“Yes, they got off here, with a gentleman.”
“A gentleman?”
He shifted uneasily on his stool. The surprise in my voice must have made him realize his information was worth more than I had paid him.
“What was he like?”
“Let’s see if I can remember.”
I took out another ten-dollar bill, but this time laid it on top of the paper napkin where the half-eaten hotdog was.
“Either you remember or you don’t.”
As I slammed down the banknote, the half-eaten hotdog rolled onto the floor. I ordered another one and more white wine, but something drinkable this time.
“I have to leave for Tandil in fifteen minutes.”
“The wine’s for me. What did this ‘gentleman’ look like?”
He licked his lips as though cleaning the rim of a glass, ready to try the chilled Torrontes wine the barman was busy opening.
“There were two of them,” he said, as though he had just remembered.
“Two gentlemen?”
“Yes, and two ladies. What’s so strange about that? Are you a policeman?”
I filled his glass and poured a half for myself. He tossed the wine down in one gulp and held out the empty glass for more.
“It’s nice and cool.”
I refilled it. This time he drank only half of it. The wine seemed to refresh his memory.
“Those two were policemen as well. I can smell them,” he said, wrinkling his hooked sommelier’s nose. “Built like tanks. Not very tall, about my height. But built like tanks. Lots of gym and steroids.”
He sat there staring at the counter, pretending to be lost in thought. I knew that if I seemed anxious, he would want more money. I said I was leaving.
“They all got into a car that was waiting for them,” he said in a rush.
“What kind of car?”
“One of those 4×4s they have in the country. Tires as fat as airplane wheels. Red. A Chevrolet, I reckon.”
“Did you see anything unusual or threatening? Did they push the women into the vehicle for example?”
He fixed his cloudy eyes on me. They were as cold as the wine.
“Gentlemen, I said. Not killers. All muscle, but polite.”
I paid for the wine and the second hotdog, which he had not touched. I commended him to get a relief driver for the Tandil run.
“I like people who try to help,” he said, patting me on the back. “Tandil is just up the road. It’s all dead straight, and there isn’t much traffic. Thanks, though.”
With that he swallowed another glass of wine, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and winked at me as he left.
All muscle but polite, two gentlemen had kidnapped Isabel and Mónica.
Some time later I heard on the radio that a bus on its way to Tandil had left the road on one of the few bends on the highway from Tres Arroyos, had sailed over the roadside ditch and come to a halt in a soya field.
12
All I had was someone else’s car and a fake I.D. card. There had been a beautiful blond waiting in bed for me, but she was dead. And the friend who had kindly invited me into all this mess had been dropped from the catalog too.
Tres Arroyos is one of those hundreds of Argentine country towns that are pretty enough to the people living there but have nothing to tempt a visitor to spend so much as a night there. The inhabitants know their charms, and try hard to conceal the sheer boredom of the clean, deserted streets, the grid of avenues round the main square, where town hall and church silently confront each other.
If the vehicle that Isabel and Mónica were taken away in was a 4×4, that probably meant they were being kept on a nearby estancia, in some shack in the middle of the countryside that would be difficult to locate and hard to get to.
I decided to give Tres Arroyos a chance by staying there a night. I registered at the Cabildo Hotel with my brand-new identity: Edgardo Leiva, married, commercial traveler. The plan I had hastily arranged with Don Quixote, his sidekick and the fat forensic specialist, fell apart if Isabel and Mónica had disappeared. The idea had been to take them back to Buenos Aires so they could quickly get back to their normal lives and not become involved in something none of us knew the true dimensions of.
A pair of muscular but polite gentlemen had pushed in before me.
I visited half a dozen estate agents, and found out all about farms, market gardens, and dairy outfits for sale or rent in the region. Everything was as I had expected: the pampas around Buenos Aires are the last redoubt of that rich Argentina that in the early years of the twentieth century our leaders used to dazzle millions of European immigrants with. They did not, of course, tell them that the really fertile land was already owned by others, most of them descendants of the soldiers who had robbed the Indians of it in the first place. All that was left to distribute was rough, parched land that needed a lot of brute strength and a great deal of money to make anything of.
The immigrants, driven out of Europe because imperial wars had left them starving, supplied the brute strength. The rewards for all their hard work were waiting for them in their graves.
“What exactly are you looking for?” the man in one of the last agencies I visited asked me exasperatedly.
I told him my interest was not strictly commercial, for the moment at least. It could be a farm that had not been worked for a while, with a rundown or abandoned shack on it. I did not care because I was not going to live there. I wanted to buy something cheap.
“You’re not going to find anything cheap around here,” he warned me.
He got out some maps and spread them across his desk. There were three properties that might interest me: farms of less than a hundred hectares. On two of them there had been a building of some kind or other. One was in ruins; the other was very run-down, with the roof missing over half of its six or so rooms.
“I’m interested in that one.”
“The owners live in Buenos Aires. I’m sure there’s no-one there. We could go now, it’s not far.”
I asked him to tell me how to get there. We could go early the next morning, I suggested.
“No, the morning’s impossible for me,” he said. “Give me a call and we’ll arrange a time.”
