No One Loves a Policeman
GUILLERMO ORSI was born in Buenos Aires, where he still lives and works as a journalist. He was awarded the 2007 Premio Internacional de Novel Negra Ciudad de Carmona for No One Loves a Policeman. His previous novel Suenos de perro won the Semana Negra Umbriel Award in 2004, and Holy City, forthcoming from MacLehose Press, was awarded the 2010 Hammett Prize.
NICK CAISTOR’S many translations from the Spanish include The Buenos Aires Quintet by Manuel Vázquez Montalban and novels by Juan Marsé and Alan Paul.
“The beauty of this novel is that it operates on many levels … not just a detective novel or a thriller, but a search for truth … Palpable in its oppressiveness, the backdrop itself transcends this novel above and beyond mere fiction to give a vivid depiction of Argentina’s crisis years in the early 21st century”
Booktrust Translated Fiction
“The tough, cynical cast of this typical noir thriller are magnificently callous company and the wider picture of a country in chaos is chilling”
Metro Scotland
“From the halcyon time of Dashiell Hammett onwards, the detective story has been pressed into service for a pitiless dissection of a corrupt society; Orsi shows that the strategy still has plenty of mileage”
BARRY FORSHAW, Independent
“Orsi’s mordant, reluctant detective is definitely a one-off”
JOAN SMITH, Sunday Times
“Martelli is not [Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth] Salander, but there is a sinuous black humour in his battles with police and political corruption that echo Larsson’s heroine”
GEOFFREY WANSELL, Daily Mail
Guillermo Orsi
No One Loves a Policeman
Translated from the Spanish by Nick Caistor
An imprint of Quercus
New York • London
© 2007 by Guillermo Orsi
Translation © 2010 by Nick Caistor
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ISBN 978-1-62365-261-6
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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Contents
Part One Small Mercies
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Part Two Paradises and Plots
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Part Three Butterflies in an Album
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Part Four Hired Brains, Unpunished Hearts
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Epilogue
PART ONE
Small Mercies
1
Five years ago, when I lost the last person I cared about, I vowed never again to answer the telephone after midnight. Since then, my resolve has seldom been put to the test. At my age it is rare for male friends to stay up late, and the women are not permanent fixtures once you are persuaded you are all alone in the world. All of them widowed or separated, and in the early hours they are snuggled up in bed, smearing themselves with creams, or warming their toes on memories of happier times and better lovers (if they have anyone to compare with). If they feel lonely, they call girlfriends. Or the Samaritans.
On the night of December 14, 2001, I went to bed early even for me. Not so much because I was tired, more that I was weary of playing along with such an uninspiring day. There was not a single bit of news I could cling to, none of those hilarious excuses Buenos Aires can be so generous with: an armed bank robbery just when you are trying to withdraw your meager earnings, or paying the rent for the unheated apartment you have been living in for the past year. A demand from the tax people because you haven’t paid the previous installment. A friend in his fifties confessing he has at last come out, and could you please recommend an analyst, preferably a young, good-looking one. I had nothing to stay up for, not even bad news on the T.V., apart from the usual ridiculous celebrity marriages, resigning ministers, chaos in the markets making nonsense of the government’s economic policies, and the inevitable run on banks. One of those days when midnight is a watery horizon and you suspect that your ship has sunk forever beneath the waves.
“Gotán, I need to see you as soon as possible.”
“I’m in bed, with the duvet round my ears. The thought of getting up and dressed, taking the car out of the garage and driving half an hour to your place makes me feel quite unwell.”
“Make that six hours. I’m not in Buenos Aires. And you have to leave right now, so that you reach here before dawn.”
It took me a quarter of an hour to dress, pack stuff for two days into a bag, and leave a note to ensure that Zulema, the cleaner who comes on Mondays, put fresh water in the bowl and fed my cat Félix Jesús his balanced diet. He was out that night—with my permission—but he was bound to be back before I was, demanding food and a place to curl up in peace.
Half an hour after Edmundo Cárcano’s call I was driving across the city as fast as a patrol car taking the special giant-size mozzarella from the pizzeria to the police station. There was hardly any traffic as I sped along the highway heading toward the southernmost stretch of the Atlantic coast. I was aiming for a tiny village of not more than a dozen houses, side by side on a bare, windswept beach, with nothing but sand dunes and sea to look at. Mediomundo was its name.
