Holy City

by Guillermo Orsi

  The three couples snatched near Puerto Madero as they were enjoying the European climate with which Buenos Aires sells itself in travel brochures have been split up in three separate but neighboring shacks. They are resting, in a South-American way, bound hand and foot on earth floors, gagged to the point of suffocation.

  They are kept awake by wafts of the warm, rotten stench from the Riachuelo, fouling what little air they manage to suck in through their gags. The guards take turns in the boring task of staring at them like insects. Every three hours a new man or woman appears (because female personnel are also being used in the operation). No-one has told any of them how much ransom is being demanded, if their prisoners are going to die or to be allowed to go home once the payments have been verified in accounts held in distant islands, accounts opened in the names of the typical frontmen who run all the illegal payments that contribute so much to the flow of capital around this globalized world.

  It is probable that Oso Berlusconi forced Carroza out of the way as he raced down the Avenida General Paz at 140 k.p.h., on his way to the Riachuelo. During his long police career, Carroza has been more concerned not to use his siren than about the bullets that have whizzed past him or even buried themselves in his meager flanks. Oso Berlusconi enjoys speed. He likes to push his way past unsuspecting motorists, siren blazing, forcing them to skid or to end up on the verges facing the wrong way. That is why he became a cop, as well as to sink an iron fist into the flabby stomachs of the Jews of Once or calle Libertad whenever he is searching for the fences of gold and precious stones after a jewelers’ or bank security boxes have been raided.

  Oso’s gray Toyota turns silently into the main alleyway of the Decamisados de América, looking like just another of the old wrecks that litter the banks of the Riachuelo. Oso was careful to switch off the siren when he left headquarters on this unofficial mission, to enter the shanty town at walking pace, and then pull up next to a heap of bricks and sand that the local worker priest hopes to use to build his church for outcasts, to sell them the Christian illusion that it is possible to save their souls and to multiply the loaves and fishes.

  Oso Berlusconi’s heart is clouded by the same Catholicism that inspires the worker priest. That is why he calls his snub-nose 9 m.m. “Rerum Novarum,” a homage to Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical that proposed to save the poor from capitalist oppression without falling into the clutches of the totalitarian red devil. Oso remembers it in the same way he does the fairy tale of Snow White and the seven depraved dwarves, or Little Red Riding Hood and a transvestite, gluttonous wolf. He was forced to read the encyclical out loud in the church of San José in Almagro by a faceless nun stinking of old people’s urine-soaked nappies, who insisted on hugging him while she gave him a gentle warning about the eternal punishment awaiting him if he did not study his catechism. The fans from the Los Penales bar applauded and fell about laughing in the church doorway, to the horror of the nuns and the parish priest, and the delight of his school mates and friends. That childhood humiliation branded the encyclical on his mind forever more, so that like some black medieval monk he swore he would annihilate any poor person who crossed his path with any thought of expropriation: “Most true it is that by far the larger part of the workers prefer to better themselves by honest labor rather than by doing any wrong to others. But there are not a few who are imbued with evil principles and eager for revolutionary change, whose main purpose is to stir up disorder and incite their fellows to acts of violence,” said the encyclical, and Oso, still in those days little Oso, swore he would employ his last bullet so that “the authority of the law should intervene to put restraint upon such firebrands, to save the working classes from being led astray by their maneuvers and to protect lawful owners from spoliation.”

  This crusade of Oso Berlusconi’s is a long, bloody and often exasperating one, although he has not come to the Descamisados de América shanty town following his ideals, but in search of finance. He strokes the butt of Rerum Novarum like a father caressing his young son’s head, as if his weapon were in more danger than him.

  Yet he smiles tenderly, with satisfaction. This is also why he became a cop.

  2

  When he knocks on the door of the caravan that Verónica uses as an office, Carroza still has Carolina on his mind. Strictly speaking, he is not thinking: it is more like an intense red image, the dark waters of death the uninitiated confuse with blood. He shakes his head like a dog refusing to be stroked. Deputy Inspector Carroza has the ability to push away his troubles without even having to scratch.

