The puchero arrives at the table. Shall I serve you? Brena asks. Go on then, she says. At that very moment the Crime boy is opening a beer at Karina Vives’ house. So? What do you think of my idea? I love it, she says. It’s a shame Brena didn’t want to be my partner. Brena’s a newsroom guy, she says, you have to understand that. But what I’m putting together is a newsroom. Karina Vives looks doubtful. With no people all working together, with no going outside for a cigarette break with your friends, with no boss to mouth off about: that’s too much virtuality for a guy like Brena, she says. And you? Would you come and work with me? the boy asks. Later on, when the moment’s right for leaving the newspaper, she says. First I have to decide what to do about this pregnancy. I get the impression it’s already decided by now, even if only by omission. She doesn’t answer. The Crime boy takes another gulp of beer, watching her over the rim of the bottle. Ink or Link? he asks. What? she says. Which would you go for? Ink or Link? I don’t understand. Great content with no link doesn’t get seen, the boy explains and goes on: Today people need someone to select the best content for them. But somebody’s also got to keep writing that great content, she says. OK, he agrees, both things are necessary, but when there’s a superabundance of content, selection becomes all the more important, and I’m going to concentrate on linking people who want to follow me to the best possible content. Do you trust in my ability to do that? the Crime boy asks. Yes I do, Karina Vives says. The boy puts his bottle down on the coffee table. Is it acceptable to kiss a pregnant woman? he asks. I think so, she says. And they kiss.
There’s no room for dessert after the puchero, so they ask for two coffees and the bill. On the television set above their heads a breaking news item suddenly comes on with the caption: Business mogul killed. Shot fifteen times. Motive may be revenge. The picture shown is the entrance to Gandolfini’s office, RG Business Developers. But Nurit and Jaime Brena don’t see it and will only learn the news tomorrow morning; they don’t even look at the television screen, they’re caught up in other things. The entrance has been cordoned off by police, who are present in large numbers. The reporter does his piece to camera, an archive photograph of Gandolfini flashes up and now the reporter is interviewing a police chief. The caption says: Comisario García Prieto, leading the investigation into this crime. The caption changes: Frenzied murder: businessman Roberto Gandolfini shot multiple times in high-security office block. And on the screen, in the background, just visible behind García Prieto, if Jaime Brena or Nurit Iscar turned their heads to look, they would recognize the figure of Comisario Venturini, in an impeccable suit and with the calm demeanour of someone supervising an operation that, yet again, shouldn’t really fall to him but which he’ll nonetheless manage perfectly, and holding a yellow folder in his hands. A yellow folder with two black lines across the top right-hand corner. A folder he’s keeping a tight grip on because it doesn’t belong to the crime scene but to him. If they turned to look, Jaime Brena and Nurit Iscar would be dumbfounded; they would believe they finally understood, they would speak that night about the pyramid of murder and that observation made by Gandolfini only days before: that the murderer is the one who’s still alive. They would ask themselves whether the folder Venturini is carrying, which now on the screen he’s folding in half and slipping into a jacket pocket as though it were a newspaper, belongs to him or has been taken from the crime scene. They would ask one another why he gave Brena so many leads on Chazarreta’s murder, even taking them to look around his house. They would tell each other that it was because Venturini wanted it to be very clear that this was a murder: in order for Chazarreta to die as he should, he had to die as the result of a murder, and that’s why he was so elusive when the other deaths came to light. They would be talking about all these things now if they had raised their heads and seen what was on the news. But they don’t do that, they don’t look at the screen, they aren’t even tempted to do so by the fact that two or three people sitting at the tables around them are looking over their heads and speaking to one another as though something important were happening. It won’t be until tomorrow morning at first light that Nurit Iscar and Jaime Brena ask those questions and begin to answer them. When, having learned of Roberto Gandolfini’s death in a hail of bullets, and in search of clues, they rewind that same scene hundreds of times – the one they aren’t watching now – because they have found out, or someone has told them, that Comisario Venturini appears in shot. Tomorrow; all that’s for tomorrow. Today, Jaime Brena calls the waiter over and pays (Absolutely not, he says to Nurit Iscar when she offers to pay her share), then they get up and leave.
