Mapuche (45 page)

The monastery's door was massive, the bell from an earlier time. The botanist had reached his final objective but now that he was there, something made him hesitate. Retaining his old reflexes, the former agent had not called to announce his arrival. He overcame his apprehensions and rang the bell.

A young monk soon opened the door, looking a little suspicious of the visitor. His austere face changed when Franco introduced himself as an old friend of Cardinal von Wernisch, whom he had come to see about an urgent matter. The monk immediately asked him to wait there, pushed open the ancient oak door that led to the courtyard, and disappeared on the other side of the building, leaving Díaz alone in the entry hall.

A painting was ostentatiously displayed in a gilded frame: a bishop from olden times who looked at him in a benevolent way. Franco took his pills in the shade of the cool vaults; he felt a piercing pain in his stomach. There was not a breath of air in the monastery's internal courtyard; only a few lizards were sunning themselves on the stones. Díaz was sweating under his blazer, his throat dried out by the medicine he was taking and the dust he had swallowed. A fat man then appeared about twenty yards away in the courtyard, a civilian with a puffy face who was coming out of the refectory, holding a plate piled high with food. An empty holster hung under his armpit, and his white shirt was ringed with sweat.

Díaz hid behind the door, his heart pounding. Alert. Red alert. It was not instinct that spoke to him, but the Voice. It warned him of a danger, an imminent danger. He remained crouched there in the shadows. The big man in the courtyard had not seen him; he was entirely focused on his food. Who was this guy, a cop? One of the men who'd been in Colonia? The botanist stepped back slightly. The Voice told him he mustn't stay there. That a plot was being formed against him, a deadly trap. The Voice told him to flee:
immediately.

Díaz retraced his steps without waiting for the monk to return. The presence of this armed man was necessarily related to his secret. How could they know that he would come here? Von Wernisch was a friend, but they might be using him as bait. The sun dazzled him for a moment as he left the monastery; the car was parked on the waste ground. Franco hurried, seized by an irrational fear, beeped open the Audi's door, and climbed in. Get out of there, fast. He didn't see the silhouette emerge from the nearby bushes; as the car door opened an Indian woman with a furious look jumped into the passenger seat. Her nose was broken, she had mauve bags under her eyes, and she was wearing a poncho that covered a revolver. Díaz immediately tried to defend himself but the Indian stuck the barrel of her gun in his belly. The gun was cocked.

“Start the car or I'll kill you, you filthy son of a bitch . . . ”

Elena Calderón was still living in the house in San Telmo, in the Avenida Independencia. She and her family had spent their happiest days there. She had kept her door open ever since Elsa and Daniel disappeared thirty-five years earlier, as if they might come back at any time. She would close it, not on the day when their bones were returned to her—this mourning was personal—but on the day when all those responsible were brought to trial and convicted: that was her way of
not mourning
.

The sun's first rays were touching the flowers in the garden. Susana knocked at the varnished wooden door and went in without waiting for a response.

“Duchess? It's me!” she shouted. “Come on, get up!”

The vice president of the Grandmothers headed for the kitchen—unlike her, Elena was a late riser, a habit she owed to her past as a middle-class night owl. Susana took the apricots out of their sack to avoid crushing them, saw the
maté
that was heating on the gas stove, and began to go through the cupboards in search of a suitable pastry dough. Her friend finally appeared at the door to the kitchen, made up and with her hair done, wearing a long embroidered silk dress.

“Hello, Duchess!”

“Hello, my dear . . . ”

“Still in frills and furbelows?”

Elena was wearing an extraordinarily elegant dishabille, her shoulders covered with a white angora shawl. Her forehead wrinkled when she heard the cupboard doors slamming as Susana closed them as if there were an animal inside that was going to jump out at her. Elena saw the apricots that had fallen out of the sack, which Susana's tornado had scattered all over the kitchen table.

“How gently you treat things,” the mistress of the house observed ironically.

“I can't find the pastry dough,” Susana replied. “You must have some, don't you? I've looked everywhere! You'll have to help me, you know I'm a really bad cook, I burn everything!”

