I must admit that rather than identifying with what was going on like a veteran, I felt more like a kid at the local cinema sucking chocolate peanuts and cheering on the Palefaces in their bitter struggle against the savage Red Indians.
“We’ve been laying the trap for days,” the officer told us like a tour guide. “Keeping a discreet eye on things. We were just waiting for the merchandise to arrive.”
The truck with the merchandise had arrived the previous evening. The routine worked as smoothly as a Swiss watch: two days later, after the cargo had been sorted, it would be handed out to local distributors and neighborhood leaders, closely watched by the police, as if it all belonged to them. Which it did, to a certain extent, although not exclusively. Taking part in the trade was the only way to try to control the army of outcasts the drug traffickers depended on to win and keep hold of their markets.
Wolf’s man was merely repeating his lines: the only reason the police were going in shooting was to reassure the public, to surprise middle-class public opinion with a frontal assault on the shanty towns they so hated. “At last something is being done,” opinion-formers in the media would bleat. “Respecting the rights and guarantees set out in our national constitution, unlike during dark periods now happily put behind us, last night a surprise operation was carried out against Villa El Polaco, the headquarters of antisocial gangs bringing terror to Buenos Aires.”
While the policeman was busy responding to his superiors’ commands on the radio, I told Wolf I could not care less about the motives for this farce, or what the results might be. Clamping his hand over my mouth, he growled that if I was sorry I had come I could get out there and then, but no way was I going to ruin his story for him now that he was out on the pitch with the game about to start.
As though performing aerial acrobatics, the helicopters converged on the same point in the sky. There was a loud bang, and the night sky suddenly became as bright as day. The assault vehicles fanned out: some of them screeched to a halt, while others roared round the edge of the shanty town, careering over the potholed roads and dirt tracks. Armed men wearing helmets and bullet-proof vests leapt out with their rifles and tear-gas launchers. A few seconds earlier, when the flare had lit up the central area that was meant to be deserted at that time of night anyway, motorcycle patrolmen had ridden down the narrow alleyways between the shacks, shouting: “Everybody inside! Those with honest jobs have nothing to fear, but we’ll blow the heads off anyone who comes out.”
When the action started, Wolf’s policeman told us to “cover your backs,” then jumped out of the car as the driver steered it into one of the entrances to the slum. Instead of getting out to back up his boss, the driver lit a cigarette and sat calmly smoking at the wheel, like a taxi driver waiting for his client.
I thanked Wolf because without his contacts I could never have got into the shanty town, then I too jumped out of the car, ignoring his shouts of “Where the fuck are you going, you idiot?” Inside the slum, bullets slammed into the walls and the dirt alleys like beetles on a hot summer’s evening. Women were screaming, and I could imagine them rushing to protect their kids in the shacks’ promiscuous bedrooms, praying to the Virgins of their home provinces to protect them, while their husbands flung themselves to the floor.
I ran bent double, my hands covering my head as though they were a steel helmet. I reached a corner that was no more than a gap between two rows of shacks, and flattened myself against a wall. I pulled out the .38 Ayala had lent me when he heard I was going in armed with nothing more than a notebook. “Don’t get yourself killed,” he had said. “If you do, the union of journalists will wash its hands of all responsibility. They’ll say you weren’t one of them, and the police will spit on your still-warm corpse when they learn you were thrown out of the National Shame.”
I checked the gun was loaded. I could not quite see why somebody who had slapped me around in the Bahía Blanca police station should be so keen to see me stay alive now. It was anyway too late to change my mind because the gunfire was tracing red and white lines to and fro in the darkness. The police must have been ordered to fire at will down the alleyways. There would be time enough to justify the police actions as self-defense by putting weapons in the hands of all those who died.
I saw a motorcyclist racing toward me. Before he could shoot, I held up my old police badge (a relic I keep for nostalgic reasons, and which I had polished that very afternoon). I made sure my hands were in the air, and pointed the .38 skywards. I gestured to him to cover me. He looked perplexed, but just managed to maneuver his bike around me, then pull up at the far side of the alley and leave the engine racing in neutral. I took this to mean he was going to cover my back, so I moved forward, staying close to the walls. I pushed my way into some shacks shouting “Federal Police.” The terrified occupants received me like actors in a well-rehearsed performance, entire families in a heap like puppies in a litter, as accustomed to this kind of police circus as they were to the everyday violence the drug traffickers and gang leaders subjected them to.
“You’re out of your mind if you thought you were going to find the girl in one of those stinking holes,” Ayala said later, when we met up to assess the meager results of the farce.
Of course, that was what I had been trying to do. Unsubtly, shouting, threatening anyone I thought might be hiding information, as well as anyone who dared to challenge me even though they were defenseless faced with this madman who burst in, kicking down balsa-wood doors and ripping down curtains intended to offer some privacy in these miserable hovels. I did the same for several streets, even after the motorcyclist without warning turned tail, leaving me to my fate. By now, though, the stream of bullets was steadily diminishing and coming from only one side. I was lit up by the helicopter searchlights, like a suburban Rambo left without any budget for his all-action heroics. At one point I found myself a split-second away from emptying my pistol into a doped-up teenager I ran into. He was cradling a 9 mm revolver he had apparently just stolen from a policeman I’m sure he shot for the pleasure of seeing him writhing in pain and bleeding to death.
