Holy City (20 page)

“She's still half-asleep. You woke her up when you rang. Why do you think no woman can pass you by without ogling you?”

Between tremors, Pacogoya bestows her a brief smile. Although it has not rained during the night, he is soaking wet.

“Don't tell me you crossed the Riachuelo …”

“Swimming, yes. It's not that polluted. That river doesn't deserve the bad reputation it has. The ecologists have made it a scapegoat; where the painter Quinquela Martín saw beauty, they only find filth. Anyway, I prefer to die poisoned. That at least takes time, you've got a better chance than if you're shot to pieces.”

“A better chance to do what, Paco?”

“To say goodbye to my friends, to be here with you now.”

He reaches out for her, but Verónica pushes him away. The thought that he has been swimming in that sewer is enough to stifle any attempt at seduction.

Pacogoya does not tell her the full story. The kidnappers wanted to kill him because he had become an obtrusive witness; but he does not mention the part he played in the kidnappings. It does not take Verónica long to see through his subterfuge, though: what was he doing in the shanty town, why did they take him there if he had only been in touch with them when Uncle disappeared?

“They made me do it,” Pacogoya says, trying to justify himself. “I had no choice if I wanted to stay alive.”

“I defend self-confessed murderers, Paco. The dregs who write ‘life sentence' with a ‘v,' who cut their girlfriends or their mothers to pieces. But what I really can't stomach are informers, grasses. Get out of here.”

“Don't abandon me now.”

“You abandoned me first. You said the ship was about to leave when you knew it wasn't and you were already choosing human beings to do a deal with. Get out and don't come back.” The shudders running through Pacogoya's puny body become uncontrollable. This T-shirt revolutionary, this seducer whose batteries have run out: Verónica is not going to protect him, she is not going to call any magistrate or allow him to hide in her apartment. If she is about to be killed, she prefers it to be for something she herself has done, not for somebody else's misdemeanors. “If I had the Bersa, I'd shoot you myself, for being such a creep.”

Pacogoya still looks at her incredulously, his grimace saying: you cannot be serious, this is a game, isn't it? You relented just now and let me in. “Let's have a rest together.”

He stretches out his arm. His intention is to brush against her cheek with the warm hand Verónica has so often leaned her weary head on, breathing in the smell of imported perfume: lotions from France, oranges from Paraguay. This time, though, his hand stinks of the Riachuelo, of a watery grave, of someone resurrected who has stopped to ask the way when he has already come to the end of the road.

“Go to the bus terminus in Retiro. I've got friends in Tucumán, good people, friends I share with Laucha. They could help you if I tell them to.”

“What does it depend on?” he asks, still shaking.

“You have to go to the police first.”

Sore from exhaustion and having to swim across a filthy river, Pacogoya's eyes flash.

“A magistrate! That's why I want to see a magistrate, to get some legal protection.”

“I'm not taking you, Paco. I don't believe in magistrates. Or in you anymore.”

Bemused, Pacogoya adopts the pose of a fencer preparing to lunge in what he knows is an unequal fight. He protests:

“You're not going to tell me you believe in the cops, are you?”

“In one cop, just one,” says Verónica.

*

Whenever a corpse gets too heavy for him, Deputy Inspector Carroza unloads his emotional baggage onto a psychoanalyst. Only occasionally: it is not therapy, nothing serious. Damián Bértola regards them as unofficial visits; he does not like thrillers, although he does admit to Carroza that perhaps one day he will sit down and write about some of the horrors he has described. Enough to make Chandler's hair stand on end.

“Give me time to die first,” says Carroza. At that they laugh, and sometimes Carroza even pays the analyst for the session and the others for which he still owes him. Why some corpses and not others? What is the difference? What sort of death makes a professional pause and stare it in the face? “The death of a fifteen-year-old kid, for example.”

