Sweet Money (14 page)

19

Lascano looks out the train window on the way to Haedo and tries to remember the address he read so long ago in Eva’s police file. But no matter how hard he tries, he can’t summon up the name of the street he feels he has on the tip of his tongue. With only the name of a neighbourhood and the unreliable memories of their conversations, he has decided to go and look for her parents. He knows the family owns a shoe shop near the station. He got on the train with the hope of catching a whiff of either his lost love or the fugitive. He doesn’t even wonder which he’d choose if he could. He knows that in a battle between reason and passion, passion always triumphs.

 

He gets off the train and enters a bar, steps up to the counter and orders a
café cortado
from a young man who has an astonishing likeness to Popeye. He grinds the coffee, loads the basket, packs it in, adjusts the handle of the spout and presses the button, moving both hands at full speed to do an array of things simultaneously and with astonishing precision. The coffee tastes horrible.

 

 

El Perro walks through the station at the very moment two trains are arriving. The one from the centre spews out a crowd that hurries off the platform to jostle for a good place in one of the interminable queues for the buses. Perpendicular to the station, on the same axis as the waiting room, an array of awnings along the main street shamelessly compete with each other to call attention to themselves. He walks slowly down the sidewalk, made narrower by the rear ends of cars parked at a forty-five degree angle. The shop windows are stuffed with imported garbage. Lascano looks at the shops on both sides of the street, still trying to remember the address he read in the file. There was something unusual that should have helped him remember, but what was it? Ahead of him, a barefoot kid lets out a piercing shout. The greengrocer turns to look while behind him the kid’s six-year-old accomplice pockets four mandarins and takes off running. Lascano watches him run by, and his lips curl into a sad smile; he remembers a phrase he heard he doesn’t know where about love being a stolen fruit.

When he gets to the second block he sees it. The shop is shut and looks abandoned, but the sign is still there: in a pretentious gold-plated old-English font it proclaims: “
Zapatería Napolitano – Calzado fino para damas, caballeros y niños.
” Then, the name of the street pops into his head: Nápoles. That was the peculiarity: the Napolitano family lives on Nápoles Street.

He’s in luck: the street is only two blocks long, but has about fifty buildings. He rules out the two apartment buildings, one three storeys high, the other four. Eva always spoke about a house. Didn’t she also mention a front garden with roses or is that getting mixed up in his head with Marisa’s family home in San Miguel? He walks up one block along one side of the street, then down it along the other. Only three houses have front yards. One has been changed into a car park for an impeccable red Renault 12. He stops in the middle of the second block to look at a one-storey house set about twelve feet back from the sidewalk. That area, which could have once been a garden, is now covered with a slab of smooth ochre-coloured cement. The facade is made of a material that looks like brick at first glance. Lascano notices a woman looking at him through the kitchen window. He crosses the street. The woman disappears. As he approaches the gate, he sees it: a quartzite stone etched with two names – Eva and Estefanía – their initials interwoven. He has found her. He rings the bell on the gate. From inside the house he hears sharp and hysterical barking and the sound of a television with the volume turned up too high. Nobody comes to the door, but Lascano suspects that the woman who was in the kitchen is now standing right behind it. It’s as if he can see her twisting a rag in her hands, scared to death, unable to decide whether or not to answer. He rings again, this time holding the bell longer. The door slowly opens a crack. The woman peeks out, the chain splitting her face in two.

 

 

The door slams shut. The dog starts barking frantically behind it. Lascano walks through the front gate and up to the door.

 

 

Silence. The door opens slowly but, this time, all the way. A tall woman with grey hair appears from the shadowy interior of the house; Lascano knows that he’s seen those eyes before. They are Eva’s eyes.

 

 

The little dog is a mutt, something like a cross between a poodle and a motor scooter. He nervously sniffs Lascano’s shoes and in one quick movement wraps his front legs around Lascano’s ankles and frenetically begins to hump him. Beba threatens to hit him with the dishcloth she has in her hand. The animal backs off a few steps, then stands watching them with nervous eyes. He remains quiet, but his entire being is aching to bark, lying in wait for his mistress to get even momentarily distracted so he can attack that leg again. With another stern command from Beba, he reluctantly creeps off to a wicker basket, where he remains, fully alert. The living room is in semi-darkness.
The house is clean and neat, but a cloud of foreboding hangs in the air and casts a dark shadow. Sitting in front of the television set in a flowered armchair and wearing pyjamas, the cathode rays casting his face in a ghostly light, Eva’s father is staring blankly at the screen. His moist, partially open lips make him look perplexed. He has given no sign of noticing Lascano’s presence, nor has he moved a muscle; it appears he does not even blink.

