No One Loves a Policeman

by Guillermo Orsi

  The not-quite-shut door was the apple for our innocent Adam. He crossed the street diagonally from in front of an apartment block, and leapt straight into Isabel’s car as if he owned it.

  By now it was completely dark. All Wolf and I could make out were the glowing red tips of our cigarettes. The explosion caught us exchanging puzzled looks, but that lasted only a split second, because before we knew what had happened we were flat on our backs on the grass, right next to the bush where Wolf had emptied his bladder.

  4

  So there I was without a car again. This time it was a real shame. My own was a big old jalopy, a Ford Torino adapted in the ’70s to run on natural gas, so they had not stolen anything of value down beyond Bahía Blanca, unless a collector got his hands on it. But Isabel’s car was a different matter: it was as beautiful as its owner, though I still found it hard to think of Isabel as a grown woman.

  I had to accept the fact there were people who did not want me alive, and that is never pleasant. Until I answered Edmundo’s call begging me to come to Mediomundo as quickly as possible, my life had been rolling along without any great dramas, the only excitement the occasional sales convention or trip to the provinces with my samples of toilets and taps for all tastes and budgets. Sales had fallen off considerably in recent months: 2001 grew darker and darker as it went along. Storm clouds were gathering on the horizon, and nobody wanted to spend money on anything but changing Argentine pesos for dollars, and then depositing them or hiding them under their mattresses. But someone who lives alone does not need much, enough for his vices and a bit of food while waiting without much hope for the days to go by, and for the weekends to pass as rapidly and as unnoticed as possible.

  As it turned out, answering that call and driving though the night had not saved Edmundo’s life, and had put mine at risk. Get rid of that one too, somebody had said, some executive, some boss or other, some capo, a police or army officer, a big businessman, any of those shadowy figures who in Argentina press their intercom and give the executioner his instructions without bothering so much as to see the victim’s face, or hear about the friends who will miss him, the orphans who sooner or later are going to quarrel over his inheritance, the women who are going to have their hearts broken or heave sighs of relief.

  The worst thing about being sentenced to death without being tried, let alone charged, is that you do not have the faintest idea why your car gets stolen in the middle of the Patagonian desert, why you find a dead girl in your hotel bed, why somebody blows up a car lent to you by a beautiful dark-haired young woman—a woman who could be your daughter but is not, and who has been inexplicably kidnapped without any ransom demand. You do not know a thing, just as when you leave childhood behind and find yourself drifting on a sea that adults think they know like the back of their hands, but where they are irredeemably lost, and where all of us end up shipwrecked.

  The night of the explosion I called Mónica to tell her what had happened. In an outburst of desperate revolt against the inscrutable laws of the God she worshipped in her electronic church, she begged me to forget the whole thing, to leave her in peace. She had decided to trust the police who had proper badges and pensions, not an outcast like me. “Look what happened to Edmundo when he asked for your help,” she said. I decided it would be pointless, then at least, to try to defend myself. Besides, it was all true: I had been thrown out of the police and out of the life of the woman I loved.

  There must have been something wrong with me for things always to turn out this way. I was never able to form a stable relationship, to be with a woman who dreamed of growing old beside me, if indeed such women exist. A short while after they were with me, they all realized they were on the wrong bus and that if they did not get off quickly they could end up anywhere, in the river or a shanty town, the back of beyond of the beyond, on the planet of the apes, at the opposite pole to happiness.

  Lies, of course. Blatant, obvious, despicable lies they told themselves when it was already too late, when they were already clinging to a love that creaked and groaned like a raft on dry land. What seas did they hope to cross, what horizons were they going to discover, when they were stranded, inescapably beached on the bitter sands of disappointment?

  But that is my life, or my karma as those charlatans claim, the fraudsters who see God everywhere by gazing endlessly into their own navels. My karma is to be the blind spot, the dead center of other people’s storms, the calm water out of the main current. So many women, so few I really miss, just one in particular, Debora or Mireya, my last tango in Barracas, the damp streets, fog on the River Riachuelo, the worst kind of folklore, like a second-rate watercolor by Quinquela Martín, or one of Borges’ knife-fighters from a half a century ago, trapped on his street corner and tossing the inevitable coin for all or nothing.