Elena Calderón, who never appeared in public without makeup (old age is a disaster, and makeup was her lifesaver), didn't like to speak about personal matters before she'd had her
maté
. She poured herself a cup while her friend bustled about.

“Well?” Susana said.

“Did you look in the fridge?”

“Twice!”

“Look again.”

“Aah!” Susana cried, for appearance's sake.

Elena finished the bitter beverage while her friend rolled out the dough in a mold.

“Carlos will be here any minute and you aren't even dressed!” Susana pointed out. The vice president wore a white dress with a cherry motif, simple but very pretty.

“Just be quiet and start cutting up the apricots. I'll be ready in ten minutes.”

That was how long it took to cook the fruit.

Elena reappeared punctually, dressed as if she were going to a marriage at the Casa Rosada.

“Is this all right, do I look presentable?”

Straight-line blue dress, white chiffon collar, a white angora shawl big enough to cover a litter of pumas, a touch of mascara on eyelids curved toward the sun like sunflowers: all she needed was a cigarette holder, Susana thought.

“Yes, yes,” she assured her. “I'm more worried about the pie!”

Elena glanced at her reflection in the big mirror in the hall—the day before, at the hospital, she must have looked awful . . . The pie was still hot when the journalist honked his horn in front of the gate to the house—Rubén loved apricots.

 

*

 

The world was there, with its gasoline lungs, taking him back to the blackest hours of his life. The worst hours. The hours when he had wild thoughts, spurs digging into his sides, fire in his flesh. Rubén knew pain, he had lived with it during his months in detention: die or go mad, the pain that cracked open your body like an oyster, reducing you to a set of bare and unprotected atoms. Rubén had turned to ice. Cold. Nasty. Unbreakable.

He had fallen into a coma after the fusillade in the delta. In his delirium, he remembered his mother at his bedside, the wrinkles of her face and her soft hand caressing his, her eyes closed, as if to wipe out the evil that had inserted itself into his body, as she had done when he was a child to drive away his bad dreams. He'd had one chance in a hundred of surviving: Rubén had fought tooth and nail against his torturers until a second
banderilla
had pierced him. He'd been found attached to the table in the bedroom, bathed in his own blood. Beside him, Miguel was no longer breathing; Rubén was. Thrust into his back under the pressure of the police sirens, the second sharpened point had missed his heart. The emergency team had stopped the hemorrhaging without being able to the bring Rubén out of his coma, but with all the blood he'd lost and the weakness of his pulse when he was taken into the operating room, he could have died ten times over.

His body had stood up to the shock. He had awakened for brief moments, drunk on drugs, entangled in bandages on a hospital bed, the ceiling merging with the plastic tarps that delimited his realm. Chemically-induced hallucinations had cast him back into the pit, struggling amid crocodiles and snakes, two days outside time that left him groggy. Finally, Rubén found his footing in the world—the world and its black lungs.

Sutures, healing, painkillers, blood pressure: Pichot, the surgeon caring for him, had prescribed six days of complete rest before he could think about going home. Rubén remained cold. Anita had been killed by a bullet to the head, the body of his friend Oswaldo had just been found on the bank opposite the island in the delta, but not the body of the Mapuche, who had disappeared in the turmoil.

Rubén lay on the white bed in the hospital room, his eyes circled by dark nightmarish rings. Across from him, Ledesma's face was also grim. The police captain hated hospitals—they smelled like sickness, other people's deaths—and above all he hated the idea of being jeered at when he retired in a few months. The old cop hadn't been able to resist the desire to torpedo Roncero and Luque, Torres's flagship: with Eduardo Campallo's suicide and the men in the delta on the run, their whole house of cards was collapsing. But his investigator, Anita Barragan, had been killed in the operation, and the case had been assigned to the forensic police led by Luque, the very man he suspected of major corruption. A fiasco for which he might have to pay a heavy price.