  He leans his right hand against the door and heaves. It barely shifts, so instinctively his left hand closes round the handle of the .38 he has stuffed down his trousers.

  He has seen films, documentaries and Greenpeace propaganda where whales are shown stranded on beaches or harpooned on the high seas, and then cut up on the deck of a Japanese factory ship. But he has never seen a whale calf so close, or stumbled over one, although he knows, even before he sees him, that this particular specimen was not butchered by the Japanese.

  The barrel of the .38 is the first thing inside the caravan before Carroza manages to ease the door open enough to slide his bones in, then spin round like a top, expecting either an attack or to find Verónica’s body as well. For one despicable moment he thinks it would be a relief to find her dead. That way there would be no room in his life for another disappointment: he could go out and kill without worrying that someone might be waiting for him with his dinner cooked, the bed warm, an armchair and soft lights, a fire for the winter that will soon arrive and never ever leave.

  But Verónica is standing behind him, her splendid figure framed in the open doorway like an improvised, fleeting Modigliani canvas. Like her skin, the silence she adopts to avoid screaming and convulsing with rage and fear, perhaps bursting into tears, is smooth and fragile as porcelain.

  “You said Chucho was with you,” Carroza reproaches her, because that still comes easier than embracing her.

  *

  The hustle and bustle of the market continues uninterrupted by the arrival of two police cars and an ambulance. A moment before he is lifted into it, Verónica draws her finger round the hole in Chucho’s forehead where the bullet penetrated his brain, already switched off by gin and boredom. All that firepower he had, all the energy he expended to fetch and carry her, even following her when she decided to get out and catch a bus, all that armor plating and the tinted windows in his car, which he boasted was like a tank, doctora, so that even if Serbs and Croats united and decided to attack they would not even make a scratch on it. “You get on with your work in peace, put all this gang of criminals behind bars where they belong, I’ll take care of you.”

  “And I left him on his own.”

  “Yes, and drunk,” Carroza reminds her. “I would have killed him myself if I had found him stretched out like that and you wandering alone around the market.” It even seems easier to talk about Carolina than about what has just happened for this sentimental skull of a man, who has a vague idea scratching at the back of his mind and who is still clutching the butt of his .38 as he pours whisky into their plastic cups. It is no more than a feeling, a flash of light in the darkness, that he prefers to close his eyes to and go back to his cop routine. “Call that unscrupulous rat of a magistrate tomorrow morning and resign.”

  “I asked for whisky, not orders,” says Verónica, picking up the beaker and downing the drink with a grimace as if it was medicine.

  “They’re going to kill you, Verónica. They’re going to kill us all and no-one will even lift a phone to ask for any explanation.”

  “They could have done that before, while I was walking through the market.”

  “That’s true, but they don’t want any fuss, for now at least. Who the fuck is interested in a bodyguard? He didn’t even have a name apart from ‘Chucho.’ I bet the magistrate doesn’t know his name either. They could have shot us in the bar, they know how to shoot when they want t
o.”

  “You know something.”

  “That’s why I came. I only took a quarter of an hour, driving carefully. And look what happened.”

  “You should have put your foot down, Walter. You let laws over-rule your instinct. You’d let your mother be killed rather than go against the regulations.”

  “And this is a lawyer speaking.”

  “I don’t defend laws, I defend people.”

  “There aren’t any people in this city, Verónica. Only monsters,” Deputy Inspector Carroza says. He chews the end of a pencil and starts to draw oval shapes on a sheet of paper he has torn from the diary. “Murderers, the sort who ought to be dead and even when they are, you need to make sure they won’t come back.”

  “That’s what you lot are there for,” she says. “What are you drawing?”

  “Heads. Three up to now. The three heads missing from three bodies. I only just found out about them. That’s why I called you and came to find you”

  “Whose heads are they?” asks Verónica, her voice reflecting the ever-present fear that the end of the world is much closer than the Scriptures say.

