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- Herausgeber: Bitter Lemon Press
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
Not for nothing is Claudia Piñeiro Argentina's most popular crime writer. Betty Boo is original, witty and hugely entertaining; it mixes murder with love, political power and journalism." Times-London "Those willing to take the time to enjoy the style and the unusual denouement will find themselves wondering why more crime authors don't take the kinds of risks Piñeiro does." Booklist The fourth novel from Claudia Piñeiro, South America's best-selling crime novelist. When a renowned Buenos Aires industrialist is found dead at his home in an exclusive gated community called La Maravillosa, the novelist Nurit Iscar (once nicknamed Betty Boo owing to a resemblance to the cartoon character Betty Boop) is contracted by a former lover, the editor of a national newspaper, to cover the story. Nurit teams up with the paper's veteran, but now demoted, crime reporter. Soon they realize that they are falling in love, which complicates matters deliciously. The murder is no random crime but one in a series that goes to the heart of the establishment. Five members of the Argentine industrial and political elite, who all went to the same boarding-school, have died in apparently innocent circumstances. The Maravillosa murder is just the last in the series and those in power in Argentina are not about to allow all this brought to light. Too much is at stake.
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Claudia Piñeiro lives in Buenos Aires. For many years she was a journalist, playwright and television scriptwriter and in 1992 won the prestigious Pléyade journalism award. She has more recently turned to fiction and is the author of the novel Thursday Night Widows – awarded the Clarín Prize for Fiction, All Yours – winner of the German Literaturpreis, and A Crack in the Wall, all previously published by Bitter Lemon Press.
Also available from Bitter Lemon Press
by Claudia Piñeiro
Thursday Night Widows
All Yours
A Crack in the Wall
BITTER LEMON PRESS
First published in the United Kingdom in 2016 by Bitter Lemon Press, 47 Wilmington Square, London WC1X 2ET
www.bitterlemonpress.com
First published in Spanish as Betibú by Alfaguara, Buenos Aires, 2011
Bitter Lemon Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Arts Council of England
Work published within the framework of SUR Translation Support Program of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, International
Trade and Worship of the Argentine Republic
© Claudia Piñeiro, 2011
English translation © Miranda France, 2016
Published by arrangement with Literarische Agentur Dr. Ray-Güde Mertin
Inh. Nicole Witt e. K., Frankfurt am Main, Germany
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without written permission of the publisher
The moral rights of the author and the translator have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All the characters and events described in this novel are imaginary and any similarity with real people or events is purely coincidental.
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
eBook ISBN 978-1-908524-560
Typeset by Tetragon, London
Printed and bound by Cox & Wyman Ltd. Reading, Berkshire
To mis amigas, all of them, just because.
To Silvina Frydman and Laura Novoa
They and I know why.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Acknowledgements
Guide
CoverContentsTitle Page“(…) in his crime stories for the newspaper, he tells the readers what happened and how, but he always arrives after the crash or the crime, he has to relive it imaginatively with witness statements and evidence. Never, until now, has the event unfolded before his eyes, nor the scream of the victim entered his own reporter’s ears.”
ANTONIO DI BENEDETTO
“Falta de vocación”, Cuentos Claros
“The microscopic debris that covers our clothing and bodies is the silent witness, sure and faithful, of all our movements and all our encounters.”
EDMOND LOCARD
Criminalistic Treatise
“The story goes on; it can go on; there are various possible conjectures; it’s still open; it merely gets interrupted. The investigation has no end; it cannot end. Someone should invent a new literary genre, paranoid fiction. Everyone is a suspect; everyone feels pursued.”
RICARDO PIGLIA
Blanco Nocturno
11
Mondays are the days it takes longest to get into the Maravillosa Country Club. The line of domestic staff, gardeners, builders, plumbers, carpenters, electricians, gasmen and other assorted labourers seems to go on forever. Gladys Varela knows this all too well, and that’s why she’s swearing to herself as she stands facing the barrier, from which a sign reading Personnel and Suppliers hangs, behind another fifteen or twenty people who are waiting, like her, to go in. She curses herself for not having charged up the electronic card that would grant her automatic entry. The problem is that the card expires every two months, and the times at which you can make an appointment to reactivate it clash with the hours she works for Señor Chazarreta. And Señor Chazarreta isn’t a very nice man. At least he doesn’t seem so to Gladys, who finds his face intimidating. She can’t decide whether the way he looks at her is surly, dry or tight-lipped. But whichever it is, he’s the reason she hasn’t yet dared to ask if she can leave early or have a break to go to the gatehouse and renew her entry card. Because of that way he looks at her. Or doesn’t look at her, because in actual fact Señor Chazarreta rarely looks right at her, rarely looks her in the eye. He just generally looks, looks around, looks into the garden or looks at a bare wall. Always with a long, unsmiling face, as though he were cross about something. Mind you, it’s not surprising, given everything that’s happened. At least her entry card is signed, that’s one thing; it means she has to queue, as she is in fact doing, but that nobody will have to call Señor Chazarreta to authorize her entry into the private neighbourhood. Señor Chazarreta hates being woken, and often sleeps until late. Sometimes he stays up into the early hours. And he drinks. A lot. Gladys suspects this, anyway, because she often finds a glass and a bottle of whisky in whichever part of the house Señor Chazarreta crashed out the previous night. Sometimes it’s the bedroom. Other times it’s the living room, or the veranda, or that cinema they have on the top floor. Not they, he, because Señor Chazarreta has lived alone since his wife died. But Gladys never asks about that, about his wife’s death; she neither knows nor wants to know. What she saw on the news is enough. And never mind what some people say. She’s been working at the house for two years and the Señora died two-and- a-half or three years ago. Three. She thinks. That’s what they told her, anyway; she can’t remember the exact date. Her duty is to Señor Chazarreta. And he pays her well, promptly, and doesn’t make a scene if she breaks a glass or gets a bit of bleach on an item of clothing or slightly burns a cake. Only once did he get cross, very cross, when something was missing – a photo – but afterwards he realized that she wasn’t to blame, and had to admit as much to her. He didn’t apologize, but he acknowledged that it hadn’t been her fault. And Gladys Varela forgave him then, even though he hadn’t asked to be forgiven. And she tries not to think about it now. Because she believes that forgiveness means nothing if you continue to dwell on your grievance. Chazarreta may have a face like a wet weekend, but what boss doesn’t? There’s too much misfortune in the world to go around smiling.
