No One Loves a Policeman

by Guillermo Orsi

  “What happened to the cargo? Whose legal jurisdiction was it? Where was the news published?” I wanted to know.

  “At 9:30 Route 8 was cleared, and the lorry headed the procession onwards. The lorry driver was able to deliver his furniture to the exhibition on time.”

  “And the weapons?” I asked.

  “That same night, the prosecutor had a telephone call telling him to be very careful about what he made of his discovery. The next morning, after writing a letter to the investigating magistrate saying he was at his wits’ end with depression, Gorostiza hanged himself. The magistrate sent his condolences to the prosecutor’s young widow, and after that silence reigned. If family and friends said anything, none of it came out. The fact that a prosecutor in Pergamino had decided to hang himself was not considered newsworthy by the national papers.”

  Of course it was not news. Who cares?

  A year earlier, a young T.V. presenter had vaulted without a pole from his apartment balcony. Four floors down, then a splatter of blood on the pavement, which the cameras of his own T.V. channel carefully recorded and showed for days afterward. The kid, who was barely thirty years old, was a coke addict. “He hallucinated,” according to a friend. “He wanted to be free.” His photograph, the face of the beautiful and damned, appeared in all the newspapers. Psychologists, priests, even political analysts came out with all kinds of theories and went on and on about how decadent a society must be to throw its most promising youngsters out of windows.

  The lorry took its varied cargo to each of its destinations. A week later, when Gorostiza’s wife wanted to lay a bunch of flowers on his grave, she could not find the cross marking it. Some anonymous avenger had removed it, some recalcitrant Catholic who had decided to take divine justice into their own hands and punish a suicide.

  9

  Don Quixote, Sancho Panza and the doctor decided to go out and sample Buenos Aires nightlife. They could not persuade me to join them. I am no good as a tour guide: I know next to nothing about Buenos Aires’ nocturnal geography and I am too old to buy affection. I wished them luck and as soon as they had left I turned off the light and went to bed.

  At 2:30 in the morning the phone rang.

  “Don’t tell me you were asleep.”

  “I still am. At this very moment I’m dreaming that a ‘p.p.’ is telephoning me.”

  Wolf did not ask what a “p.p.” was and I did not give him time to find out for himself.

  “A stupid pen-pusher,” I said, but without malice. “What are you doing waking people up at this time of night?”

  “I was returning your call, Martelli. The country’s in flames, and you’re snoring.”

  I got out of bed and looked out of the window.

  “Where’s the fire?”

  “Tomorrow a whole neighborhood is going to go up.”

  I sat on the bed and fumbled for the bedside light. Yet again I had broken my sacred rule of not answering the telephone after midnight, and yet again I was in trouble.

  Thanks to the contacts in the police whose palms Wolf had greased and to legions of informers who lived in among the dust of the legal cases sleeping the eternal sleep of Argentine justice, he had discovered that in less than twenty-four hours, federal and provincial police would be sharing a picnic, presumably by moonlight, in Villa El Polaco, in Haedo.

  “Bingo!” I shouted, suddenly wide awake as though somebody had thrown a bucket of cold water over me.

  “Don’t tell me you play the lottery.”

  “Life is chance, Parrondo. A series of coincidences, manipulated by remote control in the hands of a madman.”

  “Does that mean you’re coming or not?”

  “Where?”

  “I already told you. To the picnic. I’ve got room for you in a patrol car with a uniform who owes me a favor.”

  “Count me in. What shall I bring?”

  “A notebook. But whatever you do, don’t bring a weapon. You won’t be a policeman or a toilet salesman. Tomorrow night you’ll have your first assignment as a journalist.”

  The provincial dummies slept until noon. Félix Jesús preferred not to return to the invaded apartment, but sat out on the rooftop opposite until the sun forced him to seek shelter under the sink in the laundry.

  The first of the three to appear—with a hangover—was Burgos.

