Mapuche Page 5

  Rubén didn’t seem convinced.

  “If she called from a phone booth,” he objected, maybe her cell phone was no longer working, or she left on a reporting assignment or a honeymoon.”

  Carlos shook his white locks.

  “No. I asked the building’s concierge; he hadn’t seen María Victoria for two days and her cat was meowing for her mistress’s return, except that she seems to have vanished into thin air . . . I have no proof of what I’m saying, Rubén, unless you find something.”

  Rubén looked at his friend the journalist.

  “Money, politics, power: you’re asking me to put my hands in deep shit,” he summed up.

  “You’re the only one who isn’t dirtied by it.”

  Rubén shook his head: “That’s what you say.”

  “María Campallo is no longer showing any sign of life,” Carlos insisted, his voice becoming more serious. “Maybe she’s hiding, maybe she’s been told to keep quiet, to get out of town, I don’t know. Help me find her.”

  Carlos crushed out his cigarillo in the marble ashtray. Their glasses stood empty on the well-worn wood of the table.

  “I’ll need information about Campallo,” Rubén sighed, “about his daughter . . . I don’t have anything.”

  Carlos pulled a manila envelope out of his jacket.

  “You’ll find everything in this,” he said.

  A superimposition of buildings, paved streets, marble, scrap metal, and garbage, the home of Latin American revolution, coup d’états second nature to it, cultural, Péronist, and haughty, Buenos Aires knew that its golden age was past and would never return.

  Now kids in rags wandered in front of the buildings of the Centro, people slept on pieces of cardboard in the streets and parks, picked through refuse or lay on the sidewalks, sandwich men walked down Florida or hung out at red lights, taxis that were worn-out and not always legal drove up and down avenues smelling of gasoline, the antique stores in San Telmo were full of old chandeliers, furniture, silver, and authentic family jewels that fed an intense nostalgia. The giant movie theaters and broad boulevards had given way to franchised businesses or huge, impersonal, luxurious edifices, and if the bistro culture persisted, the prohibitive prices downtown kept the citizens of Buenos Aires away; the banks and multinationals had punched holes in the political cadaver of the country, leaving only gobs of spit on their icy glass towers.

  The art of the insult was practiced naturally and without moderation; anger impregnated the capital’s walls, but the odor of exile that emerged from them did not prevent couples, both young and old, from giving each other uninhibited passionate kisses in the streets, as if to ward off the fate that was hounding Argentina. The skin and the hearts of the people here were as blanched as the iron ore that had marked the century.

  The San Telmo neighborhood where Rubén lived had been deserted by the middle class after an epidemic of yellow fever; now weeds were growing over the walls of decrepit houses and their cast-iron balconies. A working-class bastion on the south side of downtown, the municipality was trying to rehabilitate the neighborhood around the Plaza Dorrego, its bars and flea markets. Rubén Calderón lived on Peru Street, in an art-nouveau building whose old-fashioned charm suited him—gray marble on the floors, period woodwork, doorknobs and a bathtub from 1900. A window with blue-tinted panes looked out on the inner courtyard; the kitchen was windowless but the bedroom window gave on the corner of San Juan.

  The rain had stopped when the detective pushed open the agency’s reinforced door. He laid the manila envelope on the coffee table, opened the window in the living room, which served as an office, in order to get rid of the smell of cold tobacco, and made himself a drink. Pisco, lemon juice, sugar, egg white, ice: he mixed it all vigorously in a shaker before filling a stemmed glass. A pisco sour, energizing effects guaranteed. He put on the Godspeed You! Black Emperor CD he’d bought the day before, and drank his pisco sour gazing at the sky above the roofs and listening to the lascivious moans of the guitars.

