“Someday,” Webber shouted, “they will be chanting ‘Evita. Evita.’” He continued to chant, “Evita! Evita!”
“God help us,” Tulio said again.
MONDAY, OCTOBER 22
Among the resignations that President Edelmiro Fárrell had to deal with in the aftermath of the events of October 17 was the departure from the army of Lieutenant Ramón Ybarra. Having been saved from a death sentence by the good offices of General Avalos, without further inducement he chose to pursue another career. Unlike many of his fellow officers, Ybarra wrote his resignation, signed, dated, and handed it in all on the very same day. By the following Friday, he was packing to move to Mendoza, in the foothills of the Andes far from the capital, where his mother’s brother was a prominent member of the Basque Diaspora community and the proprietor of a wine-making operation that had more than tripled in size during the war in Europe, when importing wine had been impossible. Other anti-Perón officers, fearing that the triumphant colonel still held their original letters of resignation, wrote new ones and left the army. Many removed to Montevideo, Uruguay, to bide their time until they might return to their native land. They got their wish in less than a decade. Others stayed and prepared to knuckle under to their former colleague’s dominance.
In the meantime, on October 22, in a civil ceremony in Junín, the town where Evita grew up, Perón married his actress. The colonel felt free to take this wife now that he was so powerful that no one’s disapproval could hurt him. He was free at last to unleash the full force of her charisma on his behalf.
For the ceremony, he wore his full dress uniform. She dressed in the lovely polka-dotted ensemble that Claudia Robles had designed for Perón’s fiftieth-birthday celebration, but she also sported the dreaded white hat with the cabbage roses.
Perón would go on to be the president and dictator of Argentina and she his first lady. The poor little girl had grown up to be such a somebody that a couple of years later, on her first trip to Europe, General Franco of Spain—who shared much of her husband’s political philosophy—sent his private DC-4 to fly her to Madrid, escorted by a squadron of forty planes from the Spanish air force. In Paris, dressed by Dior, she stood on the carpeted pedestal and looked at her blond self in the triple mirror. The woman in the gorgeous gown was her! No longer the little worm that people had crossed the street to avoid when she was a bastard girl out on the Pampas in Los Toldos. She was a butterfly at last. Her face flushed with joy, and her heart swelled to become the heart of the woman she had always wanted to be.
But Evita’s basking in the light of fame lasted only seven years. She died at the age of thirty-three, by which point she was the most famous woman in the world and already a legend.
In the immediate aftermath of the events of October 17, public and private, Luz’s grandmother, in deep mourning over the death of her son, failed to claim her granddaughter’s body. When Leary found out that the girl’s corpse still lay refrigerated in the morgue, he enlisted Ireno Estrada to help him steal it. He and Claudia Robles, Hernán, and Señor Gregorio gave Luz a hastily arranged funeral on Saturday, October 20. In the cemetery of La Recoleta, at the mausoleum where Claudia’s grandmother was buried. Gregorio, his blue eyes bright with emotion, gave an impassioned eulogy about how parents and grandparents should protect their offspring. His words were more stirring than any priest’s could have been.
In the late afternoon on the day of Evita’s wedding, Roberto Leary drove his red Pontiac into the hospital parking lot, swearing to himself that if the doctors did not let Pilar go home today, he would kidnap her. They had said she would be there for three days when she went in. It had turned into five. The cut in her arm was deep and had required many stitches. She had needed a transfusion. He and Claudia Robles, and even Tulio Puglisi, had offered to donate their blood, and the hospital had taken some from all of them, because with all the gunfights in the city over the past weeks, the supply was very low.
By Friday afternoon, Pilar had seemed infinitely better and complained bitterly about being kept in her bed. But the doctors insisted that they needed to be sure the wound would not suppurate. With the war barely over in the Pacific, there were no supplies of the miracle drug penicillin to cure infections. Suppose she lost her arm, Leary berated himself. He should never have left her. No matter what was going on in the city, he should have stayed only with her. He knew it was silly of him to think so. But everything about her intoxicated him. Besides, what had he done that day anyway? Lower a bridge so a bunch of harmless, little, skinny working stiffs wouldn’t drown in the Riachuelo? None of the cops had done anything much but watch. The docs in the hospital had said the seventeenth had been an incredibly quiet day for injuries, especially considering the violence of the past months. They were shocked to find that the only person who had gotten seriously hurt among the estimated three hundred and fifty thousand demonstrators was a girl.
