Blood Tango

by Annamaria Alfieri

  “Yes, I was. So were ten or fifteen thousand other people.”

  Leary conceded the point. His other prime suspect, Tulio Puglisi, had also been there, as apparently had the dead girl’s father and ex-boyfriend. “I think whoever killed her followed her from that rally.”

  Ybarra gave Leary a quizzical look. “Listen,” he said, “there is part of me that wants to get mad at you, to remind you that since June we have had insanity in the capital, people marching in the streets, people throwing rocks at one another, firing machine guns from speeding cars. And you are bothering me with this stupid little murder.”

  Leary was getting more and more suspicious. Ybarra was too good at this game of cat and mouse and was trying too hard to deflect the questions. He could not be totally innocent of knowledge concerning the crime. “Well, I could say what an army guy would probably say, ‘I’m just following orders.’”

  “I suppose. But I have another theory. Have you considered that Perón might be behind the killing of the girl?”

  Leary was flabbergasted. “What could be his motive?”

  “Well, if she was mistaken for the actress, the dead girl must have been young, slender, and small. That’s Peron’s type. She looked like the actress, who looks like a sixteen-year-old herself, right? Perón has a disgusting penchant for little girls. If he had a liaison with the dead girl, he might have had her killed if he thought she was going to talk about it. You should work on that angle—that Perón raped her and had her killed because she threatened to expose him.”

  Leary could not speak. He had been over this with Claudia Robles’s father. When the old man brought it up, Leary had figured it for senile ramblings. Was he supposed to take it seriously when it came from this powerfully connected army officer? Where could go he with such a theory? His chief would throw him out if he raised such a fantasy. Even if it might be true. “I suppose,” was all he could say.

  “Think about it,” Ybarra said, and went out, past the guards into air thick with the shouts of the protesters.

  Leary did not move for several seconds. Though he knew it might have some validity, his mind rejected the idea that in the midst of fighting for his political life Perón had found time for a dalliance with a kid and then stabbed, or had her stabbed, to death. He focused on his own theory and on Ybarra and Puglisi. One of them, or someone very like them, killed the girl, he was sure. If not, then the modista or the seamstress was right and either Garmendia or Torres was guilty. Any of Leary’s suspects was a more plausible murderer than Juan Perón. This last possibility was not only far-fetched; it defied investigation. Then again, in this city in turmoil, how was he supposed to pursue any line of investigation?

  A thought suddenly occurred to him that all but erased Perón as a possibility. From everything Leary had heard from Pilar Borelli, more than wanting to be like Evita Duarte, the Garmendia girl had wanted to be Evita. Luz had already had one lover. If Perón had come sniffing around, she just as likely would have willingly slept with him, and he would have nothing to fear from her. To be like her idol Evita, she would be loyal to him.

  Leary went out into the noisy plaza and marched away to a beat provided by the students and well-dressed bourgeois young lawyers and bank clerks, who stamped and clapped and demanded the restoration of the constitution, which no one had paid much mind to for several decades.

  * * *

  The woman at the center of Leary’s investigative theory was, at the moment, being invited to take a chair in the messy office of the lawyer Attilio Bramuglia. Evita was in pursuit of legal means to get her lover released from his damp jail on Martín García. The lawyer sat with his back to a rolltop desk covered with piled-up papers, facing a huge table similarly loaded with legal briefs.

  The actress perched on a heavy wooden armchair across from him, the only empty seat available. Askew stacks of file folders filled all the other chairs in the room and lay on the floor all around the portly lawyer.

  Evita tried to look into his eyes, but his eyeglasses reflected the glare of a fluted glass lamp hanging over his head. “You must apply for a writ of habeas corpus,” she pleaded.

  Bramuglia took off his spectacles and polished them with his tie. “I don’t think that’s the right approach right now.”

  She blew out an exasperated breath. “You have to. He is in prison in that miserable place. Where is your heart?” Evita’s normally high-pitched voice was at the level of a screeching hawk.

