The Buenos Aires Quintet by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán

people there act as if they were in a convent, fired by the secret joy of those who have succeeded in freeing themselves from at least a tiny part of their innate selfishness. In other words, people who feel solidarity: in this case, almost all of them women, somewhere between old and very old, well-dressed middle-class ladies who discovered in their own families during the Process how cruel history can be. Anyone who goes into the office hands over and receives an invisible ethical credit card, a solidarity Mastercard. Carvalho can feel its presence in his jacket pocket just above his heart as he explains why he has come to an impossibly short-sighted old woman, behind whose pebble glasses he can see at least five pairs of eyes superimposed on each other, and with a tiny mouth painted a gentle pink to chime in with her oh! so nice way of talking. She turns away from him and makes off down a corridor to the room where the grandmothers keep all the painful memories of the grandchildren they hope to find alive, even though they are just as disappeared as the parents who were snatched by the armed forces during the years of the military junta. Carvalho is moved by everything he sees around him, even the routine inertia of what has become an office, the veneer of habit laid over the most sensitive skin, the rawest of wounds. Then the old lady comes back with a big white folder. She sniffs it before opening it. ‘I told them to put in those little white balls for damp.’
    Then she plunges her inadequate, ocean-deep eyes into the pages of the file, until... ‘Ah, yes...I remember...I remember...’
    She remembers and looks up at Carvalho.
    ‘Eva María Tourón Modotti. No trace of her from the moment she was taken from her aunt, Alma. A disappeared baby, disappeared without trace. The raid was led by a Captain Ranger, although his prisoners knew him as Gorostizaga. No one is sure of his real name. Do you want to see him?’
    She hands him a press cutting. Someone is giving Captain Ranger a medal. All muscle and fibre, eyes that command obedience, a disdainful smile on his lips, triangles where his hair is receding. ‘A hero of the Falklands War.’
    ‘Has anyone talked to him about the raid?’
    ‘Nothing was ever officially proven about his taking part in it or the kidnapping. There’s nothing in the archives. We know that from information given us by the girl’s aunt, Alma Modotti, and from other survivors. But it wasn’t always the officers in charge who were responsible for this trafficking of babies. Sometimes it was their subordinates. Ranger is a pseudonym he was given because he was always boasting about how he was trained in the US Marine school in Panama – the place where the Yankees trained all the Latin American butchers.’
    ‘Are there no leads?’
    ‘Nothing. It’s one of those obscure, baffling cases which if and when they are eventually solved, prove to have been right in front of our eyes the whole time. Sometimes we can’t see for looking.’
    Even though she’s so short-sighted, she is aware of Carvalho’s ironic smile at this.
    ‘I’m not talking about myself. I know I’ve got the worst eyes in the world – every time I got pregnant, my eyes weakened by three dioptres. And I had four pregnancies.’
    That’s when Carvalho notices she has three photos pinned to her dress. The woman would be entitled to cry, but her voice is firm as she comes to the end of her train of thought.
    ‘Only one of the four is still alive. A girl, who lives in Sweden. She reckons she’ll never come back to Argentina even if President Menem sends his Ferrari to fetch her.’
    ‘D’you have any grandchildren in your files?’
    ‘A boy we found, and a girl we’re still looking for.’
    Carvalho wishes her luck with a vague gesture. Then gives her his card. ‘If you ever hear anything about the Tourón Modotti baby’
    ‘Baby? By now she’ll be almost twenty years old.’
    It’s no easy task to open a door