The deliberately lengthy pause is so that his colleagues can imagine Jennifer, and her twenty-five delicious and obliging years romping over the vast surfaces of the only apparently resting Teuton.
Thanks to Jennifer, the minister called him not long ago to put himself at the disposal, not merely of Germany, France and Italy, but of the whole of Western Christendom in order to rescue the kidnapped tourists that very night.
“He’s a practical, determined man, who I believe has some business in hand with a German company, whose major shareholder just happens to be one of the people abducted. He has immediately given orders to the federal police and an elite force of specialists in recovering kidnap victims has been assembled. They were all trained at the School of the Americas in Panama and will not stop or even sleep until they have found what they are looking for. I have their names here.”
He shows them the fax he has just received on the direct line from the ministry. All ranking officers, no greenhorns, that is obvious from their position and their records. They have freed a number of executives from leading companies without a single one of them being hurt.
“They are commanded by a man who enjoys the minister’s absolute confidence, someone Jennifer herself knows and admires, because she is the one who hands him the checks the minister makes out in his name so that he can continue to defend the constitutional order with such enthusiasm.”
He is implacable, Günther says that Jennifer says. Hard as a rock, rasping voice like a blues singer, one meter ninety tall, a hundred and ten kilos of muscles forged every day in the gym, and a prize-winning marksman. The Italian Ambassador seems delighted when he reads his name.
“Berlusconi, like our Prime Minister! Forza Italia!”
Italians and Germans, all that is missing is the Japanese Ambassador and they could form a new Fascist Axis. The French Ambassador twists his mouth in distaste. He feels outnumbered; he particularly mistrusts Italians and Third World policemen. He is not worried that the squad are hired assassins, he wants them to be serious about it. He points out to the Italian that Berlusconi is listed by his nickname, “Oso” the Bear, rather than his real name.
He willingly accepts a third glass, however. At least the brandy is communist.
8
Verónica knew nothing about Carolina until the rainy morning Romano was buried. She had returned distraught to her apartment from the funeral, not wishing to reach the following day, wondering what on earth came next, whether anything was worth it: all the usual stuff when your world crashes around you. When the phone rang she thought it must be someone unable to go to the funeral ringing to offer condolences, so she did not answer, until it rang again half an hour later.
It was Carroza, calling from some noisy place. Verónica could hear laughter and music in the background, and wondered if he had not heard about Romano: what was going through that guy’s head? She said she was hanging up, because she could not understand what he was saying, he was either drugged or very drunk. And yes, he had called to offer his condolences, but almost as soon as she answered, Carolina made her appearance: “She’s got her arms round me,” said Carroza, “I can’t bear it, I want to go with her right now.”
In her mind’s eye, Verónica saw a hostess, a pathetic forty-year-old in some bar down by the port, embracing Carroza with arms jangling with cheap bracelets, shamelessly stroking his groin, arousing him for the price of a couple of drinks and one of the always crumpled bank-notes the cop carries in the back pocket of his trousers. She hung up, but a faint buzzing told her Carroza was still there, still on the line with his whore. Verónica could not understand it: was he phoning just to show off, or was he going to tell her what he knew about how Romano had died?
“Don’t go,” she heard Carroza’s slurred, desolate voice. “I don’t want Carolina to get her way.”
He pronounced the word Carolina with a kind of shaky tenderness. Nobody spoke about a casual pickup that way, still less a prostitute. But it did not sound as if he was talking about a girlfriend or a lover either, there was no passion in his skull-like voice. Someone as desiccated as Carroza only stayed upright thanks to his obsessions and fears, and if he was in love, as Verónica thought he must be, he went about it like a sleepwalker. He was only aware of it as a headache, as the remote memory of something else he had done, Carroza crawling like an insect across his tiny, vast world.
Carolina, Verónica thinks at once when she picks the phone up late that Sunday evening. Again she hears laughter and background music from some low dive; alcohol, women and Carroza, although this time he is speaking clearly and urgently.
