Buenos Aires Noir

by Ernesto Mallo

  Cuellar looked up. “Yes sir,” he said, without moving.

  Furious, Worm walked up to Cuellar, grabbed him by a shoulder, and pulled him over to Camaño, who was drooling blood and snot. Worm pulled him upright.

  “You look like a four of cups, Ángelito,” Worm said to Camaño. And then, turning to Cuellar: “He’s yours.”

  Cuellar’s Bolivian features blanched. “But sir, we had agreed . . .”

  “How old is your little girl?” Worm asked. “Six? Seven?”

  Cuellar shook his head, unable to handle it all.

  “Look at him, damnit!” Worm shouted. Even the Renegades were fearful.

  Finally, Cuellar glanced up at Ángel Camaño, who was trying to say something, but was silenced by Worm, who knocked him with the butt of his pistol and said: “Look at his legs, his hands. Those are the hands that took the life of your little girl.” He turned to a Renegade and barked: “Pull his pants down!”

  Two of the Renegades jumped up and started undressing Camaño. His skin was shredded, torn up by rocks and debris. He was caked in blood and smelled sharply of fear. Camaño cried out, asking Worm to take pity. “Please . . .”

  The Renegades formed a semicircle around the three men.

  Worm spoke up again: “Look at him, man. Look at him good. There’s the dick that went in your little girl. Who’s going to take care of this now? You or me?”

  Cuellar couldn’t hold back his tears. Worm smiled. He could see that Cuellar’s rage had turned to shame, to hopelessness.

  “You want to kill him, don’t you?”

  Cuellar nodded.

  “Good. Good.” Worm placed a hand on his back. “But you know what? Your daughter suffered, and now she’ll never be able to forget this son of a bitch. If you kill him, it’s over in a moment. Which is why we’re going to do something else. Fideo . . .”

  One of the Renegades, a tall, thin kid wearing an Argentina soccer jersey, left the huddle of men for the other room, returning a moment later with a broom.

  “Grab it, man,” Worm said to Cuellar, who looked on, terrified. “Some things you got to do on your own. You have to be the one to avenge your daughter, Mamani. Come on, boys, hold him tight ’cause he’s gonna shake like a dog.”

  Shrek and two other men approached Camaño, who was twisting, trying to break loose, calling out, “Worm, let me go and I’ll work for you for free until I die!”

  Worm didn’t respond. Turning to Cuellar, he said, “Now, Mamani. You’re going to let him feel what your daughter felt. Grab the broom and stick it so far up his ass it comes out his mouth.”

  Cuellar started to cry. To cry and look around, searching for a way out. Worm approached carefully and whispered something in his ear that nobody else could hear. The Bolivian walked up to Camaño, took the broomstick, and whacked him, hard, in the back, whacked him one, two, three times.

  “That’s it, that’s it . . .” Worm said encouragingly.

  Already exhausted, Cuellar dropped the broom. He felt like he was going to faint—he wanted to end it.

  Worm snuck back up to him. He crouched down, grabbed the broom, and handed it back to Cuellar, ordering, “Now do what I told you.”

  “That’s enough. You can take it from here.”

  “Do it!” Worm yelled. “Your daughter deserves revenge. You told me yourself when you came to see me. Do it, you piece of shit.”

  Camaño struggled, cried, but the Renegades had him pressed against the floor, his legs and arms open wide. Suddenly, all the Renegades in the room started to chant, “Shove it up his ass, shove it up his ass . . .”

  Cuellar looked around in fear and disgust.

  “Think about your girl,” Worm said. “Give it to him. Shove it in. Make it come out his mouth.” Even some of the other Renegades seemed surprised by Worm’s intensity.

  Finally, lost in some other place, crying and asking for forgiveness from God and the Virgin Mary, Marco Antonio Cuellar shoved the broom handle into Camaño’s ass, pulling it out and then shoving it back in, harder and harder.

