No One Loves a Policeman

by Guillermo Orsi

  Burgos was driving back along the rustlers’ road, avoiding all the potholes by wrenching the steering wheel from side to side so violently that I was afraid we would find ourselves upside down in the ditch. He laughed at my terrified face. “You must have been a desk man, a bureaucrat who never ventured out onto the streets,” he decided, unable to otherwise explain why I was so alarmed by his driving. He was wrong, but I had no wish to correct his impression. Better that he feel in control, carry out his own investigation in the same carefree way as he drove.

  “Ayala is an intelligent sort, though he does his best to hide it. He’s a Dr. Jekyll who in his more lucid moments is able to see why he turns into Mr. Hyde when faced with a suspect.”

  “It goes with the job,” I said. The last thing I wanted to do was analyze the personality of some dumb provincial policeman, but Burgos wanted to go on talking about him.

  “He wants to retire. He has a family, God help us. A fine wife, and two kids. ‘I’m not going to let the criminal scum ruin my life,’ he tells anyone willing to listen. ‘Every thug I kill without the press kicking up a fuss is one more step toward my leaving the force with honor.’”

  “He wants a medal,” I said, as innocent as a schoolboy.

  “No, he wants money,” the chubby doctor corrected me, steering his way round a series of gaping holes in the broken asphalt. “What ‘leaving the force with honor’ means down here is to retire but keep the money coming in.”

  By which he meant the shares in prostitution, illegal gambling, moonlight rustling, kidnaps for ransom, and all the other little sidelines that never show up in the abundant official statistics on economic activity and employment, but which are such an important part of the overall police product.

  The doctor went on and on about Ayala’s virtues, while I felt increasingly stupid, thrown out of my job and now a fugitive, a Richard Kimble with no degree and none of the women the Yankee doctor managed to pick up in that old black-and-white T.V. series while he searched for the one-armed man who had killed his wife.

  When I mentioned this existential anguish, my companion said I had picked up a real beauty myself when I answered my friend’s call.

  “But you have to look after these sweeties,” he lectured me. “Soften them up a bit, then go for it. Did you really not fuck her?”

  I had no wish to answer him, and no time either. We were approaching Bahía Blanca’s station again.

  Ayala and Rodríguez’s silhouettes stood out against the bare brick arch of the station like characters from Cervantes. The inspector was tall and lanky like Don Quixote, and his sidekick was almost as round as Sancho Panza (though not as plump as the doctor). They went on smoking, oblivious to our presence while Burgos parked his exotic blue V.W. alongside the black Ford Falcon without number plates that the policemen had come in. Rodríguez was giving his version of the game between Rosario Central and Chacarita he had seen the previous evening before he went on duty. Ayala seemed far more interested in the details of the game than in our being there. Apparently the game had ended nil-nil as fixed beforehand by their managers, anxious to add another couple of games to a tournament designed to fleece summer holidaymakers.

  “Look, the tin-opener’s arrived,” was Ayala’s greeting for the doctor, spat from the left-hand side of his mouth directly at Rodríguez, who finished the sentence for him:

  “And he brought the sardine.”

  I stayed in the car while Burgos got out and whispered in Ayala’s ear what he had learned about me being from the Federal police force. I heard Ayala growl “So why the fuck did they throw him out,” at which Burgos shrugged and looked back in my direction, winking at me as if we were on the same side, although I had no idea if he meant I should join in or carry on sitting there quietly without a word, like a penitent who has just left the confessional.

  Ayala pushed him aside and came over to the car. I have not carried a gun for years, but no sooner had I instinctively felt under my arm for my revolver than I was squinting down the barrel of the .38 that this provincial Quixote had stuck right between my eyes.

  “I’ve had it up to here with you, Martelli. What the fuck are you doing so far from home? At your age you should be wrapping up warm and going to bed early.”

  “I’ve already told you why I came here.”

