Blood Tango Read online

  Leary let the comment pass. He made a show of writing down the names of the two men they suspected and asking for information about how to find Torres. No one around the table seemed at all impressed with his Evita–look-alike theory.

  Pilar Borelli stuck to her guns about Miguel Garmendia. “Her father came to Club Gardel, where I dance,” she said, her voice intense and tinged with fear. She described a scene that gave credence to her conviction. The brute had made an out-and-out threat. Considering how cold and uncaring his mother had been on seeing her dead granddaughter and the fact that even she described her son as a hopeless drunk, he was probably more than capable of violence toward Luz.

  “Luz told me,” Pilar said, “that he beat her all the time, from when she was a very little kid.” She made the case against Garmendia even more credible. “That’s why she ran away as soon as she was old enough.”

  Leary, who believed that Luz had never really gotten old enough to run away, looked to Claudia Robles for confirmation, but she shrugged and said, “I know she lived with the gardener who works at my apartment building, a man nearly fifteen years older than she, and he was cruel to her in public. That speaks for how he must have treated her in private.” Claudia looked down at her lap. “I thought I was rescuing her from an evil existence by giving her a job and finding her a decent place to live.” Tears started to fall from her eyes onto the pad where she had been scribbling most of the time.

  “When did Luz come to work here?”

  “A little over six months ago.”

  “And when did she start making herself up to look like Eva Duarte?” Leary asked.

  “Just in the last week,” Claudia Robles answered. “I gave her a raise. She must have used the money for a dye job.” She gave him a hurt look, as if he had forced her to confess to the crime.

  He turned to the pretty tango dancer. “When did you encounter her father in the Club Gardel?”

  “Only a few days ago.”

  He closed his notepad. “Perhaps,” he said to Pilar, “you should stay away from the club for now, considering that Garmendia knows you go there.”

  She looked at him as if he had suggested she cut off her leg.

  “At the very least,” he said, “watch out for him. If he comes anywhere near you, call me.” He handed her a card with the phone number of his office. She picked it up with both hands, read it, and then pierced him with a look. Her deep-set, dark almond eyes were inquiring, but there was an undercurrent of fear in her voice when she spoke. “I will,” she said. “I will.”

  * * *

  Ramón Ybarra, back in uniform and accompanying his commanding officer General Avalos to the Casa Rosada, listened with satisfaction as President Fárrell named his boss to take over one of Perón’s posts: minister of war. Progress, at last. Perhaps now Avalos would stop sleepwalking and take steps to prevent any uprising in favor of Perón. The only way to accomplish that would be by force.

  “Colonel Perón has left town,” Fárrell reported, as if that settled the matter for good. This president had been Perón’s creature. In the most recent shake-up, the tall, power-hungry colonel, of too low a rank to take over the presidency himself, had needed a weak superior officer to be the titular head of the government. Perón had put his considerable strength behind Fárrell. A perfect choice for the puppet master. President Fárrell had the personality of a skink. He might kill a fly, but that was about the extent of his combative impulse. But with Avalos as minister of war there was a chance for a show of strength. Avalos commanded the troops at the Campo de Mayo—at least a third, maybe a half of the Argentine army. He could order them into Buenos Aires with a phone call.

  “Things will calm down now,” Fárrell said. “All we have to do is show the protesters that we are changing the government, making some concessions to them. Then, I think we will be out of the woods.”

  Ybarra opened his mouth to offer an opinion, but Avalos raised his hand. “Let us hope,” he said, “that Perón will slink away for good.” Ybarra’s hopes, rather than rising as his general suggested, wobbled and sank. Did these two old peacocks have no understanding of the uses of power? If they didn’t, Ybarra was sure Perón did. He had seen the colonel’s handsome, withdrawn face at army gatherings and recognized the mask of a deep thinker, planner, schemer. Ybarra was sure of it.

  As they left the Casa Rosada, Avalos put a fatherly hand on Ybarra’s shoulder. “Don’t scowl so, Ramón,” he said. “Have you talked to your brother? I asked him to speak to you.”

