Nurit finishes her coffee, rinses out the cup, dries it and puts it away. Some families are marked for tragedy, she thinks. Some groups and businesses too. Tragic fate is the acceptance of death in people connected to each other as part of an unchangeable destiny. Could Chazarreta and his friends have been one such group marked out for tragedy? Putting that aside, is it a coincidence that the friends died one by one, or is there a man or woman, not so different from herself, who decided their fates, someone Nurit Iscar feels compelled to find? She doesn’t know yet, but this will be the subject of her next piece, and she goes up to her room to write it.
At the moment that Nurit is switching on her computer, the Crime boy, still a little sleepy, is entering the reception of San Jerónimo Mártir College. In the hall there is a portrait of Vicente Gardeu, complete with habit. Beneath it, a plaque bears his name and the dedication: To Father Gardeu, this school’s founder and guiding light, on the anniversary of his death. Incredible. He imagines the same portrait over the caption “Wanted for paedophilia”. He’s absolutely sure, since going online at Nurit Iscar’s house yesterday, that this can’t be the name of that unidentified friend in Chazarreta’s photo. But only now does he wonder how Gandolfini made such a mistake, given that Gardeu was someone so present in the lives of San Jerónimo students. Brena was certain that that was the name he gave. Could Gandolfini have been pulling his leg? In his pocket the boy has the photograph of the group of friends that he printed for Brena and which Brena handed him early that morning – they had dragged themselves away from Nurit’s and he was getting out of the car at his house – with the instruction that he make copies for all three of them: Nurit, Brena and himself. It wasn’t strictly necessary, since the boy could always get it off YouTube again and make all the copies he wanted. But at that time of day and after that Sunday, neither he nor Brena was in a state to distinguish between what was strictly necessary and what wasn’t. The boy, sitting in an antique, impeccably restored Gobelin chair, takes the photograph out of his pocket and studies it while waiting to be seen. Several minutes go by without anyone coming. He notices that there’s a bell beside the door of what seems to be an office or study and, putting the photograph back into his pocket, goes towards it. He rings the bell, not knowing for whom he’ll ask when the door opens. If possible, he’d like to speak to the school’s longest-standing priest, someone who was here at the time that Chazarreta and his friends were students at San Jerónimo Mártir. The Crime boy doubts his chances, but it’s worth a try. Just as he’s about to ring the bell for the second time, the door is opened by a secretary, not much over twenty, who asks him what he wants. The boy spins him the line he invented on his way there: that he’s the nephew of Luis Collazo, who has just taken his life, and that among his rambling last words was a request for this photo to be given to one of his friends – and the boy points to the man they haven’t yet located, the one Gandolfini said was called Vicente Gardeu. We didn’t manage to catch his name, and my uncle died soon afterwards, the boy explains, and the secretary nods sadly as though to convey his condolences. Of course you wouldn’t know, you’re too young, the boy says, and the teachers from that time must all be retired, but I thought there might still be a priest in the order who remembers his name. The secretary lets him talk without making any gesture to confirm or contradict what the Crime boy is saying. Then, with the same impassive face, he offers: There are no longer any priests or teachers from that era, but if you come this way, there is something that might be helpful. The secretary leads him down an apparently endless corridor paved with grey flagstones which have lost their lustre but are still beautiful. They come to a door that says Order of San Jerónimo: Meeting and Reading Room and the secretary opens it. In the centre of a large room there is a cherrywood table and around it a great number of chairs. More importantly, the walls are covered in photographs, one next to the other, of each of the school’s graduating classes year by year and under each photograph is a wooden plaque bearing the name of every boy in the respective image above, in order and engraved in gold. Today is my lucky day, says the boy, and he isn’t joking. The secretary leaves him alone in the room with the instruction to take his time looking. The Crime boy feels a little overwhelmed to be surrounded by men who were born several decades before him yet are frozen here at the age of eighteen, each cohort posing behind a blackboard upon which the year of their graduation is chalked in white. He remembers that Chazarreta was close to sixty when he was killed, and calculates that he must have left school about forty-two years ago. While he’s not bad at maths, he’s never been good at doing calculations in his head, so the boy settles on a round figure of forty and starts with the leavers from 1970 with a margin of five years on either side. He locates the group of friends in 1966. The first he recognizes is Chazarreta, probably because that’s the face he knows best. Then he looks for each of the others in turn, consulting the photograph he brought with him before searching on the wall. The wooden plaque confirms the names of the other members of the group. There’s Collazo, in the back row. Gandolfini, on one side, almost out of shot. Bengoechea, two along from him, towards the middle. And below him, holding the blackboard, Marcos Miranda, the one who was shot dead in New Jersey. Miranda’s flanked by Chazarreta on one side and on the other by that man whose name the boy doesn’t