The queue moves forward. One woman’s angry because her employer has barred her from entering the compound. Why? she’s shouting. Who the hell does she think she is? All this for some shitty piece of cheese? But Gladys can’t hear how the guard on duty responds, from his side of the window, to the woman’s furious questions. As she storms past, Gladys realizes that she knows this woman, from the internal bus or from walking alongside her the first few blocks inside the club; she’s not sure, but she recognizes her. There are still three men ahead of her in the line, who seem to be friends or somehow to know each other, perhaps from working together. It takes longer than usual to process one of the trio because he isn’t registered, so they ask for his identity card and take a photograph and they tape a serial number to his bicycle to make sure he leaves with the bike he brought in. Then they telephone the property’s owner to get authorization for him to enter. Before letting him go they note down the bicycle’s make, colour and wheel size, and Gladys wonders why it was also necessary to issue a serial number. Is it in case the man finds another bicycle, exactly the same but newer and in better condition, and tries to take that one out? That would be some luck. You’d have a better chance of finding a lottery ticket with a palindromic number on it or of getting a full house at bingo. But the men don’t question the need for this number, much less complain about it. It’s the way things are, the rules of the game. They accept it. And in a way that’s right, Gladys thinks, because it means when you leave you can prove that you haven’t taken anything, that you’re decent. Better for them to make their notes now than go around making idle accusations later. That’s what Gladys is thinking – that they shouldn’t make idle accusations – when the woman who was shouting in the queue a few minutes ago comes up to her. If you hear of any work, will you let me know? she says. And Gladys answers yes, that she’ll let her know. The woman holds out her mobile and says: Take my number. Gladys takes her own phone out of her jacket pocket and taps in the numbers that the other woman reels off. The woman asks her to ring the number then hang up, so that she’ll also have her number. And she asks her name. Gladys, she says. Anabella, says the other woman, put it in: Anabella. And Gladys saves that name and that number. The woman isn’t shouting any more; her anger has given way to something else. A mix of rancour and resignation. After swapping numbers with some other women in the line, she leaves quietly.
When her turn comes, Gladys hands over the document. The guard enters her details into a computer and straight away her face appears on the screen. The image surprises her: she looks younger in that photo, slimmer and with blonder hair; now she remembers that she’d bleached it the day before they registered her. But that wasn’t so long ago. The guard looks at the screen and then at her, twice, before waving her through. A few yards further on another guard waits while she opens her bag. He doesn’t need to ask: Gladys, like everyone in the queue, knows the form. As she struggles with the zipper it sticks and she has to tug harder at it before the teeth come free. The guard moves her belongings around in the bag to see what’s there. She asks him to make a note on the entry form of the phone in her jacket pocket, her charger and a pair of sandals she’s carrying in her bag. And she shows him these things. The guard writes them down. The other stuff doesn’t matter: paper handkerchiefs, some sweets half stuck together; her wallet containing her identity card, a five-peso note and coins for the bus fare home; her house keys; two sanitary pads. Those don’t need to be logged, but the phone, charger and sandals do. She doesn’t want any trouble on the way out, she tells him. The guard hands her the completed form and she puts it into her wallet along with her ID, forces the zip closed again, and sets off.
The three men who were in the queue with her are walking just ahead, jostling each other and clowning around, laughing. The one with the bicycle pushes it, so that he can walk with the others and chat. Gladys speeds up; this Monday queue has made her later than usual. She passes them and one says: Hello, how are you? They don’t know each other, but Gladys returns the greeting. He’s not bad-looking, she thinks, and if he’s in here it must be because he’s got a job. She’s not thinking of him for herself; she’s already married – just thinking. See you later, says the man, who’s behind her now. See you, she replies, quickening her step again to put more distance between them.
