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police chiefs had gone crazy. They all wanted to live the high life, driveimported limousines, buy houses in the gated communities where the jet set live.
    â€œCozumel Banegas offered them protection. All they had to do was set up in the zone he controlled. The tax they paid him would be reasonable, he told them—‘it’s not for me, it’s for the cause.’”
    â€œWhat cause?” asks Bértola. Used to listening to his clients in silence, he gets his own back when it is Verónica who is talking.
    â€œThe Party,” she replies, scarcely able to believe the fantasy world the shrink lives in: the Freudian ivory tower where everything is solved by discovering at what stage in childhood their client was raped by the bachelor uncle, the mother’s brother, who when he was alone at home dressed as a woman.
    â€œThe Peronist Party?”
    â€œWhat other party is there in Argentina?”
    â€œI dunno … the Radicals, the Socialists …”
    â€œLet’s be serious, Damián. I’m telling you a real-life story, not a clinical case like the ones you and your colleagues collect as if they were rare postage stamps.”
    Bértola smiles, unconcerned. The bullets whistling past Verónica’s head make no sound in his ivory tower.
    â€œCozumel Banegas,” he writes in his notebook, as if he was a client. “Why do they call him ‘the Pox’?”
    â€œBecause … he’s earned the nickname, don’t try to find any Lacanian interpretation to it. I guess it’s because he leaves indelible marks, scars, on those who don’t end up dead.”
    â€œBolivian, is he?”
    â€œAs Bolivian as Miss Bolivia. They did him the favor of granting him Argentine nationality. Payback time. For years he supplied many of the bigwigs in the province. He’s earned his fame. Someone at the top of the tree decided it was time to keep him close. It’s useful to have a general in the rearguard, far from the battle.”
    â€œSan Martín always led his troops,” Bértola reminds her.
    â€œAnd look where it got him. Him and Bolívar. And look what became of the America they fought for.”
    â€œSo where does the blond fit into this bi-national chess game?”
    Telling all this to Bértola allows Verónica to recap on the missing lady’s biography. She had been brought from Santa Cruz de la Sierra to Salta in Argentina by an agent who wanted to sell her on the cheap. “Salta is horrible,” Miss Bolivia told Verónica. “There are almost as many filthy indians there as in La Paz.”
    So she climbed onto a bus and eighteen hours later disembarked at the terminus at Retiro in the center of Buenos Aires. Within a few days, as her money began to run out, she discovered that the capital was a jungle with no Tarzans to rescue her, an artificial garden where the roses and jasmine are fake, where the rich live in neighborhoods built on rubble or the bones of the dead.
    Nobody would come to save her. She realized as much by the time she had signed up for several model agencies and found herself employed, with other girls from the “book,” to bring a bit of life to a private party being held in a Ramos Mejía mansion one January night. But Ana Torrente had not been crowned Miss Bolivia to end up in some lackey’s bed; her stomach churned as she entered the house and her blue eyes surveyed this court of pretentious no-hopers dressed in clothes where the brand names stood out like those of the sponsors on football players’ shirts. Fat slobs with massive bellies, and teeth and hair implanted at a thousand dollars a time. Flabby bodies and heads perfumed and cosseted on the outside, but with braincells inside devastated by coke and booze. The only thing left standing in this Hiroshima of the human condition was the desire for power, the need to elbow or shoot their way to the top, until they could