No One Loves a Policeman

by Guillermo Orsi

  I had handed in my gun when I was kicked out of the force, and never had another one until Isabel’s snub-nosed .38 fell into my hands. That was the only thing that saved that idiot’s life, defying me from the stinking bog he was drowning in, as though wanting me to kill him there and then, to put an end to his ghastly life. I was paralyzed by images that flashed through my mind like streaks of lightning in a storm, burning images of bodies tortured to the point of death, with this same man standing there, his whining voice deep in the jungle of desperate cries, complaining about going home late this night of all nights: “My boy’s got an exam in the morning and asked me to help him.” He was saying this to a policeman who had joined the force because he had been promised the same as Edmundo when he first started at C.P.F.: you’ll grow old without having to face death, you’ll be protected, it’s a life with all the support you need so you won’t fall, even if you never learn to walk on your own. Not even that was true: death caught me out, it reached out and embraced me and I could never be free of it again. It had been with me ever since, and still was that night when yet again you hung up on me before I could say a word.

  When finally I reached my apartment I was exhausted. The explosion, Wolf’s revelations, my long walk, the telephone call like a distress flare in the darkness. To make matters worse, it was a full moon, and under its spell Félix Jesús had gone out to prowl on the rooftops.

  I did not switch on the light. The silvery splendor of the moon through the living-room window bathed everything in brightness. I opened the fridge and poured myself a glass of milk to get rid of the acidity in my stomach. I drank it in small sips, trying to overcome my distaste. As I stood by the window I could see the silhouette of my cat on the ridge between my building and an old mansion that had been rebuilt and was now the Macedonian consulate. I have no idea whether Macedonia is a country, a city, or one of those nightmares the world has woken up to after its Cold War sleep. Félix Jesús had no idea either, but he could not give a damn anyway, and perhaps the female he was pursuing was from there, perhaps she had crossed half of Europe and the Atlantic curled up in a diplomatic bag, just to meet him.

  I poured the last quarter of my milk into Félix Jesús’ bowl so that he could replenish his strength after his amorous adventures. I went to bed and had almost fallen asleep when the telephone rang.

  I never answer the phone after midnight because blah, blah, blah…

  Whoever it was rang off, then insisted a second time. I picked it up apprehensively, holding the receiver as far away as possible between my thumb and first finger, as if the call might not only be a threat, but be capable of carrying out that threat there and then. There was no sound at the other end, so I said hello.

  “If you’d told me you had problems with wax in your ears, I could have syringed them for you.”

  The music in the background suggested the doctor was out drinking, possibly in Pro Nobis. A woman’s laughter confirmed my suspicions. The redhead, and the Swedish barman, too, no doubt.

  “What are you doing up so late, Burgos—and with women?”

  “I’m on duty, Don Gotán.”

  “Why on earth does a forensic doctor have to be on duty? Are corpses in such a hurry to be cut up?”

  “Nobody is really dead until they have their death certificate. Bureaucracy has spread so far it occupies spaces previously reserved for metaphysics, religious speculation, or any other science of uncertainty you care to mention.”

  He lowered his voice, and it sounded muffled as he protected the mouthpiece with the palm of his hand, even though the techno music was so loud not even he could hear himself speak.

  “I’m calling to tell you not to come. We’re traveling instead.”

  “Traveling where? And who is ‘we?’”

  “Don’t be dense, Don Gotán. Who did you meet in Bahía Blanca?”

  I reeled off the names:

  “A blond who doesn’t travel any more, two police officers, one of whom owes me something for the going over he gave me in jail, and a forensic doctor who saved me from being locked up for something I didn’t do.”

  “The day after you left, another girl was found dead in one of those cheap motels on the outskirts of Bahía Blanca.”

  “So why are you coming to Buenos Aires?”

  “I’ll explain tomorrow. Get some sleep now. I’m going to round up my passengers at first light and we’ll set off then.”

  He sounded as jolly about his journey as if he were going on holiday or to a picnic. I could just see him negotiating his sky-blue V.W. as fast as he could up Route 3, eyes half-closed against the bright sunlight and nursing the hangover he would have from the drinking he was doing in Pro Nobis.

  “Take care,” I managed to say. “Not too fast, and take turns at the wheel.”

  The doctor laughed at my concerns.

  “Don’t worry about us, Don Gotán. And polish up the obelisk for me.”

  6

  Provincials dream of finding an excuse to visit the city they hate the most: Buenos Aires.

  This Goliath’s head on a puny body is the favorite reason given for Argentina’s eternal frustrations—when it is a provincial providing the explanation. All the lifeblood, from the neck down, goes to feeding this megacephalic monster. This has been the case since the nineteenth century, when the Unitarians won the civil war against the Federalists. Then, as in every other war, it was not the good fighting the bad, but powerful leaders on one side confronting powerful leaders on the other, and using as their emissaries half-starving soldiers who, blinded since childhood by an enmity toward anyone who was different, had become warriors ready to lay down their lives for the fatherland, the flag, traditions, any of the symbols dragged out every time a people is called upon to tear itself to pieces.