When she gets to the golf course she turns right, then right again a few yards later. Chazarreta’s house is the fifth one down, on the left after the willow tree. She knows the way by heart. And she knows which door Chazarreta will have left open so that she can enter the house without ringing the bell: the one that leads into the kitchen from the veranda. Before doing that she picks up the papers – La Nación and Ámbito Financiero – in the entrance hall. Chazarreta must still be asleep, otherwise he’d have taken the papers himself to read over breakfast. Gladys looks at the front page of La Nación, skips the main headline, which alludes to the president’s most recent sworn declaration of assets, and goes to a large colour photo under which she reads: Two buses crash on Calle Boedo; three dead and four seriously injured. She crosses herself without really knowing why; on account of the dead, she supposes. Or for the seriously injured, that they may not also die. Then she lays the two newspapers down on the kitchen table. She goes into the utility room, hangs her things in the closet and puts on her uniform. She’s going to have to ask Señor Chazarreta to buy her another one; now that she’s put on weight the buttons are straining over her bust and the armholes cut off circulation to her arms when she lifts them to hang up washing on the line. If he wants her always to wear a uniform, as he said on the day he hired her, he’ll have to pay for it. Gladys looks into the laundry basket and sees that there isn’t much ironing to do. Chazarreta is very tidy and usually brings in all the washing that’s hanging up at the weekend, but she’ll go out to the back patio anyway to check if there’s anything to take down, just in case. After that she’ll wash the dirty plates she saw out of the corner of her eye in the kitchen sink. And next she’ll do the bathrooms – her least favourite job – to get them out of the way.
As she suspected, Chazarreta has indeed brought the washing in. There aren’t many dirty plates in the kitchen sink: either he did some washing-up at the weekend, or he ate out. She leaves the plates, a glass and some cutlery to dry on a dishcloth so that they won’t slide on the black marble work surface, then goes to the utility room and comes back with the floor squeegee and the bucket, with cleaning products, cloth and gloves inside it.
As she’s walking down the corridor, she passes the living room and notices Chazarreta sitting in the green velvet armchair, the high-backed one she thinks must be his favourite. The armchair faces a picture window that looks onto the park. But this morning the curtains are still drawn, so Chazarreta hasn’t sat down there to admire the view; more likely he’s been sprawled in that chair since last night. Although the chair’s high back and the dim light obscure her view, Gladys knows that Señor Chazarreta is there because his left hand is dangling over one side of the chair and, beneath it, on the woodblock floor, there’s a glass on its side and some spilt whisky.
Good morning, Gladys says as she passes behind him on her way upstairs. She says this quietly enough for him to hear if he’s awake but to avoid waking him if he’s still asleep. Chazarreta doesn’t answer. He’s sleeping it off, Gladys thinks, and carries on. But before going upstairs she checks herself. It would be better to wipe up the whisky now, because if the liquid lies on the wax floor for too long it will leave one of those white stains that are so difficult to remove without applying another layer of wax. And Gladys doesn’t want to start the week waxing floors. Retracing her steps, she takes the cloth from the bucket, bends down, picks up the glass and wipes up the whisky beside the velvet armchair, pushing the cloth blindly ahead of her. But straight away the cloth meets another spill, a dark puddle she can’t identify, and quickly she drops the cloth so that the liquid soaking into it won’t reach her hand; instead she touches this liquid, fleetingly, with the tip of her index finger: it’s sticky. Blood? she wonders, not believing that it can be. Then she raises her gaze to look at Chazarreta. There he is, in front of her, with his throat slit. His neck, slashed from one side to the other, opens like two near-perfect lips. Gladys doesn’t know what it is she can see inside the wound, because the sight of that red flesh, the blood and the mash of tissues and tubes is so shocking and repellent she instinctively closes her eyes, simultaneously raising her hands to her face as though closing them were not enough to stop her seeing, and her mouth opens only to let out a muted groan.
The repulsion doesn’t last long, however, because fear overtakes it. A fear that isn’t paralysing, but galvanizing. And so Gladys Varela uncovers her face and forces herself to open her eyes, lifts her head again and looks straight at the ravaged throat, at Chazarreta’s blood-stained clothes, at the knife his right hand holds in his lap and at the empty whisky bottle tucked in beside his body, next to the armrest. Then she gets straight up, runs into the street and screams. She screams and screams, determined to keep on screaming until someone hears her.
22
At the very moment Gladys Varela is screaming in a cul-de-sac at the Maravillosa Country Club, Nurit Iscar is trying to restore order to her house. That is, her three-room apartment in the poorest – or rather, most run-down – part of the Barrio Norte, French and Larrea. She doesn’t know yet that Pedro Chazarreta is dead. The news is going to spread fast, but not that fast. If she did know, she’d have the television and radio on, following every update. Or she’d go on the Internet, to an online newspaper, and find out more details of what happened. But Nurit Iscar doesn’t know. Not yet. She won’t find out for a few more hours.
