The cop sat down, and she reluctantly asked her secretary to bring two cups of coffee.
“You know why you’re here. You also know you are under no obligation to tell me anything. Why didn’t you bring your lawyer?”
“I know how to defend myself. And anyway, I’m innocent.”
The district attorney sighed and toyed with her ring. How many times had she witnessed this exact scene? How many times had a cop like this one denied, to her face and against all evidence, that he had murdered a poor teenager? Because that was what the cops did in the southern slums, much more than protect people: they killed teenagers, sometimes out of cruelty, other times because the kids refused to “work” for them—to steal for them or sell the drugs the police seized. Or for betraying them. The reasons for killing poor kids were many and despicable.
“Officer, we have your voice on tape. Would you like to hear the recording?”
“I don’t say anything on that tape.”
“You don’t say anything. Let’s have a listen, then.”
She had the audio file on her computer, and she opened it. The cop’s voice came through the speakers: “Problem solved. They learned to swim.”
The cop snorted. “What does that prove?” he asked.
“By the time stamp as well as your words, it proves that you at least knew that two young men had been thrown into the Ricachuelo.”
Pinat had been investigating the case for two months. After bribing police to talk, after threats and afternoons of rage brought on by the incompetence of the judge and the DAs who’d come before her, she had put together a version of events on which the few final and formally obtained statements agreed: Emanuel López and Yamil Corvalán, both fifteen, had gone dancing in Constitución and were returning home to Villa Moreno, a slum on the banks of the Riachuelo. They went on foot because they didn’t have money for the bus. They were intercepted by two cops from the thirty-fourth precinct who accused them of trying to rob a kiosk; Yamil had a knife on him, but that attempted robbery was never confirmed, since there was no police report. The cops were drunk. They beat the teens almost unconscious on the riverbank. Next, they kicked them up the cement stairs to the lookout on the bridge over the river, then pushed them into the water. “Problem solved, they learned to swim,” were the words that Officer Cuesta, the accused man who was now in her office, had said over the official radio. The idiot hadn’t had the conversation erased; all her years as DA had also accustomed her to that, to the impossible combination of brutality and stupidity she encountered in the cops she dealt with.
Yamil Corvalán’s body washed up a kilometer down from the bridge. At that point the Riachuelo has almost no current; it is calm and dead, with its oil and plastic scraps and heavy chemicals, the city’s great garbage can. The autopsy established that the boy had tried to swim through the black grease. He had drowned when his arms couldn’t move anymore. The police had tried for months to sustain the fiction that the teenager’s death was accidental, but a woman had heard his screams that night: “Please, please! Help! They pushed me in! I’m drowning!” the boy shouted. The woman hadn’t tried to help him. She knew it was impossible to get him out of the water except with a boat, and she didn’t have a boat. None of the neighbors did.
Emanuel’s body hadn’t surfaced. But his parents confirmed he had gone out with Yamil that night. And his running shoes had washed ashore, unmistakable because they were an expensive, imported brand. He’d surely stolen them, and he’d worn them that night to impress the girls at the dance club. His mother had recognized them immediately. She also said that Officers Cuesta and Suárez had been harassing her son, though she didn’t know why. The DA had questioned her in that very office the week the teenagers had disappeared. The woman had cried; she’d cried and said that her son was a good boy although yes, sometimes he stole and every once in a while he did drugs, but that was because his father had left them and they were very poor and the boy wanted things, shoes and an iPhone and all the stuff he saw on TV. And he didn’t deserve to die like that, drowned because some cops wanted to laugh at him, to laugh while he tried to swim in the polluted water.
No, of course he didn’t deserve it, she’d told the woman.
“Ma’am, I did not throw anyone in the river.” The cop leaned back in his chair. “And that’s all I’m saying.”
“As you wish. This was your chance to make a deal that could, maybe, lessen your sentence. We need to know where that body is, and if you give us that information, who knows, maybe you could go to a smaller jail or to the evangelist cell block. You know the evangelists would go easier on you.”