At the moment that they are leaving El Preferido, Lorenzo Rinaldi is entering another restaurant in the same area with his wife and sitting down at a table where some of the ministers closest to the president and his wife are already waiting. Have the political winds changed? regular diners who recognize them ask one another, and Jaime Brena would ask the same thing if he saw them. But Jaime Brena is otherwise engaged, walking through Palermo with Nurit Iscar. The street still feels warm from the residue of that strange heat at the start of autumn. I’ll take you home, says Brena, and it isn’t a question. Shall we walk or get a taxi? Let’s start off walking, says Nurit Iscar, then take a taxi if we get tired. They go on in silence, hoping not to be wrong-footed by the broken paving stones and bulging tree roots. Would you like to know where your nickname came from, Betty Boo? Go on then, she says. So Jaime Brena starts telling her the story that, until recently, he never thought he would, and as he does so he puts his hand around her waist. Tentatively at first, and then more firmly, unmistakably. Nurit Iscar feels a twinge of alarm, but she likes it all the same. It’s been a long time since a man held her around the waist. Jaime Brena himself was the last man to put an arm around her shoulder, the day that Collazo was found hanging from the tree. But a shoulder is not a waist. A waist has more G-spot to it. If the G-spot actually exists. Jaime Brena, as if he hadn’t noticed the consternation his hand has caused (“as if” because he has noticed it, of course), keeps on talking. He’s enjoying telling his story and he makes it funny, he wants her to laugh too, he wants to seduce her. Helping her to avoid a mound of raised slabs which threaten the pedestrian with their broken edges, he deftly pulls her in towards his body. From the waist, like a tango dancer, marking the pace. And she lets herself be led and stays there, in that place, closer to him.
If this were a Nurit Iscar novel, she wouldn’t describe what happens soon after that. Especially not after the disaster of Only If You Love Me. She’d limit herself to describing how they kiss on a street corner, how he strokes her hair and kisses her again a little before they reach the entrance to her building. That is if she eventually manages to find the right words; if, on reading it over again, she hears the music she’s looking for. But she wouldn’t describe the rush to the lift, and the liberation of their hands in its confines. And much less what happens when the two of them enter her apartment. No, she definitely wouldn’t put any of that in one of her novels. But she knows for sure that when this story gets made into a film the director won’t have any compunction about ending it with a sex scene of his own imagining. He’ll tell the story with images rather than words, with naked bodies, deep breathing, panting. He’ll even take the liberty of making them more attractive than they really are. She, Nurit Iscar, Betty Boo, and he, Jaime Brena, will become other people in that scene. The director will look for firmer legs than she has and for a male torso with a less prominent gut than he has. And he’ll make them do things they don’t do. Because even though they do everything they’d like to do, they are a man and woman thinking not about all the spectators watching them from the seats of a given cinema but about one another, and that’s the difference.
Nurit Iscar thinks about that: the film that could be made about them, of what would be added and what taken away, and laughs. She looks over at Jaime Brena, who’s smiling too.
What are you laughing about? she asks him.
Nothing, just something silly. I was wondering if you sleep facing upwards or downwards. A silly thing. And what are you laughing about, Betty Boo?
About you and me.
About us, then, says Jaime Brena.
Yes, about us, says Nurit Iscar.
Acknowledgements
My thanks:
To Christian Domingo, Laura Galarza, Débora Mundani and Karina Wroblewski, for being meticulous, unsparing and loving readers of this novel’s various drafts.
Guillermo Saccomanno, because he lent me Zippo and because he’s always there.
To Juan Martini, Maximiliano Hairabedian, Facundo Pastor and Ezequiel Martínez, because they helped me to resolve different elements in this story.
