by Caryl Ferey
The tankers were followed by semis on the main highway. Jana was concentrating on her driving, the windshield covered with orangish dust blown down from the Andes. They had picked up the Hyundai at the garage in Uspallata and since then had been taking turns at the wheel, stopping hardly at all. The miles rolled by, monotonous; after the stress of the police roadblocks at the provincial borders, the night spent in the desert seemed almost distant. Rubén dozed, his head resting against the side window, exhausted by the hot day, or meditated, his mind full of steaming equations. Jana kept an eye on the rearview mirror, lost in her thoughts. Something had happened during that night: one of the most important events in her life. Why was she so sad? So sad and so happy? The fire that was burning her could drive her mad, she felt it boiling in every pore of her skin, her dirty Indian skin that the winka had thrown to the dogs. “Who kills the dogs when the leash is too short?” They would be free. Soon.
The sun was flooding the plains. The Mapuche put her hand out the open window to absorb a bit of coolness, then put it back on Rubén’s knee and let it sizzle. He was asleep.
Buenos Aires, 215 miles.
*
Jo Prat had played all night even though he could hardly breathe. These outdoor concerts gave him terrible colds, and even the hieratic calls of the trio of groupies piling up their breasts at the foot of the microphone had left him cold. Drenched with sweat in his tight leather outfit, the asthma attack came over him as he left the stage. Get out of there. Get away from all these people who held his past glory against him.
Prat inhaled two sprays of Ventolin and quietly left the festival through the VIP exit. He had no appetite for sex this evening, and still less for talking to people he didn’t know: he took another hit of Ventolin, the third, to ward off the approaching asthma attack. Maybe he was getting old, or he’d given all he had, abused drugs too much, whatever, he dreamed only of getting back to his hotel room, a somewhat antiquated, calm little suite in the upscale neighborhood of Belgrano, where no one would recognize him: he’d take a shower and sleep with the air conditioning turned off until the cold went away.
Living in a hotel was the only luxury that suited him. Calderón and his witness had been hiding out in his flat for several days, but beneath his sovereign airs, the dandy had been shaken by María Victoria’s death. The poor little thing. Who would have believed it? Jo was sick about it. Even if the photographer had not told him he was the father (María wanted a baby more than a husband), she was carrying a bit of him in her belly, and she hadn’t chosen him at random. Her portrait dominated his loft, and that was after all a proof of gratitude if not of love. Jo had promised the detective a bonus if he discovered the truth regarding the circumstances of her death: Calderón hadn’t reported anything, but he had confidence in him—this guy looked as furious as his songs had been back in the day.
Jo Prat sniffled, his head down, his hands in the pockets of his leather pants. He’d gotten past the various barriers, his Sesame badge around his neck. A half-moon escorted him out of Lezama Park. He was thinking about María, about the baby who had died with her, when a pedestrian who was coming toward him stopped.
“Jo Prat?” the stranger asked.
The rocker looked up: a giant with pocked skin was standing in front of him, a bald man about sixty who was going to great lengths to appear friendly. A stranger was always a pain in the ass.
“Sorry,” Prat said, “I’m in a hurry.”
“The Campallo girl, was she your girlfriend?” the man asked with a fishy smile.
A leaden weight fell on the musician’s shoulders. The man who’d come up to him seemed definitely unpleasant.
“If you’re a journalist, tell your readers that I have nothing to say.” He coughed. “The same if you’re a cop.”
He tried to start down the lane but the colossus blocked his way.
“You’re the one who knocked her up, huh?” the man continued with an aggressive familiarity.
“Are you deaf? I have nothing to say to you, O.K.?”
“Three months along,” the man went on. “I checked the dates on her site: you were on tour together when she got pregnant. You’re the father of her kid. María Campallo’s little pal who informed Calderón.”
Parise had seen this face at the photographer’s home when he cleaned the apartment, the black-and-white prints she’d hung on a string like trophies. He couldn’t make the connection with the moment of the kidnapping, but before he died, Campallo had revealed things about his daughter that had put a bug in his ear . . . The rocker scowled.