  Camaño’s screams blended with the whistles and applause of the Renegades, who started to spit and kick at him with their brand-new tennis shoes. This lasted nearly twenty minutes, until Cuellar fell to the floor, unable to contain himself, his fear, his sadness, his shame, his pain. Camaño was unconscious, maybe dead, laid out in a pool of blood and fecal matter.

  Worm came up and helped Cuellar to his feet.

  “Give him a glass of wine,” he demanded, and one of the Renegades immediately handed the Bolivian a glass.

  Cuellar drank it in one gulp, and then continued to cry. “Why?” he asked, his voice broken.

  “Because the world has gone to shit, and we need to clean it up every once in a while. Now you’re going to walk away like a man. You did what you had to do. And that lump of shit will remember this for the rest of his life.”

  “You’re not going to kill him?”

  “Maybe he’s already dead. If he wakes up, he’s going to go back to work for me. What he’s not going to do is touch anybody in your family ever again.”

  “But . . . I didn’t even want to . . .” Cuellar whimpered.

  Worm put a hand on his shoulder and said softly, “Your little girl didn’t want to either. But you know what happened. And now that’s taken care of. Get back to your life, Mamani. When I need you, I’ll come looking. Understood?”

  Unable to speak, Cuellar nodded. And then, suddenly, he vomited, and scurried away, not wanting to see any more of what he had done.

  Little by little, the Renegades returned to their Playstation, to their cell phones, to cutting and packing baggies.

  Camaño’s stink started making Worm feel nauseous. He lit another joint and took a hit. He had seen, done, and ordered much worse things than Camaño had just suffered, but he felt sad for some reason, or something like sad, and he didn’t want to give in to the feeling.

  He went back to the window to get some fresh air. The day had started to darken outside. The violet sky spread over all of Los Perales, over Mataderos, over the entire capital.

  He peered down. In the dirt wasteland below him a group of kids were playing soccer. Watching them, Worm remembered playing in that same open field.

  “We need to do something with this,” Shrek said.

  Worm didn’t respond.

  “Take him to the hospital or something,” Shrek said. “Camaño is still useful to us. We should do something.” Seeing that Worm wasn’t responding, he added, “Everything okay?”

  Nothing. Worm was too far away. He smiled as far below him one of the kids swerved through the defense and scored a goal. The boy celebrated by holding his hands behind his ears, as if trying to better hear the roaring of the crowd, a crowd that, Worm knew well, would never give him anything.

  Worm leaned halfway out the window and screamed down, “Sweet goal, kid!”

  The players, excited that Worm was watching their game, whistled up to him from below.

  “Help . . .” Worm heard a thin voice call from behind.

  Seeing Camaño on his knees, Worm thought about how the world would always be this shithole, starting with the worst areas of the neighborhood, and then, sooner or later, swallowing up even those cheerful kids playing soccer down below, just as it had swallowed him.

  “What do you want us to do, Worm?” Shrek asked.

  Only then did Worm take out his gun and fire three, four, five shots, spilling Camaño’s guts onto the floor of the building, shooting up there so high, so high up in Los Perales.

  PART II

  Crimes? Or Misdemeanors?

  A Face in the Crowd

  by Pablo De Santis

  Caballito

  Translated by John Washington

  Ever since he was young, Nigro liked protests and rallies—snapping photos through the acid fog of tear gas or under the rainfall of police clubs and rocks. Once, a rubber bullet hit him in his left thigh, and he had to go to the hospital. When
he reached his fifties, however, work turned calm and monotonous: he mostly shot interviews, people on love seats sipping coffee.

  He also did a weekly photo shoot on Saturdays called “A Face in the Crowd.” He captured images of places thronging with people: Florida Street at noon, the interior of subway cars at seven thirty in the morning, the Lavalle theaters on Saturday nights, the people who got off the 11 train every morning at dawn. While other photographers captured empty beaches or inanimate objects, he preferred photos where there wasn’t space to move. He liked tightness, breathlessness. He searched for the moment when one person (just a single face in the whole crowd) looked up at the camera. Everybody else was oblivious that he was shooting them, except for that one person who discovered his lens and looked on with curiosity, with indifference, or even with alarm.

