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probably wore tutus.
    We drove west on Moreno with the top up. What was probably a cold winter’s day to the colonel felt pleasantly springlike to me. The temperature was in the mid-teens, but most porteños were walking around wearing hats and coats, as if it were Munich in January.
    “Where are we going?”
    “Police headquarters.”
    “My favorite.”
    “Relax,” he said, chuckling. “There’s something I want you to see.”
    “I hope it’s your new summer uniforms. If so, I can save you a journey. I think they should be the same color as the Casa Rosada. To help make policemen in Argentina more popular. It’s hard not to like a cop when he’s wearing pink.”
    “Do you always talk so much? What ever happened to keeping your mouth shut and your ears open?”
    “After twelve years of Nazism it’s nice to squeak a little now and again.”
    We drove through the entrance of a handsome nineteenth-century building that didn’t look much like a police station. I was beginning to understand a little of Argentine culture from a keen appreciation of its architecture. It was a very Catholic country. Even the police station looked like there was a basilica inside, one that was dedicated probably to Saint Michael, the patron of cops.
    It might not have looked like a police station but it certainly smelled like one. All police stations smell of shit and fear.
    Colonel Montalbán led the way through a warren of marble-floored corridors. Cops carrying files climbed out of our way as we went along.
    “I’m beginning to think you might be someone important,” I said.
    We stopped outside a door where the air seemed more fetid. It made me think of visiting the aquarium at the Berlin Zoo when I was a child. Or perhaps the reptile house. Something wet and slimy and uncomfortable, anyway. The colonel took out a packet of Capstan Navy Cut, offered me one, and then lit us both. “Deodorants,” he said. “In here is the judicial mortuary.”
    “Do you bring all your first dates here?”
    “Just you, my friend.”
    “I feel I should warn you that I’m the squeamish sort. I don’t like mortuaries. Especially when there are dead bodies in them.”
    “Come, now. You worked in Homicide, didn’t you?”
    “That was years ago. It’s the living I want to be with as I get older, Colonel. I’ll have plenty of opportunity to spend time with the dead when I’m dead myself.”
    The colonel pushed open the door and waited. It seemed I didn’t have much choice but to go inside. The smell got worse. Like a dead alligator. Something wet and slimy and definitely dead. A man wearing white scrubs and bright green rubber gloves came to meet us. He was vaguely Indian-looking, dark-skinned with even darker rings under his eyes, one of which was milky, like an oyster. I had the idea he’d just crawled out of one of his body drawers. He and the colonel exchanged a silent mime of nods and head jerks, and then the green gloves went to work. Less than a minute later, I was looking at the naked body of an adolescent girl. At least I think it was a girl. What usually passed for clues in this department appeared to be missing. And not just the exterior parts, but quite a few of the internal ones, too. I’d seen more obviously fatal injuries, but only on the western front, in 1917. Everything south of her navel appeared to have been mislaid.
    The colonel let me take a good look at her and then said, “I was wondering if she reminded you of anyone.”
    “I don’t know. Someone dead?”
    “Her name is Grete Wohlauf. A German-Argentine girl. She was found in the Barrio Norte about two weeks ago. We think she was strangled. More obviously, her womb and other reproductive organs had been removed. Probably by someone who knew what he was doing. This was not a frenzied attack. As you can see, there is a certain clinical efficiency about what has been done here.”
    I kept the cigarette in my mouth so that the smoke acted as a screen between my