City of Knives

by William Bayer

  But Marta knew she wasn't ready for politics...and probably never would be. She wasn't comfortable with fame, didn't like being recognized. Also, she loved being an investigator. The experience of working a case, burrowing in deep until she found the truth— there was nothing sweeter than that, she thought. The moments of illumination when everything came together were so pleasureful they made all the tedious legwork worthwhile. Also, she wanted to show people, not just the public but also her fellow cops, that police work could be an honorable occupation, not just another form of criminality.

  At the morgue she got her first close look at her victim, laid out naked beneath surgery lamps on a stainless steel dissection table.

  Staring down at the young woman, she tried to imagine her alive. Did she laugh a lot? light up a room when she walked into it? love someone? care at all for her clients even when she made love with them for money? The woman's delicate porcelain-like features still radiated beauty. The stab wounds on her body and the strangulation marks around her neck were hideous.

  Jorge told her there was no question the victim has been tortured. The stab wounds weren't deep enough to affect vital organs.

  "See how well-spaced they are, Inspector? This woman was expertly worked over. Also she was bound." Jorge showed Marta rope burns on the wrists and ankles. "Cause of death was slow strangulation. She was tied so the harder she struggled the worse things got for her. They tied her up, then stuck her all over, forcing her to wriggle until she cut off her own air."

  "How do you know since the cops cut off the ropes?"

  "Because I've seen this pattern before. Not in twenty or so years. In fact, only in textbooks. It's an old military interrogation technique." Jorge gave her a meaningful look. "Torturers used it during the time of The Proceso."

  El Proceso de Reorganización Nacional: the mere mention of that time filled most Argentines with grief and shame. From 1976 to 1983, the country had been ruled by a military regime under whose authority thousands of innocent citizens were arrested, tortured and killed. It was this period, when Marta was in middle school, that the verb "to be disappeared" found currency. She remembered the day her math teacher, Señor Gontero, was arrested. Four men in a grey car took him away. He was never seen at school again. "The bastards disappeared him," older students muttered in the halls. Now it was 2002, eighteen years since the end of the Proceso, and yet the memory of that time was still vivid, the agony of it still deeply felt and unresolved.

  "I want to see those photos in your textbooks, Jorge."

  "I'll photocopy them for you."

  "So the body's speaking to us?"

  Jorge nodded. "She's telling us the kind of person who did this."

  "A military or police person?"

  "That's what she's saying."

  "What about sex?"

  "No semen. No trace of recent activity. She ate a decent lunch yesterday, a small steak and salad."

  "Dinner?"

  "No sign. She was killed early in the evening. I estimate between eight and nine p.m."

  "She was very beautiful, don't you think?"

  Jorge agreed the woman had been beautiful.

  "How old?"

  "I'd guess twenty-two or three."

  "Commander Méndez says her first name's Silvia, that she was a fancy call girl in Recoleta."

  "Commander Méndez may be right. I also believe the commander is an extremely poor officer."

  Marta nodded, then gestured toward the victim. "Why does she seem to be smiling?"

  "That's the way people's features set sometimes."

  "She must have been terrified."

  "For sure, Inspector. For sure."

  Marta was crossing the morgue lobby when her cell phone rang. It was Rolo.

  "Her name's Silvia Santini. I've got a promising lead. Meet me for lunch. I know a little place off Plaza Recedo. It's good, and it's near the house of her pimp."

  The little lunch place turned out to be a handsome new restaurant with a huge painting on one wall: a naked woman reclining on a couch with Freud seated behind as if he were her psychoanalyst.

  Rolo was waiting for her. Seeing him, she smiled. She always thought of him as her adorable cousin—tall, lean, and, with his fine features and dark slicked-back hair, movie-star handsome. He was the first boy she'd ever kissed. At age twelve, at his suggestion, they'd "experimented" on one another. "It won't mean anything," he'd assured her, "but we should learn how to do it so when the time comes we don't make fools of ourselves."