“I’ll come and pick you up,” he says. “Don’t leave until I get there. Don’t open the door for anyone.”
He stifles Verónica’s protest by reminding her of the night of broken windows in pre-war Nazi Germany, when gangs of S.S. rampaged through cities and towns beating up thousands of Jews, and killing many of them. “Kristallnacht,” Carroza says in a harsh German that surprises Verónica. She asks him what on earth the things the Nazis did in 1938 have got to do with her life.
He promises to explain the moment he gets there. She is not to open the door, even to her friends—that could be a trick to get into her apartment. Verónica decides Carroza must have had an attack of paranoia. She calls Bértola.
“What did you give him? What drugs?”
“I don’t prescribe drugs,” says the analyst in self-defense. He is sprawled out on his sofa with his dog, Mauser. “I was reading Derrida. We cannot ignore melancholy, Verónica, or we will forget everything and that will be the end of us.”
“What will be the end of us, or me at least, is something else entirely, Damián. What did you give that cop?”
“In the first place, ‘that cop’ is your friend. He was your deceased first husband’s colleague, who was also a cop. Second, it’s not usual for a cop to come and see me. They don’t much like looking at themselves in the mirror, except to shave. What does his job consist of? Putting people in jail. And yours? Getting people out. What is there in between the two? Ordinary people, deserts, agonies.”
“Don’t play at being a philosopher on the brink of the abyss, Damián. Help me understand what I’m up against.”
“That’s my job, Verónica. But today is Sunday.”
“I know, and yesterday was Saturday. Nobody commits suicide at the weekend.”
“I never said that, don’t exaggerate. That cop would deny his own shadow. That’s why he never eats and smokes like a chimney. But he believes that something exists beyond his personal wasteland, some promised land. In his own way, he is a believer. And like all believers, he’s mistaken.”
Mauser, who had been asleep, suddenly pricks up his ears. He stares inquisitively at Bértola, then pushes his snout toward the receiver, sensing Verónica’s voice, her anxiety.
“He managed to scare me. What they did not succeed in doing by killing my bodyguard, or following us last night, Carroza is doing right now. He says a night of broken glass is at hand.”
An admiring whistle comes down the phone. The psychoanalyst is delighted by any revisiting of mankind’s macabre history.
“And that’s what scared you? Are you Jewish?”
“I don’t know why your clients don’t tell you to take a running jump, Bértola.”
“They do, believe me. Not very often, but sometimes. That guy doesn’t play games, Verónica, he kills for real. He’s a born killer, it’s a talent he has. The rest of us would have our consciences torn to pieces; he only needs to talk, to find someone who will listen, but he is the one who chooses what he wants to repent for. And from what he has told me so far, he doesn’t see any reason to repent. In that sense he’s a disciple of Spinoza.”
“I don’t read philosophy. It bores me.”
“But God exists, Verónica. And philosophy helps you understand what his intentions are.”
*
Oso Berlusconi’s Sunday has been ruined. The sudden call from the mi
nister has ruined the peace of his country retreat, which he reached transporting Pacogoya in the car boot as if he were a tent and equipment for enjoying a camping holiday.
Oso has a small cottage, a few meters from Route Eight, out beyond Pilar. It is an area with lots of weekend places, and gated communities where the rich dream of their paradises and hire people like him to defend them, if necessary by force. But Oso chose to build his refuge outside these bourgeois concentration camps. He loves nature and therefore danger, the fight to survive: it is part of his confused D.N.A.
“You have to find them, Oso,” the minister told him. “You know how to. Set them free tonight and tomorrow you’ll be police chief. I’ll call the president right now to tell him what’s going on and he can draw up the decree.”
