No One Loves a Policeman

by Guillermo Orsi

  “Don’t worry, I’m not going to move,” the magistrate said. I was not so much scared as resigned to the fact that I was going to die riddled with bullets. For a policeman, dying at the hands of sharpshooters is the same as receiving absolution in extremis for a Christian.

  Quesada raised his voice to remind the goons threatening us that he was a federal magistrate.

  “I order you to put your weapons down,” he said firmly but serenely.

  The group broke ranks and surrounded the man with the megaphone. They may have been used to obeying outlandish orders, but even they balked at opening fire in a hospital reception area. Besides, Patricio Quesada was a well-known figure: he was often on T.V. making statements about drug trafficking cases, illegal arms sales, the white slave trade, child prostitution—all the usual.

  They hesitated so long it was obvious that the man with the megaphone was awaiting instructions. By now a wall of patients, visitors and curious onlookers had surrounded us, as well as several smartly dressed medical salesmen, their briefcases stuffed with samples. The new arrivals asked those already there what was going on, and the old timers who had seen everything from the start told them what they thought they knew. “It’s a kidnapping,” I heard one of them say, “that guy over there was trying to abduct a judge, but he didn’t realize the hospital was full of police.” Another one, not two paces away from me, spat out defiantly: “All kidnappers deserve to be killed. Why don’t they just shoot him?” A third onlooker asked why there were so many police in the hospital anyway. “Because the government’s about to fall, and they’re scared of anarchy. All the doctors are being mobilized for when there’s a massacre,” explained the one who had already condemned me to death.

  At that point the goons must have received their instructions. Without so much as a word of warning the man with the megaphone ordered them to back off. A couple of uniformed policemen went over to break up the crowd. “Move along now, please,” they said impatiently, and to us: “You two go home.”

  “I can’t believe it!” I said. “First they want to kill us, now they tell us to go home.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” the magistrate said. “But stay close to me.”

  He knew what he talking about, because as we edged toward the exit I could see the man with the megaphone drawing his hand across his throat to make it plain what he intended to do if he ever caught up with me again. My intervention had spoiled a game that someone had designed and developed on a computer screen. This time it was the magistrate who squeezed my arm to make sure I kept moving. We reached the broad pavement in front of the hospital and dived into a blue limousine with tinted windows. “Poor Martínez,” the replacement chauffeur said immediately, referring to his colleague. “What bastards they are.” The magistrate nodded in agreement and added, “What a disaster, those sons of bitches will stop at nothing. What a disaster!”

  6

  Five minutes later, when the car plunged down the ramp into the basement of the Central Law Courts, it became obvious that Patricio Quesada was not someone who liked to file cases away or take his time questioning defendants and witnesses. As soon as the car came to a halt, two federal policemen ordered me to get out with my hands behind my head.

  “Take his gun, handcuff him and bring him to my office,” ordered the magistrate. Only a few seconds earlier he had been asking me how I was feeling.

  “Don’t worry,” the chauffeur said to reassure me. “These two are real policemen.”

  Closer in spirit to communism than is generally admitted, “savage capitalism” in the Third World means that there are at least half a dozen lawyers for every bourgeois, whereas ten thousand workers or the same number of unemployed people have to make do with a single under-qualified legal representative. From each according to his need, to each according to his ability to pay: Marx and Lenin would not have believed their eyes if they had lived in today’s Argentina.

  Handcuffed and stripped of my revolver, I was led in by one of the uniformed policemen, who saluted all the clerks we passed. Two assistants welcomed me into Quesada’s chambers. They also offered me coffee, which I could not accept as my hands were still handcuffed behind my back. One of them typed my personal details with two fingers on a Remington, then I was shown a bench and told to wait while the magistrate prepared to see me.

