“Upstairs, señora, they’ve come to get you.”
Verónica had arrived at the police station an hour previously. They had led her into a small office, where a police officer took her statement about what had happened. During this procedure various people came in and out, looking for the officer. She supposed that Federico had arrived, but she didn’t see him. She asked after Rafael and Marcelo. At first they had no news for her, but then a policewoman came in and told her that both men had been admitted to the Hospital Álvarez. That one had a bullet wound in his arm and that the other had broken the tibia and fibula in his right leg. Nothing too serious.
The officer taking her statement made her sign a series of papers and left her in the office until someone came to pick her up. To her surprise, her father was outside, with Federico a respectful few feet behind him.
“I spoke to the public prosecutor and you have to go and provide a longer version of your statement on Thursday. How are you feeling?”
“I’ve got a splitting headache.”
“Darling —”
“No sermons, Dad.”
“I just want to know how you are.”
“I’ve had better days.”
She needed to be more careful with her father. While his concern was genuine and she had a duty to allay his worry, there was also no reason for her to drag herself down the road of guilt and explanations.
“Thanks, Dad. Thanks for coming and sorting all this out.”
“I have to get back to the office. Federico is going to take you back to your apartment. You need to rest. What happened was terrible, but you must be strong.”
“I’ll try.”
“Let’s have lunch tomorrow.”
“Wednesday or Thursday would be better. I’ll call you.”
The three of them left the police station together and said goodbye at the door. Verónica walked with Federico to the parking lot. She said:
“I have to go to the Hospital Álvarez.”
Federico nodded without saying anything. They got into the car and Verónica felt her body flooded with the sensations of a few hours earlier. A combination of hatred for the people who had killed Julián and who wanted to kill Rafael, revulsion at what she herself had done, a mixture of disgust and relief. In the police station they had told her that two of the men were dead and that the other two had been seriously injured. She felt no remorse, guilt or regret. Just a physical disgust. A desire to be someone else, or for someone else to have done what she had dared to do. Federico’s voice took her out of these thoughts.
“When I called you, I said that I had some news about Juan García.”
A few weeks ago, Federico had meant nothing more to her than an episode from her distant past. A boy she had seen grow up but who would always remain for her a delayed adolescent, affectionate in his manner but clumsy in bed. She had thought of him as a kind of brother. A younger brother (even though he was a few months older than her), with whom she had once had an incestuous fling best forgotten. Now she was seeing him as he really was: somebody you could count on.
“Basically, García did know that we were there when you met him. And we didn’t know that the restaurant had a back door opening onto another street. Now it just so happens that one of our guys wanted to go to the bathroom and walked to a bar that was round the corner and halfway down the block. When he came out of the bar he saw a Mercedes driving down the street parallel to the one where our people were waiting. Instinctively he walked to the next corner and saw the car stop more or less level with the restaurant. He told us and, just in case, we sent someone on a bike to keep a lookout and to start following the car, if necessary.”
“And it was necessary.”
“The guy came out of there, with a woman and a couple of goons. It wasn’t easy to keep up with him. He had anti-follow techniques that our people hadn’t seen before. But we managed to stay on his trail. The guy went into the carport of a building on Avenida República Árabe Siria and Cabello. A building built less than ten years ago. And here’s the kicker: it’s a place well known to the Rosenthal law firm.”
“To my dad?”
“To the firm. Two years ago we were the local representatives for the state of Bavaria in an investigation into money laundering which involved Bavarian civil servants and businessmen from Germany, Russia, Israel and Argentina. There was a German company that was working directly with funds based here. The company was called Unmittelbare Zukunft. The local connection was difficult to uncover because a lot of the information we had came camouflaged with false addresses and names of people who didn’t exist. But one of the accused parties was a company that imported agricultural machinery, based in that building. And another important point: that company has its headquarters in Posadas, the capital of Misiones. We’ll be at the hospital soon so, to cut a long story short, our investigation almost came to nothing. We found some fall guys who had been used as frontmen, but we never got to the bottom of the story. For example, we couldn’t establish the nexus between Misiones and Buenos Aires.”
“The link.”
“The link. I think if we dig through the dirt and look deeper into the Capitán Pavone case, and the Undersecretary for Housing’s contacts, we might discover that Juan García is a money launderer – as well a pimp, a drug trafficker and child abuser.”
“And money laundering tends to be the chief activity of that kind of person.”
“And therefore the place it hurts him the most if you start interfering. You’ll find everything I’ve told you in the glovebox. There isn’t enough yet to put him behind bars, but it’s a good start.”
In the hospital they looked for Rafael and Marcelo’s rooms. The doorman was on a high-dependency unit, because he had needed an operation to extract the bullet from his arm. Rafael, on the other hand, was on the ward, in a room shared with one other person. Visiting hours had finished, but Verónica went in anyway, while Federico distracted the nurse with random questions. She knocked on the door to his room and Rafael’s quiet voice told her to come in.