 

 

Perro looks at her. Her face looks weary, every one of her movements ending in an odd flourish of resigned indignation. She is a tall woman, graceful and shapely. She turns and catches Lascano looking at her the way a man looks at a woman’s body. Her eyes glow with a sudden and evanescent flame that brings Eva to him in one fell swoop. She has those same bright green eyes whose irises seem to be spinning when they turn on you. She gives him a half smile as she hands him the maté and sits down in front of him, still holding the dishcloth.

 

 

Beba jumps to her feet and slams the dishcloth against the table as if she were swatting an imaginary fly. She turns her back on him, walks over to the kitchen sink, turns back around and leans against the counter. Lascano keeps his eyes down. He knows that a broadside is coming and he expects a heavy verbal assault to follow up the daggers in her eyes. The heat suddenly feels suffocating.

 

 

Heavy tears fall from Beba’s eyes; she shows more anger than sorrow, the pain having crystallized over the years, become deeper, more and more compressed and bitter. Lascano knows that feeling all too well, that sensation of having nothing to live for, that screen falling in front of your eyes that makes the world, even the breath you’re about to take, appear meaningless, and he can’t help wondering: what sustains this woman, how does she
maintain her sanity, what can she hope for from life? Lascano realizes that only by asking the right question will he hear the answer that’s struggling to find its way out of her soul and into the light.

 

 

Lascano looks at her and remains silent. The cries Beba holds back cast a shadow where the screams from the torture chambers echo.

 

20

The Duchess got in touch with Gelser and told him she needed to see Miranda. Miranda was so eager to see her he arrived an hour early for the appointment Gelser set up.

 

Perro walks the six blocks from the Napolitanos’ house to the main street. At the corner, Topolino Pizzeria is bathed in an aquamarine light. He stops for a minute to contemplate the scene on this suburban street corner, a scene that looks like it was lifted right out of
Buenos Aires en Camiseta
, Calé’s satirical comic book about the city’s frazzled denizens. The restaurant is packed with families, a swarm of children who think the world exists for their amusement, and who are constantly on the verge of knocking over glasses and creating other kinds of havoc. All the tables are full, and the counter as well. The people ordering pizzas or slices to go hover around the cash register, agitated and impatient. The waiters, carrying trays laden with bottles, glasses, carafes of cheap house wine and sodas manoeuvre around and through the crowds and the tables in a prodigious balancing act that acrobats of the Moscow State Circus would admire. Then he sees him: his hair has been dyed yellow, he’s
grown a moustache and he’s wearing fake prescription eyeglasses, but it’s him. Dandy didn’t lie. Mole is sitting at a table smack in the middle of the room, and he’s alone. Lascano takes one step back and watches him from behind the window just as the waiter brings him a large half-cheese-half-
fugazza
pizza and a bottle of Quilmes beer. He slips into the restaurant behind Mole and sneaks over to the public phone booth. The phone is broken. He goes to the cash register and asks to borrow the phone. He dials the number of the switchboard.

 

 

He hangs up, mumbling a curse. If at all possible, he’d rather avoid talking to Roberti. He tries to remember the name of the cadet he met at shooting practice, but his name seems to have vanished from his memory. The kid, who had only a few months left before graduating, had impressed him as being very serious. He seemed to take being a policeman very much to heart, and Lascano couldn’t help worrying about him, about how disappointed he’d be once he fully entered that world. He’d seen it too many times: these kids enter the academy full of ideals and end up turning into hopeless scum. That particular kid had sought him out several times to ask for advice about problems that had come up in the department, and Lascano had given it freely, being careful not to shatter his illusions but, at the same time, not shielding him from reality. He thought the kid should know that he wasn’t joining a kindergarten, and that the police force
was riddled with danger zones. The last time Lascano saw him, he told him he’d been assigned as a clerk in the Haedo station. But what the hell was his name? He gives up trying to remember and dials the number. The moment someone picks up the phone, the name pops into his head. He speaks, his eyes never straying from Mole.