Blood Tango Read online

  Ara’s sneer deepened into disdain. “Those repressive goons who attacked our group were probably members of your police department. How am I supposed to believe that you will honestly try to find my brother’s murderer?”

  Leary hated it that the young snob was probably right. He chose to ignore the remark altogether. “Before you leave town, what can you tell me that would help my investigation? I want to try to catch the people who murdered Alberto. At the very least, it will comfort your grandfather to know his grandson’s death did not go ignored.”

  The kid began to inch his way to the door. At that rate, it would take him several minutes to get there. This baronial parlor was three times the size of Leary’s whole apartment.

  “My grandfather is dreaming,” Ara said. “There is no way anyone will ever be accused, much less punished, for what happened. Stop acting like anyone in the government gives a shit about one more dead student.”

  Leary touched Ara’s shoulder, stopping him from continuing to the door. “The fastest way to get rid of me would be to tell me what you know.”

  Ara looked unconvinced, but he answered. “There is nothing to say. We were marching to demand the rule of law. A car went past, its horn screeching. A guy in it stuck the nose of a machine gun out the window and fired into the crowd. Alberto took a volley.” He looked as if he would burst into tears.

  Leary waited for him to regain control. He took his notebook from his jacket pocket. “Can you give me any detail that might identify the car?”

  The boy shook his head. “I was busy diving out of its way. It was dark green.” His face turned defiant. “A military color, I believe.” He strode to the door and opened it.

  Leary saw that the kid felt guilty that he had saved himself and not his brother. He put his fedora back on his head. “I am sorry for your loss,” he said. “Take care of your family.” He didn’t wait for Eduardo to see him out but marched past him to the villa’s front door and got out of there as fast as he could.

  He drove back to police headquarters, writing his useless report in his head on his way. He was barely through the front door when his captain intercepted him and handed him a slip of paper with an address on Florida Street. “A woman—stabbed to death in front of a modista’s shop. A patrol car is already there,” was all he said.

  Leary looked at the address and then up at his boss’s retreating back. He was not going to get any help from that self-centered son of a bitch. Nor anything to eat for the next couple of hours. He shoved the paper into his pocket, made an about-face, and went back to the parking lot. This was a strange call. Violence was prevalent these days, but most of it was political—like the death of the Ara boy. Streetwalkers might catch hell; they always did, but they would not be hanging around at a place like that. Florida was a street where pickpockets roamed, especially at crowded times like Easter and Christmas, but the switchblade wielders who plagued the rest of the city rarely, if ever, intruded there. Leary had never heard of a woman killed with a knife on the most exclusive shopping street in town.

  He drove his dead uncle’s classy red Pontiac to the scene of the crime. With the traffic sparse and the center deserted, it took him less than twenty minutes. He passed the opulent Galerías Pacifico—a four-story crystal palace of expensive stores and marble coffee bars. Flood lamps here and there on balconies lit up sections of the brown stone facade, but the manikins in the windows stood in the dark, so no one could see how grand they looked in their silk suits and slinky cruise wear. The usual shoppers, diners, moviegoers from among the idle rich who might have jammed the pedestrian area roundabout were absent thanks to the early-evening storms and the turbulent times.

  Leary’s tires rumbled over the cobblestones as he turned from Córdoba onto Florida. He wondered what it would be like to have nothing to do but play polo and look for the latest fashions. The car he drove was the only stylish thing he was ever likely to own, inherited from his father’s brother who had made good in the U.S.A. and had come home just in time to die. The Pontiac was beautiful and purred to Leary as it glided down the narrow calle.

  Cast-iron streetlamps spilled pools of light at intervals along the empty walkway in front of shuttered shop windows. The rain had left puddles that glistened in his headlights. The patrol car he was looking for was stopped on the narrow sidewalk halfway between Corrientes and Sarmiento. Its high beams shone into the doorway of a dress shop. Leary scrunched his whitewall tires against the curb as he pulled up behind the other car.