  The Unitarians won, and Buenos Aires started to grow. At the beginning of the twentieth century it took in poor European immigrants, and in the ’40s equally poor Argentine migrants arrived from the provinces. The blood-letting continued, fed by even poorer immigrants from neighboring countries. At first there was work—if not for all, then for a good many of them. Afterward there came Perón, compañeros, the great unwashed, all the Peronist folklore, Peronist trade unions, Peronist jobs. Perón was thrown out by the same military who had put him there, supported by the middle class, priests and communists indignant at seeing so many dark-skinned people from the interior swarming to Goliath’s head. Ciao, Perón, but the transfusion of golliwogs, nig-nogs and the lumpen continued. They would arrive at Retiro with their goats and their strange dialects, and build (that’s one way of putting it) their tin shacks: whole neighborhoods of cardboard and tin shacks, postwar ghettos in the land of wheat and cows.

  Eighteen years later, and Perón was back. This time he died before they could throw him out again, but all the same the military, and of course the middle classes, who were exasperated that so many Peronists had become political activists, third-world priests, or guerrillas, took it upon themselves to kick out his widow and all her court. The massacre, which had already started with Perón’s return, became a silent, bitter struggle, but the riff-raff still kept flocking to Goliath’s head. There were even “civilian-military” expeditions in Buenos Aires, and straightforward military ones in Tucumán province, to make sure these dregs of society vanished without trace.

  “What a shit-hole this city is!” was Inspector Ayala’s first greeting to Buenos Aires, as the three of them shot along Avenida General Paz at 120, dodging the buses.

  He had just woken up, shaken to life, no doubt, by the maneuvers Burgos made to stay on the road. After a night out drinking and six hundred kilometers of driving, he was like a jittery phantom beyond all sense of danger.

  “Couldn’t you go a bit slower, doctor? We’re almost at the center,” Rodríguez protested. He was wide awake, and had been preparing mate for Burgos for the past hundred kilometers.

  “What would you know about the center of any big city?” Burgos grunted. Apart from
being a roly-poly doctor he was originally from Buenos Aires.

  The trio turned up at my front door at 11:15 in the morning, looking like the living dead.

  Burgos, insomniac and ashen, “Though I did get some sleep on the straight bits,” he said proudly; Rodríguez, who had done his best to keep him awake, and barely acknowledged me; and Ayala, the most alert of the three: “I swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills and half a tumbler of gin before we left,” he said. He asked if I had any idea where they could stay in this shit-hole of a city, gazing disdainfully at my few sticks of furniture and at Félix Jesús who, as exhausted as our visitors, lay fast asleep on the dining room sideboard.

  Thinking ahead, I had made a reservation for them in a hotel near Retiro. Not the Sheraton, of course, but not some dingy boarding house with only half a star either. It was a hotel for provincial tourists who come to Buenos Aires and want to spend the night out eating, going to the cinema, window-shopping, taking their photographs in front of the obelisk, gaping open-mouthed on a tour of Puerto Madero, crawling like ants along the streets and small squares swarming with other country cousins in a decrepit neighborhood known by the name of “Palermo Hollywood,” full of walking mentally-wounded and transvestites.

  Ayala’s protestations that all three of them were broke led me to wave goodbye to any hope I had that I could free myself of their unwelcome visit.

  “We’re on a secret mission,” Ayala declared solemnly.

  “A clandestine one,” the doctor corrected him.

  Like the slaughter of cows by moonlight out in the countryside, I recalled: the ones that provided the juicy steaks with no hygiene controls, but at half the normal price, the ones that kept the doctor in such rotund shape.

  “We don’t have official backing for this,” the inspector said. “We’re using the weekend and two days’ overdue leave. That means we’ve got four days to clear up this affair.”

  “Of course, it also means we have to pay our own expenses,” Rodríguez said. “And if we get ourselves killed, they’ll throw us out of the police for being so stupid.” He did not seem to be as keen on the expedition as the other two.

  “They’ll know what they are doing,” I suggested. Then with a sigh I uttered the fatal words: “I guess it doesn’t matter if it’s only for four measly days.”

  I prayed it would not occur to my daughter Cecilia, a single mother with two children who has been living in Australia for the past ten years, to make a surprise visit to Argentina to see her father. In a few minutes I transformed the pretty bedroom I kept spick and span for her into a tiny refugee camp. The three countrymen soon spread their tent over the floor—they had obviously supposed that in a city as big as Buenos Aires they were bound to find somewhere to camp. I pushed the few pieces of Cecilia’s furniture against the walls so they could enjoy the three by four meters of floor space, shut the door on them, and sat down to have a martini and watch T.V.

  The main news item was the hysterical reaction of customers when told that the amount of cash they could withdraw from the banks was restricted. Argentina was about to go into a nosedive yet again, but the poor bastards were being told to tighten their belts and not say a word.

  “Good idea not to let them get their hands on the money,” Ayala said, coming in to sit beside me. He took a sip of my martini. “If they did, they’d only take it abroad.”