  “I don’t like men who stick their noses into other people’s business, especially when it’s someone who’s been kicked out of the force, pushing his snout in where nobody’s asked him to.”

  “The person who asked me was a friend. When I arrived, he had been murdered—something that doesn’t seem to bother you, but which explains why I’m pushing my snout in here.”

  “Get out of the car,” he ordered, taking a couple of steps back but still aiming the revolver at me.

  I did as I was told. I get hot under the collar when I have to deal with bureaucracy, and sometimes women drive me crazy, but I am never bothered by the sight of a gun. I have spent too long handling them, shooting and being shot at. Even though I no longer carry one, I accept my destiny. To be surprised that one day I might end up riddled with bullets would be as hypocritical as a habitual smoker who refuses to accept he has cancer because he gave up smoking at sixty.

  “I could arrest you right now, and you’d spend the rest of your life on remand, waiting to be tried for the murder of three women.”

  “But he didn’t do it!” shouted Burgos. Rodríguez was filling him in on the rest of the game now that Ayala was busy threatening me.

  “You could,” I said to Ayala, “but there are a few things I need to know so that my friend’s widow can hate him in peace without feeling any remorse.”

  “That’s not going to be easy,” Ayala said, slowly lowering his gun. “Cárcano was a womanizer, but he wasn’t mixed up in any shady business.”

  “So why did they kill him?”

  “We had better talk in the waiting room of this magnificent Victorian-style railway station. It’s a pity it’s crawling with tramps and drunks, but I’ll get Rodríguez to clear it out for us.”

  He did not have to insist. Rodríguez had already broken off his match report and disappeared inside the station. We heard him call out a couple of times and then, perhaps because one of the occupants was taking his time getting up, a bullet whistled through the glassless window. There followed shouts and the sound of running feet, and then I saw a pair of hobos leaping across the tracks in their socks and shredded underwear. One of them was whirling a pair of trousers round his head like a gaucho waving his poncho.

  “They’ll be back,” Ayala said, with paternal concern. “Even if we get thrown out, we always return home.”

  10

  We made an odd foursome following our meeting in the Bahía Blanca station waiting room. Three musketeers and a D’Artagnan who doubled as Don Quixote.

  Burgos had hardly anything to say, even though, as he admitted, the idea for our little “off-the-record” chat had been his. “I’m a doctor, not a policeman,” was his only contribution. “My profession is a priesthood. I cannot kill without betraying Hippocrates.”

  “Go and take a shit, then,” Ayala said, no doubt aware that the toilet in this splendid station would be a den of rats and cockroaches.

  All three of them wanted desperately to find the man who seduced beautiful young women and then sliced them like watermelons. They could not give a damn about Edmundo’s death in Mediomundo. Ayala had dug up nothing in Cárcano’s life that was of interest to him: he ran no rackets or brothels, and did not seem to be a drug trafficker. Solving his murder would not get Ayala on the front page of any papers or on the T.V. news, and might instead open a Pandora’s box that, as a humble provincial policeman, he would find impossible to close.

  The only virgin whose death I was interested in was the third one. My name would soon be tossed into the nearest prosecutor’s office like a stone in a pond, and within a few hours I would be on the wanted list in all the police stations in Patagonia. I could
hardly rely on Don Quixote and Sancho Panza for protection. That was limited strictly to their own small area of jurisdiction and to their even more reduced authority. As for the doctor, his network was altogether virtual, and seemed to consist of a handful of characters who could only be seen as important from the point of view of a forensic expert used to peering at bloated wounds or the entry hole made by a bullet in a corpse’s skin. Some local magistrates and a few cheap criminal lawyers as putrid as the bodies he examined.

  In spite of this depressing scenario, I was happy enough to talk things over.

  “That Cárcano wasn’t mixed up in anything shady,” Ayala said, “doesn’t mean he was never tempted, the little mouse. Perhaps he saw the cheese and went for it.”

