Mapuche (17 page)

“I'm not the one giving the orders.”

“Where's the body?

“In the potter's field.”

“That's the place for people like him, right?” Rubén focused on the policeman's vague gaze. “You get rid of the body, and that allows you to avoid conducting an investigation.”

“We conducted an investigation! We're still conducting it, what do you think? At this moment there are two cars patrolling the docks: you can see for yourself that the station is empty, that we're doing all we can!”

“All you can to prevent a second murder from revealing the way you operate,” Rubén added. “What does your report conclude, Andretti? That an unidentified tranny cut off his cock while shaving his crotch before falling naked into the harbor?”

“Ha ha!”

“What then?” he insisted icily.

The sergeant sized up Calderón, who was clearly ready to fight about it, and weighed the pros and cons.

“No one saw the tranny hooking that night,” he said. “That doesn't help us much.”

“Luz, Orlando, was keeping dope at his place,” the detective shot back, “dozens of doses of
paco
that he was dealing in the neighborhood. Do you know who his supplier was?”

“No,” growled Andretti, leaning his massive body against the office door.

“You, Andretti, you and your little pals on the night squad, who must be getting their share.”

The giant flexed his pecs.

“Listen, you little shit . . . ”

“I don't give a damn about your trafficking: you've buried the investigation so that no one will go nosing around in your affairs, right? Now answer me one question, the only one that interests me. I know that María Campallo saw the transvestite a few hours before his death: why?”

Troncón's cap could still be seen at the corner of the hall. His boss was getting visibly annoyed.

“I don't know your María,” he replied promptly. He shook his jowls. “Who is she?”

His innocent air made Calderón grind his teeth.

“The daughter of Eduardo Campallo,” he said, “a rich man who's financing the mayor's campaign.”

He showed Andretti a picture of the photographer, which the policeman examined prudently.

“I don't know . . . Never saw her in this neighborhood or elsewhere.”

“But she was with Orlando shortly before his murder.”

“Maybe,” Andretti replied, shrugging his enormous shoulders. “But not around here.”

Rubén glanced at Jana in the harsh light of the corridor—for once, the fat jerk seemed sincere.

“Did Luz have regular customers?” he asked. “High-class customers?”

“I don't know,” the policeman grumbled. “That's not my business.”

“No, your business is just to provide dope to a loser tranny so that he can ruin the lives of other losers. Are you trying to win a gold medal for humanitarian acts?”

Their eyes met, two crocodiles in a pond during the dry season. The cop said nothing, fulminating in an eloquent silence.

“If you're involved in this, Andretti,” the detective hissed, “I swear I'll make you eat your own lard.”

“Go fuck yourself, Calderón.”

But the head of the night squad was uncomfortable. Rubén signaled to Jana that it was time to get out of there. They left the La Boca police station without even looking at the dolt behind the counter.

Outside, the air was warm, the sky the color of amethyst. Jana, who had observed the joust, let Rubén come back down to a more hospitable terrain. They took a few steps along the sidewalk, between a damp mist and a dusty wind. Rubén had almost been scared when he'd looked at Andretti. He was ruminating, the alkaline core smoking under the electric wires connected to the
conventillos
.

“We were on the wrong track, huh?” Jana said, reading his thoughts.

“Looks like it, yes.”

The car was parked a block away.

“What do we do now?” the sculptress asked.

Rubén met her eyes sparkling under the setting moon.

“I'll take you back.”

 

*

 

The headlights awakened the aviator with springs for eyes who was on guard in courtyard, at the entrance to the wasteland. Jana had left the keys to the Ford in the dressing room at the Niceto, but Paula hadn't yet returned. Rubén parked the car in the courtyard.

“I'm going to look for the parents' address,” the Mapuche said as she pushed open the gate.

He let her take off toward her workshop, and took advantage of her absence to have a look around her turf. Huge red ants were feeding in the nettles, their antennas rising over their heads, under the mocking gaze of a crocodile with teeth made of screws; farther on, a rusty Varan made of bolts off a locomotive wandered through the brush, and was being left to disintegrate there. The sun was coming up behind the shed, and a few birds were chirping on the stripped poles. Jana came back to the courtyard.