  Of course she knew what he was up to, didn't care. Looking back she believed they were equally sex-starved. Kissing, of course, had not been the end of it. They took to sneaking off at family functions to carry on with their "experiments." Soon they were seriously making out. They'd joke about it afterwards. "We mustn't transgress," Marta would warn, "we must observe the taboo." To which Rolo would reply: "Huh? What's that?" She'd pinch him, they'd laugh, then rejoin the family.

  "The corn soup's great," he told her. "Also the empanadas."

  Marta ordered both, then pointed at the wall. "What's the painting about?"

  "The owner used to be a shrink. She's a friend of Isabel's," Rolo said, referring to his wife, a child psychotherapist. "When she opened this place she wanted to bring in Freud as a memento of her old profession."

  The soup was spicy, the empanadas filling. Marta could barely get them down.

  "I hit the major hotels in Recoleta," Rolo told her. "All the concierges but one denied knowing our victim. Then I spoke to a couple of bellboys. They opened up when I offered tips. Seems Silvia was high-end, what they call a gata, a fancy cat. They say she worked for a Yugoslav guy, an immigrant named Ivo Granic. Apparently he's got a short string of gatas, three beautiful girls and a pretty boy. He runs a service—expensive, deluxe, very discreet. He also hosts sex parties. You can't just phone him up. You have to be introduced."

  "He lives near?"

  "Two blocks away. I already checked the place out. Hard to see much from the street. High walls, imbedded broken glass on top. The neighbors say he gives lots of parties. When he does there're fancy cars, including official cars with government chauffeurs, double parked around the corner. The next door neighbor said she saw a couple of movie stars come out one night. Juan Sabino and Juanita Courcelles. You can't get much fancier than that."

  Marta was pleased. "Good job, Rolo."

  "I'm working hard to impress my new boss."

  "Sometimes, you know, I just want to wrap you in my arms. But on this job there'll be none of that."

  "Alas!"

  She asked after Isabel and their son, Manuel.

  "Isabel's doing great, but with the economy so bad she's had to cut her fees. Manuel's doing well in school. By the way, he's crazy about Marina. Says she's his favorite partner in tango class."

  "We better keep an eye on them. Don't want them to get too friendly."

  Rolo grinned.

  After lunch, when they stood, Marta smiled at him. "Hell! I'm going to hug you anyway,"...and she did.

  They walked to Granic's house. The neighborhood, Palermo Viejo, was starting to look smartly upscale. She noticed new boutiques, galleries, nice looking little bars and restaurants, and construction fix-up crews working on old sausage houses and cottages. She saw attractive young women pushing baby strollers and a young man walking a group of pedigreed dogs.

  With the economy in ruins, unemployment at a peak, she was surprised by this surge of renovation. But then she remembered something her father used to say: "Even in the worst of times there will always be people in Buenos Aires making money."

  Granic's house was bigger than any other in the neighborhood. It even had a yard surrounded by a high wall with TV security cameras mounted at the corners. There was another camera over the exterior door, and still another above the garage.

  "This is a vault," she said. "Whoever's inside already knows we're here."

  Rolo rang the bell. They could hear its echo through the doo
r. He rang again, then, after half a minute, cautiously turned the doorknob. The door swung open. He called out "Hello! Anybody home?"

  No response. He looked at Marta and shrugged.

  "Yeah, let's go in," she said.

  She had a bad feeling as soon as she stepped into the front hall. She saw a sunken living room ahead, moved cautiously toward it, then stopped and looked at Rolo who'd pulled back the front of his jacket exposing his pistol. When she nodded at him, he pulled the gun, then came beside her holding it out in a classic narcotics cop two-handed stance.

  The living room was furnished with expensive contemporary pieces. There were abstract paintings, facing black leather couches and a chrome-legged glass coffee table with art books neatly displayed on top. The place looked, she thought, like one of those expensive soulless rooms she was used to seeing in decorating magazines—everything pristine, perfectly arranged, without a clue to the personality of the owner.

