No One Loves a Policeman

by Guillermo Orsi

  It is strange to find yourself written about by others. Even if the stories are dreamed up by the intelligence services, it is still odd. You resent the intrusion. They are full of old photographs, apocryphal facsimiles that look like authenticated documents, handwritten documents someone else has scribbled on our behalf. But Mireya was right: there were also some real letters, sheets of paper left lying around at the end of a marvelous night.

  In this case, there were only three sheets of paper. There was not that much to tell. Almost nothing, if the facts written on three yellowing sheets of thin airmail paper were all there was.

  “You told me you left the force because being a policeman disgusted you.”

  “I was never disgusted by being a policeman,” I corrected you.

  “But that’s what you told me.”

  “Only because you fooled me. You made me believe you hated the police in general, and I didn’t want you to hate me.”

  Furious, you got to your feet again. The barrel of the gun was like a black well, or the dark window of the world before my eyes.

  “And it was true,” you said, too close for me not to think once more that this was all unreal, that you were somewhere else and that we would never meet again. “Can you deny what it says here?”

  You tore the three sheets out of the orange file and waved them in my face.

  “Deny everything and I’ll believe you again. We women in love are stupid. I’ll believe you, Gotán. Tell me it’s not true, that it wasn’t you who wrote this.”

  But it was me, and would always be me, as long as the .38 in the hands of the woman who called herself La Negra did not blow my head off. And the information about me handed to you on a plate by the orange file, the information Quesada took into account when he took me along with him, made you angrier still.

  “What did you do with the magistrate?”

  “That’s nothing to do with me. Other people take care of the logistics of our prisoners. I don’t know who comes and goes. For reasons you’ll understand, it’s your case I’m dealing with.”

  “I don’t understand, but I’m grateful anyway.”

  You took my hand and I felt like a king on the topsy-turvy chessboard. The cuckolded king, of course, one aware that in his own bedroom the queen was fornicating with her lovers, one who wrote all their names in the equivalent of an orange file so they could all be executed the moment the queen announced she no longer loved him, had never loved him, that power is a labyrinth of whispers in corridors, a constant exchange of picture cards, a game of poker in which honor and life are the beans you use to tot up the scores. Who cares anyway, when there will always be another round?

  “Come and let me introduce you,” you said, still holding my hand, allowing me to follow you wrapped in my blanket. “You couldn’t get far anyway, barefoot and with no clothes.”

  You know me, you know I hate inspiring pity, that I never appeal to anyone’s better nature because I don’t believe in it. Conquer or die—that was a good slogan, a shame nobody uses it today, or even knows what it referred to.

  We left the roofless room where I had come round. I walked along groggily because of the horse pill, while the guard stared at me with suspicion, as if killing me there and then would have been a weight off his shoulders. Mireya, though, seemed to be some kind of leader, an overseer in the madness she was enveloped in, as I was in my blanket.

  “This is Rata,” she said. “He prefers shooting to talking. He doesn’t know the meaning of a question mark; he never asks himself a question before killing.”

  “We’re colleagues, then,” I said to him, but I did not hold out my free hand or bother to look at him.

  We went into another room. This one was big and well lit, and it had a roof. It was the one I had been in several nights before, examining the maps by torchlight. In it were two men who smiled but seemed tense. They were paunchy, broad-shouldered, and wore smart uniforms. They had taken off their balaclavas out of politeness, and because it was too hot to wear them anyway. The uniforms were new, obviously bought in an army supply store.

  “Cain and Abel,” Mireya introduced them. She let go of my hand and put hers on my shoulder: “Gentlemen, this is Gotán!”

  “Chan chan,” Abel said dismissively.

  Cain took a couple of steps back and stood surveying me, like someone buying a slave. He was evidently disappointed.

  “So you’re the fancy dancer?”

  “And you’re the one in the bible who ends up killing his brother,” I said.

  “Kill him, Negra,” said Cain.

  Abel lifted his right arm in what looked like a cross between a papal blessing and a Nazi salute.

  “Who is behind you?” he said.

  I whirled round to look. Not to poke fun at him, but out of pure instinct. I took his question literally: for the past twenty-five years, I had never imagined I was working for someone else.

  “Finish him off, Negra,” Cain insisted. “There’s nothing we can do with him.”

  I recognized his voice.

  “You killed that farm dog, you bastard.”

  Cain threw himself onto me. He tore the blanket off so that I was left naked, staggering and dizzy. He pushed me hard so I would fall. I heard them laughing, making fun of my tiny prick. La Negra started to defend my manhood, which only gave rise to more jokes.

  “Who sent you, Tanguito? You didn’t come here on your own account, so who’s behind you? I’ll count to three: one, two, three.”

  “Barboza!” I said, like someone shouting “royal flush!”

  I heard a whistle of admiration, a throaty cough. Mireya said nothing to contradict me. She was as surprised as the other two.

  “That castrated pig, I should have known!” said Abel.

  Nemesio Barboza was a caudillo in the south of greater Buenos Aires. He was a leader of the most repugnant kind of Peronism, someone who had handed over worker militants, the friend and accomplice of military goons and prominent businessmen, a drugs trafficker in the ’90s. With his Alzheimer’s kept under strict medical control, he was still the boss in many of the crowded shanty towns that sprawled around the capital.