yet know. He scans the plaque, following the roster with his index finger for fear of making a mistake: Emilio Casabets. The boy makes a note of it on his BlackBerry. He checks again: there’s no doubt about it. He counts all the pupils in the front row until arriving at the one holding the blackboard; he counts along the names on the plaque again: Emilio Casabets. He goes out of the room, the door closing behind him with the kind of click that denotes heavy wood and a good-quality latch. He could go straight onto Google to search for Casabets – “google” him, a verb Brena would surely deplore – but he would rather leave this place as soon as possible and conduct his search over a coffee in some nearby bar. Back in the hall he thanks the secretary, who’s handing some admission forms to a couple. Any luck? the secretary asks. Yes, he says. Now all I need is to track the man down. His name is Emilio Casabets. That doesn’t ring a bell. He must not have had sons or grandsons at the school, but we’ll certainly have his details here. We keep a register of all leavers with their personal information and a note of their current workplace. It gets consulted a lot – it’s useful for contacts. I’d be interested to see that, says the boy. I’m busy at the moment, but if you call me later I’ll look it up for you, the secretary says, and hands him a school brochure similar to the one he’s just given the couple. You’ll find my number in here. Thanks, says the Crime boy, and goes off in search of coffee. His first instinct on finding Casabets’ name was to google him. If Jaime Brena had been in his shoes he’d have gone back to the secretary to get more information on that one, he thinks. He can almost hear Brena’s voice saying “Legwork, kid, legwork”. But, for better or worse, he isn’t Jaime Brena.
Two seconds after the Crime boy enters a bar three blocks away from San Jerónimo Mártir College, Jaime Brena is arriving at the newspaper. It’s earlier than usual – his working day generally starts an hour later – but he slept badly, woke up at dawn and didn’t know what to do, alone, in that apartment. God knows enough time has passed since he stopped living with Irina, but his flat still doesn’t feel like home. So he decided to get dressed and start the day. He began wondering about getting a dog again. Waiting on his desk is a cable with today’s possible feature piece: a French institute of sexual health, having analysed 250 cases, claims that women who are multi-orgasmic tend to have more pubic hair than women who aren’t. Jaime Brena reads it and roars with laughter. He reads it a couple of times more and can’t stop laughing, tears coming to his eyes. Then, when he’s managed to contain himself, he pictures hundreds of French women screwing behind a one-way mirror while scientists observe and log every orgasm they have. Or fake. And then examining each of them and counting, one strand at a time, how muc
h pubic hair is on each woman’s sex. Double-entry table, orgasms in the x column, number of pubes in the y, he says to himself. They’re laughing at us, he thinks. And if that’s the case, I’m going to laugh at them, too. He types out the cable’s basic information and adds: El Tribuno had hoped to test the conclusions of this study against the experience of local women, but all the ones we consulted claimed to have abundant pubic hair, so it hasn’t been possible to investigate what happens when the reverse applies. He considers titling the piece “In Praise of Big Bushes”, then decides that would be too much. Then he also types: The great wave of Italian and Spanish immigration to this country has led to Argentine women becoming sexually active and hirsute down below. He’s quite sure that someone will kill his piece before it runs, or at least cut it, edit it. That is, if anyone bothers to read it. In the bustle of the newsroom sometimes pieces written by the very experienced journalists – such as Brena – go through unchecked, so long as they are exactly the right number of characters for the allocated space. He’s going to make sure that this one is precisely the right length. He types another title he knows will never run: “An Ode to Pubes”, and emails it to Karina Vives for her to read and give him her opinion. He looks at his watch: his shift has only just begun and he’s already finished the day’s work. He wonders if Nurit or the Crime boy have managed to turn up anything new and looks in his Inbox, but there’s nothing from either of them. He calls Comisario Venturini. Impossible to avoid the greeting ceremony – How are you, dear? Well, but poor, Sir – but with that out of the way, he gets straight to the point: Have you found out anything more about Collazo’s death? Suicide, Brena, there’s not much more to know, says Venturini. But there are indications… Listen to me this time: don’t get involved, let it go. I don’t understand, Brena says. Then don’t understand, says Venturini, just let it go. Forget it, dear. Don’t waste energy on this; I assure you that it’s not worth it. Look, I’ve got a lot on here at the moment, but I’ll talk to you later. And he hangs up, leaving Brena staring at the handset. He’s never known Comisario Venturini to be so evasive, so ungracious. Perhaps Venturini should be thinking about taking voluntary redundancy too, he thinks, and goes outside to smoke his first cigarette. Or rather, his first cigarette of the working day; he’s already had one at home and another on the way to the office. He wonders again what Nurit Iscar and the Crime boy are up to. He doesn’t know it, but when he finishes the cigarette and goes back to his desk there’s going to be an email from the Crime boy in his Inbox containing the name they’ve been looking for, Emilio Casabets, along with Nurit Iscar’s latest dispatch, sent with her express request that he read it and give her his opinion.
