No One Loves a Policeman

by Guillermo Orsi

  “And who was Cárcano? A two-bit employee who stuck his hand into the petty cash so he could show his bit of fluff a good time.”

  I poured more martini into Ayala’s glass. He knocked it back like medicine. His eyes glazed over, and he called to Félix Jesús. He even tried to stroke him, but the cat sneaked behind the curtains that shaded the room from the harsh midday sun.

  “Cats are bad luck anyway,” Ayala muttered. Then he leaned back on the sofa, and he too fell fast asleep.

  I wondered what I would find when I returned if I left the three of them sleeping off their journey and their excesses. But I could not hang about for them to come to life. I had to go out and check on a few things.

  I scribbled a note saying that I would be back soon, then left without locking the front door, hoping that no robber would dream of burgling an apartment where two policeman and a forensic expert were sleeping like dormice.

  The city looked marvelous. It positively glowed in the sunlight. The streets were full and all the stores were packed with people buying T.V.s, fridges, even cars, as if they had just popped out to buy a packet of biscuits at the corner shop. The ones with cash were buying dollars or high-priced items. Nobody knew when the fire alarm would go off, but they were not waiting to hear the sound of sirens before they began rushing for the exits.

  I called Wolf from a public telephone, but all I got was his answer machine: “Take to the rafts, the ship is sinking.” Then there was a peep … and a silence where I could record a message.

  I hung up, annoyed, then called Mónica. She was one of the few people in Buenos Aires who had not rushed out to buy dollars. Just for a change, she started sobbing over the phone.

  “I’m sorry I spoke to you like that last night. I know you’re the only one who can help me, but I’m very confused. My whole life has been turned upside down, Gotán.”

  There was the familiar sound of her trying to choke back her tears, then the request:

  “Come round now. I’ve got something to tell you.”

  7

  My taxi dropped me off forty minutes later outside the apartment block where Mónica lived. We could have got there in ten had we not run into striking workers who had cut off the avenue and forced us, with much blaring of horns and swearing, into a long detour. The urban pressure cooker was building up steam. It was only a matter of days, or maybe hours, before everything hit the ceiling.

  I told Mónica I could not stay long, because my place had been taken over by a bizarre trio from the Bahía Blanca police.

  “I’ve no idea what’s brought them here. Must be a sense of pride. No policeman likes having somebody else’s problem dumped on them.”

  “What kind of problem?” Mónica said distractedly.

  “Dead bodies.”

  Her next comment took me by surprise.

  “Including Edmundo’s.”

  Mónica did not keep cats. What she did have was a pair of canaries. Crazed by being shut in their tiny cage, they sang at all hours of the day and night. Isabel called them “my political prisoners” because they had been locked away without a trial. She would have liked to set them free, but her mother insisted they brought moments of joy to her sad existence.

  She stared at them as she talked, perhaps to avoid having to look at the way my face fell as she made her confession.

  “Edmundo was not what he seemed,” she began.

  “I’m beginning to discover that.”

  She took such a deep breath it was as if she were about to dive underwater.

  “Nor am I, and nor is Isabel. Nobody is who they seem, Gotán.”

  “Bingo! Why do you think I like the tango so much?”

  “Don’t hate us for what I’m about to tell you.”

  The problem with confessions is that they always come at the wrong time. A president tells us how his life in office was made impossible. But he does this when he has been ousted and is powerless to prevent people being fooled by the next democratically elected fraud. If only he had come clean the day after his inauguration, with the applause and shouts of “Long live the president!” still ringing in his ears, then the people could for once have taken justice into their own hands and rampaged through the main square to string up all those white-gloved crooks who shamelessly passed the milch cow of the state from one to the next. But of course he did nothing of the sort. He kept his mouth shut, because he liked hearing the applause (who doesn’t?) and because he dreamed of getting his hands on the udders too.

  If Mónica had spoken out earlier, then Edmundo would still perhaps have been alive. Poorer, but alive.