The minister did not give him time to object. Being made police chief is no reward, more like a sop for losers who never learned how to make serious money. A police chief is a moving target all politicians can open fire on when something goes wrong, when lefties stir up trouble by infiltrating the trade unions and the slumdwellers’ associations, when they block roads and upset nearly everyone, then get themselves killed so they can call themselves martyrs, or scream that the police chief has to go, along with the minister, why not the entire government while we are at it?
Oso thought he would enjoy Sunday with Pacogoya, but now it is ruined. He carries him, bound and gagged, from the boot of his Toyota. The cops on duty at the road toll booth, on the lookout for drugs mules coming and going from the north of Argentina, breathed a sigh of relief when Oso told them, “I’ll take care of him.” It is Sunday and no-one likes to have to sit at a computer or an Olivetti to draw up reports or fill in forms. They might miss the best of the day, the results of the football matches, if they had to take statements from some poor wretch who knows nothing, who was only used because he is desperate to eat, or is an outcast.
Oso stands Pacogoya up and kicks him into the house. He shuts the shutters and switches on the lights. There is a smell of damp. One day he is going to have to settle accounts with the builder who robbed him blind, charging him for the most expensive materials and pocketing the difference. A bad apple; every line of business has them.
He lifts his forefinger to his lips for silence before he undoes the gag. Pacogoya is whiter than he has ever been. Even after death, his face would look healthier than it does now, confronted by this hired assassin on the state payroll.
“Where are we? What do you want from me?”
Pacogoya thinks Oso wants information about the kidnapped tourists, so he spills the beans at once, as if the gag were merely holding back the outpouring of details. Oso is highly amused at such willingness to collaborate. If every prisoner was like the Che Guevara lookalike, interrogations would be kids’ birthday parties.
Oso does not think that this skinny little drug-addict queer has the information he wants. On top of that, there was the minister’s call. He has to start phoning people to assemble the group in the next couple of hours. The most sensible thing would be to kill the little songbird, throw him into a ditch somewhere, then head back to the capital, getting in touch with his recruits along the way.
He decides against this. Perhaps it will all be over and done with quickly, and he can deal with Pacogoya in the early hours. Oso refuses to accept that Osmar Arredri has been snatched from under his nose. He has to find him, or vent his frustration on someone. Impossible to come up with the money they are demanding at such short notice; they were given until seven on Monday morning, not a moment later. The Queen of Storms sets sail at noon and all deals have to be done by then.
What if Pacogoya knows something? What if as well as handing over the tourists, he heard something, some information about where the Colombian and his girlfriend were being taken? It is unlikely, because it was the military who did it and they work on their own: they have their own planes and ships, they do not need tourist agencies.
Before leaving he switches the lights off. He has gagged Pacogoya once more and left him hanging upside down, in handcuffs, swinging from the wooden beam in the dining room.
What is Pacogoya thinking, lonely as a pendulum in the darkness, with all the blood rushing to his head? He is thinking that if he had agreed to spend that second night with Verónica, perhaps none of this would have happened to him.
9
“It’s only for tonight,” says Carroza as soon as he gets there, explaining what is going on. The operation is starting as he speaks, he himself has to report to someone called Oso the Bear Berlusconi, a retired cop, garbage left over from the dictatorship who for some reason all the politicians are protecting. No-one has ever accused him of anything, even though there were more than a few suspicions about him. He is an effective butcher, Carroza recognizes, especially when it comes to organizing clandestine operations. Which is what this one is.
“What risk am I running? I haven’t kidnapped anyone and have no intention of doing so, unless they try to leave without paying.”
Carroza does not know what she is talking about. Nor does Verónica herself; she is simply trying to take the drama out of the situation; she is so tired of emergencies, of pursuits. But perhaps the skeleton man is right: because of her role as inspector at the Riachuelo market she is in the line of fire in a battle nobody claims responsibility for, one of those habitual pretenses of restoring law and order, a spectacle put on for the media to show how the authorities are fighting corruption, a firework display, smoke and mirrors no-one believes in but everyone applauds.
