The train was nearly empty. People were keeping to home. But when Claudia emerged onto the streets of the working-class neighborhood, shoppers were out and about, mostly buying food for their suppers. The area around the subway stop was busy with open-air vendors, the sidewalks cluttered with racks of cheap clothing and tubs of seafood on ice outside a fishmonger’s store.
Claudia asked directions from a stooped granny pushing an old wicker baby carriage and picked her way down a narrow, gloomy street to a small plaza in front of an ancient church in ill repair. The barrio might have been quaintly attractive were it not for the squalor.
At the corner of the Calle Martínez, Garmendia’s street, a grocery displayed crates of pathetic little oranges stacked on rusty racks. Watermelons rested right on the cement pavement. Prices were scrawled in white chalk on a scrap of plywood painted black and resting against the storefront. Two tomatoes rotted in a greasy puddle in the gutter. Claudia’s heart sank, imagining young Luz buying food in this sort of putrid place to make the lunches Torres so disdained.
Number 39 was a dilapidated, once-elegant town house whose window boxes now contained only dead weeds. The dark door at street level was not brown, not black, not green—some ugly color between them all. The tiny vestibule smelled of cat urine and neglect. A sign taped to the doorbell said, OUT OF ORDER, KNOCK HARD. A small dog yapped somewhere inside. A list of tenants indicated that Luz’s family lived on the fourth floor.
Claudia hesitated to go in, but she had come this far. Tears welled in her eyes for the lost girl who had run away from this sad home. And to go where? To Torres, who undoubtedly lived in another such miserable hovel, which the desperate Luz thought would be a safe haven of happiness. A sob escaped Claudia.
Some children pushed into the entryway behind her, opened the inner door without a key, and ran up the stairs. Claudia entered behind them and started up after them. The hallway was dim, lit only by a single bare bulb on each floor. The voice of Alberto Acuña singing a tango on a radio spilled from the open door of a ground-floor flat. More schoolchildren in their white smocks, coming home for lunch, plowed in from the street and ran ahead of her as she walked up dusty, broken marble steps to the door of the fourth-floor apartment that Miguel Garmendia shared with his mother. She was a bit breathless when she knocked.
A slovenly old woman opened the door.
Luz’s grandmother frowned when Claudia told her her name and offered her condolences and the flowers, but the old lady let the door swing open and stood back to let the visitor enter. The room was shabby and sparsely furnished. It smelled of stewing beef.
The grandmother took the bouquet Claudia offered and put it on a battered oak chair. Claudia doubted there was anything resembling a vase in this place. “How did you know Luz?” the old woman asked.
Unprepared for the question, Claudia blurted out the first thing that came into her mind: “I met her at the market. I heard about the murder from a friend of mine who works at a shoe store on Florida.”
A large man sitting at a table against the far wall with a whiskey bottle and a glass in front of him growled at her statement. He couldn’t be anyone but Luz’s father. “Oh,” he said, “then you know the bitch who owns the dress shop.”
Claudia took one hesitant step over the threshold. “Do you know her?” she asked.
“Do I look like I order my clothes from a fancy modista? Does she?” He jerked his thumb toward his mother.
“I am so sorry for your loss, Señor Garmendia,” Claudia said. She kept her place near the open door. “You knew where she worked then? Luz didn’t think you did.”
The man stood up and swayed. “I asked a few questions at a tango club. A guy I knew saw Luz there with some little whore. What is all this to you?” He brandished a fist, but did not move toward her. He started to weep.
Claudia held her place. Though still wary of the man, a part of her heart wanted to believe his tears. He had, after all, lost his only child. But something told her any movement on her part could bring on violence.
In a few seconds he proved her instincts right. He sniveled and wiped his nose on his sleeve and started to shout. “You can’t fool me. You must be the bitch who gave her the job. I can tell by your fancy clothes. I ought to beat you within an inch of your life. That little bitch dishonored me, and you helped her do it. You deserve to die, too.” He took a step forward.
Claudia backed out the door and slammed it behind her. Praying he was too drunk to make it down the stairs without falling, she sped down as fast as her platform heels would allow.
The door behind her opened. “That’s right. Run away. But I know where to find you if I want to,” Garmendia shouted after her as she turned on the last landing. She made it to the front door and ran from the building.
Claudia’s heart did not stop thudding until she was back on the Subte, on her way back to her shop. In Buenos Aires, the very size of the city had always seemed to offer anonymity. The porteños all lived with the assumption that the complexity of their city protected them. That if they wanted to, they could hide in plain sight among the millions of other people and be safe. Claudia had assumed, for instance, that Torres would not discover where Luz worked, even though he worked at the building where Claudia lived. Yet, Garmendia, who had no connection whatsoever with anyone in Luz’s new life, had found her by coincidence because someone he knew had accidentally seen Luz at the Gardel with Pilar. Evidently, that someone had also told Garmendia where Pilar worked.
If Garmendia had managed to find Luz, it would have been even easier for Torres. If he so much as suspected that Claudia had anything to do with Luz’s escape from his grip, Torres would have been able to find the girl at Claudia’s shop in an hour. And if he knew about it now? He could come to her apartment door anytime.