Is there really such a thing as “tragic destiny”, that unchangeable force which, according to the Greeks, it was hubris to try to oppose, something akin to arrogance or insolent pride? To oppose it, they believed, could only ever be in vain because the journey towards one’s fate is as incomprehensible as it is unavoidable.
“What’s this woman talking about?” you’ll be asking yourselves, not unreasonably.
Well, I am talking about the Chazarreta case. And perhaps also the Gloria Echagüe case. But I am also talking about the deaths of four of Chazarreta’s friends, which all took place in the months before and after his death and all as a result of different kinds of accident. At least they seem to be accidents.
Successive deaths in a group of people who are all connected to each other, as these men were, unless clearly planned by one assassin or several, could be ascribed to tragic fate. But the fact that tragic events have taken place in their lives does not preclude those events also serving to conceal a crime by disguising it as another tragedy.
Take the Kennedys. A family whose members were powerful in the fields of economy, politics and government, in the United States, no less. Joseph Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald had nine children. Their son Joseph Jr died at the age of 29, piloting a plane in the Second World War. John Fitzgerald, President of the United States, was assassinated at the age of 46. Kathleen Agnes died at 28, when the plane in which she was travelling crashed in the French Alps. Robert was assassinated at the Hotel Ambassador, in Los Angeles, at 42, minutes after winning a primary election. One of the grandsons of the clan, John-John, the son of JFK, also died tragically in a plane accident at the age of 38.
Three brothers, a sister and a grandson were either assassinated or died in plane accidents. Could that be read as a coincidence? As fate? As tragic destiny? We try to find explanations for death, and they elude us. Sometimes there is no choice but to live with the discomfort of not understanding why a life has reached its end. Today we still don’t know who killed Gloria Echagüe. I realize that many people reading these lines are convinced that they do know, that the murderer was Pedro Chazarreta. I certainly envy them that, because it spares them from the unease I feel. But even if we do not agree on this point, I know that you readers will share my anxiety for some explanation to make sense of Chazarreta’s own death. And I, having seen a photograph of his best friends, of whom only one is still alive, feel increasingly uneasy. I ask myself whether the deaths of Luis Collazo, José Miguel Bengoechea, Arturo Gandolfini and Marcos Miranda are the products of fate, of a tragic destiny brought on by their own hubris, or if there is another explanation behind these deaths; a more human, more earthly explanation, to do with people rather than gods, like all crime. An explanation that would terrify me but would also save me from the uneasy feeling that these deaths have no meaning.
Jaime Brena stops reading and thinks: This woman’s good, very good. Is that all he’s thinking? Then he writes his reply to her email: Excellent work, Betty Boo, very well put. One of these days I’ll ask you to lunch at my house. Warmly, Jaime Brena.
24
At three o’clock in the afternoon, back at the El Tribuno newsroom and having discarded the scant information he found on Google, the Crime boy calls San Jerónimo Mártir College and asks for the secretary. As it turns out, there isn’t much information about Casabets in the register. The most recent entry states that Casabets has for several years been managing a rural establishment in Capilla del Señor, where he also lives. Is there an address, a telephone number or anything? the boy asks. All it says is that the establishment is called “La Colmena”, but I’m sure if you google it — Yes, yes, the boy interrupts, thank you.
Its website describes La Colmena as one of the first ranches in the province of Buenos Aires to be adapted for tourism: it can cater for traditional asados, cavalcades, weekend packages, foreign groups and special events. There’s a map showing directions. First you take Route 6, then the road to Arroyo de la Cruz, and a few miles beyond the historic centre of Capilla de Señor – so the page promises – signs for La Colmena will start to appear. It doesn’t take much for the Crime boy to persuade Jaime Brena to go with him. You bet I can, I’ve already filed my copy and I doubt anyone will miss me. Are you two abandoning me? Karina Vives asks when she sees them getting ready to leave. Jaime Brena answers with a joke: Don’t go off smoking with someone else; you know ours is a monogamous relationship. But the Crime boy doesn’t hear Brena’s joke because he’s thinking about how Karina Vives included him when she referred to “you two”. She wasn’t only speaking to Jaime Brena but to him as well. He likes that.