  “I dreamed about the living dead,” he said, sipping the weak mate I reluctantly shared with him. “They cornered me at the end of a street and wanted revenge for my autopsy reports. ‘I was stabbed to death and you wrote that I died of a heart attack,’ said one cadaver who must have been at least two meters tall, with a forty-day-old beard on a face eaten away by formaldehyde. ‘A train cut me to shreds and you wrote I died of cirrhosis,’ said what remained of another one, a man as fat as me with huge green bags under his empty eye sockets.”

  “They’re only nightmares,” I said, shocked all the same by his story.

  Burgos dismissed my uninformed comment.

  “It’s normal. The dead use the half-open doors of our subconscious to make their complaints. But nobody listens to them. I’ve had to live with this kind of thing ever since I chose forensic medicine.”

  All of a sudden I did not feel like sharing the mate with him. I put some fresh leaves in the gourd and told him to carry on drinking on his own. At that moment, Ayala and his assistant surfaced and wanted to join in.

  I took advantage of the fact that the team was all together again to tell them my news. Ayala was sure it was no coincidence.

  “They’re going to put on a show. The next day it’ll be all over the front pages. It’s a chance for your journalist friend to make amends with his bosses.”

  Burgos said Ayala was probably right, but that I should not turn down the invitation.

  “I didn’t. I said I would go. What about you three?”

  “We’ll follow the caravan,” Burgos said. “I’m not going to stay in and go to bed. Buenos Aires by night isn’t so bad.”

  “Tourists generally make for San Telmo.”

  “But we’re not Japanese tourists. I know Haedo. I was assistant to a famous abortionist in Ramos Mejía, and when I was young I worked for two years as a volunteer in the Santiago Cuneo hospital.”

  “This man is one big surprise,” Rodríguez said proudly, as if the roly-poly doctor were his invention.

  “Going into one of those shanty towns is like doing an autopsy of the city,” Burgos said. “All its guts are on display in front of you: the foulest but also occasionally what is most sublime about our society.”

  “You mean you’ve met the Virgin in a shanty town?” Ayala laughed at him.

  “The Virgin and all the saints live there,” Burgos said solemnly. “Not that I’ve ever seen them. I don’t believe in that kind of meeting on earth, even though the churches get rich promising them. I’m not religious. Poking around in intestines spilled by a knife, or hearts sliced in two by bullets means the only possible communion is with horror.”

  He drank the rest of his mate, then handed the gourd back to Rodríguez, who, being the junior, had been given the job of handing round the drink.

  Burgos said that if things had not changed since his day, the hospital was a no-man’s-land.

  “The thugs used to come in shot to pieces. They either came out as good as new or they died, but no records were ever kept. At night you could hear shooting all round the hospital, sometimes even in the grounds themselves, where there was also a scrapyard. On the pediatric ward they had to replace the wooden shutters with lead ones after a bullet ricocheted off the ceiling and nearly killed a three-year-old boy. One day the oxygen cylinders were stolen. The next they were sold back to the hospital at half price. How could they refuse a bargain?”

  “The hospital is right next to Villa Carlos Gardel,” Burgos went on. “Villa El Polaco must be one of those blisters that appear on the surface of the city, a place for gangs to hide out in when they’re at war with another gang. That’s
why there are all those weapons involved; something big is cooking. And Inspector Ayala is right: if the police force is venturing there, it’s because the script has already been written.”

  We sat in stunned silence. The only sound was the slurping of the mate as we passed the gourd from one to the other.

  Wolf had discovered that the New Man Foundation had set itself up in Villa El Polaco. Sometime before Edmundo’s death, they had built a health clinic and a ward for abandoned children under the age of six. They had also been building a chapel, but that work had been suspended when an undercover T.V. crew filmed the priest having sex with the boys he was catechising.

