Read The Buenos Aires Quintet for Free Online Page B

shows Carvalho to cowsheds that look like something out of a Hollywood film, with all the latest equipment. Unbelievable cows. Superbly looked after. ‘First the lupins, remember...then the cows, then mankind – riches, plenty. We have a future again.’
    He goes into the pastures, strokes the cows, kisses them. Carvalho doesn’t know whether to laugh or be concerned. He looks round to see if anyone is watching, but doesn’t see how behind a Venetian blind a gaunt-faced man with pale grey ice for eyes is staring at them. Next to him is the fat man from the plane, who’s clenching his teeth so hard he almost seems to have a jawbone beneath the rolls of fat. The gaunt, athletic-looking man of around fifty stares out of the window and says: ‘He’s a fool. Why did he let the Spaniard in here?’
    ‘I told you Captain, he’s unreliable. He’s going to cause us trouble. The mess that crazy guy Raúl caused here the other night has knocked him off balance.’
    ‘I should have finished them all off twenty years ago. That son of a bitch isn’t going to cause me any trouble. I wish I’d never even thought of doing a deal with them.’
    Out in the field, Roberto is still spouting his theories about cows and the future. All of a sudden he falls silent. He’s spotted Raúl a bit further on, peering at them from a ditch. Roberto tries to say something but fails, as if Raúl’s hidden gaze had paralysed his body and his voice. Then he snaps out of it, mutters an excuse to Carvalho, turns on his heel and runs into the Foundation. He bursts into the room where the fat man and the Captain were observing them. They stare angrily at him. ‘He’s here! I’ve just seen him!’
    The fat man rushes up to him and asks: ‘Who?’
    ‘Raúl!’
    The Captain turns to the window. All he can see is Carvalho philosophizing with the cows. The fat man hurries out of another door and runs waving his arms towards the motorcyclists. The bikes roar off round the building, and zoom towards Carvalho, who is taken by surprise at their determination to catch him. He doesn’t have time to ask them why. Two black leather angels throw themselves on him and knock him down. They start punching, and as he is trying to avoid the third one landing on top of him as well, beyond their masked faces he thinks he sees the fat man from the plane come panting up, shouting at the top of his voice: ‘Not him, you assholes!’
    Carvalho loses consciousness.
    Raúl runs along the ditch and falls panting by an irrigation channel. He raises himself on his elbows, and can’t see any immediate danger. Kneels down again to cup some water from the channel, and is brought up short by the image of himself reflected in the water. The wild, staring eyes of a man: Raúl. Himself. In a bad way. Several days’ growth of beard, as if he were still down in that cement hole with a narrow grating on its roof. He remembers how when his mind wandered in those days, he would sometimes see himself on top of the grating with Roberto, commenting on the behaviour of his other, imprisoned self, the laboratory rat. The two of them would stand there, in their white coats, staring down at the tortured Raúl with the same indifference as they would study a rat. Perhaps it was because he was able to stand outside himself and see that Raúl, that rat in a torture laboratory, that he managed to grasp the situation more objectively, that he managed to survive. But what was Roberto doing there, always alongside his other scientific self, the rat torturer? Passing neutral comments on the rat’s squeaks of fear. Raúl, beside himself, about to succumb mentally from the pain and fear. Then all at once the Captain appeared alongside them, with his refined, subtle cruelty.
    ‘Would you like to go out into the street, Doctor Tourón?’
    Or: ‘Who would you kill, son of a bitch, to be allowed outside?’
    The same Captain. The one who once took him out for a ride in his own car. That was no