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reach somewhere that offered protection: become a mayor, win a seat in parliament or on the city council, become a union boss.
    With a pout here, a purr there, Miss Bolivia crossed several of them off her list, until finally she found someone who was not quite asrevolting as the rest. She danced on the table, like they do in Chicago gangster movies, drank all the five-hundred-dollar champagne she could take and more, then bedded Matías Zamorano.
    Composers of tangos and boleros know it well: there is only a step between love and betrayal. Out of love for Miss Bolivia, the Pox’s right-hand man was willing to stab him in the back. He handed the Bolivians and their market over to a Lomas de Zamora crook. “A nice little deal,” he explained to the cherub in their dimly lit rented suite—king-size bed, with a water-fountain at the foot that was a replica of the Iguazú Falls—“20 percent of all they make for us and the rest for the Lomas council boys.”
    When she learned just how much that 20 percent was, Miss Bolivia let him fuck her like never before, as the waters of the artificial Iguazú splashed all over her. The Lomas de Zamora boys controlled territory ten times the size of the Pox’s fiefdom: they had an army of professionals who made sure it was kept neat and tidy, and dealt with any trouble. When the Bolivians refused to leave their benefactor in the lurch, the boys from Lomas went to fetch them in trucks. They carted the families and their goods to the far bank of the Riachuelo and told them: “It’s this or you can be repatriated first thing tomorrow. The documents are just waiting for the president’s signature: one call from us and welcome back to Bolivia.”
    â€œI can’t see the president getting mixed up in stuff like that,” Bértola protests in disbelief.
    â€œNot personally,” says Verónica, happy to explain things for him. “His puppets, the puppets of his puppets. Everything is linked: there’s a clever spider spinning away. It never stops making and spreading its web; if one part gets damaged, it patches it up somewhere else. To govern is to bring in money.”
    â€œâ€˜To govern is to bring in people,’ is what President Sarmiento used to say. That’s why he filled Argentina with immigrants. So that they would work. And he filled the country with schools too, to convincethem it was better to be Argentine than wops, dagos or russkies.”
    â€œBravo, doctor. Do you want to go on with your patriotic rant or should I finish telling you about Miss Bolivia?”
    A few nights before the boys from Lomas de Zamora trespassed into the Pox’s territory, there was another party, in another mansion. This time the lottery at the gangsters’ ball was won by the counselor himself. Miss Bolivia allowed herself to be embraced, caressed, drooled over. She imagined she was being possessed by the Marlon Brando she had seen in old films on television, in the days when Brando was young and not this cheap Don Corleone she had to shout encouragement to, like the punter urging on the old nag he has bet on out of nostalgia, the nag who of course trails in last.
    The plan was to stay close to the Pox while he was being fleeced, so that she and Zamorano would be the last people he suspected. The idea was to get rich without ending up dead in a ditch.
    But anyone who does deals with power runs the risk of becoming part of the deal himself.
    â€œThe crooks in Lomas didn’t want a fight with the people in La Matanza. Not because of the Pox, who’s a nobody, but because of the politicians and the police chiefs there, who between them control all the drugs and prostitution in the province. You have to take care of your image when it comes to peddling influence. After they took the Bolivians to the other side of the Riachuelo, the two bosses did a deal.”
    â€œAnd the loose change from the deal was the names of