“Here,” she said.

Rubén crushed out his cigarette butt on the aviator and pocketed the envelope with Orlando's parents' address.

“Thanks.”

“Are you planning to take a trip to Junin?”

“Uh-huh. To get a little info, in any case,” he replied evasively.

He'd asked Anita to follow up the lead in Colonia. How could Orlando be connected with María Campallo's round-trip excursion to Uruguay? Somewhere nearby a bell was ringing six o'clock, and he was beginning to feel very tired.

“Shall we have a drink while we wait for Paula?” Jana asked. “If I know her, she won't be back before ten in the morning.”

He raised his arched eyebrows.

“I lied to you a little while ago in the club,” she said confidentially. “When I said that I didn't want to have sex with you.”

Rubén looked at her under the fading stars: for the first time, there was something merry in her almond-shaped eyes.

“You've got energy to spare, it seems,” he said softly, smiling at her.

“It's free. Everything about me is free. Haven't you noticed?”

Rubén tried to escape her deep black eyes, but failed. She locked onto her target and wouldn't let it go. Their hands had been waiting to touch for a long time.

“Jana . . . ”

“Quiet,” she murmured, coming closer to him.

Jana pressed her lips to his mouth and felt herself melt like chocolate when he entwined his tongue with hers. Soon all she could hear was the birds cooing. With one hand, Rubén clasped her bottom and pressed it to him, so tenderly that she let herself be carried by his open eyes: black, gray, blue, stormy bouquets exploded in the courtyard. Jana no longer wanted to think or breathe, she caressed his unkempt hair, the little curls on his forehead, and felt his penis against her crotch and groaned with pleasure. Desire, light and wild, electrified her. His hand under her ass seemed to lift her off the earth, their tongues were two little sweet-water serpents that ran down between her thighs. They were kissing passionately when the sound of a car horn interrupted them.

The birds flew away from their perches, hearts beating like theirs at a hundred miles an hour.

Jana remained speechless for a moment, her lips still wet, while the garbagemen moved on. She wanted to say simple things, things she'd never said because she'd never experienced them, but a shadow fell across Rubén's face.

“I've got to go home,” he said, removing his hand.

Jana stepped back, disconcerted.

“Now?”

“Yes.” Rubén moved toward the car. “I'll see you later.”

And he left her there, under the skewed gaze of the aviator in an iron suit.

The sudden low pressure system that had been dominating Buenos Aires weather for three days had given way to a blue late-summer sky. Rubén put out his cigarette in the flowerpot; the glassed-in enclosure of the harbor station sheltered souvenir shops, a tobacconist, and a row of female employees stuffed into tight-fitting uniforms in their companies' colors.

A bleached blonde smiled under her toucan makeup: he bought a Buquebus ticket for Colonia, on the other side of the estuary, and showed his passport to the immigration officer. The ferry for Uruguay was bobbing in the brown water of the harbor: Rubén joined the passengers who were marveling at the imitation luxury of the main lounge, his face somber despite the sunshine. He had slept a few hours after returning from the wasteland, but he still felt just as feverish and shadowy images kept clouding his mind. A voice coming from the loudspeaker announced the ferry's imminent departure. Rubén ordered an espresso at the varnished wood bar, and opened the newspaper to forget the mood music: there were articles about the coming elections, about Francisco Torres, the city's mayor, who would receive almost a third of the votes, according to recent polls, about soccer and Maradona's latest escapades, but there was still not a word about the disappearance of María Victoria Campallo.

The boat had hardly left the dock when a crooner in a ruffled shirt sat down at his piano on the stage of the main lounge to do a song recital. Before an audience of old ladies with saggy arms overloaded with gold jewelry, the seducer began singing “My Way,” exchanging coy winks with his listeners.

This was a long way from the Pistols.

