The Buenos Aires Quintet (13 page)

The audience falls silent, shifting uncomfortably. Some heads wag their disapproval.

‘But we still have the tango! Our tango! We are tango! And tango is a woman: tonight, tango is a woman who no less a person than the Polack, the great, the inimitable Goyeneche, said was the only woman who could sing tangos. Here is tango!’

He raises an arm to introduce the singer. ‘Adriana Varela!’

A woman with a plunging neckline, a dramatic white face. A woman full of mystery, in full possession of her seven doors and six senses in the silvery light. The bandoneon leads off the orchestra, and as Norman withdraws, the singer fills the whole stage.

Searching
among the shadows of a memory
for footprints in the blood
as ancient as the sun.

Searching
like a wounded animal
hunted by a destiny
that refuses to admit all pain.

Come on in, stranger
there
’
s no pity here
for anyone who missed
the express train of time.

Traces
in the wounded city
a landscape between two wars
between being and non-being.

Traces
of a wounded animal
the animal of all of us
so blind, so obstinate.

Come on in, stranger
there
’
s no pity here
for anyone who missed
the express train of time.

All you
’
ll find
Is a weary city
with its mirrors smashed
and pretending not to care.

Searching
to see if among the ruins
your face might be the face
of a time that
’
s dead and gone.

The singer acknowledges the audience’s applause with an automatic, ritual wave. Carvalho stares at her, moved and astonished. Pascuali has been watching from the back row. He sees her salute her public, turns on his heel and goes out into the street. He takes a deep breath and looks up at the constellations of stars – the same stars that Raúl is enjoying, head thrown back as he runs beside the river, loping along in a way that for him has now taken over from walking. When will he be able to return to walking normally, like everyone else? And the Captain glances up at the same stars through the window of his armour-plated limousine, ignoring the presence and continual chatter of his driver. It’s the fat man who is at the wheel, attentively following the path the headlights pick out along the highway, but also acutely aware of the Captain’s unshakeable presence in the back seat. The Captain looks up at the stars, then stares at the landscape outside to calculate how much further they have to go. The car pulls up on the gravel path in front of a mansion standing on its own in a clearing of a eucalyptus wood. The Captain gets out – the fat man has opened the door for him, and is standing to attention.

‘What next, Captain?’

The Captain simply dismisses him with an airy wave, telling him to be on his way.

‘My respects to Doña María Asunción and your daughter.’

But the Captain has already bounded off and reaches the front door of his house, which he opens without needing a key, and almost without breaking stride enters a reception room. He sniffs at the air. His gaze lights upon an almost empty whisky bottle, and through it the distorted face of a woman struggling between falling asleep, collapsing into a drunken stupor, or trying to work out who has come in. Hunting trophies. Even the few books carefully adorning the bookshelves look like hunting trophies. So does an Argentine flag, on which is placed a blown-up photograph of a group of smiling soldiers, with behind them the sea, the Falklands sea. The Captain strides over to the drunken woman in her rocking chair and almost spits at her: ‘Where’s the girl?’

The woman nods vaguely upwards. The Captain bounds up the stairs two at a time. He comes to a halt in front of a bedroom door. Opens it. Inside, a young woman sleeps the untroubled sleep of a twenty-year-old. The Captain tucks her in. His cruel, impassively cold features have softened into plasticine tenderness. The girl stirs.

‘Nothing and nobody will ever separate us.’

The Captain lifts the lid of a music box. It’s Eva María’s box, the one Alma remembers so well, with the tune Pignatari sang. The Captain makes as if to caress the sleeping girl, thinks better of it, and goes over to the window to look up at the stars again. The same stars Carvalho can see from his apartment. Logs are burning in the hearth on the ashes of
Buenos Aires: un museo al aire libre
by León Tenenbaum. Carvalho, staring out of the window because he can’t get to sleep. He goes back to the table, picks up a piece of paper, and reads out loud:

Dear Charo, As I was leaving for Buenos Aires to do some work, I started this letter to try to clear up a misunderstanding. Things weren
’
t how you imagined them to be, Charo. Perhaps it
’
s time for us to wake up to the fact that we
’
re not kids anymore, and that what
’
s at stake is trying to enjoy the years left to us, before old age sets in. Charo, what might be a normal situation for you and me? Are there any normal situations after we
’
ve reached fifty, or is all that
’
s left the fear of disintegrating, of growing old without dignity, and all alone? Everything here has finished, but could start up again at any moment. Every end is its own beginning, here just like anywhere else in the world, but I
’
ve never been to a place I haven
’
t wanted to leave, and I
’
m scared of the fact that you need me almost as much as I am that I need you. Perhaps I
’
ll look for an excuse to stay here a bit longer. A professional excuse. Finding my cousin, for example. Getting paid for it. Settling my debts. Finally burying the dead...

