“So why did you end up fucking her, if you’re not a pedophile?”
“Because she turned twenty two months ago. And because Patrón sent her to me.”
Patrón is chief of the federal police in the province of Salta. He was appointed for a year as a temporary replacement for someone who had died, but has stayed for twenty. “Not even the president can shift me from here” is Patrón’s boast, as he goes through the list of all the presidents who have come and gone while he has remained untouchable in his northern fiefdom.
“This is my place in the world,” he had told Carroza when a few glasses of gin loosened his tongue the time Carroza was following the trail of some asphalt pirates all over Argentina. “This province is a patriarchal society—what am I saying, it’s pure feudalism, Yorugua.” He calls him that because it is back slang for Uruguay, where Carroza was born. Nobody in the federal police ever forgets to remind him that he is an outsider, that despite the fact that he has sworn loyalty to the national anthem, flag and emblems of Argentina, he is still a foreigner. “Salta is a business paradise. And I don’t even have to move from here,” Patrón says, slapping the table in the bar opposite police headquarters.
The members of the provincial police hated his guts. Every time there was a “fishing expedition,” as they called raids on the coca-drying operations, Patrón would get there before them. “This is a liberated zone, only the federal police can enter,” he would say, waving warrants from federal magistrates and secret orders from the central government that he pulled out of his magician’s top hat. Since he had no federal force of his own in Salta, he recruited from among the mestizos in the provincial police, the ones worst hit by hunger or vices, a brutish army that followed him the way farm animals follow the first one to move.
“They picked her up on the streets in Salta, poor thing,” Carroza says. “Miss Bolivia, just think. If you saw her on T.V. or in a magazine you’d fall on your knees. She’s a virgin, Scotty. When they saw she was blond, they took her to Patrón. They must have thought it was a federal offense.”
The two cops laugh. The gin not only loosens their tongues, it encourages their flights of fancy. She is like a Botticelli painting or a De Quincey poem. They are inspired for a few moments, as far as a cop in this Holy City ever can be.
He did not want to fuck her, Deputy Inspector Walter Carroza, the Yorugua. The girl showed him her I.D. card.
“See? I’m an adult.” She convinced him. He let her lead him on, slowly, it takes time to get him aroused.
“I’m too skinny,” he warned her, “it’ll be like embracing a skeleton, I don’t think you’ll like it.”
There is no way that anything like love can be born in the sordid rented rooms near headquarters, but a calm sort of relationship did grow up between them, one they both needed and was useful to both of them. He protected her, she gave him a hand when he asked her to. Ana told Carroza that every bone, every cartilage of his was stuffed with wisdom and tenderness. That was all she needed, she said, begging him not to abandon her even if she was the one who asked him to. And Carroza told Ana that her beauty was a chemical weapon of mass destruction, an arsenal concealed in her perfect body, a dose of genocide in her blue eyes and gaze, and that if she helped him she would never be alone, at least as long as she was in Buenos Aires.
“You sent her to the stake. Now the bonfire’s alight, you’re trying to save her by throwing petrol on it,” said Scotty when Carroza told him he had advised her to leave the country.
“All my women are getting shot at, Scotty!” Carroza protested. “I’ve been a confirmed bachelor for far too long to end up twice a widower.”
Impossible for them not to mention Verónica, as they had done when Romano was killed and Carroza had told him he would let some time pass, then approach her and see what happened. But someone else got in before him, the ombudsman, a man twenty years older than her, the father she was looking for.
“The first time Verónica was left a widow by Romano, Yorugua. But the second time, when her ombudsman was killed, she was left an orphan,” Irish Scotty tells him. “Try again, don’t let anyone else get in before you this time. And don’t wait for her to get shot.”
9
She knows it is too late to get off; the carousel is spinning too fast. If her parents had been watching they would have found her funny, with her scared face and her fruitless lunges to grasp the prize. But this time on the merry-go-round there are no horses or Dumbos or planes, only murderers, and she is having no fun at all. Nor are her parents watching her, or her men: she is all alone, looking at herself like someone about to stick a knife in her own body.
She calls the magistrate, but he is not there. He is not in Lomas de Zamora. “He isn’t even in Argentina,” the court secretary tells her. “He’s gone to Melbourne for a jurists’ conference.”
“A magistrate from Lomas at a jurists’ conference?”
“Yes, interesting, isn’t it? Comparative jurisprudence must mean as much to him as Jung’s deep psychology does to a forensic scientist, but the Party is paying and the Party is paid by the taxpayers who support this rotten system; stupid men and women like you and me.”
Laucha Giménez, who has offered to bolster her spirits for a few hours, says Verónica has become anti-democratic. Halfway to becoming a fascist, in fact.
“What do you want, another dictatorship?”
“They don’t need one,” Verónica tries to explain. “That’s why it doesn’t happen. Now they’ve got these unspeakable thieves. They don’t cost as much as the military and they have one big advantage: they don’t go round making speeches about the fatherland and it would never occur to them to go to war with Chile or England.”
