes strain to see the effect his words are having on Raúl.

  ‘Can you remember what my main business was in those days?’

  ‘You ran a wholesale milk delivery business.’