Nurit wants not to be there any more; she makes her way as best she can to the door and opens it. In a way you’ve flattered me with your suspicions, believing me capable of setting up a firm like that; that’s not something anyone could do. Do you remember the Furies? (The who? the Crime boy will ask a little while later when Nurit Iscar tells him this.) It’s almost like striking a blow for them. I always thought Aeschylus was wrong to turn them into Eumenides; they went from being avenging Furies to benevolent creatures, and that was a shame. The Eumenides respect the law and justice, they don’t take justice into their own hands, Nurit manages to say. Exactly, that’s why it’s a shame, says Gandolfini. Don’t you think it’s right that someone brought those bastards to justice who raped their friend? Put political correctness to one side and tell me exactly what you think. That you scare me, that’s what I think, says Nurit Iscar, and she’s about to leave but Gandolfini stops her once more: Two last things. She turns to look at him without taking her hand off the door handle. First: not a word of this to anyone. I enjoy talking to you and your friends, but I don’t want to have the same problem I had after meeting Jaime Brena. And the second: Maidenform, says Gandolfini, and smiles. What? Maidenform. Then Nurit does leave, flees, almost. On her way to the lift she asks the secretary where the toilets are, and goes straight there.
Inside, she pulls down her pants and sees on the label the name she already knows will be there: Maidenform.
26
Nurit Iscar can’t remember what happened from the moment when she got into the lift on the seventeenth floor of the building where Roberto Gandolfini’s offices were and the present time, which finds her sitting at a table on the corner of Córdoba and San Martín together with the Crime boy and Jaime Brena. They tell her that she ran across Alem, narrowly avoiding a car, that she was carrying her ID card in her hand and that when she reached the other side she collapsed into Jaime Brena’s arms and passed out. But Nurit Iscar remembers nothing: not running, not the car that nearly knocked her down, not even the arms of Jaime Brena. The last clear image she has in her mind is of herself leaning over, knees bent, pants pulled halfway down her legs and the label: Maidenform. And then the lift, but only hazily, something that must have been the lift, and the knot in her stomach from the sensation produced as it plunged downwards. They tell her how they bundled her, still unconscious, into the minicab, how she came to when air entering through the open window hit her but that she was still gone, lost. That they took her to the first bar they found to give her something to revive her. She – stirring the double espresso into which Jaime Brena has poured a shot of brandy and added three spoons of sugar – tells them everything she can remember from before that strange amnesia, what happened from the moment she stood before Gandolfini’s secretary until she got into the lift after their encounter: what his office was like, the window, the river, the meeting, what Gandolfini had said and what he’d denied, what she had said. The pyramid of murder. And finally the threat. The yellow file with the two black stripes; a file that Gandolfini never opened but the contents of which, it was obvious, he knew and boasted about: Yellow with two black stripes diagonally across the top right-hand corner, she repeated. The make of her underwear. And the Furies, although, even though the Crime boy asks her about them, she doesn’t stop to explain their significance. You can look for it on Google later, kid, Brena advises him. The two men are still shocked. I can’t believe you did this all yourself, Betty Boo, Brena says. Don’t tell me off, she pleads, I’m more scared now than when I was there. Nurit’s eyes fill with tears and Jaime Brena moves as though to take her hand, but she – without noticing this or realizing his intention – moves hers, only a little but enough to give him pause. What do we do next? the Crime boy asks. We don’t do anything, says Nurit, almost angrily. I’m not putting anyone’s life in danger, especially not my children’s. All three are silent for a moment. A party of Brazilians who have come into the bar with bags and packages needs them to move so that they can get to the only free table next to a window, a table that’s too small for them and to which they have to pull up two more chairs. Talking and laughing loudly, those Brazilian tourists are the perfect counterpoint to what’s happening at the table shared by Nurit, Jaime Brena and the Crime boy. Once the new arrivals have all settled in, Jaime Brena says with resignation: Sometimes one has to settle for having discovered the truth. What does that mean? asks the boy. It’s not our job to administer justice, we’re journalists. If, in the course of an investigation, we uncover some important, true information that we aren’t in a position to prove, that’s still a lot more than we manage most of the time. Don’t we have an obligation to fill the police in about this? I’ve already spoken to Comisario Venturini and he wouldn’t give me the time of day. But it’s not just a question of responsibility: if this Gandolfini carries on killing people, the blame for that is going to be on our heads, the boy says. We always carry some guilt; the question is deciding which kinds of guilt we’re prepared to live with, says Brena. I couldn’t live with the guilt of that madman killing one of my sons, says Betty