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Carlos wiped his mouth with a paper napkin, threw it amid the remains of his tart and pulled a photo out of his jacket; it was a digital portrait that he pushed across the table. Rubén saw the face of a brunette in her thirties, with the vague eyes of those who are thinking about something else when the shutter clicks. Curly hair, rather pretty . . .

“Do you know her?” Carlos asked.

Rubén shook his head.

“No.”

“María Victoria Campallo. She left me a message yesterday at the newspaper, telling me that she would call back. She didn't call. I tried to reach her several times, without success. I went by her place a little while ago but she wasn't there. María Victoria is a photographer,” he explained.

“What did the message say?”

“Nothing. Just that she wanted to see me, that it was urgent. I was away, and I didn't get her message until this morning, on the answering machine.”

“What's the problem?”

“María is the daughter of Eduardo Campallo, the businessman. You know that there will soon be elections: Campallo is the chief financier for the mayor, Torres. I don't know if there's a connection, but Campallo's daughter has to know where our newspaper stands.”

His steely eye shone under the curls of smoke from the cigar he had just lit. He was watching to see his friend's reaction.

“Did she leave you her cell phone number?”

“No; she was calling from a phone booth.”

“Campallo rarely appears in Torres's company,” Carlos went on, “but he provides the funds for his election campaigns. Campallo began in concrete, taking over his father's firm in the 1970s, and he multiplied its sales before lining his pockets by bidding on procurement contracts during the wave of privatizations. Since then he's been doing favors all around, beginning with his political friends: he's also greasing the palms of the labor unions and the
alcahuetes
8
who hover around the Casa Rosada, the lobbies . . . An investment, so to speak,” he added ironically in order to mask his bitterness. “We've been onto Campallo for a long time, but the guy is a big shot. I don't know what his daughter wanted from me or why she hasn't gotten back to me, but at the beginning of the electoral campaign, you have to admit that it's tempting to see it as more than a mere coincidence.”

Rubén looked at him with an inquisitive eye.

“Why are you telling me all this?”

“Because you're a detective,” Carlos said, with an ambiguous smile.

“I'm concerned with the
desaparecidos
and their children,” Rubén reminded him. “Not with rich people's kids.”

“María Victoria is now one of the
desaparecidos
.”

Rubén didn't seem convinced.

“If she called from a phone booth,” he objected, maybe her cell phone was no longer working, or she left on a reporting assignment or a honeymoon.”

Carlos shook his white locks.

“No. I asked the building's concierge; he hadn't seen María Victoria for two days and her cat was meowing for her mistress's return, except that she seems to have vanished into thin air . . . I have no proof of what I'm saying, Rubén, unless you find something.”

Rubén looked at his friend the journalist.

“Money, politics, power: you're asking me to put my hands in deep shit,” he summed up.

“You're the only one who isn't dirtied by it.”

Rubén shook his head: “That's what you say.”

“María Campallo is no longer showing any sign of life,” Carlos insisted, his voice becoming more serious. “Maybe she's hiding, maybe she's been told to keep quiet, to get out of town, I don't know. Help me find her.”

Carlos crushed out his cigarillo in the marble ashtray. Their glasses stood empty on the well-worn wood of the table.

“I'll need information about Campallo,” Rubén sighed, “about his daughter . . . I don't have anything.”

Carlos pulled a manila envelope out of his jacket.

“You'll find everything in this,” he said.

 

A superimposition of buildings, paved streets, marble, scrap metal, and garbage, the home of Latin American revolution, coup d'états second nature to it, cultural, Péronist, and haughty, Buenos Aires knew that its golden age was past and would never return.