  Over time, the agency’s office had taken over more and more of the apartment, whose private space was now limited to a bedroom at the end of the hall. Computerization had made it possible to reduce the number of volumes, to expand the field of his research, and to cross-reference sources—to produce a DNA register of the bodies of identified desaparecidos, a pedigree of the torturers who were still at large or of those who had been granted amnesty, testimonies—all of it connected with the files of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, which Elena kept up to date, and to those of the Grandmoth­ers, who were looking specifically for the children of the desaparecidos. The agency was financed by the royalty payments on his father’s works, which were still published abroad, the fees that his customers could pay, and private funds or resources that had been taken away from former oppressors. In any case, he wasn’t much interested in money—he would have to spend time counting up the money that was missing, and his own losses were final.

  The air coming in the window was humid, borne by a capricious breeze that was blowing up to him. Rubén put his glass on the coffee table, sat down on the 1960s couch that faced his overloaded bookcase and opened the manila envelope.

  Carlos was well equipped to decipher the financial setup of the Campallo empire and its ramifications: a specialist in economics, the journalist was also a member of a pressure group composed of jurists, intellectuals, and lawyers who were calling for the establishment of a CONADEP9 to judge those who had bankrupted Argentina during the financial crisis of 2001-2002. Carlos’s group concentrated on property owners who, controlling the main source of currency in the country, had sequestered the dollars derived from their activities and hidden their real revenues in order to reduce their tax bills. This oligarchy, which was connected with the world of finance, had exported its enormous amounts of surplus capital, speculating against the peso and their own country, to the point of draining it dry.

  Eduardo Campallo was one of the men who had been able to take advantage of the situation. Trained as an engineer and urban planner, he had studied in the United States before taking the reins of the family business after the early death of his father, who had died in harness, so to speak. In 1975, Eduardo began running Nuevos, a construction firm based in Buenos Aires. The following year, the military hired Nuevos to tear down the slums in the center of the city and build new apartment buildings, a gigantic project that had given the young entrepreneur a leg up and at the same time expanded his networks. Martínez de Hoz, the minister of Finance under the dictatorship and subsequent governments (he was nicknamed Robin Hood, because he robbed from the poor to give to the rich), had studied at the same business school in the United States from which Campallo had graduated. A simple ideological acquaintance? Nuevos, which was later to become STG and then Vivalia, had quadrupled its turnover during the dictatorship and during the Menem years its sales exploded. Pursuing its policy of privatization, the state had then sold off land with full services in the center of Buenos Aires, hiring Campallo to build a business center there—at a profit of 200 percent. The same type of operation was repeated two years later, with the development of luxury residences in Puerto Madero and the conversion of old buildings on the docks into lofts, once again with record profits that had propelled Campallo into the upper economic spheres. Commissions, money transfers to offshore banks through dummy companies, forgeries—Carlos and his friends suspected Eduardo Campallo of having paid off the political class involved in these transactions in exchange for its generosity.

  Campallo subsequently diversified his activities by moving into the media and communications; he owned several newspapers, celebrity magazines, and scandal sheets, a private radio station and shares in several cable channels. The 2001 bankruptcy slowed the expansion of Campallo’s empire in the center of the capital, but not in the province of Buenos Aires, the most heavily populated in Argentina: Vivalia built, among other things, the ultra
-secure community of Santa Barbara, surrounded by walls, some fifty kilometers from the city, with a special highway, reserved for residents, providing access to the international airport, armed guards, sport facilities, urban services, green spaces, etc. Campallo mixed with the country’s elite, who had no lack of supplicants. Some them had naturally become his friends, beginning with the mayor of Buenos Aires, Francisco Torres.

  Rubén finished his pisco sour. Although Carlos had put together a complete file on Campallo, he’d given Rubén little information about the businessman’s family. In 1974, Eduardo Campallo married Isabel de Angelis, who came from the local upper middle class. Now fifty-nine years old, a Catholic, and the mother of two children—María Victoria and her brother Rodolfo, who was two years younger—Isabel Campallo was involved in various charitable activities unrelated to those of her husband and his large personal fortune. Their son Rodolfo worked as a host on his father’s radio station, while María Victoria worked as a camera operator. Often away on business, according to the concierge, who was at those times assigned to feed the cat. What was he doing behind the scenes? Carlos had added a digital photo of María Victoria and the address and access code of the building where she lived.