He was lying with his plastered leg outside the sheets, watching some sports show on TV. Or perhaps it was his room mate who was watching it. Verónica walked up to the bed. She asked him how he felt and he said that nothing hurt any more, which was extraordinary considering all the injuries he had sustained over the last few days.
He thanked her for saving him.
She apologized for not having arrived earlier.
Neither would accept the other’s courtesies. At that moment Verónica’s phone started ringing. She didn’t recognize the number but answered anyway.
“Are you my daddy’s girlfriend?”
“Who’s speaking?”
“Martina, Rafael’s daughter. Are you his girlfriend?”
“Martina, what a coincidence. I’m with your daddy right now. How did you get my number?”
“It was stored in my grandmother’s phone from when he called the other day…Wait a moment.” She said something to another person who was with her. “Tell me, then. Are you his girlfriend?”
“No, of course not. Wait and I’ll pass you on to your dad.”
“No, you wait. Before you pass me on there’s someone here who wants to speak to you.”
Verónica stared, unblinking, at Rafael.
II
He ran, ran like the wind, like Bullseye in Toy Story, a movie he had seen at Dientes’ house. They were a superteam but he had no superpower, not even that of flying very low. He needed to get home quickly and he could only use his skill at dodging people as though they were troublesome defenders. Besides, after running five blocks without pause he began to feel tired. He walked one block briskly, had a breather and started running again, but the second spurt only lasted three blocks. He slowed down for a few hundred yards then accelerated again. His legs began to feel very heavy.
He arrived home with his tongue sticking out and his heart pounding like the supporters’ drum at a Nueva Chicago match. He
desperately needed water but there was no time to lose. He went straight to Martina’s apartment and banged on the door. Her grandmother opened it, saying that Martina was doing her homework and couldn’t come out.
“I need to speak to her.”
“It’ll have to be later. She’s got to finish her language homework because she got a bad mark last time.”
“It’s urgent.”
“Not now, Peque.”
“I need to tell her that I’m in love with her.”
The grandmother looked at him as one might look at a Martian asking for a glass of wine.
“I’ll call her.”
Shortly afterwards Martina appeared.
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Come.” He grabbed her arm and pulled her some distance from the door. Between gasps for breath, he told her that she had to get in touch with the woman who had come to see them.
“Ah, her.”
“Or with your dad.”
“She told me I was very pretty. I don’t trust her one bit.”
“Martina, listen, I need to talk to your dad. Can you call him?”
Martina stood, thinking.
“Wait here.” She went into the apartment and returned in less than a minute. “I stole my grandmother’s mobile. Let’s go up to the terrace.”
El Peque climbed the stairs two at a time, while Martina calmly scrolled through the contacts, looking for her father’s number. They settled into that corner of the roof that no adult ever came to – apart from Supergirl – and Martina dialled Rafael’s number. There was no answer. She tried a few times and got the same result. El Peque started to panic. He had to let Supergirl know that the contest was that night, not the next day.
“It’s a matter of life or death,” he said.
“I’ve got an idea,” Martina said, while she navigated the mobile’s keypad. “When my dad called on Thursday, my grandmother said he’d done it from someone else’s number. I bet it was that woman’s.”
“You think?”
“They must be going out or something, because otherwise you don’t use someone else’s phone. Wait, here in Accepted Calls there’s a number that doesn’t come up with anyone’s name. Yes, it’s a call from Thursday afternoon. I’ll try it.”
After listening to it ring for a few seconds, El Peque heard a voice at the other end of the line.
“Are you my daddy’s girlfriend?”
What was Martina doing? Had she gone mad?
“Martina, Rafael’s daughter. Are you his girlfriend?”
If she wasn’t careful Supergirl would cut her off.
“It was stored in my grandmother’s phone from when he called the other day.”
“Martina, put me on, I need to speak to her,” said El Peque, both pleading and angry at the same time.
“Wait,” Martina brushed him away and listened to the voice at the other end before saying, “No, you wait. Before you pass me on there’s someone here who wants to speak to you.”
She gave the mobile to El Peque and made a gesture to him that he neither understood nor cared about, since it presumably had something to do with her father’s romantic life.
“Hello, it’s me, El Peque.”
“Peque, how are you, is everything OK?”
“Everything’s terrible. The contest has been moved to today. They took Dientes there straight from the club. You can still save him, right?”
III
It seemed very, very long ago, that morning when she had eaten breakfast absently flicking through the newspaper and thinking every so often that she was finally going to meet Juan García. It could have been a year ago, the lunch with the mafioso politician might have taken place a few months ago, the afternoon at the magazine was more like the fruit of a fitful dream, one of those of which you remember only a fragment, nothing more. And this day had been filled with stories that would take a lifetime to assimilate: her escapade in Álex Vilna’s car, crossing the city with no respect for traffic lights or speed limits, or other road users; that dramatic encounter on the sidewalk outside her apartment with Marcelo – whom she had thought dead – and Rafael, who had seemed to be about to die; and the assassins who had never suspected that ten seconds later they would meet their own deaths. How long until this long day was over?