To Nicole Witt, Jordi Roca and their team.
To Julia Saltzmann and Gabriela Franco.
To Marcelo Moncarz.
To Eva Cristaldo and Anabella Kocis.
To Paloma Halac.
To my children.
A CRACK IN THE WALL
Claudia Piñeiro
Reckless ambition and needless violence crack secrets wide open
Pablo Simó’s life is a mess. His career as an architect at a dead end; he is reduced to designing soulless office buildings desecrating the heart of Buenos Aires. His marriage seems to be one endless argument with his wife over the theatrics of their rebellious teenage daughter. To complicate matters, Pablo has long been attracted to sexy office secretary Marta Horvat, who is probably having an affair with his boss. Everything changes with the unexpected appearance of Leonor, a beautiful young woman who brings to light a crime that happened years before, a crime that everyone in the office wants forgotten, at all costs.
Piñeiro once again demonstrates her capacity to scratch below the surface, laying bare relationships based on habit and cowardice, and exposing the motives of those driven by reckless ambition.
“Piñeiro’s moody, immersive thriller explores personal integrity with an ironic twist, calling to mind Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley series.” Booklist
“Piñeiro keeps the reader hooked right up to the wicked, if logical, ending.” Publishers Weekly
£8.99/$14.95
Crime Paperback Original
ISBN 978 1908524 089
eBook ISBN 978 1908524 096
www.bitterlemonpress.com
ALL YOURS
Claudia Piñeiro
Infidelity and obsession lead to murder…
Inés is convinced that every wife is bound to be betrayed one day, so she is not surprised to find a note in her husband Ernesto’s briefcase with a heart smeared in lipstick crossed by the words “All Yours”. Following him to a park in Buenos Aires on a rainy winter evening, she witnesses a violent quarrel between her husband and another woman. The woman collapses; Ernesto sinks her body in a nearby lake.
When Ernesto becomes a suspect in the case Inés provides him with an alibi. After all, hatred can bring people together as urgently as love. But Ernesto cannot bring his sexual adventures to an end, so Inés concocts a plan for revenge from which there is no return.
“If you read only one crime book in translation this year, make All Yours the one, a book that grabs you from the start and whips along at pace. Piñeiro is a best-selling Argentinean author, and unlike many South American books this one doesn’t loiter. It screams out to become a film – The Postman Only Brings Double Indemnity perhaps”. CrimeTime
£8.99/$14.95
Crime Paperback Original
ISBN 978 1904738 800
eBook ISBN 978 1904738 817
www.bitterlemonpress.com
THURSDAY NIGHT WIDOWS
Claudia Piñeiro
“A nimble novel, a ruthless dissection of a fast-decaying society”
—José Saramago, winner of the Nobel prize for literature
Three bodies lie at the bottom of a swimming pool in a gated country estate near Buenos Aires. Under the gaze of fifteen security guards, the pampered residents of Cascade Heights lead a charmed life of parties and tennis tournaments, ignoring the poverty outside the perimeter wall. Claudia Piñeiro’s novel eerily foreshadowed a criminal case that generated a scandal in the Argentine media. But this is more than a tale about crime, it is a psychological portrait of a middle class living beyond its means and struggling to conceal deadly secrets. Set during the post-9/11 economic meltdown in Argentina, this story will resonate among credit-crunched readers of today.
Winner of the Clarín Prize for fiction and now a film by Argentine New Wave director Marcelo Piñeyro
“A gripping story. The dystopia portrayed is an indictment not solely of an assassin but of Argentina’s class structure and the wilful blindness of its petty bourgeoisie.” Times Literary Supplement
“A fine morality tale which explores the dark places societies enter when they place material comfort before social justice, and security before morality.” Publishers Weekly
£7.99/$14.95
Crime Paperback Original
ISBN 978 1904738 411
eBook ISBN 978 1904738 589
www.bitterlemonpress.com
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