Leary approached her room and saw Hernán Mantell standing outside the closed door. “Claudia is in there helping her get dressed,” he said.
They stood in silence for a moment. “I’m taking her home with me,” Leary said. “I feel like I never want to let her out of my sight again.”
Mantell nodded. “I can believe it.”
The door opened, and Pilar stood just inside the hospital room, smiling. She had heard Leary’s voice when he arrived, heard him say that he was taking her home with him. Now, she saw admiration in his eyes. Señora Claudia had designed and made with her own hands a beautiful dress for Pilar to wear, of silk in the palest yellow, with a slim skirt and a full draped top, to accommodate her arm in a sling beneath. It was, by far, the most beautiful thing she had ever owned. The señora had done her makeup, brushed her hair. She felt beautiful, like a bride in her traveling outfit, setting off for Paris. She had sewn clothes like these for girls who got to do such things. But she was happy to go with Leary to his flat in San Telmo and stay there with him as long as he would have her.
He stepped to her and kissed her on both cheeks. “Are you okay?”
“No sign of infection. It’s a good thing. What good would a one-armed seamstress be?” She meant it as a joke, but none of them laughed, and the tears that she had kept at bay for five days suddenly burst out of her eyes.
“Oh no!” Claudia said. She grabbed a towel from a rack next to the sink to catch the drops. “Please don’t let them fall on the silk.” Then she was weeping, too. For poor little Luz, to whom she had said those identical words in an incident that led directly to the girl’s death.
“What do we do with them, Mantell?” Leary asked. “Now, they are crying. Now that everything is alright.”
Hernán put his arm around Claudia’s shoulders. He knew why she wept, and why often it was only when relief came that she let herself go.
“I have a nice bottle of Torrantes chilling in my refrigerator,” Leary said. “Won’t you come and share it with us?”
“Oh, please do,” Pilar said. She wanted Señora Claudia to see how nice his place was.
When they were settled in his parlor with their wine and a platter of antipasti from the Sicilian grocers, they talked about the meaning of all they had seen in the last fateful days.
“I used to think,” Leary confessed, “that Perón might be a good thing for Argentina. That was what most of the guys on the force thought. But for all I’ve heard in the past week, whatever good he does will come at too high a price.”
“The men I work with at the paper are talking about leaving the country. There is no way we will be able to report the truth. Anyway, our paper won’t survive the crackdown.”
Pilar gasped. “Oh, Señora Claudia, you are not thinking of leaving Buenos Aires, are you?” She thought about her work, that her job would disappear.
Claudia smiled. “I think it’s time for you to drop the ‘señora’ and address me in the familiar. And, no. I will stay. I cannot move my father, so I cannot go.”
Hernán took her hand. “And so will I,”
he said. “I will find a way to earn a living with my pen. Someday, I hope, eyewitness accounts of what we have just seen will be needed.”
Leary put his arm gingerly around Pilar’s shoulders and kissed her cheek. “Perón is pretty sure to win the next election. It will take until after that before the worst oppression takes hold. That’s what Tulio Puglisi says. The voting isn’t until February. In the meantime, I will do my job. After that, I won’t want to be a cop.”
“What about that nice union man, Tulio?” Pilar asked. “What’s going to happen to him?”
“He has to get out of Argentina before the arrests and intimidation begin,” Hernán said. “He told me he might go back to Sicily, where his parents came from. Or to a cousin in Pennsylvania.”
He turned to Leary. “What about that son of bitch Webber? Do you think Perón will get his chauffeur off?” Hernán asked.
“I called Señora Duarte to tell her what had happened,” Leary said. “She said she hopes he rots in jail, that he abandoned her when she needed him most.”
Pilar laughed. “So much for Evita the Saint.”
Claudia wondered if she would ever be asked to make another dress for the tiny actress. “She will probably go to the French designers now that she is going to be the president’s wife,” she said aloud, not really intending to.
They all laughed. But then a sad silence fell. “What will become of Buenos Aires now?” Claudia asked. “I am afraid for my city if it is under mob rule.”
