No One Loves a Policeman

by Guillermo Orsi

  I confess I did not feel sorry for him.

  So often the solution is staring us in the face, but we just cannot see it. Or it is itching at our backside and we scratch and scratch but cannot ease the itch.

  That same morning Mónica received a letter registered in Madrid. It was the bank statement for an account in her name. She was positive she had never opened an account in Spain “or anywhere else, Gotán. I’ve never been one to put money in banks, it was always Edmundo who took care of that.” According to the statement, she had $250,000 to her name. The money had been deposited on the day of Edmundo’s murder.

  “It’s a sick joke,” she said when I went to see her at her friend’s apartment.

  “More than that, it’s a way of buying your silence.”

  “By someone who thinks I won’t say anything because Edmundo was unfaithful to me, who thinks I’m secretly glad he’s dead.”

  The account had been opened by a complete stranger, probably with fake documents, although he must have had all of Mónica’s personal details, her social security and national insurance numbers.

  “Only the state has access to all that information,” I said, staring time and again at the statement and the letter of welcome from the Spanish bank.

  Whoever it was had not bothered to go to Switzerland, the Cayman Islands, or Panama. They wanted the account to be legal and above board, something Mónica would have to justify if she withdrew the money and wanted to transfer it to Buenos Aires. The people making the deposit must have known that in Argentina the banks gobble up their client’s money. The idea must have been for Mónica to go and get it herself at the cashier’s window in Madrid.

  “Help me, Gotán. I don’t know what to do or where to begin. The money is like the gravedigger’s first spadeful of earth on my back. They want to bury me alive, but why choose such a perverse way to do it? They could have killed me when they kidnapped Isabel …”

  Mónica’s voice failed as she remembered the moment when they pulled her daughter out of the car and dragged her away. She was crying desperately, begging her mother to save her.

  “If they didn’t kill you, that means they want you alive. Whoever it is, they want you on their side. A quarter of a million dollars waiting for you back in the home country. Not bad for a resentful widow.”

  “I’m not resentful, Gotán. I loved Edmundo a great deal. I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to understand what happened between us.”

  The evening was airless. In the apartment of her friend, who had left us alone together as soon as she had shown me in, and in the rest of the city too.

  Through the open windows we could hear the distant rumble of people beating on pots and pans, lamp posts, anything that would make a noise. They were singing and chanting, unable to sleep because they were so angry and so hot, all making for Plaza de Mayo as they always do when Argentina falls apart.

  I told Mónica to trust me. Nobody in their right mind could find any reason to trust an ex-policeman, but they were the words Mónica wanted to hear. She was safe where she was. Her friend took care of everything, even going to meetings to bring news of the electronic church they both belonged to, news of cures and miracles: paralyzed people who rose from their wheelchairs or cast aside their crutches and started to walk, blind men and women who suddenly saw the light, deaf mutes who became talkative thanks to the power of prayer.

  And the biggest, most unbelievable miracle of all: loves that come back.

  4

  It is no coincidence that in a country on the verge of imploding, some individual cases follow the same logic. Fragmentation is a threat to any power that boasts it is eternal. In the midst of any shipwreck there is someone on the bridge watching the spectacle in comfort with his life jacket on.

  Lorena’s death must have upset the serial killer in Bahía Blanca so much it was understandable he might want to withdraw, to distance himself and look for a new patch that would not unscrupulously be taken over by any mafia organization. It is one thing to commit a crime for personal reasons; crime for profit is quite different. And it is just as awkward to be famous and even celebrated for something you did not do as it is to be accused of something you were not responsible for. Like any artist, a serial killer has no wish to steal anyone else’s thunder, and does not seek easy applause. It is not a passing fame he is after, but to become a classic, so that he can escape the cruelest revenge, that of vanishing into oblivion.

