No One Loves a Policeman

by Guillermo Orsi

  After announcing that Argentina was going hell for leather for disaster yet again and that there was nothing I could do about it, they said they would leave me to rest or breathe my last. They would be back the next day to say goodbye, whether I was still in my bed or by then being fitted for a wooden overcoat. The tubes supplying me with air and sustenance prevented me from cursing them roundly for all they had done for me.

  I closed my eyes, and in the middle of the night dreamed that someone came and took all the tubes out of me and bundled me away into the boot of a car. From there they took me heaven knows where, and two “male figures” unloaded me while a “female figure” issued instructions and talked on a mobile to a fourth person whose sex I could not determine.

  I woke up in even more pain and feeling weaker than on the previous day, only to find that certain dreams are the confused prologues to even worse nightmares.

  There are two ways of immersing yourself in violence: either of your own accord, or by letting yourself be swept along by it, like somebody falling into a raging torrent. I would have preferred the former, but found myself in the latter.

  When I woke up, I was in a different bed. I had no tubes stuck into me any more, which chiefly goes to show that all this costly medical apparatus is often unnecessary, and only adds to the health service’s bills.

  I did not try to move, but I was not tied down either. I was in such poor physical shape that my captors must have decided I was in too much pain to attempt an escape. Flat on my back in the hospital bed, I consoled myself with the fact that at least the room had a roof. This gave me a surge of optimism: if I had been abducted from Tres Arroyos hospital and taken in a car boot to another one, that must mean someone was interested not only in keeping me alive, but also in staying in contact with me.

  It was not you, Mireya. That was my first disappointment when I came back to life, thanks to having my heart in the wrong place. Who was it then? Who had taken the risk of secretly abducting me and transferring me to another hospital?

  The door to my room opened. Finally I got the answers.

  4

  At the end of June 1978, while the Argentine football team was winning the World Cup, to the euphoria of the populace and the satisfaction of the military dictatorship, one of the top police chiefs, Anibal “Toto” Lecuona died in an ambush in the Tigre Delta outside Buenos Aires. The commander of the First Army Corps gave immediate instructions to the owners of the national newspapers and news agencies that nothing about his death should emerge. That night crowds poured onto the streets to celebrate winning a manipulated tournament lavishly promoted to show the world an Argentina that had returned to peace, had an economy that was growing as fast as savage capitalism allowed, and was exporting middle-class tourists flush with money from all the exchange-rate and other fiscal juggling going on.

  The murdered police chief was far from having been the dictatorship’s blue-eyed boy, but to order his death in the midst of all the patriotic rejoicing must have seemed like a dangerously dissident initiative to the monolithic armed forces. The man had in fact been a fifth columnist for the Peronist guerrilleros, but he enjoyed the protection of a big cereal wheeler-dealer who, like the good progressive bourgeois he was, made sure he was affiliated to the Communist Party. He donated as much money to their campaigns as he did to the Rotary Club, of which he was also a member, just in case. The Argentine Communist Party had swapped its copies of What Is to Be Done by Lenin for color pamphlets of the Kremlin, whose gerontocracy were delighted with our dictatorship because it had disobeyed the underhand boycott imposed by the Carter regime in Washington, and sold them wheat on better terms than it had to the European Community.

  Only a loose cannon, or a fundamentalist in the murderous crusade known as the Process of National Reorganization, could have thought it would be a good idea to shoot the police chief on the same night as the football triumph was being celebrated, and anyone who did not dance was a Dutchman.

  Whoever drew up the orange file was generous with the space devoted to that hidden episode, giving it the equivalent of a center spread in a newspaper. My name and even my nickname Gotán figured prominently in this well-thumbed document originally intended for a restricted circulation, which Burgos and Ayala had pried from Patricio Quesada’s dead hands. But why, almost a quarter of a century later, was anyone still interested in an episode that in no way altered anything written about the last Argentine military dictatorship? Did some eager, democratically minded researcher into those atrocities want to shed more light on the shadowy goings-on of that period, to expose me to public condemnation, and send my weary bones to jail?

