Holy City (28 page)

“Who?” asks André, more because he has not been listening than because he is completely cynical. Giácomo does not even react; he is far too busy with his big fat Piedmontese game chips and the way they crunch in his mouth.

*

At the moment that the ambassadors agree to send the same formal protest note to the Argentine government—2:15 a.m. on Monday, 7:15 a.m. in the home countries of the murdered passengers from the
Queen of Storms
—Oso Berlusconi is leaving a rowdy press conference that took
place in the mudbath where the Descamisados de América shanty town is sinking like a sordid Atlantis.

As usual, the press conference was a kind of cross-examination before a jury of paid scribblers, television reporters, microphones, cameras, shouting, everyone milling around and insults from people who have nothing to do with anything but turned up anyway because it has become the done thing to come and shout “Murderers!” at the police: the latest therapeutic technique.

He does not explain. He says nothing to placate them: “We shot them because they came out firing,” Oso says and repeats, “they used the hostages as human shields, it was them or us. We couldn't let them get away, we didn't have a clear view of them. If I had given the order to cease firing it would be the bodies of my own men you would be counting now. I'm sorry, but the lives of policemen are just as valuable as those of tourists, however rich and foreign they were.”

“He's not sorry for a thing,” says one woman reporter who cannot be more than twenty-two, on high heels in the mud and wearing lots of make-up to face the camera that multiplies her Barbie-doll features in thousands of tiny cathode windows. “The leader of the rescue operation is a psychopath with a police badge. He has no apologies for sacrificing six innocent people when it was his job to save their lives. This is not the kind of police we deserve … but now let's go to our colleague who is outside the French Ambassador's residence …”

“Loud-mouthed bitch,” Oso mutters to himself as he pushes his way through the reporters and dives into his gray Toyota.

What is he supposed to feel sorry for? For being a cop, obviously. But what else could he have done with his life? He would be dead if he had not become a cop, or shut up in a psychiatric hospital or Devoto or Sierra Chica jail, put away until he rotted.

As it is, he is free as a bird, with all the women he wants and a good car. That is something, at his age. And he gets pleasure from crushing the weak and any informers, of having people he can order around,
make them respect him. That adolescent journalist should bite her tongue before speaking: they come out of college firing at anything that moves, like novice cops, but they want guarantees, rules, that the rights of murderers are respected.

Oso accelerates, trying to put as much distance as possible between him and the scene of the crime. He leaves the Riachuelo and its stinking waters and people behind, the frustration of a night that literally backfired in his face. He ought to settle matters with Carroza, that shady piranha, that traitor. He is sure he wants his job and last night he got that bit closer to it. Oso is furious.

In the meantime, nobody mentions Osmar Arredri and his beautiful girlfriend Sirena Mondragón. Not even the press is bothered about them now: they are all far more interested in having Oso burned at the stake. Although they might be aiming even higher—Oso consoles himself—at the minister or the president, why not? After all, the victims are Europeans with fat bellies and bank accounts, from that rich Europe which will not have anything to do with blacks or communists down on their luck, or the mixed-race immigrants from the poor America that was once the hope of the world, the America of Che and before him people like Sandino or a president who thought Chile was Cuba until he was bombed in his own government palace, the Argentina of all those revolutionaries who he himself in his own humble way helped to exterminate before he even had his precious Rerum Novarum.

“They should reward me, heap medals on me. Instead they want to burn me at the stake, the bastards,” rages his conscience or whatever it is gripping his entrails. It is as if he is already on fire before he becomes the victim of all those traitors, opportunists, the ones latched on to the teats of power while they point him out, condemn him, drag him to the fire like all those who have really got balls, weapons and the crazy heat inside them.

Even before he reaches his cottage out near Pilar he realizes the bird has flown, although he has no idea how he managed to escape.
He sees the front door open, the darkness, silence all around.

He checks inside, but nothing seems to be missing. In fact, there is nothing to take, apart from a 1950s refrigerator he bought in a sale which still works, a black-and-white television, a table and two chairs, a bunk bed. Oso regrets he is not going to be able to use the table anymore: the ceiling beam that gave way under Pacogoya's slender weight fell on it and split it in two. Could it have killed the Che lookalike? Unlikely, the dead do not usually run away. But they do not get far, either.