  As soon as he got out, he saw the victim. Oh, shit. The body lying in the entryway was a girl’s, small and slender. Very young. Bad enough to be on permanent night shift when it meant investigating carved-up compadritos killed in their petty gangster knife fights. But a dead teenage girl? Younger than his youngest sister? Shit. Shit.

  “Hola, muchachos,” he called without enthusiasm to the uniformed men standing over the body. They parted, revealing the girl’s head. Disbelief stopped him in his tracks. It could not be. The dead person was the actress Eva Duarte? The mistress of the just deposed vice president of Argentina? And the captain had sent him to investigate? Velasco had not come himself? A murder like this should have brought out the minister of justice, if there was one after the government housecleaning of the past twenty-four hours. Maybe Velasco himself had already been thrown out—creature of Perón that he was.

  “I don’t think it’s her,” Ireno Estrada said. He was short and muscular and never kept his shirt collar buttoned once he left the station. Of all the nephews of minor-league politicians on the force, he at least had a brain in his head.

  Leary pushed back his fedora and leaned over the body. “She could have fooled me.” On closer inspection, the nose, the mouth did not look exactly like the face on the covers of his mother’s soap opera fan magazines, but everything else … “Was she on her back like this when you found her?”

  “No. I turned her over to make sure she was dead.” This was from Estrada’s chubby partner—Rodolfo Franco, whose mother’s second husband had the contract to pick up garbage in the Palermo district. The well-to-do refuse collector had dumped this particular piece of low-wattage trash on the Buenos Aires Municipal Police Force. Anyone with two centavos’ worth of brain cells would have concluded, from the size of the pool of blood surrounding the body, that there was not enough left in the poor girl to keep a mosquito alive.

  Her dress, where it was not soaked with blood, was pale green and looked expensive. A small, cheap purse on a metal-chain handle hung from her forearm. The real Evita Duarte, he was sure, would not have been caught dead in these tacky stiletto-heeled patent-leather shoes, one of which was half off the dead girl’s foot. But this waif had been caught dead in them. Where would a girl who could not afford decent shoes have gotten this dress?

  He reached up and closed her eyes, then opened her purse. It seemed almost as much of an invasion as the knife had made. He took out a small glassine envelope with her identity card and held it up to the beam of the patrol car’s headlights. “Luz Garmendia. It says she lives on Colombres. She was sixteen.” His voice choked on the last word.

  There was one peso, sixty-nine centavos in the purse, and a handkerchief edged with the kind of lace working-class girls made with fine cotton. Then, he noticed a glint of metal at the margin of the pool of blood, near the girl’s right hand. “A key.” This was odd. Poor girls did not live in houses that were ever locked. “The dress is too expensive for the shoes and purse.” He was thinking out loud.

  Franco guffawed. His soft belly wobbled when he laughed. “Big expert in girls’ dresses, are you, Robo?”

  Leary would gladly have strangled the knucklehead. “I have three sisters,” he said instead of a curse. He had been warned too often that his arrogance toward the politically well connected was not a proper path to promotion on the force. “I don’t imagine you know anything at all about women.”

  An ambulance siren approached from the north. Leary got to his feet and on a
whim tried the key in the lock of the shop door. It opened. He looked up at the sign across the top of the entrance. CHEZ CLAUDIA, it said in large gold letters, and under it in elegant script, STYLE POUR LES FEMMES.

  “Reno, find out where the owner of this shop lives and get me a phone number for him.” The ambulance pulled up. The spinning red light reflected off the girl’s blood.

  The driver approached with a stretcher. One glance and he looked stunned. “Holy God!”

  “It’s not her,” Leary said. But a suspicion was beginning to form in his mind that whoever had stabbed this poor girl had made the same mistake.

  * * *

  All over Buenos Aires at that moment people were worried, angry, puzzled. In their hovels in the villas miserias around the factories on the periphery, the poor rejoiced over the parting gifts Perón had announced over the radio in his farewell speech, but even more, they feared that his fall from power would take away the gains they had won from his hands.

