Holy City

by Guillermo Orsi

  6

  It was not easy for Ana Torrente to reach Buenos Aires. It is not the same arriving at Ezeiza airport on an international flight, even if it is from Bulgaria with connections, as getting off a bus at the Retiro terminus following a journey of almost twenty-four hours from Salta. It is not the same kind of people and the smells are very different. At Retiro you disembark amidst the ruins of the city; it is not the atmosphere of the elegant neighborhoods, it is another planet. Although the sun shines for everyone, it is the distance between Pluto and Mercury. The air is saturated with the smell of cheap fried food from the stalls, dark-skinned people are everywhere, street vendors and beggars, thieving youngsters out of their heads on glue who will never reach adolescence.

  And Ana Torrente, like so many of the local immigrants, was scared.

  “But I didn’t stop to look at the Torre de los Ingleses or the Sheraton opposite Retiro square. I went straight to the post at the terminus and asked for you.”

  “You did the right thing.” She has come back to him, just as she did the day she arrived. She likes to hear his voice. It does not matter what he is saying, it comforts her, satisfies her, calms and encourages her. It must be something to do with her hormones, because the man beside her is on his way to the scrapheap. In the gloomy, sordid room, stretched out on a bed they are not the first to use, he is like a fake Egyptian mummy, a papier-mâché android, a robot whose only practical use is to listen to her, hold her and, occasionally, to prevent her being killed. “You’ll have to get out of here,” he says.

  “Where to, Bolivia?”

  The noonday sun is glaring even through the slats in the shutters. He almost has to close his eyes when he goes over to look out at nothing, the filthy pavements, people walking past head down, caught up in worlds there is no point getting too close to, worlds that explode every so often, spattering him with blood, wounding him if he is not continually on his guard.

  “I nearly got killed yesterday,” he tells her. “Near here, only three blocks away, in a miserable bar on Alsina. The shots weren’t meant for me, but I was close enough.” Miss Bolivia is not impressed by his stories anymore. They are all he has to tell her, like a grandfather telling fairy tales. She dozes off, even manages to dream a little. “I’ve got a friend. Retired from Interpol. He lives in Spain now, in the Canaries.”

  “What does he do there, play horseshoes?”

  “When he was in service in the mother country he helped organize a network of Latin-American girls. All from the Southern Cone, white women,” he explains. “They’re all so contented no-one can persuade them to come back. They’re saving in euros.”

  “So your friend is an elderly pimp.”

  He feels so weary he starts to get dressed. She asks if they can stay a while longer. She feels sleepy and can never relax outside. It is only in here, with him, that she still feels her life could get better.

  “So you’re going to stay.”

  “There’s a job to be done,” she says. He smiles his nicotine smile; he is already desperate for a cigarette, but he has run out of them again. He rescues one of the butts from the floor and lights it. The flame from the lighter singes the bunch of hairs protruding from his nostrils. “You’ve got more hairs on your snout than on your nut.” Ana ruffles the fuzz on the top of his head. “Of course I’m going to stay, to finish what we began,” she adds. She pulls him toward her while he is taking a drag at his cigarette, laughing at his cough and the wheezing sound like an out-of-tune organ in some abandoned cathedral that comes from his chest. “Afterward, if you like, I’ll be a whore in Spain. But let’s finish first.”

  *

  Sometimes he enjoys being like this with women he hardly knows. Although the previous evening his pleasure had been spoiled: first of all by Verónica insisting on knowing who killed her husband, allowing the doubt to ruin her life in a way he cannot conceive, but which leaves him feeling uncomfortable for days.

  What’s dead is done with. Like the lanky guy who sat in the wrong place and, to top it all, suffered the indignity of the people who took his corpse home having to explain to his widow “in what circumstances the death took place.” The widow, a truculent, obese woman—140 kilos of fat in a ball a meter and a half round—refused to accept the dead body. “Throw him to the dogs,” she said. “Let that little tart bury him. No, better still, let her dig a double grave, because tomorrow I’ll find her and kill her.”

