Sweet money il-2

by Ernesto Mallo

  When he hears that name, Perro crosses his arms and bows his head. Turcheli elaborates enthusiastically.

  So, we can bring you back. Truth is, Jorge, I’m not sure I feel like returning. Just leave all that to me. I’m going to need you to keep the Apostles in their place. What makes you think I’d help you with your internal power struggles? Because you’ve got the soul of a cop, Perro, that’s why. And because I’m better than they are.

  What makes you better? First place, I saved your life; second, the Apostles are mixed up with some Turks who’re mixed up with Colombian coke. They want to make Buenos Aires a transfer station to Europe. Several department higher-ups are already involved. When I become Chief, the first thing I’ll do is clean that one up.

  You just want to keep at your traditional business of selling precincts. You know what, Perro? It’s simpler, and it’s already all set up. When you get in bed with those narcos, you don’t know what you’re in for, those people are hell, big time. They’ll take a pound of your flesh if you look at them wrong. I’m a businessman, Perro, not a man of action. With drugs, you’ve got to be ready for anything. I’m ambitious, but I like the good life, peace and quiet. Everything in moderation, I say, can’t let yourself get too greedy.

  Perro feels nauseated. He stands up and inhales deeply.

  What’s my status? Your file is locked away in my desk. Everyone thinks you’re dead. I won’t be able to keep it up for too long, but once I get my promotion, we’ll set everything straight. And Giribaldi? Retired. Military officers don’t even step outside in uniform any more. They’ve got legal problems. Things are getting rough for them. The Full Stop and Due Obedience laws they passed so we couldn’t prosecute them for crimes committed during the dictatorship are full of holes. What do you mean? The kids they stole from the guerrillas, for example. Nobody can stop those trials. Because stealing a baby can’t be an act of war, you understand? I understand. There’s one prosecutor who’s all over that, he’s hunting them down, one by one, already got three or four of them behind bars.

  Turcheli looks at his watch, stands up and makes ready to leave.

  They tell me you’re right as rain. How do you feel? Not bad. Good, let’s shut down this operation, it’s costing me a fortune. I’ve got a room for you in a pension in Palermo. Don’t worry, it’s not a dump. Whatever you say, but I don’t have a penny. Don’t worry about the dough. Ramona will take you there in a few days and she’ll take care of everything. Just sit tight until I’m in, then I’ll come get you. Okay? Whatever you say, but don’t think for a minute that I’m going to get my hands dirty for you. We’ll talk about that later.

  Lascano goes over to the window to watch him leave. The dust the car kicks up is going in the other direction now. Turcheli wants to send him back to the front. His life of suspended animation for his recovery and rehabilitation has come to an end. In his head, he can hear someone shout, “Action”, and he knows that means the cameras are rolling once again. He has no desire to wage war against crooks and murderers, in the police force or outside of it, to be vigilant twenty-four hours a day, constantly looking over his shoulder. He has absolutely no urge to take on responsibilities, run risks. He’s got nowhere to go, nowhere he wants to go, except to Eva, into her arms, her love. His close brush with death made him wiser, more detached, more calculating. He looks at the spool from which the thread of his life is unravelling, and he realizes there’s not much left, and the little there is is unwinding faster and faster. He dreams of easygoing, pleasant days. He wants to lay claim to the quota of love that life has, up till now, lent him only very briefly then stolen away as if the whole thing had just been a joke. He regrets not having a picture of Eva. What he wouldn’t give at this moment to look in her eyes, touch her, feel her breath, her hands. As soon as he gets back to Buenos Aires he’s going to try to find out where in the world that woman is. He’ll tell Jorge that he’s not going to accept his proposal, and he’ll ask him for money so he can find Eva. He can’t imagine any other purpose or destiny, he has no interest in anything other than finding her.

  As the orange sun, pierced by the thousands of eucalyptus leaves, plunges toward the horizon, Lascano’s chest hurts, right where the pain of the gunshot wound mingles with that of longing.