The house is a mess. Half-empty wine glasses, yesterday’s disembowelled newspapers, crumbs on the floor, butt ends everywhere. Nurit Iscar doesn’t smoke, never has smoked, and detests the smell of cigarettes. She hopes that allowing others to smoke in her house is therefore a sign of love, and not submission. Love or submission: it’s a question she often poses herself – and not only in the matter of cigarettes – without yet having arrived at a satisfactory answer. The day before, her friends Paula Sibona and Carmen Terrada – both of whom smoke – had come over for their monthly get-together, which takes place on the third Sunday of every month and has been a fixture for two years. Not that they don’t get together at other times, for a coffee or to go to the cinema, for a meal or on any number of occasions which conceal a secret purpose: to let time pass, as it inevitably must, but in good company. The third Sunday of the month is different, though. Sometimes Viviana Mansini joins them, but not always, and they are grateful for that because, while Viviana believes them all to be intimate friends, the other three don’t feel the same about her. When Viviana’s with them the talk tends to revolve around her, and she’s always making some observation which, however innocent it may sound, feels like a kick in the ovaries for one of the others. Like when Carmen was complaining that she’d been anxious about a small lump in one breast until a medical test revealed it to be merely dysplasia, and Viviana Mansini replied angelically: I know what you mean. I felt the same a couple of months ago when I had that biopsy, I don’t know if you remember, no, you obviously don’t because you were the only one who didn’t call to find out what the result was. And in the silence that followed, Carmen looked at her as if to say “thanks, bitch”, but she didn’t say anything. In fact it was Paula Sibona who came to her defence and, imitating with difficulty the same angelic tone said: Obviously it went well, Vivi, because your tit’s all there. And she emphasized the point by grabbing her own breasts and moving them gently up and down over an exaggerated compass to illustrate the generous heft of Viviana Mansini’s bosoms. But, besides sparing them her sarcasm, Viviana’s absence means they can criticize her, too. Because, as Paula Sibona says, It must be my age, but bitching about Mansini gives me almost the same adrenaline rush as fucking. And that Sunday before the Monday that Pedro Chazarreta turned up with his throat slit, their monthly gathering was confined to the inner circle – no Viviana Mansini – and took place at Nurit Iscar’s house. They rotate houses every month, but the procedure is always the same. They meet before lunch; the lady of the house buys all the papers – and all the papers means all the papers; then, while she cooks her speciality, which in Nurit Iscar’s case doesn’t extend much beyond steak with salad or spaghetti carbonara, the others pull apart the newspapers and read articles with the aim of selecting a few to read aloud. This exchange takes place after lunch, over coffee. But they don’t bother with any old news. Each of them, as with the cooking, has her speciality. For Nurit Iscar it’s the crime stories – not for nothing was she considered, until a few years ago, “the Dark Lady of Argentine literature”. Although that’s past history for her and something she’d rather forget, she can’t resist serving up “blood and death” when her friends demand it – so long as it doesn’t involve writing fiction. And better still if there’s sex, Paula Sibona usually says. Carmen’s speciality is national news, and her greatest pleasure is finding inconsistencies in the declarations of politicians: syntactical errors and – why not? – howlers. The one she has the most fun with is the mayor. Someone who can’t speak shouldn’t be in charge of a city, she’s always saying. And, far from being elitist, her observation alludes to the obvious contempt a certain affluent social class – from which the mayor hails – feels for language (words, meaning, syntax, conjugation, use of prepositions, solipsisms) and which she, a secondary-school teacher of language and literature for more than thirty years, refuses to countenance. Paula Sibona’s choice of news, in contrast to her unsuspecting friends, has less to do with her personal interests than with her love for Nurit Iscar: she goes for theatre and cinema reviews, and entertainment in general. It’s true that Paula is an actress (although, can she still be an actress if it’s nearly two years since anyone called to offer her a part?), an established actress who, as the years have passed, has slipped from playing the lead parts in soap operas to being “the mother of” and thence into unjust oblivion. If there’s anything that holds no interest at all for Paula Sibona it’s reading the papers. They make me feel ill, she says. But she’s still an enthusiastic member of the group, secretly hoping that the items she chooses to read aloud may help her friend Nurit to exorcize a hurt caused her – Paula believes – by the press. A pain. She doesn’t know if that’s achievable, but she won’t give up nevertheless. Because Nurit Iscar, the Dark Lady of Argentine literature, married until five years ago and with two sons finishing school and about to go to university, fell in love with another man and then, as well as getting divorced, wrote her first romantic novel. Which, on top of everything else, didn’t go well. It didn’t go well in terms of plot, or critical reception, or with the legion of fans anxiously awaiting a new Nurit Iscar novel. Unfortunately her own love story didn’t have a happy ending either – and that’s something else she’d rather forget. Some of her readers stuck by her, but many others were put off by a novel that was so different to the others, and lacked the one element they had hoped to find: a corpse. And then the critics, who had largely ignored her up until that point, went in for the kill. “This attempt to be literary falls flat.” “Iscar should have stuck to plotting, which is supposedly her strength, and left the metaphors, the poetic pretensions and the linguistic experimentation to writers who understand these things, either through study, instinct or talent – something which, if she has any, is not discernible here.” “A novel that deserves to go unnoticed, a forgettable novel.” “It defies logic that Iscar, having struck on the magic formula for a bestseller, should now attempt something about which she knows nothing: writing serious literature.” And there were plenty more like that. Nurit has a box full of cuttings relating to her last novel: Only If You Love Me. A white box, really big, not like those ones people keep – or used to keep – their love letters in. It’s tied up with a blue silk ribbon that she plans never to untie again. But she keeps the box, almost as though it were evidence of a crime, although she doesn’t know which was the worst crime: writing the novel, reading the reviews, or letting herself be so affected by them. It was those reviews, together with the failure of the love affair that led her to write that ill-fated novel, and the murder of Gloria Echagüe, Chazarreta’s wife – a case Nurit had declined to cover for the newspaper El Tribuno because she was so absorbed by Only If You Love Me – that prompted her to “do a Salinger” (albeit in a Third World/female/crime-writer-ish way), locking herself away for ever, far from the world to which she had belonged up until that point. The difference, though, was that she had neither Salinger’s fame nor sufficient savings or royalties to finance her exile, so she had to look for a job that would allow her to pay the electricity and gas bills, to do her supermarket shop and all those other things for which one needs a salary or money in the bank. Or in the wallet. And since the only thing she knows how to do is write (although, after those reviews, even her aptitude for writing has been thrown into question), that is what she does. But under other people’s names, as a ghostwriter. She prefers the Spanish term for this: escritora fantasma, something applauded by her friend Carmen Terrada, who to this day defends the use of their native tongue against the anglophone invasion, a battle she knows to be lost but which she finds romantic. Paula Sibona won’t accept her friend’s reluctance to go back to doing what she enjoys – writing her own novels – so she keeps trying to show her the small-mindedness of some reviews which seem to have been written more than anything to flatter their authors and make them famous. Or notorious, like Lee Harvey Oswald or Mark David Chapman. And Carmen Terrada offers up a more erudite comparison: how Jean Genet stopped writing for five years after being “stripped naked”, to use his own words, in an essay his friend Sartre wrote about him. But just remember that they are not Jean-Paul, Nurit, dear, and you are not Genet.