  Rubén dressed in black and prepared his equipment.

  *

  The bohemian youth had moved into Palermo, attracting designer clothes shops, bars, and restaurants in the cosmopolitan fashion that delighted tourists and real estate speculators. The neighborhood was now cut in two, Palermo Viejo and Hollywood, which had been renamed since artists and film people had taken up residence there.

  1255 Nicaragua, three o’clock in the morning. A chrome bus in exuberant colors passed by, a fabulous vessel sailing through the night. Rubén crushed out his cigarette in the gutter of broken slabs of marble and punched in the building’s access code. The lobby was empty, and there was no elevator; he passed in front of the drawn curtains of the concierge’s loge and climbed the stair to the landing on the third and last floor. Music was playing in the neighboring apartment. Rubén examined the lock on the door, selected one of his lock picks, and manipulated the lock until a click indicated that it was open. Silently, he slipped into María Victoria’s loft, making his way by the light coming in from outside, lowered the shades on the street side, and then turned on a lamp. The apartment was spacious, modern, and sober: an American-style kitchen, two long black sofas decorated with multicolored cushions, an architect’s table near the tall bay window, and a photography studio set up behind a screen—umbrella lamps, floodlights, a white background for photo shoots. Rubén took a few steps across the brown wooden floor: a dozen photos were hanging from a string stretched across a corner of the room, held in place by clothespins. Her most recent prints, no doubt. He recognized the concerned look of the attractive brunette with curly hair—María Victoria’s self-portrait, with a charming little lizard tattooed below her ear. The other photos, stage photos, showed a rock singer; his shaved head, eyes with black makeup, and convoluted poses rang a faint bell. He copied them on his BlackBerry, put on a pair of plastic gloves, and had a look at the office area.

  A slogan was attached to the wall above a vintage lamp: “Don’t create models of life, create model lives.” There were piles of press kits, fanciful postcards thumbtacked to the wall, an enlarged portrait by Helmut Newton in which a tall, nude blonde perched on stiletto heels stared into the lens, an ashtray without butts holding a neighborhood shoemaker’s card, a small box in the Peruvian style filled with coffee beans, and, in the middle of the desk, what seemed to be the place usually occupied by a portable computer. Ruben observed the loft, imbuing himself with its atmosphere.

  Food in the fridge, recent purchases, clothes in the washing machine, there were multiple reasons for rejecting the hypothesis that Victoria had run away or committed suicide. An open bottle of fruit juice, leftovers, a few eggs and containers of soy yogurt—all perishable foods. Nothing that told him much. An ancient Polaroid was set on the chest of drawers, next to the landline phone. Rubén picked up the receiver: an electronically-generated voice announced a new message, recorded at noon—a certain Miss Bolivia, who was thanking María for her photos. Rubén took down her name and number. No address book or appointment calendar was visible anywhere around the telephone. He briefly flipped through administrative papers that had been put in folders, stuck the latest phone bill in his pocket, and called María’s cellphone number, just to see: telephone out of order. Had she cut her line? Rubén went upstairs, doubtfully, and refrained from smoking.

  The bed was made, clothes were scattered across the quilt. No sign of a cell phone. María had probably taken it with her. He went into the adjoining bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet: a bottle of sleeping pills, antianxiety medications, the rest beauty products. No prescription. He returned to the bedroom, went through the drawers in the night table—trinkets, condoms, a short, chrome dildo, heat-rub, a few photography magazines, a small bag of marijuana that smelled rather stale, a packet of powder . . . Rubén wet his finger: cocaine. Very poor quality. You could find anything in Buenos Aires, and coke in particular, but the proximity to Colombia did not prevent it from smelling of kerosene. He left the little chest of drawers and opened the closets, counted about twenty pairs of shoes. A careful search of the jackets and pants yielded nothing, as did going through the clothes lying on the bed. He bent down and saw three black hairs intersecting on the pillow: long, curly, similar to the photographer’s hair. Rubén put them in a plastic bag before going back down the spiral stairway.