And now she had sent an eleven-year-old boy on a suicide mission with no protection. Federico’s first response had been to make various phone calls consisting of brief but intense exchanges. While he spoke, he gestured to Verónica to walk with him. They returned to the parking lot. Federico looked in the boot for his briefcase and took some papers out of it; they were screenshots from Google Earth. The night was already very dark and it was hard to see in the weak light of the parking lot. They walked back to the hospital entrance and sat on one of the benches where patients waited for emergency treatment. Verónica watched her friend, feeling helplessly unable to resolve anything herself. Federico had dismissed her suggestion that they warn the Sarmiento railway authority. He told her that they wouldn’t pay her any attention, even if the Minister of the Interior were to make a special intervention. Only when Federico had finished the last of his calls did he turn to Verónica, who had picked up fragments of the conversations. He stood up and spread the Google Earth printouts over the bench.
“What you can see reproduced here is the entire trajectory of the Sarmiento line, from Plaza Miserere to the city of Moreno. Along twenty-six miles of track, there are 175 places, in total, where the line crosses streets. It sounds like too many to watch. But that’s not necessarily the case. Ramiro – our new intern from Ituzaingó – and I did some intelligence work on this. There are some crossings in areas where it would be impossible to hold the competition because there are bridges over the line, for example, or railway crossings, or very well-lit avenues, or busy streets. Then there are the places where a child has already died or been injured. They never return to those places. For some reason they don’t use them again. So, if we eliminate all those, there are only eight remaining where the competition could be held.”
“Just eight?”
“Eight, in a twenty-two-mile stretch. Three in the capital and five in Greater Buenos Aires. If the contest is held in the capital it won’t be too difficult to find out when they arrive at the designated place with the children. I’ve just spoken to the security people we work with at the practice, and we can put those three places under surveillance.”
“There are still five others.”
“Those are crossings located in Padua, Castelar, Ituzaingó, Morón and Haedo. It would seem that these guys have exhausted all the possible sites between Haedo and Ciudadela and that the only crossings left are well to the west. I spoke to people from the National Child Protection Service and also with an appellate judge from Morón. It’s possible they may be able to send specialist police teams to Padua, Castelar and Ituzaingó.”
“Can we trust them?”
“The cops? It’s all we have.”
Verónica looked at him, asking for more precision.
“‘All we have’ isn’t enough.”
“Look, if this ends badly I can assure you that no cop from that team will be able to continue working in the police force. They’ll be cleaning out the animals at the zoo.”
“The other day you said that a patrol car could get anywhere in six minutes.”
“With some advance planning, yes. It’s harder in a hurry. There are two places which the police in those districts would struggle to reach quickly: Morón and Haedo. Strangely, they’re the two most central crossings. You’d think that if one of the other three points could be ruled out, a patrol car could get just as easily to Haedo as to Morón, but it would take fifteen minutes.”
“Come on, then.”
“Where to?”
“To Haedo and Morón. How long will it take to reach them from here?”
“However long it takes us to get to the freeway – then we go down Calle Dolores Prats as far as Aveni
da Rivadavia, then either turn back towards Haedo or continue towards Morón. Reckon on a bit more than half an hour, if we put our foot down.”
“Let’s go right now, then. On the way I’m going to call one of my sources to see if he can warn the drivers who are on duty tonight.”
IV
Sometimes he believed that it wouldn’t be the boys who appeared in front of him on the tracks, but Verónica. Verónica and the flowery dress he had seen in that dream on Saturday. Would she reappear in his dreams? Would he see Verónica’s dress fly through the air? Would he see her step towards the edge of the platform before jumping, just at the moment his train passed? Was she capable of something like that? He remembered the story of something that had happened ten years ago. There was a young driver who was shortly to be married but, at the last moment, changed his mind. The fiancée didn’t take this at all well and one day they came to tell the driver that she had tried to commit suicide by taking an overdose, but that she had survived. He went to visit her in hospital. She spoke harshly to him and told him two things: that she was pregnant, and that the next time he saw her she would be standing in front of the train. And she was as good as her word. One day the girl appeared on the crossing at Caballito station and threw herself onto the tracks under the train he was driving towards Plaza Miserere. The poor fellow didn’t come back to work and was never heard of again.
Verónica was not one of those girls. Who was Verónica? As if his thoughts had the power of invocation, his mobile began to ring. The screen said VÍCTOR R, which was how he had saved Verónica’s number. The coincidence of her calling just as he was thinking about her meant he must be dreaming after all. Besides, she never called him.
“I’m sorry to call you, but it’s urgent.”
“I can speak and drive at the same time.”
“Are you on the train?”
He stopped the train at Castelar, opened the doors and made sure the platform was clear before closing the doors again and pulling away.
“I’m on a shift. I’ve nearly finished.”
“Lucio, what I have to tell you is very important: the competition with the boys on the tracks is today.”
The Fragility of Bodies Page 30