After emptying the ashtrays and airing out the room to banish the smell of cigarette smoke, Nurit Iscar sweeps the floor. Then she washes some plates left over from the night before, puts the tablecloth in the washing machine – she’ll set it off later when she’s gathered more dirty laundry – and dumps the scattered Sunday papers into the regulation black bag which, in a few minutes, she’ll take out to the landing with the other rubbish. Only moments before, Gladys Varela was doing precisely the same chores for her boss, Pedro Chazarreta. But at this moment, as Nurit Iscar ties up the black bag full of newspapers, Gladys Varela isn’t doing anything, apart from crying, as she sits in the electric buggy one of the Maravillosa guards drove over in, minutes after another resident called to advise security that a woman – a domestic, he said – was screaming like a lunatic in the middle of the street. Soon afterwards a van arrived, bringing the head of security and three more guards, and they offered to drive Gladys to the infirmary. But there’s no way she’s leaving until the real police come. The Buenos Aires police. She tells them she’s not moving an inch. And this time the guards also seem to be more cautious. Once bitten, twice shy, the security chief tells a neighbour who’s come to ask why nobody is inside the house with the body. Nobody with a good memory is going to repeat the mistakes made by the guards who came to that house on the day Gloria Echagüe died, three years ago. They aren’t going to approach the scene of the crime or let anyone else near it. They aren’t going to move so much as a stray hair that may be lying anywhere in the vicinity of the victim, much less allow anyone to clean up the blood, or place the body on a bed; any request not to inform the police, with the argument that everything was “just an accident”, will fall on deaf ears. If necessary, no one will breathe until the patrol car arrives. They made that mistake once before. And although nobody mentions it, although guards, neighbours, the odd gardener, the maid who works in the house across the road and Gladys Varela do no more than exchange silent glances while waiting for the Buenos Aires police to arrive with the district attorney, everyone has the strange sensation that, this time, someone is giving them the chance to get things right.
33
It’s a few hours later, in the afternoon, when Nurit Iscar takes the bag of Sunday papers out to the landing for the concierge to pick up with the other rubbish, and she still doesn’t know that Pedro Chazarreta is dead, his throat slit from side to side. She’s going to find out soon, though, in about a couple of hours, when she takes a break for tea. Because the news has started to spread. And soon after Nurit concludes her cleaning effort and remembers to pour a bit of water into the plant pots that adorn her balcony – she’s never been what you’d call green-fingered, but she’s aware of those plants as the only other living beings in her home and she’s determined not to let them dry up – in the newsroom of El Tribuno newspaper the internal line 3232 lights up on the telephone that sits on Jaime Brena’s desk. In the world of crime journalism, he’s better known as plain Brena – but he’s not actually on Crime any more. They moved him to Society. It wasn’t a move, it was a demotion, Brena likes to point out. But on one of those occasions his (and everyone’s) boss, Lorenzo Rinaldi, snapped back: What are you complaining about? On any other newspaper you’d be on the Society desk too, or haven’t you noticed that almost no leading newspaper has a Crime section these days? They put the crime stories in Society or News. It’s thanks to this change of section that, when his internal line starts ringing that afternoon, Brena isn’t writing a crime report but studying a survey that claims 65 per cent of white women sleep on their backs while 60 per cent of white men sleep facing down. And his first reaction to this revelation is a mathematical niggle: why not say that 65 per cent of women sleep facing up and that only 40 per cent of men sleep in the same position? Or that 60 per cent of men sleep facing down, while only 35 per cent of women sleep in that position? It’s like when the weather forecaster predicts a 30 per cent chance of rain. If it’s only 30 per cent, wouldn’t it be more useful to state “70 per cent chance it won’t rain”? What’s being highlighted in each of these cases? The difference? The coincidence? The majority? The minority? A desirable or undesirable outcome? What really rankles with Jaime Brena is that, at least in the survey about white men and women’s sleeping habits, nobody thought to ask themselves those questions before writing up this wire story. Whoever wrote the headline will have phrased it that way because that’s how the information came to them. There’s hardly any time these days in an agency or newsroom to think about syntax and vocabulary, only spelling. Barely even that. The agency story with the survey findings comes furnished with quotes from researchers at the University of Massachusetts who suggest possible sociological, cultural and even psychological reasons to explain their findings. Is this news? Jaime Brena wonders. Who really cares what percentage of people sleep in which position? Were other races not included in the survey because the researcher couldn’t – or didn’t want to – include them, or didn’t care? Now that could be a news story, the reason why some races – or one, whites – get studied and not others. Or perhaps no other race was surveyed because the only people willing to contribute to such a stupid enterprise were white, he decides, picking up the phone which was ringing until a second ago and saying Hello? But by now there’s nobody at the other end, just a dialling tone. Brena uses the interruption to stretch his arms above his head, interlacing the fingers, turning the palms upwards as though aiming for the ceiling, cracking the knuckles and so easing his lower back which, at sixty-something, doesn’t respond well to so many hours sitting down. Tell me, why do 65 per cent of women sleep on their backs and 60 per cent of men on their fronts, he asks Karina Vives, a journalist on the Culture section who sits at the desk on his left, next to one of the few windows in the newsroom, the one that looks on to the boulevard. And Karina, who has known him since she came to work at the newspaper eight years ago, and who knows what it means to Jaime Brena to have been forced out of Crime in