"Pablo!" I called to him.

He didn't even look at me. He remained focused on the barman's movements. n.o.body spoke, as if the duel the two were engaged in had roots too deep to be reached by words. Suddenly, without further preliminaries, Sandoval's right arm moved in a wide semicircle and he hurled the chair at one of the windows that looked out on the street. There was another enormous crash, more running feet, more shouted insults. At this point, the bar owner stopped hesitating. It seemed to him that his drunken enemy, now disarmed, would be easy to subdue, and so he tried to rush him. He didn't know (as I did) that Sandoval's reflexes were not so easily dulled, despite his bloated appearance, or that he'd practiced boxing at a gym in Palermo ever since he was a kid. And so, when the proprietor of the bar got within his range, Sandoval caught him with a left hook to the jaw that flung him backward and left him sprawled on one of the empty tables. "Sandoval!" I screamed.

Things were moving from bad to worse. He looked at me. Was he trying to place me in the strange and belligerent context he'd created? He picked up another chair and walked a few steps in my direction. That's it, I thought. Just what I need to crown the evening: an all-out brawl with my a.s.sistant in a lowlife dive on Venezuela Street. But Sandoval had other plans. With his free hand, he gestured to me to get out of his way. I stepped aside. The chair pa.s.sed before my eyes at a respectable height and velocity and smashed into a gla.s.s sign advertising a brand of whiskey: a mature-looking gentleman sat in an armchair in front of a chimney fire and sipped the liquor from an elegant little gla.s.s. We'd seen a sign like that before, in some other bar in the area, and it was a piece of advertising that Sandoval detested, as he himself had informed me in the course of a previous bender.

With this final chair attack, which Sandoval probably considered an act of justice, his destructive impulses seemed to have been exhausted. The bar owner must have made the same a.s.sumption, because he jumped on him from behind and both of them fell to the floor and started rolling among the tables and chairs. I went to separate them and, as is the usual outcome in such cases, received several blows myself. I wound up sitting on the floor, clutching Sandoval against my body and shouting to the barman to calm down; I'd make sure my friend kept still, I said.

"We'll see about that," the fellow said at last, getting to his feet.

His cold, menacing tone of voice scared me. He went over to the cash register. I figured he'd pull out a pistol and start shooting at us, but I was mistaken. What he pulled out was a telephone token; he was going to call the police. The two or three remaining customers, who hadn't deemed it necessary to intervene, realized his intention and left the place in haste. I looked around. Was it possible that there was a public telephone in this hole in the wall? There was not. The proprietor of the little bar gave us a series of murderous looks as he headed for the door. The last thing we needed that night was to end up in the slammer. I stood up. Sandoval looked like a man unaware of his surroundings. I went out after the bar owner, who was walking toward the Bajo. I called to him. Only after my third try did he turn around and agree to wait for me to catch up. I told him there was no need to call the cops; I'd take care of everything. He gave me a skeptical look, for which he had his reasons. The broken storefront window must have been worth a healthy sum, and I seemed to recall a number of splintered tables and chairs, not counting those that Sandoval had turned into missiles. I insisted, and the owner finally agreed to return to the bar. We walked back in silence. When we arrived, I couldn't fail to understand why the guy was mad. His front window was lying in pieces on the sidewalk, and inside, signs of damage were visible everywhere.

He spread his arms and looked at me as though asking for an explanation, or as if he'd changed his mind and now considered his recent indulgence excessive and unwarranted.

"How much will it cost to repair all this?" My question lacked conviction and emphasis, as he must have noticed.

"Well ... a whole lot. Just look around."

I've never been any good at bargaining. I go from feeling like a s.a.d.i.s.tic exploiter to feeling like a dimwitted sucker, and vice versa. And that situation-with Sandoval sitting on the floor in front of the bar, leaning back against it and calmly drinking from a bottle of whiskey (he'd somehow managed to get his hands on an intact survivor of the recent disaster), and with the bar owner clinging to the possibility of calling the police like an ace up his sleeve-absolutely surpa.s.sed anything I might have imagined.

He named a ridiculously high figure, practically enough to renovate his nasty little dive from the foundations up. I told him I wasn't close to disposing of that kind of capital. He answered that he couldn't accept so much as a peso less. A relatively smaller figure crossed my mind: the sum of the roll of banknotes I still had in my inside pocket. In my deluded state, I'd thought the roll represented the cancellation of my mortgage debt, but now, trying to sound final, I offered the sum to him.

"All right," he said, giving in. "But pay me now."