I could have killed him. Nobody would have called me to account for it. Yet I could feel you looking at me: you were still too close, peering at me like a tropical fish swimming in artificially clear and warm waters, far from paradise, behind glass walls where I saw nothing and your eyes in the middle of nothing. “You’re a killing machine and you don’t realize it, Gotán,” you would have said if I had finished off this smooth-cheeked thug. It is all the same, he’s a crook, but he could be a worker, a left-wing café intellectual, a guerrillero or one of those youngsters studying to be a chef who still believe the world could be a little less of a cesspit. “Kill him and carry on dancing, you’re good at that,” I would have heard you say in some hidden corner of my head or in the empty wastes of my sleepless nights. “They’re lost causes, if I don’t kill them, they’ll kill us,” you’ll say when you’re out of earshot of others like you, boasting beneath your penitent’s mask.
I stuck my gun between his eyes and took the 9 mm from him. I would probably need it if I got out of the slum alive. I whispered to him like a paramedic to a dying crash victim that I would be back to deal with him when I had finished my search. My threat did not seem to worry him. He stared at me blankly, and hardly seemed to notice the barrel of the .38 pressed against his forehead. Then he closed his eyes and smiled, which made him look still younger, no more than a kid.
I lowered my gun and left the shack.
Outside, the gunfire had ceased. Loudspeakers from the helicopters were warning people to stay quietly indoors. “Your identities will be checked, and those of you who have nothing to hide have nothing to fear,” said someone who sounded like a radio presenter hired to make a special program on his night off.
I walked steadily back to the entrance to the shanty town, wearing my old police badge on my chest. Nobody tried to stop me, although occasionally a guard gave me a suspicious look.
Anyone with borrowed I.D. could have walked out of that make-believe raid. Nobody really wanted a gunfight: everybody was following their script, and I must have been the only nutcase who was improvising.
The next morning there were photographs in all the newspapers and extensive T.V. coverage of Operation Run Rabbit, as an imaginative interior ministry official christened it when he pushed in front of the police chiefs to be interviewed. Figures were given, the quantities of drugs and weapons seized, promises that a thorough investigation would be carried out into where it had all come from, those responsible would be caught. “This government has set itself the mission of rooting out organized crime, with the penal code in one hand, and with an absolute respect for the rights of the thousands of honest citizens who live in poor neighborhoods such as El Polaco.”
Wolf did his best to disguise his relief at seeing me emerge in one piece.
“That’s the first and last time I invite you along, Martelli,” he growled. “You’re nothing but a bastard policeman. They could easily be carrying you out on a stretcher with a blanket over your face.”
“Yes, but I’m walking out, and empty-handed,” I said, suddenly exhausted and wondering what I had been looking for, why I had gone out on a limb like that, whether I really thought I was Sylvester Stallone at a beginners’ audition. “If they knew the people they were looking for weren’t here, why didn’t they leave the others in peace to get on with things?”
“Nobody wants people in shanty towns to get on with things in peace,” Wolf said. “Your honest taxpayers want them to vanish, to have them disappear from the map. If they could agree on the political costs, they would build a Berlin Wall to protect the city of Buenos Aires from all these lumpen. Anyway, come with me, this is when the show really starts.”
Wolf dragged me back inside the shanty town. We walked straight ahead, following the path the police car had taken, and soon came out into the central square above which the helicopters had dropped their flares.
Smoke still hung over the open space, reeking of cordite. More than a hundred young men and women were squatting in the middle, leaning on each other for support. They were all silent, and hardly glanced at each other, still stunned by the attack and cowed by an equal number of police surrounding them.
There were fewer journalists, although it seemed there were more because they were scurrying all over the place, excited by the war scene they were covering live. Every single T.V. channel was there; photographers were shooting roll after roll of film, while the reporters waited for permission from the man in charge of the operation to ask their questions. As soon as they were given it over a loudhailer, they rushed to interview police and officials, but ignored the empty gazes of all those under arrest.
At the far end of the open space, far from the T.V. lights and flashbulbs, lay half a dozen corpses. All of them still brandishing weapons in death. Nobody would ever know whether any of them had actually resisted the police attack, or how many had been picked off to prove that this midnight raid had not been a mere stroll in the park.
The policeman who owed Wolf a favor came up and asked if he was alright. He deliberately turned his back on me, as if he knew what kind of journalist I really was. Wolf did his job, asking him for his assessment of Operation Run Rabbit.
“It seems they moved everything out just before we got here,” the policeman said. “We found only a couple of rifles in an informer’s house. The traffickers must have planted them there so we would shoot him.”
“Where is the informer now?” Wolf wanted to know.
The policeman pointed to the heap of bodies.
“All this is off the record,” he insisted, lowering his voice. “If you publish any of it, you can forget your friends in the force.”