“It was called that by the estate agent who deals in these remote properties. He’s a fisherman, but he uses nets rather than a rod. He catches all kinds of fish and makes stews for the few lost tourists who turn up here,” Cárcano had explained. He reckoned the resort should be called Asshole of the World. The estate agent owned a bar on the beach ca
lled All Kinds of Fish. He was the one who told me on this cold, windy morning that he could not believe it. “Why, just yesterday he was here eating sea bream and drinking sherry. How can he be dead? Poor Edmundo,” he said, referring to my friend Cárcano, shot at point-blank and killed outright, which at the very least cast doubt on the suicide theory put forward by the policeman who had arrived that afternoon from Bahía Blanca.
Cárcano had built himself a simple, beautiful chalet with what he had saved from his oil-company salary. When I arrived, I could find no trace of the blond, almost an adolescent and nearly as lovely as the house, who he had said he loved and with whom he planned to share this seaside eyrie. Not a lipstick or a sanitary towel, never mind underwear or a toothbrush. It looked as though no-one was visiting or living with Cárcano in his marine hideaway. That was the conclusion of the inspector, detective or traffic policeman from the provincial force who turned up in Mediomundo to investigate what he termed “this unfortunate event.”
“If he called you at midnight it was probably because he didn’t feel too good. Older people do get these bouts of depression at night,” the inspector said. He was little more than thirty, and his nose for sleuthing had already been dulled by easy money from gambling and prostitution.
I asked him if he was going to check for fingerprints, but he said the forensic team would do that when they got here the next day or the day after. “We’re up to our ears in work,” he boasted, looking me straight in the eye. If the murdered Edmundo Cárcano was hoping for justice, he was not going to come by it by way of this bureaucrat, disturbed in his so-crowded routine eight long hours earlier by a friend of the victim. A friend who, rather than end up with the car wrapped round his head, had driven unhurriedly for six seemingly endless hours, and who as soon as he arrived felt sorry he had not once exceeded the speed limit, but had traveled singing a duet with Lucila Davidson on the radio, even allowing himself the luxury of closing his eyes for a few seconds so he could imagine her beside him, the two of them looking out over a sea of delirious fans. Closing his eyes up on stage with her, dreaming his erotic dream even if the car several times swerved onto the verge, blissfully unaware of what awaited him in this remote seaside village in the south-east of Buenos Aires province.
I knew I had arrived too late as soon as I opened the door of my friend’s charming chalet. Day had dawned half an hour earlier, but even without touching the body, lying in a pool of blood, I could tell Cárcano had not lived to see its first pale light.
The house was clean and tidy; typical of my friend, for my taste a little too concerned with keeping things shipshape. No wardrobe door was open, and the only thing strewn on the floor was his body. The murderer appeared to have focused on what he had come for. He had not forced a door or window, so Cárcano must have known him and trusted him enough to let him in. Perhaps when he called me the man was already with him, pressing a gun to his head.
Edmundo was not the kind to get mixed up in anything dangerous. In recent years he had some wild scheme for making fuel from grain crops. He had found a backer, a banker willing to underwrite his research and then invest in the small business or cooperative Cárcano set up, of which he was chairman and general secretary. The other members were geeks, people obsessed with changing the molecules of whatever came within their grasp, building new worlds from the leftovers of the present one. In other words, people willing to give themselves a hard time to show uncaring humanity that if we have made planet Earth a dangerous place to live in, there is nevertheless still time to save it.
When I called Cárcano’s daughter to tell her the news she sobbed at the end of the line, but said she had been afraid that something like this was going to happen. She is about the same age as her father’s girlfriend.
“Since he left my mother for that tart he’s been getting mixed up in funny business,” Isabel said. She was as indignant as ever about her father’s betrayal: to her way of thinking, his lustful adventure had exploded like a depth charge in their happy home. “He neglected his job. Thirty years with the same company! He was going to retire next year, and the firm was going to give him a gold medal. They had even promised to pay him extra to make up for the crappy state pension he had been contributing to all his life. He and Mummy had planned to travel to Italy, to visit our grandparents’ house in Bologna.”
Isabel cried for three pesos and forty-two cents’ worth of my longdistance call. From the public telephone box I could see the sea and a cold, clear night falling over the deserted beach. I was thinking what a good idea it would be to have a little nest of my own in a place like this.
“What ‘funny business’ did your father get involved in?” I asked when it seemed the tears were drying up.
Isabel, in Buenos Aires, hesitated, sniffed, took a deep breath, sighed.
