When he got back to their apartment, Claudia, still in her slip, was standing in the open doorway. “He’s gone,” Hernán said. He led her inside and sat beside her on the sofa. “Tell me the whole story.”
“He was drunk. He brandished a piece from the newspaper at me. He said he was sure I knew where Luz had gone when she ran away from him. He said what I have been thinking: that if she had stayed with him, she would still be alive. He wept. Her father wept the same way.”
“Her father was there?”
“No. A couple of days ago I went to pay a condolence call on him and her grandmother.”
“You what? You are nuts! I like to think of you as an artist, a creative type who’s more intuitive than logical, but Jesus Christ, Claudia! Have you no sense? One of those brutes must have killed that poor girl and you are paying social calls on them?” He was shouting so loud it hurt her ears.
She began to weep. “I did not pay a social call on Torres,” she said. “He forced me into that filthy room. He made me confess that I was the one who took her away from him. He kept drinking from a bottle of aguardiente he pulled out of an old watering can. He spat at me. He threatened me with his knife. I was sure I was going to die the way she did.” She could not continue.
Hernán took her in his arms and put his hand on the back of her head.
“He told me it was my fault that Luz was murdered. And he was right.” She sobbed so deeply that it took her a moment to catch enough breath to speak. “He said if it wasn’t for me, he could have protected her.”
“Right.” Hernán said, his voice full of irony. “Protected her black-and-blue.”
Claudia wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Better black-and-blue than bled to death. He was right: it is my fault.”
He squeezed her to him. “No, darling. No. It was the murderer who killed her. Not you. Not you.” He lifted her chin and looked into her dark eyes, red rimmed from her tears. “Are you all right? He didn’t…” He couldn’t say the words.
She shook her head. “No. Not that.”
“How did you get away from him?”
“I apologized. I mollified him. I told him I was wrong. I gave him all the money in my purse. Oh, Hernán, I did not know what I was doing. I started to tell him my whole life story. About my grandmother, the war widow from Paraguay. About my mother dying when I was only eight. I kept thinking in the back of my mind how Luz was like me, raised by her grandmother and her father, and how very different my childhood was, living with kind people who adored me.”
She was overcome with grief. He went to the kitchen and brought her a glass of water.
She took a sip and kissed his hand. “When I realized Torres was falling asleep, I just kept talking and talking until the knife fell from his hand and then I snuck out of the door and crept up the stairs to home.”
He slumped onto the sofa beside her. “Where I treated you like shit.”
She raised her eyebrows and smiled. “That is a rude but accurate description of how you behaved.”
“Why didn’t you stop me? Why didn’t you tell me the whole story?”
“My father was still here. After he left, you started to get angry and…”
He pushed her hair away from her wet and exhausted face. “I was sure you were dead,” he said. And then he kissed her with all the passion his body had feared it would never feel again.
It was after seven before they disentangled from each other. He felt as if he had repossessed her, taken her back from the brink where she had been. “I was afraid your father would die from grief and I would go crazy without you,” he said. “You are the glue that holds me together.” He kissed the top of her head as it rested on his shoulder.
The telephone clanged just as the last words left his mouth.
He ran for it, thinking it might be her father, still worried about her. His editor didn’t give him a chance to complain about the hour. “The sugar workers in Tucumán have called a general strike in support of Perón. I need you to cover the unions. They are going to hold a big parley today to decide what they are going to do.”
“Right,” was all he said into the phone. He apologized to Claudia for having to leave her alone today.
“Don’t worry,” she said. All she wanted to do was hide under the covers all day.
“Swear to me you will call the detective as soon as it’s light.”
“Oh, I will. Don’t worry. I am more convinced than ever that Torres killed Luz.”
He kissed her. “And promise that you will stay here. You will not leave this apartment until Torres is in custody. You will open the door to no one but your father or me.”
She swore it.
Hernán shaved and took a quick bath. By the time he went back to the bedroom, Claudia was fast asleep. He drew the drapes to darken the room. He would call the detective himself. He stopped by her father’s apartment on the way out. “She will probably sleep until noon. You have your keys to our place, right?”
Gregorio nodded.
Hernán did not want to tell the old man the truth. “Make sure she stays home today. Strikes are beginning around the country. The streets could get even uglier than they have been, and if the army decides to march on the city, there will be insanity in the plazas.”
“I will sit on her, if I have to,” the old man said.
Hernán leaned over and kissed him on both cheeks. “Thank you,” he said.
“She is everything to me,” Gregorio said.
“To me, too.”
* * *
What with the darkened room and the depth of Claudia’s fatigue, Hernán turned out to be right about how long she slept. It was her father’s little dog, whining to go out, that awakened her. She pulled on a robe and found Gregorio and the Schnauzer in her living room. The dog was sitting by the apartment door like a sphinx.
Claudia kissed her father’s forehead. “I am sorry I made you worry last evening,” she said. She offered no explanation. He must never know what really happened, and she could never lie to him. Not convincingly. He would spot it in a second.