Chapter 2

The Hidden Man

Because it’s an old, old woman struggling with the tray, a dinner trembles on the brink, especially a plate of soup, like a sea with no shore. The old woman insists stubbornly, even though she finds it hard to walk and her Parkinson’s threatens at any moment to spill all the liquid to the floor. She struggles to a corner of the kitchen, manages to deposit the tray on a shelf while she gropes for a bell on the wall. In fact it’s a spring, and the wooden-panelled bottom half of the wall opens before her. A black hole to the unknown. After a moment, a man approximately as old as she is appears. He’s wearing a dressing gown, half-moon glasses. He leans out of the hole and stares round suspiciously.

‘All quiet?’

‘Yes, all quiet.’

‘Is the guy with the sideburns still in power?’

‘Yes he is, Favila, just like he was yesterday and the day before yesterday’

‘Perón didn’t come back?’

‘Forget Perón, he’s dead.’

‘I can’t believe it.’

‘Come on, eat your dinner before it gets cold.’

The man picks up the tray with difficulty. His hands shake as much as hers. But he also succeeds in not spilling a drop of the soup. He grasps the tray firmly and heads back into the darkness. Just before she closes the door on him, he reminds her sternly: ‘If the Argie military, the Francoists, or any other armed bastards show up, you know what to tell them.’

She ignores him. She presses the switch again with something approaching vindictiveness, and the man disappears in his hole before he can add something more. The old woman stands rooted to the spot for a moment: ‘I’ve completely forgotten what I’m supposed to say. I’ll tell them the first bloody thing that occurs to me.’

Norman Silverstein’s narrow face is sweating in the spotlight beneath the clown make-up.

‘Until a few years ago you’d get some Japanese or other appearing in the jungle of a Pacific island convinced the Second World War was still going on. I reckon it was always the same one, on the same island. They’d slip him a few coins, a canteen full of
sake,
and he’d start his little number. All the tourists would say: “Ah! Here comes that stupid Japanese soldier who’s still fighting for his emperor!” And he would strike his best threatening imperial warrior pose, with one of those huge swords all the best samurai have. “Ahso! Hatamitaka! Fujimori! Tanaka! Come off it, Takiri! Stop playing the fool! Commit hara-kiri and get it over with!” There’s obviously no point in any Japanese hiding out nowadays. But have you any idea how many moles, how many hidden people there are in the world today? All those who can’t settle their debts, all those who can’t pay the alimony to the women they’ve divorced, all those afraid they’ll be recognized as ex-torturers, all those afraid they’ll be tortured again, a million Tutsis hidden from the Hutus, a million Hutus hidden from the Tutsis. All of them, all of us, are like those inscrutable Japanese soldiers – who in this day and age asks anyone to explain themselves? We accept everything. God is dead. Marx is dead. Mankind is dead. Marlene Dietrich is dead. And I’m not feeling too well myself. Anything goes! Not even nation states have sovereignty any more. We’re ruled by multinationals, by monetary funds, by fixed prices, by Yankee Doodle soldiers. The only sovereignty we have left is over our torturers. When a foreign judge wants to try our torturers: it’s an attack on our national sovereignty! The sovereignty of repression! It’s all we have left. So are you surprised if everything gets mixed up? Guerrilleros marry upper-class girls, left-wing mayors rip off everything they can lay their hands on in Buenos Aires: trees, pavements, whole blocks of streets, building plots, lamp-posts, lamp-post lights, the shadows of dogs pissing against the lamp-posts. All they leave us are the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and their demonstrations, and the old-age pensioners demonstrating outside Congress. Anything goes! So what’s the point in hiding? There’s only one. I respect those who are hiding because they’ve forgotten where Buenos Aires, America, the world, are – all they can remember is the tiny corner where they were, are, and will be, scared out of their wits.’

The faces of the audience live up to the simple sociological calculation Carvalho has made about the effects of Norman’s sarcasm: a few smiles, embarrassment, perplexity, annoyance. Carvalho asks for the bill and pays. He looks at his wallet and the money inside. Not much left. He stares doubtfully at his credit cards. Turns his head when he hears Alma’s voice: ‘Are you running out of dough?’