  “Stop that shouting!” Bramuglia scolded her as if he had the right.

  Evita sputtered. She wanted to snatch up the wooden tray full of notebooks in front of her and smash him over the head with it.

  He stood up and patted the air between them. “Get ahold of yourself. This is not about you. The fate of the country is at stake. Stop thinking that what happens to you is the most important issue in Argentina. The nation needs Perón to stay here, not to flee like some escaped pickpocket.”

  Her heart thudded against her ribs. She squeezed her lips together not to let a curse escape.

  He looked directly into her eyes. It felt as if he was reading her soul. “You may become very important one day. But you are not important yet.” He came to the chair next to her, took a pile of folders off it, and loaded them precariously onto a stack against the wall. “You don’t know the first thing about the real issues here.”

  “I know what’s good for Perón!” She was yelling at him, but she did not care. Mercante had said that Bramuglia was Perón’s man. He was not, as far as she could see.

  He looked at her as if he, too, was on the verge of violence. But he took a deep breath. “In situations like this, the only way we can get such a writ is for Colonel Perón to send a registered telegram promising to be out of the country within twenty-four hours of his release. It will be quid pro quo.” He spoke as if to an unruly child.

  Evita did not know the words he had said, but their meaning was obvious, and she hated it. To fight was her instinct. To lash out at the smug officers, the overfed tycoons, and especially the hypocritical church hierarchy who fathered bastards of their own and still condemned anyone born out of wedlock. All those worms wanted to keep Perón down. She swallowed her bile and implored the lawyer. “But Perón himself wants to go. I would prefer it if he would fight back. But the colonel told me himself he wants to take me away where we can live a quiet life.”

  Bramuglia’s smile communicated disbelief bordering on mirth. “Do you really think that sentiment will stick?” He answered his own question. “Perón knows very well that if he leaves now he will never be allowed to return. I know him. He will not accept such terms.”

  Evita prickled at his patronizing attitude. “I doubt you know him better than I do,” she said, sitting up as straight and tall as she could. This walrus of a man thought that, because she was small and a woman, he could treat her like a child. Evita looked down at her red fingernails and thought about scratching his eyes out. “He spoke his heart to me. I know what he wants.”

  The lawyer turned up his heavy lips in a falsely sympathetic smile. “Even if he is momentarily clinging to the idea of escape, we have to save him from himself. He is taking the path of least resistance at this point, but that will get us absolutely nowhere. I tell you Argentina needs him to stay and fight.”

  Stay and fight was what her heart said, too. But Perón was so vague about what he really wanted. She felt on a teeter-totter with him. One moment he seemed to be drawing her into the fray and the next pushing her to the sidelines. The people closest to him often pressed her in opposite directions. Did they understand what he wanted or were they as confused as she? They all hailed him as a great leader, but he had a strange, elusive way of ruling. “Does he have a chance to regain his position if he stays?” she asked. She did not know for sure what her colonel really wanted, but she would do anything to help his return to power.

  Bramuglia shifted his weight to face her. The chair beneath him creaked. “He is walking a line between
resistance and capitulation. But he must decide. I do not understand moderation in this context. There is no middle ground for me. He is essential to the nation. If he does not fight now, he will not get another chance. I think you agree, don’t you?”

  She looked at him, this massive man. It would take four of her to make one of him. He thought himself far superior to her, but she would not be bested in her support for Perón. “I have nothing but venom for the people who have robbed him of his position.”

  “Well then, there will be no writ of habeas corpus. Do you understand?”

  She nodded. “But then what will we do. We cannot let him rot in jail.”

  This time Bramuglia’s smile was pure sunshine. “We have to appeal to his supporters. If the thousands of people who love him grow to realize the overwhelming nature of their enormous numbers, nothing will stop them.”

  “What can I do? I am not even his wife. They have barred me from the radio. I got a call from the station head.” She had been fired while Perón was with the president, signing his resignation. She wanted the microphone, wished for the hot and stuffy sound booth where she could woo the people in their kitchens and parlors, send her voice to them and make them feel what she felt. But that door was locked against her. “What can I do?” she demanded of Bramuglia again.

