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  “Ituzaingó 69”: dozens of hits came up, ranging from the famous battle between Argentine and Brazilian troops that was to result in Uruguay’s gaining independence to a city in Corrientes province, by way of a garage rock group and several addresses in Greater Buenos Aires. Rubén wrote down the names and addresses, and then went to the photographer’s site, which she seemed to update regularly. María Victoria Campallo followed artists on tours or films, which explained her frequent travels. He made a list of the musicians with whom she had worked: the most recent was a saccharine pop star who was very popular in South America and had performed in Santa Cruz a month before, but he and his staff had continued the tour in Colombia. Surfing on the site, Rubén came across the face of the man in the photos hung up in María Victoria’s studio. The date of the concert indicated that the pictures had been taken toward the end of November, during the rock festival in Rosario. A black leather outfit, boots, pomaded hair like a stallion’s mane, black eyeliner emphasizing his tormented eyes, a little too heavy, but an undeniable aura that would elicit the screams of the groupies that he must collect in large numbers: Jo Prat, that was the vampire’s name, the former leader of the Desaparecidos, unrecognizable under his makeup and his extra weight. Rubén called Pilar, a friend of his who handled the cultural pages in the celebrity gossip magazine Clarín.

  Pilar Dalmontes liked to fuck her husband and also other men. She answered on the third ring.

  “It’s been a long time, you little bastard!” she said, seeing Rubén’s number come up on her phone.

  “Nice to know you remember me.”

  “I’d have preferred to forget you,” Pilar admitted, clearly in great form at lunchtime. But you know how I am.”

  “Marvelous.”

  “Flatterer! Don’t tell me you don’t have an hour for me?”

  “How about a minute?”

  “I’m not sure I can do much for you in such a short time.”

  “I need a contact,” Rubén said. “Jo Prat. Can you get it for me?”

  “Hmmm. I like it when you put on your velvet voice,” Pilar said, ironically. “What do you want with him, with Nosferatu?”

  “I want to bring a little sunshine into his life.”

  “How is yours going?”

  “Great.”

  “I don’t see you anywhere, night owl: have you got something against your contemporaries? Married women?”

  “On the contrary. So?”

  Pilar looked through her address book.

  “Gurruchaga 3180,” she reported. “Do you want his number, or would mine be enough for you?”

  “Guess.”

  “I have only his landline.”

  “I’ll make do with that. Do you know if Prat is around here just now?”

  “I think he’s on the program for the Lezama festival next week.”

  “O.K.”

  Rubén wrote down the number, thanked the gossip queen, who pretended to simper, and called the singer. Another answering machine. He left his name and number, asking Prat to contact him right away. Outside the windows, the sky was still threatening. He warmed up some leftover paella, and called the numbers that appeared on María Campallo’s telephone bill, all of them administrative or professional contacts that were of no help. Same with the shoemaker’s shop, which was closed that day and the following—the shoemaker, whose name was Gonzalez, took Mondays off. All that didn’t get him very far. Miss Bolivia finally called him back.

  Pleasant, the young woman agreed to meet him in an hour at La Trastienda, a nearby bistro where she was appearing to promote her album. She was also a rock singer: Rubén found her profile on Facebook, and saved the information. Outside, a storm was brewing. The sparrows had left the windowsill, driven away by the wind. Rubén left the agency in a downpour.

  The covered market in San Telmo did not attract an upscale crowd, with its dilapidated stores displaying antediluvian underwear, its bric-a-brac and shops with dusty ironwork. On the Plaza Dorrego, a few retirees were playing violins to supplement their pensions, which Menem had trimmed. They played on imperturbably, despite the gusts of wind that were whipping the displays of the itinerant vendors and second-hand sellers. Rubén crossed the square, where tourists who had taken refuge under plastic windbreakers were standing around, and found Miss Bolivia at the bar in La Trastienda.

  A representative of an ethnic, explosive variety of rap, less than five feet tall and lost in a pair of shorts and big sneakers, Miss Bolivia was surrounded by her fans, half a dozen little lesbian dolls who followed her everywhere. They immediately hit it off. Rubén paid for a round of Coca-Cola. The rapper confirmed that she had called María the day before regarding the cover of her next album. The little Bolivian had not seen her since the photo shoot ten days earlier, it was the end of vacation, everyone was still a little here and there. In any case, María Victoria wasn’t a close friend, they had just met through work: she didn’t know if the photographer had a steady boyfriend, what she did with her nights, if she was interested in politics, astrophysics, or dog grooming.

  “All I can tell you is that María is hetero,” Miss Bolivia said.

  The little dolls giggled behind her. He left the bar with the rapper’s CD.

  On badly photocopied flyers, girls with breasts like artillery shells pretended to be hungry for sex: Rubén brushed off a dozen hawkers soliciting on the Plaza Dorrego and went home. As he came in the door, half-soaked, Jo Prat called back on his cell phone.