  “And they call me Gotán, not Tanguito.”

  But this clarification, or anything else I might have to say from then on, was apparently of no importance. Abel took Cain by the arm and led him off to another room. They had decisions to take which were none of my concern. It seemed as though my invented revelation had caused such an impact that my execution had been postponed.

  The woman who called herself La Negra congratulated me.

  “You always have an ace up your sleeve, even when you’re stark naked.”

  She picked up the blanket, put it round my shoulders, and we set off back to the room without a roof.

  “If you’re one of Barboza’s men, I’m surprised you came on your own.”

  “I came with a magistrate, for Chrissake! What’s happened to him?”

  “Don’t worry,” said Mireya, alias La Negra, who had once been Debora. “The most important thing now is to get you out of here unharmed.”

  “I’m not leaving without my dead friend’s daughter, or Quesada. Did you kill them? Does everyone who ruffles your feathers finish up like that dog?”

  I began to feel very cold. I started to tremble and must have turned blue, because all of a sudden Mireya put down her gun and hugged me tight.

  After a moment’s surprise, desire flared up in me like a cigarette butt dropped carelessly in a field of scrub when it has not rained for months.

  Mireya’s dress was little more than a napkin tied around her neck. There was nothing to undo or tear. It slipped over her head in one swift movement, then up over her long, raised arms. Her breasts flopped against my chest. I cupped them in my hands, warming them and bringing them to life with a tongue I quickly lost control of. My body declared its joyful independence from all the political plotting, all the threats, the pressure and even its own imminent demise. It had be
en caged for far too long, a prisoner of memories no-one shared, of an image as false as that of me belonging to Nemesio Barboza’s hordes, or the story written on the three sheets of paper in the orange file. My body was like the effigies we used to burn on the feast of St. Peter and St. Paul when I was a child: made for this, for this night, this woman.

  You did not say “I love you”; that was never something you said. At most you agreed to dance the tango with Gotán in some out-of-the way dive in Boedo: “Women in love are stupid” you had said earlier in that same room.

  “So it was true, then,” you whispered in my ear while your tongue licked my wound, the lobe of my left ear and then probed deep inside. Your head rolled downward, rolling almost forever, crushing my throat, my chest, stopping only to lap at the prenatal dreams curled in my umbilical, then on, down again, sated, warm, down, down, down. “Everything the file said was true, everything people say to each other and you never said to me, yet there I was with you, they wouldn’t laugh at your prick if they saw it now,” you said, clinging to my buttocks like a lifebuoy, what if women were not so stupid after all, what if when it came to sacrifices they were the high priestesses and not the offerings? Your head resurfaced, and you were wet, Mireya who wanted to be called La Negra and who was once Debora, you slipped through my hands so I could not catch you, you slid off as easily as your dress. My hands could not really strip you bare, uncover you, catch you and hold you.

  “Tell me it isn’t true,” you said as I penetrated you almost without meaning to, just because we were so close, because of the imminence of what we already knew, the collision of one world into another, the fusion of matter, atmosphere and suffocation.

  “Tell me you didn’t shoot him in the back. Tell me you at least gave him the chance to defend himself, that you risked something that day.”

  “The eyes of an unrepentant murderer are unbearable, Mireya. How can you know that is what he really is, or that, despite all appearances, he didn’t kill anyone? Why talk about that now: are you recording this, is there a hidden camera in your clitoris, Mireya? After twenty-five years, who cares what happened? It was not professional, it was revenge.”

  “Do you love me?”

  Your question did not surprise me, and nor did the cynicism I glimpsed behind it. I needed to believe that at last you wanted to know what had really happened.

  “I do, but you …”

  “The last love, Gotán.”

  Then the cold once again, a sharp, definitive chill as the stiletto pierced my heart.

  3

  You do come back.

  They are lying, the ones who say there is no return and those who talk about dark tunnels with a light at the end of them.

  You do not come back because of any faith in God or Stephen Hawking. You do not come back because of all the virtues or vices you have accumulated: there are no rewards or punishments. You do not come back because there is something called reincarnation.

  It is not exactly death you come back from. You come back from a dark place full of sounds and sensations which, given the circumstances, are impossible to make sense of. When you lose as much blood as I did, part of you has been emptied, like a wineskin poured onto a table which nobody is sitting at any longer because the banquet is over.

  In the hours between when I was murdered late at night and the early morning when I was rescued, I had more than enough time to die properly and put a stop to all the mess I was making in this world. The advantage of being unconscious is that you do not feel the weight of any remorse or regret: with a liter or two less of blood and memories, your body feels light. It floats off aimlessly, until the moment when other arms enfold it, and someone else’s blood brings a different kind of emptiness.

  “You had a lucky escape, Martelli.”

  Inspector Ayala did not sound convinced. The sight of a corpse coming back to life can unsettle even the most cynical policeman.

  “Your heart is over to the right.”

  This time it was not Ayala speaking: what did he know about hearts? It was Burgos, floating like a fluffy cloud in my hazy vision.