She looked out the window of the Subte car; the darkness of the tunnel reflected back only her own mournful expression. In a city this size the girl should have been able to disappear from those dreadful people. Having discovered where Luz worked, had Garmendia then waited outside the shop for his daughter and killed her? He had wept over her death. Could he have faked those tears? She didn’t believe he could be such a clever actor. Perhaps he had butchered his daughter in one of his drunken rages and later repented it. Or perhaps Pilar was right, that Torres had killed Luz. It would have been even easier for him. Especially if the brute suspected Luz’s connection to Claudia. Even if he didn’t, Luz had told Pilar she had seen him at the rally. He could easily have followed them to the shop and then lain in wait until poor little Luz was alone.
Claudia shook her head and her reflection in the window shook its head back. She needed a coffee and a cigarette. Then she would try to talk to Roberto Leary. She had to persuade him to give up his harebrained theory about the murderer wanting to kill Eva Duarte. Either Luz’s father or Torres had robbed the girl’s life just when it was happiest. Whoever it had been must be made to pay.
* * *
That afternoon, Ramón Ybarra escorted a group of citizens into General Avalos’s new office in the Casa Rosada. When the general took over as minister of war, he had eschewed occupying the desk that Perón had so recently abandoned. He took instead a smaller place, closer to President Fárrell.
By their English suits and expensive shoes, the men of this delegation would likely take a position Ybarra could support. These were people he might find useful if he and Rocco could get enough officers on their side to make his planned uprising work.
Ybarra carefully introduced himself to each one and made sure they would remember the charming lieutenant when the right time came. He showed them into Avalos’s office. The obvious leader of the group took Avalos’s outstretched hand. “General,” he said, all cordiality. “Thank you for receiving us. I can only imagine how many things you have to attend to today. My name is Osvaldo Strade.”
“Yes, I recognize you from the pictures in Crítica.” Avalos indicated the chairs opposite his desk and invited them to
sit, but there were five of them and only two seats.
“No, no,” Strade said, holding up a hand. “We will speak our piece quickly and let you get on with your important work. We just want to make sure you understand how serious our objections are to Colonel Perón’s policies. Especially, we feel that the impossibly generous concessions he doled out in that impudent broadcast Wednesday must be rescinded at once.”
Ybarra knew better. If he had his way, no such step would be taken until the might of the army had taken firm control over the populace. He wondered that these obviously wealthy and powerful men did not see the inadvisability, even stupidity of negating Perón’s latest pronouncement before a true military state was established. Until then, all the workers in the packinghouses would need to hear was that the lily-livered government was stripping them of their gains. The riffraff would be up in arms in hours. They would not even need that whore of an actress to stir them up. These men would have their way, but not until after he and his friends cracked down on the monkey populations in the unions.
Ybarra managed to keep a straight face while Avalos gently broke the news to Strade and his followers that their request could not be granted. Then the general told them something that he had not yet revealed to Ybarra: “I can tell you in the strictest confidence that Colonel Perón will be taken into custody very soon. But I tell you without reservation that if any word of this leaks out before the fact, the arrest will not take place. The order is in the hands of the justices, but the law must be followed to the letter. I take it I have your word, as gentlemen, that you will not breathe a hint of this outside this room.”
Two days ago, Ybarra would have rejoiced at this news, which brought broad smiles to the faces of their visitors. Today, however, Ybarra was not sure how he felt. If the plan he was hatching was to come to fruition, Rocco and the other junior officers needed to see themselves as Argentina’s only hope. Any decisive move by Fárrell and Avalos against Perón would dilute their resolve.
Each visitor gave a signal of his oath not to tell: blessing himself or making a cross over his lips and his heart like a schoolboy in short pants. One even put his left hand on an imaginary Bible while he raised his right and said, “You have my word.”
Osvaldo Strade spoke again. “It would be best if we could tell the students outside the Palacio Paz what is going to happen. They are counting on us to convince you. I am afraid they will be outraged if we are forced to report that we failed to get action against the colonel.”
“I am sorry,” Avalos answered. “That would be out of the question. There would be no way to control the information if you shared it so broadly. A leak at this point would jeopardize the entire matter.”
The smiles left the faces of the delegates. They filed out in silence. Ybarra escorted them down the hall, eager now to get rid of them so he could find a private spot where he could telephone Cisco and tell him this latest news. When their party reached the stairs to the exit, his secretary approached him and put a pink telephone message in his hand. It was from his brother, who insisted on seeing him before the day was out. He crumbled it and stuffed it into his jacket pocket as he accompanied Strade and his coterie of magnates down the regal marble staircase to the front door and saw them off. As quickly as he could, he found an empty office at the rear of the third floor and dialed Francisco Rocco’s number out at Campo de Mayo. He was able to convince Cisco that they still needed to be ready—just in case.
“But we will not move unless we have to.” Cisco’s voice was tentative, almost fearful.
“Of course not.”