Boo, looking at the boy. I understand, the Crime boy says, but it’s a shame that we can’t find some way to write about this. We have to think it over a bit, says Brena. There may be a way to relay some of it, between the lines, turn things around and tell without telling, like we used to during the dictatorship: coded writing. Who would we be writing in code for today? asks Betty Boo. I don’t know, for anyone who wants to know. And where is that person who wants to know? Who reads the articles we publish, the novels we write? Is anyone reading them? Who? The Brazilians erupt in guffaws, and the laughter overwhelms them. A waiter arrives at their table with beer and a selection of aperitifs comprising many more little dishes and pots than these tourists will ever be able to eat. Their laughter gives way to exclamations and wonderment at what the waiter is laying before them. And then more laughter. I’d like to speak to Comisario Venturini in person, says Brena. I get the impression he knows more than he’s saying. I don’t want anyone put at risk, Nurit warns. Don’t worry, I’ll be discreet, but we’re already at risk, Brena says, then he asks: Do you think you’re in a fit state to go back to La Maravillosa, Betty Boo? I don’t know, but that’s what I’m going to do; I’m going to go there, write my last piece and get my things together. Then I’m going straight home. It doesn’t make sense to stay there any longer. Would you like one of us to go with you? Brena asks. No, we all have things to do, she says. OK, let’s speak later, then, Brena says. The boy nods without saying anything. What’s up, kid? Brena asks him. Is this what being a journalist is? Searching for the truth, believing you’ve found it although you can’t prove all of it, then having to keep quiet to avoid risking your life or somebody else’s? Yes, sometimes it is, kid; sometimes not even that, you don’t get close to the truth. And sometimes, very rarely, you feel that you’re getting things right. But then one day you look at the calendar and you realize that life has passed you by, that there isn’t much left ahead of you. I don’t want that to happen to me, says the boy. I didn’t want it either, says Jaime Brena.
At the moment that the Crime boy is going up in the lift to the El Tribuno newsroom and Nurit Iscar is in the minicab passing through the toll on the road that leads to La Maravillosa, Jaime Brena enters the reception area of Comisario Venturini’s building and, at the behest of a secretary, takes a seat opposite his office door. He hasn’t got an appointment, but he knows that Venturini will see him anyway; he always has before. Soon afterwards the secretary, without having asked first, brings him coffee in a little Tsuji porcelain cup, white with gold edging, a luxury accorded only to the institution’s highest ranks. On the tray there is a sugar bowl, also porcelain, but from a different set, with old sugar stuck to the spoon and a paper napkin folded into a triangle under the cup. He’ll see you in a minute, says the secretary. Jaime Brena still hasn’t decided how much he’s going to tell Venturini and how much he’ll keep back. He promised Nurit Iscar, Betty Boo, no
t to endanger anyone. Will he ever dare tell Nurit that he was the one who thought up the nickname Betty Boo for her, and not Rinaldi? When she published her novel Death by Degrees he became one of her most loyal readers: a fan, even. After finishing that, he read all her previous novels, eagerly awaiting those still to come. He even liked Only If You Love Me, although he thought it a minor work. Around the time Death by Degrees came out, one newspaper’s cultural supplement published a full-page photograph of her. He’d cut it out and stuck it onto his desk. He had it in front of him as he worked. One day when he couldn’t think of the right word to end a piece, he had looked up and asked the photo: What’s the word for when someone who’s the natural heir to a throne rejects it, Betty Boo? He said it just like that, “Betty Boo”, as though that had always been her name, as if no other name did credit to Nurit Iscar and her curls. Betty Boo. Abdicate, came the answer, after a moment, and he snapped his fingers: abdicate. So it was that Nurit Iscar, Betty Boo, became his consultant on difficult questions and everything else important. When around that time Lorenzo Rinaldi – with whom Jaime Brena was still on good terms at that point – asked him what the source was of some of his (in Rinaldi’s words) “far-fetched conspiracy theories for certain crimes”, Brena would say: Betty Boo told me, and point to the photograph without any further explanation. Until one afternoon Rinaldi passed his desk and told him that he’d just met her, the woman in the photo, in person, on a television programme. And not long afterwards Nurit Iscar started appearing in the newsroom every so often. Sometimes she’d wait for Rinaldi, sitting in one of the armchairs in reception, then they would go off together. She and Lorenzo Rinaldi. Other times they would spend a long time in his office, then she’d leave alone. One day a rumour started circulating in the newsroom. Then Jaime Brena decided to take the photograph down and not consult it any more. Will he ever dare tell her all this? he wonders again. It’s doubtful; it would mean revealing too much of himself, and if there’s one thing Jaime Brena has been very careful to avoid all his life it’s telling any woman anything about himself that (according to his own neurosis) they have no business knowing.
Betty Boo Page 27