Now kids in rags wandered in front of the buildings of the Centro, people slept on pieces of cardboard in the streets and parks, picked through refuse or lay on the sidewalks, sandwich men walked down Florida or hung out at red lights, taxis that were worn-out and not always legal drove up and down avenues smelling of gasoline, the antique stores in San Telmo were full of old chandeliers, furniture, silver, and authentic family jewels that fed an intense nostalgia. The giant movie theaters and broad boulevards had given way to franchised businesses or huge, impersonal, luxurious edifices, and if the bistro culture persisted, the prohibitive prices downtown kept the citizens of Buenos Aires away; the banks and multinationals had punched holes in the political cadaver of the country, leaving only gobs of spit on their icy glass towers.

The art of the insult was practiced naturally and without moderation; anger impregnated the capital's walls, but the odor of exile that emerged from them did not prevent couples, both young and old, from giving each other uninhibited passionate kisses in the streets, as if to ward off the fate that was hounding Argentina. The skin and the hearts of the people here were as blanched as the iron ore that had marked the century.

The San Telmo neighborhood where Rubén lived had been deserted by the middle class after an epidemic of yellow fever; now weeds were growing over the walls of decrepit houses and their cast-iron balconies. A working-class bastion on the south side of downtown, the municipality was trying to rehabilitate the neighborhood around the Plaza Dorrego, its bars and flea markets. Rubén Calderón lived on Peru Street, in an art-nouveau building whose old-fashioned charm suited him—gray marble on the floors, period woodwork, doorknobs and a bathtub from 1900. A window with blue-tinted panes looked out on the inner courtyard; the kitchen was windowless but the bedroom window gave on the corner of San Juan.

The rain had stopped when the detective pushed open the agency's reinforced door. He laid the manila envelope on the coffee table, opened the window in the living room, which served as an office, in order to get rid of the smell of cold tobacco, and made himself a drink. Pisco, lemon juice, sugar, egg white, ice: he mixed it all vigorously in a shaker before filling a stemmed glass. A pisco sour, energizing effects guaranteed. He put on the Godspeed You! Black Emperor CD he'd bought the day before, and drank his pisco sour gazing at the sky above the roofs and listening to the lascivious moans of the guitars.

Over time, the agency's office had taken over more and more of the apartment, whose private space was now limited to a bedroom at the end of the hall. Computerization had made it possible to reduce the number of volumes, to expand the field of his research, and to cross-reference sources—to produce a DNA register of the bodies of identified
desaparecidos
, a pedigree of the torturers who were still at large or of those who had been granted amnesty, testimonies—all of it connected with the files of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, which Elena kept up to date, and to those of the Grandmoth­ers, who were looking specifically for the children of the
desaparecidos
. The agency was financed by the royalty payments on his father's works, which were still published abroad, the fees that his customers could pay, and private funds or resources that had been taken away from former oppressors. In any case, he wasn't much interested in money—he would have to spend time counting up the money that was missing, and his own losses were final.

The air coming in the window was humid, borne by a capricious breeze that was blowing up to him. Rubén put his glass on the coffee table, sat down on the 1960s couch that faced his overloaded bookcase and opened the manila envelope.

Carlos was well equipped to decipher the financial setup of the Campallo empire and its ramifications: a specialist in economics, the journalist was also a member of a pressure group composed of jurists, intellectuals, and lawyers who were calling for the establishment of a CONADEP
9
to judge those who had bankrupted Argentina during the financial crisis of 2001-2002. Carlos's group concentrated on property owners who, controlling the main source of currency in the country, had sequestered the dollars derived from their activities and hidden their real revenues in order to reduce their tax bills. This oligarchy, which was connected with the world of finance, had exported its enormous amounts of surplus capital, speculating against the peso and their own country, to the point of draining it dry.