  I wondered if Edmundo had ever been to the shanty town to see how the money provided by C.P.F.’s godfathers was being spent. I doubted it. At the end of the ’80s, by which time he was solidly ensconced in the oil company, my friend brought the curtain down on his social conscience. He never went so far as to say that the shanty towns were full of the dregs of society, of those who preferred to live on benefits and theft rather than do any work. I knew he had signed petitions of solidarity with the poor who had hitched a ride on President Menem’s panjandrum and were dragged along alive until they lost every last shred of dignity. But I knew he was disillusioned, and sick of it all.

  “You’re a policeman,” he would say to me. “You don’t have any great dilemma, because the police are there to protect bourgeois property. But I used to believe in something different, in a new order. ‘The people are never wrong,’ Perón used to claim. And look what happened: the people elected his executioners and have carried on doing so ever since. If the British had not yomped all over us in the Falklands, Admiral Massera would have been president now. And I even suspect things might have been better that way. Many more dead, but better.”

  Edmundo was probably right. Instead of boycotting or corrupting politicians, the money men who propped up Massera and the rest of the dictatorship would have been enthusiastic supporters of a democracy in jackboots, marching in double file like Pinochet’s victorious armies in Chile. But Edmundo’s killers did not give him time to reconcile himself with his conscience.

  10

  Burgos planned to go and see the colleague who had whispered the real information about Lorena over the telephone. While they were at it, they could reminisce about university days at La Plata, girlfriends they had shared or fought over like dogs, ideas that had put them at loggerheads and realities that had re-united them in the fragile truce with our regrets that characterizes life for anyone over fifty.

  Ayala and Rodríguez said they were going to visit “a museum,” without admitting they did not mean the Art Gallery but the police museum in Central Headquarters. This consisted of gruesome weapons and bits of murder victims once famous for some reason or other but long since forgotten by the tabloid press.

  They had agreed a rendezvous with Burgos later on so that all three of them could climb into the sky-blue V.W. and wait somewhere near the Lugano police station, the starting point for the punitive expedition to Villa El Polaco due to kick off at midnight.

  I spent the afternoon and evening writing to you, struggling to order my thoughts and pin them to the page like dead butterflies. You would probably read my letter with apprehension rather than nostalgia. Nothing is the way I said it was; everything is in such chaos in this windowless, doorless room where I keep my memories of you.

  Nobody, least of all you, will bother to follow these tracks to see where they started out from, who it was that tiptoed through the life of the woman he loved the most, to glean some idea of how he could possibly be the same man who kicked down doors, smashed furniture, and held his gun to the head of the people whose homes he had burst into.

  “The violence is the same,” you said when I tried to explain in order to keep you with me. “There’s no difference between blowing a crook’s brains out or a student of sociology’s. You’re a killing machine and you don’t realize it.”

  How could I accept what you said without losing you? How could I spill my heart out without you feeling so disgusted that you shut your eyes, turned on your heel, and left?

  I spent the whole evening trying to find a way to explain what a mess I had made of my life, to convince you that we do not live in Disneyland, that Donald Duck went quack quack quack when you were a little girl, but you never understood a thing, that there is no such thing as a society where the police spend the entire day helping old ladies and blind people across the road.

  You were never going to read all that nonsense, Mireya. It was nothing more than a way of filling the evening, just like going to see an old friend from university to talk about the clandestine struggle against fake autopsy reports or sordid prostitute murders. Or going to the police museum to get kicks out of the smell of formaldehyde that bits of bodies were floating in. Nightmares that become routine for forensic doctors or policemen who have done more than direct the traffic or give directions.

  Vain dreams; moments when every horizon looks black and every breath leaves you gasping for air. I tore up all the sheets of paper I had struggled with for hours.

  At 9:30 I met Wolf in a bar on Avenida del Trabajo and Tellier. The whole neighborhood stank of abattoirs. Nothing unusual in that: if the roly-poly doctor had been around he would have been as emotional as a country boy in the city when the smell on the breeze took him back to his childhood down on the farm.

  “Did you bring your reporter’s notebook?”

  “If a diary where I write all my heartaches will do instead, here it is.”

  I showed him a blank book, missing the pages I had thrown away.