  “The cheese in this case being the girl,” Rodríguez concluded, briefly raising his head from the sports newspaper he was studying. “Catalina Eloísa Bañados by name, although she used Lorena for her modeling work in agencies that are little more than a front for the white slave trade.”

  “What agencies?” Ayala said.

  “You know the ones, Inspector. They use cheap motels here on the coast, less than three stars. Five-star places have a different class of clientele.”

  “Lorena didn’t look like someone who was three stars or less,” I said, annoyed by Rodríguez’s scorn.

  “You should have fucked her, Don Gotán. In bed after a good workout, women make the best informers. They fall for you, if only for a few moments, and blab about anything and everything.”

  I wondered just how often the doctor found voluptuous young women falling for him, or what arts not learned in the morgue he used to seduce them.

  “Well, I didn’t,” I said, indignant. “I didn’t have the opportunity or the inclination. She was with a friend of mine who had just been murdered. Whenever I looked at her I saw him lying there in a pool of his own blood with his eyes wide open, obviously killed by a professional.”

  What I did not tell my fat friend and the Cervantes duo was that I was in no mood to fall for anyone. After all, this was not a cozy tea-time chat among girlfriends.

  It was time for us to leave. The toilet next to the waiting room stank to high heaven, and as the morning drew on our cars parked outside might arouse suspicion. Ayala and Rodríguez were off duty, and should have been either asleep at home or putting in a few extra hours as security guards at a factory or for one of those gated communities being built like medieval fortresses outside our cities to protect the haves from the have-nots.

  What we agreed in the end was that I would leave that night for Buenos Aires with brand-new papers that a friendly counterfeiter in Bahía Blanca was already preparing for me. I could use Isabel’s car to pick them up in Tres Arroyos. If I was stopped at a road block, I could use the documents and a ten-dollar bill to see me through. No local policeman wants to try arresting fugitives, because they are generally armed. The police are in more danger than the people on the run, because when they go up to a car they are on their own, even if they have an army battalion backing them up at the roadside. Besides, if saving their own skins were not motive enough, in summer they are too busy shaking down the dimwits who go on holiday without warning lights, or with out-of-date insurance or a broken left-rear light. The police know they are on to a good thing: they only have to threaten to write a ticket or impound the vehicle and the harassed family man or lover reaches into their wallet for twenty or thirty dollars “for the police widows’ and orphans’ fund” that always needs replenishing.

  My mission in Buenos Aires was to consult archives and find informers. As Ayala saw it, the murderer on the coast was no novice: he knew exactly what he was doing, and left no clues. He also made sure each time that somebody else would be the first person the police looked for.

  “You’re the most pathetic case,” Ayala said, to encourage me. “It’s normal for the dummy to be some poor fool, a traveling salesman or a businessman having an affair. But for them to use an ex-federal police officer just goes to show how low public regard for our institutions has fallen.”

  I did not react to his insults. My face was still smarting from his attentions in the police cell, and though I had half a mind to pay him back in kind, I decided enough was enough for one day.

  We agreed to meet up again five days later on Mediomundo beach.

  “That way I can stretch out and get some sun,” Ayala said.

  “Count me out, boss. Putting all this blubber on display would be too much like sexual perversion,” Rodríguez said, gripping the rolls of his stomach fat.

  Burgos drove me back to the Imperio Hotel. He parked half a block away, told me to wait, then went to recover Isabel’s car. When he returned, he said that the day-time receptionist, who knew him as well as his nighttime colleague, had asked what kind of a mess he had got himself into: the hotel is crawling with detectives, he said. They found a girl dead in a room where a guy from Buenos Aires was staying. He left without paying or taking his things, and he was the one who was supposed to come and collect the car.

  “You owe me a hundred dollars,” Burgos said. “The night porter didn’t share the tip you gave him with his colleague. It’s getting more and more expensive to keep people quiet.”

  I had to hand over the hundred before he let me into Isabel’s car, a Renault Mondino that was as impeccable and silent as a cat on the prowl. When I pressed gently on the accelerator, it positively purred.