  “I never believed the stories about him getting promotion and bonuses,” she said. “What bonuses, if he was not selling anything, or involved in any of their so-called strategic plans? Besides, the oil is there underground. You extract it, refine it, and use it to prop up the whole economy. By selling it abroad.”

  “I know a bit about economics and politics. That’s why I prefer to read thrillers.”

  “Edmundo was never a team player. ‘One of these days I’m going to screw them,’ he used to say. ‘And I’m not going to let them screw me. Then you and I can go on a world tour, starting with Italy. I owe you that.’”

  “And the ‘New Man Foundation’ gave him that opportunity.”

  “How do you know that?”

  I told her.

  “Journalists. Always digging dirt. Just like the police. The dirty work is not so much gathering all the stuff, but deciding what to do with it. ‘This one should be locked up, that one should stay out because he’s up to his neck in it and could be useful as an informer, that other one is no use to us, throw him off a bridge and make it look like an accident.’”

  “You make it sound disgusting.”

  “That’s why I sell bathrooms and am on my own. I have a daughter in Australia, two grandchildren I don’t know, even from photographs. The bedroom I was keeping for her has been invaded by a bunch of deadbeats. There’s not much room left for disgust, Mónica. Tell me more—I don’t know everything.”

  I’m not crying for you, Mireya. Nor for anyone else: I hate pity, and self-pity is even worse. It is like stabbing yourself in the stomach to impress other people by spilling your guts rather than really trying to kill yourself. And it’s nothing short of a scandal for a sixty-year-old who has had the power of life and death over the defenseless. I was even given a medal for shooting a teenager who had stabbed his own grandmother and cut up his younger brother with a broken beer bottle.

  The kid ran out of a shack in the Villa Diamante shanty town, hands high in the air. “Don’t shoot,” he shouted, “I’m innocent.” He was too young even to shave, and was crying like my daughter when she failed her first exam or when she broke up with her childhood sweetheart.

  I knocked him to the ground with a blow from my gun-butt and charged inside the shack. After I saw the bodies, I spun round like a turnstile and cut him in two with a burst of fire. My police partner came over, picked up a kitchen knife, and forced it into his hand. There was an official inquiry. The prosecutor accused me of using excessive force, my defense lawyer argued it had been self-defense, and my companion said he did not see exactly what had happened, that by the time he had run over from the patrol car the kid was already dead. I was on the T.V. news and in all the papers. Next to that of the smooth-cheeked victim, my portrait looked like Frankenstein’s monster after its third operation. “Another itchy trigger-finger: How long must this go on?” screamed the tabloids.

  No, I’m not crying for you, Mireya. You didn’t even take the trouble to find out what had happened in my life. For you it was enough to learn that before I sold toilets I had killed people. “What kind of justice are you talking about?” you asked, the first and last time we talked about it. “I’m sure if you were a policeman during the dictatorship you must have been a torturer. You ought to have died, Gotán. You’re dead to me.”

  I ought to have explained. If only explaining were as ea
sy as raising a weapon and firing when rage rises in your throat as though the soul were leaving a dead body through the mouth. I’m not crying for you, I never have done, but I did not put up a fight either.

  You did like me calling you Mireya though. “It sounds kitsch,” you would say, “but in your arms I’m swept away by the music, the lights, the show you’re putting on, Gotán. Take me away from here, anywhere out of this world.”

  Who would ask a shipwrecked sailor to quit his island, his palm tree, his coconut? The ocean is dark, deep, and cold. From out on the waves you shouted “Murderer!” You never called “Goodbye.”

  Mónica’s version was not all that different from Wolf’s. A few details, a million pesos here, a million there; the number of people involved, some of them well known, others the anonymous worker bees of corruption. Edmundo came somewhere between the two. He was busy on the telephone at his office in C.P.F. headquarters. Occasionally he went to a meeting either at a posh restaurant in Puerto Madero or a few blocks closer to the port, among the dark rows of containers.