  There are no other choices when you have to confront your faceless enemy, the one who is bound to attack you from behind. The coin decides if it is all or nothing. And if it is nothing, that means nothing.

  Wolf suggested we walk away from the explosion. It would take some time for them to find out who owned the car. A car being blown up on the streets of Buenos Aires is not such an everyday event as it is in the Middle East or in Hollywood films, but we could watch the fuss on T.V. and avoid all the questions for which we had no answers.

  I had arranged to meet the doctor and the Cervantes duo the next day, and I did not want to return to Bahía Blanca empty-handed.

  About ten blocks from the National Library we found a bar that looked quiet. Wolf ordered a Gancia, and I asked for a beer, cheese straws, crisps and peanuts. We were celebrating the happy hour of survival, so we drank a silent toast to our immortality and then, slumped back in his chair as he had been in Isabel’s unfortunate car, Wolf at last told me what he had found out about Edmundo Cárcano.

  “Some reports, whispered comments, lots of speculation,” he cautioned me lest I get too enthusiastic. “I want to enjoy my suspension like a well-earned holiday, even if it is unpaid,” he said. “Journalism is a trade for educated gossips, just occasionally endowed with a sense of aesthetics that allows them to give shape to their tittle-tattle. But sometimes reality is based on pure fiction, Martelli. You may be the most upright person in the world, but if the atmosphere all round you is corrupted, and the corrupt don’t go to jail but are rewarded with the best cars and the best women, sooner or later you will flush your values down the toilet—sorry for the allusion. C.P.F. is a multinational that does business all over the place. It has legitimate employees and employees in the black economy.”

  “That’s because they drill and refine black gold,” I said. “Naturally, some of them get splashed.”

  Wolf took advantage of my interruption to polish off the last handful of crisps. He ordered another Gancia and more crisps. Then he went on:

  “If you work as an office boy, you have no choice but to be a saint. If you’re a manager in a multinational, you have to give in to sin or you’re done for. Edmundo didn’t get where he was because of his professional abilities, believe me.”

  “But he was only a departmental manager. The big bosses at C.P.F. are all imported,” I said. A lukewarm defense of my friend’s reputation.

  “And precisely because of that they don’t understand what’s going on locally. They earn ten times as much as the home-grown people, so they can even permit themselves the luxury of turning down offers. Listen, I’m not making any moral judgment here. I would have done exactly the same in your friend’s shoes.”

  “And what did he do that you would have done exactly the same?”

  “Calm down, all in good time. First clear one thing up for me, Martelli: why did your friend ring you the night he was killed?”

  I hesitated about giving the information to a gossip-monger with an aesthetic sensibility, but it might be all he had to go on beyond the speculation of his informers.

  “He asked me to come to his beach house as soon as I could.”

  �
��Did he say his life was in danger?”

  “No. And he didn’t sound agitated. ‘It’s something that will change your life, Gotán,’ he said. ‘But if you stay tucked up in bed you’ll miss out.’”

  Wolf made short work of the second dish of crisps. He did not offer me any.

  “I don’t have any friends in the police,” he said, as if resigned to the fact. “And don’t thank me for still being alive, I didn’t do it on purpose.”

  “I detest funerals, Wolf.”

  “Call me Parrondo.”

  “O.K., Parrondo. I don’t want to have to go to any more funerals of people I’m fond of. It’s useless suffering. I can’t bring them back to life, and I’m terrible about remembering the good times we had together.”

  We sat in silence for a while, Wolf with his Gancia and me with my warm beer. We were both staring out of the window overlooking the square, in the hope that we would see the outline or face of someone we knew who could shake us out of our gloom and doubts, or help us get back to normal, as though when we parted company Wolf could go straight back to his job at the paper and I could climb into Isabel’s car without being blown to smithereens.