  "Heavy-duty security system, unlocked front door and no one home. I don't get it," Rolo whispered.

  "Maybe someone is home. Maybe he's taking a shower. Where'd you think all those cameras are monitored from?"

  "The kitchen maybe."

  "Let's take a look."

  They passed through a dining room decorated in the same expensive style, then into a kitchen with stainless steel counters and appliances, everything in place and perfectly clean as if never used.

  Rolo opened the refrigerator. "No food," he said. Inside were neat rows of bottles: white wine, champagne, vodka and gin.

  "Looks like an oversized hotel mini-bar," Marta said. "This whole place feels like a hotel, freshly cleaned too. You can still smell the cleansers."

  Continuing to search the ground floor, they discovered two side-by-side restrooms and a library, shelves full of what looked to be unopened books. There was a desk in front of a window overlooking the garden with nothing on top except a sleek brushed metal phone.

  She paused at the foot of the carpeted stairs. "I don't hear a shower going. I think we're going to find something up there."

  "Yeah, something unpleasant."

  She drew her own pistol and started up, Rolo just behind. At the top of the stairs there was a carpeted hallway, with four doors, all closed, leading off. Three led to empty bedrooms with empty closets and baths, all as anonymous, luxurious and sterile as the rest of the house. The fourth door revealed a narrow flight of stairs with another closed door at its top.

  They moved cautiously, Marta certain that if there was anything to be found, it would be at the top end of these back stairs. At the door she paused, listened. She could hear faint buzzing on the other side.

  She thrust the door open. A man, sitting naked in a pool of dried blood, faced her from the far wall of the room. Though he was dead, his arms were raised, stretched out on either side. Flies were buzzing around his body and the smell in the room was starting to turn bad. The man's entire torso was punctured, like Silvia's, by little knife wounds, but he wasn't smiling the way Silvia had seemed to be. As Marta approached she brought out a handkerchief and held it to her nose. Then to her horror she saw what was holding up his arms. His palms were nailed to the wall behind.

  This time, Marta was determined, no precinct cops would mess up the scene. She and Rolo withdrew to the first floor where she called Homicide, then waited until the forensic squad arrived.

  It was twenty minutes before the first van showed up. Marta and Rolo led the crew upstairs. The murder room turned out to be one of a suite of small servants rooms, seemingly the only inhabited rooms in the house. There were clothes in the closets, papers strewn on the desk, a three-line phone, a Republic of Argentina passport in a bureau drawer.

  From the passport photo Marta identified the dead man as Ivo Granic, alleged to have been Silvia Santini's pimp. But, she noted, certain important items were missing: there was no cell phone, no computer, no personal address book or agenda book showing appointments or bookings for Granic's gatas. And there was still no sign of the screens on which the security cameras could be monitored.

  "Let's find the monitoring station," Marta told Rolo. "The forensic squad can handle things up here."

  They searched the house again top to bottom, then the garage. It was two cars deep, but there was only one car inside, a new American SUV. The garden was well-kept with outdoor furniture and a gas-lit barbecue-rotisserie as immaculate as the kitchen stove.

  "He must have a full-time maid and gardener to keep the place so nice," Rolo said. "I've never seen a cleaner garage."

  "We're missing something," Marta said.

  She made two circuits around the house, went back inside, walked slowly again through all the ground floor rooms, came out and circled the house once more.

  "There's more space showing outside than fits the floor plan," she told Rolo. "Let's check the first floor again."

  They started in the library, rapping on the walls, looking for a bookcase that might disguise a door. They knocked on the walls of the bare-shelved pantry off the kitchen and checked the mirrors in the downstairs baths. Rolo finally produced a hollow sound when he hit the back wall of a coat closet off the front hall.

  "There's something behind," he told Marta. "I can break in by kicking through the wall."

  Marta didn't want to do it that way. She insisted they find the entrance.