  “You can be an inspiration,” he said. “That will be enough. You shout too much. You are the kind of person who can whisper and be heard. Stop shouting.”

  * * *

  While Evita ruminated about the true meaning of Bramuglia’s advice, the crowd in the plaza in front of the Casa Rosada became bolder and bolder. The day wore on and the setting sun reflected its fire in the windows of the seat of government. President Fárrell discussed who might be appointed to a new cabinet and dwelled on the problem of Perón and how to muzzle him for good, and the leftist demonstrators outside in the square became more and more unruly.

  Ybarra, sitting in on a meeting in the office of the paper-tiger president, did his best not to smirk. His plan was going to work despite the so-so news from Francisco Rocco. No one above the rank of captain had agreed to join them. But a couple of captains were solidly with them. The army had risen up with only junior officers before. It could again. Ybarra had drawn up a detailed plan for how the troops from the Campo de Mayo would march on the center and put down the rabble. “If we don’t fight back now, we will lose the country for a long time,” he blurted out, giving voice to his inner thoughts despite himself.

  General Avalos looked annoyed and remained cautious. “Without Perón, the army has no civilian constituency,” he said. “We must legitimize our position. That means forming a government that can attract adherents among the powerful outside the military.”

  Ybarra let him blather on. The army’s tanks and guns would soon be commanded by men with the balls to use them. Ybarra chewed on his thumb. He needed to be more careful about what he said. If he and his comrades declared themselves too soon, they would wind up in the brig, probably for the rest of their short lives. He would see the proper moment when it arrived, when Fárrell and Avalos were done for and before Perón had risen from the dead.

  President Fárrell gave Ybarra an arch look. “My boy,” he said, “stop scowling. I know well your point of view, but Perón is marginal and inconsequential at this point. No one but us knows where he is. I will send out a communiqué saying that he is not in jail, and that will convince his supporters that he has abandoned them.”

  The crowd on the streets soon proved Fárrell wrong. Late that afternoon, shooting began within a block of the Casa Rosada. Pro-Perón protestors staged a raid on the officer’s club at the Palacio Paz. Pistol shots popped back and forth between the demonstrators and the military men inside. At one point someone went to the roof of the Palacio Paz with a machine gun. As shots sputtered down into the street, forty mounted policemen attacked the protestors from the rear, plunging their horses into the crowd and swinging their sabers at medical students and middle-level bureaucrats in cheap suits. The crowd scattered through the streets, shouting slogans. Some of the unruly and frustrated demonstrators sniped at the police from behind barricades in darkened doorways. It would be midnight before the tumult subsided. By then a prominent physician would be killed and the hospitals would have filled up with nearly two score wounded.

  As the riot was heating up, Evita returned to Pierina Dealessi’s apartment from her meeting with Bramuglia. Pierina lived in a turn-of-the-century Belle Epoque building. The french doors of the facade had little wrought-iron balustrades, and when the windows were opened they made little balconies where a child such as Evita had been might dream of reciting poetry to a crowd down in the street. When Evita entered the apartment, she discovered that her friend was still at the Teatro Nacional Cervantes, rehearsing her new play. Though Evita knew well the tradition of the theater, it still amazed her that entertainments were being planned while people were being killed in the plazas. She took one of Pierina’s chic but uncomfortable Art Deco chairs and phoned home to find out what news there was of her colonel. Cristina answered the phone. Her radio was blaring a bolero in the background.

  “Señora,” she said, her voice pitched to fear level, “some soldiers came. They have taken Domingo Mercante. He told Jorge to tell you that he is going to jail. Jorge says he will take Señor Mercante’s place as your protector.”

  “Is Jorge there?”

  “No, señora. He went to get a car for you because the government men came to take away the Packard. Señor Mercante is going to give you his Chevrolet. Jorge went to get it and bring it to you.”