Before the end of the day, the captains of industry were proved more prescient about the situation than the generals of the army. That evening, Ybarra got more grist for his mill. Enraged students stormed through the great archway at the entrance to military headquarters at Palacio Paz and attacked the building. At 9:00 P.M., a shoot-out erupted between the students and the police. One man was killed and more than fifty others were wounded, including a Jewish-Italian immigrant woman who had done nothing more radical than take a walk in her own neighborhood with her husband, her daughter, and her young son.
In the face of this further chaos, late on that moonless night, President Fárrell finally signed a duly prepared arrest warrant for Perón. In his apartment in the Recoleta district, Ybarra had fallen asleep over a map where he had been planning attack routes between the Campo de Mayo and the center of the city. The telephone awakened him well before dawn. Avalos deputized him to go to Perón’s apartment with a squadron of soldiers to make the arrest.
As Ybarra suspected, Perón had already gone into hiding. Over the shouted objections of Perón’s chauffeur, Domingo Mercante told Ybarra where the colonel could be found. Mercante said that Perón had instructed him to reveal his whereabouts.
In his car, on his way back to his office to report that Perón was still at large, Ybarra passed a drunk in the street, shouting, “Viva Perón. Viva Perón.” Ybarra spit out the window in the man’s direction.
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 13
Though it was still dark, Juan Perón and Eva Duarte were awake and waiting in the house in Tres Bocas when the boat coming to arrest Perón approached. Jorge Webber and Domingo Mercante had beaten the arresting officers to the secluded retreat, Jorge hoping he could help Perón escape, and Mercante wanting only to prepare his friends for the inevitable and to see what help he could be at the last minute.
Perón immediately refused Jorge’s pleas that he and Evita run away. The whole idea of fleeing like some worthless outlaw depressed him even more than the thought of jail. “Please, Jorge, if you don’t mind,” he said, “go into the bathroom and pack up my razor and shaving soap. Get my cigarettes, and a few clean shirts and underclothes. I don’t imagine they will deny me a few necessities while I am in custody.”
Webber saluted, though he was not a soldier. He left the door to the bedroom open so he could hear the conversation in front of the fireplace as he quietly packed a bag for his colonel.
Mercante and Perón immediately turned their attention to how the situation could be rescued. As Webber expected, Evita insisted that they focus on the needs of the lowest workers. “The poor grasitos,” she said. “Their hearts will be broken when they find out. Domingo, you must help them. If you can get them to rise up, they will save their hero. They would die for you, Juan. I know they would.”
Perón put his arm around her shoulder. All the energy of the champion athlete that usually infused his body was drained. “You see, Domingo, why I chose her to be my other self? Her heart goes right to the descamisados. And no one I have ever met works as hard as she does. I thought I was a man who knew how to work hard. But she makes me feel like a lazy lout.”
“What good will it do me without you?”
Mercante went to the front windows to look for the boat they all knew was coming. He glanced back at Evita and then at the colonel. “What do you think we should do next?” he asked Perón.
Perón turned away from her and gave Mercante a knowing look. “I am not sure we can come out of this on top,” he said. “I will need a lot of help if I am going to stand up to my enemies. We will have to chart the best course through roiled waters. It will not be easy to find.”
Evita began to pace. “Just tell me what you want me to do. I will be a fanatic for your cause.”
Perón answered her, but he looked at Mercante when he did. “Your time has not yet come. You will know when to act, mi gioviota. In the meantime, I want you to stay safe and stand by me.”
She studied him with that look of hers, of intense observation. She was where he wanted her: too off-kilter to rush about and make trouble. His future hung in the balance. But it was not just a tug-of-war between opposing factions in Argentina. More important to him were the forces within this tiny sylph of a woman—her swings between rage against injustice and hunger for fame. She was not enough of an actress to play her role well if he defined it for her. If he directed her too strongly
, she would overdo her part. If he tried too hard to tone her down, he would freeze her into doing nothing. He had to step her along slowly until the time was right. Then she would do what he needed with all her heart, and her sincerity would be irresistible.
He turned to Mercante. “Domingo, will you look after her for me?” He caught Mercante’s glance and saw that he understood the full import of what looking after Evita could mean.
“Certainly,” Mercante said. He went to the window again. “No sign of it yet.” He went back to Evita and took her hand. “Do you have anyplace where you can stay besides your apartment on Posadas? Demonstrators will focus on it. It will not be comfortable for you there.”
“If there was a phone here, I would call Pierina Dealessi, a friend from my stage-acting days. She has always helped me when I needed her. As soon as we get back to Buenos Aires, I will ask her if I can stay with her. I know she will say yes.” Pierina had taken Evita in many times when she was unknown and starving, in those dreary days before she had regular work.
They heard a boat approaching. At this hour in the off-season, it could only be the one they expected. Its engine roared like some huge and angry jaguar coming up the channel to hunt them. She went to Juan and embraced him, finding it impossible to hold back her tears or her outrage. “The generals have all the power at this moment. They have all the money and the guns, but we have heart. Heart will always win, because heart will never give up.”
Jorge Webber closed the bag he was packing and carried it to the front door just as the knock came.
Blood Tango Page 8
