by Caryl Ferey
“First, thanks for agreeing to this meeting,” he said, changing the subject. “As I explained, everything you say to me will remain between us. I will not speak about it at the trial, to the cops, or to anyone. I am going to tell you what I know and I ask you to do the same.”
María’s mother did not flinch; she was on the defensive. Ever since Calderón’s first appearance at their house things had gone from bad to worse: she had lost her daughter under tragic circumstances, then her husband. She now had only a son who was virtually catatonic since the revelations at the cemetery, and her beautiful eyes to weep with.
“I found the bodies of María’s parents,” Rubén continued without animosity. “Samuel and Gabriella Verón, a young Chilean-Argentine couple who were murdered in September 1976. The Center for Forensic Anthropology has confirmed that their DNA matches that of María Victoria and Miguel Michellini. Your children’s birth certificates are forged, as you know.”
Isabel Campallo shook her head.
“No.”
Rubén’s espresso arrived.
“Listen, Mrs. Campallo. For the moment, the press doesn’t know about this, nor do the judges, but the Grandmothers have a file of charges against you, and whether you are in mourning or not, you’re still subject to punishment as an apropriadora. You could get seven years in prison. It’s up to you whether you want to stain your name and that of your husband.”
There was a silence along the promenade where couples were entwining to the clacking of halyards. Isabel Campallo hunched a little more over her bandaged arm.
“Well?”
“One day Eduardo spoke to me about children,” she finally said. “Two young children. He told me they had been abandoned in front of a hospital, that we could adopt them. I believed him.”
“Sure, Rodolfo was found under a cabbage leaf and María in a flower . . . Summer ’76, you know what was going on then, don’t you?” he snapped at her.
“Yes, the military was in power. But the dictatorship didn’t prevent people from abandoning their children.”
“Before they were liquidated. Desaparecidos whose children were stolen from them.”
“When two babies are put in the arms of a sterile woman, she is ready to believe anything at all,” Isabel Campallo retorted. “And then, however it happened, these children didn’t have parents,” she said in her defense. “We gave them the opportunity to have the best possible education. That’s what we did. Always.”
Rubén blew his cigarette smoke in the widow’s face.
“You claim that you knew nothing about the conditions under which your children were adopted, or about the people who allowed it?”
“No. I believed Eduardo’s version. Perhaps because I wanted to believe,” she conceded. “I lived with it.”
“But you never told your children they had been adopted.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“It was convenient.”
“And cowardly: you must have suspected that they had been taken away from their parents.”
“No, I wanted to love them, that’s all. You aren’t capable of understanding that, Calderón?”
Silent tears were running down the apropriadora’s cheeks.
“Love them while hiding the truth about their origins,” Rubén said. “A fine little neurosis you’ve got going there.”
“That doesn’t make us monsters,” Isabel said, gaining control of herself. “My husband and I have always loved Rodolfo and María Victoria as though they were our own children.”
“I’d hardly expect you to detest them because they came from murdered parents,” he replied angrily.
Piqued, Isabel rebelled.
“Your memory is short or selective, Mr. Calderón. At that time the country was threatened with anarchy. There were murders every day, in the open street: police officers, judges, soldiers, CEOs—the terrorists were killing everybody! Montoneros, communists, or followers of Che Guevara, it didn’t make much difference: they all wanted to change the world without asking whether the world wanted to pay the price—in blood! Why do you think Argentines welcomed the military putsch? Mistakes may have been made, but those who were secretly interned were interned for good reasons: it was them or us!”
Rubén could have put his cigarette out on her face; he threw it away instead.
“You have strong arguments for someone who doesn’t ask questions,” he observed cynically. “Why didn’t you say anything to me when I came to tell you about your daughter’s disappearance? We might still have had a chance to save her. Did you think of that, or had your ideology consumed your heart?”
A disquieting veil passed over the detective’s waxen face.
“Rodolfo was present,” she said, embarrassed. “I . . . I couldn’t talk about the subject in front of him.”
“Maintaining your lie was more important than saving your daughter’s life, huh? You disgust me,” he said between his teeth.
Isabel held back her tears. People were strolling past the terrace, deaf to the drama that was being played out there.
“Do you know why your husband committed suicide?” Rubén asked.
The widow shrugged her thin shoulders.
“Out of sorrow . . . Obviously.”
“He didn’t leave anything behind him?”
“No.”
“Don’t force me to break your other arm,” he said in an icy tone. “If your husband had killed himself out of love for his daughter, he would have left a note to explain. So?”
“It’s at the notary’s,” she said.
“What’s at the notary’s?”
“Eduardo left a letter, dated the morning he died.”
“What does this letter say?”
“That he was leaving his fortune to Rodolfo,” Isabel replied. “I retain only the house, plus the property from my family.”
Rubén grimaced.
“Your husband disinherited you?”