  3

  The night is pitch black and it’s raining. The rain is pouring down outside the windows. It’s raining all over the city, the country, the world. Giribaldi is woken up by a dream he doesn’t want to remember, the same one that’s been waking him up for a long time. For such a long time that he’s lost track. He doesn’t know when he first dreamt it. Maisabe is asleep next to him and Anibal is in the adjoining room, but he feels alone, as if there were nobody left on Earth and even these people no longer meant anything to him. He wonders if they ever did, but suspects so. The storm rattles the windowpane and an image flashes through his head, of himself jumping through it and falling in slow motion through a cloud of broken glass, just like in the movies. His fantasy dishes him up a free sample of the bolt of pain and darkness that follows his crash into the pavement; the rain falling on his mangled body mixes with his blood, then runs into the street. A few passers-by gather around his dead body and, up above, looking out from the balcony, Maisabe contemplates him, a strange smile hovering over her lips. He sits up in bed, as if he were spring-loaded. He thinks he hears a sigh. He turns to look at his wife. A line of spit dribbles out of the corner of her mouth, pulled down by the drop at the end. Steps down the hallway. The whole house creaks and whines. He hears a child cry. He enters Anibal’s room. He stands watching him for a long time. Half his face is lit by the street light shining through the window; the other half is in shadows. He’s convinced the child is awake and pretending to be asleep. He walks over to him and brings his face close up to his. He’s too quiet; Giribaldi wonders if he’s dead. He touches him. The boy opens his eyes and stares at him without blinking. Giribaldi pulls back and looks away. He leaves the room. He goes to his office and opens the French doors onto the balcony. The raindrops bounce off the floor and splash his bare feet. He goes out onto the balcony and looks down, calculating exactly where his body would land. The rain is icy cold. He withdraws into the room. He closes the door to his office and sits down at his desk. He doesn’t know what to do with the tremendous urge he has to cry. He sits there contemplating nothingness until morning comes and the household comes alive.

  Maisabe brings him a cup of strong, black coffee, without sugar, puts it silently down on the desk and leaves. At the exact instant she vanishes from his sight, she says, Good morning. Giribaldi doesn’t answer; he looks at the steaming cup; he smells the aroma of the coffee as if it were a memory. The only thing that’s real is what’s happening at this very moment. The minutes, the hours, the days spill into the emptiness, the endless void. He brings the cup to his lips and doesn’t realize, until much later, that the liquid has burnt his tongue. He wonders if his numbness is due to a terminal illness.

  He waits for more than three hours before the secretary informs him that a problem has come up and the general won’t be able to make it. She doesn’t offer him another appointment, she says she’ll consult with her boss and call him. Her voice lacks conviction, her words are halfhearted, she makes not the slightest effort to pretend. Major (Ret.) Leonardo Giribaldi leaves the building at 250 Azopardo and starts walking toward Corrientes. He, like so many other military officers who were discharged when Alfonsin promoted more modern ones, has become a pariah. Nobody is going to stick his neck out for them or defend them. On top of that, it seems they should now be grateful that they’re not being put on trial. The worst part is that nobody tells them what’s going on, everybody simply ignores them, as if they had never existed.

  Giribaldi is trembling with rage. He sits down on a bench in the plaza and tries to calm down. From high atop a pillar, Columbus looks toward Spain, his back to the Casa Rosada, the presidential palace. A palace that’s never occupied, he believes, by great men, patriots,
those who devote their lives to serving their country. The blue-and-white flag waves from over one of the balconies. During other eras, its majestic flutter filled him with pride; now all he feels is shame. The communists managed to take over. What they couldn’t win as men, on the battlefield, they won by seducing the people, who always want to be flattered. He looks at the window of the office of the President of Argentina.