  It amazed Ybarra, this weak-kneed appeal, as if a big brother should be called in to subdue a petulant, overwrought child. His brother, a major in the quartermaster corps, had left him a message to call. But little brother was an adult now, not a six-year-old who was subject to the advice of a brother ten years his senior. Ramón held his tongue. Instead he lied and said he had spoken to him.

  “He told you about the letters?”

  Ybarra would be caught in the lie if he said yes, and in not obeying his superior officer if he said no. “Perón should be arrested,” he said instead. “That’s the only way we are going to have any chance of controlling what he does next.”

  “A girl was killed last night who looked like Evita Duarte,” Avalos said. “I heard it from Justo Arietta, who has temporarily taken over the Federal Police.”

  “Has Velasco been pushed out?”

  “Yes,” Avalos said. “We need the police to back the army now. Velasco was loyal to Perón.”

  Ybarra was not sure Arietta had the cojones for the job. “What about this murder?”

  Avalos shook his head. “The dead girl was a nobody, but the police think whoever murdered her was after the actress.”

  Ybarra thought for a second. “That would give us an excuse to incarcerate the actress, too,” he said. “We can put the proud Evita into protective custody.” He warmed to this idea. “If Perón and his hussy are both in jail, they will not be able to incite the rabble against the government, as I am convinced they will.”

  Avalos gave him a curious look. “You know I take your thoughts on this subject seriously, Ramón, but in this case, I think we have bigger fish to fry than the pipsqueak radio-novella actress. I have arranged for the officer corps to meet us at the Paz Palace. We are going there now. We have to reorganize ourselves for any eventuality. The faster we put together a new government, the safer we will be. There are too many dangers that could await us.”

  Their car took ten minutes to get through a small but determined group of pro-Perón demonstrators who had taken up a post blocking the thirty-foot arch that guarded the entrance to the Palacio Paz, the military headquarters of Buenos Aires. The massive mansion with its mansard roof and majestic facade was supposed to be a bastion of strength. Ybarra had his doubts.

  Inside, three hundred military men heard their new secretary of war call for elections at the first possible moment. Lieutenant Ramón Ybarra, tortured by his scratchy, hot uniform, listened with rising anger while Argentina’s top military men toyed with totally inadequate strategies. Nothing they considered doing would put Perón permanently out of the way, much less reestablish the army’s dominance. Perón’s supporters would rise up all over the country. The noisy group outside these very windows were not the only workers who would march. Pro-Perón demonstrations were already under way up north in Jujuy. Well, if they were not going to solve the problem, he had to try.

  As the meeting broke up, Ybarra gave the high sign to his fellow lieutenant, Francisco Rocco. “Cisco,” he said, smiling as if he were going to invite Rocco to a soccer match. When they were close enough not to be overheard, he said, “I have to be at Campo de Mayo tomorrow for an early conference. Meet me at ten thirty in the officer’s mess for a coffee.”

  * * *

  After leaving the modista’s shop, Roberto Leary spent the day digging for information to back up his theory that whoever had murdered Luz Garmendia had been after Eva Duarte. By noon, after hours without progress, he de
spaired of getting anywhere. The murderer had left no clues at the scene. All Leary could do was think about what the possible motive might be and work backward. Her father, her ex-lover Torres, of course, but everything in Buenos Aires seemed to be about politics these days. Even the death of a simple nobody like Luz Garmendia. That she could so easily be mistaken for Evita must have had something to do with the killer’s going after her.

  Leary focused on trying to find out the names of outspoken anti-Perónists who targeted their venom at Eva Duarte, people who might have thought that killing the actress would further weaken Juan Perón. Leary’s was a weary endeavor. Millions wanted the now-former vice president and minister out of the way, but most people Leary spoke to scoffed at the idea that a woman could have any influence whatsoever on the power structure. They imagined that the wives of the mighty could have a bit of private clout, but they believed such women knew enough to keep themselves in the background or real men kept them there. As for mistresses, they were playthings. If a man didn’t think enough of a woman to marry her, she would never be able to change the state of the nation. Leary wondered about this conventional wisdom. Watching what happened in his own family had convinced him that a determined woman who had a man’s ear could certainly sway him. All the more so if she also had access to the more vulnerable parts of his body.