  “Good,” Evita said.

  “Señora, I am afraid.”

  “Oh, Cristina. Just stay inside. You will have nothing to fear if you stay off the streets. We left a good deal of food there. Just don’t go out.”

  “No, señora. Not for me. I’m afraid for you. It is that Jorge—he is very short and skinny. He will not be able to protect you now that Domingo Mercante has been taken away.”

  That evening, a special edition of Crítica, the mostly widely circulated news daily in Argentina, announced in a banner front-page headline, PERÓN NO LONGER A THREAT TO THE COUNTRY.

  While Eva Duarte was on the phone with her housekeeper, Lieutenant Ramón Ybarra at the besieged officer’s club in the Palacio Paz and Tulio Puglisi in the office of the National Shoe Makers Union both read the headline, smacked it, and uttered the same oath: “Not if that bitch of an actress can stir up the descamisados.” Ybarra imagined the treads of tanks rolling over the cobblestones of the center to prevent that from happening. He already knew which streets and avenues they would take. Puglisi imagined the poor slobs by the thousands hailing Perón and wondered what the defeated people in Italy and Germany would think when they saw films of Argentine fascist rallies on their newsreels.

  When Evita hung up on her housekeeper, she took her goose-fleshed body to the window, grateful that it was covered with wrought iron. The grating gave a decorative air to the facade of the building but its real purpose was to keep out thieves. Perhaps it would also bar a man who might come to kill the mistress of Juan Perón.

  Someone had already killed little Luz just for looking like Eva Duarte.

  Evita thought about the last time she had seen the girl at the modista’s shop just before Perón’s fiftieth birthday party. They had all joked about Evita’s new ensemble of matching silk pants and shirt, very like those they had seen in films with Katharine Hepburn. She had given Luz one of her cast-off dresses that day—a cute green one. There had been tears of gratitude in Luz’s eyes. She had taken the dress tenderly, as if it were a piece of rare porcelain, and brought it into the dressing room and tried it on. Now the police thought she had died because she resembled Eva the actress.

  Evita saw herself reflected in the window before her. Luz had looked like her in that dress, but she had not been like her. Luz was soft all the way through. Evita knew she had a will of steel inside her.

 
Bramuglia had said she could whisper and save Perón, but she could not feel that way at the moment. All she could think to say right now were her prayers. For Luz. For herself.

  She put her finger on the inside of the glass and traced the vine-and-leaf design of the iron grillwork outside. It seemed to her that tonight she and Juan Perón were both behind bars.

  SUNDAY, OCTOBER 14

  Early the next morning, with the streets of the Palermo district as quiet as on any Sunday, Jorge Webber arrived at Pierina Dealessi’s building carrying a box of medialunas from the nearby bakery. He met Dealessi coming out the front door, taking her mother and sister to Mass. “Evita is up there,” Señora Dealessi said, without preamble. “There is a military officer with her.”

  Jorge’s nerves rang an alarm. Rather than wait for the dolt of an elevator operator, he took the marble stairs two at a time to the third floor. A military officer? It could be someone from the government to take Evita into custody. She had only him to protect her. He wished he had a gun.

  He reached the apartment at a trot and stopped before the door that had been left ajar. He heard her voice. He entered decorously despite his anxiety. Evita was sitting in a chair in the corner of the salon, reading a letter. A short, stocky in man in a colonel’s uniform sat on a love seat near her, under a large poster of the Paris World’s Fair.

  Evita looked up and smiled as she took the pastries from him. “Oh, thank you, Jorge. Now I have something nice to offer Colonel Mazza. Would you go down to the café on the corner and bring us some coffee, too?” She went back to reading the letter. Whatever it said, it made her tremble.

  Evita waited until Webber had gone before she spoke to the polite and elegant man opposite her. Miguel Angel Mazza was an army surgeon who wore the uniform of a colonel, the only symbol of the army she could stomach, because it was the uniform Perón had been wearing when she met him. “Tell me how he seemed when you saw him?” she asked.