  Why make a moral judgment about someone who, one sunny morning or evening with the threat of rain in the air, like yesterday, is gunned down, stabbed to death, or killed in whatever way occurs to the hired killer, whether by accident or design? What’s dead is done with.

  He is no Clark Kent, to disappear into a phone booth and come out as Superman in Metropolis. It is true he did fly yesterday evening, but no more than a meter. He had not flown like that for years, not since he stopped playing scrum-half for the university team in Montevideo, back in the days when he still dreamed of defending the law some other way.

  Yesterday evening’s flight saved the skin of Verónica Berruti. The widow of his colleague Romano. An attractive woman with whom, in his nicotine way, he has always been in love.

  He is proud of what he did; it is the best thing that has happened to him in a long while. He would not have liked her to be killed under his hairy nose, thanks to some obnoxious, complicated business involving contraband mafias, asphalt pirates. That was not why she had graduated as a lawyer, just as he would not have graduated, if he had gone on with his studies, to defend cheap thieves, rescue them from young offenders’ institutions and let them roam the streets armed to the teeth, on their own or in gangs, raping and killing for pure pleasure, crack cocaine oozing from their pores.

  Before the patrol cars arrived, while the Spaniard was shouting from the basement—“Don’t shoot, I’ll give you everything, I’m unarmed”—and the dumpy woman was trying to clasp her lanky lover to her although he was already a corpse, Deputy Inspector Carroza plucked Verónica from the floor like King Kong grasping the blond from the Empire State building and got her out of the bar. He crunched his way over the shattered glass and threw her into the back seat of his car, parked in a no-parking zone thanks to an out-of-date police permit.

  It was then that Verónica finally realized she was in way over her head, even if she had a massive, well-armed whale calf to fetch and carry her to and from the market. That son-of-a-bitch judge should have warned her what she was getting in to. And to top it all, his honor wanted a nice, tidy report, a novel with a happy ending so that his party boss did not write anything unkind on his file and spoil his chances of becoming a minister. He had gone to war with an army of cheap clowns, fake lions, who were defeated before they had opened fire. And as he held forth on his tapped telephone about the independence and majesty of justice, all the while he was receiving instructions and advice by text on his mobile.

  Carroza wanted to take her somewhere safer, but Verónica insisted on going home.

  “Have you got a gun at least?”

  “I lent it to a friend.”

  “Great. And what happens if your friend kills someone: her husband, for example?”

  “I don’t think she has one.”

  “Her lover then, or anyone she runs into.”

  “I didn’t lend it her so she could kill someone, but so she could defend herself. It’s here, halfway down the block,” said Verónica, pointing to the entrance to her building.

  They said goodbye inside the car, with a friendly kiss on the cheek. Smooth skin against papyrus.

  “You never answered my question,” she said.

  “Go straight up and ring me on my mobile,” he said. “Confirm everything is O.K.”

  “Any further advice?”

  “Don’t go out alone. Call that miserable excuse for a magistrate and tell him to give you twenty-four-hour protection. At least until you’ve finished with the market.”

  He has been in love with Verónica fo
r so long that now, seeing her walk off calmly swaying her hips, he is glad he abandoned his studies in Montevideo, that he is not a lawyer but occasionally an aging Clark Kent zipping in and out of phone booths in Metropolis.

  7

  It is not a twin tower miraculously still standing in the far south of America and is no target for Al-Qaeda fundamentalists. It is an old forty-floor building near Retiro, a few blocks from Catalinas. That is where the modern office blocks are, glass-fronted to imitate the ones in Manhattan and crammed with hundreds of salaried bureaucrats.