Rubén climbed upstairs—there was an open-air bar and the gilt was getting on his nerves—but it was no better: two walls of loudspeakers were spitting out a deafening techno house, driving the tourists toward the benches on the top deck. Were they that afraid that people would get bored? Thinking they were filling dead time, they ended up creating voids. Far from the bass tones that were emptying the deck, Rubén found a place that was more or less quiet at the rear of the ship and stood at the rail, smoking and looking out over the muddy water stirred up by the propellers. The cranes in the commercial harbor loomed over the container ships as they were going out to sea. A shiny new three-master was coming back toward the marina. He was still thinking about Jana, about her fragrance in his arms, and what had led him to kiss her in the courtyard. The Mapuche had come out of nowhere. And for what reason, if not to return to it? Age, social and ethnic background, everything separated them. The ardor of their kiss at dawn betrayed a deep and common despair that he didn't feel up to confronting. In any case, it was too late, too late for everything. The wind freshened under the maritime sun. Pollution formed a gray band in the distance over Buenos Aires, adrift under the pall of smoke from the outlying factories. Rubén forgot the young Indian woman and the undulation of waves beneath the swell.

 

Anita had collected precise information about the address in Colonia and María's trip there three days before she disappeared. Jose Ossario, the man who lived at No. 69 Ituzaingó Street, was not in the phonebook, but Anita had found a record of his car in the highway police's files—a white Honda registered in Colonia del Sacramento. The rest was on the Internet.

An Argentine citizen, Jose Ossario had first worked for various science fiction magazines before publishing in 1992 his first book,
The Hidden Face of the World
, a hodgepodge of scientism on a bed of conspiracy theories that combined espionage, astrology, and acute paranoia. In the book, Ossario elaborated his own crazy, earnestly believed truth, gaining notoriety among initiates. Later on, he had worked as a paparazzo before starting up several press agencies that all ended up the same way: unpaid bills, outlandish accounting practices, bankruptcies, and various con games. An expert in blackmailing and extorting scoops, Ossario had come through without a scratch until 2004, with the publication of a series of photos showing the former head of Menem's cabinet, Rodrigo Campês, with the daughter of the country's leading labor leader, scantily clad, on the beach at Punta del Este, where the lovers were staying in a palatial suite—for which, naturally, no one was paying the bill. After the scandal hit the headlines, Ossario had thought his day of triumph had come, but he was rapidly disabused. This not being his first scrape with the judicial system, buried in fees for documents and lawyers, blacklisted, he had ended up throwing in the towel. There had been no news of him since he went into exile in Uruguay three years earlier, except a book,
Counter-Truths
, a sensational story brought out in a thousand copies by a small publisher in Montevideo, but the only response had been a wall of silence. Now fifty-one years old, the former paparazzo lived at No. 69 Ituzaingó Street, but clearly . . .

Rubén stamped out his cigarette on the metal deck.

They were arriving in Colonia.

 

*

 

As in Brazil, the amnesty for the dictatorship's henchmen had been the cornerstone of the transition to democracy in Uruguay. Recent developments suggested there was light at the end of the tunnel, but the country seemed to be living in slow motion, as if hiding the past had encased the present in wax.

Colonia de Sacramento, the country's former colonial capital, was no exception to the countrywide somnolence. Old, abandoned buildings, streetlights from 1900, ruins with balconies eaten away by rust, beat-up Fords from the 1950s, Rambler Americans and ancient Fiat 500s keeping cool under the orange trees. Although outwardly reminiscent of the old-fashioned charm of the Gay Nineties, inside the souvenir shops were full of manufactured horrors—porcelains, clothes, craftworks, everything was in turgid bad taste. Rubén walked down paved streets shaded by palm trees and came out on the Plaza Mayor.

Sparrows were chirping under rotating sprinklers on impeccable lawns, brightly colored parrots perched on an ancient tree took flight into the sky to flirt briefly with the wind; a few old men dozed on a bench as the sun suffocated everything. Jose Ossario lived a little farther on, at the end of a cement lane that led to the sea.

Ituzaingó 69. The sun was beating on the perimeter wall, hiding a flat-roofed house that was almost invisible from the street. Rubén rang the intercom, located the surveillance camera above the reinforced grille, rang again. No response. He stepped back to widen his angle of view, but over the wall he could see only a bit of whitewashed facade and two closed shutters. He glanced through the interstices of the grille, saw a garden with tired flowers and more closed shutters on the ground floor. The lane was empty, the heat pounded on the sidewalk as if it were an anvil. Just then, Rubén felt a presence.