He must have doubted that a guy like me, a guy who went around playing guardian angel to a hopeless drunk, could be carrying that amount of cash. I held it out to him. He counted the bills and seemed to grow calm. "Help me put things back in some order. If I leave the place this way, I'll have to spend tomorrow cleaning up, and I'll lose the whole day."

I agreed. We shifted Sandoval off to one side so he wouldn't be in the way, swept up the broken gla.s.s, stowed the broken tables and chairs in a little storeroom located on the far side of a filthy patio, and redistributed the undamaged furniture. Not counting the mirror and the window, I believe the bar owner came out ahead. After all, that gla.s.s advertising sign for whiskey had been an appalling thing to look at. You could almost say Sandoval had been right to pulverize it.

33.

We took the only taxi whose driver was brave enough to pick us up. At three in the morning, and with the signs of our recent combat clearly visible (Sandoval's shirt was missing all of its b.u.t.tons; I had a superficial but conspicuous cut on my chin), we can't have looked like a very trustworthy duo.

The whole way, I kept my eyes fixed on the meter. I knew exactly how much money I had left, and it wasn't a lot. The first taxi had cost me a bundle, though it was nothing compared to the small fortune I'd laid out for the damage Sandoval had done to that wretched little bar. I didn't want to arrive at his house and have to ask Alejandra for money.

Poor girl. She was waiting in the hallway, protected by a mantilla she'd thrown over her nightclothes and her dressing gown. Before we went in, I paid the cab fare. Alejandra told me to ask the driver to wait so that he could take me home. She didn't know I was flat broke, and naturally, I didn't tell her; I imagine I muttered some excuse. Between the two of us, we got Pablo inside and to bed. After that ch.o.r.e had been accomplished, Alejandra offered me a cup of coffee. I was about to refuse, but she looked so helpless, so sad, that I decided to stay awhile.

She wept silently when I gave her the news about Nacho. Pablo hadn't told her anything. "He never tells me anything," she declared, raising her voice. I felt uncomfortable. The whole situation was very complicated. I loved Sandoval like a brother, but his addiction aroused more impatience than compa.s.sion in me, especially when I saw the anguish in her green eyes.

Green eyes? An alarm went off inside my head. I bounded to my feet with a start and asked her to see me to the door. She wondered where I expected to find a taxi at that hour of the morning. It was past four, she said. I told her I preferred to walk. She replied that I was crazy if I intended to walk all the way to Caballito in the middle of the night, with all the things that were happening lately. I said there wouldn't be any problem. Whatever the situation, all I had to do was to show my Judiciary credentials, and that was that. It was the truth-I'd never had the slightest difficulty in that respect. Of course, I'd been prudent enough not to flash any such ID in a wrecked bar, with my court colleague sipping whiskey on the floor beside me.

She walked me to the door, told me good-bye, and thanked me. Often, in the twenty-five years that have pa.s.sed since then, I've wondered about my feelings toward Alejandra. I've never had a problem acknowledging that I admired her, I appreciated her, I pitied her. But was I in love with her? Back then, I couldn't answer that question, and I continue to think that it isn't pertinent. I've never been able to desire my friends' wives; I'd find that unforgivable. Believe me, I don't consider myself a moralist. But I could never have looked at her as anything other than my friend Pablo Sandoval's wife. If at some point I did fall in love with another man's wife, I was careful not to strike up a friendship with the husband. But I promised myself not to speak of that woman here, so let's come to a full stop.

I walked across half the city on that cold July night. A few cars and a military patrol in a light truck pa.s.sed me along the way, but n.o.body bothered me. When I reached my apartment building, it was past six. As always after a sleepless night, my weariness caused me to conflate recent memories with those from the day before, so that images of the fight in the bar, of Pablo's cousin's disappearance, and of the previous morning's breakfast seemed to be part of the same single recollection. At that hour, all I wanted was a warm bath and a two-hour nap that would distance me from everything that had happened. So when I stepped out of the elevator on the fourth floor, I had no idea what was waiting for me.