Bértola listens to the story on the telephone. He writes one word, “patience,” in his notebook. Carroza lights a fresh cigarette from the tip of the one he is smoking. He needs to smoke himself down to the bones, to disappear behind his nicotine cloud so that he can tell the story: he went into the poor-looking house in Floresta, one of the working-class districts built during the first Peronist government at the end of the 1940s, when Perón was still keeping his promises. The old couple were lying on the kitchen floor. The old man's throat had been slit, the old woman gasped her last breath in his arms.

Carroza leapt out into the yard, climbed onto the dividing wall and spotted the kid squatting in the next door yard, staring at him. He had not had time to escape and so sat there calmly, waiting for a moment's inattention or to be taken before a judge for minors. He was clean, no trace of blood on his clothes, crouching there like a goalkeeper preparing to save a penalty. The knife was in the kitchen and more than likely
had no fingerprints on it: the boy had taken the precaution of wearing gloves, like a real goalkeeper, like someone he might be if he were given the chance to grow up and play in the youth team of a club like River Plate or Boca Juniors, if he was good enough.

But Deputy Inspector Carroza did not give him that chance. Perched up on the wall, he shot him twice, right between the eyes. He split his head in two like a fig, then dropped back down into the old couple's yard. A dog that must have been their pet, a mongrel that had been shut in until it was let out by the cops who followed Carroza into the house, suddenly started barking at him as if he was its owners' killer.

The same feeling, but for different reasons, takes hold of Carroza now, as he stares at the photo of the Jaguar. When he finds him, he will have to kill him. His instinct tells him he is still alive, that at some point their paths are bound to cross, that he will have to kill him. And for some reason or none, but due to something hidden like a marked card in the cardsharps' game he finds himself playing, he will once more feel the weight, the weary, choking sensation of a death like so many others.

The man in the photo, and what he has learned so far about the Jaguar, has something about him that disturbs Carroza. It is a family likeness that immediately put him on Carroza's most-wanted list, made him someone he takes mental note of, someone he is already on the lookout for all the time, even in his dreams.

Yet his criminal career is no different from that of other monsters who kill for pleasure rather than obvious gain. The only distinctive feature about the Jaguar's handiwork is that his victims arrive incomplete at the morgue. Sometimes the heads turn up two or three days later; at others, they never appear. Plus something else: the ones that do appear are empty, like those of so many people who go through life pretending to human beings. The brain, eyes and tongue have been scooped out, like pumpkins on display at Hallowe'en.

“Why do you tell me these things, Walter? They sicken me.” This was Verónica's protest the night before, but that was why he had been to see her, to tell her the story. The dead bodies Ana Torrente had been leaving in her wake, like the prints from Cinderella's glass slippers, were all headless. The manager executed by the remnants of the Shining Path, the San Pedro dealer Miss Bolivia had gone to see thanks to Carroza and before him Matías Zamorano, the amputated right hand of Counselor Pox. Carroza has just found out that he too had been decapitated after his death. “It can't have been her,” Verónica protests yet again. “She didn't have the tools or the strength. Although I'm no forensic expert, I suppose you can't cut a head off with a single blow.”

“I'm not saying it was her,” says Carroza, drawing tobacco smoke down as far as his soul, then expelling everything, soul included.

“Her manager was killed by the Shining Path; Zamorano by Pox's men. As far as we know, she was nowhere near Mary Poppins, the flying policewoman. The only death she could be accused of is that of the dealer. And with my Bersa.”

“I checked yesterday and the gun isn't registered. It never was: it's a phantom gun, so don't worry on that score.”

“I'm not losing any sleep over him. Scum like that deserve to be where they are,” says Verónica. “How else can they be got rid of, except by exterminating them?”

“What about the law?” Carroza said, amused at the sudden outburst of violence that has turned Verónica's usually pale skin bright red.

“Law authorizes violence. Every law is a cross on a headstone.”

“And in some of those tombs lie bodies who have something missing, Verónica. Corpses whose heads are somewhere else.”

Now he is all alone.

He searches for a public telephone he can call Uncle from without giving away his identity. Perhaps Uncle has been resurrected and will answer, “Nephew, what a surprise”; perhaps he has come back from the dead and all this is no more than a nightmare he has just woken up from, which is why he has such a headache, is shaking so much and feels he is about to collapse, and is utterly alone in a way you can only be alone in cities like Buenos Aires.