  At some point, Wolf turned toward me and our eyes met. If the unnamed game he had been playing was Hide and Seek, he had obviously reached a hundred and shouted out in his mind, “Here I come, ready or not.” I was home free.

  But the sinister game we were caught up in was only just beginning.

  5

  Against all expectation, and above all apparently against our better judgment, we ended the evening hugging each other and promising to meet again when everything had become clear and justice reigned again on Earth, or at any rate in Argentina. Wolf allowed me to call him Wolf, and I said he could call me Gotán.

  I said no to his offer of a taxi home. It was a fine night for walking, and besides, I needed to take my time leaving the place I could have died in.

  Halfway there I stopped off at a bar to go to the toilet. On the T.V. screen, watched by two lonely customers, I caught a glimpse of Isabel’s car in flames. It was a news flash on Cronica, with ticker tape announcing in huge letters that the tank of a car running on liquid gas had exploded. As I had my pee I imagined the debate there would be in the next morning’s papers about the risks of using liquid propane gas as fuel. They would probably not even bother to find out who the car belonged to. Once she was free, Isabel could report it stolen, and claim on the insurance.

  But who was going to free Isabel, and from whom?

  The jigsaw puzzle Wolf had pieced together from the bits of information he had gleaned here and there indicated, or at least suggested, that not only sheltering but operating freely beneath the umbrella of the Argentine subsidiary of C.P.F. was an N.G.O. whose aims were not altogether charitable, even though some of its members were grateful recipients of its donations.

  The N.G.O. was called the New Man Foundation. It had a formal structure to help it administer funds and gifts from private and official sources. These were intended to improve the infrastructure of a shanty town on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. According to censuses—preferably ones collected from helicopter gunships—the shanty town was home to thirty thousand souls with not a single credit card among them.

  It is moving—at least, it moves me—to see how the state and big business are so concerned about the poorest and most needy in our society. Even though it may not crop up on their balance sheets, there are always organizations appealing for solidarity to help rescue the inhabitants of our infernos. Collections, donations of all kinds, and paragraph seven of point four of the law granting a big international construction firm the right to build a brand-new motorway over the heads of the poor provincial workers crammed into the shanty towns mean that a few coins from the petty cash accounts of businesses and contracts find their way to these worthy organizations.

  Nothing wrong with that. The more coins the better, if Uncle Scrooge shakes out his pockets. Donald Duck quack quack can pick them up and dig at least a couple of drains to put sewers in. But sometimes, so many wearisome times, not even this spare change reaches its destination. Sometimes not enough care is taken with a cigarette that has fallen to the ground and bang! everything goes up in the air like Isabel’s car. Goodbye soup kitchen.

  Because of the position he held in C.P.F.—institutional relations manager or some such title—Edmundo had been asked to join the ranks of the N.G.O. aiming to transform all those workers without any hope of work into the spitting image of the New Man that the followers of Che Guevara had dreamed or hallucinated about in the ’70s. The first contacts must have been formal, to sound each other out rather than to listen to worthy humanistic speeches about how, in order to save capitalism and western society, we ought to be paying more attention to the poor before they rise up and eat us raw.

  This is exactly what the Roman Catholic Church that supported the military dictators said, as did all those who financed the military adventures that have laid Argentina to waste. Nobody has a problem sounding off like this nowadays, despite the fact that thirty years earlier that kind of idea cost the lives of thousands of humble political and social activists and those who, dazzled by the thought of an armed socialist utopia, declared war on an army whose mission has always been to turn its weapons on its own people whenever called upon.

  There was nothing odd, therefore, in the fact that an oil company chose to support those who said they were working on behalf of the dispossessed. Quite the contrary: newspapers, magazines and the T.V. are full of praise for these instances of “good” capitalism, whereas they castigate the ogres of the international lending agencies for coming up with adjustment plans that will steal the bread from the mouths of little orphans.

  “Who is going to suspect that C.P.F. sets aside funds for the New Man not to feed the sparrows in the shanty town, but to buy and sell arms on the black market?”

