The Buenos Aires Quintet by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán Page A

secret. After they read and memorized it, people were supposed to destroy it. Nearly all the group were captured. I was there the night they raided Raúl and Berta’s apartment in La Recoleta. But Roberto and I were only there by chance.’
    ‘And the report?’
    ‘Someone handed it over to the military’
    ‘Roberto?’
    ‘I’m not sure. Nobody knew what was going on. I could swear it wasn’t me, but it could have been any one of us, trying to buy our freedom. The fact is that all of us who were in the Berta Modotti group saved our skins, apart from her. She was killed in the shootout. And there’s something else.’
    Pascuali doesn’t ask him to go on, but he does anyway.
    ‘I helped the goons interpret the report.’
    ‘And the others didn’t?’
    ‘I couldn’t say. We’ve never talked about our experiences in the Navy Mechanics School, which is where we all ended up.’
    ‘Nobody’s perfect. Everyone has something to hide.’
    ‘Some more than others. I suddenly thought maybe Raúl believed it was Roberto who gave the military the report. I wanted to talk it over with him.’
    ‘You haven’t had time for that since 1977?’
    The forensic scientist comes in, and Pascuali signals to Font y Rius to follow him. They walk down a corridor full of curious onlookers; both Font y Rius and Pascuali note with surprise that the director of The Spirit of New Argentina is among them. But whereas Font y Rius tries to avoid contact, Pascuali stares at him, racking his brain to try to recall where he’s seen that angular face and its disdainful look before. The two of them reach the police car. Pascuali uses the car phone.
    ‘Headquarters? I want you to put out a call for the arrest of Raúl Tourón as the prime suspect in the murder of Doctor Roberto Améndola Labriola. Dig out the most recent mugshots from the files.’
    ‘D’you think Raúl did it?’
    Pascuali turns towards Font y Rius and growls: ‘If you’re sure you didn’t see the murderer, then yes, I do. For the moment, he did it. Strange, I thought I recognized the New Argentina director. He said his name was Dónate.’
    Font y Rius doesn’t seem interested.
    The blinding light hurts Alma’s eyes. She thinks she can see a dirty blue sky: a sky that’s immensely dirty, intensely blue. She hugs her body as if she were naked. But her clothes have been thrown on. Her blouse is unbuttoned, she has no stockings, her skirt is undone. She can feel the indents of the ropes she was tied up with on her arms. She gets up from the sofa, turns her head, can smell or taste chloroform. The chair she was tied to stands there alone. Everything else is where it should be: her books, her notes. She cries with a mixture of panic and joy. The door bell rings. She bites her fist to avoid shouting out. Then hears Carvalho’s voice.
    ‘Alma? It’s me. The Masked Galician.’
    She laughs tearfully and runs to open. Carvalho has to hold her tight until she can recover the thread of what she wants to tell him: the words, her breathing all come out in a rush, her eyes are still rolling with fear. He sits next to her on the couch and hugs her again. He conveys sympathy, she her need for protection.
    ‘Are you going to tell me the truth once and for all?’
    ‘I don’t know what the truth is. There are so many different versions. I’ll tell you my own. I told you what happened the night of the raid. But it didn’t really happen exactly like that. When they burst in we were having dinner and doing political work. But most of all, I’m not Alma. I’m Berta.’
    Carvalho cannot and will not hide his stupefaction.
    ‘Let me speak. I was Berta. Now I don’t want to be her any more. That night, I tried to fight back against the people raiding us.’
    Deep down inside her, the film of those events reels out as she describes what happened. Her voice changes with each character: ‘Raúl shouted at me from the other room – “don’t be such a fool! They’ll kill us all!