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Doctor Fillol, who had remained silent up to that point, rushed up to the former interrogating officer.

“Do you believe what she said? That my name doesn't appear anywhere?”

Parise ignored the doctor.

“When they dig into Campallo's past, they're likely to trace the matter back to you, General,” he said to Ardiles. “We have to go to plan B.”

“The monastery?”

“Until we see which way the wind is blowing,” the head of security replied.

It took a few seconds for Leandro Ardiles to make up his mind. Since his wife's death two years earlier, the old man had hardly left his guarded residence. What was the point? But the imminence of danger aroused forgotten sensations in him: courage, duty, abnegation. Should he flee, as Parise advised? They could pounce on him at any time, and at eighty he was too old to run away. Preparations had to be made and his rear secured.

“What about Brother Josef?” he asked.

“First we have to get out of this trap,” Parise decided.

The priest had no reason to betray them. Ardiles agreed, his face somber. He had confidence in Parise, who had over time become more than his right-hand man. All right, they would leave as quickly as possible.

“And me?” Fillol asked.

“You'd be better off following us,” the head of security replied. “Calderón and the Madwomen have a copy of the document: damaged or not, they might make it public to spread panic. We have to leave, disappear. The sooner the better.”

“But . . . my clinic, my appointments . . . ”

“Would you prefer house arrest?”

The director of the clinic fell silent. For him as well, things were moving too fast. Parise led the two men out of the room. Jana watched them, trembling all over. Miguel was no longer moving.

“What about them?” El Picador asked, pointing to the prisoners.

The giant hardly looked at them.

“Get rid of them,” he said as he shut the door.

El Toro sized up the weeping puppet.

“For a guy who's supposed to have a weak heart, the gigolo's holding up pretty well!”

El Picador set his leather attaché case on the table. Inside were half a dozen
banderillas
and knives of different sizes. He chose the thickest, a steel point several inches long, and stood over the transvestite. Jana couldn't breathe. “No,” she moaned. “No . . . ”

The poor transvestite was hanging on only by his tears, soiled with scarlet snot. The
banderilla
went in under his shoulder blade and pierced his heart. Miguel shuddered under the shock; his limbs jerked in a nervous spasm, one last time. The coup de grace.

Jana was trembling with fear on the iron plate. Her broken nose was dripping blood, her vision was clouded, tears ran like razors down her cheeks. Miguel. A foul wind blew on her. El Toro was smiling over her naked body.

“Calderón is fucking you, huh, little whore . . . ”

“Your sister too,” she hissed in his porcine face.

The fat man sniffed as he unbuckled his belt. He didn't need El Picador for this little
India de mierda
. He unbuttoned his pants and took out his cock, like a relief. It was hard, hot, already enormous.

“What are you doing?” his acolyte asked.

“I'm going to have her first,” El Toro replied.

Jana shivered on seeing his monstrous penis. El Toro had sodomized people by the dozens, especially male prisoners—there he went all out. The wags in the barracks had nicknamed him El Toro not so much for his bullish ways as for the size of his cock, a thick, veined log accompanied by testicles that hung like stillborns over his fat, hairy legs. Ten inches long, he'd measured it, of course. With that, there was no need to rape opponents with corncobs, the way Rosas's police did: El Toro had what was needed in his pants. An engine of death. He had ripped apart the little tranny's anus to make him speak, he had perforated his intestines as he was crying for mercy. Adrenaline. He was visibly thriving on it.

El Toro enjoyed the Indian woman's fear as she lay tied to the table. An oily glee lit up his face when he stuck his engine of death between her legs.

“You'll see,” he whispered in her ear. “You're going to call for your mother, too.”

The source of the Paraná River was in Brazil, some 2,500 miles farther north. Carrying everything along with it as it went, it veined the delta before coming out on the Río de la Plata, where it flowed to sea.

A rhizome of water, mud, and jungle, with a surface almost as large as Uruguay, the El Tigre delta had hundreds of canals and as many islands, inhabited and uninhabited; sometimes these were moving islands consisting of the accumulated vegetation carried along by the currents. No vehicles other than motorboats were allowed in the ecological preserve; ports, luxury shops, hotels, residences, or bed-and-breakfasts, activity was concentrated around the city of El Tigre, but all you had to do was navigate a few miles for the houses and cabins to become few and far between. Then nature became luxuriant, wild, omnipresent.

