“And where is Emanuel now?”
“He’s holed up in one of the houses back behind the tracks. He lives there with his friends. Are you going to give me money now? They told me you’d give me money.”
Marina kept her in the office a while longer, but she couldn’t get much more out of the girl. Emanuel López had come out of the Riachuelo, she said. People had seen him walking through the slum’s labyrinthine alleys, and some of them had run away, scared to death when their paths crossed his. They said he walked slowly, and he stank. His mother hadn’t wanted to take him in. That part surprised Marina. And he’d gone into one of the vacant houses at the far end of Villa Moreno, past the abandoned train tracks. The girl yanked the bill from Marina’s hands when she finally paid her for her testimony. The DA had found her greed reassuring. She thought the girl was lying. Surely some cop friend of the murderers had sent her—or they’d sent her themselves; they were only on house arrest and they certainly didn’t comply with it. If one of the boys turned out to be alive, the whole case could collapse. The accused cops had told a lot of their colleagues about how they tortured young thieves by making them “swim” in the Riachuelo. Some of those colleagues had talked, after months of negotiation and outlays of large sums of money to pay for the information. The crime was corroborated, but a dead man who turned out to be alive was one crime less, and it would cast a shadow of doubt over the entire investigation.
That night, Marina was uneasy when she went back to her apartment after a quick and not very stimulating dinner at a new restaurant that had good reviews but terrible service. Her common sense told her that the pregnant girl was only after money, but there was something in her story that sounded strangely real, like a living nightmare. She slept badly, thinking of the dead-but-alive boy’s hand touching the shore, the ghost swimmer who returned months after he was murdered. She dreamed that when the boy emerged from the water and shook off the muck, the fingers fell off his hands. She woke up smelling the stench of dead meat, consumed with a horrible fear of finding those swollen, infected fingers between her sheets.
She waited until dawn to try to call someone in Moreno: Emanuel’s mother, or Father Francisco. No answer. That wasn’t strange; cell phone reception was poor in the city and even worse in the slum. She got alarmed when no one answered the phone in the priest’s soup kitchen or in the first-aid clinic. Now that was odd: those places had landlines. Could they have gone out in the last storm?
She kept trying to get in touch with someone all day, unsuccessfully. She canceled everything that afternoon—she told her secretary that her head hurt and she was going to spend the time reading files, and he, ever obedient, had suspended all of her meetings and hearings. That night, as she cooked spaghetti for dinner, she decided that the very next day she would go to Villa Moreno.
—
Not much had changed since her last time on that southern edge of the city, on the desolate street that led to Moreno Bridge. Out there, Buenos Aires gradually frayed into abandoned storefronts, house windows bricked up to keep squatters out, rusted signs crowning buildings from the seventies. There were still some clothing stores, sketchy butcher shops, and the church, which she remembered being shuttered and still was, she saw now from the taxi; there was, though, a new chain on the door for extra security. This street, she knew, was the dead zone, the emptiest place in the neighborhood. Beyond those run-down fa?ades, which served as a warning, lived the city’s poor. Along both of the Riachuelo’s banks, thousands of people had used the empty land to build their houses, which ranged from precarious tin shacks to quite decent brick-and-cement apartment buildings. From the bridge you could see the extent of the slum; it stretched out along the black, calm river, fading from sight where there was a bend in the water and it disappeared into the distance among the smokestacks of abandoned factories. People had been talking for years about cleaning up the Riachuelo, that branch of the Rio de la Plata that wended into the city and then moved off southward. For a century it had been the chosen site for dumping all kinds of waste, but especially the offal from cows. Every time Marina got close to the Riachuelo she remembered the stories she’d heard from her father, who for a very short time had been a laborer on the river barges. He told of how they’d dumped everything overboard: the scraps of meat and bone, the muck the animals brought from the country, the shit, the gummed-up grass. “The water turned red,” he said. “People were afraid of it.”
He also explained to her that the Riachuelo’s deep and rotten stench, which with the right wind and the city’s constant humidity could hang in the air for days, was caused by the lack of oxygen in the water. Anoxia, he’d told her. “The organic material consumes the oxygen in the liquid,” he said with his pompous chemistry teacher’s gestures. She’d never understood the formulas, which her father found simple and thrilling, but she never forgot that the black river along the city’s edge was basically dead, decomposing: it couldn’t breathe. It was the most polluted river in the world, experts affirmed. Maybe there was one with the same degree of toxicity in China, the only place that could possibly compare. But China was the most industrialized country in the world; Argentina had taken the river winding around its capital, which could have made for a beautiful day trip, and polluted it almost arbitrarily, practically for the fun of it.
The fact that the crowded hovels of Villa Moreno had been built along the banks of that river depressed Marina. Only truly desperate people went to live there, beside that dangerous and deliberate putrescence.
“This is as far as I go, ma’am.”
The driver’s voice startled her.
“Where I’m going is three hundred meters farther on,” she answered, distant and dry, the tone of voice she used to address lawyers and police officers.
The man shook his head no and turned the car’s motor off.
“You can’t force me to go into the Villa. I’m asking you to get out here. Are you going in alone?”