Holy City

by Guillermo Orsi

  Oso does not like dykes, though, or queers. Nor the Pope, although he is a fervent Catholic.

  He calls out her rank again. When there is no reply, he edges his way into the room, swiveling his gun round 180°. Nobody had better appear now, because he will fill them full of lead.

  He searches the apartment, then uses his mobile to call Group Captain Castro’s home number.

  “What do you mean, he’s not there? Doesn’t that bastard son of a bitch sleep with you?”

  Groggy from the pills she has taken, Castro’s wife cannot get out the words properly. She has no idea who is calling, or why he is shouting at her like this.

  “Wait, I’ll go and look for him if it’s so urgent,” she manages to stammer, but Oso is already thundering his way down from the fortieth floor to the group captain’s apartment. He hammers on the door, kicking it hard to stress the message. The whole building trembles, more from his boots than from the wind. If he had been Frankenstein’s monster, his hair would have stood on end when he saw her, but Oso has seen uglier women: he has even slept with some. Nothing is going to stand in his way. He does not wait for her to ask him in, but pushes past her, then searches through every room, behind every bit of furniture. The wife is furious, but not with him. An onrush of hatred can clear the mind of any amount of drugs. Her central nervous system gleams like a warrior’s sword. “I know where to find him. Follow me … that swine.”

  She lurches out of the apartment, pulling Oso with her in the slipstream of her anger. She stumbles, but immediately rights herself and plunges on. She is wearing an ankle-length nightgown, her face is covered in cream and she has a hairnet on. Add an oxygen mask and she could be an alien from a lost world, the kind of alien for whom marriages must continue at all costs and man must not separate what God (who is a little further off now, as they have descended twenty floors) has joined together.

  “That bitch! As if she didn’t have enough losing her husband in a whorehouse in the asshole of the world, the stinking cow!”

  She starts pounding on the door of the apartment on the seventeenth floor, but Oso quickly pushes her aside and fires at the lock. Then he kicks the door open with his boot. He tries to get past the cuckolded wife and ends up shoving her onto a table, where she smashes a collection of small ivory statues the dead airman must have brought back from his heroic missions to the furthest east.

  The apartment looks neat and tidy. The lights of Puerto Madero are reflected in the dining room windows. It must look very picturesque in the daytime. “The rats have got a privileged view of the river,” thinks Oso as he strides toward the bedroom, where catastrophe awaits him.

  It is the scream from the woman behind him, who has managed to extricate herself from the ruins of Asian art, that horrifies him more than the massacre in front of him. The group captain is sitting up against the headboard of the bed as if he is about to be served breakfast—except that he would not be able to enjoy it much, because he has no head. The widow is lying prone across his body, face down on Castro’s prick. Shot to death in full fellatio.

  Oso Berlusconi is not having a good night. If only he had the murder weapon in his hands he would finish off the surviving widow, just to stop her screaming.

  He leaves the apartment and leaps down the stairs four at a time. The exercise makes him feel twenty years younger. In the end, it is all a game and in his youth he was always a good sportsman.

  The guard is surprised to see him coming out of the door to the stairs.

  “Don’t tell me the lift broke down again, at this time of night. Did you find the group captain?”

  He does not seem to hear the screams of the recently bereaved widow seventeen floors up. When Oso points this out to him, he smiles briefly. “It’s normal,” he says. “There are married couples fighting every night in this slum.”

  “What happened?” asks Miss Bolivia, turning the radio down as he thumps back into the car.

  “Nothing. A few problems.”

  Oso turns the radio up again. That bandoneón.

  “It’s been playing for quite a while,” she says. “Ever since you left. It’s nice music; a bit sad.”

  “It’s tango, you idiot. And it’s Pichuco playing.”

  He switches on the engine and pulls out slowly, glancing warily at the former studios of the state-run television station. He thinks he can see what looks like candlelight inside and before speeding off wonders once again what on earth they are storing in there.