  The fourth call after midnight made me realize that something was changing in my life. A week earlier, I would not have answered the telephone. Félix Jesús would have looked at me pityingly while it was ringing, then set off on his nighttime tour even more convinced that whereas a lack of curiosity can save a cat, it condemns humans to lonely, sleepless nights.

  “Martelli … ?”

  The woman’s voice sounded wary and hesitant. I did not reply.

  “As I understand it, you live on your own,” she said, after a pause of at least ten seconds. “Unless your cat also answers the phone.”

  This made me sit up. Until now, Félix Jesús had been left out of this.

  “Who is that?”

  “You don’t know me. And I don’t know you either.”

  Again, I said nothing, resisting the temptation to ask how she knew I had a cat. It might just have been a guess—anybody can have a cat. Or rather, not anybody. And my cat is not any cat.

  “I was given your number by a journalist,” she said, sounding less tense. “Parrondo, from La Tarde. He’s the one I send my announcements to.”

  I coughed awkwardly.

  “You’ve got it wrong. You or Parrondo. I don’t write reviews.”

  “You’re not a journalist, you’re a policeman,” she said, growing irritated.

  I took a deep breath. I was about to tell her I was no longer a policeman, but I had no idea who I was talking to. I preferred to listen.

  “Don’t expect him to turn himself in.”

  She waited for me to make some kind of comment. But far from being put off by my silence, it seemed to provide her with the oxygen I was lacking.

  “He’s going to stop,” she said. “For two or three months, whatever it takes. He doesn’t want to be blamed for murders he didn’t commit. They tried to frame him for a girl and a transvestite who worked for the government. They’re unscrupulous fraudsters, like those people who make photocopies of hundred-dollar bills.”

  I was beginning to understand, though I could not quite believe a woman would speak on his behalf. When I said as much, she grew even more annoyed.

  “You say you understand, but you don’t understand a thing. You think that just because you’re a policeman, you know about human nature.”

  “I suppose you’re protecting him because you love him,” I ventured.

  “Of course, he’s the love of my life. There at least you’re right. He’s my man, my partner. Even if he does have that failing.”

  “It’s quite a failing though, isn’t it?”

  “What about those in power? They’ve had lots of people killed, haven’t they? Didn’t they have wives, children, grandchildren? Or shouldn’t a criminal have feelings, or need a home, a family to protect him?”

  “Do you have children?” I said. I thought she would hang up. Instead, I was surprised to hear her say tenderly:

  “Two, a boy of eight and a girl aged six.”

  She went on replying to my questions as if she were answering a survey. Yes, they went to school, a private one, because you know what state schools are like these days, and besides, they let anyone in, whereas in this school the atmosphere is excellent. No, we don’t have any money worries, he earns well. No, I’m not going to tell you where he works, do you think I’m a complete nincompoop?

  “Parrondo told me he’s leaving the paper.”

  “Thanks for telling me, I had no idea,” I admitted. “What can I do for you two?”

  “Tell people. I send my announcements, but nobody prints them. P
arrondo said you had influential friends.”

  She would have hung up if I had contradicted her.

  “There’s something strange going on here, Martelli, something really serious. He doesn’t want to get mixed up in it.”

  “Is he going to stop killing?”

  “For a while at least. He needs to kill, but he’s promised me he’ll be careful. I’m forever reminding him he has a family to think of.”

  “Aren’t you afraid?”

  “He wouldn’t harm a hair on my head, poor thing. To him, the family is sacred. The kids and I, we’re the apples of his eye.”

  Ayala was not convinced, preferring to put my midnight telephone call down to a need to make him look a fool. It took him a long while to accept what my call tracer told me, but eventually he agreed to go with me to what turned out to be a flea-ridden boarding house out in Liniers. According to the grouchy landlord, a married couple with two children had been staying there until a few hours earlier.