  *

  Jo Prat had created his rock group in the early 1980s, when the junta had had to make concessions to social pressure. Los Desaparecidos had saluted the victory of democracy at the Obras Sanitarias stadium, supported by a vengeful crowd:

  Milicos, hijos de puta! Qué es lo que han hecho con los desaparecidos? La guerra sucia, la corrupción son la peor mierda que ha tenido la nación! Que paso con las Malvinas? Esos chicos ya no estan, no podemos olvidarlos y por eso vamos a luchar!10

  The rest had been less glorious: the group had worked the concert halls and festivals for four years without taking time off, endured stress, lack of privacy, and drug addiction, and finally sank into quarrels about matters of ego and alcoholism. Colombian marijuana and the spangles of the Menem years had ended up disgusting him: quarrels, depression, treatment, Jo Prat had crossed several deserts where he’d dried out over and over. The disappointments and the wounds inflicted by people who the day before were rubbing him the right way had made him taciturn, somber, and bitter—“open-pit coal,” as he said in his songs. Courageously or rashly, at the age of fifty Jo Prat was resuming a solo career with an album and a tour that had begun in November, before the summer festivals.

  Gurruchaga 3180, Palermo Hollywood. The paved streets were shaded by sycamores with trunks covered with romantic slogans. Jo lived two blocks from the Plaza Cortázar, famous for its beer taverns, its giant screens, and its high-priced, fashionable stores, in a white three-story building shaded by the foliage of a rubber tree.

  An acrobatic painter harnessed to his pulleys was repainting the shutters of the little apartment building next door, accompanied by a mutt’s shrill barking: Rubén looked at the worker’s overwhelmed face, kicked the dog to make it go away, threw his cigarette in the gutter, and went into the lobby. A polished marble stairway led to the upper floor. Informed of Rubén’s visit, the singer immediately opened the door.

  The last Grinderman album was playing in the living room of the apartment decorated with a refined taste that clashed with the lugubrious look of its owner: pasty-faced, made-up eyes, dressed in black leather pants despite the humid heat, Jo Prat received him rather coolly.

  “You don’t look like a private eye,” he said when Rubén came into his lair.

  “Were you expecting some guy with a fedora and a flask in his pocket?”

  “I no longer drink anything but green tea,” de
clared the former rocker. “Do you want some?”

  “Vamos.”

  A Fender guitar hung on the wall, and there were engravings and a finely-worked teapot steaming on the table of the Japanese-style living room. A white angora cat straight out of an old Disney film jumped off the armchair from which he dominated the scene and, intrigued by the stranger’s Italian shoes, sniffed them with the assiduity of a professional feline.

  “Ledzep,” Jo Prat said in lieu of an introduction.

  The animal rubbed against the leather as if he wanted to make a genie come out of it, then relaxed a bit. Rubén folded his legs underneath the Japanese bench while the master of the household did the honors. An inhaler lay on the table. Ventolin.

  “Well?” inquired the singer.

  Rubén explained the situation, María Victoria’s phone call to Página 12, the silence that had since surrounded her. As Rubén talked, Jo Prat’s face contracted, which only made his double chin more noticeable.

  The cat was doing his best to settle down on his knees, and Rubén was struggling to stay perched on the bench.

  “Have you seen her or talked to her on the phone recently?” he asked, his face full of cat hair.

  “No,” Jo replied. “Why, do you think something happened to her?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out. Do you mind if I smoke?”

  “So long as you don’t blow your poison in my face.”

  Ledzep didn’t much like the cigarette, but he remained concentrated on his objective.

  “Did María talk to you about herself or about her problems?” Ruben went on.

  “Not really. On tour, people say stupid things to each other. It’s either that or stress,” added the musician, pragmatically.

  “I found antianxiety medicine in her apartment. Does María have a tendency to get depressed?”

  “Huh?”

  “Is she in therapy?”

  “Like everyone else here, no?”

  Buenos Aires has more psychoanalysts per capita than any other city in the world.

  “Hm. What kind of relationship does María have with her parents?”

  Jo shrugged. “Normal.”

  “And that means . . . ?”

  “I had the impression she doesn’t see them much.”

  “Do you know why?”

  “Goodness no.”

  “Her father is one of the wealthiest men in the country,” Rubén insinuated.

  “Right. That’s nothing to boast about,” the rebel grumbled, pouring another round of green tea.

  “Does María have a reason for being angry with him?”

  “With her father? I know that María went through her grunge, or gothic, period when she was a teenager, but that’s no reason to throw yourself off a bridge. And then that’s the time when you resist your parents: hers may be rotten with money, but in photography María found her way and the means to be independent, with regard to her parents and the rest of the world.”

  “A loner?”

  “Rather someone who knows how to compartmentalize her life: private on the one hand, professional on the other. That’s what we have in common.”

  At the cost of a stubborn battle against gravity, Ledzep had found his balance between Rubén’s thighs.

  “Is María involved in politics?” Rubén asked.

  “You mean on the left?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know any right-wing artists?” Jo Prat laughed.

  “Nobody’s perfect,” Rubén admitted, pushing aside the angora tail that prevented him from seeing his interlocutor. “And you haven’t answered my question.”

  “No, not especially involved. Just in what she does. That’s already enough,” Jo remarked, calling upon Rubén to witness what he’d said. “Look, Calderón, why don’t you ask her parents directly? If anybody can help you, they can, can’t they?”