  In posh apartments overlooking lush parks, or on patios with views of star-filled skies, and in the mahogany-paneled bar at the Officer’s Club in the Palacio Paz, the rich and the powerful told one another of their outrage over Perón’s audacity. They despised his final attempt to buy off the trash who did the dirtiest jobs in the land. More than a few of them believed Perón’s mistress was behind his outrageous behavior. They condemned “that woman” as the greatest threat to their society. Much as they hated Perón, it was the avaricious actress they cursed. It terrified them to think Evita, the venal and social-climbing virago, would resurrect her lover and rob them of their lifestyles of luxury. The words of the tango told them: the guilty are always the women. More than one self-satisfied plutocrat let out a dirty guffaw when he pointed out that like the woman who had committed mankind’s original sin, this viperous temptress was called Eva.

  It was well after midnight before the millionaire denizens of the Jockey Club or the Círculo des Armas turned their minds toward practical ways in which they might avoid a calamitous uprising incited by Señorita Duarte.

  Meanwhile, the actress was, from the start, all practicality. Before darkness fell, she sent Jorge and Cristina to the Brazilian grocery on the next block to buy canned foods that could sustain them if they were forced to endure a siege. She filled the bathtubs with water, in case the officials decided to cut them off from the necessities of life. She packed suitcases for a quick getaway and considered sewing her jewels into the hems of her skirts.

  Perón took a soldier’s precautions, closing and locking the shutters, checking and loading his pistol, and posting three sergeants armed with machine guns at his apartment door.

  THURSDAY, OCTOBER 11

  In the wee hours of the next morning, Rudi Freude, the son of a German immigrant billionaire and, some say, Nazi spy, who had been hard at work arranging for the importation of German gold and brainpower, drove a Benz touring car to the servants’ entrance of the massive, elegant apartment building where Perón and Evita had enjoyed their illegitimate cohabitation. Unnoticed by the crowd watching the front door, the little lady and her lover and a couple of small suitcases were swept away to Tres Bocas, a remote retreat where the bluebloods from the Avenida Alvear kept enormous country “cottages,” and where Evita and Juan could secret themselves in the home of a supporter. Domingo Mercante, Perón’s most trusted adviser, accompanied them.

  The Benz arrived at a dock where the boats of the wealthy awaited summer, when they would take their owners along tree-lined channels to their peaceful getaways. Once the fugitives had boarded one of them, Freude wrapped Evita in a blanket for the chilly ride.

  Subdued and worried, Perón sat in the stern of the boat and whispered with Mercante. Evita pulled the blanket around her like a shawl and stood at the railing. In the moonlight, the water was the color of pewter and looked solid enough to walk on.

  Freude tried his best to cheer her, plying her with hot coffee from a thermos and pointing out huge villas where, in the gardens, white blossoms of spring fluoresced in the midnight moonbeams. “I was at a party in that one,” he said of a two-story mansion, still boarded up and awaiting the vacation season. “It belongs to a friend of my father’s named Wagener. They have a great art collection, including a beautiful portrait by an artist named Klimt. I wish I could show it to you.”

  Evita wondered how he could think about pictures under the circumstances. She glanced back at Perón, hunched over, his hand cupped, lighting one cigarette from another. “I wish we were on a boat to Paris,” she said.

  Rudi gave her a doubtful smile. “Beautiful place,” he said. “I was there often after we took it in forty-three. I am sure you will see it one day.”

  She fell silent. A dull, cloudy Thursday was dawning by the time they finally arrived at the safe house. It looked more like a Black Forest chalet than an Argentine hideaway.

  Once Perón and Evita were delivered, Freude and the loyal Mercante took their leave.

  Perón put his arm around Evita as they waved good-bye until the boat disappeared into the gray gloom that smelled of mud. Perón spoke German to the caretaker, who built them a fire in the fireplace, brewed them some coffee, and trundled off to his apartment over the stable.

  They sat close together on a soft sofa before the fire. “Is Mercante going to get the union leaders to stand up for you?” she asked him.

