No One Loves a Policeman
Page 20
The orange file had a restricted circulation among those magistrates who considered themselves honest, “career” jurists, the untouchables, the ones still resolutely faithful to the blindfolded lady with her balanced scales rather than to any clone the government might have produced to replace her.
Quesada’s fine words, the arrogant way in which he spoke of himself and a chosen few others, did not entirely convince me. What was there in that orange file about me?
“What the intelligence services did not say. The true story.”
Although he still had hold of my arm, I came to a halt there and then like a tree growing out of the pavement. I dug my heels in like a donkey or a stray dog refusing to be taken away to the pound and the gas chamber.
That afternoon, when the president resigned halfway through his term and abandoned the presidential palace in a helicopter, the same afternoon when his political opponents were celebrating the success of a civilian coup organized by mafia bosses and local gang leaders, financed by dirty money and with the acquiescence of the opposition and even some members of his own party, that December afternoon when the police fired on a crazed populace that swept through the streets like waves across the deck of a ship in a storm, that December 20, 2001, I discovered that my true story, the one I had never told anybody, the one I believed I had erased even from my own memory, was described from start to finish in the orange file.
8
In the early morning of December 21, 2001, lying back against the headboard of the bed it had made for itself, Argentina stared blindly into the darkness. It was taking a rest, stunned but satisfied by the great orgasm. It had rid itself of a worthless president, but had a dim suspicion that the vague, half-formed idea of replacing him with something different had already been tossed onto the scrapheap, and that other people were lining up, without even consulting it, to take part in the pagan rites of political speculation.
The front pages of all the newspapers were filled with the photograph of the helicopter taking off from the palace roof. Just like Isabel Perón in 1976, at the end of 2001 Fernando de la Rúa was escaping across the roofs of a city that had become too dangerous for him. Shortly before, while he was writing his own letter of resignation, the National Shame had shot at spontaneous demonstrators on the streets outside.
I put some fresh water and more of the balanced diet out for Félix Jesús, then locked my apartment and waited downstairs for the magistrate’s car. It appeared before I had finished my first cigarette, approaching me slowly with Quesada himself at the wheel. He pulled up and got out.
“You drive,” he said. “I’m worn out. I haven’t slept for two nights.”
“I haven’t had much sleep either,” I said. “But I can understand that you didn’t want to bring a chauffeur.”
“I’ve already lost one. He had a wife and two children. His name isn’t going to be on anyone’s list when they tot up how many people died in this madness.”
As I slid behind the wheel, I myself felt like Quesada’s chauffeur. I wondered if I should stop at a garage to at least get the tires checked. I remembered how right Wolf had been when we came out of the National Library talking about Faulkner and made me sit on a park bench while Isabel’s car went up in a ball of flames. But Quesada seemed different: in his world, if something got broken, it was replaced—even when it came to human lives.
Just as when I had received Edmundo’s telephone call, I drove out of Buenos Aires in the dark, unsure of what I would find when I reached my destination. While Quesada lay sprawled over the back seat of this automatic Japanese limo, I thought about what I had learned from him.
“The orange file is like a database,” the magistrate had explained. “It’s not an intelligence network, and we don’t have the latest generation computers. We are a club, a sect, a brotherhood of justice at bay. Magistrates also spend a lot of time in libraries, and in newspaper archives. Looking up matters of jurisprudence in a country that is constantly changing its laws so as not to have to abide by them is a job I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. But it has to be done if we are to justify our verdicts and sleep with a clear conscience when we send criminals or murderers to jails they will come out of long before they even start to realize just what they are responsible for.”
The name Pablo Martelli was among those chosen to go into the orange file as people who could be trusted. And alongside my name, the facts—not so different, according to what the magistrate told me, to the version the intelligence services had given. Whoever had supplied the information had not gone quite as far as Quesada wanted to believe, convinced as he was that he belonged to some post-modern Masonic brotherhood where the nation’s 21st-century heroes were being groomed.
After its great orgasm, Buenos Aires was exhausted. On street corners we saw the remnants of park benches torn up in angry protest at police repression, tires still giving off the acrid stink of burned rubber, shreds of posters demanding that the government resign, gas canisters, and smaller cartridges from hand guns: all the paraphernalia left over from an afternoon spent fighting one another, only to hand ourselves over the next day to the latest miracle worker, the messiah who first got his name onto the list. Someone who overnight had already been trying on all the attributes of power, pulling faces in front of the mirror, trying to decide on his less cretinous profile, rehearsing the next scene in our unending national farce.
I drove out toward the south-east again, and headed down the coastal highway. There was little traffic apart from a few lorries and buses. For long stretches there were no oncoming headlights. I had the feeling I was piloting some ship into the depths of an unexplored ocean. I searched for Lucila Davidson’s voice on the radio, but all I could find were early morning charlatans, religious pastors who howled their psalms like ravenous wolves. At that time of the morning, the sheep were dreaming that they had broken into the pastures of power at last. Contented, their bodies light, they muttered and plotted as they slept, buoyed by a non-existent victory, by an uneasy dream that would rob them of their illusion soon enough.