From the back of the boat, Rubén was silently scrutinizing the bank. They passed alongside a thicket of brush, hardly disturbing the birds nesting there. Anita was in front with a detailed map of the region, and Oswaldo was at the helm.

Responding to the commotion she'd heard on the phone, Anita had rushed to Palermo and found Rubén in Jo Prat's apartment, looking haggard. There was a body on the terrace of the neighbors, who were terrified and had called for help, and her childhood friend was in the living room, shattered. He was staring absently at the weapons sitting on the table, and hardly reacted when she arrived. Anita brought him out of his lethargy. His precious witness had been kidnapped in turn, but all was not lost: Gianni Del Piro had made a telephone call the preceding evening. According to the information she had just received, the pilot was currently in the El Tigre delta.

Oswaldo came to pick them up at the marina, where Rubén had asked him to meet them as soon as possible.

An old friend of his father's, Oswaldo lived in a worm-eaten shack in the middle of the jungle: an ERP activist and a great book lover, Oswaldo had taken refuge in the delta after the first roundups in 1976, and had lived there ever since as a hermit, devoting himself to fishing and painting. Oswaldo had retained a phobia for the city and a savage hatred for anyone who wore a uniform. The old man guided the motorboat with a sure hand, his thick beard capturing the sea spray thrown up by the hull. Rubén had explained the situation to him without giving any details, and Oswaldo hadn't asked for any: Daniel Calderón had never seen any of his paintings, Daniel's son was a kind of nephew to him, and he knew the region like the back of his hand.

Del Piro's phone call had been made from a point about twelve air miles from the port of El Tigre. There was no town on the map, just a simple telecommunications relay in the middle of nowhere. The pilot had called from one of the islands scattered along the canals. Rubén felt depressed among the jugs of water and gasoline. He had made a mistake by telling Isabel Campallo about her daughter's pregnancy. She had informed her husband, who, in one way or another, had informed the killers. They had followed the trail back to Jo Prat and discovered the hideout. Jana. The idea that they might harm her revolted him. Die or go mad . . . No, he couldn't go through the same nightmare a second time. And still less at this precise point in his life.

Palm and banana trees grew along the bank. His traveling bag was wedged under the seat where it would stay dry, filled with weapons. Oswaldo was navigating at reduced speed through the zigzagging part of the canal, avoiding the fallen trees and branches on the surface of the water. No one around, only the millions of insects buzzing in the sun.

“This should be the right direction,” Anita commented, bent over her map.

Oswaldo grumbled. He didn't like cops, even if they were blond and had big breasts. Pollen and petals were floating in the air as they made their way upstream. An odor of mud emanated from the cloudy water. They passed by the abandoned dock of a colonial house made of wood and adobe, a few stands of pine, and a sprawling willow that held back the alluvium. The last corrugated-iron shacks had disappeared; ahead, there was nothing but miles of dense jungle. Disturbed, an
urutaü
, a local species of owl, fluttered in the branches. Leaving the meandering channels, Oswaldo headed straight ahead and accelerated in the lagoon. The boat was no more than fifteen feet long, but the motor was powerful. Spray flew up from the prow without driving away the birds, who were the kings of the delta. Across from them lay an island like dozens of others. Then there was a quicksilver glint in the sunlight. Rubén looked through his binoculars and felt his heart swell: it was a reflection off a fuselage. A seaplane.

He put his hand on Oswaldo's arm to make him slow down:
they were there
.

Anita was feverish in the front of the boat.

“Do you think they've seen us?”

They had made a loop to pass by at a distance from the island and were now doubling back through the canal on the other side. Rubén didn't answer. He had his loaded gun, his pockets were full of bullets, a billy club, a fighting knife, a pair of pliers, a tear-gas bomb; and a thirty-five-year-old hatred was wringing his stomach. Hugging the shore, Oswaldo brought them upstream, facing the wind. It was growing hotter and hotter as noon approached. Rubén glanced at his cell phone: he had reception again. The closest police station was not far away, on the Paraná River.

