Carlos Gamerro - The Islands

The life-saving hands in question belonged to an army officer active in the task groups that had waged the first battles of the Dirty War: his name, Arturo Cuervo, rang a bell from somewhere, probably Malvinas; I made a mental note to check up on him later on. Shared experience sometimes creates deep bonds between the most dissimilar of people, all the more so between the son of a German officer and this enthusiast schooled in the same ideals. Through him Tamerlán cemented his ties to the upper echelons of the military, but if in his dealings with them he was little different from the other big businessmen who promoted and supported the coup, it was his more intimate, engaged relationship with Captain Cuervo that set him apart. The visiting hours left little room to suspect humanitarian motives: ‘Olimpo Garage, 25/7/76, 23.45 to 06.15; Banfield Hole, 01/11/76, 00.45 to 05.15; Orletti Motors, 09/3/77, 02.30 to 08.55; Olimpo Garage, 10/7/77, 00.00 to 08.30 …’ There were no details of what he did in his nocturnal descents to these discreet concentration camps spread over the length and breadth of the city, whether he was content to look on at what Cuervo and his henchmen were doing or whether he’d sometimes be allowed to join in; whether on trying his hand he limited himself to those responsible for his captivity or whether, in the event, he wasn’t picky; either way, the face that came out of those pits of pure pain with the first light of day can’t have been a very pretty sight. What was it — aside from his self-professed contempt for those colleagues who let the military go about their dirty work with impunity while they kept their own noses clean — that ate into him and made him return to the nocturnal depths again and again, with Cuervo as his Virgil? Was it perhaps that a delicate equilibrium resulted from the balance of his diurnal and nocturnal activities, the latter maybe fulfilling for him the same function as did weekends in some Club Med for his less imaginative colleagues? What is certain is that Tamerlán and his empire reached their peaks of splendour in those years: the two peaks of the towers to be specific, which he started building shortly after his release. Four years he took to erect that mountain of light in the sky, gestated during his nine months underground; but clearly some secret taste for the more tempting regions of the night had seeped into his blood for ever, because, for all the days spent in the lucidity of the heights, every now and again he had one of those nights when fear and pain were darkly sought, like a fever taking hold of his entire organism.

There seemed to have been a reconciliation of sorts between father and son before the opening, attended by the top brass, and at around the same time there was a cooling in the relationship between Tamerlán Snr and now ‘Major’ Arturo Cuervo: the latter, apparently unsuccessful in his attempts to convince the former that the best property deal in Argentina since the Conquest of the Desert was to invest in the future of — I knew it! I just knew we’d get there sooner or later! — the Islands. Tamerlán’s son, who’d just arrived from Austria and found himself doing his belated military service under Cuervo’s protective wing, also had something to do with Malvinas, but, before I could find out exactly what, the telephone made me jump, as if it had screamed rather than rung. At the other end Verraco’s voice was trembling. I could hear the tears in his choking voice.

‘The English have won! They’re entering Puerto Argentino!’

I calmed him down as best I could: ‘Listen, you can’t win them all; let’s try not to give in to triumphalism, Commander Sir; remember we promised not to make the same mistakes the second time around.’ I gave him a few practical tips and persuaded him to try again. His call had made me anxious and I couldn’t go on reading, so I stuck some leftover takeaway milanesa and chips in the microwave and gobbled them down while I waited for him to call back. It was no more than an hour before I had the exquisite pleasure of hearing the broken voice of my former Commander when he rang back.

‘They’re sailing on Buenos Aires! I can’t stop them!’

‘I’m on my way,’ I told him, and hung up.

With reddened eyes Verraco leaped up when he saw me come in. The English flag was waving from the Obelisk. It was an unnecessarily cruel touch, I admit, but one I just hadn’t been able to resist.

‘What happened?’ I said to him, feigning intense curiosity.

‘I don’t know, we were undefeated, then suddenly …’ He shook the joystick, which had cracked from the effort and now hung limply from its wires. ‘This piece of crap kept getting stuck and my shots kept going wide and the game kept getting faster and faster … Did you really understand what I asked you for?’ He smiled, forcedly, aware that the others were watching us. ‘It’s not as if everything had to be a pushover for us, but hey … you could at least have warned me; how embarrassing, my subordinates are going to think their chief …’ He lowered his voice and whispered in my ear: ‘Isn’t there some way we can sort it out?’

‘I made it as easy as I could,’ I said in whisper loud enough for everyone to hear. ‘I can’t understand how the English could have won.’

Stifled giggles were heard and Verraco scoured the room with furious glances.

‘I’ll have to check all the software. It’ll take time.’

Verraco had remained standing there at the side of the screen as if it were an X-ray and I the doctor drawing in my breath before hitting him with ‘It’s cancer.’

‘A long time.’

Once I was sure no one could spy on me over my shoulder, I clicked my fingers over the keys to whistle for my tracer program and up it popped, obediently wagging its tail, with César Tamerlán’s file in its mouth. It was all here: his statements, those of the witnesses, blurred photographs of the broken window and dented lawn, with selected pixels highlighting the dead man’s outline and, at the end, the sacred scroll, valued at one hundred thousand dollars, with names, addresses, phone numbers, IDs and all the information Tamerlán needed to bribe the witnesses effectively. Victory, victory! I exclaimed to myself, closing my eyes and thanking the infinite heaven of cyberspace that had rained this manna on me. While I copied everything onto a floppy, I killed the virus so that, from now on, Verraco could suck on his new dummy hitch-free. I copied not only the SIDE file, but the Federal Police file too, and made back-ups of both just in case. A hundred thousand dollars. Piece of cake.

1 Margaret Hilda Thatcher

2 Leopoldo Fortunato Galtieri

3 Liverpool FC

4 CA Boca Juniors

5 Sir Winston Churchill

6 Juan Domingo Perón

7 Carlos Menem

8 John Major

9 William Shakespeare

10 Jorge Luis Borges

11 Jeremy Moore

12 Mario Benjamín Menéndez

13 Che Guevara

14 Sid Vicious

15 John Lennon

16 Carlos Gardel

17 Evita

18 Lady Di

19 Pucará

20 Sea Harrier

21 San Martín

22 Nelson

23 Paul ‘Gazza’ Gascoigne

24 Diego Armando Maradona

25 Nicanor Costa Méndez

‘The wound in your head seems to have affected you in a highly original way, Sr Félix. In all the literature on the subject I can’t remember a single case like yours.’

‘I swear to you, the names were there last night,’ I said, unable to prise my terrified eyes away from the screen.

‘Perhaps your computer’s the one that needs the treatment then.’

Fingers trembling, I dived to the deeps of my files. I’d brought something else with me from the SIDE: a sneaky little program. I displayed it on the screen.