I enjoyed driving out of Buenos Aires, putting my foot down on the highway while Quesada, another little sheep, dreamed he was a wolf. Before dawn we would be in Mediomundo, a quiet beach where the people who owned or rented the few chalets dotted among the sand dunes would by now be arriving for their summer holidays.
The judge said something in his sleep; probably even asleep he was studying cases and delivering verdicts. I wondered how he would react when we got there, when we opened the door we should not be going anywhere near, when we turned the handle and pushed the door open. What would happen when my upright believer in jurisprudence found what we were looking for.
9
The woman I loved the most only loved me a little. Nothing new there: we always love what does not love us, and are loved by those we do not love enough. Perhaps the woman who only loved me a little was right: what is the point of loving a policeman? People love winners, those who are lucky, poets, madmen even. But who loves a policeman?
I was nothing to the magistrate fast asleep behind me, although he expected me not to fall asleep at the wheel. I was less than the crooks, rapists and murderers he locked away, or more often allowed to go free for lack of proof, or anywhere to put them.
Yet I have never shot anyone in the back. I always kill face to face, staring into the eyes of the person who is going to die at my hands. I never give them any advantage, of course, or I would not be here.
The magistrate needed me, the woman I loved the most needed me, the murderer needed me. I was their shadow, the echo of their voices when they were alone and told the truth. If I did not exist, what justice would the magistrate dispense? What love would the woman who only loved me a little learn to forget, and who would put an end to the serial killer’s compulsion?
I put my foot down. The speedometer whizzed round into the red. The slightest mistake, if I nodded off for a second or if a wheel touched the verge, and it would be
no more magistrate, no more memories for the woman who does not remember me; goodbye, shadow; goodbye, echo; even when they are on their own they can lie. That is all death is: darkened rooms and blank sheets of paper that will never be written on, impunity for those who survive.
We were heading for Mediomundo. Quesada thought that if we searched my friend’s chalet we might find something the forensic team had missed, for the simple reason that there had been no forensic team carrying out a search in the first place.
“It’s a beautiful day,” I heard from the cradle in the back of the car, where after four hours’ deep sleep the magistrate had woken up as pink and rested as a baby.
“We’ll be arriving in half an hour,” I said, like a pilot telling his passengers to fasten their seat belts for landing.
The sun was just coming up over the horizon, spreading across fields full of crops and hundreds of cows, the fertile pampas, the untold wealth of our colonial country. Meat and soya, wheat and maize, sunflowers, pigs and sheep, horses that sniff the ominous odor of the slaughterhouse and gallop off until they are forced to stop by the barbed-wire fences. All of them Argentine, even if they are not human: compatriots watching life go by in a state of contained despair.
“Did you bring a gun?” I said.
“There’d be no point, I don’t know how to use one.”
I opened the glove compartment and passed him Isabel’s .38.
“You’d better learn—we’re going to need it.”
At first he looked at the gun with horror, but then began to examine it.
“If you’re not shooting, make sure the barrel is pointing upward. That lever you’re about to press is the safety catch. As soon as we get there, I’ll teach you how to load it.”
“What about you?”
I showed him the other gun in the glove compartment, an old .45 that was National Shame issue when I was thrown out.
“It’s old, but effective. It belongs to Félix Jesús,” I said, not bothering to explain who he was.
To enter Mediomundo, you have to turn off the highway down a dirt road that is scarcely more than a track, although it is graveled. Lining it are plumed palm trees that look like the Swiss Guards at the Vatican.
“We should have stopped for breakfast,” the magistrate mused.
The track wound past a vineyard, then climbed a sandy hill from which you could see the sea. There was a line of gentle waves rolling in, the sky was an intense blue, and the sun was rising like shares on the New York stock exchange when the Republicans win.
“It’s a beautiful spot,” Quesada said cheerfully.
The track broadened, and we drove into the village. No more than two houses to each block, everywhere well looked after, young pine trees planted to fix the sand dunes. Although that day was the start of the summer holidays, there were only a few cars parked outside the houses: the Argentines were resting from their labors. The day before, they—and not the armed forces—had ousted a president. Nobody knew what was going to happen now: in fact, nobody ever has. Especially not the people who get rid of their presidents. A beautiful day, a beautiful spot.
Edmundo’s house was small: my friend was never ostentatious. It was a simple chalet, like the ones that Italian immigrants have built all along this coast, facing out to sea, toward Italy. The grounds, though, were spacious, and it looked as if a gardener had been to cut the grass only the day before.
I still had the key Lorena had entrusted me with the night we left. Quesada gave me permission to use it. He was being serious: “Of course, I should have spoken to the magistrate in charge of the case,” he said. “But I’ll take responsibility.”
Inside the chalet there was a strong smell of damp, as though it had been shut up for far longer than my last visit. There was still a blood stain in the middle of the floor; nobody had bothered to clean it up. “It’s evidence,” said Quesada. “It’s my friend’s blood,” I corrected him.