“Who are you working for, her father? You’re beginning to annoy me with your crap,” he growled in a hoarse voice. “Let me by.”
His lungs were hurting, and he wasn’t wary. The guy with the chalk-white face grabbed his arm, and in a convoluted movement turned it around so that it pressed on his throat. Jo Prat tried to get away but the giant had immobilized him, and he knew how to fight. Prat didn’t. The man pushed Prat’s forearm against his windpipe so hard that it made tears come to his eyes.
“Let me . . . go!”
Parise dragged the rocker under the trees lining the deserted lane.
“Calderón came to grill you, right?” he growled.
“Leave me . . . alone.”
The hold was shutting off his trachea so that he couldn’t breathe. He was already suffocating and the bald man seemed to have Herculean strength. Jo tried to wrench himself free, in vain. Parise was blowing his mentholated breath in his face.
“The Campallo girl talked to you about something,” he said in a sugary voice. “Something very important, before she disappeared.”
“I didn’t . . . see her.”
“A document,” Parise continued without letting up the pressure on his windpipe, “a paper concerning her parents. María Victoria must have talked to you about it. And you talked about it to Calderón.”
“No!” Jo spluttered.
Parise glanced furtively toward the park lane, which was still empty. He released the hold that immobilized his prey, balled his fist like an anvil and struck him hard in the stomach. A vicious blow that robbed him of what little breath he still had.
“I don’t believe you,” belched the former interrogation officer.
Jo Prat held his stomach, a soldier under machine-gun fire, gasping for air that didn’t come. With his free hand, the asthmatic grabbed the Ventolin inhaler in his pocket and nervously put it to his mouth. He didn’t have time to breathe in life; Parise wrenched the inhaler out of his hands.
“Tell me what you know and I’ll give you your medicine back. Are you the one who hired Calderón?”
Jo thought he was going to die. He shook his head, unable to breathe. He was suffocating, for real.
“Yes . . . ”
“Where is he?”
“I . . . don’t know.”
He couldn’t resist when the giant searched his pockets and found a little wallet and the key to a hotel, the Majestic in the Belgrano neighborhood. Bizarre. According to the information he had, Prat lived in Buenos Aires, and the papers gave an address in Palermo Hollywood.
“What the fuck are you doing in a hotel? Huh? Why aren’t you sleeping at your place?”
Parise waved the precious inhaler in front of the singer’s glassy eyes. Jo grabbed his arm; he needed the medicine, urgently. Parise, seeing that he was red in the face and unable to talk, stuck the inhaler between his lips. Jo sucked in a saving gulp that allowed him to escape from the abyss, but Parise immediately took the inhaler out of his trembling hands.
“More,” Jo wheezed. “I need . . . more.”
His lungs were whistling like a locomotive and he could hardly stand up, a pathetic marionette slipping on a bed of nails. Parise thought hard for a moment under the branches of the trees: Calderón had not returned to his office, the girl that lived with the tran
ny had disappeared from circulation, and surveillance of the Grandmothers’ office had yielded nothing. The detective must have found a hideout for his witness, some place from which he could operate without attracting attention.
“You know where Calderón is,” he said.
Jo did not reply, imploring as the man held him up at arm’s length.
“Is he staying at your place? Is that why you’re in a hotel?”
Gripped by panic, Jo Prat nodded. He reached for the inhaler; he had no strength and soon he would have no air. Parise smiled under the tree that was hiding them. The others were waiting near the gates, in the van.
“Thanks for the information,” he said with a smile.
Parise threw the Ventolin into the branches and watched the man suffocate, inexorably, on the carpet of moss.
*
Buenos Aires’s towers were emerging dimly through the smog when the Hyundai got caught in traffic on the superhighway. Seven in the morning around the capital. Black smoke spitting out of exhaust pipes, patched-together, backfiring cars, American trucks with shimmering chrome: Rubén and Jana passed through concrete housing developments with washing hanging out over the dirt before reaching Rivadivia, one of the longest avenues in the world—forty thousand numbers.
