Our Cordero was not the only one involved in the business, Wolf went on after he had finished his sandwich. He was but a link in the network. All you had to do was click in the right place, and you could find a huge selection of arms for sale. Devotees of the free market, the arms dealers competed fiercely with each other, offering seasonal bargains and all kinds of novelties, including weapons not produced in Argentina but easily obtainable elsewhere. The merchandise was stored in containers broiling in the sun at the port of Buenos Aires while the customers sorted out payment.
Cordero must have got the thumbs down from God or the Devil when a surreal brigade of Argentine policemen arrested one of the customers from the border town of Ciudad del Este in possession of a recently arrived container. Instead of accepting their cut in the deal, they handcuffed the businessman and promptly dispatched him to appear in court in Argentina, not bothering with any diplomatic formalities. The Paraguayan consul in Iguazú called his Argentine counterpart in Ciudad del Este (for once not to arrange a date for a game of golf followed by a couple of joints in the residence of one or other of them) to protest at what he called “the violation of Paraguayan sovereignty by a gang of uniformed pirates from your country, which could cause an international incident of unforeseen consequences, dear fellow.”
The traffickers in these sensitive border regions employ informers to listen in on all judicial, police and diplomatic communications. They soon informed the frustrated purchasers what had happened. The would-be buyers were a newly formed Islamic group which genuinely or just for the sake of it claimed to be behind all the explosions that the sons of Allah inflicted on the enemies of the Koran throughout the world. Cordero’s name was noted and passed on to other even more shadowy figures. A week later, he came to the kind of end that Wolf was now telling me about, with a mixture of admiration and disgust, in a bar crammed with savers who had suddenly found their savings all seized by the government.
“They found Cordero in the same Bahía Blanca hotel you stayed in.”
This piece of news immediately brought Ayala to life. He pushed a sweaty office worker on his lunchbreak out of the way, drank the rest of Wolf’s Coca Cola, and asked him where the fuck he had heard that. Wolf did not blink or even look in his direction. “I never reveal my sources,” he said to me. Ayala put a hand round the back of Wolf’s neck, yanked him forward, and kneed him as hard as he could in the groin. Wolf collapsed against the counter, gasping for breath. It was his second such assault in a very few days.
If anyone near us noticed what had happened, they gave no sign of it. Wolf’s eyes rolled up and he went white as a sheet. I gestured to Ayala to let him go, then made sure Wolf did not fall to the floor. I offered him a glass of water, and a dry cough suggested he was managing to breathe again. A little color seeped back into his cheeks.
“If this bastard is a friend of yours, I’m out,” he said furiously.
“This is his first trip to Buenos Aires,” I whispered in his ear. “He doesn’t know how to behave in big cities.”
“When we left Bahía Blanca a day and a half ago, everything was quiet,” Ayala grumbled. “Now there’s yet another body. Normally years go by before we have any stiffs at all. And this when I’m away from my post.”
Wolf paid his bill and left without saying goodbye. I followed him, signaling to Ayala to stay where he was.
“You’re surrounding yourself with garbage again, Martelli,” Wolf shouted at me when I finally caught up with him. “I understand that once a policeman, always a policeman, but I’m a journalist and I’m collaborating with you because at the bottom of all this mess is a dead man who happened to be your friend.”
“And his daughter is still missing.”
Wolf stopped and looked round to see if Ayala was following us.
“He’s a bit rough and ready, but he’s an honest policeman,” I said, not entirely convinced.
Wolf set off again, pushing his way through the streams of people wandering aimlessly along the road as if there had been a mass escape from a lunatic asylum. No-one knew where they were heading, but they were too scared to stop and rest.
“They found the body of the man you saw with the blond model at the Imperio Hotel in Bahía Blanca. Strangely enough, in the room you had been in two nights earlier, Martelli.”
“He made a quick journey to Buenos Aires, then.”
“Quicker than if he had been alive. But what is strangest of all, and something tells me I should take advantage of being suspended from the paper to go on a long holiday and not get mixed up in this any further, is how he was killed and what state he was in.”
He came to a halt, and made me do the same. The people behind bumped into us, then went on their way without apologizing. They were all completely bound up in their visions of the imminent apocalypse, counting the coins they could take home to buy food and medicine.
Wolf had become my mirror. Looking at him, I saw my own face. My own testicles began to ache. I could see he was afraid, and felt the fear as my own.
“When they found him he was wearing women’s clothes. Miniskirt and a skimpy top. High heels, and made up as if he was going to a party.”
“Was he a queer?”
I was taken aback that I was asking such a stupid question, but Wolf seemed as much at a loss as me.
“Not that I know of. It’s a message, Martelli. They dressed him up as a whore either before or after killing him.”
“How did they kill him?”
“With a stiletto. Somebody stuck it under his left nipple and plunged it into his heart. The maid who found him fainted on the spot. In less than half an hour, the transvestite corpse was loaded into an unmarked ambulance, a van with tinted windows that set off at full gallop for Buenos Aires, flying through police controls without even slowing down, as if it had a critically ill patient on board. But there is no record of the body being listed in any morgue. It was taken straight to Villa El Polaco, and by the time it was laid out there he was dressed as a man again.”