He raised one eyebrow at the vagueness of her apology, but he did not press her for more information. This is how they had managed since her teenage years. It was an unspoken pact based on love and respect. He did not pry, and she did her best not to make him want to. He took her hand and kissed it. “Querida,” was all he said.
“I’ll get dressed, while you walk Fritz,” she said. “Then, I’ll make us a coffee.” He put on his jacket and his old straw boater and went out with the dog.
Claudia took the detective’s card out of her purse and dialed his number, only to find that he was not at his desk. She left a message with the gruff-voiced man who answered Leary’s phone.
By the time she had washed and thrown on a pair of slacks and a shirt, her father returned and switched on the radio. “I don’t know why I bother,” he said. “All they talk about on this thing is what might happen.” He took a newspaper from under his arm and handed it to her. “It’s the same with this. They don’t really know. It’s silly, a bunch of grown men behind typewriters and in front of microphones playing guessing games. As if that will stop the rest of us worrying.”
Claudia took the paper but laid it aside. “You know, the reporters are afraid to write the truth. The men on the radio are probably even more afraid of speaking it.”
Her father followed her into the kitchen. “I guess I slept through breakfast,” she said. “Let’s have lunch. Outside the kitchen window, clouds skimmed across the sky, intermittently obscuring the sunlight, brightening and darkening the room by turns.
He cranked the coffee grinder while she put water in the espresso pot. “You’re not going to the store today?” he asked. It was something between a statement and a question.
“No,” she said, “and I wouldn’t have any customers if I did. I think I am about to lose my best one.” She spooned the grounds into the pot and screwed it together. “Hernán says Perón wil
l leave the country if he can. Evita will go with him, I am sure, and that will be the end of my making clothes for her.”
“Your dresses were too good for her anyway,” he said. “She is certainly not as elegant as you make her look.”
She took a match from a metal box on the shelf and lit the gas under the coffeepot. “My best customers are always like her—women who used to be very poor. Old-money people generally care little for the latest fashions. Evita needs to be a la mode to convince herself that she has arrived.”
Her father chuckled. “Yes, and she spoils the effect by wearing too much jewelry and those awful hats. And she claims she loves that molester of little girls.”
“Except that he raised the salaries of the poorest workers, I dislike him as much as anyone. But I cannot dislike Evita. She drew my sympathies the first time she stepped into my shop and pretended she was not intimidated by the prices. I cannot even tell you why she moves me. She can be a viper, but you want to believe what she says because she says it. I cannot help it. I care about her.” It was always this way when discussing Evita. No one was neutral on the subject of Evita.
Once she had poured the coffee, her father sat at the kitchen table while she rummaged in the refrigerator. “When I was returning with Fritzy,” he said, “I heard angry voices coming from the alley beside the building. It was that disgusting gardener arguing with someone.”
At his words, fear prickled Claudia’s skin. “Stay here,” she said as calmly as she could. She handed him a tin of beef broth and a can opener. “Open this and dump it into a saucepan. I just remembered, I have to make a call.”
She went into the living room and dialed Leary’s number again. A different man answered. As quietly as she could, to hide her fear from her father in the next room, she told the policeman that it was urgent that they send a car to her address. “There’s a lot going on in the city, lady,” the policeman said. “We’ll do our best.”
She put down the receiver gently and kept her curse to herself. She went back to the kitchen. Her father, the unopened can and the opener still in his hands, was looking out the kitchen window. It was lined with glass shelves that held old red, green, and blue bottles that she had collected since she was a little girl. The intermittent light coming through them showed colors on his skin as if he were standing behind stained glass.
“They are shouting now,” he said. Even with the window closed, they heard threats and epithets coming from the alley below. He turned away from the window and got to work on the soup can.
“Somebody will report the fracas,” she said as lightly as possible. “I was thinking that since there aren’t any customers at the shop and I am staying home, you might help me take down the winter drapes and put away the winter clothes.”
Her father nodded gravely. After another glance at the window, he made sure her apartment door was locked.
* * *
Jorge Webber drove Evita in Domingo Mercante’s Chevy past the majestic facade of the Palacio del Agua toward Pierina Dealessi’s apartment. He wished he still had the Packard so he could drive her in the elegance she deserved instead of in this nondescript rattletrap. After their trip through the barrios yesterday, she had taken to sitting in the front seat beside him.
He was sure they had not done enough yet to help Perón. She had not entreated the workers with speeches as he had hoped she would. If she had tried, she could have drawn a crowd wherever they went. How could merely chatting with workingmen and their families—one by one, or a few at a time—do the trick? She did not even instruct them in exactly what to do. The boys in the plazas had gotten angry, but she had kept her voice gentle—never acting the firebrand he knew she could be when her ire was aroused. He was afraid they would not rise up unless she told them to.
“Let’s not go back to Pierina’s,” she said. She had Perón’s letter in her hand, and she was chewing on the cuticle of her left thumb. “I want to go to see Bramuglia again. He has to help me get a writ.”