  “They stayed in all day, arguing at the tops of their voices. The kids were crying, and my other tenants complained. But they had paid a fortnight in advance, which nobody does round here, least of all the scumbags who were protesting. In the end they stopped fighting, the woman made a telephone call, and they left as suddenly as they had arrived. I wanted to give them back their money, but they refused. They didn’t bring any luggage.”

  In the register, the family head and presumed woman-butcher had written: Sebastián Gómez, profession—administrative assistant, home address—Bahía Blanca.

  “That could be false information,” the landlord said, “I don’t ask anyone for their documents, just the money up front. But they seemed decent enough—they made a lot of noise, but seemed decent.”

  Like the doctor they drove a V.W., but theirs was a normal color, white. Apart from crying when their parents were arguing, the two children had not said a word the whole time they were there. The landlord’s description fitted at least half a million people in Argentina: the man was of average height, skinny, and bald. His only distinguishing feature was that he had no body hair at all, “Not even on his arms—he was as hairless as a chihuahua,” the landlord said.

  Based on this description, the killer did not seem the kind of man to seduce women by his appearance. Instead, I had a chilling image of the shock his victims must have got when they discovered his smooth, slippery snake’s skin. Yet somehow he persuaded them to go to bed with him; there were no marks of violence before he drove the stiletto into them.

  Ayala left the boarding house shaking his head. His belief that he was on the trail of a mythomaniac was faltering. Even though it was so early, he called Bahía Blanca and told the officer on duty to send out patrols: “Try to intercept him on the road,” he said. “He’s traveling with his family, although he’d have to be really dumb to head back south.”

  The lines on Ayala’s face showed his disappointment that the case would be resolved by the murderer yielding to family pressure and calling a halt. If he stopped killing of his own accord, what did Ayala stand to gain as a policeman? He had not even been the one who had taken the call.

  “Nobody need know the details,” I said, generously. “All I’m interested in is finding my friend’s daughter alive.”

  But Inspector Ayala was not someone who rewarded altruistic gestures. He said he planned to return to Bahía Blanca at first light, with or without his assistant, and by bus if Burgos wanted to stay on in Buenos Aires.

  But that long, hot Buenos Aires night had one more surprise in store for me.

  Burgos had gone out with his professor friend and what he described as “two little orphan girls.” He said the girls had been longing for a night in the care of two old fogies with plenty of money. Just as there are volunteers in hospitals to give emotional support to patients who have no relatives, so there are brotherhoods of gentlemen willing to take care of young girls anxious to enjoy the checkbooks of their aged, addle-brained sugar daddies. The professor belonged to one of these brotherhoods—as Burgos later explained—and indulged in this vice because he needed to compensate for his close contact with bodies preserved in formaldehyde by enjoying firm flesh and smooth skin. Burgos himself thought it might be a good way to seek refuge from the bedlam on the city streets.

  What he did not foresee was that he would spend most of the night in a crowded common cell in a Santos Lugares police station, where ten dirty old men caught in acts of sodomy or pedophilia had been taken after a police raid. All the details were being typed out by a clerk who barely raised his eyes from the prehistoric typewriter to inform us that the prisoners would stay where they were until the magistrate assigned to the case had taken all their statements.

  After we had hung about for two hours, and in recognition of the fact that Ayala was a serving policeman, the inspector who had just come on duty carrying a box of pastries under his arm gave us permission to see Burgos.

  “I should have stayed in Bahía Blanca,” the doctor wailed as soon as he saw us.

  He was slumped in a corner of the cell in which the ten geriatric cases struggled for air, while at least a dozen flustered young virgins crowded together like puppies on a row of teats.

  “Ayala was going to leave this morning, with or without you,” I said.

  “Like rats abandoning a sinking ship,” Burgos grunted, avoiding the inspector’s dull glare.

  “Where’s the professor?” Ayala wanted to know.

  “They took him straight home. They herded the rest of us into their van like cattle, but they found him a taxi. All he had to do was promise to call the magistrate, who is a friend of his.”