The police had not found anything, but the T.V. cameras were filming hundreds of packets of marihuana and crack, several plastic bags full of a white substance, dozens of rifles, shotguns and automatic pistols, baseball bats, flick-knives and chains. It was like sale day at a department store, with all the merchandise laid out for the lenses of the local and foreign press.
All those arrested were ordered to stand up and file past the press. Frightened, stiff from having to crouch for half an hour, aching from all the blows they had received, they nevertheless got to their feet and formed a long line that snaked round the empty square.
“We have the whole of Mercosur here,” scoffed the policeman, whom Wolf identified as Inspector Quijano. “Chileans, Paraguayans, Bolivian Indians, Brazilians. Plus a couple of lost Ecuadoreans, and even three Venezuelans who arrived not long ago from Caracas with a mission to brainwash the poor and open a branch of President Chavez’s Socialist party in Argentina.”
Wolf was listening to Quijano like a priest hearing confession. Despite the warning, he had switched on his tiny recorder.
The Chavez supporters identified by the National Shame were three poor devils who had probably pitched up in Argentina hypnotized by the mirage of being able to buy one U.S. dollar for one Argentine peso. This chimera had attracted Latin American immigrants by the thousand: Argentina is closer than Europe, and it is a promised land, a crucible of races, destined to be great. Any South American outcast could save dollars here then go home and buy themselves a new car they could drive along their motorways instead of having to sleep underneath them.
Now the party in Argentina was coming to an end. As so often in the past, the batteries were running low, there was no way to go on blindly borrowing, and it was time to pay up or spend years washing the dishes. We already knew which of the two options it was likely to be, and who was going to have to roll their sleeves up. The middle classes were banging saucepans and shouting that they wanted their money from the banks. The poor were casting wistful glances back at the places they had left behind for the dream of making money in the big city. Only the crooks went on celebrating. In the boardrooms of the big companies busy repatriating their capital and speculating on an imminent devaluation of the Argentine peso, or in slums like El Polaco or Carlos Gardel, where they were preparing for the fiesta of riots and looting the political opposition had been planning for months.
This D-day landing in the Buenos Aires slums was one of the government’s last despairing attempts to show it had a strong grip on crime. No-one believed them. The journalists invited to the spectacle laughed in the faces of the police spokesmen, who as soon as the cameras and recorders had been switched off admitted that this was another sham. They said they were sick of being used to deliver a double message: they were supposed to get tough with criminals on the one hand; on the other, they were meant to treat all the lumpen like blood brothers, even if they would not think twice about murdering a policeman.
I was beginning to think I had wasted my time going on the picnic when I suddenly saw my Bahía Blanca friends among the swarm of journalists. Like all true provincials, they were drawn to lights, and the only ones still shining in the shanty town were those of the T.V. crews.
Burgos saw me and came over.
“I thought you were dead, Don Gotán, but I’m glad you’re not. I don’t like to have to rummage around in the bodies of people I’ve grown attached to.”
“It was all a waste of time,” I said by way of a greeting.
“Well, better to be out partying here than sleeping like sardines at your place,” he said. “But don’t give up yet, let’s take a look behind the scenes.”
We walked over to the place where those who had been killed in action were laid out. We did not need a forensic scalpel to see that none of them had died fighting off the police attack. The bodies had been rotting for hours.
“They finished them off a while ago, probably nowhere near here.”
I do not get any pleasure from firing point-blank at someone and seeing them crumple under the impact, peering sightlessly at me as they stare into the abyss. Burgos was not impressed by the sight of death either. But we could not help staring at each other, horrified at what we were wi
tnessing.
“They’re traveling corpses,” he said. “The logistics of this farce have become so sophisticated that if we had a military dictatorship now, throwing prisoners alive into the sea from planes would seem the work of amateurs.”
It was not only Lorena who had traveled after death. What Burgos told me, with all the calm authority of his profession, was that there were people who specialized in this kind of macabre transport. As police investigations usually ended at the graveside, few questions were asked about the specifics of this final journey, unless there was some reason to wonder why healthy, rich and happy young people had suddenly perished of a heart attack.
“But we’ve still got nothing,” I insisted. “I haven’t been threatened again, my friend’s daughter is still in limbo. Perhaps she’s become another traveling corpse.”
Burgos puffed out his cheeks. He seemed to hesitate, as if pondering the value of the information he had uncovered. He lit a cigarette and inhaled the smoke like someone waking up and going out in the early-morning mountain sunlight.
“I talked with my colleague in La Plata for a good while,” he said. “Apart from recalling the old days, and the good times that are harder to reconstruct in memory than the most complex crimes, he told me there was blood on the blond model’s body.”
“Naturally: she was murdered.”
“There’s no ‘naturally’ about it: the blood wasn’t hers.”
I said nothing and waited for him to elaborate.
“Don’t expect me to tell you whose it was,” he said. “I don’t have a portable laboratory with me, and however influential my friend may be, he can’t determine who it came from. He could only say it was a different blood group.”
No One Loves a Policeman Page 14