  My involvement in the affair made it less of a surprise that Toto Lecuona was still alive than it was to see him coming through the door, healthy and smiling, with the apparent intention of embracing me.

  “None of your bones are broken, and the blood you lost was partly replaced in Tres Arroyos hospital. They finished pumping up those flabby muscles of yours in here,” he said by way of a greeting, even though we had not seen one another for almost a quarter of a century. He came over and hugged me. “You old crock … I had to get you out of that provincial hospital—they were planning to kill you.”

  “What, again?”

  He guffawed and sat beside me on the bed. He was right, I was well enough to sit up with his help and lean back against the headboard, even though a sharp pain in my chest reminded me of Mireya’s reappearance in my life.

  “You’re an inconvenient witness, the missing link in a chain rusted by time, Gotán. If you are killed now, there is no-one who can contradict what it says in that orange file.”

  “I’ve no intention of contradicting it. I was happy selling toilets.”

  “But you put on the masked avenger’s cape and flew off to bring justice to Gotham City.”

  “Don’t talk to me about justice. Tell me instead why you came back?”

  “I have my pride, even if I’ve retired to the Canary Islands with my adolescent girlfriend.”

  “All my friends seem to be doing the same. Why can’t they settle for the truth, that they’re nothing more than living mummies?”

  “Look who’s talking, the tango dancer.”

  “Mireya is thirty-nine, almost an old woman.”

  “And it’s because of her that you’re here instead of enjoying a happy retirement.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Disappeared without trace. Everyone in the G.R.O. has vanished, and left me in the lurch.”

  Since this time I had no tubes, I asked once again what on earth G.R.O. stood for.

  “‘Group of Revolutionary Officers’ … Until a few hours ago, they hoped to seize power. Now they’re the initials on a rubber stamp.”

  “The military again?”

  “But these are youngsters, Gotán. They’re the internet and mobile phone generation. They admire Chávez in Venezuela, and they support Evo Morales in Bolivia.”

  “Bingo!” I said triumphantly. “But what brings you here?”

  He stood up and paced round the room. He lit a cigarette, filled the air with smoke, and then asked if I minded him smoking.

  “What I mind is dying without finding out why nobody will let me go back to my peaceful job, why they keep bringing up the past, why they want to make me guilty, why they make up a story I can no longer be bothered to deny. And I’d also like to know who Mireya—or La Negra, as she calls herself with these people—really is, where Edmundo’s daughter is, and more than anything, why Edmundo was murdered. He was a good guy, he also put his money on a less crappy world once upon a time.”

  “That’s quite a list of questions,” Toto said.

  I refused the cigarette he offered me. “I’m choking already,” I said, and smiled. As hare-brained as ever, Toto Lecuona: someone who could be boasting about his latest conquest as the bullets were whistling around him.

  “The G.R.O. recruited Edmundo. He liked the idea of shaking up our subservient democra
cy.”

  “Off his head again. I honestly thought he was becoming more mature, and only wanted to be happy. Instead, they made mincemeat out of him.”

  “Don’t talk about your best friend that way, Gotán. Don’t pretend to be cynical. Dreams don’t grow old; revolution is eternally a fifteen-year-old who is worth risking everything for.”

  “Go fuck yourself, Toto. Tell me everything, and let history judge me, as Fidel and Admiral Massera both said in their time.”

  Toto stopped pacing and stared at me, taking a few moments to decide whether to go on talking to me at all, or to abandon me to my executioners. The fact that he spoke meant he had given me another chance.

  “Edmundo called you that night from his beach house. He was happy there with the girl …”

  “Lorena, another nom de guerre.”

  “That’s right: Lorena, I’d forgotten her name, poor thing. Edmundo was willing to risk everything, and wanted to bring you in too. ‘He’s a good friend, and an even better killer,’ he said. ‘I can vouch for that,’ I said at the meeting we held just before Edmundo called you, ‘and a good conjurer too.’ I told them about the trick you played that night back in 1978 when all those cretins were celebrating a football championship played on the graves of all our comrades.”