  Mónica found out when the institutional relations manager’s earnings could no longer be concealed, at least from his wife, because they had joint accounts. “Although he also opened one in the islands,” she said, meaning the Cayman Islands, one of the many safe havens for the savings of the good, the bad and the ugly in the parallel economy.

  Edmundo did not trust his bosses, either as employers or as partners in this siphoning-off of funds. “They drop you in it at the first opportunity,” he would say to Mónica whenever the situation depressed him, whenever he realized what a huge betrayal of business ethics he was caught up in. “They’re always cutting each other’s throats, they pursue the person they want to get rid of until he has a heart attack and dies. Then they send the biggest wreath to the funeral, give his wife medals, and even grant her a pension. It’s spare cash to them.” And if there was no heart attack? “Plan B,” Edmundo told Mónica, predicting his own fate.

  While Edmundo was diverting the small change from these shady deals into his joint account, the honest gentlemen of New Man turned a blind eye to everything. Just about everyone was getting their hands dirty. And if they formed a brotherhood of traitors, they could hardly expect some sucker with a halo and wings to come down and offer them redemption like Jesus at the Last Supper.

  But the account Edmundo opened in the name of Catalina Eloísa Bañados was the last straw for the organizers of the fraud. A tribunal of dinosaurs in old-fashioned waistcoats and gold watch chains gave him the thumbs down. Lorena was right to get in my car and tell me to take her as far away as I could from Mediomundo; she was hoping that by losing herself in the depths of Patagonia she would have time to think. But she did not even have time for a pee in the service station before they caught up with us.

  “Your bladder saved your skin,” Mónica said. “They can be cautious when they need to, but they’re not afraid of spilling blood if their business looks as though it will suffer.”

  “They would have forgotten all about me if they hadn’t seen me with Isabel in that Bahía Blanca restaurant. Worse still, instead of keeping my head down I tried to tackle the guy who came in looking so full of himself with Lorena.”

  Poor Lorena had already been their hostage. I had been intoxicated with her scent the one time I had embraced her, but Edmundo had staked everything on her. Their joint account was opened, and the money deposited. They told her that if she signed, she could go free. But they killed her anyway, after screwing her.

  “They were waiting for you that night at the Imperio Hotel,” Mónica said. “The receptionist told me. He’s a parrot trained to talk if offered money, Argentine pesos or dollars. ‘A couple came and asked for Señor Martelli,’ he told me. ‘A portly gentleman and a very pretty young woman.’ If you had returned from your nighttime adventure a little sooner, you wouldn’t be here now.”

  “I was in a police cell. A provincial inspector slapped me around. I was rescued by a forensic doctor who eats steaks from cattle butchered out in the countryside by the light of the moon. They’re juicier and cheaper that way, he says.”

  While he was waiting, the portly gentleman screwed Lorena, and instead of the conventional cigarette and glass of whisky afterward, he stuck a stiletto under her breast. The finest steel, though.

  “Did nobody see him leave?” I asked Mónica.

  Apparently from that moment the parrot had stopped squawking.

  I could imagine the police’s hurried discussions, nervous phone calls, a mobile phone ringing in the overcoat of the man in charge. Instructions to the maids to leave everything clean and tidy once the girl’s dead body had been carried out on a stretcher. Nothing ever happened here. The mobile rang again, and the man in the overcoat said “Yes, sir” half a dozen times or more, then went to talk to the hotel manager and reminded him that if any of this got out to the press, he would personally be checking the hotel’s fire safety status that very afternoon.

  “But why did they kidnap Isabel?”

  Distraught, Mónica looked at me and shook her head as though trying to rid herself of the images of her daughter’s abduction. She could still hear her cries: “They dragged her away from me,” she said, struggling to staunch the tears welling up yet again in her eyes, and to stop shuddering at the memory of the terror so that she could tell me clearly:

  “I have no idea, Gotán. No-one has contacted me. I thought they would demand a ransom, or some information they thought I must have, but I swear I don’t know anything more. All I have is a dreadful feeling about this.”