“So the criminals we’re up against are conjurers,” I said, with grudging admiration.
“I’m not up against anyone, Martelli. This is as far as I go. I’m off on holiday. I don’t have a single peso in any Argentine bank. I’ve managed to get it all out of the country. It’s not a lot, but it will guarantee me a couple of carefree months in a neighboring country. I’ll be back once the mushroom cloud has receded. There’s bound to be a devaluation, so I’ll be a rich man in a country where everyone’s been fleeced.”
He shook hands, but before I could say goodbye properly, he was swallowed up by the anxious crowd. I did not have the chance to tell him to be careful, although I knew that his usual plan of escape was to take the boat across to Carmelo in Uruguay, then travel overland to Canelones, where a rancher’s widow who raised Aberdeen Angus cattle would be waiting for him. They had been seeing each other once a month for at least fifteen years. The widow had children in France and Germany who did not like the idea of their rich mother seeing a gold-digging pen-pusher, so the two always met in secret, far from prying eyes and gossip.
It was a long time before I saw Parrondo again. His byline vanished from La Tarde. Whenever I rang I was coldly informed he had quit his job. For two years, the only response from his bachelor apartment was from his answering machine, which parroted the same old message: “Take to the rafts, the ship is sinking.”
3
You would think that someone who switches their sexual orientation after death and who has been a public functionary, if not a minister or secretary of state, must be newsworthy. Yet nobody had recorded Cordero’s death. I searched through the crime pages in the papers, trawled the internet: nothing. Cordero had never existed and, given the circumstances, was not likely to now. If I had not seen him in that Bahía Blanca restaurant and recognized his face among the “criminals” laid out in Villa El Polaco, I might have doubted his existence myself.
The death sentence on Edmundo that Isabel h
ad referred to must have come from Cordero’s office or somewhere else where he did overtime as a fixer in the illegal arms trade. Lorena or whatever her name was must have been his secretary and lover, positions which often overlap to such an extent it is hard to tell when the secretary stops admiring and starts fondling, or whether the secretarial candidate’s vital statistics were more important than her professional abilities.
I wondered if Edmundo had betrayed his masters as Mónica had suggested, or had discovered something that made him a target. If the order to kill him had come from Cordero, who then had decided that he, as well as his secretary, had also to be removed from the board?
I had to admit that this bloody game of chess was being played with some skill. The fact that no traces of semen were found in Lorena’s body, and that Cordero had been dispatched while dressed as a woman meant there were sensitive souls involved in this sinister affair, people who loved opera or the decorative arts, defenders of the conservative order, by all means, but willing to see social conventions evolve a little, provided this presented no threat to power. A kind of moral compromise, allowing things to change so that nothing would change. The eldest son of an aristocratic family, like the unfortunate Cordero, for example, could make an unnatural sexual choice and be supported by his relatives at social gatherings, but woe betide the perverted queer if he imagined he could claim his share of the inheritance. In that case he would very soon turn up in a ditch with a stake up his ass.
According to Wolf, Cordero’s death had been a message. The mafias operating at every level of society love messages. The bourgeoisie, members of that supreme mafia consecrated by capitalism and protected either by robust arguments or blood and thunder, demand that the artists it buys should offer a message in their works. They have to be positive even when they are portraying hell. There has to be a chink of light suggesting that good will triumph in the end, that evil will be forced back into the darkness and those who threaten the right to property will burn at the stake.
That wild morning, when Buenos Aires was a volcano of unbridled corruption and millions of petits bourgeois looked on helplessly as infamy erupted on all sides, I felt afraid. Not for the future of society, which I don’t believe in, and whose famous stock of values was as volatile as the central bank reserves. No, I was afraid that if I came out of all this alive, I would have to face some unpleasant revelations. Until that moment I had firmly believed that my departure from the police force had been based on a sense of disgust, on my rejection of any kind of complicity with the Argentine dictatorship’s barbaric genocide. The system’s steamroller could not find any values left to crush out of me. Being a policeman embalmed my spirit—if such a thing exists, and if it is not an illusion to argue that man is anything more than his body.
There is no difference between shooting a criminal who killed an old woman to steal her pension and murdering a school teacher just in case he had left-wing notions. Death does not make ethical distinctions. It claws at everyone in the same way. It is a tiger living inside us, just waiting for the chance to escape and fulfill its destiny. Some people give it the opportunity only once in their life, in a moment of passion, a fit of anger, or for economic gain. Others choose to become policemen. Patrolling the streets of a city like Buenos Aires is to live side by side with the tiger, to let it loose in return for getting paid, to think the beast was really someone else when it mauled and then watched the dying groans impassively, refusing the hand held out for us at the last. To be a policeman is to shut your eyes, stuff your hands in your pockets, and let people die.
That warm night in December 2001 the roly-poly doctor looked pleased with himself.