The cop laughed. He was laughing at her, and he was laughing at the dead boys.
“You think they’re gonna give me much time? For this?”
“I’m going to try to have you locked up for good.”
The DA was about to lose her cool. She squeezed her hands into fists. She looked into the cop’s eyes for a moment, and then he said very clearly, in a different, more serious voice, without a trace of irony:
“If only that whole slum would go up in flames. Or every last one of those people would drown. You don’t know what goes on there. You. You have no idea.”
—
She did have some idea. Marina Pinat had been DA for eight years. She’d visited the Villa Moreno slum several times even though it wasn’t required by her job—she could investigate from her desk like all her colleagues did, but she preferred to meet the people she read about in the files. Just months before, her investigation had helped a group of families win a case against a nearby tannery that had been dumping chromium and other toxic waste into the water for decades. It had been an extensive and complex civil suit she’d spent years working on. There were families who lived by the water and drank it, and though the mothers boiled it to try to get the poison out, their children got sick, consumed by cancer in three months, with horrible skin eruptions that ate away at their legs and arms. And some of them had been born with deformities. Extra arms (sometimes up to four), noses wide like felines, eyes blind and set close to their temples. She didn’t remember the name that the doctors, somewhat confused, had given that birth defect. She remembered one of them had called it “mutation.”
During that investigation she had met the slum’s cleric, Father Francisco, a young parish priest who didn’t even wear the white collar. No one came to church, he’d told her. He ran a soup kitchen for the children of the poorest families and he helped where he could, but he’d given up on any kind of pastoral work. There weren’t many faithful left, just a few old women. Most of the slum’s inhabitants were devotees of Afro-Brazilian cults, or they had adopted their own doctrines, worshipping personal saints like George or Expeditus, setting up shrines to them on corners. “It’s not bad,” he said, but he didn’t say mass anymore except when that handful of old women asked him to. It had seemed to Marina that, behind the smile, the beard, and the long hair—his look of a militant revolutionary from the seventies—the young and well-meaning priest was tired, burdened with a dark desperation.
When the cop left and slammed the door behind him, the DA’s secretary waited a few minutes before knocking on the door and announcing that someone else was waiting to see her.
“Not today, hon,” said Pinat. She’d been left exhausted and furious, as always when she had to talk with cops.
The secretary shook his head and his eyes implored her.
“Please, Marina, see her. You don’t know…“
“OK, OK. But this is the last one.”
The secretary nodded and thanked her with a look. Marina was already thinking about what to make for dinner that night, or if she felt like going out to a restaurant. Her car was at the mechanic’s but she could use the bike; the nights were cool and beautiful that time of year. She wanted to get out of the office, invite a friend out for a beer. She wanted that day to be over and the investigation too, and for the boy’s body to finally turn up once and for all.
While she was putting her keys, cigarettes, and some papers into her purse so she could leave quickly, a pregnant teenager came into her office; she was horribly skinny and didn’t want to give her name. Marina took a Coca-Cola from the small refrigerator she had under her desk and told her, “I’m listening.”
“Emanuel is in Villa Moreno,” said the girl between long gulps of soda.
“How far along are you?” Marina asked, indicating the girl’s belly.
“I dunno.”
Of course she didn’t know. Marina calculated the pregnancy was some six months along. The girl’s fingertips were burned, stained with the chemical yellow of the crack pipe. The baby, if it was born alive, would be sick, deformed, or addicted.
“How do you know Emanuel?”
“We all know him. Everyone in Moreno knows his family. I went to his funeral. Emanuel used to be kind of my sister’s boyfriend.”
“And your sister, where is she? Did she recognize him too?”
“No, my sister doesn’t live there anymore.”
“I’ll see. Go on.”
“People say Emanuel came out of the water.”
“The night they threw him in?”