Webber made a left at the next corner and skirted the monumental statue of San Martín at the edge of the park near the military club to cross toward Bramuglia’s office. Before they reached the broad avenida, they found themselves in the middle of an unruly anti-Perón rally. Now, Webber was glad they didn’t have the easily recognizable Packard. The crowd blocking the street forced him to slow practically to a halt. Suddenly, a man recognized Evita and started to shout, “It’s her. It’s her.”
“Get down,” Webber said, and reached out and pushed her down with his hand on her back. She slammed forward so hard that she doubled over. She threw her arms over her head. He held her down and drove slowly, trying to get through the throng in the street, steering with his left hand and practically nudging the people out of the way with the bumpers and the fenders. Fists started beating on the windows and the doors, which fortunately he had thought to lock when they got in. She started to lift her head. He pushed on her back. “Stay down,” he said. He leaned on the horn and managed to get to the end of the block and then sped away as fast as the car would take them through the now-deserted street.
“I think we have to get you indoors,” he said when they were safely away. “I don’t think now is the time to go to Bramuglia’s office.”
When she sat up, her nose was bleeding.
“Oh, my lady! I am so sorry.” Blood was dripping onto the bodice of her pretty, pale-pink dress. He stopped the car. “I am so sorry.”
“I need a handkerchief,” she said. Her normally pale skin was white as milk.
He took a fresh handkerchief out of his breast pocket and gave it to her. “Put your head back.”
She rested her head against the back of the seat. He watched the street to make sure that no one approached.
“Take me to Pierina’s,” she said when the bleeding had stopped. “I will take this as a sign that I should forget about the writ.
“I won’t go out again today,” she told him when they reached Dealessi’s building, and the doorman opened the car to let her out. Webber was relieved. How could he do his duty and protect her if she went out into the dangers of Buenos Aires on a day like this?
* * *
Roberto Leary returned to his desk just after noon, leaving his car in the police parking lot, where, among the dowdy black and gray sedans, it resembled a real diamond in a box of dross. The exterior of the police headquarters looked like any other of Buenos Aires’s graceful nineteenth-century buildings, but the interior, when Leary entered it, smelled like a jail and a morgue—of shit and decay. He had never gotten used to the odor and after all these years he knew he never would. Since the early-morning call from Hernán, the dressmaker’s boyfriend, he had been out looking for Torres. The gardener had not reported to work at 8:00 A.M. and there had been no sign of him at his address or in his neighborhood gin mills, where evidently he often spent most of his time off.
Ireno Estrada and his dummy partner Franco had had no luck picking up the bastard. Now that Leary could charge him with assaulting the dressmaker, he had to get him in custody before he did something worse. He sent the men back out to scour around for Torres and walked back to his desk, spending more time fantasizing about the girl Pilar than about how to catch Luz’s killer—whoever he was. Between love and death, he knew which one he preferred. He made a halfhearted attempt to fill out a report, but after a quarter of an hour he discovered he had put the carbon paper in backward. He was cursing the fact that reports were required in triplicate when Estrada and Franco came in at a run. They should have been out looking for the gardener.
“I told you not to come back without Torres. Why are you still here?” he demanded.
“Get back out to your car,” Estrada said. “They found a dead body at the apartment of that woman who owns the dress shop.” Estrada didn’t have to say which dress shop.
Leary trotted behind them down the wide hallway and out to the parking lot. Their patrol car was pulled up behind his Pontiac. They had left the blue
light on the roof spinning. Leary tailed them at breakneck speed, with their siren blaring, past the obelisk and into the grid of streets between Córdoba and Santa Fe. The unstable weather seemed to have passed and knots of demonstrators blocked the avenidas, as they had for the past few days. The sun glinted off the chrome on his hood as he turned the last corner and pulled up behind Estrada and Franco, who were already out of their car and running.
They slid to a halt on their leather soles behind a small knot of curiosity seekers standing near a raised flower bed at the front of the building. The dressmaker’s father—Gregorio Robles—and another man almost as old stood with their feet in the pansies, looking down at a corpse that was partially obscured by the plants. Leary looked around for Señora Robles, but she wasn’t there. He mounted the low cement wall that created the bed and stepped over the wrought-iron fence that topped it. He gestured to the people standing along the walk. “Talk to these people and find out what they saw,” he told the patrolmen.
He took off his hat as he approached the corpse.
“It’s Miguel Garmendia,” the old man, Gregorio, said.
“You knew him?” Leary asked.
“Claudia did. The neighbors came up to tell us there was a body. She came down with me and identified him. I sent her upstairs. To keep her safe.”
“Good idea.” Leary looked closely at the body. Garmendia was lying on his back. Blood from the wound soaked his shirt but not the ground around him. His heart had stopped before he bled to death—unlike his poor daughter. “Who found the body?”
Gregorio introduced Leary to Raul Llorca, the manager of the building.
“Did you see anyone at the scene when you got here?” Leary asked him.
The tall, skinny building manager had a self-satisfied look about him that one would expect to see on emperor. He turned down the corners of his mouth and shook his bald head. “I went to the café across the square to have a coffee. When I got back, I found the body. No one else was around.”
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