  Although I often find it hard to fall asleep in my own bed at home, in this uncomfortable position I soon drifted off, only jerking awake when my head nodded forward and I found myself staring around me like a newborn babe. It was only just beginning to dawn on me that the person I had forced to abandon his sham internment in the Fernández hospital could easily arrest me for depriving him of his liberty. My predicament was made even worse by the fact that he was God almighty in this legal world.

  I have no idea how long I had to wait, but when finally I went into the magistrate’s chambers I felt refreshed. The uniformed officer had taken my handcuffs off.

  “I had to open a case against you,” Quesada apologized, smiling in a way that added the finishing touch to my astonishment. “Technically, you tried to abduct me, and that is a punishable offense.”

  He gestured for me to sit down in front of an imposing desk piled high with files.

  “In fact, you saved my life,” he admitted with a sigh. “If, as I believe, your intentions were different to those of the people who put me in the hospital in the first place.”

  If I demurred in any way, I could almost hear the cell door opening, then slamming shut and the key being thrown away for good.

  I explained how I had reached him, the complicated system of perceptions and intuitions that functioned like pulleys operating in a vacuum, usually bringing me nothing, but just occasionally surprising me with an unexpected load.

  “Your friend was lucky,” the magistrate said, meaning the roly-poly doctor who had been caught with his hands on the flesh of young temptresses. “I’m going to make sure those squalid geriatrics end their days with their bones whitening in the coldest jail in Patagonia.”

  I did not like to remind him that the medical professor had avoided being taken in by mentioning his name. It is always best to say nothing when magistrates, priests or generals are carried away by fits of puritanical zeal. At any rate, the “grandparents” and their sham “grandchildren” were now not his first concern. The accident he had narrowly survived meant he had either to face his adversaries head-on or to forget them altogether.

  He started shifting files on his desk, taking some from the bottom of a pile and putting them on top, then doing the reverse. I soon got the message that he did not think this an appropriate place for us to talk, even if it was his office—or perhaps precisely because of that. He motioned to me to get up and follow him.

  We went out through a side door, avoiding the reception area, then walked down the service stairs. Five minutes later, still without having exchanged a word, we were seated at the counter of the noisiest bar in the area.

  “Magistrates’ offices in Argentina are one big ear,” Quesada said, more relaxed now, even though he had to struggle to make himself heard above the hubbub. Most of those making it were lawyers demanding justice not for their clients but for themselves. They too had been caught out by the government’s restrictions on withdrawing money. “Everything that’s said is picked up by the intelligence services. Or by blabbermouth journalists with their hidden cameras.”

  “I’m not a journalist,” I said. “And I’m no blabbermouth.”

  “Before I say any more I should check why you were thrown out of the police force, but there’s no time,” Quesada said.

  I too was wondering why he put his trust in an ex-policeman who had forced him out of a hospital ward at gunpoint with no more explanation than that he needed to talk. The magistrate told me that he was being held prisoner by factions in the armed forces and the police who roamed freely through the streets of Buenos Aires but felt no loyalty toward what he termed “their natural commanders.”


  “Your audacity or your lack of awareness opened the cage door for me, Martelli. I’m no pet bird, and I don’t like tiny, enclosed worlds.”

  The order to get rid of him, if possible without any show of violence, had come from on high. Believers know that beyond God there is nothing. Atheists are sure that beyond nothing there is still nothing, yet we Argentines will never know who exactly sits on top of the pile, even though the managers of the system boast of their omnipotence.

  Quesada had been friendly with one of the magistrates who were quick to pass on the investigation into the explosion at the Rio Tercero military factory. There, one quiet and baking-hot summer morning in the province of Córdoba, an arms factory had gone up in flames. The results were nightmarish scenes that Hollywood special effects experts would have loved to use for their Rambo films. The debris bombarded the defenseless inhabitants of Rio Tercero like a biblical plague. The fact that it was a small city with wide streets and avenues was the only reason hundreds did not die, but such a shocking, brutal event left wounds that the apparent impunity of those responsible did nothing to heal.