  Leary had to find out who might hate the actress enough to have done her harm. He thought around in circles until the light suddenly dawned on him. He punched himself in the forehead when he finally realized where to look. All the powerful of Buenos Aires had spies watching their assumed enemies, and Perón must have had a network of thousands of snoops.

  Leary asked around in his office and found one of his fellow investigators who knew Colonel Domingo Mercante, Perón’s greatest adherent, a fellow colonel who was known to act as Perón’s chief of staff. Mercante would be the man who knew everything. If anyone could identify Eva Duarte’s major detractors, he could.

  Mercante seemed standoffish when Leary first called, but when Leary told him about Luz Garmendia’s murder just following Perón’s farewell rally at Perú and Alsina and that the girl was an Evita Duarte look-alike, Mercante immediately gave him a name: the rogue union leader Tulio Puglisi. “He gets vicious when he talks about her,” Mercante said. “And despite his anti-Perón sentiments, he was there that afternoon.”

  Leary thanked Mercante, but he was sorry to suspect Puglisi. He had met the young union man while investigating a break-in at the National Shoe Makers Union office. Puglisi was passionate about his work, something Leary envied because he used to feel that way, too. The last thing a demoralized detective needed was to investigate a man he liked for such a miserable crime.

  It took the rest of the afternoon, going through files at the office of a friend who worked for the newspaper Crítica, to find a photo of Puglisi in the paper’s morgue—where they kept all their backup information.

  Leary took the clipping and chose to show it to the winsome tango dancer who had been with Luz Garmendia at the rally. He told himself she was his best witness and that it was information, not the girl, he was after. In any case, he knew where he could find her after dark.

  Late that evening, Roberto Leary entered a bar on the ground floor of an elegant gray cement building that would have been built of stone if it had been in Paris. Here in the “Paris of the South,” the architects had pretensions of elegance but only lowly materials with which to build.

  When he entered the Club Gardel, the room, four steps down from the sidewalk, was almost as dark as the gloomy street outside. He did not pay the entrance fee; cops never did. He checked his hat and made his way through the knot of young men blocking the bar.

  The band was playing “La Violetera,” and the dance floor was packed with couples circling in tight formation. Without moving his body, he could feel how his muscles would respond to the music. It had been too long since he had danced, or known a woman he wanted to dance with. He was a cop now, on the trail of a possible witness to a bloody murder. Pilar was known to be here four, five nights a week. He was sure to find her on a Thursday, the night that regulars never missed, when the crowd was thick and excitement high, but when it was still possible to really dance, as it often was not in the crush of Friday and Saturday mob scenes.

  Aware that his upper body had begun to sway to the music, he pushed his way through to the bar and ordered dry vermouth on the rocks. He took the drink and plowed back out through tight groups of working-class muchachos to watch the couples as they passed under the spotlight near the bandstand. Most of them were in close embrace, some wonderful dancers, obviously accustomed to dancing together. Light glinted off the metal edges of the bandoneón as the player extended and squeezed the instrument and made heartrending music.

  Leary recognized the girl’s hair first—straight, shining black, bobbed to jaw length and swinging like silk fringe as she turned her head from side to side with the movements of the dance. Her red dress hugged her ass, with a slit halfway up her leg, giving her room to step. She and her partner disappeared around to the other side of the crowded floor. Leary sipped his drink and waited for the song to end.

  When Pilar spotted Leary coming toward her as the next number was about to begin, her heart beat with fear of being questioned about Luz’s murder, but she could not resist him. She let go of Mariano’s hand and moved toward the detective without a backward glance. She thought she saw in the intention in his eyes a cabecco, a look that was an invitation to dance. She held out her hand to him, as the strains of “Yira, Yira” began, happy for the musicians’ choice. He took her hand, kissed it, and let it go. “Can I buy you a drink?”

