Mapuche (26 page)

The old Buenos Aires Institute of Forensic Science, which used to be adjacent to the medical school, had been transferred to the Avenida Comodoro Py, not far from the Retiro and the new port. Opened with great ceremony in Antepuerto, a new zone filled with public buildings, the Morgue Judicial, a resolutely modern structure, contrasted with the Mussolini-style austerity of the past century; a large marble hall sheltered the reception area, the cafeteria, the educational sector, and a private space reserved for victims' families. The upper floors—containing laboratories, forensic clinics—were reached by a two elevators, one reserved for the public and employees, and the other exclusively for the medical staff, corpses, and authorized persons.

Anita was waiting in front of the ambulance entrance, worrying about being caught there, when Rubén arrived.

“Did anyone see you?” she whispered.

“Apart from a few spy satellites, no.”

“Ho, ho, ho.” Anita pinned the badge Guillermo had given her on her lapel. “Come on, let's not waste any time.”

With its long marble corridor, soft lighting, balustrades and glass staircases, the smooth architecture of the Forensic Institute was more reminiscent of the international airport than of a morgue. A little Bolivian woman was distractedly mopping the floor, a white mask over her tanned face, which she hardly raised as they passed by. Anita walked fast under the filtered neon lights: Rubén had no business being in the lair of the forensic police, and her job was absolutely on the line here.

“The body was prepared for burial,” she whispered as she guided the detective through the labyrinth of the high tech bunker. “Damn, the funeral service is going to start any minute now, and it's crazy to be here!”

Rubén avoided the surveillance camera at the corner of the corridor and followed the blonde to the cold storage area.

“We have five minutes, no more,” Anita said as she opened the door.

The room exhaled a combination of ammonia and deodorant for public toilets. The aseptic white walls, a harsh light, and a row of compartments on the right, dead bodies classified by their order of arrival. Number 23: Anita pulled out the aluminum drawer and immediately looked away.

Rubén cleared his mind as he approached the monster. Muñoz, who had just finished the autopsy, had tried to make the corpse a little more presentable, but with half her head torn off, the state of her skin and her empty eye sockets, poor María was unrecognizable. Rubén swallowed as he thought about the self-portraits hanging in her loft, and better understood why the family was rushing the funeral.

“Four minutes,” Anita whispered, looking at the wall.

The skin was withered and faded, the skull had been cut behind the frontal lobes, rather cleanly despite the gauze bandages. Probably a boat's propeller. The rest of the face was a horror. Not only the eyes but also the mouth had been eaten away by whelks. María Victoria Campallo. A diaphanous, almost milky body, round breasts, a slightly rounded belly, sewn back up in haste.

“The windstorm that hit the coast caused some damage in the ports and marinas,” Anita said, keeping her distance. “But according to Maritime Affairs no shipwreck was reported in the Río de la Plata area.”

Rubén nodded. The cadaver's paleness indicated that it had been in the water for a long time, several days to judge by the state of the skin, which was beginning to rot in contact with the air. No sign of a bullet wound, a knife blow, or a cigarette burn.

“What does Muñoz's report say?”

“If I knew that I wouldn't be cooling my butt here,” his friend replied.

Above all, it was the odor that was boring into his head. Rubén put on a pair of surgical gloves and handed a pair to Anita.

“Here, help me turn her over.”

Anita blew aside her blond locks, a nervous tic she had. They grabbed María's corpse and flipped it over on its stomach. No visible lesions, despite multiple apparent fractures. The body must have floated to the surface and then been ground up by a freighter, ferry, or trawler, whose propeller had cut off the top of her skull. Rubén forgot the ugliness of death and put his gloved hands on the drowned woman's back. His senses very quickly became more acute, as if the lessons in forensics taught by Raúl were coming back to him through his fingertips: carefully, he felt the bones, followed the uneven shapes of the fractures. The jawbones were broken, the clavicle, the ribs.

“The results of the toxicological tests won't be in for several days, but Guillermo has some stuff for you,” Anita said to hurry things up. “Let's get out of here, please.”