The president had just announced a state of emergency. That evening, supermarkets and stores had been looted in Buenos Aires suburbs. On T.V. you could see the looters parading triumphantly while local store owners wandered disconsolately amongst overturned counters, scattered food, smashed electrical appliances. The police had done nothing because there was no way they were going to open fire on the people: they were their heroic defenders against every kind of abuse.
“It was so nice in there. It brought back so many memories,” Burgos said, almost in a trance. “While they floated in their tanks filled with formaldehyde, the dead bodies seemed to be listening to us recalling the olden days. ‘Thanks to my profession, I’ve traveled all over the world,’ said my former colleague, who is now a university professor and a member of the academy of medicine. ‘I met and socialized with top-notch people in the most refined environments. I was treated like royalty, and even honored for my contributions to pathological anatomy by countries like France and the United Kingdom. Luxury hotels, receptions, expensive women who offered themselves to me simply to share my prestige. But I don’t enjoy any of that as much as I do being here, surrounded by my corpses and now with you, my dear colleague. I thought you were lost forever in those southern wastes.’ We ate lunch in there too,” said Burgos. “Not much of a meal though, because the professor is vegetarian.”
“I hope you didn’t share with him your taste for rustled meat.”
“You’re right, I would have been embarrassed, although when it comes to meat I don’t think a man of principle like Miralles approves of eating it at all, however it is raised. A cow is still a cow, and it doesn’t really matter if it has a stamp on it from some vet or other—besides, vets are a long way further down the ladder of our profession than forensic experts.”
Even though their trip down memory lane had taken up most of lunch, the two of them had spent a few minutes talking about the topic which had in fact brought them together again: the misadventures of an ordinary serial killer who suddenly finds he has other people’s crimes laid at his door.
“I wouldn’t like to be in that poor man’s shoes,” Burgos said Miralles had told him. “To pick your victims like he does takes a long time. You have to study all the possibilities, and avoid leaving any traces, because forensic medicine has made great strides in recent years. To be made responsible for somebody else’s handiwork must be really tough.”
“It’s a typical trick of those in power, professor,” Burgos told Miralles. “It’s like a fugitive crossing a river to throw a pursuing pack of hounds off the scent. Before and during the last dictatorship, the paramilitaries claimed their outrages had been perpetrated by left-wing guerrillas. Ordinary people do not discriminate; they condemn without a second thought. Evil is always lurking somewhere.”
“But if we’re governed by the Devil, who put him there?”
Miralles was not as convinced as the La Plata pathologist or Burgos that the lack of semen in Lorena’s body was significant. If she had not been killed at the hotel, her body could have been thoroughly cleaned before it was taken there. In fact, the time of death did not coincide with when the body was found in my hotel room, although the crime had occurred not more than twelve hours earlier. Miralles did not rule out the possibility that the killer might have been a woman, although he said we should not be carried away by anything we discovered. We should proceed with scientific caution, use trial and error, and above all, be patient.
This professor who had been so acclaimed in Europe and who only found peace among his dead bodies could not know and did not have to worry that while he and his colleague exiled in Bahía Blanca chatted about the good old days, when the worst pain they felt were the pangs of love, a young woman had been abducted and might already be dead.
“Be patient? That’s impossible,” I grumbled.
Inspector Ayala was busy preparing his weak mate. Rodríguez had called to say we should count him out. The police museum attendant had turned out to be a tarantula disguised as a dragonfly. She was sucking him dry, but “I feel so good,” he told his superior. To top all this, she had suggested he leave the police down in the southern deserts and transfer to the capital. She said she had good contacts in personnel, who would sign him up as a corporal with a salary twice as high as the pittance he earned in Bahía Blanca.
“But to do that, he would have to live with her in Buenos Aires,” Ayala complained.
“Nothing comes for free,” Burgos said.
“Perhaps, but Rodríguez hasn’t got the faintest idea of what it means to live with a policewoman.”
Ayala told us he knew what he was talking about. All his pay went on satisfying the whims of his wife’s femininity, which was distorted from the day she chose to join the police. The sexuality of a woman who gets her kicks beating men over the head with a baton is not dealt with in any of the manuals. Who are they arresting when they handcuff a crook? Their father, who always betrayed them with their mother? Their older brother, who dominated them? The man they live with, who beats them?
“The police and psychoanalysis make strange bedfellows,” I said, remembering how authoritarian governments had persecuted analysts, and how the mental health services in public hospitals had been decimated when the military napalmed the already sparse forests of analytical thinking in Argentina.
But perhaps the police museum attendant was the perfect partner for a brutish lout like Rodríguez, and the federal police force the ideal place for his petty perversions to go unnoticed in the anonymity of the rosters. Ayala was hurt: he felt betrayed, but he had only himself to blame: he was the one who had brought Rodríguez to Buenos Aires in the first place. His guard-dog loyalty had not even lasted two days. Ayala would have to return to Bahía Blanca alone, empty-handed. He had no proper leads to help catch the serial killer, and no suspects.
No One Loves a Policeman Page 16