Sweet Money (3 page)

 

Maisabé brings him a cup of strong, black coffee, without sugar, puts it silently down on the desk and leaves. At the exact instant she vanishes from his sight, she says
, Good morning.
Giribaldi doesn’t answer; he looks at the steaming cup; he smells the aroma of the coffee as if it were a memory. The only thing that’s real is what’s happening at this very moment. The minutes, the hours, the days spill into the emptiness, the endless void. He brings the cup to his lips and doesn’t realize, until much later, that the liquid has burnt his tongue. He wonders if his numbness is due to a terminal illness.

He waits for more than three hours before the secretary informs him that a problem has come up and the general won’t be able to make it. She doesn’t offer him another appointment, she says she’ll consult with her boss and call him. Her voice lacks conviction, her words are halfhearted, she makes not the slightest effort to pretend. Major (Ret.) Leonardo Giribaldi leaves the building at 250 Azopardo and starts walking toward Corrientes. He, like so many other military officers who were discharged when Alfonsín promoted more modern ones, has become a pariah. Nobody is going to stick his neck out for them or defend them. On top of that, it seems they should now be grateful that they’re not being put on trial. The worst part is that nobody tells them what’s going on, everybody simply ignores them, as if they had never existed.

Giribaldi is trembling with rage. He sits down on a bench in the plaza and tries to calm down. From high atop a pillar, Columbus looks toward Spain, his back to the Casa Rosada, the presidential palace. A palace that’s never occupied, he believes, by great men, patriots, those who devote their lives to serving their country. The blue-and-white flag waves from over one of the balconies. During other eras, its majestic flutter filled him with pride; now all he feels is shame. The communists managed to take over. What they couldn’t win as men, on the battlefield, they won by seducing the people, who always want to be flattered. He looks at the window of the office of the President of Argentina.

 

 

He tries to push these thoughts away because they make him feel like he’s going to explode with rage. He’s got to do something, get busy, or he’s afraid he’ll go crazy. He gets up, spits on the gravel path and turns toward the post office. It’s time for the stampede of office workers. Tomorrow he has an appointment with Gutiérrez, who made a lot of dough as commander of a task force and used it to start a cleaning and security business. Seems he’s doing well, but when they spoke he told him,
As long as you don’t get your hopes up, come on over and we’ll have a cup of coffee.
He already knows he’s not going to give him a job, but at least they can talk. For too long his wife has been practically the only person he talks to. All Maisabé goes on about is the house, the boy’s school, the prices, the money that’s never enough.

He walks down the stairs into the subway along with a rushing, chaotic and undisciplined crowd. All these noisy, disorderly people make him sick. He represses an urge to bark out an order for them all to fall into line.
If he had the slightest hope of being obeyed, Giribaldi would divide them into two groups: those going up and those going down. Those boarding the train would take one step back to leave room for those getting off. Once the cars were emptied out in an orderly fashion, the others could step forward and enter. Quick, efficient, organized, clean. This upsets him – people on the loose, struggling for space, pushing each other like animals in a corral. If it were in his power he would impose rational discipline that would save them from their own bestiality, this promiscuous rubbing of body against body, this total lack of respect for each other’s space. But he has no power at all. Once he did, and he could exercise that power anywhere and everywhere and at any time. Then his power was limited to the barracks. Now: nothing.

 

While he waits for the train, whose slow and tentative headlights are already shining through the tunnel, he feels like anybody, like nobody, like one more victim of the shoves and neglect of these civilians, civilians who are utterly oblivious to the debt of gratitude they owe men like him. People crowd around, get tenser and tenser, preparing for their attack on the seats. Giribaldi, a bit stupefied from staring at the lights that grow as they approach, thinks about the minuscule distance that separates him from death: one step and it’s over. Everything. Someone touches his back. His first thought is that they want to push him onto the tracks. He wheels around, his hand flying to the nine-millimetre gun in his shoulder holster, and he glues a furious eye onto a young yuppie. He looks him over – a two-day stubble, black suit, yellow tie and colourful backpack. The yuppie
doesn’t even look back at Giribaldi, he’s in his own world, his ears covered by earphones echoing a rhythmic
dum-dum
that keeps time with the swaying of his head. The crowd starts to move and, with the force of a wave, sweeps Giribaldi into the train.

4

Marcelo moved out of his parents’ house less than four months ago. Now only his mother’s, because Mario passed on a week after Marcelo moved out. That death was anticipated, though not expected so soon. There were unexpected complications due to bronchitis, the doctors made the diagnosis and the old man came down with acute septicaemia. A few days earlier, when Marcelo asked him how he was, he delivered his last good line
: Well, truth is, I’m much closer to the harp than the guitar.
He died from one day to the next. Marcelo has dinner with his mother two or three times a week.

 

Due to the customary period of mourning, he had to delay his marriage to Vanina. A few days after his father died, he was appointed Public Prosecutor. He benefited from the resignation of many judicial officials who were not keen to have their actions during the dictatorship investigated. He attributed his promotion to his father, a little help from the above and beyond. Then he felt odd for having entertained such a thought. Life after death seemed to him about as probable as a pig with wings. But it was his private way of acknowledging everything his father had given him, everything he was grateful for.