My apartment door was open, and a beam of light was projected out into the dark corridor. Had burglars robbed me? I walked to the door and crossed the threshold without thinking that the intruder might still be inside, and in fact no one was there. But I reflected on that later, because as soon as I reached the doorway, I was terrified to discover that the apartment was in absolute chaos. Chairs and armchairs were overturned, the bookcases tipped over, the books ripped apart and scattered everywhere. In the bedroom, the mattress had been slashed to pieces and foam rubber littered the floor. The kitchen, too, was a mess. Stunned as I was, I didn't notice right away that my television set and my stereo system were nowhere to be found. So this was the work of thieves, right? In that case, the violence they'd acted with didn't make sense. Eventually, I went into the bathroom, sure of finding it a shambles like the rest of the place. But there was something else, something apart from the shredded shower curtain and the contents of the medicine chest strewn over the bathroom tiles and the bidet faucets turned on full in an attempt to flood the place. There was also a message, written on the mirror in soap: "Chaparro son of a b.i.t.c.h lucky this time. Next time you're meat."

The writing was large and neat, the work of someone who was in no hurry and felt totally in charge of the situation. Something was scribbled at the end of the message, but hard as I tried to decipher it, it remained illegible. I figured it was the signature of the p.r.i.c.k who wrote it. What kind of man could act with such impunity, could lord it over others in such a way? Was there someone who had an unresolved issue with me? As I asked myself these questions, I was buffeted by a cold wave of fear.

I went out. With brilliant foresight, I tried to lock the apartment door. Only then did I notice, key in hand, that the lock had been kicked in.

34.

After abandoning my trashed apartment on that twenty-ninth of July, I found myself disoriented. Obviously, the perpetrators weren't simple burglars, nor had it been some random attack. For a moment, I thought about retracing my steps and having a word with the building superintendent, but I was terrified by the idea that the people who'd come looking for me the previous night might try again in the morning. I told myself I'd done right to flee the scene at once. But where could I go? If they knew my address, they must also know where my parents lived, or Sandoval, or someone else close to me. I couldn't put myself-or the people dear to my heart-at risk. But I didn't have a cent. And although I was in fact walking on Rivadavia Avenue, heading for the center of town, I had no fixed destination in mind. I checked the street numbers: I was in the 5000 block. So now what?

If I had misgivings about filing a complaint directly with the police, I could go to the courthouse and file it in the Appellate Court, or so I thought. I wasn't sure. Suppose they were waiting for me around the Palace of Justice? And who the h.e.l.l were "they"? Who were they? I happened to pa.s.s a bar that had a public telephone. I went in and searched my pockets. One of the four or five coins I was carrying turned out to be a phone token. I dialed the number of Alfredo Baez, the only person I trusted at all.

He was surprised by my call, but-perhaps alerted by the alarm and haste in my voice-he immediately put my chaotic tale into some order by asking a few precise, logical questions. It was his idea that we should meet some hours later on the Pueyrredon Avenue side of Miserere Square.

I wandered around that part of town the whole morning. It was almost noon when I realized I hadn't notified the court that I wouldn't be coming in to work. With my last remaining coins I bought a token and called the office. My excuse for not showing up was a sudden attack of the flu, and I was informed that Sandoval had called in sick as well. As I always did when I took a day off, I pa.s.sed along some instructions. I consoled myself by recalling that our office workload wasn't very heavy at the moment. I'd have been more concerned if I'd known that I wouldn't set foot in the court again for seven years.

Around two in the afternoon, I took a seat on a bench in the square. At 2:30, I started awake; some guy had just sat down next to me. I turned my head. It was Baez.

"Your espionage work doesn't require concealment, I see," he said. It pa.s.sed through my mind that he always liked to f.u.c.k with me a little.

"I'm sorry to bother you. I didn't know who else to call."

"Don't worry about it. Tell me what's going on."

I described to him in great detail everything I'd seen in my apartment from when I arrived until I got the h.e.l.l out of there. My tale wasn't long in the telling, but I do believe I spent more time relating it than living it.

When I finished, he asked me, "What did you say was missing from your place?"

"The TV set and the stereo system."

"And the message on the mirror ...?"

"It said they came there to do me in, and I was lucky I wasn't there. Next time, it said."

"They used your name, right?"

"Yes."

Baez contemplated the toes of his shoes for a few moments. Then he turned his head toward me and said, "Look, Chaparro. If this is what I think it is, you're f.u.c.ked. Just in case I'm right, don't go home, don't go to the court, don't go anyplace where they know you. At least, not until I get in touch with you again."

"And what the h.e.l.l am I supposed to do in the meanwhile?" On another occasion, I would have been ashamed to show Baez how vulnerable I was, but in those circ.u.mstances, I had no inhibitions.

Once again, he thought for a while. Then he said, "Do this. Go to a rooming house called La Banderita, on the corner of Humberto Primo and Defensa. I don't mean right away. Give me time to go there and talk to the owner. Then you show up. You say your name is ... Rodriguez, Abel Rodriguez, and you've got a room reserved and paid for. I'm going to give him a week's rent in advance. By the way, you don't have a penny in your pocket, right?"

