Perónistas, aroused to fury by the disappearance of their saint, sent out their own agents on a clandestine hunt for the body. Fearful that the secret of his silent guest might leak out, the major took to sleeping with his service revolver under his pillow. One morning, before dawn, he was awakened by strange noises in the corridor outside his bredroom. He shot twice at a form that appeared in the doorway, killing his pregnant wife who had gone to the bathroom. After that, Evita’s body was moved to the fourth floor of military intelligence headquarters and dumped in a packing case labeled ‘radio sets.’
At that point, Colonel Hector Cabanillas, the head of the Casa Rosada secret service, took over responsibility for the body, the President having finally decided to send it abroad until passions in Argentina cooled. In Septembers of 1956, the body, still in its packing case marked ‘radio sets,’ was shipped to the Argentine Embassy in Bonn, where it was kept in the storeroom, unknow to the Ambassador. It was then put in a coffin and shipped to Rome, where it was met by a lay sister of the Society of St. Paul named Giuseppina Airoldi, who had been told that the body was that of an Italian widow who died in Argentina having left instructions for her burial in her hometown of Milan. There, under the name of Maggi, Evita was laid to rest.
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