order to write up stories like this one, puts on a gormless expression and guesses: Because squashing your tits hurts more than squashing your dick? then waits, po-faced, for his answer. It’s prick, girl, prick, Brena says, and with a look of distaste starts bashing out on his keyboard the title of the piece and an intro: Women Upwards, Men Downwards. The headline will only confuse readers, but it amuses Brena to imagine the wild scenarios their misunderstanding may conjure up. How long is it since they moved him to Society? Three weeks? Two? he wonders, scratching his head with a black pencil, though not in response to any itch. He can’t remember. A long time. And all because he went on that cable show, the one with two armchairs and a lamp for a set, and said: I work at El Tribuno, but I read the competition because I trust it more. He’s still angry with himself. It was a stupid thing to say, Jaime Brena knows that. But he’d been out to lunch with a colleague and there’d been wine, a lot of wine. Too much wine. And anyway, what he had said was true. That’s not in dispute. Several of his friends had switched papers in recent months. Some colleagues from work, too. But nobody apart from him was stupid enough to own up to the fact. Much less in front of a television camera, whether cable or terrestrial. So much news about the president’s assets, the president’s broadsides, the president’s teeth, the president’s business dealings, the president’s shoes: it got boring. The president’s teeth and shoes are of absolutely no importance to him; as for the rest, the first time it’s news, the second time it’s repetition and the third, if it takes up half the front page and that same day the death of the president of a European Union country and his official retinue in an air accident doesn’t make the front page (or does, but in a tiny space) it’s something else he doesn’t dare find a name for. But not news. That’s his hunch, anyway. His take. He liked it when El Tribuno used to lead with an international news story. Or a sporting one. Or crime, of course, because then he, Jaime Brena, would be writing that lead piece. That time is long gone, though, as Brena knows only too well and, worse, he suspects that it may not be possible to revive it. At least not for now. If it does return, he doesn’t expect to be around to see it.
He opens his drawer and takes out the voluntary redundancy papers. Perhaps the time has come. Perhaps he should do this once and for all: take the money and run. If I had any sense I would, he tells himself, but I’ve always been a bit of a tit. Or a complete tit. Brena’s been working at El Tribuno for eighteen years. He learnt his craft there. And while he can imagine reading a different newspaper every morning – in fact he does – he can’t imagine working in another newsroom. Even though having to see Lorenzo Rinaldi’s face every day makes him feel ill. Very ill. One of these days he’ll tell him to go to hell. He doesn’t know when, but it’s going to happen. It’s just a matter of time. And space. Because you can’t tell a man to go to hell anywhere. Not in a lift full of people, for example. Brena, I’d like you to cover the National Festival of Patagonian Lamb in Puerto Madryn. Go for two or three days. Get out of town – have you ever been whale-watching? You’re going to love it. And Jaime Brena who, as Rinaldi knows, hates leaving town and cares very little about whales and even less about Patagonian lamb, would have loved to reply: “It’ll be a pleasure, Rinaldi, and why don’t you suck my dick” – but there wasn’t enough room. Because after a retort like that, you have to be prepared to get thumped. Anyway, that would have been the end; that would have been tantamount to emptying his drawers and walking out. And if he’s going to leave, it won’t be with only the scant contents of his desk. Gustavo Quiroz from International News got a cake, as did Ana Horozki from Travel. Apparently even Chela Guerti walked off with a tidy sum, three years after her exile to the back page. They get rid of salaried staff whose pay has gone up over the years and replace them with recent graduates who can be paid half as much. That’s what they’re paying for – to get rid of people. Never mind that the new recruits can’t conjugate a verb or differentiate between advise and advice, or that they get Tracy Austin mixed up with Jane Austen. Somebody will pick that up later down the line. And if not, too bad. What counts is – slowly but surely – to get rid of everyone old and expensive. Mind you, Brena would be willing to bet that Rinaldi isn’t going to wave him off with a fat redundancy packet, that he won’t get even a fraction of what’s been approved for the others. He’ll get his retirement money, but it’ll be the minimum amount required by law, maybe less. Jaime Brena picks up the receiver and calls Personnel. When does this voluntary redundancy thingy have to be signed by, sweetheart? You can take until the end of the year, if you like. It depends on how you feel yourself. I don’t feel myself, my religion doesn’t allow it but I might be interested in voluntary redundancy, he tells her, and he hears her laugh at the other end of the line. You never change, Brena. If only, he says. And he means it. He wishes he weren’t changing, but for a while he’s been feeling older. That he can’t get away with playing the fool like he used to until a few years ago, and with pretending that he’s ten years younger than he really is. Better still, pretending to be ageless. Age used to be an irrelevance to him. Strange, then, that he’s started to feel so old. Too old for everything: for work, travel, even for girls. It’s not only a feeling: in the last year his body has visibly aged. He sees it in his abdomen, which protrudes just below his chest and sinks undifferentiated into his belly. Why, if he’s never been fat? And in his hair, which isn’t yet falling out copiously but which is beginning to look thin in the area that will one day inevitably be bald. And in his bum cheeks, which – although he tries not to catch sight of them in the mirror – he knows to have fallen like two ripe pears. Or two tears. What do you expect, you’re over sixty, he tells himself by way of consolation, only to realize immediately that this is the very opposite of a consolation: he doesn’t want to be over sixty. Brena puts the forms back in the drawer and gazes over the desk partition at the boy they brought in to replace him on the news stories that used to be his: violent crime and assault. A