“Did he have a safe?”
“I don’t know the house. I didn’t even manage to spend a night here,” I said.
He did have a safe. It was in the wall behind a painting. Of course. Edmundo cannot have had much to hide if it was that easy to find. And to open: it was empty.
“I think we’re wasting our time here,” I said gloomily.
“Look under the furniture, in the kitchen, in the bathroom.”
I started with the bathroom. Traditional fittings, old-fashioned taps, a bath bought from some house clearance. If Edmundo really did have funds in Switzerland, he should have come to me to refurbish the room.
We were both so occupied—the magistrate in the kitchen and me looking for heaven-knows-what in the bathroom—that we did not hear the front door opening. Whenever somebody enters a house without knocking, they are not doing it to pass the time of day with the people who happen to be there at that moment.
There are ways of being violent without being rude. What is the difference between a louse who kills for a few pesos and a licensed killer? Their way of going about it.
“Welcome to Mediomundo,” said one of the two gentlemen who appeared behind us, brandishing automatic rifles.
“Today’s the first day of summer, although high season only starts after the 31st,” said the other.
“If you’re looking to rent the place for January or February, the owner is away at the moment. He left a few days ago, and we don’t think he’ll be coming back.”
“He was murdered,” I said, staring at the bloodstain on the floor. Every time I say something stupid, I promise myself I will never do it again, but you cannot change bad habits from one day to the next. “I bet he didn’t even get a chance to defend himself.”
When one of the gentlemen hit me I crashed through a rattan table and ended up on the floor. The magistrate took a couple of steps back, worried he would be next, but our friends knew who he was and respected his office.
“We hit him because he’s used to it,” one of them said. “He’s one of us.”
“You’ve taken it out on prisoners in your time, haven’t you, Martelli?” said the other, kicking me in the kidneys with the toe of his boot.
“The police are like fairies: they wave a wand and the innocent become guilty,” they went on explaining to Quesada.
“Get up, you son of a bitch,” they said, talking to me this time. “We don’t want you to die lying down.”
“Remember, whenever you take a statement, nothing is what it seems, and everybody is a liar,” they advised the magistrate. Then one of them knocked me to the floor again with his rifle butt.
The first thing you should always do when you are beating someone up is to take their gun. Our two visitors were so concerned with being polite they had forgotten to do so. Face down on the floor, gasping for breath, I clutched on to my .45 like an asthmatic reaching for his inhaler.
The magistrate stood there as cold and transparent as a stalagmite. He could not believe his eyes: the shots, the violent jerking of our visitors’ bodies, their eyes rolling up as blood spurted from the neck of one and the middle of the forehead of the other, then the two collapsing together in one heap.
“It was luck, not my good aim,” I said with false modesty, trying to see if I could breathe in again.
The magistrate knelt down and put his head between his knees.
“I feel sick,” he said.
He was right, we should have had breakfast before we got to Mediomundo, but the cafés along the way were shut.
At first I thought he was going to pass out, but he recovered, took a deep breath, and went onto the attack.
“There was no need to …”
“If I shoot from such close range, I shoot to kill. Besides, I only did what they were going to do to us.”
Quesada did not say it, but he obviously thought they were going to spare him.
“Who are they?”
“Hounds of the Baskervilles. Dogs with badges, the guardians of the temple. Where’s the .38 I gave you?”
“It’s not a torch, Quesada. We’re past the point of no return. We have to cover each other’s backs. These people don’t faint at the sight of blood.”
“But who are they?” he insisted. “What’s behind all this?”
“You should know. Look at your infallible orange file. I’m a complete nobody, so if even I am in there, you must have at least some idea of who we’re looking for.”
Quesada could not get over it. He was still more affected by my marksmanship than he was by the mess he had got himself into by coming here.
“Lock the door and we’ll carry on looking,” he said eventually.
All of a sudden he seemed to have forgotten the two fresh corpses on the floor. A strange force was driving him on: he was sure that there must be papers. Magistrates are lawyers, and lawyers are attracted to papers like moths to a flame.
We had talked about it before we left Buenos Aires. A plot had been hatched to depose the president. At the same time, though, there had been another plot, and this one won. A power vacuum is essentially a vacuum, and if one lot do not fill it, another group will.
So who were the ones who had got in first? Those who any newspaper reader already knew about. Nothing new there. People on the streets of Buenos Aires were shouting “Kick them all out!,” but none of them would do it. The protesters would go home or back to work, and when they were asked to, they would vote again for the same people. Anyone who got in first had won the game.
“Who are ‘they?’”
They are no better than the others, Quesada had told me the previous evening. The Trotskyite left; Peronists who felt betrayed by their own party; military officers cashiered for taking part in previous coup attempts; other officers still on active service, who boosted their wages with a little arms dealing; the police mafia; port bosses who dealt in drugs; shipping companies supplying chemical happiness by air, sea, and land; managers in crisis like Edmundo.