"No, I don't, but ... maybe I could pa.s.s by the court ..."

"What did I just tell you? Don't even think about going to the Palace of Justice. And not anywhere else, either. You put yourself in your room, and you go out, if at all, only to do whatever shopping you need. Here's some money-just a few pesos. Come on, take it, don't be like that. You'll pay me back later."

"Thanks, but-"

"One week. In a week, I should have a pretty good idea of what this is all about. Things are in such a mess these days, you never know, but let's hope for the best."

"Can't you tell me anything? What do you think's going on?" Still today, I'm amazed at what a fool a man can be when he's as scared as I was back then. Baez's unfailing tact kept him from making fun of my stupidity.

"I'll be in touch with you. Stay calm."

He started to walk away, but then he stopped and turned back to me: "Is there some really sharp person a.s.signed to your court at the moment, someone we might turn to? I mean somebody with some clout, your clerk, your judge, the other clerk ..."

"Our clerk's a woman on maternity leave," I said, and the thought of that distracted me for a moment. But I recovered quickly and went on, "The other section's clerk is mentally challenged."

"That's often the case."

"And we have no judge. Fortuna Lacalle retired a while ago, and they still haven't named his replacement. The acting judge is Aguirregaray, from Examining Magistrate's Court No. 12."

"Aguirregaray?" Baez looked interested.

"Yes. Do you know him?"

"He's a great guy. At last, some good news. Take care of yourself. I'll see you in a week, more or less. Don't worry, I'll come to the rooming house."

I followed his instructions to the letter. I pounded the pavement of the city center all day, and as evening was falling, I headed for San Telmo. As soon as I identified myself as Abel Rodriguez, the man who received me at the rooming house-I a.s.sumed he was the owner-handed me a key. The room was clean. I flung myself onto the bed without stopping to remove my clothes. I hadn't closed my eyes for a day and a half, and during the course of those thirty-six hours, I'd partic.i.p.ated in a barroom brawl, walked across half the city of Buenos Aires by night and by day, gazed upon the complete destruction of my home, and turned into a fugitive, although I didn't yet have a very good idea why. I laid my head on the pillow-which also smelled clean-and fell fast asleep.

35.

The bar where Baez had me meet him seven days later backed up onto the Rafael Castillo train station and was a revolting dump. Three shabby gray Formica tables, a bar covered with sinister-looking sandwiches under gla.s.s bells, some wooden stools with peeling paint. The entire establishment, tiny to begin with, was made to seem even smaller by the greasy stink coming from a grill, where the chorizo sausages and hamburgers left over from lunch were now dry and cold. A few men, looking pretty down and out, leaned on the bar and conversed in shouts. At intervals of fifteen or twenty minutes, the corrugated iron roof was shaken by the great din of locomotives pulling trains, and a fine rain of dirt fell from the ceiling beams on persons and things. To complete the scene, a jocular broadcast host, abetted by two unhinged female commentators, was hollering from a radio whose volume was turned all the way up.

After a tense week spent hiding in a rooming house at the cost of Alfredo Baez's savings, I wasn't apt to make too many demands. I don't think I complained, but I couldn't help finding my surroundings soul-shattering. Still, I knew I had to be in a safe place where people were unlikely to look for me, unless they had the c.o.c.kroaches on their payroll.

I hadn't heard from Baez at all that week, except for a note he'd left at the reception desk to set up our meeting. I got to the appointed place early, so I had time to upset myself by imagining all the things that might have gone wrong in the past seven days. What if Baez had been the victim of a persecution identical to mine? What if someone had attacked him for poking his nose into the wrong places? My nervousness, steadily intensified over the course of a week and augmented by the nauseating smell, the filth, the bellowing at the bar, and the radio shouters, put me on the verge of breakdown and flight. Luckily, the policeman was as punctual as usual; had he not been, I don't think he would have found me. He shook my hand and sat down, making one of the dirty metal-and-leatherette chairs squeak.

"Were you able to find out anything?" I lit into him at once, before he was well settled. I wasn't in the mood for small talk.

Baez eyed me before answering. "Yes. In fact, I've found out several things, Chaparro."

He frightened me. It wasn't what he said, it was the way he was staring at me. His face bore the expression of a man unsure of how to introduce his subject. Could my plight be that grave? I resolved to shorten the way to the raw truth. "Good," I said. "In that case, I'm listening."