So Oso Berlusconi goes out to find him.

Poor Che Guevara lookalike, lost in the jungle with none of the real Che's courage, none of his hopes of setting the continent on fire with one, two, many Vietnams. And there are no parrots or monkeys in this jungle, only cannibals.

“He must be drugged, he looks like an addict,” says the attendant who picked him up after he passed out next to the unleaded pump, eyes rolled up, mortally pale, as skinny as an anorexic.

He dragged him to the boss's office, who stared at him like some sort of vermin: “Drop him on the floor,” he tells the employee. “Wash your hands and call the clinic so they can come and fetch him. He stinks.”

The only thing this jungle has in common with Che Guevara's is the Bolivians. The pump attendant is a
bolita
too and so is the man from the grease pit who came with his filthy hands to help him lift Pacogoya, now looking like a camouflaged corpse with black patches all over elegant clothes already ruined by the rough treatment he has received
and his escape across country. There are black smears too on the face of this bedroom revolutionary, this empty-handed delivery lover who is as stranded as the
Queen of Storms
, which is going to set sail without him in a few hours' time.

The service-station employee calls the clinic, but it is a police car that turns up.

“We'll take him,” says the cop behind the wheel. He does not bother to get out, simply points toward the office where Pacogoya is still flat out on the floor.

“But you aren't doctors or nurses,” the attendant points out. As a poor Bolivian, he detests the police.

“And you're not Argentine. Bring that turd out here and put him in the back of the car, if you don't want me to take you in as well, you asshole.”

The asshole does not need to be told twice. He knows that if the cops feel like it they can take him to the station. If he is lucky they will only slap him around a bit and let him sleep the night in a cell. Otherwise they might kick him in the liver until it bursts, and then say he fell and hurt himself, that he was drunk when they found him—“asshole Bolivian, be careful because we've got our eye on all your lot.”

The Bolivian asshole already feels sorry for the hell that those two and others are preparing for the Che Guevara lookalike. They were in such a hurry to come and get him before the ambulance did they must want something from that human wreck. Drugs, what else could it be? “Every pig wants a share of that,” the owner of the gas station always says. He breathes a sigh of relief when he sees his employees loading Pacogoya into the police car: “One addict less, they should put them all onto that boat that got stuck in the river then sink it,” he tells them, happy, relieved, apocalyptic, white.

*

So where is he? He is not in the
Pigs' Trough
, he does not reply to his mobile or on the line in his den in calle Azara, which rings and rings.

Scotty feels weary. He ought to sleep: he was on duty all Sunday and although he does not have to go in on Monday, someone will call him early in the morning—someone always calls to piss him off, everyone at headquarters needs his advice and wants it before he has had any breakfast, like a urine sample.

But Scotty does not want to sleep. If he went to sleep now he would only have nightmares, awake with a start, reaching for his revolver and aiming it first at nothing, in the darkness and then by the dim light of his bedside lamp. The bed of a lonely cop, of course, a cop living on his own, no woman can stand to live with a cop, unless she too is one and women cannot be cops.

“Where the fuck have you got to, Yorugua?” he asks the shadows around him, all on his own.

He has to share what he has discovered with Carroza. Or rather, his intuition, because he has not really discovered anything. Yet he has no doubt about it: that is why they are always ringing him from headquarters. They consult him like an oracle, believe him even if he talks nonsense, stammers rubbish, or even says nothing. Above all, they believe him when he says nothing. They have a religious belief in his silences, like people believing in a dog that does everything but speak, “look how he's looking at you,” even though all the dog is doing is staring at its fleas, has no thoughts in its mind, does not remember a thing, dozes off without revealing a thing.

Finally someone picks up in the Azara den. But not Carroza.

It is a woman's voice.

“Verónica?”

“No, Ana.”

“Who the fuck is ‘Ana'?”

