Mapuche (16 page)

The most hyped club in Buenos Aires was jammed full for that night's show, which was in full swing: the sound machine blared, and under strobe lights, an ecstatic crowd was gathering in front of an immense stage. The show that was being presented left Rubén stunned for a moment.

A tall blonde straight out of an erotic comic book, wearing a miniskirt and a sailor's jacket, was dancing voluptuously under the lights, occasionally giving a French kiss to her feminine alter ego, a willowy brunette with slicked-back hair and a man's suit, who wrapped the super bimbo in her voracious legs. Blind to the petting of the two beauties, a bald tranny weighing at least 350 pounds and draped in silk was sodomizing a young gladiator, masked, muscular, and armed with a trident; his colleagues in the Roman legions were sinking their swords into the asses of terribly consenting ephebes, licking the plastic blades and making gluttonous gestures toward the audience, which was exulting along with them, caught up in the trance. A sexual execution, an act of unbridled lust, multiple partner-swapping, lesbian, homo, tranny, men or women dishonored, all kinds of combinations followed one after the other on the stage of the Niceto, a sort of orgiastic brothel orchestrated by one of de Sade's henchmen, one in high form. Club 69 was the troupe's name: an extravagant porno-comic choreography.

It was four in the morning, it was the third club that Rubén had scoured, and Paula was stage right, wiggling her behind in a red dress with glinting fake rubies; radiant, a ten-carat smile making up for her missing tooth, the laundress's son was giving a blow job to the beak of a pink swan who decorated the backdrop. They had been running into each other in Peru Street for years. Sated, Paula tapped the bird's spangled hind side to emphasize its good taste, turned toward an audience that would applaud anything, and recognized the man in front of the stage—the detective, who signaled to her that he'd be waiting for her in the bar after the show.

Rubén passed through the wasted crowd and ordered a drink at the nearest bar. He recognized the young Americans with pasteurized sex appeal who were swaying their hips to techno house music, had his drink passed to him over a hedge of drinkers whose average age couldn't have been more than thirty. He was watching, pensively, the drunken parade of peacocks around blondes when he saw Jana at the other end of the bar. Auburn hair that evanesced, a black tank top, and fairy-like arms: she had seen him, too.

Rubén made his way through the fauna.

“What are you doing here?” the sculptress asked him, still surprised by what could only be a coincidence.

“I was looking for you,” Rubén replied in the din.

Jana wanted to make room for him but they were being pressed against the bar.

“I thought we weren't worth your trouble? How did you know that we'd be here?”

Ruben leaned toward her ear.

“You left me a list of places where your tranny friends hang out,” he said into her hair. “I made the rounds of three dance halls before the guy at the door told me about the show this evening. Naturally, that put a bug in my ear!”

“Bravo, Rin Tin Tin!” she laughed over the bass.

Rubén put a bill on the bar sticky with beer.

“Can I buy you a drink without you throwing it my face?”

“I wouldn't want to ruin your
hidalgo
outfit,” she said considerately.

Calderón was wearing a shirt under a 1960s-style leather jacket that must have been worth two or three of her sculptures.

“I wasn't born with a silver spoon in my mouth,” he informed her.

“Was it too big?”

Rubén broke out laughing amid the drunks, and suddenly looked ten years younger.

“So, what'll you have?”

“Same as you,” she said.

He caught the bartender's eye and ordered two pisco sours. Jana was almost as tall as he was, and so close he could smell her musky odor.

“What do you want from Paula?” she asked.

“I'll explain it to you when we've gotten our drinks: it's too noisy here.”

They almost had to shout at each other to make themselves understood.

“In any case I lied to you the other night,” Jana confessed, jostled by the sticky crowd. “I no longer have any desire whatever to have sex with you!”

“You'd have tired yourself out anyway.”

“Not my type.”

“What?”

“You're not my type!” she shouted.