  This bald assertion of Wolf’s had taken me aback more even than seeing Isabel’s car go up in flames. They were only his suspicions after talking to his contacts in the dead of night, but they might at least explain why his bosses at the newspaper had taken such drastic measures against him. Nothing in what Wolf had published even hinted at what he had told me, but even so it had brought out the hemorrhoids on the dirty asses of those in charge at La Tarde. Although rumors of this kind are more common in newsrooms than coffee breaks, nobody is willing to print anything that could cause a stink. There is no analysis of what is going on, and still less reporting of it. The journalists are all far too worried about hanging on to their desks in their little compartments, making sure they live to enjoy the benefits and holidays they have worked so hard for.

  “Poor guy,” I said to myself as I walked down the acacia-lined streets, taking in the intense perfume of jasmine wafting from houses with gardens. Edmundo had spent most of his adult life in C.P.F. He had the classic career of an exemplary employee, from office junior to top manager. Thirty years of getting up at dawn, eating breakfast half asleep, rushing out to catch the 7:15 train, then spending the day between reinforced concrete walls that kept out the sun and rain, buried alive on one of the top floors of a building identical to thousands of others in cities all around the world, surrounded by zombies and transformed into a puppet just intelligent enough to accept the life he was living, an unbroken line drawn between youth and the moment when they gave him a couple of pats on the back and a gold medal for his loyalty to the company.

  Nobody, not even Mónica, could have judged him for falling into temptation. Even if the apple he bit into was a shady business, a street with the unavoidable dead end. Not very different from the life he had been leading, except that in this case death caught up with him just when he thought he had found a way out, courtesy of a beautiful young woman.

  “If he called you at midnight and asked you to come immediately, it was because he needed to confide in someone,” Wolf said, trying to see beyond the obvious. “Things were probably getting out of
hand.”

  “What could I have done?”

  “I don’t know, maybe he needed a front man, or a bodyguard …”

  “Give me a break, Parrondo. I’m just a decrepit old animal, like Félix Jesús.”

  “Who’s Félix Jesús?”

  “A decrepit old animal.”

  I walked almost forty blocks through the warm spring night spiced with the scent of flowers and police sirens. As I had done so often over the past five years, from a public phone booth I dialed the only number I could not wipe from my memory. I needed to hear a voice, to imagine that by saying a magic word I could recover the past, could retrace my steps like a little boy who runs away from home but as night falls starts to feel afraid and runs back to the maternal embrace.

  You said hello, but then perhaps because it was so late or because of some strange music I could not hear but which pierced your soul, you said, yet again, “Please, please don’t phone me any more.”

  I hung up and wandered on, through more blind alleys in my labyrinth. “Don’t phone me any more,” you said for the first time five years ago. “I don’t want anything to do with a policeman.”

  You had fallen in love with a toilet salesman and woke up when you heard all about my past in the National Shame. It was one night when we were drinking in a bar we used to go to where we could cling to each other for a few well-danced tangos. We were there, roused by the music and heading for bed, when fate, tired of shaking its tumbler, suddenly threw the dice and we lost it all.

  The guy dancing with an old crone in a short skirt and red high-heels refused to get the point of me turning away when he lurched toward us and shouted: “Why, if it isn’t Inspector Martelli … we’ve put away some crooks in our time, haven’t we, eh? Tell her, tell my friend here, who we are.” He stopped dancing, leaving his partner to complete her twirls and then rush off, embarrassed, to the toilet, while my tiny world collapsed around me. Without a word, you turned and walked away, Mireya. Since then I have never plucked up the courage to tell you the truth, like a murderer forced to confess his crime before he can begin to explain it, explain why he aimed for the heart of the man or woman he hated, to explain that hatred, to explain why unreason is so much stronger than reason. I felt the same sense of shame as the old tart who had run to hide in the toilet, except that I stood rooted to the spot in the middle of the dance floor, having to listen to the guffaws of my drunken one-time colleague: “Let her go, Martelli, she doesn’t deserve you. She’ll never understand what we’ve been through together.”