  The president of the day proclaimed to the four corners of the earth that the Rio Tercero incident had been an accident. As with Quesada’s car losing a wheel, anything is possible. But suspicion and the endless investigations that followed, delayed at every stage by changes of jurisdiction and legal challenges as varied as the ammunition flying out of the arms factory that scorching November morning, eventually led to the exposure of a sordid deal. Argentina, a country, as one nineteenth-century hero once put it, “whose flag has never been draped on the triumphal chariot of any victor,” was, in the dying days of the twentieth century, being used as an aircraft carrier to deliver supplies of arms to countries engaged in racial or fratricidal wars. This, despite the fact that all the world’s bureaucracies had made solemn declarations supposedly banning them from purchasing such weapons.

  Clink, into the till. Grab the money and run.

  The rich world meanwhile applauded the economic and political miracle brought about by the most corrupt government on earth. It came to power promising to do the exact opposite of what it did, and was financed by drug traffickers—none of which was of the slightest concern to the world’s policemen. In less than a decade, that model government transformed Argentina into a vast bargain basement, with people and goods sold on the cheap.

  Quesada’s friend had not lasted long in the investigation. A couple of telephone calls and an accident similar to the one Quesada escaped from were enough to quench his professional curiosity.

  But a month ago, a visit to his personal doctor had rekindled the flame. He went with a pain in his chest, but came back with a heart attack, said Quesada. The cardiologist who looks after him works in the Santiago Cuneo hospital.

  In addition to warning him not to smoke or overdo it in the bedroom, as he was writing out a prescription the doctor told him that the Santiago Cuneo, once a model teaching hospital where many eminent doctors had trained, had now been turned into an arms dump.

  What the doctor told his patient corresponded exactly with what Don Quixote and Sancho Panza had discovered in their wanderings through a building that was no more than the shell of a hospital. While dozens of police were busy raiding the shanty towns that backed on to the hospital like parasite fish on a shark, enough weaponry was being stored in the newly built wards of the Santiago Cuneo for a second invasion of Afghanistan.

  Unable to credit what his friend had told him, Quesada had decided to visit the hospital as just another patient. He took a number and then, like thousands of others who had been there since dawn, joined the jostling queues waiting to be seen by a doctor. Once hidden among this herd of people, it had been easy enough for him to slip away, supposedly in search of a toilet but in fact heading for the new buildings.

  When he heard a command to halt, Quesada was reminded that to be an administrator of justice in Argentina is nothing more than a floral tribute. Every judicial ruling or verdict is a poem: sometimes it can be beautiful, at others nothing more than a string of clichés. But it is always something recited, and never carried out. The brute who blocked his path said his face looked familiar from T.V. He was searched for any hidden microphone or recorder, then told to go back the way he had come. “Go and get yourself seen to in a private clinic, only the poor come here,” the guardian of the temple advised him.

  Quesada had retraced his steps, but before the day was out he began a judicial investigation that had government officials awake well before dawn the following day.

  The noise in the bar had become so deafening I had to cup my right ear toward Quesada’s mouth to hear what he was saying. On that broiling afternoon of December 20, 2001, everyone wanted to be heard, but nobody wanted to listen.

  “Many eminent politicians and businessmen are involved in this, Martelli. And military men too, of course, but they’re the ones who have the most doubts.”

  “What do you mean by ‘this?’”

  “The president is resigning—he’s on his way out out. He won’t make it to the end of December, not even his wife listens to him any more. But these people fear that if the henhouse is opened and the cock has gone, then the steppenwolves will come down, eat the hens and steal all the eggs.”

  “But who are these wolves? Speak more clearly—and louder too, I can’t hear you for all the row in this place.”

  “They have already deposited their money abroad and left more than half the people in poverty. Like the Santiago Cuneo, which looks like a hospital from the outside, Argentina looks like a country when in fact it’s nothing more than a breaker’s yard, Martelli.”