  Three isolated incidents, not even remarked on. In chronological order, the first headless body appeared in the Peruvian jungle. Shining Path was nothing more than a memory: Abimael Guzmán was behind bars in his striped pajamas, but a few of his followers carried on robbing travelers, hunting birds, small-time drugs dealing, in order to survive.

  “I went sniffing around in the Peruvian press when I learned how Ana Torrente’s coronation as Miss Bolivia ended up.” With a shudder, Verónica realizes that this thinking skull knows more about Ana than she does and that she might not like to hear what he knows, but that this is the reason for him being there, not to scrape up the corpse of a gin-soaked whale calf. “I told her to go and see you,” Carroza admits, referring to Ana. “She needed a lawyer and didn’t trust any of the police ones. Come to that, nor do I.”

  But even the remnants of Shining Path did not go in for beheading their counterrevolutionary enemies. Of course, habits can change: extremes of climate and hardships can alter the behavior of even the most orthodox believers. If there had been only one case, it might have gone unnoticed, possibly attributed to a gourmet puma or a stray head-shrinker. Losing one’s head is not news even for prominent politicians, the ones who are so keen on having others beheaded.

  No, it was the second headless body that caught Deputy Inspector Carroza’s attention.

  “The body appeared in San Pedro, 170 kilometers from Buenos Aires. The local police say there was no head, but as far as I know heads don’t get up and walk away.” Carroza takes off his jacket and wraps it round Verónica’s shoulders. She is shivering, affected by what has happened and by the ghoulish story Carroza is telling her. “Ana Torrente had been in San Pedro,” he continues. Verónica draws the jacket closer around her. The air is an icy dagger at her throat. Carroza does not give her time to ask how he knows this. “I sent her,” he says. “Miss Bolivia and I work together.”

  3

  Sated by now with tango and the best steaks, the tourists from the Queen of Storms stranded in Buenos Aires are beginning to ask one another when they are going to leave this crazy port of call, this noisy, dirty city so full of ragged poverty once you step outside the circuits marked by the guides, the threatening sort of poverty that tourists find attractive in Bombay or Rio, but do not expect to find in Buenos Aires, so far away in the south, but so European. “And talking of guides, what can have become of that charming man, born somewhere down here, in Paraguay wasn’t it?” says an old, jewel-bedecked woman in a restaurant in the smart Palermo Soho district, rummaging in her bag for the gold card that will allow her to pay for her barbecue and vintage wine in six installments.

  “He’s a Casanova, a babe-fucking machine,” says the blond woman in her forties sitting beside her. She has kept her legs closed since the night the charming guide fucked her in her cabin for a hundred dollars, including the hit of cocaine he sold her: a real bargain. The blond asked Pacogoya for a kiss when he left before dawn the next morning: “That’ll be another twenty dollars,” was the charming reply from the fairytale Paraguayan Casanova, that miniature version of the mythical guerrillero who turned Fidel’s hair white when he called for the revolutionary flame to ignite the whole of Latin America, until Fidel could breathe more easily again after Che’s ordeal and crucifixion in Bolivia.

  Pacogoya himself is facing another ordeal in the Descamisados de América, one that has nothing to do with the socialist revolution. Nobody told him he could not go home when it was all over. They simply asked him to stay in the fourth shack for now, to offer support for the changing guards. He knows the prisoners and their names; he can even speak their languages a little, so the captors need him. They do not seem at all concerned that the tourists from the Queen of Storms have begun to notice his absence. He may not be the only tourist guide—“but I’m the only one who supplies them with drugs,” he says in his own defense. “Bunch of stinking junkies, they can put up with it for a couple of days, or commit suicide if the withdrawal symptoms are too much for them,” Pacogoya is told. “We need you here, your job isn’t finished yet.”