“Call Ledesma,” he said. “Have him send a police patrol boat.”

“The Old Man?” Anita asked. “O.K., but . . . Shit, what do I tell him?”

“That we've found the people who killed María Campallo and the laundress in Peru Street. Tell him that I take full responsibility, and especially that he should get his ass in gear.”

Anita glanced at him from the prow of the boat, met his icy gaze, and typed in the police chief's number on her phone. After a brief discussion, Anita was able to convince Ledesma and hung up, her hair flying in the breeze.

“It's done,” she said. “He's going to send a patrol boat. But you're going to be on the hot seat if you're wrong.”

Rubén wasn't going to wait the three-quarters of an hour it would take the delta cops to get there. Too late? The island was getting closer as they approached through the wavelets, hardly a hundred yards away. A moorhen was paddling nearby, serene in the current. They passed alongside piles of branches washed up near the bank, a thick vegetation interlaced with vines: Oswaldo was navigating slowly, keeping an eye out for movements in the surroundings.

The seaplane they'd seen earlier through the binoculars was bobbing on the other side of the island. Then they saw a cleared area, logs piled up under the pine trees, and, farther on, in the hollow of a little sheltered creek, the façade of a pink house. Rubén signaled to Oswaldo to land. The hermit turned off the motor. Anita was ready, her service weapon loaded, peering into the shadows under the branches. The boat soon ran up on a pile of pebbles and mud with reeds growing in it; with one leap, they were on land.

“Hide the boat and wait for us here,” Rubén whispered. “And be ready to take off in a hurry.”

“Don't worry, son.”

Oswaldo gave them a reassuring wink and watched them move away through the forest. Anita followed Rubén under the shadow of the pines, more and more anxious. He moved forward, hunched over, noiselessly, and suddenly knelt down behind a thicket. There were two guards on the terrace of the house, a speedboat tied up at the dock, and another sentinel under the pines, about twenty-five yards away. A guy with a neck brace, behind logs of wood, sitting on a deck chair. Rubén had seen him in Colonia.

“Maybe we should wait until the police get here,” Anita whispered at his side.

Rubén shook his head. In an hour Jana would be dead. Tortured, raped, her skin burned off with electricity, her love scattered. She might already be dead.

“Wait for me here,” he said in a low voice.

Oscar Frei was battling mosquitoes, glued to his chair, an automatic weapon under his armpit. He didn't see the shadow crawling up to the woodpile. The guard sensed a presence behind him, but sunk in his neck brace
and his deck chair, he turned around too late: the billy club struck his temple violently. A hand was held over his mouth as he faltered. Frei fell out of the chair, his head full of stars as he was being dragged toward the logs. He tried to stand up, but the sharp point of a knife slipped under his eyelid, slicing the thin skin.

“One move or a word and I'll cut out your eye and your fucking brain too.”

Lying on his cottony body, Calderón stared at him with crazy eyes.

“How many of them are there inside the house?” he murmured, very close to the man's face.

The knifepoint was piercing the lower eyelid. On the terrace, Pina and Gómez had seen nothing.

“A dozen,” Frei replied, pinned to the ground. “I don't know exactly.”

“Are they all armed?”

“No . . . There's a civilian . . . a doctor.”

“Is the Indian woman there?”

Frei nodded.

“Where is she? In which room?”

“I don't know . . . I'm on guard . . . I didn't see anything.”

Rubén raised his head and quickly assessed the topography of the place. The two guys were killing time on the terrace, which could hardly be seen through the branches. It was an old house of painted wood, built on pilings, with tall paned windows. Frei made the mistake of thinking that Calderón was distracted: he grabbed the detective's wrist, intending to wrestle with him on the needle-covered ground, but the blade immediately sank in. A sudden blow, struck with all the weight of Rubén's body. Frei groaned in Rubén's hand, which was still held tightly over his mouth to muffle the sound. The steel slipped under his eye as if it were butter, pouring out a continuous red flow, before it reached the brain. The man jerked a last time and died.