Vanina was the most beautiful girl in high school, and now she is the most beautiful girl in the architecture department at the university. Though perhaps a little too aware of her beauty, she is polite and well educated. Marcelo thinks that her self-consciousness makes her movements less spontaneous, too studied, designed to emphasize her best features of face and figure and made to please whatever – people, animals, even objects – she has in front of her. They are both still caught up in how they are seen by their group of high-school friends, a group in which they are “the” couple. She has always been quite keen on the idea of getting married and having a family, but she accepts the excuse of Mario’s death to postpone the wedding with fewer protests than Marcelo would have hoped for, and more anger than he could have ever imagined. He doesn’t realize that Vanina’s anger smoulders away inside her like live embers, embers one notices only when they burn you. Since his appointment as a Public Prosecutor, he’s had a deluge of projects he’s wanted to work on. Investigations, open cases, a series of crimes committed by the military during the dictatorship that have never been brought to trial or punished, that have been bogged down in a series of laws and contradictory decrees, in many cases unconstitutional, which he would have to disentangle and pursue in opposition to the government’s lack of political will to prosecute criminals in uniform.

 

Mama is in the kitchen putting the last touches to the meal. The room that was his is exactly the same as it was the day he left it. That his mother has left it intact feels a bit creepy, even ghoulish, like when parents of a
child who has died make cenotaphs of their rooms. Marcelo came to look for something he left there when he used to be a clerk in Judge Marraco’s court, documents pertaining to an investigation that was left unresolved – the Biterman case. When he takes the envelope off the bookshelf, he knocks to the floor a book by Kelsen his father gave him when he started studying law. He sits down on the bed, puts down the envelope and picks up the book. In spite of being an impenitent reader, his father didn’t like writing at all, not even a dedication, but he did highlight one paragraph in yellow:
Justice, for me, is the shield under whose protection science – and along with science, truth and sincerity – can flourish. This is the justice of freedom, the justice of peace, the justice of democracy, the justice of tolerance.

He smiles. That morning he has been working on several cases of children of the disappeared, those who were stolen by the military during the dictatorship. The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo had supplied him with evidence, some of which mentioned a military base in the provinces that was used as a base of operations and clandestine detention centre, named Coti Martínez. It was believed that Coti was short for
Comando de Op-eraciones Tácticas I
. Several witnesses implicated a major by the name of Giribaldi. He made note of that name, which was somehow familiar. He had seen it before, and he spent all morning trying to remember exactly where. In the afternoon, while he was having lunch with Mónica, his friend and mentor, a judge in the criminal courts, suddenly, between bites of Don Luis’s steak with mushroom sauce, he remembered: his name had figured in the Biterman case.

Superintendent Lascano, otherwise known as Perro, gave Marraco all the evidence related to Biterman’s murder, in which Giribaldi was a suspect. The situation was as follows: as was common at that time, the task force, or death squad, commanded by the major had executed two young people, a man and a woman, in an empty field. By chance, a truck driver stopped on the shoulder to take a piss and saw the dead bodies. He drove away and reported what he’d seen at the Puente de la Noria police station. A little earlier that same night, a man named Amancio Pérez Lastra had an altercation with Elías Biterman, a money lender from the Once neighbourhood to whom he owed a lot of money. Biterman ended up dead. Pérez Lastra then turned to his old friend Giribaldi to help him dispose of the body. The major suggested he dump it in the same place where he’d shot the two subversives. In the meantime, Lascano was sent to the scene to investigate the two dead bodies the truck driver had reported, but when he arrived, he found three dead bodies, one of which exhibited many features different from the other two. Lascano realized that this corpse had been dumped there rather than executed by the military. He began investigating and all hell broke loose. He identified the murderer and the weapon used in the crime, and specified each link in the chain of complicity. Marraco did not include any of this evidence in his investigation, and Marcelo was an eyewitness to this intentional concealment of evidence. Instead, the judge instructed Marcelo to take the file to Giribaldi, which Marcelo did after he made photocopies of its contents. Those documents, which implicate Giribaldi in the death of a civilian, are in that envelope he is now holding in his hands.

Tomorrow he will try to find Lascano. He has the feeling he might be biting off more than he can chew. His mother calls him to the table. He puts all the documents back in the envelope. He decides to also take Kelsen’s book with him.

 

The aroma wafting down the hallway makes his stomach growl like a crocodile: his mother makes the best risotto in the world.

5

Jorge shaves meticulously and for a long time. He opens the tap and contemplates with satisfaction as the bathroom fills up with steam. He undresses and steps into the very hot shower. His wife says he boils himself rather than bathes. He washes his hair with herbal shampoo, scrubs his body with scentless glycerine soap, then rinses twice. He dries himself off in front of the open window, feeling his pores closing in the cold breeze. He takes a bottle of Fahrenheit cologne out of the medicine cabinet. He aims the spray at the ceiling and lets the cloud of scent fall over his skin like a morning mist. These moments of his morning ablutions are when he plans his day, when he feels most inspired. He’s quite satisfied this morning. Despite all the Apostles’ manoeuvrings and the pressure they applied to secure the position for one of their own, he got it. He remembers Filander’s angry look the day he was sworn in, and he smiles. Now he must quickly dismantle their operation. Those guys are no sissies, and he can’t expect them to roll over and play dead. That very morning he will begin to execute his plan to decapitate the organization. He knows he doesn’t have a moment to lose; he can’t give them time to get a foothold, surround him, throw him
off balance. In one fell swoop he will move Cubas to the Oran precinct, he’ll open an internal investigation of Valli and Medina – up to their eyeballs in the racket of stripping stolen cars – and he’ll put Bellón and García on administrative leave. Filander has to die. He’d rather avoid such a measure, and he resorts to it only when he has absolutely no other choice; this, he believes, is such a case. Filander is a dangerous lunatic. He trusts the rest will scurry away like cockroaches when the lights go on. Then he’ll deal with them in a few days. Ladeski has had it in for Hernández ever since he got the upper hand and kept the fifteenth precinct. If he promises it to one of them and gives the seventeenth, for example, to the other, he’s got a good chance of getting them both on his team. He’ll first have to see their reactions, but he’s almost sure they’ll come on board with him. He just has to wait and see.