The young intern on duty that night knew Calderón's reputation as a troublemaker, like himself, but to hell with his superiors, for whom he had only moderate respect. The future forensic scientist had stoned the police's armored cars during the crisis, and when those responsible for the bankruptcy fled from the rooftops by helicopter, he'd flipped them the bird, along with thousands of other bare-chested longhairs. Guillermo had not assisted Muñoz during the autopsy, but he had cleaned up after the heavyweight had done his work. In particular, he had found two X-rays in the waste bins, rejects that he had made off with before they could be destroyed.

Rubén put the pictures on the lighted screen that lit the small room where the intern had been waiting for them. Certain fractured areas were not clear. He spent a long time examining them. It was not only the jawbones, the clavicle, and the ribs that had been caved in, but also the femoral heads and the heel. María's body seemed to have imploded.

The characteristics of the fractures left no doubt. María Campallo had not been beaten with iron bars or crushed by the hull of a ferry while she was floating on the surface: she had been thrown out of an airplane.

“What is it?” Anita asked.

Rubén paled. The Death Flights.

 

*

 

Drugged with sodium pentothal, loaded into trucks or cars, gagged, bound, and hooded, subversives extracted from the prisons were taken to military airports and thrown alive into the Río de la Plata. Night flights, in helicopters or more often in airplanes. Sometimes the cadavers were found trussed up on the coast of Uruguay, dismembered or mutilated bodies that the waves brought in depending on the variations in the currents. The unexpected storm the preceding week had driven the photographer's body back toward Buenos Aires, as often happened during the worst days of the Dirty War.

Lost in these reminiscences, Rubén saw the scene once again in violent flashes, the kidnapping of María Victoria and the person she thought was her brother as they came out of La Catedral, the transvestite whom they tortured in front of her to make her talk, the screams, the confessions, their separation, Orlando sent to the deserted quays of La Boca, María drugged to transfer her to an airport in the countryside, the rich industrialist's daughter reduced to a package thrown into the trunk of a car, a simple number to be erased, to be made to disappear, María inert on the floor of the fuselage, flying over the drop zone, the black skin of the ocean crinkling under the moon, she still deep in her chemical dreams, feeling neither wind nor fear, the voracious and muddy waters at the mouth of the river far below, and then María Victoria cast into the void, her fall, her interminable fall toward the ocean. Hitting the sea after falling 6,000 feet is like hitting a concrete wall: María's bones had exploded in her flesh.

Rubén was driving down Corrientes, shaken after his visit to the Morgue Judicial. His hand snatched at the night air through the open car window. His shirt was drenched with sweat, his loaded Colt was in the glove compartment. Big cars were rolling down the swarming Centro Avenue; the signs on the luxury shops were still illuminated and sparkled under the eyes of old ladies in furs whom aging
hidalgos
were taking to dinner after the show. The people downtown seemed rich, happy, healthy, guardians of the
porteño
soul. His father would be their age if he'd lived.

Rubén arrived at the apartment in Palermo, his eyes burning with fatigue. The lamp in the Japanese living room was lit and the curtains were drawn, but the room was empty.

“Jana?”

The smell of weed floated down the glass staircase. He found her upstairs, sitting cross-legged in front of the low table that served as a desk, her eyes glued to the computer screen.

“Dracula left me some
flores
,” she said, handing him the joint.

Jana wore a threadbare gray shirt over her shoulders and black jean shorts just as threadbare as the shirt. A butt had already dried out in the ashtray—local marijuana—under the wise eye of the big white cat who had finally emerged from his hiding place and positioned himself on the chest of drawers. Rubén chased away the images of death that had been haunting him since he left the Forensics Institute, took the joint between his lips, and leaned down to look at the screen.

“The Montañez you're looking for must now be at least fifty-five years old,” she said, “if he's still alive.” She showed him the notes she'd scribbled on her loose sheets. “I've found a dozen of them on the Internet: the former petty officer might be one of them.”

Rubén ran through her notes: truck driver, restaurant owner, delicatessen, public scribe, none of people named “Montañez” that Jana had listed worked in a private security or caretaking firm.

“What did you find out at the morgue?” she asked.

“María Campallo was thrown out of an airplane,” he drawled. “The currents washed the body up on the coast. That implies a pilot, a suitable plane, an airport close enough to Buenos Aires to be able to organize the transfer, accomplices . . . ”

He passed the joint back to her.