  I bet that’s where he is, that fat faggot bastard, that traitor. He got rid of the entire general staff. Passed a bunch of useless laws. Made us think that the only ones who’d be put on trial for actions against the guerrillas would be the top commanders, the members of the Junta. But when it was their turn to sit in the dock, they opened their big traps and said they didn’t know what was going on. How could they possibly not have known!? The ones who have taken their places dress up in the costume of democracy, as if they didn’t have anything to do with it either. They just sat around on their big fat asses praying every night that they wouldn’t come for them, and they played their cards very carefully. And here we are, the ones who did all the work, the ones out on the front lines risking our lives, now it’s our lives on the line.

  He tries to push these thoughts away because they make him feel like he’s going to explode with rage. He’s got to do something, get busy, or he’s afraid he’ll go crazy. He gets up, spits on the gravel path and turns toward the post office. It’s time for the stampede of office workers. Tomorrow he has an appointment with Gutierrez, who made a lot of dough as commander of a task force and used it to start a cleaning and security business. Seems he’s doing well, but when they spoke he told him, As long as you don’t get your hopes up, come on over and we’ll have a cup of coffee. He already knows he’s not going to give him a job, but at least they can talk. For too long his wife has been practically the only person he talks to. All Maisabe goes on about is the house, the boy’s school, the prices, the money that’s never enough.

  He walks down the stairs into the subway along with a rushing, chaotic and undisciplined crowd. All these noisy, disorderly people make him sick. He represses an urge to bark out an order for them all to fall into line. If he had the slightest hope of being obeyed, Giribaldi would divide them into two groups: those going up and those going down. Those boarding the train would take one step back to leave room for those getting off. Once the cars were emptied out in an orderly fashion, the others could step forward and enter. Quick, efficient, organized, clean. This upsets him — people on the loose, struggling for space, pushing each other like animals in a corral. If it were in his power he would impose rational discipline that would save them from their own bestiality, this promiscuous rubbing of body against body, this total lack of respect for each other’s space. But he has no power at all. Once he did, and he could exercise that power anywhere and everywhere and at any time. Then his power was limited to the barracks. Now: nothing.

  While he waits for the train, whose slow and tentative headlights are already shining through the tunnel, he feels like anybody, like nobody, like one more victim of the shoves and neglect of these civilians, civilians who are utterly oblivious to the debt of gratitude they owe men like him. People crowd around, get tenser and tenser, preparing for their attack on the seats. Giribaldi, a bit stupefied from staring at the lights that grow as they approach, thinks about the minuscule distance that separates him from death: one step and it’s over. Everything. Someone touches his back. His first thought is that they want to push him onto the tracks. He wheels around, his hand flying to the nine-millimetre gun in his shoulder holster, and he glues a furious eye onto a young yuppie. He looks him over — a two-day stubble, black suit, yellow tie and colourful backpack. The yuppie doesn’t even look back at Giribaldi, he’s in his own world, his ears covered by earphones echoing a rhythmic dum-dum that keeps time with the swaying of his head. The crowd starts to move and, with the force of a wave, sweeps Giribaldi into the train.

  4

  Marcelo moved out of his parents’ house less than four months ago. Now only his mother’s, because Mario passed on a week after Marcelo moved out. That death was anticipated, though not expected so soon. There were unexpected complications due to bronchitis, the doctors made the diagnosis and the old man came down with acute septicaemia. A few days earlier, when Marcelo asked him how he was, he delivered his last good line: Well, truth is, I’m much closer to the harp than the guitar. He died from one day to the next. Marcelo has dinner with his mother two or three times a week.

  Due to the customary period of mourning, he had to delay his marriage to Vanina. A few days after his father died, he was appointed Public Prosecutor. He benefited from the resignation of many judicial officials who were not keen to have their actions during the dictatorship investigated. He attributed his promotion to his father, a little help from the above and beyond. Then he felt odd for having entertained such a thought. Life after death seemed to him about as probable as a pig with wings. But it was his private way of acknowledging everything his father had given him, everything he was grateful for.