  On his way, he picked up the shoemaker’s card in the ashtray, went into the vestibule and took out the clothes that had been stuffed into the washing machine. They had not been washed. He inspected the pockets and found a crumpled cigarette paper at the bottom of a jeans pocket, with a few words scribbled on it in pencil: Ituzaingô 69 . . .

  He’d already been there for half an hour. Ruben looked around the loft one last time. It was impossible to tell whether someone else had already searched it, whether María had left in a hurry, or why she was no longer giving any sign of life. He had seen no scratches on the lock, and so the front door had not been forced, but something was bothering him; he could not say what it was. He glanced into the toilet room before leaving—the cat litter was dirty—and noticed a strange series of pendants on the door, artistic compositions in plastic hanging on a string. Her specialty, it seemed. A series of humorous ready-mades, some with punning titles, others without. Then Rubén saw the pregnancy test hung on the toilet door: “Terme au mètre.”

  The pregnancy test was positive.

  4

  Rubén didn’t have a cat. Cats spent their time crawling all over him, curling up in his clothes if he’d been so unfortunate as to leave them lying around, rubbing them with their muzzles as they looked for the armpit, and he much preferred the company of women, even if it was episodic. The fact that he had never lived with anyone did not change his image of women, his desire for new romantic adventures: women just didn’t last, that’s all. He had spent years reconstructing himself after his detention. The balance was fragile, and certainly unpredictable, so what. Rubén lived in a pit of archives, faces that had disappeared, too much dust, file folders, with corpses between the pages and on the walls, a cage from which he watched women pass by. None of them had stayed long, or he had not held onto any of them, which for him amounted to the same thing: Rubén told himself that at the age of forty-seven it was too late. He was not expecting anything in particular and his solitude didn’t need anyone. The time for affairs en passant was over, his father’s poetry, which he knew by heart, would be of no use to him, he was reduced to silence, to nothing, words had long since betrayed him, and the stars didn’t give a damn.

  He was attached to the void. As for seeking a kindred spirit, it was already there, in the closet, near the bed where no woman would ever sleep again.

  Rubén put on a Ufomammut CD to drown
out the noise of the air lane that passed over the intersection of San Juan and Peru, aired out the bedroom where he woke up, and had a coffee-croissant-cigarette breakfast that struggled to compensate for too little sleep. The business with the cat continued to bother him: if the building’s concierge had found it meowing on the landing, María Victoria must have deliberately put it out so that it would be taken in—in which case she had fled without even taking the time to leave it with the concierge—or else it had escaped. How? The loft’s windows were closed, but the animal might have been able to sneak out when the front door was opened. Had it been frightened by someone breaking in?

  Sparrows were chirping excitedly outside the window, charming little monsters imported from France that had driven out the native calandria. Rubén gave them the remains of his breakfast, took a shower, and mentally drew up a list of his leads.

  –A telephone message left the day before from a cell phone (“Miss Bolivia”).

  –The photos of a singer that were hung on a string.

  –A crumpled piece of paper in the bottom of a pocket of a pair of jeans thrown in the dirty laundry, with what looked like an address (“Ituzaingó 69”).

  –A neighborhood shoemaker’s card.

  –Three hairs on the pillow.

  –A phone bill for the preceding month.

  –A small amount of dope in the night table—marijuana, cocaine.

  –A pregnancy test, positive.

  On his way back from the loft, Rubén dropped the pregnancy test in the mailbox at the Center for Forensic Anthropology, along with the bag containing the hairs and an explanatory message for Raúl Sanz, who led the research team. According to the SMS he received on his BlackBerry, he would have a reply by the end of the day. It was noon. Rubén began by calling the number saved on María Victoria’s answering machine, let it ring. “Miss Bolivia” didn’t pick up, so he left a message on her cell phone before continuing his research on the internet.