  “He says he will do everything humanly possible to reverse the events of the past few days, but it’s a tricky business,” Perón responded.

  “You will need all your strength to fight those lily-livered idiots. If you show them any weakness they will eat you alive.” She delivered the line as if it were from one of her scripts when she had played Catherine the Great and Queen Elizabeth on the radio. For a moment she had an eerie feeling that her real life was being created by a scriptwriter for a radio drama. She squeezed his hand. She wondered if she would ever be an actress on the radio again. That bastard Yankelevich had called her and summarily fired her from Radio Belgrano the second Perón resigned. But she did not speak of this. Perón was too discouraged already. She snuggled closer to him.

  His sigh seemed forced, like that of an actor trying to make it heard over the airwaves. “I have warned Domingo to cooperate with the Federal Police if they come looking for us.”

  “If?” she asked, in a voice uncharacteristically satiric, completely atypical of her way with her colonel. “Is there any doubt that the officers and the ruling class will do whatever they can to stop you from helping the poor? And without Velasco in charge, they now have the police in their pockets.”

  At almost that very second, a member of the police force that Evita so feared telephoned Perón’s apartment on the Calle Posadas and spoke to Jorge Webber, the chauffeur, who had been left to hold down the fort. Roberto Leary was glad to hear that the actress had gone out of town in the middle of the night to a secret hideout over a hundred kilometers from the city. If there was a madman out to kill her, at least she was safely in hiding. Leary gave Perón’s man his phone number and extracted a promise that Webber would call him if the actress returned to Buenos Aires.

  Leary inhaled deeply to steel his nerves. This first task had turned out to be easy. His next job would, he was sure, be extremely unpleasant. He dialed the phone number of Claudia Robles, the modista who owned the shop where Luz Garmendia had been stabbed to death.

  * * *

  At ten that morning, Hernán Mantell drove Claudia Robles to meet a policeman at her shop. Hernán was at war with himself. With the latest upheaval, the government could totter either way. The journalist in him hoped for a return to the democratic constitution, which had been largely ignored for decades and then totally suspended when the military took over the government two years earlier.

  At that point, citizens’ rights went out the window. The newspapers had been censored, but now Perón’s departure left only the indecisive Fárrell in charge and the army with only a tenuous hold on power. If the future tipped
in the direction Hernán hoped for, freedom of the press might be restored.

  Hernán’s editor had called him at seven thirty to tell him that General Avalos was taking over as minister of war, which could mean only that Perón’s ouster was complete. Still, the army had almost no support among the people—less actually without Perón, since he at least had his descamisados down in the factories on the periphery. At this point, matters could open up or descend into even greater repression. And what of Perón? He didn’t seem the type to go quietly into that good night.

  Hernán’s work, even his existence, hung in the balance, but whatever his anxieties for his own future, the horrible news that had come just before dawn—of the murder of the girl Luz—had torn his mind away from those worries. How could he leave Claudia, his wife in all but name?

  He had had a lawful wife when he was barely out of his teens, a willing girl who had seemed almost as desperate for sex as he had been. When they were discovered together in the backseat of her father’s car parked in the family garage, he had been forced to marry her. Nothing much had happened between them after that. She repented her wanton ways, and as quick as she had been to open her legs before marriage, she kept them firmly closed after the hastily arranged ceremony. They grew apart, had not seen each other for decades, but he could not marry Claudia—the love of his life—because there was no divorce in Catholic Argentina.

  Duty called him to work, but love kept him with Claudia, at least until he delivered her into the arms of her father. The old man had taken the Subte to arrive at the shop on Florida at nine. By the time Hernán drove Claudia there, Gregorio Robles probably would have broken the news to Pilar, the seamstress. Having lovingly raised his daughter by himself, Gregorio would know how to comfort the young Pilar. He would also be there to greet the detective who was coming to interview Claudia about the murder. That is, if the policeman arrived early. Devotion to duty was not a signature habit of the Buenos Aires police force.