  “Nobody questioned your death, Toto. That Communist Party Rotarian who protected you was dispatched the very next day. They shot his daughter first, in front of him, after two marines had raped her: the same two that I saw being feted recently as heroes of the Malvinas campaign.”

  Toto Lecuona took a deep breath of the air he himself had poisoned, as if he were about to dive into an oceanic trench and needed reserves of carbon dioxide. He knew that to submerge oneself in memory is to mutate, to change not your skin so much as your species.

  “La Negra, or Mireya as you call her, is a big shot in the organization. She was the one who rang me in the Canaries and convinced me that this time it was for real, that we could seize power by taking advantage of the weaknesses and contradictions among the squabbling morons in government. We were going to announce the start of a new stage in Perón’s unfinished revolution, blah, blah, blah … The young military men are angry because they are never taken into account and told to wait before they are brought any new toys to play with. They’re sent to let off fireworks in Central America and before that in former Yugoslavia. Just put yourself in their shoes: they had nothing to do with the dictatorship.”

  “You put yourself in them, Toto. Of course, nobody in Argentina had anything to do with anything. I can’t believe what you’re telling me: what did you think you were going to do—bring socialism to Argentina?”

  Toto Lecuona stared hard at me, as lost as ever.

  It was just like the night when I engineered the farce of his murder by a police squad I was in command of.

  We came to his house, a small prefabricated place in a working-class part of San Fernando where he lived on his own. We smashed in the door without any difficulty and found Toto stark naked with a girl. He started shouting nervously, “You bastards, who sent you?” while we kicked the girl out like a dog caught sleeping on a bed. I made the three numbskulls with me leave too. “I’ll handle this on my own,” I said, “we’ve got old scores to settle.” They were pleased: it meant less work for them, fixing the body so it looked as if he had resisted arrest, writing up reports, all the paperwork.

  When we were alone, I told him what was happening. In two or three days’ time he was going to be quietly arrested, then slowly tortured in the Olimpo or the Escuela secret prisons. After that, an injection and then he would be food for bottom feeders in the widest river in the world. He could not believe they knew everything. “It was you who told them,” he accused me, beside himself with fury, impervious to fear because he was so sure of his own invulnerability. I had a hard time convincing him they had let him grow like a tropical plant in the Antarctic base of Marambio. “If you only knew how far you’ve been infiltrated,” I told him that night as I helped him gather up two pairs of trousers, a sweater and a jacket and put them in a bag. I gave him the money I had collected: enough for him to get by for a couple of days, to reach a frontier or find a hiding place. “Better to leave the country though, because if they find you alive, I’ve had it,” I said. He vanished cursing everyone and everything.

  As soon as he left that night, I set fire to the bed and the cheap wooden furniture in the house, emptied my revolver at the smoke while the flames leaped up, then walked out calmly. Before I climbed into the patrol car I lit a cigarette, “Let’s go,” I told the others, as if I had just been to take a pee in the undergrowth. “That’s another one who won’t cause any more trouble.”

  “Who gives a fuck about socialism these days?” Toto said at last. “Russia is governed by mafias; China by gangsters desperate to make fortunes at the cost of millions of Chinese begging in the streets; North Korea, a medieval country with nuclear warheads; Cuba, a Sweden without a penny, even taking in a crazy guy like Maradona. No, Gotán, to talk of socialism now is like wanting to get to the moon in a hot-air balloon. Jules Verne wouldn’t consider it for a novel.”

  Beyond this, even he grew confused trying to explain the complicated alchemy the G.R.O. theorists were trying to work. “They were all highly educated,” he said, “with Masters degrees from First-World universities. Brains, Gotán, brains, what we never had. That’s why we ended up in the National Shame.”