The day before a poor innocent bystander had been shot in the center of the city, but today none of the media even mentioned it. Only her and the Spanish bar owner remembered it, for very different reasons. Too late to pull any punches. Even if the accountant drew up a report in which the Riachuelo market came out looking like the Disneylandia he had promised to take his grandchildren to, her appointment as inspector had lit a fuse. And if it was one big powder keg, the tiniest spark meant danger.
“We have to get to the bottom of it, now we’ve gone this far,” she tells the accountant on the telephone, to the dismay of Laucha Giménez, who cannot understand where her friend’s vocation for suicide comes from.
“I do my job, doctora,” says the accountant. “You have to understand, I’m a professional, not a mercenary. I’m not going to throw my reputation to the dogs for the sake of a magistrate.”
“A magistrate who’s abandoned us,” growls Verónica, then immediately wishes she hadn’t said it. Laucha’s warning grimaces are too late to stop her. At the far end of the line, the accountant is silent as the grave, until finally he blurts out:
“What do you mean, he’s abandoned us?”
Verónica gestures back at Laucha who is waving her arms at her. It’s as if the two of them were trying to work out how not to scare a coward with a tale that would make Poe or Lovecraft’s hair stand on end.
“Nothing. He’s out of the country for a couple of days at a conference for jurists. I called to discuss it with him.”
“To discuss what, doctora?”
“Getting to the bottom of what’s going on at the market.”
She tries to wriggle free from the avalanche of questions and to reassure him, but the accountant is a grandfather who has principles. He has grandchildren he wants to take to Disneylandia, but not at the expense of his integrity. He is a professional, not a mercenary.
They laugh when he hangs up, after Verónica’s efforts to reassure or confuse him.
“While you were at it, you should have told him that when you were having coffee with a policeman friend they sprayed you with bullets,” says Laucha. “Then you’d see how quickly he forgets the idea of going with his grandchildren to the land of Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck.”
“It’s the magistra
te who is in for a surprise,” Verónica replies. “If he knew what’s about to hit him he would hide in a kangaroo pouch and ask for asylum in Australia.”
Laucha points out that Verónica is the one most in danger, not the magistrate or the accountant.
“You’re the inspector. It’s your face everyone has seen in those dark market alleys.” Laucha is already nibbling at fifty with her tiny, sharp teeth. She stopped ovulating two years earlier and now when she is with a man has no idea if she is flushing because she is turned on or because it is the menopause. She is small, one meter sixty tall, still shapely, with a healthy sexual appetite, although that is causing her problems. She does not understand frigid women. “They don’t know how to fuck,” she says. “They’re the victims of a lamentable machista education.”
“They start with what should be the end,” says Verónica knowingly. “They want to get married.”
She says this out of bitter experience. She is forty-five and has an exultant body, a cup overflowing with life that has suddenly become target practice for dark, shadowy figures.
“You need a lover,” Laucha declares. “One who isn’t a cop, a magistrate, or a certified accountant. And not that useless guy you stay up all night waiting for. A man like a sports car with the hood down, so that you can see the stars even if you’re flying along at a thousand k.p.h. Someone who’s more interested in the beauties of Andromeda than the traffic lights on the street corner. An artist, a romantic, even if in his spare time he’s a whore or a drug addict.”
Verónica reminds her of the experience she had with the Tibetan, a rock musician.
“I gave up everything when I fell in love with him. I closed my office and joined him in the caravan he and the band went on tour in. Rehearsals, interviews, concerts with hallucinating, noisy adolescents shouting ‘Do it! Do it!’ all the time, as if it was a mass love-in.”
“That’s what they buy the tickets for, don’t get jealous,” the Tibetan would tell her between the screaming and the drum solos, concerts where they sweated on stage like miners digging in their mines, cursing a capitalist society destined for the holocaust in songs impossible to decipher, then between tours getting together with an accountant the spitting image of the grandfather Verónica has just been talking to. They wanted proper accounts and safe investments for their money. “There’s no way we’re going to leave any of it here in this country, it’s bound to get stolen,” the Tibetan used to insist. When he was not drugged, he dreamt of a white house with windows looking out on the Mediterranean.
“And when he was drugged?”
“Two white houses overlooking the Mediterranean. It’s the same world, Laucha. There aren’t two planets circling around one on top of the other, the unknown dimension is part of the system, the mysteries of having to pay taxes so that the powerful can continue to pull the strings and go on making money. When our bones ache, or our joints feel stiff, it’s not due to our hormones, Laucha, it’s the strings digging into our flesh where we’ve been pulled and pushed around so much at other people’s whim. ‘They climax,’ the Tibetan used to boast to the others in his band, ‘well, some of them do, I’ve never counted how many, but they touch themselves while we’re playing. But it’s not sex, just madness.’”
It lasted three months. That was as long as Verónica could hold out. The tours did not always bring in money, so what Verónica had saved went on emergencies and debts, concerts canceled due to bad weather or because nobody turned up—the Tibetan was no Charly García. Also there were towns in the interior where the only tunes they ever heard were folkloric dances: when they saw “THE TIBETAN AND HIS BAND” on posters, the people in those godforsaken holes thought they could dance square dances and quadrilles to their music.