Eduardo Campallo was one of the men who had been able to take advantage of the situation. Trained as an engineer and urban planner, he had studied in the United States before taking the reins of the family business after the early death of his father, who had died in harness, so to speak. In 1975, Eduardo began running Nuevos, a construction firm based in Buenos Aires. The following year, the military hired Nuevos to tear down the slums in the center of the city and build new apartment buildings, a gigantic project that had given the young entrepreneur a leg up and at the same time expanded his networks. Martínez de Hoz, the minister of Finance under the dictatorship and subsequent governments (he was nicknamed Robin Hood, because he robbed from the poor to give to the rich), had studied at the same business school in the United States from which Campallo had graduated. A simple ideological acquaintance? Nuevos, which was later to become STG and then Vivalia, had quadrupled its turnover during the dictatorship and during the Menem years its sales exploded. Pursuing its policy of privatization, the state had then sold off land with full services in the center of Buenos Aires, hiring Campallo to build a business center there—at a profit of 200 percent. The same type of operation was repeated two years later, with the development of luxury residences in Puerto Madero and the conversion of old buildings on the docks into lofts, once again with record profits that had propelled Campallo into the upper economic spheres. Commissions, money transfers to offshore banks through dummy companies, forgeries—Carlos and his friends suspected Eduardo Campallo of having paid off the political class involved in these transactions in exchange for its generosity.

Campallo subsequently diversified his activities by moving into the media and communications; he owned several newspapers, celebrity magazines, and scandal sheets, a private radio station and shares in several cable channels. The 2001 bankruptcy slowed the expansion of Campallo's empire in the center of the capital, but not in the province of Buenos Aires, the most heavily populated in Argentina: Vivalia built, among other things, the ultra-secure community of Santa Barbara, surrounded by walls, some fifty kilometers from the city, with a special highway, reserved for residents, providing access to the international airport, armed guards, sport facilities, urban services, green spaces, etc. Campallo mixed with the country's elite, who had no lack of supplicants. Some them had naturally become his friends, beginning with the mayor of Buenos Aires, Francisco Torres.

Rubén finished his pisco sour. Although Carlos had put together a complete file on Campallo, he'd given Rubén little information about the businessman's family. In 1974, Eduardo Campallo married Isabel de Angelis, who came from the local upper middle class. Now fifty-nine years old, a Catholic, and the mother of two children—María Victoria and her brother Rodolfo, who was two years younger—Isabel Campallo was involved in various charitable activities unrelated to those of her husband and his large personal fortune. Their son Rodolfo worked as a host on his father's radio station, while María Victoria worked as a camera operator. Often away on business, according to the concierge, who was at those times assigned to feed the cat. What was he doing behind the scenes? Carlos had added a digital photo of María Victoria and the address and access code of the building where she lived.

Rubén dressed in black and prepared his equipment.

 

*

 

The bohemian youth had moved into Palermo, attracting designer clothes shops, bars, and restaurants in the cosmopolitan fashion that delighted tourists and real estate speculators. The neighborhood was now cut in two, Palermo Viejo and Hollywood, which had been renamed since artists and film people had taken up residence there.

1255 Nicaragua, three o'clock in the morning. A chrome bus in exuberant colors passed by, a fabulous vessel sailing through the night. Rubén crushed out his cigarette in the gutter of broken slabs of marble and punched in the building's access code. The lobby was empty, and there was no elevator; he passed in front of the drawn curtains of the concierge's loge and climbed the stair to the landing on the third and last floor. Music was playing in the neighboring apartment. Rubén examined the lock on the door, selected one of his lock picks, and manipulated the lock until a click indicated that it was open. Silently, he slipped into María Victoria's loft, making his way by the light coming in from outside, lowered the shades on the street side, and then turned on a lamp. The apartment was spacious, modern, and sober: an American-style kitchen, two long black sofas decorated with multicolored cushions, an architect's table near the tall bay window, and a photography studio set up behind a screen—umbrella lamps, floodlights, a white background for photo shoots. Rubén took a few steps across the brown wooden floor: a dozen photos were hanging from a string stretched across a corner of the room, held in place by clothespins. Her most recent prints, no doubt. He recognized the concerned look of the attractive brunette with curly hair—María Victoria's self-portrait, with a charming little lizard tattooed below her ear. The other photos, stage photos, showed a rock singer; his shaved head, eyes with black makeup, and convoluted poses rang a faint bell. He copied them on his BlackBerry, put on a pair of plastic gloves, and had a look at the office area.