So she is going to spend the night in his spider’s nest. Verónica finds the idea slightly repugnant, but it does not seem as if there is any more palatable alternative.
“I’ve been living there for two months. It’s not the best neighborhood, but that doesn’t matter, because you’re not going out, until tomorrow at least.”
“Where is calle Azara?” Verónica asks, refusing to remember the names of streets. “I’m not a taxi driver, I have enough trouble trying to remember the numbers of our laws,” she adds in self-defense.
Carroza pulls up outside his apartment and hands her the keys. It is true, the neighborhood does not seem very welcoming: old houses, deserted streets of colonial cobblestones, high pavements for the days when the river rises, overflows the drains and floods everywhere; mist creeping up from the nearby Riachuelo.
“Don’t open the door for anyone or answer the phone. Only your mobile and only then if I call you.”
Verónica feels protected and defenseless in equal measure. Carroza is the one least at risk if blood really starts to flow, because he has already lost most of his. His skinny tissues feed more on memories than on red and white cells. She trusts him, but the immortality she attributes to him is not transferable.
It is too late to reconsider anything now: within the hour all the sharpshooters Oso Berlusconi has called are due to meet up. Fifteen men trained to kill and ready to carry out whatever orders they are given. Carroza still has no idea what it is all about and perhaps will not know until the minute before he has to swing into action. He thinks it must be a big raid, combing through an area where they can discover something to show the press next morning.
“We’re to meet near here, that’s why I thought it must have something to do with the Riachuelo market,” he tells Verónica. “As far as I know, which isn’t much, the place where they’re hiding those tourists can’t be far from that tribe of wandering delinquents.”
Verónica is jolted upright.
“Are the kidnapped people from the Queen of Storms?”
Carroza is no expert in English, but thinks yes, the tourist liner that ran aground in the river. Verónica asks if anyone who was not a cop called him that afternoon. Carroza says no, although he was not at home, he was out digging up the dead, as per usual. He did not miss anything on his mobile—he checks it: no messages or missed calls.
“Stay here, I’ll be back as soon as I can,” Carroza repeats. He is not too conc
erned with her question, he is in a hurry to get to the meeting point. Verónica bites her bottom lip hard. “We’ll talk later,” she says. She does not know whether Pacogoya’s partial confession that morning has anything to do with all this, but she intends to give him a call as soon as she is alone.
*
Far from the Swedish woman in Esquel—although he had not warned her he was coming—and too close to Buenos Aires—although he has no idea where he has been brought to—hanging upside down from the ceiling, Pacogoya starts to swing from side to side, like one of Hemingway’s bells. He is encouraged by the increasingly loud creaking sounds from the wooden beam that the monster tied him to. If he does nothing, his head is going to explode like a blood-filled pomegranate, or the devil is going to come back and torture him to reveal what he does not know.
In extremes such as this, his weak physique is a positive advantage. He does not need iron muscles to overcome gravity and sway energetically to and fro. It is like being in a hammock, although not quite so comfortable, and he becomes as enthusiastic as he was in his childhood. The beam creaks even more loudly. Now Pacogoya is worried that the whole ceiling might come down on top of him, but even so, to die buried like that could never be as fearful or painful as to be slowly finished off at the hands of an unscrupulous son of a bitch who has complete impunity on his side.
The sound of his mobile, which his captor left on the table, takes Pacogoya by surprise. At the first ring, the beam gives way and cracks into several pieces. The clapper drops out of the bell and falls heavily to the floor, although he quickly arches his back to avoid splitting his skull open. Even so, a sharp snap and a stab of pain between the shoulder blades tells him a bone must be broken. He clenches his teeth; he is gagged so tightly he can hardly breathe and the handcuffs are cutting into his flesh; only his feet are free now that the rope has come loose. He tries to stand up, but the pain is so bad he can only kneel: all this penance and not a single virgin in sight. And the mobile is still ringing.
Holy City Page 17