Mapuche by Caryl Férey, Steven Randall

art center.
    La Recoleta was the quarter of foreign embassies, private properties, old money not subject to the hazards of the virtual, republican gilding. The avenues were broad, clean, and gave off a perfume of private homes in a very European style, with cracked Milanese facades and age-old architecture. Rubén parked the car in a side street and walked under the big mangrove trees whose roots cracked the asphalt: the Campallo family lived a little farther on, in a building barely visible behind tall foliage. It had been constructed in the early nineteenth century and was partly covered with ivy.
    A peaceful place after the turbulence of the city center, in any case for people who were not much inclined to mix with others. Access to the property was controlled by a black grill with sharp points and a state-of-the-art surveillance camera. Rubén rang on the intercom, the panoptic eye targeting him.
    Finally someone answered. A woman.
    â€œYes?”
    â€œHello,” he said, moving closer to the intercom. “Are you Mrs. Campallo?”
    â€œYes,” the metallic voice replied. “What do you want?”
    â€œTo talk to you about your daughter María Victoria. I’m a friend.”
    â€œShe’s not here. What’s it about?”
    â€œWell, that’s just it,” he said in an affable voice. “No one has heard from her for days, and I’m looking for her.”
    A brief silence.
    â€œWhat do you mean, no one’s heard from her?”
    â€œHave you?”
    â€œWell, no. Who are you?”
    â€œRubén, a friend.”
    â€œI don’t know you.”
    He crushed out his cigarette on the sidewalk.
    â€œMrs. Campallo, if I were you I’d open the gate . . . ”
    The intercom went quiet for a moment, the distant echo of a doubt that seemed to last two or three eternities, and then the click of the gate opening.
    A white gravel walkway wound among the giant plants in the garden. The businessman’s main residence was a large, beautiful white house, a veritable little manor in the middle of a shady park. Rubén breathed in the aroma of the flowers and followed the spiral of insects that were coming out as the weather cleared. María Victoria’s mother was waiting on the front porch, her arms crossed under a deep red cashmere shawl, dark glasses with a garish frame covering half her face.
    A very attractive woman, Isabel De Angelis could have had a career as a beauty queen had her aristocratic name not prevented her from working. Eduardo Campallo had plucked her to decorate his buttonhole at the age of twenty, when she had just begun to bloom, and he kept her as a talisman of a perfect success story. Isabel Campallo had dyed hair put up in a bun, a designer dress over prominent kneecaps, and a severe look for someone who had just returned from a vacation. From afar, the businessman’s wife could pass for one of those old tanned beauties on tranquilizers fighting anorexia one sees at the American Express, but close up you saw two pinched lips covered with too much orange lipstick and a vertical posture intended to keep the world at a distance.
    A chubby man in his thirties wearing a suit waddled alongside her.
    â€œWho are you?” he asked the visitor.
    â€œI imagine you’re María Victoria’s brother?” Ruben replied.
    His belly bulging under a white shirt without a tie, Ray-Ban glasses perched on a bald head, a Porsche watch and gleaming loafers, Rodolfo Campallo flaunted the plump figure of a complacent success.
    â€œRubén Calderón,” he said, showing his detective’s badge.
    â€œI thought you were a friend of María Victoria,” his mother said, astonished.
    Rodolfo sized up the private eye: brown hair that was too long, falsely calm elegance under a black suede jacket, athletic and arrogant despite the veneer of class, his provocative air, his grayish-blue dark eyes, everything about him was