Shall we ask Nurit Iscar along? Brena asks the boy as they’re getting into the car, and the boy decides to call her and ask. He doesn’t get her, though, because as they’re setting off towards Capilla del Señor, Nurit is walking through La Maravillosa and, yet again, she’s forgotten her mobile. She was distracted as she left the house by the thought that once her latest piece appears in El Tribuno she won’t be able to walk around these streets so easily. The public naming of residents of this club – in one of the country’s highest circulation newspapers – and her suggestion that their deaths conceal a mystery that ought at least to be investigated won’t come without a cost. She wonders if the Crime boy or Jaime Brena have found out a
ny more information that will help them reach Chazarreta’s missing friend. The only one still alive. Or at least that she believes to be alive. She’s surprised that they haven’t called her yet, and it’s only when she pats her pockets to check for the mobile that she realizes she didn’t bring it with her. Just as well, she thinks; it won’t do any harm to walk for a while without being connected to anything, to walk aimlessly, even, choosing a path because of the colour of its trees, or the scent of a particular flower, or its silence. She’s aware that these ruminations sound a bit sentimental. She always did have a sentimental side, but she used to be better at hiding it. As the years pass one’s worst flaws don’t deepen exactly; it’s more that they finally reveal themselves. You can’t keep up the pretence in the way you once could. It’s annoying to admit it, but she likes this place, La Maravillosa. If you could forget about the wall encircling it, or all the bureaucracy at the entry gate, or the expression on some neighbours’ faces, or that to buy antibiotics you’ve got to travel at least six miles, that there’s no public transport, no corner bars or seven-day-a-week cinemas, you could say that La Maravillosa is a lovely place. She’s thinking about all the things it’s hard to forget and the reasons why someone chooses one path over another when she realizes that she’s in front of Collazo’s house. It’s strange that there’s nothing to mark off the area, nothing like the red tape around Chazarreta’s house to bar access. If she wanted, she could easily get to the cobblestone path that passes the tree where Collazo was still hanging yesterday; she could get as far as the tree itself, the exact branch. Cautiously, she starts off along the path, walks as far as the oak and looks upwards, scanning for traces of the rope which had held that lifeless body, for marks, for signs of damage to the tree. There they are: the flayed bark, the white trunk glistening, as though sweating. She imagines Collazo hanging right above the spot where she’s standing at that moment. The feet dangling above her head. If there’s no longer anyone at the house, if they haven’t posted a guard in front of it or surrounded it with plastic tape, it’s because they consider this an open and shut case: suicide. She imagines how much it must hurt to hang like that, suspended in the moment between life and death. It must hurt. And she wouldn’t know how to tie the knot. Thinking that reminds Nurit that she hasn’t been in touch with the transport tycoon’s ex-wife about Untying the Knots. She ought to call and put her mind at rest, tell her that the manuscript will be ready in a couple of weeks. When she’s finished her work here. Soon. She looks up to the tree’s crown. No, she wouldn’t choose to hang herself from a tree. She wouldn’t jump in front of a train or shoot herself, either. It would seem wrong to shatter the body that has been her shelter. She would take pills, for sure, a lot of them, thus easing the transition from sleep to that other state about which we know nothing. Is there a specific method of suicide reserved for each person? If Collazo had committed suicide, is this the one he would have chosen? At the moment that Nurit Iscar is arriving back at her house, the Crime boy and Jaime Brena spot a sign by the road indicating the entrance to the La Colmena ranch and turn off towards it. There’s something contrived about the scenery, which is of a neat prettiness that doesn’t happen naturally but has to be worked at. They drive on past an area signed Coaches and Visitor Parking, and stop in front of the entrance to what must have been the original homestead. Before they have even got out of the car, a woman has come forward to introduce herself as the person in charge. We don’t receive visitors on Mondays, she says. We’re not visitors, strictly speaking, says Jaime Brena. We’re looking for Señor Emilio Casabets. On what business? asks the woman. It’s personal, Brena says quickly. We have some mutual acquaintances and we’d like to chat, to talk over a few things. Emilio isn’t one for talking, the woman replies automatically, and it sounds as if this is something she often says. Emilio is my husband. He went out riding but he should be back any minute. The woman shows them in and offers them a drink, which they decline. Please don’t go to any trouble, Jaime Brena says. He can sense the woman’s wariness when she looks at them, as if she doesn’t trust them, or as if he and the Crime boy represent some kind of danger to her. He tries to draw her into conversation but she’s reticent, giving succinct answers then clamming up, making no effort to continue the exchange. Emilio isn’t one for talking and neither is she, Brena thinks. The wait becomes tense. The Crime boy asks if he may take some photographs. The woman says: Yes, you may. And doesn’t add a single word more.
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