  This older building is called Alas. It stands out from the others and was built in the 1950s. The people who live here are Argentine air-force officers with their wives and children, those who have not managed to acquire a residence in Buenos Aires apart from these dilapidated, antiquated apartments. To reach them you have to travel in lifts that usually do not work, or get stuck between floors, causing panic among those who are claustrophobic and protests from the security guards, who have to come and rescue all those trapped several times a day.

  On the fortieth floor, one step from paradise, there was once a big room for a radio-communications network. Nowadays, with the advances of mobile technology, the internet and other computer plagues, talking by radio has become a pastime for the nostalgic and the radio has been shut down.

  This eyrie perched on top of a city that rarely bothers to look up, a place with a view over the Río de la Plata and Puerto Madero, and very close to Uncle’s apartment, was where the federal police chose to house Osmar Arredri and his beautiful girlfriend Sirena Mondragón.

  They guard them in pairs: two cops replace each other every six hours. They come in, mutter “hello” and sit down to read the newspapers, do the crosswords (only ever half-finishing them), scribble combinations for the winners at Palermo or San Isidro racetracks, drink their maté and let time go by (something all of them are expert at). The Colombian and his girl cannot respond to the greeting because they are both gagged. These gags are only removed so that they can eat the provisions brought up by Rosamonte. She is the maternal touch in the kindergarten, a junior officer in the police public-relations department. Her real name is Rosa Montes, but she is so skinny her colleagues always call her Rosamonte after a brand of maté leaves, because in that funny, clever way of theirs they reckon she is as thin as the metal straw used to drink the stuff.

  A fourteen-inch television screen shows the programs the guards are interested in watching. Only they can hear the sound because they are wearing earphones. Rosamonte listens in whenever there is a cookery show on. Their guests cannot see the screen. The idea is to keep them isolated from the world, to break their spirit without having to resort to physical violence. Someone used to living the high life on everything that easy money can buy is not going to take being tied up and gagged for long, unable to touch his beautiful mermaid or scratch his nose or ass, only allowed to go to the bathroom every eight hours and having to eat the junk Rosamonte buys from the local fast-food stores.

  Rosamonte has been given special permission to do this job. She prefers her public-relations work at headquarters, where she attends people, visits businesses, does institutional promotion. On the side she also sells personal and property security services from the company run by Oso “the Bear” Berlusconi.

  “There’s going to be trouble,” says one of the cops just coming on duty. He stabs at the television screen with the remote, trying to find a news program. “They’re taking tourists from the stranded ship.”

  “Who is?” asks Rosamonte.

  “What’s that sound?”

  There is a sound from the ceiling like a trouser zip being pulled.

  “Rats.”

  “Don’t give me that. How does a rat get up to the fortieth floor?”

  “In the lifts I guess, when they’re working. Who’s snaffling the tourists?”

  “Nobody knows,” says the other newly arrived cop. “But everyone’s in a state about it.”

  Rosamonte pours a maté for the first new cop.

  “This is the port area. There are more rats than people.” In order to sweeten his mood, she explains that there are rats even in Puerto Madero, where an apartment can cost a million dollars. “Pedigree rats come off the boats and mix with the native ones to create a new oligarchy. Buenos Aires, a melting pot for rats.”

  “She sure knows how to talk, doesn’t she?” says the cop who spoke last. Even with his bulging eyes he cannot make out any breasts on her.

  “How long is this going to last? I’m fed up with it,” says the one who was looking up at the ceiling. He sits down: “I don’t like being here.” He gazes across at their captives. They are not moving and seem to have dozed off. “The Colombians could turn up at any moment to take them back. They’d shoot the crap out of us.”

  “They won’t take on the air force,” says Rosamonte. “That would be war. Besides, Oso is coming to take over tonight.”