  Beyond the street corner, in some darkened back room of the Holy City, Pichuco, Fats Troilo, stops playing and opens his eyes.

  PART THREE

  God Exists, Man Only Sometimes

  1

  The taste of blood mingling with the sickly savor of lipstick. That is how her nights so often finish.

  She should have stayed in Bolivia. Or at least in that lawyer woman’s apartment. What’s the use of the Bersa if she can’t empty it into the body of the bastards who beat her up when something goes wrong? Or worse still, those who fondle her, ask her to kneel in front of them, “You know what you have to do, baby.” Second-rate actors, dreadful scriptwriters, there is never a happy ending, an embrace, a fond farewell. Only corpses.

  Oso brought the car screeching to a halt two blocks from headquarters. Instead of unlocking the doors, he sat behind the wheel staring into the distance, as if looking for something in the deserted street.

  “You talked to someone” He had switched off the radio, the engine, the city. “Don’t be frightened, Bolivia. I know you didn’t give me away. I’m just asking a question.”

  Obviously it was not a question. He wanted her to give him a name. It did not even matter what they had talked about.

  “I talked to my godfather, Deputy Inspector Carroza.”

  “I’m your godfather.”

  “You’re my sugar daddy.” The back of his hairy, hard hand, a warm hand she has kissed and licked in grateful thanks, split her lip. Another night of blood and lipstick. “I didn’t betray you!” she groaned.

  “Of course not. If anyone betrays me I don’t slap them, I kill them.” He unlocked the car doors. She wound down the window, desperate for some fresh air. “Get out of here. What are you waiting for?”

  To Ana’s surprise, he switched the police siren on.

  “I didn’t know you had a siren on your Toyota.”

  “We cops have sirens in our assholes. Get out, I don’t want to see you.”

  She had difficulty climbing out of the car. Oso had parked some way from the curb, in a puddle. She tottered on her high heels, then finally managed to straighten up and feel more sure of herself.

  “Don’t do anything to my godfather.”

  She slammed the car door shut, knowing that having his car door slammed made Oso more furious than any insult. She slipped her hand inside her bag and felt reassured at the cool touch of the Bersa. The Toyota pulled away, its siren howling like a dog that has had its tail trodden on.

  Ana ran her tongue over her bloody lip and realized something. She had been right to come here from Bolivia.

  *

  But no-one can escape from hell. It accompanies us wherever we go: when we die there are no surprises, we are on familiar ground.

  In his lair on Azara in the Boca district not far from the Río Riachuelo, Deputy Inspector Walter Carroza is looking at photos he has downloaded from the Internet. He bought a computer a couple of months earlier and is still learning how to use it, but it already has become indispensable. He threw out the last woman who dared leave a pair of knickers and a toothbrush behind, then reappeared the next day aiming to cook dinner for him. He gets more turned on by porn on the net than by the dregs of womankind who, because of his age, history and economic situation, are all he is able to pick up. The rotting hulks on the banks of the Riachuelo are closer to Atlantic liners than these conquests to any real woman.

  Miss Bolivia is not love. Both of them are clear about that, yet it feels good to meet her now and
then, to caress each other while there is still some warmth in their bodies, to console one another like shipwreck victims who drink a toast in salt water on their liferaft.

  He dreams of Verónica. Even when he is with Miss Bolivia he closes his eyes and dreams of Verónica as a bride in white, with an orange-blossom bouquet. A choir of drug-addict angels is singing the Ave María while he whispers in her ear and she laughs softly, although he is not whispering words of love but telling her in great detail how Romano was shot and who did it, and how they celebrated afterward, just as when Boca Juniors football team wins a championship. After all, if Romano beat her the way she claims he did, if he smashed her face like that, the world is not as unjust as preachers say it is.

  It is 2 a.m. and Carroza has been staring at photos for three hours. He has printed out half a dozen of them, but he is not happy about the way they came out. They were better on screen, the depth behind their gazes, the splinters of hell glittering in their pupils.