‘Yes, I’m running out of dough, and I can’t ask my uncle for any more in advance until I find his son.’

‘You’ll have to get a job. What can you do?’

‘Look round me.’

Silverstein has finished his monologue and announces: ‘We all know that as far as modern tango goes, there’s a before and after, and that the watershed between the two was a piece composed by the late lamented Astor Piazzola: “Ballad for a Crazy Guy”. Ladies and gentlemen, tonight we are privileged to have among us the author and singer of the words to that unforgettable song, a man who is the living memory of tango and our Buenos Aires slang: Horacio Ferrer!’

As the applause rings out, a bohemian-looking figure with eyes as streaked as his moustache stands up to acknowledge it.

‘And now, a tango worthy of our illustrious guest: “Hidden Man!”’

The music starts up, but Carvalho turns away from the stage just as Adriana Varela makes her entrance.

‘Are you leaving already? Aren’t you in love with Adriana any more? Didn’t you say she’s the best tango singer you’ve ever heard, and the one with the most exciting neckline in Buenos Aires?’

‘I’ve got a business meeting.’

Outside, the night is tinged with green, or silver if he looks at the moon. All the housefronts and the shadows seem bathed in a green light, as does the taxi he hails and the taxi-driver he tells: ‘to La Recoleta’.

He has to blink and screw up his eyes several times until the real pale shades of the night appear before him. The green that filled his vision was the green of the metal doors and railings of the Modelo prison in Madrid, where he spent time in his youth. The colour and smell of prison repeat on him like heartburn whenever anyone mentions fugitives. But now he can clearly see the colour of the whisky in his glass, and he pours part of it into his coffee and whispers to himself the word
carajillo,
staring down at the mixture in his cup as if it could take him home. He looks up, gazes at the other people in the bar, and then turns his attention to the man addressing him. He is around sixty, with hair turned silver by the neon lighting and smoothed back with cheap brilliantine. He is dressed far too smartly, although it’s plain his suit is not new, and that his shirt has been washed and rewashed many times. But his cufflinks gleam, and so do his tiepin, his shoes and one gold tooth.

‘Vito Altofini’s the name, Altofini Cangas; my father was from Lombardy, my mother from Asturias.’

‘Don Vito, I need an Argentine partner. As a foreigner, I have no right to work here.’

‘You’ve come to the right man.’

Don Vito spreads out press cuttings yellow with age that detail his career in crime: ‘Vito Altofini succeeds where police fail. A trail to follow in the case of the kidnapped Bayer family’ Carvalho picks the cutting up. In it, a considerably younger Vito is pointing to a piece of clothing. The photo caption reads: ‘The kidnappers came from Uruguay. No political motive involved.’

‘How did the case end?’ Carvalho wants to know.

‘Unfortunately, the Bayer family was never heard of again, but no one could ever prove the kidnappers didn’t come from Uruguay. The piece of cloth I’m holding up was part of a woollen waistcoat woven in the Uruguayan style, in the days when people still wove by hand. Where is your office?’

‘I’ll put one in my apartment.’

‘What sort?’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘I mean: private dick from the United States in the 1940s, or chintzy furniture
à la
Hercule Poirot, or neon lighting and computers like something from a Hollywood B-movie in the 1980s?’

‘Are you a film critic then? Or an interior designer?’

But Don Vito is reliving his past.

‘In the good old days I had my office done out exactly like Dick Powell’s in the Dashiell Hammett films – they were the best ever made, black and white they were.’

Then he considers Carvalho, his attitude to his drink and to life in general. ‘Are you hoping to get rich as a private detective here in Buenos Aires?’

‘I have to make money to buy time. I came to find a disappeared cousin, and my savings are running low’

‘A disappeared person? For political reasons? At this stage in the game? All that’s dead and gone, my friend.’

‘Perhaps he’s not one of the disappeared. I wouldn’t know what to call him.’ Carvalho thinks before he elaborates: ‘Perhaps he’s just a hidden man.’

The removal people carry out the dining-room table and then as if by magic reappear almost instantaneously with a desk to replace it, plus some old filing cabinets from a 1940s office with vague traces of art deco. Alma helps Carvalho put away what had been on the table, and to place the armchairs for any hypothetical clients.

‘Where will you eat?’

‘In the kitchen.’

Alma consults her watch and cries out: ‘Oh, I’ll be late for my class!’