“No. Eduardo knew that I didn’t need money. My family is very rich, that’s not it.” Isabel sighed under the black corset of her dress. “It was rather a last act of love for our son,” she explained. “My husband suspected that Rodolfo would someday find out the truth about the adoption. I think he wanted to prove to him that despite our silence, we loved them, him and his sister, as our own children. That we wanted to protect them.”
This piety did nothing to sway Calderón.
“No,” Rubén rasped. “No, something else happened. Something that pushed your husband to kill himself.”
The bubbles in Isabel’s Perrier were beginning to evaporate in the warm air of the terrace. She looked up, surprised.
“What could have led Eduardo to commit suicide?”
“The truth,” he said. “The truth about the death of his daughter.”
Isabel was pale on the other side of the table, and soon became transparent.
“Explain yourself,” she said.
“Your husband seemed alarmed the other day when I told him about the circumstances of María’s murder. Think what you want of me, Mrs. Campallo, but I wouldn’t have come to disturb your mourning if I hadn’t been sure that she was killed. I believe your husband understood that too, at that moment: and that it was a shock for him.”
Isabel’s forehead furrowed.
“Between the burial and his suicide, who did your husband see, aside from his family? The forensic police? Luque?”
“No . . . No.”
“The mayor? Torres was his friend, wasn’t he? He’s the one who set up the elite police force: your husband might have asked him for an explanation regarding the falsified autopsy report and the murder that was being concealed from him. They must have seen each other, or talked on the telephone.”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, Eduardo went to see him on the morning of th
e day when . . . ”
Isabel didn’t finish her sentence.
“The day he committed suicide,” Rubén went on. “Think about it. Your husband met his friend Francisco Torres, then dictated his last wishes at the notary’s office before putting a bullet in his head. Why did he do that, in your opinion?”
Isabel Campallo stared at him, disconcerted.
“Because Eduardo had understood that his friends were hiding the truth from him,” Rubén said, driving the point home. “That they were themselves involved in the murder.”
“No.” She shook her head, incredulous. “No, Francisco is an old friend. He would never have done such a thing. He has nothing to do with the dictatorship. He was barely twenty years old at the time. It’s impossible.”
“Torres could have given in to the pressure. Lots of people are involved, an old general and others, perhaps people close to him.”
“No,” Isabel repeated. “I tell you that Francisco is a family friend: he knows María Victoria, Rodolfo . . . I refuse to believe you.”
“Nonetheless, your husband committed suicide after they talked.”
“I’m telling you that’s impossible. Francisco is an honorable man.”
“Precisely, he might have admitted to Eduardo that he was implicated in the affair, how the murder was hushed up by Luque and his clique.”
“Why in the world would Francisco do such a thing?” she countered.
“Maybe in order to protect someone. Someone whose name is on the internment form proving the adoption of your children.”
“That was more than thirty years ago. Francisco hadn’t even done his military service: how can you suggest that there was a relation with your old oppressors?”
Rubén lit a cigarette, which didn’t make him feel any better. Then the answer came to him like a lightning bolt—why hadn’t he seen this connection earlier? Isabel Campallo was right about Torres. It wasn’t himself or one of his friends that the mayor of Buenos Aires was trying to protect: it was his father. Ignacio Torres, the man who had gotten rich in the wine trade before launching his son’s political career. Gabriella Verón had owned land in the Mendoza region . . . Ignacio Torres was the man of the estancia.
*
His head was throbbing, accompanied by the jolting of the apparatus. Too many events all at once—the hospital, Campallo, Torres’s betrayal—and he could hardly stand up. A sequence of blows that he received right in the face, like a boxer on the ropes. Jana. Rubén had turned the equation around in his head hundreds of times, and had found only one answer to her silence: if she had taken the weapons from his cache without notifying the Grandmothers, it was because she thought he was dead. There was no other explanation. Rubén trembled when he thought of what she might do. He had no way of contacting her, the Ford was no longer in Peru Street, where Miguel had left it: Jana had left the city without contacting anyone, with his weapons. Did she have a lead, a lead he didn’t have? The fear of losing her was still with him. What did she think, that she was going to liquidate them, all by herself? Had she gone mad?
Rubén was slumped in the rear seat of a light plane, suffering from the turbulence and his pain, using his bruised flesh as a cushion. A tubby walrus was at the controls of the Cessna, Valdés, the head pilot at the El Tigre airfield. The detective had found him in his tumbledown shack, playing endless games of solitaire on his computer, as if nothing had changed since the preceding week. Valdés hadn’t heard from Del Piro but he’d bared his big, nicotine-stained teeth when he saw the stack of bills Rubén laid on the counter.
“We’re almost there!” he finally brayed from the cockpit.
Sweat was running down Rubén’s face.
Mendoza, ten in the evening. He needed a bed, a hotel where he could rest. The detective walked slowly across the tarmac, his left arm glued to his side as if he’d broken his shoulder. Rubén was gritting his teeth, he was tough: the Glock was in his bag, and he shot with his right hand.
*
The Torres family belonged to the oligarchy of landowners who had divided up the country among themselves two centuries earlier. Ignacio had grown up in the fertile valleys of the Uco, the pride of Argentina. He loved his region, which was magnificent, the wine that was made there, the power he had inherited, and the money that sustained it.