"The thing is I don't know where to begin."

"Wherever you want," I said, and then, trying to joke: "We've got lots of time."

"Don't believe it, Benjamin. You don't have so much." As I listened to him, I tried not to let my growing panic show. "You have to take the bus to San Salvador de Jujuy tonight. It leaves at ten minutes past twelve, from Liniers. Under the General Paz freeway."

When I caught my breath again, I asked, almost shouting, "What are you talking about?"

"You're right. I'm sorry. I think I started with the hardest part. Please be patient."

"I'm listening," I agreed, without lowering my guard.

"After our meeting the other day, the first question I asked myself was who in the h.e.l.l had attacked you. Clearly, it was no random act. That one sure thing, added to all the rest, allowed me to identify them pretty easily."

"What do you mean, 'all the rest'?"

"Everything, my friend," he said. Then, realizing that my anxiety demanded more precision, he added, "To begin with, the way they went in, the time they went in. Do you have any idea how much racket they must have made, breaking all the things they broke? Your common, everyday thieves go about their work more stealthily. Those guys barged in like they owned the place. They didn't give a s.h.i.t who might hear them. Think about it, Chaparro: a small band of thugs, acting with impunity in the middle of the night. These days, you don't need many more clues to figure out what side they're on, do you?"

I was beginning to understand, but it was incredible. What could guys like that want with me?

"You've come up against one of those groups of outlaws employed by the government, my friend. That's it in a nutsh.e.l.l. You were colossally lucky they didn't catch you at home. If you'd been there, you wouldn't have lived to tell the tale. You'd have been dragged to a car by your hair and thrown into the trunk, and then pulled out of the trunk and tossed into a ravine with four bullets in you."

Baez seemed to withdraw for a moment, silently contemplating the images of what might have been. Then, suddenly, he returned: "Everything points in the same direction. The impunity, the savagery, the operating in teams. Do you know your neighbor in Apartment B? It took me a long time and a bit of work, but I finally got her to the point where she was willing to tell me that she'd looked out of the peephole and seen four men pa.s.s her door."

"And what could they have wanted with me?" "We're getting there, Chaparro. Bear with me. My next step was to establish-or let's say to confirm-that the men belonged to a group connected with Romano or Gomez."

"What?" Those two names fell on my ears with a terrifying splat, like a body landing on the sidewalk from ten floors up. "What are you telling me?"

"Calm down, Benjamin. No use getting upset. It was a foregone conclusion. You're not a militant, you're not a public person. You don't work in a field the military's interested in-in fact, I don't believe they give a hoot about Justice. So what reason could there be for a group of guys like that to come busting in on you? They had to have something against you, some old grudge, something personal ..."

I did a finger calculation before I spoke. "Forgive me for saying this, but that's ridiculous. It's been almost three years since I've heard anything about Isidoro Gomez-not since they released him from Devoto-and not a word about that other son of a b.i.t.c.h, either."

"I know, I know. I thought about that, too. But it led me to the next question. I decided to operate on the a.s.sumption that those guys had something to do with your incident, or vice versa, you follow me?"

"I follow you." Was I truly following him?

"So I had to start thinking about their motives for wanting to do you in. I didn't believe they had any new motives, and old ones struck me as even less logical. So I gave all this a lot of thought, and I wound up coming back to the present and focusing on what's going on now. At first I thought it would be really hard to investigate anybody who works with the intelligence services, anybody in that game. Maybe in a serious country, such organizations are hermetically sealed. Or in any case, I suppose they are. But here, they have more holes than a tea strainer. They like to show off-you know?-all that riding around in cars without license plates, wearing sungla.s.ses, exhibiting those Ithaca shotguns like they were their ... you know what I mean."

He grew distracted again, and a grimace, a mixture of mockery and contempt, appeared on his face.

"So they turned out to be relatively easy to locate. And then, after two or three conversations in which I played the role of the admiring a.s.shole eager to listen to elite macho bulls.h.i.t, I practically came away with an organization chart outlining their operations."

"I find it hard to believe they can be so obtuse," I ventured to say.

"Believe it. If they weren't such bloodthirsty sons of b.i.t.c.hes, you'd s.h.i.t yourself laughing at them. Let me go on. Romano apparently has his own little group of seven or eight psychos. It seems he was kept on after they closed down Devoto, bad joke that it was. On the other hand, holding on to the guy was only logical. You couldn't expect a worthless lout like him to do any kind of productive work."