  The male cops laugh. A war with Colombia, that’s all we need, they say. The talk turns to football. They recall the time Colombia thrashed Argentina 5–1; what a disaster, a worse defeat than in the Malvinas. Football bores Rosamonte and there are no cookery programs on television, so she turns to look at their prisoners. Oso has told her they are not to see her face, but she stares at them openly. What are they going to remember, if they do manage to get out of there alive? Rosamonte’s face is thin and bony. There is hardly anything feminine about her—and she likes women. Her male colleagues had better not find that out, or she will be in for a hard time. Dykes are harassed in every police station until they cannot stand it any more and resign, or end up raped and beaten. Ordinary women, the ones who join thinking they are Charlie’s Angels, also get treated badly, but in general they say not a word, they just put up with it: the benefits they enjoy on the force outweigh their disgust. And if any of them are crazy enough to report their tormentors to the courts or television, they can forget about a career in the police: their male colleagues will not rest until they are turfed out or shot to pieces in a gun battle.

  Rosamonte passes the time surveying their captives. She does not feel any pity for them. They are foreigners and, not only that, Colombian. And all Colombians are drug traffickers. Wherever they go they are regarded with suspicion. Nobody wants them around: in Europe they ask them for visas and documents that do not even exist. They put them through an X-ray machine before they let any of them in. Argentina is not like that, say the immigration officials. They can all get in with no problem—diplomats with enough drugs to kill a horse, politicians loaded down like mules with saddlebags stuffed full of dollars. But if some poor fool tries to smuggle a Japanese camera in, he had better watch out, because it will be confiscated and he will end up in jail.

  Osmar Arredri opens his eyes and Sirena Mondragón seems to have woken up too. They allow Rosa to gaze at them and stare back, gagged, tied up, not struggling or protesting. Rosa Montes thinks they would look with kinder eyes at the rat still scuttling above the ceiling.

  8

  Crunching their way over broken glass and warm blood come the newsmen, cameras on their shoulders and microphones at the ready. They arrived even before the ambulance and police. As soon as she saw them, the dumpy woman went even more pallid. The Spaniard went out to meet them.

  “It was a robbery, but they didn’t get anything,” he said, following instructions from Carroza, who a couple of seconds earlier had recommended he not even mention him.

  “Tell them the lanky guy and his bit on the side were here on their own.”

  “What if she says something?” asked the Spaniard.

  “Yes, who else is going to say something, the lanky squirt isn’t going to, is he?” Carroza asked, telling him: “Say another couple was here, you don’t know who they were, but they ran out as soon as the shooting stopped. Perhaps they were part of the gang, tell them.”

  The Spaniard was not convinced by this version: “If I say that, they’re going to take me in to
make a statement. Perhaps I’d better tell them the truth.”

  But Carroza insisted: “None of that crap, don’t give me away. If she says another couple was in here, tell the press the guy was tall, fair-haired and blue-eyed.”

  “I can’t lie that far,” the Spaniard muttered, just before the newsmen appeared and before Carroza could repeat that he was not to give the game away, that he would pay for the smashed windows and the lanky guy’s work insurance would pay for his funeral, if he had kept up with the installments.

  That same night he went looking for Ana Torrente. They met the next day.

  When she had come to see him as soon as she reached Buenos Aires, Carroza had not wanted to fuck her.

  “She’s only a girl,” he told Scotty, “and she’s scared stiff.”

  Scotty did not believe him.

  “When did that ever stop you?” Scotty asked.

  “I’m no pedophile,” Carroza insisted. (At that point he still thought Ana Torrente was a minor.) “She can’t be seventeen yet. It’s priests who are the pedophiles. They have it off with the schoolgirls who go to them to do penance. They touch them up in the confessional. Either that or they get choirboys to go down on them. I’m a cop, Scotty.”

  Scotty stared at him in complete astonishment, as if he were a Siamese cat in a shanty town. How could he believe him? They had known each other since they both joined the federal police. Scotty is of Irish descent, but in Argentina they call him Scotty, just as they called all Spaniards Galicians and anyone from the Middle East a Turk. All these places are so far away, in the north of the planet. What recent graduate from police training school knows where Glasgow or Dublin are? They barely know the names of the streets of Buenos Aires.