Rubén handed her the glass that had just landed on the bar and led her off in search of a less deafening place. People were dancing even in the club's corridors and hallway, where the boozers were walking back and forth. They found a table covered with empty glasses far enough from the dance floor so that they could talk; a man with an eye-patch was snoring on the neighboring bench, his shirt unbuttoned, probably abandoned by his pals. They sat down on the vacant stools without disturbing the drunkard. Rubén took off his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves.

“So,” Jana asked, her cloth jacket tossed on the bench, “why did you want to see us?”

“Your pal Luz was seen in a tango club last Friday. A woman was with him, María Victoria, the daughter of Eduardo Campallo, a rich industrialist who is financing the mayor's campaign. Do you know her?”

Jana was looking at the skin on the inside of her forearms: she slugged down half the pisco, the little straw stuck between her lips, and answered with a pout.

“Never heard of her.”

“María Campallo disappeared the night that Luz was killed,” the detective went on. “I don't know what happened to her, but I've been looking for her for days. It happens that two witnesses saw them together at La Catedral a few hours before the murder of your transvestite friend.” Jana frowned. “María Campallo is a photographer. I was hoping you or your friend Paula could help me put the pieces together.”

“Your story's pretty strange,” Jana commented.

“Yes.”

“Do you think Campallo's daughter was murdered too?”

“We'll find out when the cops drag the harbor. But as you said, they seem not to be doing anything.”

Over her drink, the Mapuche was thinking hard, and forgot the shame that had overcome her at Calderón's office the night before—a strange reunion.

“Odd how things turn around, isn't it?” she remarked.

“That's because they go together,” Rubén replied.

Their eyes met, familiarly. The ice was broken.

“I don't know whether this might help you in any way, but I searched Luz's squat last night, with Paula. We found letters addressed to her family; apparently they live in Junin. I tried to contact them but I couldn't find their name in the phone book. Maybe they have an unlisted number, or maybe they're dead. Luz made up things about everybody,” she explained, “starting with her parents: we'd have to go there, but I'm not sure my old junker would make it.”

Junin was about three hundred miles away, in the middle of the pampas.

“What's their name?”

“Lavalle. Luz's real name was Orlando, Orlando Lavalle. We also found dope in the squat,” Jana added. “Bags of
paco
, which Luz must have been dealing in the neighborhood. She never mentioned that to Paula.”

Rubén nodded. The photographer had coke and weed in her night table, nothing very serious compared to
paco
.

“Do you know who was getting her the stuff?” he asked.

“No, but Luz could have been dealing on some mob boss's turf, and he killed her as a warning.”

A battle for territory, with Eduardo Campallo's daughter caught in the crossfire . . . The neighborhood of La Boca was adjacent to San Telmo: Rubén knew the dopers in the neighborhood, who would put a knife to your throat to pay for their fix and who would be found dead one morning in the courtyard of a
conventillo
. María might have been at the wrong place at the wrong time, in Luz's company, but something didn't fit in that scenario.

“María was pregnant when she disappeared,” Rubén said, “and
paco
is the worst shit on the market. I can't imagine her poisoning her baby with stuff like that.”

“Unless she wanted to kill it.”

“You have strange ideas.”

“Something must have brought Luz and Maria together.”

Jana finished her drink, the bass throbbing in the background. Over the detective's shoulder, she spotted Paula perched on a Greek column that two gladiators in G-strings were pushing into the mosh pit: she was wiggling in her dress with rubies lit by the spotlight, blowing powdered kisses to the hysterical crowd, smiling with happiness, as if happiness existed.

Rubén was looking at her, his mind obviously elsewhere. She took the opportunity to study the fine brown locks that covered his forehead.

“Do you know the name of the cop who pulled Luz out of the harbor?” he said, waking from his trance.

“Andretti,” Jana replied. “The head of the night squad. The kind of cop that would eat bats.”

Rubén knew him by reputation: a zealot. He glanced at his watch: almost five in the morning.

“O.K.,” he agreed.

“O.K. what?”

“I'm going to have a couple of words with him,” Rubén said, his eyes somber.