  He had downloaded the file that afternoon at headquarters and put it on his hard disk earlier that night. These are not ordinary murderers, people who simply kill to get rid of someone out of lust, passion, or greed. These are beasts that would make even Beelzebub cross himself if he saw them. Carroza too, although he is little more than a skeleton held together by memories and a certain sadness, finds them repulsive, finds it hard to look at them peering out so defiantly from the screen: powerful, invincible, even though some of them (he does not know how many or whom) are already dead.

  It was Scotty’s idea that he glance at this gallery of rapists, murderers and shit-eaters genetically programmed or sent by God, the hard core of the accursed seed from which the universe once germinated.

  “There they are,” Scotty said. “Nobody pays them any attention. Some are already stiffs, others are still cooking human flesh or eating it raw, but they make no noise about it, they go around silently, disguised as ordinary people. Every so often I see myself in them, it’s better than looking into a mirror.”

  Somebody, on some occasion, arrested them, took them in for a misdemeanor that was more than just a parking ticket. Somebody knew what they were, even though most of them were never accused of anything and had to be released, lions with their appetites sated, part of the pack.

  The computer program lets Carroza group them together in an album. Just as when he was a kid and collected stickers with famous actors, football stars, heroes from history. They have all done something: they cannot hide it, unable to pretend they are innocent even if their faces were burned away with acid. Nor would they want to, it is obvious: they are proud of themselves, they are free forever of any torment of guilt.

  “One of them looks familiar to me.”

  Scotty asks who the sweet Jesus is talking at 2:30 a.m.

  “It’s you, Yorugua, who else could it be? At this hour in the morning everyone’s either asleep or fucking. Only you would think of doing overtime.”

  “More than familiar, he’s someone from my close circle, Scotty. As if it was your own face but for the moment you can’t remember your name.”

  “I’m not one of your close circle,” Scotty defends himself. “What you’ve got is called Alzheimer’s. I can recommend the pills my father-in-law takes. They’ll at least stop you talking all this shit.” With that he hangs up, but since the person who called is Carroza, the line stays open until Scotty picks it up again. He feels as though he is being watched by a pitbull in the middle of the night, its eyes fixed on his neck like a bone in an osobuco, just waiting for him to shut his eyes so he can leap on dinner. “What do you want?” he asks.

  “You to tell me where you got those photos.”

  “I told you, off the Internet, from search engines, broadband genius. Once you’ve learned how to use your P.C. you won’t be such a balls-breaker. What does your relative look like?”

  “Big forehead, but it’s intelligence, not baldness. The evil is concentrated in his eyes. Even if he was blind it would still shine. And he’s not my relative.”

  Carroza hears the sound of springs from Scotty’s bed, female protests—the woman sleeping beside him is being pushed aside so that he can sit up and read a notebook or consult his mental archive. Scotty stores a database of criminals where others have thoughts.

  “Write this down. Then get off the line and let me sleep. I’m on duty tomorrow and besides, I’m not sleeping on my own like you are. Your relative is called Torrente. Ovidio Ladislao Torrente Morelos, to give him his full title. His surname comes from an army officer who they say took charge of him when he was newly born in the mountains. That officer was known for such heroic feats as being part of the personal bodyguard of General Banzer, the dictator who ousted Torres. You’d know who he was if you had the slightest idea about the recent history of Latin America.”

  “I couldn’t give a flying fuck about the recent history of Latin America,” says Carroza. “What has this Torrente got to do with Ana Torrente?”

  “I thought Miss Bolivia would have told you her story, Yorugua. I like to know who I’m taking to bed.”

  “She doesn’t say anything. She’s an angel and angels don’t have stories, Scotty, they come down from heaven and are at your side when you need them. You tell me. If you gave me his photo it’s because you knew him and knew I would recognize something about him.”