  * * *

  The first envelope came to the office along with the regular mail. His name, Norberto L. Nigro, was written by hand in a neat, black cursive. There was no return address. Inside the envelope was a 5x7 photo. At first he thought that an “artist” must have sent it to him. He and Orsini, his boss, would laugh at “artistic” photographers who substituted reality for artifice, the figurative for the abstract, who intruded on the silence of photographs with long, abstruse explanations. These artists shot the foot of a chair, a traffic light turning green, clothes hung out on a balcony, and then they put together shows and called them things like “Manifestation of the Visible,” “The Borders of the Real,” or “The Darkness of Light.”

  But the photo in the envelope didn’t have a title or a signature. It was just a simple shot of water in a swimming pool.

  The second photograph, as anonymous as the first, came a week later. This time you could make out the edge of the pool. There was something odd in the angle of the take, as if the photographer had been pushed off balance. The photo had also been taken from a high point of view. With the first envelope, the lack of a return address could have been a mistake, but now Nigro knew it had been intentionally left off.

  A few days later Orsini came across Nigro examining the third photograph—the roof of a merry-go-round with white-and-red horses weathered by rust and grime—and asked him what he was looking at. Nigro rummaged around in his desk drawer and showed him the other two photos, asking if anybody else in the office had received anything like them.

  Orsini shook his head. “It’s probably just some lunatic,” he said.

  “Lunatics usually say too much. This guy isn’t saying anything,” Nigro responded.

  “Do you recognize the place?”

  “It looks like some country club pool. I haven’t been in a pool for thirty years.”

  “It must be a pool with a diving board. All these photos are from a high vantage point.”

  Orsini, never able to focus on anything for very long, forgot about the photos as soon as his phone rang.

  They kept coming, one more in September, two in October, all as unpopulated as the first. Although there was nothing scary in the photos, and there wasn’t any sign of a threat, Nigro felt a prickle of anxiety every time he opened a new envelope. They were like a series of letters in a secret message. He knew that an essential element of this message was that the photos were empty; there was not a single person in any of them.

  It was the coffee vendor—a twenty-five-year-old idiot who specialized in interrupting conversations and spilling scalding coffee on your desk—who made the connection. Without anybody asking his opinion, he pointed to the photos that Nigro had laid out on his desk and said, “Maestro, now that you’re taking shots of a pool, you should snap a couple with some girls in bikinis.”

  “They’re not mine. I don’t even know where they were taken.”

  “They’re from Chacabuco Park.”

  “Are you sure?”

  The coffee seller rearranged the photos on the desk as if aligning fragments of a map.

  “The pool, the trees, the deck lounge, the roof of the merry-go-round—just a few steps away.”

  “Is there a diving board?”

  “Three of them. One pretty high. The others lower.”

  * * *

  Nigro went to the paper’s archives to look for any news related to the pool in Chacabuco Park, something that could explain the ghostly photographs. The archivist delivered him a manila envelope full of articles on the construction of the highway that cut through the park, the damage it caused; the disappearance, back in the seventies, of a statue of a panther; the happy memories of a peanut vendor who had worked in the park for forty years. Once, a man was stabbed in a corner of the park, but it had happened two years before, and it was far from the pool. There were also a few photos of the pool and its diving boards.

  The next Saturday, he walked from his neighborhood of Boedo to the park. The flowers of jacaranda and tipa trees had confettied the November sidewalks purple and yellow. When he arrived at the gate to the swimming pool, a worker with a gray apron told him that he couldn’t go in, that the pool didn’t open until the first Tuesday of December.

  Nigro told the man that he just needed to snap one photo from the diving board to announce the beginning of the swimming season in the paper. He dropped a few made-up names of municipal authorities, and, succumbing to the onslaught of directors and subdirectors, the man in the gray apron let him in. He walked through the men’s changing room that stank of chlorine, and opened the door that led to the pool. The diving board stood silently on the opposite side, as if waiting for him. When he finally made it to the exact point from which his anonymous correspondent had been taking the photographs, he would find, he knew, the answer to the riddle.