They arrived at the time when the cartoneros were going home.
Raúl Sanz was waiting for them at the Center for Forensic Anthropology. The EAAF15 had been created in 1984 under the direction of Clyde Snow, an American anthropologist and forensic scientist who had offered his knowledge and trained the staff members who were to be his successors. The organization, which was independent, worked in more than forty countries with various institutions, both governmental and nongovernmental. Under Raúl Sanz’s guidance, Rubén had learned about ballistics, genetics, archeology, how to exhume and identify bodies, how to locate graves, and how to establish the facts based on the position of the bodies, objects found on the scene of the crime, clothing, fractures . . . Raúl, a man in his forties who was always meticulously well-dressed, kissed Jana’s hand before embracing his friend.
“We were wondering if you were going to get here,” he said, leading them into his lair.
“We were, too,” Jana commented.
Raúl looked questioningly at Rubén, who signaled to him to let it drop. He put down the military sack on the anthropologist’s desk.
“A real little Santa Claus,” the latter noted when he looked at the contents.
The skulls hadn’t suffered too much despite what they’d been through on the trip. Raúl Sanz picked them up like puppies in their basket. DNA results would be available in twenty-four hours, he soon assured them. They exchanged a few words of explanation over black coffee, greeted his full team, and then separated in the Center’s lobby. Jana and Rubén had a ten o’clock meeting at the Abuelas’ office with the Grandmothers and Carlos: that left them time to pass by the apartment to take a shower and feed Ledzep.
“The poor old fellow must be keeping an eye on his food bowl and wondering what we’re doing,” Jana remarked on the way.
“Losing two or three kilos wouldn’t do him any harm,” Rubén replied, “or his master, either.”
“You’re a nasty little puma, not everyone has the luck to have your pelt.”
She ran her hands through his hair and saw his tired smile. Jana yawned in spite of herself. She was in a hurry to get back.
Apart from the kiosco that was opening up at the corner, the shops on Gurruchaga Street were still closed at that hour. They went around the block twice before parking the car and hurrying into the building’s lobby.
The muffled atmosphere in the loft seemed somehow odd, as if they had left a century earlier. They set down the bags in the entry hall. Rubén went to the window with the drawn drapes and saw nothing but vehicles without drivers parked along the sidewalk.
“What is it?”
“Nothing . . . nothing.”
Fatigue was playing tricks on him. Or stress. Jana gave him a furtive kiss on the lips, to relax him.
“I’m going to take a shower.”
She took her bag from the entry hall, wondered where Ledzep had gone—the old cat must be sleeping in some closet; the blinds were drawn in Jo Prat’s bedroom, the heat had withered the roses. Jana put the .38 on the night table, picked out clean clothes. She heard mewing under the bed. She bent down and saw two round eyes glowing.
“What are you doing there, old boy?”
Ledzep’s only response was to hiss at her.
Rubén was climbing the glass staircase when Anita called his cell phone. At the sound of her voice, the detective sensed immediately that the news was bad. Jo Prat had just been found dead in Lezama Park: a volunteer at the festival had found his lifeless body and called 911. An asthma crisis, according to the preliminary examination—a Ventolin inhaler lay near him.
“Shit.”
“Where are you?” Anita asked with concern.
“At his place,” Rubén replied.
The Moroccan lamp gave a soft light in the bedroom: Jana was getting ready to undress, but something stopped her. She sniffed the air in the room. The objects were familiar, but the atmosphere had suddenly become unbreatheable. The Mapuche drew back: somebody was in the apartment. The odor of sweat permeated the walls, and was growing stronger and stronger. She grabbed the loaded revolver lying next to the vase where the dead flowers were turning brown, and sensed a presence at her left.
“If you move or scream, I’ll . . . ”
Jana fired without aiming: the .38’s bullet raised a cloud of plaster dust when it hit the wall but missed its target. She didn’t have time to fire again: two harpoons dug into her neck.