  According to Carlos, who had ended up contacting their servant, María’s parents were returning that day from Mar del Plata. Rubén crushed out his cigarette in the bowl of sashimi without disturbing the cat.

  “You live in the same neighborhood as María and you haven’t seen each other for weeks,” he noted.

  “I’ve been on tour since the beginning of the summer,” the singer replied. “I’m at home between two series of shows. In any case, we almost never see each other outside work. Why are you asking me all these questions?”

  Ledzep played dead; Rubén had to helicopter him to the floor in order to reach his jacket pocket. He turned on his BlackBerry and showed Jo the pictures he’d found in María’s loft.

  “These photos were taken in late November,” he said, “during your concert in Rosario. What do you think about them?”

  “They’re pretty flattering, don’t you think?”

  Annoyed, Ledzep shot the stranger a haughty glance.

  “María Victoria hasn’t contacted you since she developed the shots?” Ruben asked.

  “I’d have told you.”

  “Unless you’ve got something to hide.”

  “My fat belly gives me enough to worry about,” Jo replied.

  “I found marijuana and cocaine in her night table. Was she taking drugs?”

  “If fucking on Ecstasy is a problem for you, you’re the problem. María is not a junkie,” Jo assured him. “By now I can tell one a thousand miles off.”

  Sure.

  From the other side of the table, Rubén looked at him hard with his coal-black eyes.

  “Can you tell me why you’re looking at me that way?”

  “Because María Victoria is pregnant,” the detective told him point blank.

  Jo Prat paused. “Pregnant?”

  “Three months gone, according to analysis,” Rubén confirmed. “I don’t know much about kids, but in my opinion María plans on keeping it.”

  The seducer frowned, covering his forehead with deep wrinkles.

  “Do you sleep together often?” Rubén asked, taking for granted that they did.

  “Almost every time we meet,” Jo Prat replied without blinking.

  “The last time in Rosario, at the end of November?”

  “Possibly. If you’re including me among the potential fathers, keep in mind that in thirty years of touring I must have fathered at least a dozen rug rats.”

  Rubén lit a cigarette, less courteously.

  “Paternity moves you to the point of tears, doesn’t it?”

  “I’ve never wanted children I couldn’t take care of,” Jo explained. “So far as the rest goes, get used to it. Not to mention that María could have slept with other men during the same period.”

  “She got pregnant at the end of November, according to the analysis. You were together that week, and your portraits are hanging in the middle of her loft. Sorry to have to tell you this, but everything suggests that the baby is yours.”

  The bags under the singer’s eyes got a little heavier under his makeup.

  “I imagine she never told you about it to avoid having to get a clandestine abortion in the event that you insisted on it,” Rubén added.

  Abortion was still not legal in Argentina. Jo Prat emerged from his thoughts.

  “Do you think the fact that she’s pregnant has something to do with her disappearance?”

  “I don’t know.”

  A siren howled in the street. The news left the ex-star in the middle of a minefield. For a moment, he remained perplexed in front of his cold tea. Images were rushing through his head: María’s smile when they’d had sex in the hotel room in Rosario, the champagne she’d hardly touched, his not using a condom—as usual with women he already knew—her sweet, peaceful look on the pillow when they fell asleep in each others’ arms after making love . . . Did María already know, by some feminine magic, that she was carrying his c
hild? Was she planning to tell him someday?

  The silence that followed the revelation brought him back to the voice of Nick Cave coming out of the speakers. Jo ran his hand over his slicked-back hair.

  “Do you know anything else, Calderón?”

  “That María Campallo’s father is financing Torres’s campaign, that she left a message with an opposition journalist, and that nothing has been heard from her since. For the moment, that’s about it.”

  The vampire paled in the gloom of the twilight that was filtering through the venetian blinds. Even if María had concealed the existence of this child from him, even if she was only looking for someone to father her child, she’d chosen him. He couldn’t leave her like that, lost out there somewhere.

  “Who are you working for?” he asked the detective.

  “Nobody.”

  “You think María has disappeared?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

  Jo Prat hesitated a moment. Then without a word he got up, stepped over the white cat lying on the floor, and went to the desk near the front door. He dug around in a drawer and came back to Rubén, who was still the prisoner of the Japanese bench.

  “Here’s thirty thousand pesos,” he said, his eyes dark. “As an advance.” (An envelope dropped on the tea table.) “Find her,” the rocker said. “Her and my damned kid.”

  5

  A short note in the day’s newspapers referred to an unidentified body found the day before near the old ferry in La Boca: a man about thirty years old. Nothing more. The barbarous mutilation, the possibility of a sex crime, the victim’s gender, and all the sordid details of the affair were not mentioned.

  Jana had risen early to buy the newspapers and after reading them she called the La Boca police station to obtain explanations: according to the cop she talked to on the phone, the investigation was proceeding. It was impossible to determine the victim’s full identity, to find out whether his family had been informed, whether the police had questioned any suspects or found Luz’s purse in the area. Jana had persisted, but the cop on the phone got exasperated: if she had revelations to make, she could request an appointment with Sergeant Andretti; if not, there was no point in calling back.