“I hit rock bottom and decided that was enough. Besides, I’m a lawyer. After three months his probationary period was up and I fired him.”
She had opened her legal office again. As she did not have a cent, she put an advert in the paper and that was how Bértola turned up. From then on they shared expenses: traumas and inheritances, Oedipal complexes and habeas corpuses.
“And what happened between you and Bértola the other night when you went to his place?” Laucha wants to know, already savoring what she expects to hear from Verónica.
“He said goodnight with a peck on the cheek”
10
Fewer than ten blocks separate the Alas Building and the Buenos Aires Sheraton. In the Alas building, Osmar Arredri and Sirena Mondragón are still tied up and gagged, under the watchful eye of the guard who is the twin of the rat scampering along the rafters. In the Buenos Aires Sheraton, the manager is trying to convince the dozen journalists and as many cameramen who have gathered that nobody has called a press conference there.
The executives of the hotel owners’ association are adamant: the abduction in broad daylight of three tourist couples from the Queen of Storms cruise liner has to be kept quiet until they reappear. Buenos Aires is not Bogotá or Lima; Argentina is not Chile or Peru. If the kidnapping for ransom of foreign tourists were to hit the front pages, the lucrative tourist industry could be badly hit. It is one thing to travel to the Third World because it is cheap and they copy what is on offer in Europe so well. It is quite another if travelers become goods to be bartered for. The government has called the tourism bosses to make sure the news does not get out. The Queen of Storms needs a few more days’ repairs; meanwhile, according to the government “the law enforcement officers have begun a painstaking search of the whole city,” starting of course with the usual dens where criminals hide, “the shanty towns or favelas where those scum live,” as the government officials are shouting at local bureaucrats in places where the city is not quite as glossy as in the tourist pamphlets.
But the tourists from the liner are up in arms. Not so much over the fate of their kidnapped fellow passengers, but because many of them have still not found rooms and have had to spend a second night in hotel corridors.
What at first was only a rumor is now confirmed. No-one can locate the three couples, who just happen to be the richest of all the group, the ones who drink vintage wines at their tables and prefer to travel round the cities they visit in limousines rather than agency minibuses.
The only abduction that has been officially recognized (because it took place in a hotel and in front of everyone) is that of someone who, they now find out, runs the drugs racket in a large part of Bogotá. Nobody knows or cares whether the drugs boss boarded the Queen of Storms for a rest or to carry on his deals on the ship. “It’s high time that travel agencies took more care when they draw up their passenger lists,” one English tourist protests, in English, during the curious press conference taking place in the central hall of Retiro railway station.
The old, refurbished Victorian station (built over a century ago by the English) is an opera house where baritone and tenor voices, sopranos and contraltos, respond discordantly to questions put to them by a group of very young journalists all trying to get a scoop. They are there because their editors have shouted at them to “come back with a big story, really big, or you can start looking for another job.” They are pushing and shoving each other and shouting even louder than the bleating tourists. The office sheep on the way home from their daily slaughterhouses stare in astonishment at this impromptu performance, although most of them rush straight past without looking in order not to miss their daily commuter train. Both the foreign tourists and the office sheep are travelers. They share a desire to continue with their journey; the only thing that distinguishes them is how much they have paid to arrive at their destination.
On the television screen that the two captives cannot see on the fortieth floor of the Alas building, Rosamonte and Sergeant Ramón Capello watch the rowdy press conference that is being shown live from Retiro. Sergeant Capello is not from the federal police but the air force. He is a “redneck,” as the air-force officers like to call their N.C.O.s. He is there under orders from Group Captain
Castro, who is a close associate of Oso Berlusconi. Castro lives on the twenty-third floor of the same building with his no-longer young wife and spinster daughter. She is almost as unattractive as Rosamonte and he has already given up hope that one day someone will take her off his hands.
Oso personally asked Captain Castro to do him this favor. At night it is hard to find policemen to guard the prisoners; nearly all of them are trying to earn a bit on the side in private security firms, or as stewards at football games. So there is a gap of six hours before he, Oso, can come to interrogate the prisoners himself.
“I’ll send my adjutant up,” Captain Castro told Oso. “He’s a trustworthy redneck from Chaco Province. He can deal with any emergency; he was brought up in the hills slitting pigs’ throats.”
Oso is wary of Castro’s boasts. Castro is someone whom his comrades-in-arms would not have in their airports scam and who is trying to curry favor so that he is not kicked off what they call the “drugs jumbo,” a virtual airline that comes and goes, passing with its cargo through all the controls without a problem, carrying more cocaine than passengers and never showing a profit. Oso does not trust Castro after he heard the story that he chickened out in 1987 when the rebel army officers were about to topple the constitutionally elected president Raúl Alfonsín. In those days, Castro was a flight lieutenant in charge of a helicopter gunship that was meant to strafe all those traveling in the presidential limousine. The mission failed when he asked over the radio if all the rebels were off their heads, landed his helicopter at the port of Olivos, then embarked on a yacht with his lover, the daughter of a big landowner. The attempted coup was a failure. Castro was saved from the purges that followed, but he never reached the rank of brigadier and was still living with his family in an apartment block where the rats ran the tenants’ association.
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