As she dashes out she bumps into Don Vito. Carvalho can barely recognize him in a broad-brimmed trilby tilted rakishly to one side, but then he spots his gold tooth gleaming as he rewards the young lady with a flashing smile, doffing his hat as he steps to one side to allow her past. In his other hand he is carrying a zip-up briefcase like a 1950s insurance salesman. He takes a good look at Carvalho’s office installations, and comes towards him, openly disappointed.

‘So you went for the down-at-heel Humphrey Bogart style in the end, did you?’

‘Down-at-heel Carvalho style more like.’

‘What did you do to make that interesting woman run out of here in such a hurry?’

‘She’s almost a cousin.’

‘Fantastic. I always kept twenty or thirty cousins on the go. By now, they’re all nieces.’

‘It’s not what it seems. She
was
in a hurry. She’s a professor of literature, and she has a class to give.’

Carvalho looks down at his watch. All of a sudden he’s had enough of giving explanations, so instead he almost barks at Don Vito: ‘Take a seat.’

Carvalho takes a bottle of 15-year-old J&B out of a desk drawer. ‘It’s the best I could find round here.’

But Vito Altofini refuses the offer politely, and instead takes all the bits and pieces he needs to make a drink of
mate
tea from his briefcase.

‘If you’ll let me use your kitchen, I prefer to make myself a
mate.
It’s what I like, and I thought to myself... ‘That Spaniard won’t have the first idea what a
mate
is.’

Carvalho waves him towards the kitchen, and a short while later he and Don Vito are savouring their drinks in time to each other. Carvalho appreciates the gourd with silver décorations that Don Vito is drinking his
mate
from; by the way he is cradling it and drinking from it with such reverence, it must be a very precious object. Carvalho feels slightly tipsy. His tongue is loose, but he’s not drunk.

‘At the moment we haven’t got any clients, Don Vito. Here in Argentina you suffer from the same problem of moral relativity as we do in Spain, in the West, in the whole of the fertile North. Adultery, theft, even murder aren’t taboos any more, because everyone is a potential adulterer, thief or murderer. Then again, although our public police forces are experiencing a crisis of numbers and standards which has given rise to a huge increase in private security people, most of them work for big firms, even multinationals. That’s why classic private detectives like us struggle to survive.’

‘Public police forces are unfair competition. I’d privatize all policing. The whole lot.’

‘So you see it as a labour market problem?’

‘Elementary, my dear Carvalho. At times of crisis like this, even accountants are up against it. I’ve got a relative who’s an accountant – he’s had to take on extra work. He does the books for two or three firms now. It’s not only the working class that’s fallen on hard times, you know. The bourgeoisie ain’t what it used to be either.’

Then he begins to mutter:

The middle class is on its uppers
Mireya has gone, Margot is dead
And all their lordships
’
suppers
Are no more than crusts of bread.
Tears at their farewell are falling
Tears that times are now so hard
The lovely Barra Florida
’
s closing
Nostalgia is our business card.

Don Vito does not notice Carvalho’s mild amazement at this outburst, and goes on: ‘If you like, we can look for your cousin in the meantime.’

‘I wouldn’t know where to start. A few weeks after I got here, I almost had him. My cousin left Argentina during the military dictatorship. He thought his wife was dead, and that his daughter had disappeared. The years went by, and suddenly he gets a bee in his bonnet to come back. But he chose the wrong moment. Twenty years had gone by. His wife’s alive, but...sorry, I mean his sister-in-law is alive. She’s the one you saw running out.’

‘So she really is a cousin. Carvalho, you’re a man of principle.’

‘Some of my cousin’s former guerrilla friends are still loyal, but others have taken over his scientific discoveries. They’ve had them patented thanks to a Captain, the same man who captured and tortured them twenty years ago, and who now is using more terror and money to control them. And his daughter still hasn’t been found.’

‘It sounds like an Argentine soap opera written by a Venezuelan scriptwriter,’ Don Vito mutters to himself, suddenly serious: ‘but I’m sure it’s true. As true as you or me here. Is anyone else after your cousin?’

‘The police. Or rather, a policeman called Pascuali. He’s a professional: in other words, he wants law and order to be upheld.’

Don Vito almost chokes on his
mate.
He’s saved by a knock at the door and the sudden appearance of a thin, hollow-eyed young man with a pallid face. He wastes no time in presenting himself: ‘I’m Javier Lizondo. If you are the detectives whose name is on the door, I need you. Someone’s killed my girlfriend.’