  “Ang gow goo u kno?”

  With all the tubes supplying me with air and liquids, this was the nearest I could get to a proper question.

  “Because I cut you open with a hunting knife I use for wild boar. I thought you were dead, and I was curious to see what the guts of someone from the National Shame looked like.”

  Ayala burst out laughing. I was in no state to tell whether this was at the doctor’s scatological sense of humor or because it was really true. It was in this hospital bed at Tres Arroyos that I discovered the inspector had a metal tooth.

  I felt no urge to speak. I could not have said anything intelligible anyway. My throat hurt, and just breathing made me choke. I would quite happily have slipped back into death again, but for the urgent need I had to know. Burgos and Ayala took it in turns to fill me in.

  Nobody had been arrested because nothing had been reported, either to the authorities or to the press. Parrondo had got in touch with Mónica from his Uruguayan retreat. He told her that “sources within the G.R.O.” had informed him that Isabel had been abducted because they thought she had information about documents Edmundo Cárcano had deposited in Geneva, together with the money he had siphoned off to enable him to enjoy his twilight honeymoon.

  “Gwat er fug zzz er gro?”

  “Don’t try to talk. You could perforate one of the tubes, and if oxygen got into the saline solution there would be such a build-up of gases you’d burst like an airship,” said Burgos.

  “G.R.O. are a sect financed by a group of big businessmen who want it all ways,” Ayala explained. “They support democracy as long as it lasts, but they don’t rule out alternatives. It was all in a bunch of papers we found in that roofless ranch we fetched you from—or rather, what was left of you.”

  There were no names amongst the documents, apart from mine on the three sheets of paper in the orange file that Quesada had been clinging to. When I heard his name, I almost tore out the tubes to ask what had happened to him, but my rescuers did not give me time to do so.

  “He is in the mortuary of this very establishment,” Burgos said, apparently under the influence of the rhetoric within the files they had discovered.

  “He was not as lucky as you,” Ayala said.

  Burgos promised there would be a proper autopsy, although it hardly seemed to matter if he had died when they first started shooting at us, or later, perhaps under torture. The poor magistrate: in the end, he knew no more about what was going on than any low-grade stool pigeon at work in the corridors of the Law Courts.

  I closed my eyes while Burgos and Ayala went on explaining. I wanted to believe it was all a stupid nightmare, that in this first dawn of the twenty-first century it could not be true that the Argentines were at it again, searching for or offering themselves as cheap messiahs. Still thinking they were unique, better than all the rest of humanity, kicking over the table like provincial hoodlums, like small-town schemers who ruined their neighbors’ reputations with the same pleasure as they stuck toothpicks into bits of cheese and salami while drinking themselves silly in the only bar on some ghastly main street.

  In Buenos Aires they had already brought on a substitute president who, after receiving a standing ovation from Congress for declaring a moratorium on the country’s debts to the pack of foreign hounds baying for blood, was to be kicked out through the back door only a week later. In the midst of this farce, political parties and popular organizations were boasting how they had got rid of a constitutional president as if he had been the very worst banana republic dictator.

  I closed my eyes and disguised myself as a corpse again, but I could not avoid hearing the details of how Burgos and Ayala had made their way to the roofless ranch.

  When they had reached Bahía Blanca, they found the real serial killer, the family man, waiting for them at the police station. He signed his confession and asked to be left alo
ne in his cell until the trial had been prepared. He said he was tired of arguing with his wife all the time. He decided in the end to make her his final victim, although he claimed in his defense that this murder had been a crime passionnel: fights between husband and wife start easily enough, but you never know how they are going to end.

  When the serial killer turned himself in, Inspector Ayala saw his last chance of promotion before retirement vanishing out of the window. So as not to get too depressed about it, he suggested to the doctor they try to find Isabel’s kidnappers. The closest place for them to start looking was the ranch I had been to, although they had to get the estate agent to show them the way. After they pitched up there, they not only had to give me mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to make sure I made it to hospital, but they also had to revive the poor estate agent, who almost had a heart attack when he saw what had been going on in a property he had been trying to sell as unoccupied.

  In the end, nobody even knew there had been a plot. The businessmen who had included the G.R.O. as part of their portfolios dismissed the idea the same night the president was taking his last trip with official bodyguards. The arms stored in the Santiago Cuneo model hospital would be duly shipped out to an unknown destination on a caravan of trucks that did not even attract the notice of the staff working there, used as they were to daily shoot-outs in the neighboring shanty towns, the constant toing and froing of the police, and to seeing notorious gang leaders swaggering along the corridors with the assurance of top surgeons.

  One day Argentina should seriously consider exporting the sophisticated know-how behind the way it strips governments of power without waiting for them to complete their constitutional terms. Throughout the twentieth century it has had more practice at this kind of thing than any but a few countries in Africa. We are world leaders at it.

  My saviors had little more to tell. Ayala seemed glad to have discovered I did not leave the National Shame out of a fit of the vapors: “That’s for pregnant women, not police officers,” he said. Burgos was more aseptic and skeptical. He said he was reserving his opinion until I either recovered or died, which would be obvious soon enough. I am not sure whether he was trying to encourage me or finish me off.