  Vanina was the most beautiful girl in high school, and now she is the most beautiful girl in the architecture department at the university. Though perhaps a little too aware of her beauty, she is polite and well educated. Marcelo thinks that her self-consciousness makes her movements less spontaneous, too studied, designed to emphasize her best features of face and figure and made to please whatever — people, animals, even objects — she has in front of her. They are both still caught up in how they are seen by their group of high-school friends, a group in which they are “the” couple. She has always been quite keen on the idea of getting married and having a family, but she accepts the excuse of Mario’s death to postpone the wedding with fewer protests than Marcelo would have hoped for, and more anger than he could have ever imagined. He doesn’t realize that Vanina’s anger smoulders away inside her like live embers, embers one notices only when they burn you. Since his appointment as a Public Prosecutor, he’s had a deluge of projects he’s wanted to work on. Investigations, open cases, a series of crimes committed by the military during the dictatorship that have never been brought to trial or punished, that have been bogged down in a series of laws and contradictory decrees, in many cases unconstitutional, which he would have to disentangle and pursue in opposition to the government’s lack of political will to prosecute criminals in uniform.

  Mama is in the kitchen putting the last touches to the meal. The room that was his is exactly the same as it was the day he left it. That his mother has left it intact feels a bit creepy, even ghoulish, like when parents of a child who has died make cenotaphs of their rooms. Marcelo came to look for something he left there when he used to be a clerk in Judge Marraco’s court, documents pertaining to an investigation that was left unresolved — the Biterman case. When he takes the envelope off the bookshelf, he knocks to the floor a book by Kelsen his father gave him when he started studying law. He sits down on the bed, puts down the envelope and picks up the book. In spite of being an impenitent reader, his father didn’t like writing at all, not even a dedication, but he did highlight one paragraph in yellow: Justice, for me, is the shield under whose protection science — and along with science, truth and sincerity — can flourish. This is the justice of freedom, the justice of peace, the justice of democracy, the justice of tolerance.

  He smiles. That morning he has been working on several cases of children of the disappeared, those who were stolen by the military during the dictatorship. The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo had supplied him with evidence, some of which mentioned a military base in the provinces that was used as a base of operations and clandestine detention centre, named Coti Martinez. It was believed that Coti was short for Comando de Op-eraciones Tacticas I. Several witnesses implicated a major by the name of Giribaldi. He made note of that name, which was somehow familiar. He had seen it before, and he spent all morning trying to remember exactly where. In the afternoon, while he was having lunch with Monica, his f
riend and mentor, a judge in the criminal courts, suddenly, between bites of Don Luis’s steak with mushroom sauce, he remembered: his name had figured in the Biterman case.

  Superintendent Lascano, otherwise known as Perro, gave Marraco all the evidence related to Biterman’s murder, in which Giribaldi was a suspect. The situation was as follows: as was common at that time, the task force, or death squad, commanded by the major had executed two young people, a man and a woman, in an empty field. By chance, a truck driver stopped on the shoulder to take a piss and saw the dead bodies. He drove away and reported what he’d seen at the Puente de la Noria police station. A little earlier that same night, a man named Amancio Perez Lastra had an altercation with Elias Biterman, a money lender from the Once neighbourhood to whom he owed a lot of money. Biterman ended up dead. Perez Lastra then turned to his old friend Giribaldi to help him dispose of the body. The major suggested he dump it in the same place where he’d shot the two subversives. In the meantime, Lascano was sent to the scene to investigate the two dead bodies the truck driver had reported, but when he arrived, he found three dead bodies, one of which exhibited many features different from the other two. Lascano realized that this corpse had been dumped there rather than executed by the military. He began investigating and all hell broke loose. He identified the murderer and the weapon used in the crime, and specified each link in the chain of complicity. Marraco did not include any of this evidence in his investigation, and Marcelo was an eyewitness to this intentional concealment of evidence. Instead, the judge instructed Marcelo to take the file to Giribaldi, which Marcelo did after he made photocopies of its contents. Those documents, which implicate Giribaldi in the death of a civilian, are in that envelope he is now holding in his hands.