  “Yesterday people started raiding supermarkets,” I said, struggling to make sense of all this. Quesada had the advantage of knowing the secrets of this huge labyrinth better than the minotaur.

  “It didn’t start yesterday, Martelli. The presidential palace, the parliament, and that decadent, empty palace over there,” he swept round to indicate the Law Courts, “they’re nothing but stage sets rigged with microphones.”

  “I understand,” I said, lying. “The problem isn’t the fact that this government will fall halfway through its term, it’s who will take its place and announce for the nth time the arrival of a New Argentina.”

  “The steppenwolves,” Quesada said again, his face as anguished as an addict with no fix. “They’re already in the henhouse gobbling up the hens.”

  7

  Just as there is no scent in dried flowers, just as butterflies no longer flutter when pinned in an album, there is no sadness in memories. Words sometimes capture facts or faces, the faint trace of a smile; they hold emotions we once thought of as everlasting as if in a bowl. But time ends up cracking the bowl, and in the absence of fresh words or faced with our inability to express them, all absolutes perish.

  Your words, Mireya. Written on headed paper from a hotel in the south of Patagonia. “Don’t let’s ever leave,” you wrote. You were afraid we had reached the end and that only the calm down there could save us. It was a perfect spot: a small lake, like a mirror flashing among the trees, a freezing windowpane from where we could spy on the harsh world outside.

  Perhaps you already knew, and that is why you wrote those words. Bowls containing the poison that could put an end to despair, as we sat by the fire in the huge hearth of Los Machis Hotel. Words not to be repeated out loud, but dreamed of in a whisper. If we did not say them it would not happen.

  But it did happen. And from that moment on we had no need of words to show our feelings. Words that spoke of a love that was, that should have been, our last.

  Quesada asked me to make myself scarce.

  “Crawl into your cave and don’t come out, even to take your dog for a walk,” he said. We were already on the pavement outside the bar, which like every other public space in Buenos Aires had become a meeting place for arguments between the deaf, for the most absurd assertions and political opinions that made bibl
ical prophecies seem as uncomplicated as weather forecasts.

  “You’re more dangerous than the Unabomber,” he said, clutching my shoulder. “If you were lured down to that place … what did you say it was called?”

  “Mediomundo.”

  “It was to chop your head off.”

  “But Cárcano was my friend.”

  “There are no friends in this business, Martelli. Friends are pawns, to be sacrificed so that kings can grow stronger.”

  As I had already done inside the bar, I denied having anything to do with anyone involved in plots.

  “You only look in your own mirror,” Quesada said. “You don’t see what others see. You were a policeman. And not just any policeman.”

  The hand on my shoulder gripped me like a claw. He held me back, but at the same time said, “No, don’t stop, keep walking, make it look as though we’re talking about football.” There was a traffic jam in front of us, so we dodged round cars and buses to reach the opposite pavement.

  “You said you knew nothing about me.”

  “What we don’t know, Martelli, we find out. While you were handcuffed and dozing in my chambers, I went into the network.”

  Obviously he was not referring to the internet.

  “It’s all nonsense,” I said. “A pack of lies written by bureaucrats trying to justify their fat salaries by cutting out little pictures and sticking them in files.”

  “I’m not accusing you of anything. The orange file exists, even if nobody talks about it.”

  I remembered he had mentioned the orange file when he had borrowed the doctor’s mobile in the hospital, so I asked what it was. Quesada kept on pushing me forward, making me walk.

  “It’s a sort of bible for people who work in the law,” he said. “And a safe conduct too. We judges are no fools, Martelli. The state has infiltrated the whole system. Not content with informers, it has installed its own judges in every court. They’re the ones who worry about their ratings, the ones who put make-up on in the car when they see journalists with cameras. And they talk, talk, talk. They pull rabbits out of hats and fascinate the public the way dictators used to do in the days when there was no T.V.”