Needle in a Haystack (7 page)

They enter a typical neighbourhood bistro and the waiter greets him with some familiarity, as well as no little surprise that he has company. Without even asking her, Lascano orders the daily special for both of them, a jug of house wine and some sparkling water. She tries to comprehend the situation, but doesn’t manage in the slightest. When the food arrives, Lascano wolfs his down in four or five mouthfuls, then waits for Eva to finish. When she’s halfway through, he begs her pardon and lights a cigarette. He has paid her not the least attention
since they sat down and her desire to understand what’s happening starts to fade. When she loads the last mouthful onto her fork, Perro asks for the bill. He settles up and they leave. He holds the door for her and as she passes him he makes the most of the moment to gaze at her. The dress looks fantastic on her.

In the cold night air, he feels the whirlwind of his mind calm down and he starts to recover his self-control and he distracts himself thinking about the incredible number of ways women can make themselves look beautiful. Not only can clothing never entirely hide their sexuality, most is designed to emphasize it. These days a woman must try hard to look ugly and really there are no ugly women, only careless ones, and Eva could not look ugly even if she tried, and by then he’s had enough of thinking. So he lights a cigarette. Three paces behind him, Eva feels as happy as a little girl on her birthday. She catches up with Lascano, takes him by the arm and holds on to him, in such a way that he feels her breast on his bicep and his sex gets playful and betrays him down in his trousers. Thus they walk the rest of the way home. Lascano doesn’t know whether he wants her to let go of him or for the journey to last for ever. She hums softly and now even rests her head upon his shoulder. Her pheromone-charged scent attacks Perro. His body feels the physical need for this other body with an intensity beyond any thought and he clenches his fists in his pockets to prevent himself jumping on her right there and then. But they’ve reached the narrow doorway of his building and they have to separate to get through.

Outside the apartment, Eva leans against the wall and looks at him as he searches for his keys, but she
doesn’t look at him in any old way. Her eyes are full of provocation, her pupils fearless, her breasts rise and fall to the rhythm of her breathing. He opens the door and looks at her arse as she walks into the flat. She knows he’s looking, and he knows that she knows, and he asks himself how is it that a woman can tell when you’re looking at her arse. And he hears, or thinks he hears, the sad bolero about lost lovers. And she sees him cross the room and plunge into his bedroom, shutting the door behind him, and she doesn’t hear him cry because he cries in silence, but he does cry. He sleeps in his clothes. Tonight Marisa doesn’t come to visit him. Cross with him, no doubt. But when he sleeps:

He wakes up, drowning in his own sweat. He gets up, stumbles out of the room. On the sofa Eva sleeps. She has carefully folded up her new clothes and neatly placed them on a chair. A long arm dangles out of the blanket. He moves closer, gently touches her hand. Only to assure himself that she’s not part of the dream, of the desert, that she is really there, alive. She is there.

One o’clock. Florida high street. Hustle and bustle. The galloping inflation unleashed upon 1979 infects everyone. Office workers, financial traders and beggars alike are all prey to the frenetic uncertainty. Those with money rush to spend it, for soon it will not be worth the paper it’s printed on. Those without money will never have any.

Although winter chills prevail, as the elderly are only too aware, there’s a feeling, but only a feeling, of spring in the air. Not for Amancio, though, who is buried up to his eyeballs in debt. What really worries him is his debt with Biterman: the Jew could lift the lid on his financial shenanigans at any moment. Amancio has fraudulently guaranteed several different loans against the same assets, each time craftily hiding his outstanding obligations. So the cheques he signed for Biterman could prove to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Everything else he signed can only lead to civil court orders, which drag on at their own slow pace and can take up to ten years to resolve with the right delaying tactics, and even then there’s a strong chance that the whole matter will come to nothing. But the cheques can send him straight to a penal court. If
Biterman decides to declare him bankrupt, the whole pack of creditors will set upon him. This in turn will bring about his total ruin and, most probably, send him to Devoto jail. Amancio wakes up punctually at five o’clock every morning imagining such a scenario in a panic of fear and revulsion. The Jew has to be stopped in his tracks somehow and a brilliant idea as to how suddenly comes to Amancio: Giribaldi.

Throughout his youth, in his free time between Military College, his activities with the Tacuara far-right movement, Father Meinvielle’s anti-semitic lectures at the Huemul bookshop and Sunday mass, Giri played scrum-half for Atalya, with Amancio a three-quarter. They became friends over post-match beers, visits to brothels in Carupá, parties at the Atlético de San Isidro rugby club or the Rowing Club, where these young rabble-rousers, smoking and dressed in tuxedos, stood around flexing their muscles. The girls from the Jesús María, Anunciata and Malinkrodt convent schools loved to lead the lads on, but were instinctively repulsed by the idea of taking things further. Thus the boys left the parties horny and smarting, spilling onto the street as a gang ready for a fight. They would look for one, and find one: there was always some unsuspecting idiot to take their frustration out on, burn off some of the testosterone the girls had brought to the boil. Naturally, Giri was mob leader. Nobody had asked him to be, he just assumed the role by being the biggest and cruellest lout of them all, and because no one in the group dared stand up to him. Whenever anyone protested, Giri would stop him dead with his steely stare, enough to remind any upstart how brutally he dealt with street-fight victims.

Giri had calmed down these days, a married man and an officer of the Argentine Army, deeply committed to the fight against the vague generic term of “subversion”. His stories of extracting confessions via electric shock, of executing communists, of all his repression exploits, had in Amancio their only confidant.

Making out like he’d rather not be bringing the matter up but using their binding friendship as cover, Amancio plans to ask Giri’s advice on what to do about his debts with Biterman. He really hopes that Giri will do him the favour of making the problem go away. After all, Jews and communists go together hand in hand, and Giri professes to hate the Sons of Israel even more than he does the followers of Lenin. Giribaldi has the means and the power to make Biterman disappear for ever, and Amancio’s main worries along with him. With this in mind, Amancio walks along Florida, carrying the world on his shoulders. He heads towards Augustus where, over a coffee, he daydreams about the Jew being crossed off his list of problems.

Sitting in the dark, Eva asks herself:
What is it he wants?
Everyone wants something. She decides she’ll start probing Lascano.
Let’s find out what he’s up to and see if we can’t engineer a safe way out of here,
she’s thinking to herself when Perro arrives home. He switches on the light and takes off his coat. She looks beautiful yet distant, staring at some undefined point on the wall.

Eva gets up and heads determinedly for the door.

Lascano watches her leave with mixed emotions: relieved to recover his solitude, anguished already by her absence. He starts to follow her, but changes his mind, stops and lights a cigarette.

Out of the womb, everything is exposed to the world. The street seems sinister to Eva. Beneath her summer dress, she feels the cold between her legs and she shivers. She comes across a few coins in a pocket. Finding a public telephone that works these days can be a real feat. Eva is lucky, but her calls come to nothing, or worse. An unfamiliar male voice answers Domingo’s number. Eva gives her password, but he replies with any
old thing. She hangs up. Either Domingo’s been caught or he’s on the run. Her second call goes unanswered. The third is met by a female voice: