Holy City (15 page)

“And contemplating your navel instead of defending yourself.”

She is referring to Bértola when she says this. Her theory is that it is no coincidence that Verónica chose an analyst to share her office expenses with. She cannot stand those charlatans: she prefers the people in her native province who offer a talking cure but do not pretend they are doctors.

Laucha Jiménez is not called Laucha “the Mouse.” Her real name is Paloma, or “Dove.” Verónica is in fact the only person to call her Laucha, but she has to admit that her face and her behavior were mouse-like when they studied an introduction to law together. She was the only student with a permanent cough in the huge, silent faculty library. A dry, rasping little cough that got on everyone's nerves as she scratched at the pages of books in her haste to get on to the next one. She was reprimanded and even warned she would be barred from the library because of this mousy habit of hers. “I can't keep my hands still, I get cramp in my fingers. Sometimes I'm afraid I'm going to wake up one morning with little claws. It's all very Kafkaesque,” she would say, laughing at this nervous habit gnawing away at her.

The Mouse was born in Tucumán Province, in a town called Monteros that was surrounded by sugar-cane plantations and lemon groves, although what she most remembers from her childhood is the army. She was ten years old when the guerrillas started their rural adventure there, an adventure inspired by Che Guevara and doomed to failure like his had been.

“I have to go.” Verónica gathers papers and her coat when she hears Chucho sounding the horn, then seconds later the entry phone.

“You've changed your car at least, haven't you?” Laucha is worried. A single individual and a good shot, according to Verónica. Did she see him shoot? No, it's a joke. And she uses the same car every day.

“It's late. Why don't you stay the night?” asks Verónica, brushing aside her friend's advice. “I'll be back at dawn, like a vampire.”

“What happens if one of your lovers turns up?”

“Switch the light off. All any of them want is a fuck. I don't think they could tell the difference between us.”

The wind swirls round the wide, dirty pavements outside the Alas Building. Rain and cold squalls have ruined a night which only a short while before boasted a bright, round moon. Oso Berlusconi parks his gray Toyota with no license plates on Viamonte, round the corner from the main entrance. On this side are big locked shutters that were once the entrance to the tiny studios of the state-run television channel. The channel moved and now the place is shut up.

Oso thinks they must be storing something there, but has no idea what: phantoms no doubt, and the skeletons of sets and bit-part actors who are either long since dead or confined to the actors' hospice. In the days when they made television programs here, they were still in fuzzy black and white, the actors cried live on screen and singers did not mime to soundtracks, but sang out of tune or forgot the words. The television cameras had valves and were enormous, and often overheated.

“To think Pichuco once played here,” Oso says, then explains to his extremely young companion that Pichuco was a famous tango musician.

“I've seen photos of him,” she says. “A fat guy with jowls who looked like he was falling asleep over a tiny accordion.”

“That wasn't a tiny accordion, Bolivia, it was a
bandoneón
. And he wasn't asleep, he was playing it. My God, could he play.”

“Don't call me Bolivia,” she protests.

“
Esquismii
, Miss Bolivia. Wait for me here. Lock the doors as soon as I leave. If there's any trouble, get out of here.” He hands her the car keys. It is useless for her to protest yet again that she does not drive. The car is armor-plated, Oso explains. “If you hear shooting, stay where you are. Don't even think of getting out. Put the radio on, there's bound to be some good music.”

The night guard at the front desk does not seem surprised when he sees Oso's imposing face filling the monitor screen. He has seen him somewhere before, or perhaps it is because he looks so much like a cop, he tells himself. Oso hardly needs show him his credentials and tell him he has come to see Group Captain Castro.

The guard knows that the birdcage up on the fortieth floor is occupied. And that the little birdies must be important, because there has been a stream of federal cops coming past, as well as others, like Oso, who are not ordinary policemen.

“How can any military officers live in this mess? The Albergue Warnes housing estate was like the Sheraton compared to this,” says Oso when the guard opens the side door for him.

“They do complain about the rats,” the guard admits. He cannot be more than twenty and is from Corrientes Province. A quarter of a century earlier his superiors would have sent him to die in the Malvinas.

“I think it's the other way round,” Oso says. “I bet it's the lady rats who complain about the officers”

“Have you got an appointment with the group captain? It's midnight.”

“You don't say! Does the group captain go to bed that early?” Oso is already turning his back on the guard and heading for the lift.

Oso detests the way they grovel to their superiors in the armed forces these days. Before, when he was young, Argentina had conscription. Civilians were obliged to enlist almost as soon as they were out of adolescence and were trained in the use of arms, combat practice, and keeping the officers' quarters spick and span. They always had to serve them fresh
yerba maté
tea and could only chew on their anger until they were released. Now that there was no more national service, those who enlisted were human doormats, shrunken men and women who, unlike policemen, did not even risk their lives picking up the garbage of society.

The lift climbs slowly, lurching upward. “If this is what their planes are like, I pity the airmen,” thinks Oso, “and I'm sure they are.”

The lift door finally opens at the thirty-ninth floor. He wants to take the stairs up to the fortieth—because the lift does not go that far and just in case. If anyone is waiting for him, it is better to be able to move. His 9 m.m. Browning offers him fire power and there are some of his own people up there, so there should be no problem in getting in to greet the prisoners.

The rain is heavier up here and the wind howls more loudly. God must be just outside. Oso has never liked heights, he has always had his feet firmly on the ground. He is a prize-winning marksman. He went to Tokyo once to receive a cup, with all expenses paid. Geishas going down on him, smiling all the time. That's culture for you.

He climbs the stairs slowly, on his guard. The Browning sits snugly in his right hand. A light that is not from the corridor is spilling weakly out of the room. He does not like that one bit. The birdcage door is wide open.

He wonders whether Castro brought in some of his own men as backup, as he asked him to do. He does not trust that ingrate an inch. In fact, he does not trust anyone; that is why he is still alive.

Oso flattens himself against the corridor wall and slides along it to the open door.

“Sergeant … ?”

He cannot remember Rosa Montes' name. All he can recall is that she is a lesbian; she tried to hit on one of her female subordinates, but all she got was a slap and a complaint for misconduct, which Oso rejected. “She's a good cop. They've punished her by sending her to public relations, but in the street she never took pity on those young hoodlums, she would shoot first then draw up very convincing reports afterward.”

Oso does not like dykes, though, or queers. Nor the Pope, although he is a fervent Catholic.

He calls out her rank again. When there is no reply, he edges his way into the room, swiveling his gun round 180°. Nobody had better appear now, because he will fill them full of lead.

He searches the apartment, then uses his mobile to call Group Captain Castro's home number.

“What do you mean, he's not there? Doesn't that bastard son of a bitch sleep with you?”

Groggy from the pills she has taken, Castro's wife cannot get out the words properly. She has no idea who is calling, or why he is shouting at her like this.

“Wait, I'll go and look for him if it's so urgent,” she manages to stammer, but Oso is already thundering his way down from the fortieth floor to the group captain's apartment. He hammers on the door, kicking it hard to stress the message. The whole building trembles, more from his boots than from the wind. If he had been Frankenstein's monster, his hair would have stood on end when he saw her, but Oso has seen uglier women: he has even slept with some. Nothing is going to stand in his way. He does not wait for her to ask him in, but pushes past her, then searches through every room, behind every bit of furniture. The wife is furious, but not with him. An onrush of hatred can
clear the mind of any amount of drugs. Her central nervous system gleams like a warrior's sword. “I know where to find him. Follow me … that swine.”

She lurches out of the apartment, pulling Oso with her in the slipstream of her anger. She stumbles, but immediately rights herself and plunges on. She is wearing an ankle-length nightgown, her face is covered in cream and she has a hairnet on. Add an oxygen mask and she could be an alien from a lost world, the kind of alien for whom marriages must continue at all costs and man must not separate what God (who is a little further off now, as they have descended twenty floors) has joined together.

“That bitch! As if she didn't have enough losing her husband in a whorehouse in the asshole of the world, the stinking cow!”

She starts pounding on the door of the apartment on the seventeenth floor, but Oso quickly pushes her aside and fires at the lock. Then he kicks the door open with his boot. He tries to get past the cuckolded wife and ends up shoving her onto a table, where she smashes a collection of small ivory statues the dead airman must have brought back from his heroic missions to the furthest east.

The apartment looks neat and tidy. The lights of Puerto Madero are reflected in the dining room windows. It must look very picturesque in the daytime. “The rats have got a privileged view of the river,” thinks Oso as he strides toward the bedroom, where catastrophe awaits him.

It is the scream from the woman behind him, who has managed to extricate herself from the ruins of Asian art, that horrifies him more than the massacre in front of him. The group captain is sitting up against the headboard of the bed as if he is about to be served breakfast—except that he would not be able to enjoy it much, because he has no head. The widow is lying prone across his body, face down on Castro's prick. Shot to death in full fellatio.

Oso Berlusconi is not having a good night. If only he had the murder
weapon in his hands he would finish off the surviving widow, just to stop her screaming.

He leaves the apartment and leaps down the stairs four at a time. The exercise makes him feel twenty years younger. In the end, it is all a game and in his youth he was always a good sportsman.

The guard is surprised to see him coming out of the door to the stairs.

“Don't tell me the lift broke down again, at this time of night. Did you find the group captain?”

He does not seem to hear the screams of the recently bereaved widow seventeen floors up. When Oso points this out to him, he smiles briefly. “It's normal,” he says. “There are married couples fighting every night in this slum.”

“What happened?” asks Miss Bolivia, turning the radio down as he thumps back into the car.

“Nothing. A few problems.”

Oso turns the radio up again. That
bandoneón
.

“It's been playing for quite a while,” she says. “Ever since you left. It's nice music; a bit sad.”

“It's tango, you idiot. And it's Pichuco playing.”

He switches on the engine and pulls out slowly, glancing warily at the former studios of the state-run television station. He thinks he can see what looks like candlelight inside and before speeding off wonders once again what on earth they are storing in there.

Beyond the street corner, in some darkened back room of the Holy City, Pichuco, Fats Troilo, stops playing and opens his eyes.

The taste of blood mingling with the sickly savor of lipstick. That is how her nights so often finish.

She should have stayed in Bolivia. Or at least in that lawyer woman's apartment. What's the use of the Bersa if she can't empty it into the body of the bastards who beat her up when something goes wrong? Or worse still, those who fondle her, ask her to kneel in front of them, “You know what you have to do, baby.” Second-rate actors, dreadful scriptwriters, there is never a happy ending, an embrace, a fond farewell. Only corpses.

Oso brought the car screeching to a halt two blocks from headquarters. Instead of unlocking the doors, he sat behind the wheel staring into the distance, as if looking for something in the deserted street.

“You talked to someone” He had switched off the radio, the engine, the city. “Don't be frightened, Bolivia. I know you didn't give me away. I'm just asking a question.”

Obviously it was not a question. He wanted her to give him a name. It did not even matter what they had talked about.

“I talked to my godfather, Deputy Inspector Carroza.”

“I'm your godfather.”

“You're my sugar daddy.” The back of his hairy, hard hand, a warm
hand she has kissed and licked in grateful thanks, split her lip. Another night of blood and lipstick. “I didn't betray you!” she groaned.

“Of course not. If anyone betrays me I don't slap them, I kill them.” He unlocked the car doors. She wound down the window, desperate for some fresh air. “Get out of here. What are you waiting for?”