“No. That’s why I’m here. He came out a couple of weeks ago. He’s only been back a little while.”
Marina felt a shiver. The girl had an addict’s dilated pupils, and in the half-light of the office, her eyes looked completely black, like a carrion insect’s.
“What do you mean he came back? Did he go somewhere?”
The girl looked at her like she was stupid and her voice became thicker as she held back laughter.
“No! He didn’t go anywhere. He came back from the water. He was in the water the whole time.”
“You’re lying.”
“No. I came to tell you because you need to know. Emanuel wants to meet you.”
She tried not to focus on the way the girl was moving her fingers, stained from the toxic pipe, interweaving them as if they didn’t have joints or were extraordinarily soft. Could she be one of the deformed children, the ones with birth defects from the polluted water? No, she was too old. But when had the mutations started? Anything was possible.
“And where is Emanuel now?”
“He’s holed up in one of the houses back behind the tracks. He lives there with his friends. Are you going to give me money now? They told me you’d give me money.”
Marina kept her in the office a while longer, but she couldn’t get much more out of the girl. Emanuel López had come out of the Riachuelo, she said. People had seen him walking through the slum’s labyrinthine alleys, and some of them had run away, scared to death when their paths crossed his. They said he walked slowly, and he stank. His mother hadn’t wanted to take him in. That part surprised Marina. And he’d gone into one of the vacant houses at the far end of Villa Moreno, past the abandoned train tracks. The girl yanked the bill from Marina’s hands when she finally paid her for her testimony. The DA had found her greed reassuring. She thought the girl was lying. Surely some cop friend of the murderers had sent her—or they’d sent her themselves; they were only on house arrest and they certainly didn’t comply with it. If one of the boys turned out to be alive, the whole case could collapse. The accused cops had told a lot of their colleagues about how they tortured young thieves by making them “swim” in the Riachuelo. Some of those colleagues had talked, after months of negotiation and outlays of large sums of money to pay for the information. The crime was corroborated, but a dead man who turned out to be alive was one crime less, and it would cast a shadow of doubt over the entire investigation.
That night, Marina was uneasy when she went back to her apartment after a quick and not very stimulating dinner at a new restaurant that had good reviews but terrible service. Her common sense told her that the pregnant girl was only after money, but there was something in her story that sounded strangely real, like a living nightmare. She slept badly, thinking of the dead-but-alive boy’s hand touching the shore, the ghost swimmer who returned months after he was murdered. She dreamed that when the boy emerged from the water and shook off the muck, the fingers fell off his hands. She woke up smelling the stench of dead meat, consumed with a horrible fear of finding those swollen, infected fingers between her sheets.
She waited until dawn to try to call someone in Moreno: Emanuel’s mother, or Father Francisco. No answer. That wasn’t strange; cell phone reception was poor in the city and even worse in the slum. She got alarmed when no one answered the phone in the priest’s soup kitchen or in the first-aid clinic. Now that was odd: those places had landlines. Could they have gone out in the last storm?
She kept trying to get in touch with someone all day, unsuccessfully. She canceled everything that afternoon—she told her secretary that her head hurt and she was going to spend the time reading files, and he, ever obedient, had suspended all of her meetings and hearings. That night, as she cooked spaghetti for dinner, she decided that the very next day she would go to Villa Moreno.