  “Don’t get lost,” the doctor said. “Buenos Aires is a city full of temptation.”

  He was standing by the driver’s window, enviously stroking the smooth paintwork.

  “Don’t start with that nonsense again.”

  “The owner of a car like this must be a fine woman too. Why not fuck her if you get the chance?” he ventured by way of farewell.

  11

  What is a clairvoyant? Someone who foresees the future, or someone who determines it by suggesting what is going to happen?

  I put my foot down. I was keen to get away as swiftly as possible from Burgos and his going on about my sleeping with whichever women I might bump into. I had not had much luck in that area. The last woman in my bed had been murdered, and I had not so much as touched her, apart from our hug at Edmundo’s place when she had turned up in such apparent distress.

  So she was not Lorena. Then again, Mireya was not Mireya, although with her I did get a bit further than a filling station lost in the desert.

  “What else could you call me but Mireya like the tango, Gotán?”

  I had laughed that night as we were leaving the Dos Por Cuatro tango bar half a block up from Boedo on the way to Puente Alsina, a dark, cobbled street from bygone days lit by old-fashioned street lamps you would expect to see in a warehouse or in a San Telmo antique shop window. Dos Por Cuatro was once owned by a Basque dairyman but had now been converted by his grandchildren into a tango bar. It still had its carriage entrance, and there was an old milk cart in the yard, shafts pointing to the sky. Nobody uses horses in Buenos Aires nowadays, but at weekends they harness some old nag to it and take Yankee and European tourists out for a ride. They cannot go far because they do not want to get into the busy avenues, but the driver and his attendants are glad of the tips in dollars.

  “But you’re not blond, like Mireya was.”

  I was not very keen on calling her Mireya, which made me wonder if it was because I did not really want to name her at all. We lose what we put a name to. It’s like shining a bright light on a flower so we can examine it more closely. Love fades, for this and many other reasons, but always, always too soon.

  I left Bahía Blanca and sped along the highway at 140. I paid more attention to my rearview mirror than to the road ahead. I am always afraid that the shot will come from behind, or the push into the ravine when we are standing at the top admiring the view.

  It may no fun being a policeman, but it is worse to have been one. The memories weigh too heavily: there is too much past you cannot return to. And yet nothing i
s dead and buried. Not even the corpses.

  Isabel and Mónica were not waiting for me at the Cabildo Hotel in Tres Arroyos. In fact, they had not checked in.

  For a brief moment I tried to convince myself they must have headed straight for Buenos Aires. It made sense: what would they have gained by waiting for me? It simply meant they were caught up in an affair that had nothing to do with them, only hours after Edmundo’s death.

  I called the hotel in Bahía Blanca. According to the receptionist, the two women had left early that morning, in the midst of all the turmoil over the discovery of the dead body. He obviously fancied his chances as an informer for the yellow press. “They took a taxi to the bus station,” he said.

  When I called the bus station they told me there was no morning bus to Buenos Aires, but one to Tres Arroyos. I had told Mónica and Isabel to rent a car, but they must have preferred the bus: Isabel could console her mother while keeping quiet about the mess they were in that was not of their making, and did not really seem to have anything very much to do with Edmundo either.

  I went to Tres Arroyos bus station. The bus from Bahía Blanca had arrived on time. “Not many people got off,” the driver told me. He was a lanky, pallid individual who looked as though he had either slept very badly or had just been dumped by a consumptive girlfriend. I found him at the bar of a fast-food stall, tucking into a hotdog with a glass of white table wine.

  “Let’s see if I can remember,” he said when I asked him if he had seen an older woman and a tall, pretty young woman with good breasts, a nice backside and long dark hair. “Let’s see if I can remember,” he repeated, digging into a decayed tooth with a toothpick and gently belching the smell of hotdog and cheap wine all over me. His memory improved when I slipped a ten-dollar bill into his open left hand, resting as if by coincidence on the counter in front of me.