  While the country was collapsing around our ears, and the roly-poly doctor was licking his wounds in the crammed Santos Lugares jail, the magistrate who was supposed to be taking their statements was too busy on much more important business to come to Santos Lugares. It was the inspector himself who told me this, as he offered me his last croissant and a few sips of sugary mate.

  “An officer has gone to try to persuade the pain-in-the-ass neighbor to withdraw his complaint. I don’t want this garbage in here all day. Who’s going to feed them? The courts? And anyway, the complaint is about noise, not about prostitution or the white slave trade … A thank you wouldn’t go amiss …”

  His last words referred to the way I grimaced as I handed him back the mate gourd. “Thank you,” I said through clenched teeth. “Who’s the magistrate in charge of the case?”

  He looked at me, uncertain whether to tell me.

  “That’s confidential, part of the proceedings, blah, blah, blah … But I’ve heard you were thrown out of the National Shame, so I’ll tell you. His name is Patricio Quesada.”

  I jotted the name and telephone number on the corner of a newspaper, then tore it off. The front page was filled with photographs of the previous evening’s demonstration in Plaza de Mayo.

  “In any case, as soon as my man gets back and confirms the neighbor has withdrawn his complaint, I’m letting the lot of them go. I want them out of here by midday. I’ve got no funds, and I’m not sending any of my men out to beg food for this bunch of old perverts and underage whores.”

  I decided to keep the magistrate’s details anyway. Call it instinct or a hunch, faith in the capricious ways of fate, or the sense of smell of a battered old hound who despite wind and rain picks up the sulfurous odor of his own urine and finds his way home intact.

  The officer came back soon afterward, and by 8:00 in the morning all those rounded up in the raid were thrown out on to the pavement. Ayala and I waited for Burgos, who finally appeared, eyes lowered. He hailed a taxi, and we set off with him in search of his sky-blue V.W., which he had parked outside the brothel.

  “There is a God,” Burgos said triumphantly as he clambered behind the wheel of his exotic vehicle. “That magistrate friend of the professor is one of the people who ordered the raid on Villa El Polaco. He told me as we were being carted off. That should give you som
ething to chew on, Martelli. Allah is great, but Buenos Aires is greater still: it’s a huge bucket full of crooks and traffickers. That’s why they needed three magistrates from different jurisdictions to authorize the police to go in shooting.”

  “And what did they find?” Ayala wanted to know. “I had to go to the Santiago Cuneo on a hospital visit with that horny brute Rodríguez to uncover the weapons.”

  Ayala was in a bad mood again, and with reason. Rodríguez had been devoured by a policewoman who was turned on by the pickled organs in the police museum. The case he had been pursuing in a city he hated was slipping through his fingers, and nobody seemed to give a damn about a cache of weapons stockpiled in a teaching hospital.

  “Do as you see fit, Martelli,” Burgos said. “There is a God. It’s up to you whether you believe in him or not. I’m heading back down south.”

  “Me too,” Ayala said.

  “There’s nothing more I can do here,” the doctor concluded. All he had done, in fact, in Buenos Aires was to talk to two other medical experts, probably as roly-poly as himself, and spend his nights in bars or brothels. And still he was complaining.

  Not long afterward, once they had taken a shower and bundled up the few clothes they had brought with them, Inspector Ayala and Dr. Burgos left for Bahía Blanca. They gave me a final message for Rodríguez.

  “If he calls or turns up here, tell him either to come back home and place himself under arrest, or to clear out of Argentina altogether. If I get my hands on him, he’s done for,” Ayala said, genuinely distressed at his subordinate’s desertion.

  With that, we said goodbye. I needed to be alone. I might not have learned much from the three Patagonian musketeers, but even though we had been stumbling around like three blind men in a minefield the experience had alerted my antennae. I could feel a chill breeze blowing from somewhere, even though in those torrid summer days all Argentina seemed to be gasping for breath, and one or two ancient cadavers were beginning to stink.