nice boy, but wet behind the ears. Very soft. Generation Google: no legwork, just keyboard and screen, everything off the Internet. They don’t even use a biro. The boy makes an effort, it has to be said: he’s always the first to arrive, the last to go, and Rinaldi is squarely behind him, making it look as though the Crime section can run perfectly well without him – without Jaime Brena, that is. Well, these things happen sometimes; you can land up somewhere fulfilling a function quite separate to the job for which you were taken on and with an ultimate objective you know nothing about. You can end up being someone else’s puppet and that, he believes, is what’s happening to the boy in Crime: Lorenzo Rinaldi is using him to stamp on Brena. But even though he has the boss’s backing and doesn’t suspect the machinations behind his appointment and new position, the boy seems very lost, almost dazed; he misses important things and, even though he doesn’t make the clumsy mistakes typical of a beginner, there’s a whiff of insecurity in the way he writes, a hesitancy that doesn’t escape Brena. For the first time, the competition is breaking important crime and assault stories before El Tribuno. Apparently the boy will say: I wasn’t happy about running it, it was an unreliable source. Or: It didn’t strike me as relevant. Or: I had a lot of copy and not much space, so something had to go. But Jaime Brena doesn’t believe him; he suspects the real problem is that the boy doesn’t have good contacts. And a good crime reporter depends on contacts passing on leads that, sooner or later, will blossom into stories. Better still if the info is exclusive. Because if you have to wait until they lift the gagging order, you’re toast. It doesn’t matter if the contacts are police, lawyers, informants, judges or prisoners, so long as they have the right information. Sometimes he thinks he ought to help him. The boy. Then he thinks, why should he? They didn’t assign the boy to him. Let Rinaldi train him up; after all, and though Rinaldi hasn’t said he’s the Crime Editor and doesn’t appear as such in the paper, he seems to be acting as the head of that leaderless section. But Brena reckons that Rinaldi’s less likely to give the boy a training than a kick in the teeth, sooner or later, once he’s outlived his purpose. A painful kick. The worst of it is that – although Jaime Brena doesn’t want to admit this – the boy inspires mixed emotions in him. He doesn’t entirely dislike him. He reminds Brena of his own first steps in journalism more than forty years ago. Forty-four years: an eternity (why shouldn’t he be expensive, why shouldn’t they offer him voluntary redundancy?). The difference between him and the boy is that he had mentors, both in the newsroom and out in the world, and since he’d come straight from school, he had none of that virgin petulance that some of the university graduates arrive with. The boy’s all Google and university and no street, Brena thinks. He’s worked in the crime section on a rival newspaper, alongside Zippo, a long-time colleague with whom Jaime Brena has a love–hate relationship. Brena knows that working with Zippo amounts to little more than a secretarial role, because the man doesn’t even trust his mother. Just at that moment, as he’s thinking about Zippo’s caginess, the boy looks up, sees Brena watching him and acknowledges him with a quick jerk of the head, and Brena returns the greeting, making a hat-tipping gesture even though he’s not wearing anything on his head. From his desk, Brena calls over: Got anything for tomorrow? Nothing weighty, the boy answers. Nothing weighty, Brena repeats. Why not see what’s happening in the rest of the newsroom, he suggests; do you know what the most important element is in deciding whether a crime story deserves to be news? The question catches the boy off guard, and even though it’s the equivalent of that old favourite – what colour was San Martín’s white horse? – he seems flustered and unsure what to answer. Then reluctantly, as though Brena had sprung a surprise exam on him and he were scared of flunking, the Crime boy opens his mouth to answer and Brena immediately warns him: And don’t say “the place where the crime took place, the people involved, the gravity of the deed”, because you’re not at university any more. Jaime Brena waits. The boy thinks. Or tries to think. Brena says nothing, but knows that if the boy panics and, just to prove he knows something, spouts that five “w’s” rule “who, what, when, where and how” (though strictly speaking the last one’s “w” goes at the end), he’ll have to make an effort not to slap him, both for the wrong answer and for giving it in English. Brena wonders why some people, though not everyone, add a sixth “w” – why – and others don’t. Perhaps because it is the hardest question to answer, the most subjective, the one that requires you to get inside the head of the criminal. Come on then, Brena chivvies. No, I don’t know, I can’t think of anything else, says the boy, giving up. Brena smiles and then declares: The other stories circulating in the newsroom that day. Never forget that on a quiet day some bastard’s going to spring out of nowhere at the eleventh hour demanding you give him something – anything – to put on the front page, and you’re going to have to think of something on the spot. I think they’ve got tomorrow’s cover sorted, says the boy, the sworn statements and the personal fortune amassed by a prominent civil servant in the Ministry of Finance. Wow, that’s massive, Brena interjects, not trying to hide his sarcasm. Didn’t that story run last week? Yes, but some of the details have been confirmed now. I see, so this is how they hope to stop losing readers, and then they go blaming the Internet and online new sites for their falling sales. In this country, everyone’s busy lining their pockets. Since when is the increasing wealth of one senior civil servant big news? And two weeks running? Jaime Brena shakes his head and shuts up, he’s tired of the subject, bored by it. God knows why he always ends up ranting about the state of modern journalism. Doesn’t he perhaps share some of the responsibility for it, through either his actions or his omissions? He tries to change the subject, but nothing comes to mind. He gazes at the Crime boy for a few seconds, as though wanting to give him some advice, to orient him a bit. But his fit of bonhomie goes unheeded and so Jaime Brena returns to his survey on the sleeping habits of white men and women.