  It took them another ten minutes. At several points, she noted, Rolo became impatient. Like most narcotics cops, he liked to bust down doors. She did her best to calm him. She was fascinated by the problem and excited by the prospect of what they might discover. If the comings and goings in the house had been recorded they might be able to solve their case that afternoon.

  Entry to the space behind the wall was not, as it turned out, through the coat closet itself. The back wall didn't pivot, there was no trick lock or secret spring. Access came from above, a trap door hidden beneath a throw rug in one of the roomy bedroom closets on the second floor.

  The monitoring room contained a desk and above it a wall of shelves housing forty small TV monitors that revealed far more than exterior views. In fact, each of the bedrooms was covered by four separate monitors. She sent Rolo back upstairs to test the system out. Sitting in the little room she could see and hear everything he did and said in the bedrooms and baths through tiny cameras and microphones they hadn't noticed, concealed in the ceilings and walls.

  "This isn't just a security monitoring station," she told him when he rejoined her. "This is a spy's nest. Suppose fancy visitors like Sabino and Courcelles come here for a party. Granic introduces Sabino to one of his gatas. Maybe he introduces Courcelles to his pretty boy too. Each couple talks, maybe smokes some grass, then goes up to one of the bedrooms for sex. From down here Granic, or someone who works for him, records it all. Depending on the vulnerability of his victims, he can practically name his price when he offers to sell back the recording."

  "I'd certainly think about killing a guy who tried a stunt like that on me."

  "Yeah, a guy who did that would have a lot of enemies. But where's the computer that ties everything together and records everything on hard disc?"

  "Granic was tortured. He told them about this room, they came down here and cleaned it out."

  "They cleaned it very well. It's as immaculate as the rest of the house. The crew upstairs'll fingerprint everything, but something tells me they won't find anything down here."

  The forensic squad worked late into the night. By the following day, certain conclusions had been reached:

  Granic had been killed in the room where Marta and Rolo had found him. Estimated time of death: six p.m. the previous evening, just a few hours before the estimated time of death of Silvia Santini.

  There was no trace of Silvia's blood in the room, which meant she'd been tortured and killed somewhere else.

  The house was completely clean no prints, fibers or signs of intruders.

  Two sets of neighbors told Rolo they saw a dark van enter the g
arage the evening before, and that they'd seen lights burning in the windows through the night. Another neighbor, walking her dog around six a.m., saw a dark van quickly departing the garage. As this van was the type with black windows, she couldn't tell how many people were inside.

  "That was the cleanup crew," Rolo said.

  Marta agreed. "That there was a cleanup crew tells us a lot."

  They were sipping coffee in a student café off Plazoleta Olazábal, two blocks from the Homicide Division building. Most of kids sitting at nearby tables were puffing on cigarettes, several were immersed in textbooks, others were arguing politics, and still others working studiously at their laptops. Sunlight glinted off a nearby public sculpture, an assemblage of bronze nudes called "Canto al Trabajo." Across the Plazoleta was a row of imposing columns, the facade of the Engineering School, formerly headquarters of the Eva Perón Foundation, huge and monolithic, built in the bombastic Italian fascist style so beloved by the Perónistas.

  The sky was grey, the air hot and sticky. Marta longed for the balmy days of a Buenos Aires autumn.

  "Time to split up the work," she said. "You track Granic and Silvia. Find out everything you can about them, Granic's immigration records, ownership of his house, all that, and, most important, where Silvia lived... because that's probably where she was killed. Who were her friends? Where did she eat that little steak she had for lunch? Meantime, I'm going to try a shortcut. We have the names of a pair of movie stars. I'm going to drop in on them cold this afternoon, see what they have to say about Señor Granic and his wild late night parties."

  The estate was in Pilar, a suburb twenty miles from the center of the city. There was an exclusive polo club there, an excellent private school and a small mall with branches of high-end city shops and boutiques.

  The estate, which bore the name "Casa de la Felicidad," was guarded by a set of high iron gates. There were two security cameras mounted behind, and a loudspeaker through which Marta was greeted by a stern female voice.