I shook his hand, looking as pleased as if we had just done a fantastic deal. He was obviously interested in selling something; I was more concerned about getting him off my back. I had the information I was looking for. If the two polite gentlemen had taken Isabel and Mónica to some out-of-the-way place, it could be the half-ruined ranch on a neglected farm. There would be no witnesses. On any working estancia, market garden or dairy farm there are farmhands, cows. If the estate agent was right, on this one there would be nothing more than thistles and a ramshackle wind-pump.
I climbed back into the Renault and switched on the radio. As I did so I remembered I had left Bahía Blanca without checking to see if the car’s papers were in the glove compartment. As I opened it, the snub-nosed .38 fell onto the passenger seat like a cat escaping from a cupboard. On the radio they were forecasting a storm for that night.
Debora, I wrote on the steamed-up glass of the bathroom mirror. As I was combing my hair after the shower, the letters gradually faded, leaving only my face in view. If memory is a window on the past, I give up. All the glimpses of it I get are snatches of events seen through shutters. I hear footsteps but have no idea whose they are, whether they are coming toward me or leaving me forever.
“Call me Mireya if you like, Gotán. You’re really pathetic, but call me Mireya if it makes you feel good.”
She had no idea I was a policeman when she allowed me to call her that, to talk to her as if we were in some cheap melodrama, exaggerating my lines, making fun of my own autumnal passion. I was in no hurry to tell her what I had once been, and anyway, she was delighted at my current occupation as a salesman of bathroom furniture, washbasins, bidets and toilets, together with all the fittings and pipes … “I don’t suppose you carry samples
with you, do you?” she asked, laughing. “No, just leaflets. Don’t laugh, sweetheart,” I said. “Somebody has to make sure that people can perform their ablutions in modern, well-designed surroundings.”
She liked my voice and the way I looked at her. “There’s something so old-fashioned about everything you do,” she told me. “You’re like one of those old 78s transferred to a C.D.,” she insisted, clinging to me, incredulous and fearful.
I did not have to wipe her name from the mirror. The draft between the bathroom door and the window saved me the trouble.
I called Buenos Aires. When I heard Isabel’s voice on the answering machine I caught my breath. While I was enjoying the happy hour in Cabildo Hotel, she might be dead, and Mónica with her.
My next call was to my own apartment. I do not like calling when I’m not at home, out of respect for Félix Jesús’s feelings, because every time the telephone rings he arches his back and spits as if he is being threatened by an Alsatian. But it was night already, so he had probably already slipped off through the cat-flap I had made for him in the basement.
After two rings, the recorded messages kicked in. I heard a voice saying: “The girls are fine, but don’t even think of looking for them or they’re dead meat. Wait for news.” There were no insults, and the tone was like an astronaut resigned to the idea he would never get back to earth. I hung up and had to go and sit at the bar until I stopped sweating.
I ordered a mineral water and while the storm they had forecast began to make its presence felt, I thought things over.
Edmundo was dead, so there was nothing I could do for him. Nor could I help the three murdered young women. But Isabel and Mónica were still alive, if I was to believe the emotionless bulletin of the person who had called me in Buenos Aires. I was determined to head back there at first light. I had the suspicion that somebody had deliberately dismantled a jigsaw puzzle, but that all the pieces were still there. Of course, the universe is a whole, but as we thread our way through it between lucidity and madness we all have to fit the pieces back together as best we can.
I could not allow myself the luxury of going to sleep that night, even though I was tempted by the freshly made bed, the T.V. in my room, a film I could watch until I fell asleep halfway through, and outside my window the rain, lightning, and perhaps even hailstones crashed against the streets of the town like the horses’ hooves of an army of occupation.
It seemed a pity to take Isabel’s new Renault out of the hotel garage where I had left it and expose it to the rain that was lashing the roofs of Tres Arroyos. If there are hailstones it could ruin the paintwork, I thought. It is normal to exaggerate the danger when you are about to face the unknown, to think, for example, how silly it would be to catch a cold, when in all likelihood the night was going to end with bullets flying.
Two and a half kilometers up the highway, turn left onto the side road until you reach a fork, then left again. Another nineteen hundred meters down what is little more than a track you come to a gate, and beyond that is the property, the estate agent’s map told me.
If the storm carried on much longer, it would soon be impossible to reach the place. I drove out onto the highway. It was easier to see into my conscience than through the windscreen. I drove slowly, aware I could be hit by a truck or a bus traveling at more than a hundred driven by someone who loved hotdogs and cheap wine. A flash of lightning showed me where to turn off to the left.
At least I was safe from the insomniac madmen on Argentina’s main roads. I speeded up along the deserted side road until I reached the fork. I bore left again, and suddenly had to slam on the brakes to avoid colliding with the farm gate.
This was not a good time and an even worse situation in which to go visiting a farm of less than a hundred uncultivated hectares. I switched off the engine and the lights. I could only see my hands when I lit the cigarette I decided to smoke before getting out. The condemned man’s last moment of pleasure.