“We need to meet. I don’t trust any phone in this country of informers, where half the population is listening in to what the other half is saying.”
“O.K., but do tell your mother, and the burial is in Bahía Blanca.”
When I mentioned the burial, a lump came to my throat. A steadfast friend who died in Mediomundo, a beach that does not appear on any tourist map, down round the asshole of the world.
He and I met when there was still military service in Argentina. Serving the fatherland for eighteen months, preparing mate tea for the sergeants, cleaning the latrines in the officers’ mess, going out in the early hours on sordid military operations to frighten the civilians. We were thirty-six when a drunken general gave the order to invade the Malvinas. Too old to fight a war that was lost before it began, and yet two decades later my friend abandoned his wife Mónica for a twenty-year-old blond who was scarcely born when another general surrendered Port Stanley to save the lives of thousands of soldiers, not to mention his own.
Time can take on weird dimensions, like the elongated shadows in this sharp evening light. If, as the tango says, “twenty years are nothing,” they are far too much when it comes to two lives as far apart as Edmundo’s and his near-adolescent and now-vanished blond. All the past, all the memories you carry with you as a camel carries its hump simply do not exist for someone whose over-riding concern is the future. How could the two of them have set out on a journey together? Where could they go? Whichever direction they took, it would be tearing something apart.
The sun set over the beach. Rather than travel another fifty kilometers to Bahía Blanca, I decided to spend the night in my dead friend’s house.
We take some decisions in only a few seconds, but soon find that the rest of our life is not time enough to regret them.
2
The house was better equipped for a good time than for a death. The fridge was full, there was a shed at the end of the garden piled high with firewood, whisky and cognac in the bar, two T.V.s with a satellite dish, bookshelves stocked with bestsellers enough for anyone not concerned to explore the mysteries of serious literature, a sound system with C.D.s of the Rolling Stones, Julio Sosa and the Leopoldo Federico Orchestra; Eduardo Falú singing Castilla and Leguizamon; Mozart, Charly García, Skinny Spinetta; Lita Vitale and Tita Merello. You could sit on the sofa in the small, warm living room and wait peacefully enough for a giant wave to come and sweep everything away.
But tsunamis do not ring the doorbell. And it is only in the movies that beautiful women call to say hello after dark. That was why when somebody rang the bell I thought it must be Edmundo they were looking for and I would find myself confronted with a lovely face pouting with disappointment.
“Isn’t it horrible?” the blond said, as though we were old friends. She swept past me without explaining who she was, although it was not difficult to work out that she must be the Lolita who had brought a little joy to Edmundo’s autumn years.
“Pablo Martelli,” I said, holding out my hand, but she turned and clung to me as if I were a piece of driftwood on the high seas after her ship had gone down.
Her hair was damp from the evening mist. It gave o
ff an enchanting fragrance of wild strawberries in a wood, if you could imagine that smell with your eyes closed when you’re being clung to as though you were a drowning woman’s only hope.
“I’m Lorena.”
She said this with her head pressed against my shoulder, her face buried in my shirt—the only clean one I had brought, thinking I would be gone two nights at most.
“They murdered him. They shot him like a dog before he had the chance to explain he wasn’t going to keep the money. Poor Poppa, dying like that just when we had all we needed to start a new life and be happy.”
If what she said was true, I could well understand her dismay. Losing a still attractive, intelligent and healthy man in his sixties, especially someone as relatively well off as Edmundo, must be a real blow in times like these when there is so much unemployment and the young have to face so many existential uncertainties. As far as I could recall Cárcano saying, Lorena was not a career woman, although she had studied for a degree in something or other at a private university. She had been wasting her time in employment agencies or multinationals where they employ graduate students to run bank errands, when all of a sudden: bingo! she runs into Edmundo.
“Tell me what happened,” I said, not at all impatient to come out of our embrace. “I didn’t know Edmundo had enemies.”
When I said this, she cast off her life raft. She headed for the bar to pour herself a whisky. It was only after she had gulped it down that she seemed to realize I was still there.
“You shouldn’t stay here,” she said. “It’s not safe.”
“You’re right. Besides, as you’ve been living with Edmundo, this is your place, and I’m an intruder. But my only other choice was to go to Bahía Blanca. Isabel is arriving tomorrow.”
My news disturbed her. She did not ask why Edmundo’s daughter was coming because the answer was obvious. She went to the picture window as though she could see the ocean outside despite the dark night under a new moon.
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