  “If anybody asks, you work on the paper with me. I do the crime reporting, you cover the social side of things.”

  “What happens if there’s shooting? Where do I hide?”

  “Don’t play the fool with me, Martelli. If you’ve brought a weapon, you can stay here.”

  I undid my jacket and lifted my arms. Wolf shrugged as if to say “come off it” and looked away. There were just the two of us in the bar, apart from the waiter watching the football on T.V. The street outside was deserted.

  “This isn’t the Normandy landings,” Wolf said eventually, leaning across the table toward me. “This kind of operation is planned in advance. It doesn’t come from some headstrong magistrate—the police have taken their precautions. They have informers all over the shanty town. They would never move in otherwise.”

  “What are you trying to tell me, Parrondo? I’m a toilet salesman, remember.”

  “Times have changed. Fundamentalism is for the Arabs. In Argentina nowadays everything is up for grabs.”

  We walked three blocks to the local police station. Nobody stopped us at the entrance. Wolf introduced me to the officer who owed him a favor. As he had promised, there were spaces for each of us in a patrol car that had the insignia, searchlight, and sirens to prove it was working on behalf of us all. I felt a tug of nostalgia, although Wolf was right that times had changed. The car was nothing like the ones I had known so well: the dashboard was as full of instruments as a jet plane. A keyboard and a small screen made the interior look yet more futuristic. Over the radio I could hear the control-room voice above those of police patrolling the streets. The city was calm, apart from some insignificant demonstrations in Palermo and Belgrano. “Middle-class assholes protesting that they can’t get at their money,” said one of the cops. “They’re more hysterical than a bunch of transvestites.”

  “This is going to be a walk in the park,” said the man Wolf had latched on to. “But just in case, don’t take any risks, and don’t run off to the first layabout who calls you over to complain about police brutality. You might get taken hostage, and if anything happens to you, I’m the one who’ll get it in the neck. Understood?”

  Yes. If Ayala’s suspicions proved correct, we would not be the only real or fake journalists taking part in the raid. The government was trying to convince public opinion that it was fighting crime without m
assacring anyone, showing respect for thugs and criminals as though they were tender young schoolgirls—even though the greater part of that public opinion (family heads, practicing Catholics, orthodox Jews, rich businessmen or mediocre public- or private-sector employees) were in fact calling for tougher measures: “That’s enough taking people into custody and allowing them their rights, they need to be shown what’s what,” these people said. “Tear out their fingernails, grab them by the balls. I’m against the death penalty, but I don’t mind seeing them get blown away,” they said, say, will always say every time they face the prospect of being mugged in a dark alleyway, hear a noise at midnight in the charming houses they are sweating blood to pay for, or feel a drug addict’s knife pressed against their neck.

  The police caravan—eight patrol cars, three armored vehicles and at least a dozen motorcyclists—set off with no lights on across the city. We barely paused crossing Avenida General Paz and met up with the provincial police also participating in the raid. There were at least three times as many of them, and they made no attempt to conceal who they were or where they were going.

  They took the lead, roaring down General Paz with sirens blaring, forcing the few vehicles on the highway at that time of night onto the curb. We roared down Rivadavia at the same speed, slowing only slightly to avoid any of the vehicles tipping over and providing the press and the T.V. with headlines about an embarrassing police pile-up.

  When we reached Haedo the signs announcing QUIET—HOSPITAL seemed to excite everyone still further. We were in enemy territory now, there was no going back and getting home for a good night’s sleep.

  Out of nothing, or rather out of the fog caused by smoke drifting over from the rubbish tips in Villa Soldatti, three helicopters joined the party. I could feel a sense of patriotic duty stirring within. When I left the police force, I swore to myself I would never again allow this demon to possess me, the strange excitement you feel when you know you are about to wreak violence on the weak and defenseless, those who are different from you, those who in the name of ideology or religion spit on the hand that feeds them, reject their masters, want absurdly to be free.