  “All right, you’ve ruined my night now anyway. But put your light on, make sure the street door is locked and bolted. Believe me, it’ll scare you rigid.”

  *

  He hangs up on Scotty, but immediately calls Verónica directly on her mobile. He does not care if she is asleep or locked in the embrace of someone who has descended from the ships, he has to talk to her, to share the information with her at least. If he is going to be killed tonight he does not want to take all this hangover to the grave with him; his motto is to go to bed on an empty stomach so that he will not have nightmares.

  Verónica is not in bed. She is at the Riachuelo market and she is wide awake.

  “I never heard from her again,” she says, referring to Miss Bolivia.

  “I have, that’s why I want to talk to you.”

  “Come to the market. You can find everything you want here, at the best prices. The market’s crammed with people, Walter.”

  Verónica is the only one who remembers his name, which is another reason he loves her: she preserves his identity as if it were something valuable. “People come from all over to buy here. People with lots of money; some of them even bring their bodyguards. The market is like a convention of bankers, gypsies and gangsters.”

  “Talking of bodyguards, where’s yours?”

  “Right beside me, like my shadow,” Verónica lies.

  Chucho has fallen asleep in the caravan that serves as her office. Boredom and gin have left him curled up in a corner, watching the doctora working on her laptop. This was the opportunity Verónica was looking for to slip out and walk through the market without drawing any attention to herself, mingling with the crowd.

  Carroza promises to be there in fifteen minutes. This is not exactly good news for Verónica: he is a bird of ill-omen, an owl with a police I.D. She would not be surprised if he swivels his head round 180° when he prowls the dark streets of Buenos Aires. It is not that he is afraid of being shot in the back, more that he wants to see the face of whoever has fired at him. He has put so many people “to sleep” that he has lost count. But he has never received a reprimand or an official warning, although his bosses do not consider him a hero either. Romano liked him, but admitted in private that you had to be careful with him: he lives on his own in rented rooms, never in the city center and never for longer than six months. His number is not in the phone book; he does not use credit cards; he does not leave any traces or befriend any shopkeepers. He turns his collar up or looks the other way when he meets a doorman.

  Verónica heads down the central aisle of the market. She is still amazed at the brazenness with which smugglers and aspha
lt pirates display their wares. Even she is almost tempted to buy a twenty-dollar Christian Dior perfume that a circus dwarf who has run away from the circus is waving at the level of her knees and which, despite the difference in their heights, her sense of smell tells her is genuine.

  *

  It is the time and the day—3 a.m. between Saturday and Sunday—when discos fill with dancers and A&E departments overflow with overdosed addicts and people who have been shot or stabbed. The medics cannot cope, and the police come and go sounding their sirens but always arriving too late to do anything: “Attention base, young male badly wounded; attention base, homicide in street brawl; attention base, female raped and thrown in ditch, no signs of life.”

  Deputy Inspector Carroza enjoys the police radio the way others do their favorite nightly music program. Every call is a hit that his police imagination fills in until he has created an Impressionist canvas he would like to paint one day when he has retired—if he is still alive. He studied art in his beloved Montevideo, back in the days when he never dreamt he would cross the widest muddy-brown river in the world, not to sing tangos like some of his school mates, but to shut himself away in cells, ruin his freedom, sink the wolf’s fangs he could never admit to that rose like a nauseating wave of flesh and blood from his throat on that endless night when Carolina was killed.

  *

  From the depths of the Descamisados de América shanty town, the Riachuelo market looks the way New York does from the Statue of Liberty. Or, less spectacularly, the way Buenos Aires looked to Tito Lusiardo as he leaned with Carlos Gardel over the deck rail of the liner bringing them home from Europe. The lights of thieves and sultans glittering in the dark, the spectacular gleam of all that fake gold and all those costume diamonds shamelessly displayed like a Bible or Don Quixote on the bargain tables of the bookshops on Avenida Corrientes.