  I explained as gently as I could that the people who had real money had already been taking it abroad for ages, while those caught in this latest trap were the same old victims, the ones in families where everyone including the dog went out to work, or those who had inherited their parents’ house and had sold it and were trying to live off their savings.

  “I couldn’t give a fuck about the suffering middle classes,” Ayala said, adding for good measure that he was no leftie, not even a Peronist. “They think they’re the country’s moral backbone, but they’re pathetic. They get us to do their dirty work, then go round clucking like hens that we’re torturers. Tell me, what the fuck do they want? You used to be a policeman, didn’t you?”

  I did not answer, but instead asked about the other two. I wanted to know what had brought them to Buenos Aires when the four young women had been murdered around Bahía Blanca.

  Ayala said Burgos and Rodríguez were sleeping it off like addicts, snoring like wild cats, and we had to give them time to recover. Their journey had been a middle-of-the-night, spur-of-the-moment decision. By first light they were already underway, with the lunatic doctor driving. He had such a regular and intimate contact with death, the inspector said, that he never believed he could die at the wheel.

  “He thinks he’s immortal,” I said.

  “Something like that.”

  Ayala polished off my martini and, while I was preparing another, told me what they had found out thanks to the skill and energy of the gut-ripper, as he called Burgos.

  Of the four dead women, three had appeared in the open air: one by the roadside, another in a field, and the third in an abandoned warehouse in the port area of Bahía Blanca. The only one found indoors was Lorena, and yet the police report said she had also been found by a highway.

  “Who put her in my room, and why? And why did they take her out again?”

  Ayala waited until I had passed him the martini before he went on.

  On the T.V. screen I could see the puffy face of a fifty-year-old man declaring that this was a country of swindlers. “They won’t let me withdraw more than 250 pesos a week. How can I live on that? Does the minister live on that?” he howled. Earlier, the minister, a bald man who had been president of the Central Bank during the dictatorship and had canceled the debts of the top businessmen who had paid for the massacres, the same bald fellow who the democratically elected president prior to the one now being pilloried had brought in as his savior, the same man who the current imbecile had called on to save his skin, had appeared on every T.V. channel insisting as cool as a cucumber that Argentina was not in crisis, that if the government was preventing people from withdrawing their money, it was so that they would use their credit cards: “In which other modern country do people still use cash rather than cards?” proclaimed old baldy, the jack-in-the-box for our dictatorships and lily-livered democracy.

  “Are we watching T.V. or talking about what happened?” Ayala scolded me.

  Burgos found that his everyday bread and butter was snatched from him before it could even reach his mouth. Lorena’s body was sent straight to La Plata to be examined by the federal forensic pathologist who had taken an interest in the case. But before this expert could even put on his rubber gloves and pick up his scalpel, the official autopsy report had been released to the national press. According to this report, the same maniac who had taken the lives of the other women was responsible for the death of Catalina Eloísa Bañados, in the circle of aspiring models known as Lorena.

  Infuriated by the cynical way in which public opinion was being manipulated, the La Plata pathologist had telephoned Burgos.

  “They were colleagues at university,” Ayala said. “Burgos doesn’t quite see eye-to-eye with him because he’s Jewish, but he’s not religious. He’s married to a Christian and hasn’t set foot in a synagogue since they clipped his foreskin.”

  Ecumenicism is a great thing, especially if it means that the half-converted Jew trusted Burgos sufficiently to confide in him that the weapon which had inflicted Lorena’s mortal wound was not the one used on the other three girls.

  “Very similar, but not the same. About a tenth of an inch thicker than the other stiletto. Besides, that one was a vulgar bit of steel. This one is a finely crafted dagger. Finely crafted from fine steel,” so Ayala reported the La Plata pathologist as saying.

  “A professional job.”

  “The man who killed the others is an amateur.”

  “But a killer nonetheless,” I said, holding up my martini glass and peering into it like a clairvoyant into a crystal ball.

  “That poor bl
ond was as dead as the others,” Ayala admitted.

  I stood up and paced around the living room. Now that the T.V. was off I could hear the doctor’s loud snores and incoherent swearing from Rodríguez.

  “He talks in his sleep,” Ayala said. “Sometimes he even gets up. Don’t be alarmed if he comes in at night and tries to hug you. He says his father pays him visits at dawn, which is odd because he never knew who his father was. He and his mother abandoned him on the front steps of Bahía Blanca hospital hours after he was born.”

  “I’m not interested in the reasons for your friend’s sleepwalking. Sooner or later, they’ll find the man who killed those other three girls. Even if it takes ten years, people like him always get caught. They don’t want to die without the world knowing who they are. Our problem is Lorena.”

  “She’s dead too.”

  There is not much point trying to discuss things with someone who is already half-drunk, but the other two were out for the count, so there was nothing else for it.

  “The fact that the body was moved, and the way the forensic report was suppressed, means that it was not that maniac, or any other one, who killed her. She was planted on me—first alive, then dead—because I was Cárcano’s friend.”