13
My last puff on the cigarette coincided with an easing of the storm. The rain fell more gently now. Crickets began to strike up their music.
I got out of the car and clambered through the wire fence onto the property. The torch and the .38 in my hand belonged to Isabel. I could not imagine her with a weapon, and wondered if she knew how to use it, where she had learned to shoot and who had taught her. Edmundo was not someone who favored guns: he was an old-school type, said they were the devil’s work. I am not a great fan of them, either; that is why I have not used one for years. Besides, you do not need a .45 to sell toilets to the middle classes.
I walked toward the only light I could see. I had to watch my feet on the uneven, slippery ground. Despite the darkness it was obvious the land had not been worked for years, like so many small farms on the fertile pampas that were created by the subdivision of big estates, generations of inheritances wasted by the descendants of decadent oligarchs, then dismembered by the miserable ambitions of bureaucrats who had never smelled damp earth or cow dung in their lives.
By the time I arrived at the source of the light I was covered in mud and exhausted. Before me stood a big, square old house with a veranda. It was here that my guiding star was hanging. A 4×4 was backed onto the veranda. There was not enough light for me to be able to tell whether or not it was red.
The estate agent would have been surprised if we had gone out there that afternoon, because lights were on inside the house and there was the steady hum of a generator from the back.
I felt for the snub-nosed .38 in my jacket pocket. I was not even sure the gun worked: women who carry weapons never seem to bother to maintain them, and see no reason to dismantle them from time to time to clean them. I also guessed that whoever was inside would probably have as much firepower as the Israeli army. I was not going to survive a shoot-out; my only chance was to remain unnoticed until I could learn something of what was going on.
The mud plastered all over me was useful camouflage. Besides, they say it does wonders for old, dry skin. It nutrifies all the molecules, and for a while at least you are as soft as a baby’s bottom. I crawled along like a lizard, going past a drinking trough and finally stopping to get my breath back next to the wind-pump tank.
Bank employees moan because policemen can retire ten years before they do, but I would like to see them up to their ears in mud, on either side of their fiftieth birthday, or being bashed on the head or shot from behind by an accomplice of the thug they have just caught red-handed. When I left the Buenos Aires police I swore that I had done my last of these pentathlon events, and yet here I was. And the rain was pouring down again.
I sheltered under the eaves, next to a small window that turned out to be the bathroom vent. The electrical storm lit the vast empty pampas once more. I peered round the corner of the house and confirmed what I had suspected: the 4×4 was red.
There was no sound from inside the house, not even voices. They were probably asleep, or sitting there in silence because they had nothing to say to each other. I crouched down and was backing away from the wall when I felt hot breath on my right cheek. I froze, expecting a blow or a challenge, but all I heard was a low growl. Cautiously, I turned my face as slowly as possible. I found myself staring into the muzzle of an enormous farmyard dog.
How can I describe what I mean by a farmyard dog? They have all kinds of genes, from the most aggressive to the most docile. They have pedigree or mongrel blood, and can, of course, be of any size. The only thing they all have in common is that they hang around farmhouses, which they are never allowed to enter, hoping to snaffle a few scraps and perhaps even a friendly look from some human being—although only very rarely a pat or a stroke.
I decided to sit down and relax, to allow the dog to sniff my clothes and stick its nose into all parts of my muddy body. He cannot have found anything untoward, because at the end of his inspection he began to wag his tail and nuzzle me. I started stroking him, at first apprehensively and then determined to make sure he w
ould be on my side. The dog soon rolled over and waved his legs in the air like an upturned cockroach. I tickled his belly. I could feel the warmth of his affection, and this made me happy in a way I had not felt for a long time. If I had been taken by surprise and killed there and then, I would have died with a silly grin on my face.
A blinding flash followed a few moments later by a crack of thunder jolted me out of my beatific state, and brought an abrupt end to the dog’s pleasure. We were both back on the alert. I went up to the only proper window in the house, followed closely by the dog, by now my firm friend.
The light on the veranda which had been my guide suddenly began to flicker. The generator was on the blink or was running out of fuel. Inside the house, a voice asked what the fuck was going on, so I sneaked back as best I could to my hiding place next to the wind-pump. I was just in time to see two men emerge from the house, presumably the muscular but polite gentlemen the bus driver had told me about. Surprised by my retreat into the shadows, the dog hesitated midway between me and the house, staring toward my hiding place.
“What’s wrong with that dog?” one of the men said.
“How the fuck should I know!” the other said gruffly. He set off round the back of the house, cursing the generator: “I told you to buy a decent one, not some cheap Oriental crap.”
They had a brief argument, with one of them defending his decision because it had saved them a stack of money, the other one still going on about Chinese products: “This heap of shit is going to leave us in the dark any moment now,” he said. His words proved prophetic. The generator suddenly died without so much as a sigh.
The weak, flickering light from the bulb was replaced by intermittent blinding flashes of lightning. The dog took advantage of all the confusion to come over to the wind-pump and sprawl at my feet. He wanted more stroking: he must have been autistic.
“Can you see anything?” the man who had been concerned about the dog asked his companion.
No One Loves a Policeman Page 6