“Not the mob,” Hernán said. “Perón. Perón.” He imitated the chants of the workers in the plaza. “And he is worse than the mob. We are in for terrible times.”
Claudia sighed deeply. “Oh, God, don’t say that.”
Hernán took her hand. “Dearest, there has been a city here for four hundred years,” he said. “It has survived dreadful times before. Rome survived Caligula. Buenos Aires will survive Perón.”
“One day, perhaps,” Leary said, not entirely in jest, “Pilar and I will move to Paris and open a school of the tango there.”
Pilar’s heart wobbled. She imagined how wonderful that would be.
“In the meantime,” Leary said, “we’ll stay here in the city we love, and we’ll dance.”
He went to the Victrola in the corner and wound it. He put a record on the turntable and put the needle in the groove. The velvety voice of Carlos Gardel filed the room, singing “Mi Buenos Aires Querido.” The two couples stood in the small space between the back of the sofa and the door. They held one another in close embrace, not dancing, for there was not enough room, but feeling the music in their bodies.
HISTORICAL NOTE
This is a work of fiction. The background events are given more or less as they happened, but the historical characters are presented in a fictional way—to serve the story rather than the facts. The details of what they say and do should not be taken as historically accurate.
The tumultuous politics of Argentina at this dramatic moment seemed best portrayed by creating characters that embodied the various points of view. The character of Evita was the hardest to peg. Contemporaneous accounts and most biographers portray her either as a saint or a whore. She appears to this writer as neither and as both. She was a woman driven to overcome her sad and hopeless childhood; her biting ambition had its roots in humiliating poverty. But those bleak early years also made her a true believer when it came to championing the underdog. Though I do not approve of the repressive regime of the man she loved and supported with all her heart, though she was often a self-serving viper, Evita is, in some ways, irresistible. Imperfect virago, naïve and ill educated, still she was a genuine idealist who believed with all her heart that Perón was bringing social justice to the poor workers of Argentina. She worked tirelessly to help the downtrodden of her country, albeit with little regard to the niceties of charitable fund-raising or transparent accounting. That said, she did build hospitals and schools and trained record numbers of nurses. Where other, worthier champions of women’s suffrage failed (notably Alicia Moreau de Justo), as first lady, Evita succeeded in getting women the vote. She and Perón saw to it that Perón got the credit. In fact, Evita may have invented the role of first lady—the activist wife of a head of state.
I believe Perón was a master manipulator who exploited Evita’s ignorance, passionate nature, and craving for stardom, as he did Argentina’s economic and social problems, to achieve and keep his powerful grip on his beleaguered nation. For her part, having attained power as President-General Perón’s wife, she wielded it with a vengeance. Once they were a first couple, Evita became very much the center of attention. She protested constantly that she was only a conduit between the people and the man who was really responsible for their gains. But Perón immediately began to lose power after she died; his first regime lasted less than three more years. Was he the weaker of the two, goaded to greatness by her ambition, the beneficiary of her love and charisma? Or was he the wizard behind the curtain who used her showy involvement to mask his real machinations and distract attention from the brutality of his stranglehold on Argentina?
It seems impossible that anyone will ever tease away the myth and reveal the real Evita. But this I know for sure: Evita’s early experiences taught her to hate the ruling class. At least some of them lived up to her assessment, in spades. When at the age of thirty-three she lay dying a tortured death of a uterine malignancy, they scrawled “Long Live Cancer” on the walls in their fancy neighborhoods. How can one refuse a certain amount of sympathy to a dying young woman so abused?
ALSO BY ANNAMARIA ALFIERI
Invisible Country
City of Silver
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Annamaria Alfieri’s first novel, City of Silver, was named one of the best debut mysteries of the year by Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine. She is president of the Mystery Writers of America–New York chapter and lives in New York City.
Visit her Web site at www.annamariaalfieri.com.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
BLOOD TANGO. Copyright © 2013 by Annamaria Alfieri. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.thomasdunne.books
www.minotaurbooks.com
Cover design by David Baldeosingh-Rotstein
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Alfieri, Annamaria.
Blood tango: a mystery / Annamaria Alfieri. — First Edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-250-00455-0 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-02048-2 (e-book)
I. Title.
PS3601.L3597B57 2013
813'.6—dc23
2013011729
eISBN 9781250020482
First Edition: June 2013
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