  He climbed the steps uneasily—he was terrified of heights—and stepped onto the platform. Vertigo made his hands tremble. He took a quick picture of the bottom of the pool—without water, but with a few splashes of paint. He snapped a leafless tree, the weathered roof of the merry-go-round. Patiently, he replicated each of the photographs of his anonymous predecessor.

  When he had taken them all he realized that he wasn’t alone. There was a stranger, wearing a gray sweater despite the November heat, standing right behind him on the diving board. He looked a little over forty, and wore old-fashioned, square-framed glasses. He seemed serious, like he was concentrating on something, or trying to figure out what to say.

  “I knew you’d finally make it,” he finally said.

  For a moment Nigro considered screaming, but it would have been too embarrassing. “Do we know each other?” he asked.

  “No. This is the first time we’re seeing each other. I’m from Misiones—a photographer, like yourself. But my photos don’t make it into the paper. I work weddings, birthdays.”

  “Are you going to let me go down?”

  “You came here to find out why I sent you those photos, and now all you want is to leave?”

  “I’m scared of heights.”

  “That’s something else we have in common.”

  Nigro stared at the guy. He was smaller than Nigro, but the platform was narrow enough that a shove would send both of them over the edge. I should have waited until December, he thought, when the pool would have been filled with water.

  “Given your fear of heights,” the man said, “I’ll be quick. Three years ago at a wedding, I ran into an old friend from my teenage years. She was the bride. Seeing her again, I realized how much of my life I’d wasted. With some ridiculous excuse I took her out onto a patio to snap some photos, just the two of us, while the groom got drunk with his friends down below. After she came back from the honeymoon we saw each other again. Two years later we decided to run off together. We left a series of clues that would make people think we were living together in Italy. But we were actually just in a different part of Buenos Aires.”

  The man shrugged, peering down as if calculating the distance to the bottom of the pool.

  “The husband would have kept on thinking we were in Europe, far away and out of reach. But one evening you took a shot
of a car in the metro filled with tired people on their way home from work. She was the only one in the car who was looking at the camera. Do you remember that shot?”

  “Buenos Aires is a big city.”

  “She had a sister who lived here, close to Congreso. After he found out she was still in town, her ex kept an eye on the sister’s house until she showed up. It was in February. We had planned to meet at this pool, as we did twice a week. When she didn’t show, I climbed up to the diving board to get a better view. She never came. Her husband confronted her as she walked out of her sister’s house, called out her name, and when she turned he shot her in the forehead. Then he killed himself. You work for a newspaper, maybe you even covered the incident.”

  “Crime isn’t my beat.”

  “You never put it together, did you? Even when looking at all my photographs together—that it was about waiting?” The man rubbed his hands together—the first sign that he was anxious. “You never realized that the place was always empty because I was waiting for a woman who would never show up?”

  Nigro didn’t respond: he didn’t want to tell this guy that none of that had ever crossed his mind. The only reading he had ever come to with the photos had led to the ignorant steps he’d taken up the ladder and onto this diving board.

  The man flinched; Nigro prepared to defend himself. His camera was heavy. If he swung it at the man’s head . . . But any rapid movement would probably knock them both off the platform. The man’s flinch, however, was just a nervous stepping out of the way, giving room for Nigro to pass. Nigro walked by him and started his slow descent down the concrete steps.

  “Careful, Mr. Photographer. Those steps are only made for climbing up.”

  Nigro’s feet started shaking and he hurried down. He wanted to get away, to erase this man from his mind.

  When he was on level ground, he saw that the guy was still waiting up top, as if on guard.

  * * *

  A few days later Nigro received another envelope, which he opened very carefully. Inside was a clipping with one of his own photographs: a wooden car of the A line, six in the evening. Everybody in the photo was oblivious, except one woman staring at the camera, her eyes wide in fear.