  “So they had lots of good ideas,” I said, “but they used them in the service of criminals. Why did they kill Edmundo, Lorena, and someone called Cordero? Why try to finish me off? And why try to bring a poor serial killer into it, a family man, a loving husband who could not bear to see her love him so much, and decided at the last moment to include her on his list. He’s in a cell at Bahía Blanca, as depressed as hell.”

  “Mireya was the one who personally planned all that. It’s something you’ll have to ask her, if you ever see her again.”

  It was my turn for a hollow laugh, but the sudden pain in my chest reminded me once again that unrequited love leaves its mark.

  “My Mireya isn’t someone you’d call a stable personality, Toto. She’s not what she was yesterday. And she can be the opposite of what she seems today.”

  “For now, you’re among friends. The pair who rescued you from the ranch are outside, watching over you like guardian angels. I don’t know where you find your friends, Gotán.”

  “Or my loves.”

  At that point, Inspector Ayala and the doctor made their theatrical entrance. With Rodríguez still absent—they thought he must still be wrapped in the embrace of the police museum attendant—Burgos and Ayala seemed to complement each other admirably. No sooner had they come in than they apologized for not having warned me about my traumatic transfer from Tres Arroyos hospital.

  “We didn’t want to wait for your executioners to find out they had come up against a rare specimen with a heart over to the right,” Burgos told me.

  “Where am I now?”

  “In the Santiago Cuneo.”

  “But don’t worry,” Ayala said, afraid I might react badly to the news. “All the weapons have gone; there’s not so much as a penknife left. They took everything.”

  “Where to?”

  “Paraguay, probably,” Toto said. “They’re big arms buyers, and they pay with top-quality drugs. The G.R.O. never really owned those weapons, they were only leasing them. If we had seized power, there would have been no problem paying for them.”

  “While they’re busy plotting, Argentines are expert administrators. Their problems start when they get their hands on the state budget.”

  “The people at the ranch fled south,” Burgos said.

  “How do you know?”

  “Just a hunch, Martelli,” Ayala said. “Nobody ever knows anything for sure. Not even the Pope—I bet when he looks out of the window at the Vatican and sees the crowds in St. Peter’s square, he must be shit-scared and wonder:
‘Shall I tell them or not God doesn’t exist?’”

  We all laughed at that. I laughed as gently as possible, because I was still meant to be seriously ill, but very early the next morning, before the duty doctor made his round, we left the Santiago Cuneo model hospital and warehouse for weapons in transit. Shortly before we left, a nurse who was quite happy to cooperate—thanks to the generous tip Toto gave her in euros—supplied me with another horse pill, this time for the pain in my chest, although even that was not as bad as it had been the day before.

  Although we left at 5:00 in the morning, the corridors on the ground floor of the hospital were already teeming with people hoping to become patients. They were queueing to get a number at 8:00 which would enable the chosen few among them to be seen by late that afternoon, the next day, a week later, or in a month’s time. Those who were late would be lucky to get an appointment after their death.

  I only learned all this from my friends’ comments as I lay in the back of a Japanese 4×4, rented and driven by Toto. He had decided to join the hunting party for the G.R.O. because, after the failure of their coup, they had neglected to pay him.

  “One of those at the ranch was the G.R.O. treasurer. And La Negra’s lover, in fact,” Ayala said, oblivious to any damage he might do to my chances of recovery. “That’s why they chose what they thought was a safe spot. Who would have thought that the brains behind an armed revolutionary organization would hole up in a tumbledown ranch in the middle of nowhere.”

  “I did,” I said from my uncomfortable position on the floor of the 4×4. “Though I thought they were common criminals, not social redeemers.”

  Loud snores from the doctor. Apparently he intended to sleep all the way.

  “He was snoring like that when we drove from Bahía Blanca to Buenos Aires,” Ayala said. “The problem was that he was driving. ‘It’s my angina from smoking,’ he told me when I shook him to make sure we didn’t crash into a farm truck waltzing all over the road as it came toward us.”