  Her heart sank. There were a few things she would like to do with this man. Dance, to begin with. But talk about Luz’s murder was not one of them. “Thank you, yes.”

  They took their drinks to the corner nearest the door. A couple of the club regulars snuffed out their cigarettes in a black Bakelite ashtray, got up, and gave them the tiny table. They sat across from each other on bentwood chairs, and Leary put his head near hers to be heard over the music and the chat of the crowd filling the aisle between the hatcheck and the bar. “You dance beautifully,” he said.

  “I would gladly dance with you.” Perhaps this night would live up to her hopes after all.

  His dark eyes smiled, then turned serious. “I want to ask you about a man who was at the rally the afternoon before Luz was killed. I am wondering if you saw him, and if he might have followed her afterwards.” He reached into the inside breast pocket of his jacket and took out a newspaper clipping and placed it on the table between them. He pointed to a man in suit, sitting at a desk with two other men. He was young and good-looking, with dark wavy hair and light eyes. He was smiling broadly in the photo. The caption identified the man as Tulio Puglisi, a director of the National Shoe Makers Union.

  She shook her head. “He’s young to have such an important position.” The walls next to Leary and behind him were mirrored, so when she looked up she saw two of him and wondered if one was a cop and the other a dancer.

  Leary asked again if she had seen that Puglisi fellow at the rally. “He is about my height,” he said.

  “No,” she said and shook her head again. “I don’t remember seeing him. There were a lot of people there.” She hated to disappoint him, but it frightened her to her core to think the murderer might kill her because she was a potential witness. Her reflection in the mirror behind Leary’s head frowned at her. She did her best to change that look to a smile.

  He shoved the photo back into his pocket and drained his drink. The band took up “Arrabal Amargo.” “I’ll have that dance now,” he said, with just the right combination of request and command.

  He took her hand and led her to the dance floor. Despite the press of the crowd, he held her in open embrace. He was just a bit taller than she in her high heels. He held his cheek against her forehead, but their bodies apart. The narrow space of air
between them seemed infused with the pulsating rhythm and the nostalgia of the music, but though he led her with the intensity of longing in the song, he never closed the embrace. Only their ankles and knees brushed as their legs passed each other’s. His cheek was smooth, recently shaved, and carried the minty smell of shaving soap.

  He never let go of her hand, not even when the band took a break and he took her to the bar for a drink. They danced every dance. He spoke hardly a word. As the crowd thinned and gave them room, his improvisations of steps and pauses, the passion with which he danced made her wild for him. Just before dawn, the band signaled the end by playing “Adios Muchachos,” the song to which no one danced because it was the last song the great Carlos Gardel had sung before he boarded a plane that crashed and ended his life. The dozen or so couples still left on the dance floor stood swaying almost imperceptibly, watching the bandoneón open and close, the fingers of the guitar player on the strings, listening to Mariano sing the words.

  Leary drove her home and kissed her chastely on the cheek and then drove his wonderful red American car away, the headlights illuminating the buildings as he rounded the curve at the end of the cobblestoned street and disappeared, leaving her alone with her desire.

  * * *

  At midnight, the president of the nation took to the airwaves, announcing that elections would be held at the earliest possible moment. In hastily arranged meetings, half the army brass still hoped to maintain Fárrell in office. The other half supported a solution put forward by professors and students, that the Supreme Court take power in the interim. The other armed services saw this as impossible. The navy reminded anyone who would listen that the court had no power. Who on that court knew how to run a country? No one.

  Many wondered whether anyone could rule this nation, divided as it was.

  FRIDAY, OCTOBER 12

  The next morning, while the newspapers carried no truthful news and a whirlwind of rumors terrified the citizenry, Hernán Mantell gave Claudia a good-bye kiss. She had kept him up until the wee hours, protesting, “It’s my fault. I thought I was helping her by bringing her out of the misery she lived in, but I brought her to her death.” She wept at intervals and talked about how the death on her doorstep would affect her business. Then went back to guilt, this time over thinking about money when Luz Garmendia lay on a slab in the morgue.