 

A large man with a big, pockmarked nose despite his abstinence, Captain Ledesma wore a dark expression mixing anger and grief. He had hardly recognized Anita Barragan's face when her body was brought back to him. Her blond hair was sticky with blood, her head had exploded under the hydrostatic stock: a bullet fired at point-blank range. It looked like a summary execution.

“I don't know how far you're involved in this, Calderón,” he concluded in the polluted air of the room, “but I want to tell you right away that the surveillance of Del Piro's cell phone will not appear anywhere in the report, and agent Barragan will be said to have acted on her own initiative, tracking down the Peru Street murderer. There won't be a word about Cam­pallo and his daughter. Luque and Torres will have my hide if they find out that I was carrying on a covert investigation. Moreover, I suggest that you do the same. Cap­tain Ron­cero will come to question you today, according to what I've been told. Limit yourself to the Michellini case: that's my advice.”

“Muñoz falsified the autopsy report on María Campallo,” Rubén retorted from his sickbed. “All you have to do is exhume the body.”

“After her father's suicide?” Ledesma asked, astonished. “Don't even think about it.”

“María was murdered, you know that as well as I do.”

“You can explain that to Luque and Roncero, they will probably be curious to hear your version of the story. I'm finished with it.”

There was a nauseating silence in the room. Rubén was dying of heat in his hospital gown, flying on an analgesic cloud that did nothing to calm his desire to kill.

“Are you going to let the death of a cop go unpunished?”

“I have no choice,” Anita's boss insisted. “Luque has taken over the case, in person, and he's going to make short work of your statements.”

The gunpowder and ballistics tests implicated the detective in the killing, and he would be forced to reveal the hidden side of his investigation to Roncero and to Luque and his elite police, who would then never let him go.

“Does Luque scare you that much?” Rubén grunted. “I thought you hated him.”

“We often hate what scares us.”

“Miguel Michellini's DNA corresponds to María Cam­pallo's, not to their alleged mother's, and . . . ”

“Forget Campallo,” the policeman interjected. “Harassing a mourning family, and one that is moreover close to the mayor, would blow up in your face, Calderón, you can be sure of that. The report I delivered to Luque is limited to the Michellini case,” he said firmly. “You've left a pile of dead bodies behind you, old pal. Whether it was in self-defense or not, you're in no position to attack, you're on the defensive!”

Imprisoned on his hospital bed, his left arm hooked up to tubes, Rubén was almost lost in his pillows. He closed his eyes, suddenly weary. The old cop was drawing back. He was letting go. But he was right on one point: the forensic police had taken over the case and Luque wouldn't do him any favors. Ledesma was shifting his weight from one foot to the other in front of Rubén's chart, simultaneously eager to leave and ill at ease with the idea of leaving the detective alone in his condition.

“Anyway, I'm pleas— . . . sorry about what happened,” he said.

Rubén wasn't thinking about the steel point that had been run through him in the bedroom on the island, about his ears burned by the
picana
, or about the electrical furies that were gnawing at his brain, he was thinking about his friend Anita, about his childhood dreams that were dying here on this hospital bed. He thought about her blond smile when she gave him her drawing of a captain sailing over a gray sea speckled with blue . . . Ledesma wanted to say something else, but Rubén bared his teeth, livid.

“Get the hell out of here!”

 

*

 

Samuel and Gabriella Verón, the parents who had disappeared, were not Argentines, but Chileans: that was why they weren't entered into any database.

The Grandmothers had finally tracked them down in the archives of Nazareth House, a reception center within the church of Santa Cruz, through which many Chilean refugees passed after Pinochet's coup d'état. Father Mujica, who was close to the poor and the oppressed, had been murdered by the dictatorship's thugs, but the activists had questioned witnesses from the time. Samuel and Gabriella Verón had migrated to Buenos Aires in late 1973, shortly after Perón's death, unaware that the same military junta would take power there. They had gone into hiding after the Triple A roundups, and escaped the death squads until they were finally kidnapped one day in the winter of 1976 along with their baby, a little girl then sixteen months old.
17
Their disappearance had gone unnoticed because, like Father Mujica, their Argentine friends had all been swept up by the state machinery.