He put his glass down on the wet table. Jana's glass was already empty. In her Indian veins ran alcohol and electricity.

“I'm coming with you.”

 

*

 

Crooks and gang members considered the Argentine police a rival force, one that was armed and whose job was to protect big-time criminals from small-time ones. A tenuous porosity: weapons moved in illicit circuits linked to the police and the army; when young thieves were arrested, they were severely beaten before they negotiated their freedom in exchange for part or all of what they had stolen, the meagerness of their take explaining the cops' inclination to liquidate them; going over to the enemy was a way for delinquents to earn money “legally” and save their skins at the same time.

Scapegoat, teammate, jack of all trades—the role of Officer Troncón varied with the moods of his superior, Andretti. At first, Jesus Troncón had cleaned the police station's toilets and winos' cells before it occurred to the sergeant to use him for specific operations. The greenhorn was officially employed as an “apprentice electrician”: he could always rig alarm systems and start fires in squats for the benefit of real estate developers.

Troncón was on the reception desk that night. He recognized the Indian woman who burst into the station, but not the big, brown-haired guy with 220-volt eyes who swooped down on his counter.

“Is Sergeant Andretti there?” Rubén asked, without introducing himself.

Jesus put his skin mag under a pile of badly photocopied papers. The guy's elegance didn't go with the shabbiness of the place, and he couldn't understand what he was doing with the
negrita
.

“He's not available,” Troncón declared, adopting a suitable tone. “What is it about?”

“The murder of the transvestite you fished out of the harbor,” Rubén replied

“Oh, yes.”

“Go find Andretti, I'm telling you.”

Jana was fidgeting near the plastic plants. The station was deserted, without even a drunk or a doper howling for a fix in the cells.

“I have orders,” Troncón said angrily, his forehead low and stubborn. “I'm the one who makes decisions.”

The dolt was getting flustered.

“Fine,” Rubén said impatiently. “Where's the chief's office?”

“End of the hall on the right,” Jana replied.

“He's not there!” Troncón cried.

“You squint when you lie.”

“Nobody's going down there!” Troncón stationed himself in the middle of the hall, his hands on his hips, on his belt. “You have to make an appointment.”

Rubén pushed the idiot against the wall.

“Boss!” Troncón shouted, picking up his cap. “Boss! Boss!”

“What's going on?” a voice thundered from the end of the hall.

Alerted by the noise, the colossus came out of his office: Sergeant Andretti, 250 pounds, a little pudgy but still capable of knocking a mare's eye out with one punch.

“What the fuck is going on?”

He knew Calderón. He'd seen him around and knew his reputation: he was a violent, nosy troublemaker who was high on human rights and was building up files on the former oppressors. Andretti scowled when he saw the Indian woman behind the detective; she was the one he'd questioned the other night. Rubén went up to the big cop.

“I'm investigating a disappearance and the murder of Orlando Lavalle,” he said without showing his badge, “the tranny you pulled out of the harbor. I know he was tortured before being thrown in the water. What did the autopsy show?”

“I don't have to answer your questions,” Andretti replied, his shirtsleeves folded up on his hairy forearms. “And I don't like private eyes. Get the hell out of here with your whore!”

The former wrestler was running on testosterone.

“This lady is a witness to a murder. Would you prefer that I speak with the journalists? A tranny from La Boca emasculated and thrown into the harbor like a piece of shit, that would make the headlines of more than one newspaper. What do you say to that, big guy?”

The sergeant scowled. He saw Troncón's head sticking up at the end of the hall and snorted.

“Well?” Rubén persisted. “What did the autopsy show?”

“Nothing at all,” Andretti replied. “It didn't show anything because there was no autopsy. We didn't find the tranny's purse and there was nothing in his squat, either, no documents, nothing to identify him, zip.”

“That doesn't mean you don't have to do your job.”

“Our job is to save money: do you know how much an autopsy costs?” the sergeant said, turning to Jana.

“Convenient, isn't it?”