“I can take care of that,” the sculptress said.

“You don't know my files, the classification system.”

“Do you think I'm retarded? Just tell me what to look for.”

Her coldness perked him up.

“Pilots' names,” he replied. “Compare them with the ones appearing in the files. Also look into their backgrounds, the kind of airplanes used on the weekend of the double murder, the nature of the airports around the city, with or without control towers . . . Anything you can find.”

“O.K. And Montañez?”

“We'll have to look in the Navy archives. File a request with the appropriate authorities. That can take weeks.”

He yawned, weighed down by the musician's
flores
and his lack of sleep the night before.

“O.K.,” Jana said. “Go to bed, I'll deal with the airports. You can sleep in the downstairs bedroom.”

He nodded. The Mapuche's face was very close, her full lips delicately drawn. Rubén abruptly stood up straight and rocked back and forth over Jana, who had already turned her attention back to the internet.

“Good night,” he said.

“Try to get some sleep, you stubborn ox.”

Ledzep, who had been following the conversation from the chest of drawers, jumped down and followed Rubén.

The hope of finding Miguel alive was growing slimmer by the hour. One chance in a hundred, according to the detective: without him, Jana would have no chance at all. She relighted the joint and began to surf the websites. There were half a dozen airfields scattered around the city, private flying clubs perennially short of funds and therefore not very picky about the people or merchandise that passed through their facilities. The smallest did not have a control tower, and seemed to limit themselves to giving flying lessons. Two of them bordered on Route 9, the main highway nearest the Río de la Plata. Jana took down the pilots' names listed on the first one, three men with smiling faces out of
Top Gun
, and entered the data into Rubén's files. More research. Cross-checking. Available photos. Comparisons with the organizational charts of the oppressors and their accomplices—wasted time: none of the three pilots appeared on Rubén's blacklists. She made notes on what she found anyway, who knew.

The second airfield didn't have a real Internet site, just a vague advertisement with photos that looked like they dated from the 1970s. No proper names: just the fees charged and the options available. Ledzep, who must have been thrown out of the bedroom, nuzzled her bare feet with the assiduity of a wild animal reconquering territory. Jana looked at the clock; it was very late. Too agitated to sleep, she left the computer on standby and went down the glass staircase. Thoughts flashed into her head, each more sinister than the last—had the killers already thrown Miguel into the estuary? She smoked a joint of pure
flores
while looking out at the street behind the curtains. The city's lights flickered like fireflies in the violet sky. She suddenly felt lost, foreign to the place, as if time was passing without her. Without him? Rubén was keeping his distance, as if something ineluctable were going to happen and crush them both. Jana didn't give a damn about their differences, about the violence that lay just under his skin, even about his age. The body had feelings that didn't lie. His burning hands, his cock, the passionate embrace the other night, in the yard . . .

Ledzep's mewing brought her out of her night owl's thoughts—he wanted to go to bed, too. Weary, she put out the joint, drank a glass of water, and brushed her teeth in the bathroom adjacent to the bedroom. A designer mirror, king-size bed, minimalist furniture, oriental lamps that shed a subdued light to produce a voluptuous atmosphere. Jo Prat had put a bouquet of flowers on the night table, red roses, obviously; they were magnificent. Rubén was sleeping fitfully on the white sheets, having taken off just his shoes, his arms hugging the pillow as if it might escape. Hope, despair. She wavered a moment under the effect of the THC, closed her eyes to the disaster, and sank down without regret in the shadow of his arms.

Two black holes cast into the void.

The population of Buenos Aires, which had no land use policy, had settled along the rail lines, with the result that the city was shaped like an open hand. The indus­tries had then slipped into the interstices, continually extending the suburbs and their three ring roads. Rubén was driving on Route 9, which was jammed, listening without flinching to the nonstop news on the radio. He'd slept eight hours straight, and the fatigue that had dogged him for two days had been diluted in black coffee. The newscaster had just announced the death of María Victoria Cam­pallo, whose body had been found on the shores of the ecological preserve. No other details at the moment, except that an investigation had been opened. Not a word regarding the burial, which would take place that evening, nor about her murder, even though it was fact by now. Had her father, who had contacts in the media, ordered that the matter be handled that way?