  It had all been too good to last. The drugs within reach, ready to be sold, on Uncle’s bed. The delivery of the three couples to vehicles traveling with special permits along streets barred to traffic in the city center. Pacogoya thought all he had to do then was to return to his apartment in Recoleta to sit and wait. Perhaps he could call Verónica, by now she must be sorry for kicking him in the balls like that and wanting to spend a satisfying night with him, lent added flavor by a visit to a Greek restaurant in Las Cañitas district where he had promised to take her.

  That is what he did, or tried to do, after the third handover. Like the Pied Piper of Hamelin, he took the third couple to try out a pretty little restaurant between two side streets. “Only people from Buenos Aires go there, they serve tender meat, pizza with real cheese and a rough wine from the coast,” he told them, as if promising the delights of the Garden of Eden. The Hiatsu cut them off at the cobblestoned corner in San Telmo and three men who spoke no German bundled them into it head first, without even telling them where they were going. The German pair (the third couple Pacogoya had handed over that day) did not at first understand that this little unprogrammed diversion was not part of the tour, because their guide sat up front with the driver and started talking animatedly with him in that tribal language Latinos have, while the other two gentlemen tied them up and gagged them with thick plastic tape, and then covered their eyes with masks like the ones they themselves used to get some sleep with on planes.

  When they reached the Descamisados de América shanty town and unloaded the Germans, by now rigid with panic as well as manacled, Pacogoya clapped the driver on the back and said to them all, “Well, lads, it’s been a pleasure working with you.” The fourth man, who had not taken part in the abduction but remained sitting silently in the vehicle keeping an eye on the captives like a mastiff watching over a pair of cats, opened his mouth for the first time to say: “‘Well, lads,’ my ass, you’re staying with us—where do you think you’re going?”

  *

  Fewer than two hundred meters separate Pacogoya’s endless vigil and the whispered conversation between Verónica Berutti and Deputy Inspector Walter Carroza. If the guide who supplies cocaine and tourists knew that the woman with whom he imagined spending the night was so close by, he might have made a desperate attempt to escape. Nobody is guarding him and the darkness around the shacks is barely lit by the glow from the market.

  Verónica does not know whether to confess to Carroza that Pacogoya is on the list of people who have been to San Pedro. She is even less inclined to do so when she learns that Ana sprayed the drugs dealer with bullets from her own beloved Bersa, the trophy from her first widowhood she should never have lent her. Especially because, although it is apparently a known fact that Ana executed the deale
r, nobody has arrested her. And that nobody is of course Walter Carroza.

  “Because I wasn’t born yesterday. Your Bersa would be nothing without Ana Torrente. It would be safely hidden in the drawer you got it out of and that bastard in San Pedro, who besides selling drugs to eight-year-old kids on the way home from school wanted to fuck her up the ass without paying, would be alive and trafficking like so many others, licking the hand of the Lomas police chief.”

  So that was it. A bag of bones and cracker-barrel moralizing held together the skeleton that is Deputy Inspector Walter Carroza. His alliance with Miss Bolivia is nothing more than a cocktail, a brew created out of their common hatred of rapists. But how does he know, or imagine, that there was no kitchen knife after the Bersa? Isn’t it too much of a coincidence that her manager, brought to justice by the remnants of the Maoist revolution in Peru, also appeared headless? Or is there a butcher following in the footsteps of Miss Bolivia, someone who tidies up the mess she leaves behind her, like someone switching off the light in a room that someone else has left on?

  They leave the market. Veronica locks the door to her caravan as if she were leaving her cottage in the country. A man hired to protect her has just been killed and then removed from the scene like a drunk lying in the road.

  “What do you mean, you’re from the federal police, deputy inspector? This is a matter for the province,” the officer in charge of the removal of the body told him coldly. “The stiff is one of his honor’s men and his honor works for the mayor of Lomas. Let them take care of it. Tomorrow is another day. This isn’t your jurisdiction, deputy inspector, go and get some sleep—if possible, with the young lady, ho ho.”

  Not a drop of blood remained on the caravan floor. Instead of chemicals to analyze it, a floor mop with bleach and then everyone home to bed. And the whale calf to the morgue.