—
Not much had changed since her last time on that southern edge of the city, on the desolate street that led to Moreno Bridge. Out there, Buenos Aires gradually frayed into abandoned storefronts, house windows bricked up to keep squatters out, rusted signs crowning buildings from the seventies. There were still some clothing stores, sketchy butcher shops, and the church, which she remembered being shuttered and still was, she saw now from the taxi; there was, though, a new chain on the door for extra security. This street, she knew, was the dead zone, the emptiest place in the neighborhood. Beyond those run-down façades, which served as a warning, lived the city’s poor. Along both of the Riachuelo’s banks, thousands of people had used the empty land to build their houses, which ranged from precarious tin shacks to quite decent brick-and-cement apartment buildings. From the bridge you could see the extent of the slum; it stretched out along the black, calm river, fading from sight where there was a bend in the water and it disappeared into the distance among the smokestacks of abandoned factories. People had been talking for years about cleaning up the Riachuelo, that branch of the Rio de la Plata that wended into the city and then moved off southward. For a century it had been the chosen site for dumping all kinds of waste, but especially the offal from cows. Every time Marina got close to the Riachuelo she remembered the stories she’d heard from her father, who for a very short time had been a laborer on the river barges. He told of how they’d dumped everything overboard: the scraps of meat and bone, the muck the animals brought from the country, the shit, the gummed-up grass. “The water turned red,” he said. “People were afraid of it.”
He also explained to her that the Riachuelo’s deep and rotten stench, which with the right wind and the city’s constant humidity could hang in the air for days, was caused by the lack of oxygen in the water. Anoxia, he’d told her. “The organic material consumes the oxygen in the liquid,” he said with his pompous chemistry teacher’s gestures. She’d never understood the formulas, which her father found simple and thrilling, but she never forgot that the black river along the city’s edge was basically dead, decomposing: it couldn’t breathe. It was the most polluted river in the world, experts affirmed. Maybe there was one with the same degree of toxicity in China, the only place that could possibly compare. But China was the most industrialized country in the world; Argentina had taken the river winding around its capital, which could have made for a beautiful day trip, and polluted it almost arbitrarily, practically for the fun of it.
The fact that the crowded hovels of Villa Moreno had been built along the banks of that river depressed Marina. Only truly desperate people went to live there, beside that dangerous and deliberate putrescence.
“This is as far as I go, ma’am.”
The driver’s voice startled her.
“Where I’m going is three hundred meters farther on,” she answered, distant and dry, the tone of voice she used to address lawyers and police officers.
The man sh
ook his head no and turned the car’s motor off.
“You can’t force me to go into the Villa. I’m asking you to get out here. Are you going in alone?”
The driver sounded frightened, genuinely frightened. She told him yes. Certainly, she’d tried to convince the dead boys’ lawyer to come with her, but he had plans he couldn’t change. “You’re crazy, Marina,” he’d told her. “I’ll go with you tomorrow, but today I can’t.” But she’d been single-minded. And what was she worried about, after all? She’d gone to Moreno several times before. It was the middle of the day. A lot of people knew her; no one would touch her.
She threatened to complain about the driver’s behavior to the owners of the taxi service; what a scandal to leave a judiciary official on foot in that area. She couldn’t move the man an inch, which was the reaction she expected. No one went near the slum around Moreno Bridge unless it was unavoidable. It was a dangerous place. She herself had left behind her little tailored suits she always wore in the office and in court, opting instead for jeans, a dark shirt, and nothing in her pockets except money to get home and her telephone, both so she could communicate with her contacts in the Villa and so she’d have something valuable to hand over if she was mugged. And of course her gun, which she had a license to use, was discreetly hidden under her shirt. Not so hidden, though, that the outline of its butt and barrel couldn’t be seen on her back.
She could enter the Villa by walking down the embankment to the left of the bridge alongside an abandoned building that, strangely, no one had decided to occupy. It was rotting away, corroded by damp, sporting ancient signs advertising massages, tarot readings, accountants, loans. But first she decided to go up onto the bridge; she wanted to see and touch the last place Emanuel and Yamil had seen before they were murdered by police.
The cement stairs were dirty and reeked of urine and rotten food, but she headed up them at a trot. At forty years old, Marina Pinat was in good shape; she went jogging every morning and the court employees whispered that she was “well-preserved” for her age. She detested those murmurings; she wasn’t flattered, they offended her. She didn’t want to be beautiful, she wanted to be strong and razor sharp.
Things We Lost in the Fire Page 14