The province of Mendoza produced the best wine in the country for a domestic market that was at the time very strong. Wine was the popular drink par excellence, but Ignacio was a visionary. Argentina, which had prospered by supplying a devastated Europe after the war, exported its raw materials: wine would be the new El Dorado. As early as the 1970s, Ignacio Torres had understood the predominance of capital over labor. With the liberalization of markets, financial speculation soon became more profitable than local agropastoral or industrial production, especially if the profits were invested abroad. However, a fairly strong society had to be created before entering these markets.
Ignacio had taken advantage of the ups and down of the dictatorship to increase the scope of his holdings, tripling the extent of the family lands in order to build the wine estate of his dreams, which he called Solente.
The main vineyards in the region were concentrated around Luján; Solente was farther south, off the beaten path. Torres had brought in the best winemakers from Europe and America to improve the syrahs and cabernets that had, up to that point, been consumed only by common, unsophisticated drinkers, and to build the his winery’s reputation. Afterward, he had counted on an intense advertising campaign and prospected on export markets and influential milieus, especially Mondovino, the specialized magazine that established the ratings, judiciously: the Argentine wine industry’s sales exploded in the 1990s, in particular those of Solente, whose bottles now cost six times more than they used to. What did it matter if the majority of his compatriots no longer drank wine because they could not afford such luxuries? Exports more than compensated for the decline of the domestic market.
Solente. The geographical location of the winery was ideal, with its hundreds of acres of vines lining the Andean foothills, and although the family chapel was reminiscent of Pinochet-style architecture, the building that received the public and merchants was ultramodern. A vast exposition hall with sculptures and contemporary works of art, gardens with exotic plants; an air-conditioned gift shop selling bottles of wine and other merchandise with images of the vineyard; a restaurant and lounge with a terrace offering views of the fabulous mountain range and its snowy peaks: more than a wine estate, Solente had become a brand. And Ignacio Torres had amassed enough money to launch his eldest son on a political career.
He’d made it to the Casa Rosada: at seventy-three years of age, that represented the culmination of a lifetime’s work. His son Francisco had the stature of a president, the capacity for work, the charisma, and for his part, he had solid support in financial and industrial circles. The mark he would put on the country would be irreversible: the Torres mark.
To be sure, Ignacio had a few problems, but he had no intention of changing his methods. As he did every year in this season, the master of the vineyard had come to supervise the harvest. The few clouds attacking the Andes dissipated over the extinct volcano Tupungato, the guardian of the valley of his childhood. Yes, he could be proud of his work. The bunches of grapes gorged with sun extended as far as the eye could see, to produce a wine that promised to be exceptionally good that year. Ignacio tasted a grape, spat out the skin, and judged for himself—perfect acidity. Protected by a broad-brimmed hat, the old man was ambling down the row deep in thought when a voice hailed him:
“Mr. Torres?”
Interrupted in his reflections, Ignacio showed a certain surprise. He had a brief moment of hesitation. Romero had dropped him off at the top of the north parcel so that he could inspect the vines before the harvest, and the quad had stopped down below. He couldn’t see Romero and a man was coming up th
e dirt path: a big, brown-haired man dressed in black, who was walking with the slow and cadenced pace of a legionnaire.
“What do you want?” Torres called.
“I have to talk to you,” the man replied as he approached.
After sleeping poorly for ten hours in a hotel near the airfield, Rubén had rented a car and driven to Solente, stuffing himself with painkillers.
Still ten yards before reaching the boss.
“If you’re a journalist, you must have been told at the reception desk that I receive visitors only by appointment,” Ignacio said, irritated. “You can see for yourself that I’m busy.”
“Yes,” Rubén said in a weary voice. “I called at noon. I was told that you were at the vineyards to supervise the harvest. I’m not a journalist.”
The detective stopped at the bottom of the row, dripping with cold sweat after his forced march over the hills. Ignacio Torres had a broad, flat body in accord with his cowboy get-up. His lively eyes soured.
“Who are you?”
“Rubén Calderón,” he said. “I work for the Grandmothers.”
It was impossible to discern the landowner’s reaction behind his Ray-Bans.
“What do you want?” he asked curtly.
Rubén was dying of heat in the sun and he had no time to lose.
“The truth about the theft of land from the Verón family,” he said point-blank. “September ’76, you remember? Colonel Ardiles brought you Gabriella, the sole heiress to these lands, a young woman accompanied by her husband. They had been extracted from the secret jails at the ESMA.”
Ignacio sensed the danger: he glanced toward the bottom of the parcel, saw the quad halfway up, but still not that dolt Romero.
Romero was resting between the vines, a bullet in his chest after a duel that hadn’t lasted long.
“Nobody will come to save you, Torres,” Rubén said, reading his mind. “Certainly not one of your men disguised as piqueteros. You’re the one who sent them to track down Montañez, aren’t you? With whose help, Luque’s?”