  I gave her a hug. I was becoming an expert in comforting women, although all I could offer were empty words and gestures, a little bodily warmth.

  I asked Mónica to move out of her apartment. I promised to talk to a friend of hers who lived on her own not far away.

  “Make sure you go,” I told her. “You’re in danger here.”

  You need to stay out of it as long as you can, I told myself as I left her. You cannot always be on the front line, exposed to the crossfire of those scrabbling for power in this country full of people resigned to their destiny, the sheep who flock to electronic or established churches, the believers in paradises that have been brought crashing down by capitalism’s hypnotic charms.

  The only paradises left in Buenos Aires are those you find in its streets. Trees that President Sarmiento had brought over from Japan in the nineteenth century. Proletarian sparrows sing in their branches, sharing airspace with pigeons used to being fed in the public squares. They nest up in the cornices of the tall buildings where they are born, eat, shit on people, and die. The zoology at ground level is not much more diverse: dogs, cats and rats fight over streets and wasteland, although it is the rats that come out way ahead in the basements of the grandiose mansions in the smart neighborhoods and in supermarket storerooms.

  Then there are the murderers. People trained to kill if hired to do so, crack shots who no longer bother to blacken their faces or wear balaclavas, but are clean-shaven and wear cologne bought in Paris. But not even the documentaries on the Discovery Channel or Animal Planet show them at work.

  We feel sad when a lion tears a deer to pieces. That is the law of the jungle. It is a natural law. The one we are governed by was invented by us. And there is no rational or aesthetic explanation for terror.

  8

  It is so nice to come home and find your family all waiting for you.

  Even before I opened the door, the smell of spices and fried food reminded me that I rarely cook, but usually eat in canteens, and then survive by taking antacids to put out the flames of heartburn. I went straight in without knocking and headed for the kitchen. Burgos was there, putting the final touches to a lentil stew. He was wearing an apron he had found in a wardrobe, probably belonging to one of the women who very occasionally invade my solitude.

  As befitted those of their persuasion, the two policemen were doing nothing useful. Rodríguez was sprawled on the sof
a watching T.V. Ayala was going through my sparse library, apprehensively examining novels and a few philosophical treatises bought by my ex-wife in her student days, which I sometimes browse when I am fed up with T.V., although I invariably come to the conclusion that I am impervious to anyone else’s thoughts.

  We ate in the kitchen, enveloped in the smell of garlic and watched over by Félix Jesús, who was observing the spectacle from the blue cushion on top of the washing-machine that served as his bachelor bed.

  “Let’s talk business while we eat,” Burgos said. “Heaven knows what we might run into, and it’s always best to meet destiny with a full stomach.”

  “The Last Supper,” Rodríguez said, with a rumbling laugh that had the same effect on us as a reheated meatball.

  Yet we did not really get round to talking about what was worrying us until we had finished eating. Instead we talked football. Ayala told us he would have liked to become a professional footballer rather than a policeman, but had never got beyond the youth team of a Bahía Blanca club playing in the provincial championships. Even in those tournaments, he said, the results were fixed. The skillful players were offered a few dollars so they would all of a sudden become paralyzed when it looked as though they were about to score, leaving the team that had been backed to come out on top to win the game.

  “If anyone did not accept the rules, they made sure his leg was broken in the next game,” Ayala said. “While the referee was attending to the bunion on his left foot.”

  Ayala gulped down a glass of table wine that he had filled to the brim, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and said:

  “That’s why I joined the police. If there are bones to be broken, I prefer them not to be mine.”

  Burgos had encountered something similar in his profession. When he was a student he discovered that the top doctors used the public hospital as a shop-window for their talents. They would appear as experts on T.V. and then the next day parade along the corridors and operating theaters like national heroes. The transfer of patients and even hospital supplies to their private consulting rooms and clinics, not to mention the use of public facilities for experiments the medical council would never have approved of, was common currency in the anthropomorphic trade where they earned their fortunes.