There is no reply. He imagines Uncle's apartment stripped bare, with even the furniture gone. Someone who was always such a private person and would not even let his nephew come near. How things can change from one day to the next, thinks Pacogoya, in a tango moment.

Verónica for starters. Why has she got on to her moral high horse all of a sudden? Someone like her, with two dead husbands and many more (him included) queueing up to get into her bed.

The business world is always bloody, he tried to explain to her, as if she did not already know, nobody does a deal without putting pressure on, or trying to get rid of, any rivals. Armies do not go to war to free nations, but for business reasons, give and take, you are worth this much and no more. So what's the game this do-gooder lawyer is playing? It must be the menopause, hot flushes: the last few times she even complained that his Che Guevara pistol hurt her.

The cruise ship is leaving tomorrow. Tonight he ought to be back in the hotel, with the kidnap victims all set free, their ransoms paid and
him with a nice commission in his pocket. They had promised to pay him in cash at the very moment they were threatening to blow his brains out in Uncle's apartment unless he gave them the list of the richest among the rich, those who had spent the trip showing off clothes and jewels that had dazzled even the dolphins leaping alongside, conversations Pacogoya had heard on deck or in the dining rooms about investments all over the world, oil, computers, mergers and takeovers, all the financial chitchat of people who will never know the joy of trying to scrape together enough small change for the bus.

Pacogoya kept his word: he identified the richest passengers and handed them over personally. With the promised commission he could retire straightaway, leave Argentina, even change his identity. He could shave off his beard, no longer be an imitation Che Guevara, the delivery lover of women who were never satisfied, but spent their time masturbating as they crisscrossed the world, the tourist guide sleeping in a bunk while he serviced and comforted bloated lords and ladies who moaned endlessly about their suites as if they were being kept in cells, corrupted by so much wealth and power until they had nothing left to do but fill themselves with botox and silicone, fooled into thinking they could cheat death through plastic surgery.

He hangs up. No Uncle, no Verónica. He is not going to call that cop, hand himself over like an idiot. Who does that menopausal do-gooder take him for? In his hiker's backpack he has got enough stuff to be able to spend several months without having to worry, in some spot where nobody is looking for him. After all, he is not important enough for them to want to pursue him. They only kept him in that filthy shack in the Descamisados de América slum as a precaution. Then again, they did not know him well enough to be sure they could trust him and people like them had to be careful: perhaps they would have set him free in a few hours, along with the Europeans. Of course, then the victims would have identified him and goodbye Pacogoya, farewell to any more deals, he really would be joining Uncle or rotting in jail, where he would
have been raped as soon as he got there, poor little, fragile little Che Guevara lookalike.

“Give him a call,” said Verónica, meaning the skeleton who never stopped smoking. “Tell him where the kidnapped tourists are. Explain the exact location; he'll protect you, he never hangs his informers out to dry, as long as they can be of use to him. You don't have to hand yourself over. I'm not asking you to do that, just call him and tell him. Don't do it for the sake of your conscience, I know you haven't got one. Do it for your own safety. If the cops raid them, they'll be so busy shooting each other they'll forget to kill you.”

But Pacogoya did not speak to Carroza. He did dial the number, but hung up as soon as he heard the smoke-filled skull's voice, echoing from another world.

He is near the Retiro bus station, but has no intention of going to Tucumán as Verónica suggested. Instead he buys a ticket south, to Esquel. He knows the region and there is a cabin by a river, with a Swedish woman who has discovered a tiny Sweden in the far south of Argentina where she does not have to pay taxes. She will always be waiting for him, she said the night he ended up in her bed during another cruise, in another ship, the
King of Madness
. This Swedish girl will open the door of her Nordic cabin to him, delighted to have someone to fuck so far from anywhere. Pacogoya might not even have to sell drugs to survive, if she includes him in her list of monthly outgoings. The Swedes—men and women—are fond of giving people asylum: they have that going for them, and Bergman.