The telephone rings again, and this time Brena gets to it in time. Jaime Brena speaking, he says. Comisario Venturini, says the voice at the other end. Comisario, repeats Brena. How are you, my dear? I’m well, but poor, Sir, and you? Same story here. It pleases Jaime Brena to hear this voice. It’s something like a Pavlovian reflex, making him alert, tense, but excited, almost happy; some substance – adrenaline? – is released inside him. I’ve got something for you, Brena, says the police chief. Something that’s going to cost me a traditional asado and a fine bottle of red? An asado with champagne, I’d say. I’m all ears, says Brena, just for the pleasure of it, because he knows that nothing he may hear from the police chief – or any of his other contacts – is going to find a place in the Society pages. He still hasn’t told his contacts about the move; he can’t bring himself to deactivate them: he’s known some of them all his working life. His pieces for Society don’t have a byline, so to all intents and purposes he’s still the newspaper’s chief crime correspondent as far as anyone outside El Tribuno is concerned. I’m listening, Comisario, he says, tearing a pink piece of paper off his jotter and ready to note down whatever Venturini is about to tell him. Somebody you know very well has just turned up dead, Brena, but don’t worry, it’s not someone dear to your heart. Who? Chazarreta. Chazarreta? Found with his throat slashed. Talk about a coincidence! You said it. And this is from a good source? I’m standing in front of the body right now, staring into the wound, waiting for the forensics to arrive. Where exactly? In his house, in La Maravillosa. And why are you so far out of your jurisdiction? One of those strange coincidences of life I’ll tell you about some time. You know the house, right? You came here to interview him the last time. Yes, I know the house. The maid found him. The woman gabbled on for twenty minutes without drawing breath or saying anything useful, and now she’s gone into shock. Any hypothesis? Lots, but nothing substantial. I was hoping you’d give me your thoughts, Brena. You’ve caught me on the hop, Comisario; give me a bit of time to digest the news, then I’ll call you back. OK, my dear, I’ll be at the crime scene a bit longer. If you think of anything, call me. I won’t tell you to come over, because the attorney’s due any minute and they’re not letting so much as a fly in the front door, not after what happened last time … I understand. Looks like I got you an exclusive, eh? And I’m humbly obliged. Call me. I’ll call you, Comisario. Anything else? Yes, Dom Pérignon, Brena. Short ribs, pork belly, sweetbreads and Dom Pérignon. Consider it done.
Jaime Brena puts down the phone and sits staring at the paper, wondering what to do. He knows that what’s landed in his lap is a bombshell. In a couple of hours every newspaper in town will be on to it, but as in all things, he who strikes first strikes hardest. Although some may say – Rinaldi said it himself, at one of the last front-page meetings Brena ever attended – that since the explosion in online news on the Internet, the concept of an “exclusive” lasts no longer than the time it takes to copy, paste and press Forward. Any old-school journalist, and Brena counts himself as such, still cares about exclusives. The death of Chazarreta’s wife, three years ago, had the whole country on tenterhooks. And although not enough evidence was ever found to charge the widower, 99.99 per cent of people have always believed Pedro Chazarreta to be the murderer. That percentage includes Jaime Brena, who not only covered the investigation for El Tribuno but also led the way for other newspapers, from the day of the murder to the closure of the case. When this story appears in the papers tomorrow, Brena knows that people will say justice has been done. Even though one can never be sure of what is just, or of anything. True justice for someone who ought not to have died would be resurrection, not that someone should kill her assassin. But Brena doubts that kind of justice has ever been conferred on anyone, Jesus Christ included. He walks over to the boy’s desk with the pink slip of paper in his hand. Hey, have you got a minute? he asks. Then he catches the boy minimizing the window in which he’s been writing so that Brena can’t read it and, even though he says, Yes, of course, Brena thinks: Bad attitude, kid, crumples up the note, throws it into the wastepaper basket beside the feet of this apprentice of criminal journalism and says: Nothing, it doesn’t matter. And he goes straight from there to Karina’s desk, flashes the box of Marlboros he’s just taken out of his shirt pocket and asks: Want to come? And the woman gets up and goes with him.
Outside there are at least three other colleagues smoking. The ban on smoking in confined spaces in Buenos Aires has sparked a pavement culture that Jaime Brena quite enjoys. They sit on the kerb. How’s things? asks Karina, hesitating briefly before taking the cigarette he offers her. Fine, he says, lighting his own. What did you decide about taking redundancy in the end? I still don’t know. Sometimes I’m sure I want it, and other times I can’t picture myself not coming here every day. Brena takes a long draw on the cigarette, then slowly lets the smoke out. Besides, I’m sure Rinaldi won’t want to give me the same payout the others got. But you deserve it, more than anyone. What’s that got to do with anything? Is being deserving any kind of guarantee? You’re right, the girl says, and she puts the cigarette in her mouth for Brena to light it. What about your love life? Ah, that’s