“And who are you? A pervert, I bet, one of those late-night maniacs.
Jerk off if you like, I'll squeal if it excites you. Or are you a queer? If you are, wait a minute, because a real man will be here soon.”

Ana is having fun. Verónica is tied up and gagged, lying on the floor in a fetal position, still staring defiantly up at her. She ought to have blindfolded her, or torn out her eyes, thinks Ana as she listens to the caller panting as if he really is jerking off.

Scotty carries on panting. He has transferred the call to his mobile and is breathing heavily as he leaves his apartment, goes out into the street, gets into his car. He loses the line as he sets off, but calls again.

“I thought you must have come already, pervert,” says Ana. “Take your time, we've got all night. The man you need is on his way, if you want it up the ass.”

That voice.

As he drives and pants, Scotty tries to stay true to his intuition. Sometimes the desire for everything to fit in neatly has led him to make huge mistakes. And every mistake, in the job he has that can never be paid enough, means at least one death. A cop is like a surgeon. A surgeon opens up bodies, is a pathologist of people who are still alive; a cop digs around in the intestines of a disgusting city. He does not linger over squares or avenues, or eat fine steaks in Puerto Madero or Las Cañitas: a cop steers his way through the guts like Scotty is doing now, on his guard and filthy, and, as always, on his own. He may be applauded by two-timing rats who brown-nose him in private but who, as soon as the television lights go on, start bawling about civil rights, how barbarous it is to beat up a child-killer simply to cut short a life he does not deserve to have, or demand information that always arrives too late, like ambulances or firemen, after death and fire are already dancing their gray tango, the really last one this time, not in Paris but in the still cobblestoned streets of Barracas, in the dirt roads of Mataderos, or in the center, the city which by day is full of people and finance, and at night is deserted, on the prowl, searching for sex.

“Your real man is here, pervert, he's opening the street door. Jerk off
hard now, imagine you're throwing yourself into his arms and coming, do it, do it.”

Ana is not lying.

He has arrived. He closes the door and comes into the apartment on calle Azara. He is not surprised to find Ana there. With the phone nestling on her shoulder she touches herself. She stares at him while she encourages the other man panting into the receiver, the other man who has the mobile against his mouth as he stops the car, switches the engine off, then hangs up.

“The pervert's hung up,” says Ana, still staring at the man who has just come in.

A surprise party. Like a birthday party, when friends and relatives wait in the darkness, whispering to each other, “Here he comes, don't make any noise, we don't want him to find out now.” And when finally the birthday boy arrives, comes in and switches the light on, surprise! “For he's a jolly good fellow, for he's a jolly good fellow!”

Oso Berlusconi smiles. It does not even occur to him to think that it is not his birthday, that he is not being rewarded for some outstanding deed, that this is not his house and that there is nothing to celebrate. It is good when people applaud you, when they shout “Brilliant, Oso, we love you.”

Yet someone warned him on the radio in his gray Toyota. “We're expecting you,” said the voice. “We have to think of something, we don't want to be put through the mincer or to be crushed.” To Oso it seems
logical they have to think of something. The rescue operation was a disaster, they will be talking about his “elite police corps” even in the United Nations tomorrow, he will be the butt of jokes in Interpol, the Sureté, the Italian and German police forces. “Are we in Russia?” the headlines will scream. “Who governs Argentina, Putin?”

So he went to meet them, at the colonial mansion in the middle of the pampas, ten kilometers from Exaltación de la Cruz. He has to grin and bear it, he cannot run away if he wants still to be part of the business. Even if he wanted to, where could he go? He is a cop. Corrupt and a murderer, but a cop—or perhaps because of that. He would be writing reports about raids on brothels or arresting delinquents and pickpockets if he had not decided a long time ago to join up with them. He was never interested in who they really were, what their faces were like, what interests they were defending. Nor did he believe in the speeches they came out with over the years: they were no defenders of Western civilization, or democrats, or fighting for God and the Fatherland. Power, money, that is what they wanted. So did all of these people, he says to himself when he enters the darkened room and then is hit by the brilliant light from the enormous chandelier, the shouts and applause, “For he's a jolly good fellow, for he's a jolly good fellow …”