“La concha de tu hermana!”16 El Toro whispered, holding his hand to his ear.
Her muscles paralyzed by the shock, Jana collapsed against the night table. El Picador rushed out of the bathroom, sweating in his three-piece suit. Blood was dripping on El Toro’s jacket with epaulets; the lobe of his ear had been shot off. The girl lay next to the bed, in convulsions. El Picador set down his attaché case, seized the syringe ready for use, and threw the garrote to the big man.
“Hurry up, damn it!”
Rubén was on the terrace of the loft, talking with Anita, when the detonation resounded on the ground floor.
“What happened?” she cried. “Rubén!”
He turned around and found himself facing two men who leapt through the sliding door, a big bald guy and another whose nose was covered with a bandage. Rubén jumped the latter just as he was pulling the trigger, diverted the shot with a blow of his forearm, and wrapped the man’s arm around his neck. Parise aimed his Taser but Calderón pushed Puel back, using him as a shield.
“Get out of my line of fire!” Parise hissed. “Goddammit, get out of the way!”
Puel, who had served in the commandos, felt the bones in his neck cracking: he kicked backward to destabilize Calderón, who sent him flying with him against the screen. The bamboo fencing gave way under their weight; they fell twelve or thirteen feet onto the neighbors’ terrace.
Parise trampled flowers and bushes and leaned over the low wall. Puel and Calderón were grappling with each other at the foot of a white plastic table, which had broken their fall. They were hissing with hate as they fought, a ferocious combat that first one, then the other seemed to be winning. A mad, lethal waltz. Parise hesitated to fire. At that distance, he could just as easily hit the wrong target, and as for jumping down to deal with him, he wasn’t sure he could get back up. The two men rolled on the tiles, their muscles straining, pummeling each other in a battle that was as short as it was violent. The mask that protected his nose got in his way, but Puel, this time, would not let go of his prey: Rubén was biting the dust on the terrace, his forearm pressed over his windpipe. He struggled to get free, succeeded, and jammed his palm against the bas
e of Puel’s broken nose: a flood of blood spurted out under the bandage. Puel felt the flaming arrow shoot up into his brain. In a second, Rubén had turned him over. The detective was breathing heavily to expel the hatred that was restraining his muscles, wedged his hands under the base of the killer’s head in order to break his vertebrae, and suddenly froze: there was a child on the terrace.
A youngster in swimming trunks, who was watching them fight, a kid three or four years old as surprised as he was, his eyes of a pure innocence underneath his bobbed hair and curls.
Rubén gripped Puel’s head, jaw, and neck in a vise and with a sudden jerk broke the man’s cervical vertebrae. The head he was holding in his hands fell down on the chest, which no longer weighed anything.
A stupefying second.
The kid hadn’t moved, either.
“Emiliano?” a woman’s voice called from inside the apartment. “Emiliano, are you there?”
Perched on the neighboring terrace, Parise had taken out his automatic pistol: the bald man had been about to fire into the pile when he saw the child, that damned rug rat in his Disney swimsuit, who was watching them fight it out to the death.
“Emiliano, where are you, dear?”
White net curtains were blowing through the neighbor’s French doors. Parise looked back at Calderón, who, protected by Puel’s inert body, was blindly digging through his jacket in search of a weapon.
“Emiliano!”
Parise swore between his teeth. The noise was going to alert the whole neighborhood, the brat’s mother was coming, and he couldn’t liquidate all the witnesses. The killer retreated, cursing, and rushed down the glass staircase. El Toro was sponging up the blood that was dripping on his soiled coat while his partner was dragging the girl to the front door. They had drugged her and bound her hand and foot with tape. No time for Calderón.
“Vamos, vamos!” the team leader barked.
Etcheverry was waiting in the van, double-parked.
Rubén had met the eyes of the bald man who was taking aim at him from the terrace. He found Puel’s pistol under his arm and grabbed it to fire, but Parise had disappeared.