They clamber back into their vehicles and the two armored cars pull slowly away, making their way around the Río Riachuelo. In the distance they can see the lights from the contraband market, where at this time of night the deals being done outside any tax or penal law are at their height. Verónica calculates that ten thousand people visit the market whenever it opens to the public and that nightly sales must come to around six million pesos: that is too much money exchanging hands only a few meters from the biggest hideout of traffickers in the region, the Descamisados de América shanty town.
If the struggle to control the market has cost the lives of first Matías Zamorano, Counselor Pox’s right-hand man and Miss Bolivia’s boyfriend, and shortly afterward poor Chucho, the whale calf the Lomas magistrate had delegated to look after Verónica Berutti, it seems as though this Sunday night the fight to enjoy its profits is moving toward the final battle, even though Oso has presented their expedition as a simple rescue operation.
Despite this, the man in the front with Carroza is wary. He insists he is going to stay in the car until it is all over. Carroza has no opinion and the bald man weighing 130 kilos plus his gun has also fallen silent.
The three of them are veterans. Nobody likes to die, even if they grumble about needing false teeth, their aching joints and Viagra failing, leaving them alone and limp in a hotel bed while the young whore who cannot be more than twenty-five mocks them, “old fart with your droopy prick,” instead of saying farewell with a tender “goodnight poppa.” All that might make them feel like dying, but not really: instead, they want to be as far as possible from the scene of the uncommitted crime, as far as possible in time, looking back to days when they were good-looking, tough and aroused instincts other than pity when they showed off muscles as hard as the guns they kept at their waist or under their shoulder. Days when they were in charge and slammed the door on any romantic pretensions the woman of the moment might entertain, leaving her to choke on her own tears rather than finding themselves abandoned, sagging, existential mincemeat.
They hear instructions on their car radio. They all know what to do, but Oso Berlusconi is a perfectionist, he takes care of every last detail, knows his men by their Christian names and their blood groups. Then again, he cannot allow a single rabbit to escape tonight; that is why he is insisting that they shoot to kill at anyone running away—there cannot be more than three of them, he says, one for each couple of prisoners. Oso knows what he is talking about, because he recruited them. His only fear is that they come out shooting and one of them escapes, then calls a press conference. That is why he will personally make sure he is there in the waste ground behind the shacks, taking aim with the others, gunning down anyone he sees and finishing them off one by one.
“It’ll all be over in five minutes, then we can go and eat a barbecue with red wine in the market restaurant,” he encourages them over the police radio.
“That guy’s a psychopath,” says the bald man, by now covered in sweat.
“That’s why he’s the boss,” says the other one.
“I’m hungry,” says Carroza, leaving the car.
Crouching down and in indian file, the federal cops move into the shanty town. Oso signals for them to fan out to cover the three shacks where the kidnap victims and their guards are meant to be. The darkness in among the tin and cardboard shacks of the Descamisados de América shanty town is complete. It is as though night itself were lurking in the alleys where two people collide if they are going in opposite directions, where filthy water flows as if it were an open sewer and where from every hut come the sounds of shouted abuse, the cries of children, the words and the panting breath of love.
Nor is there any light inside the three shacks that Oso waves them to surround. He chooses Carroza as one of the three men who are to go with him to cover the rear where the guards are bound to try to escape if they have any hope of getting out alive. The provincial police have surrounded the outer perimeter of the slum. Oso has no worries about that squad’s marksmanship. They have been trained with all the rigor of infantry marines: they are only brought out when the provincial authorities give them precise instructions to resolve a situation by shooting first and asking questions afterward.
What Oso agreed with their commander has left no room for doubt: they are to shoot the kidnappers even if they come out with their hands in the air shouting that they want to surrender. They are to reach the morgue weighing twice as much as usual because of the amount of lead in them. As Oso knows from experience, wars, even private ones, are only really won when no prisoners are taken and all witnesses are disposed of.
Deputy Inspector Carroza spits on the palms of his hands and rubs them together, then carefully closes them round his Czech rifle, one of the fifteen that Oso handed out when they met in the empty warehouse in Barracas. When the mobile starts to vibrate in his back pocket, he hesitates over answering this call from an unknown number. This is no time to talk, although he can listen: he takes the call and says nothing, but pays close attention.
At the moment of going into battle, it is not good to discover that the enemy is within your own ranks and that you yourself are in his sights.
11
They have reached that moment when they stare at each other in silence, share a cigarette, start to laugh in a way which begins in either of their faces, then spreads to the other one. The moment for gentle kisses, lips caressing where they had previously been devouring, hands building castles, one on top of the other, “if men only knew,” says Ana, stroking where she has previously penetrated, moving her first finger as if tracing the outline of that other pair of lips where she has just seen her passion ignite and then fade.
Verónica paints Ana’s lips with a soft, shiny lipstick, then licks it off again.
“Some men want to be women, though,” she says.
“But they have no idea where to start. They confuse the trappings with the essential.” Ana, Miss Bolivia, allowing her to rub off the lipstick and lifting the hair from Verónica’s perspiring forehead so that she can give it a kiss, laughs as she leaves her wet imprint on the wrinkles that the forty-something-year-old covers with make-up.
How long has Ana been there? She came in through not one but two open doors, in spite of Carroza’s warnings. Who did that wreck of a cop think he was, with no more meat on him than a resentful skeleton?
She laid the Bersa on the coffee table as if she was about to sign some kind of armistice, then pulled Verónica toward her. Verónica allowed herself to be drawn in. Nothing like this had ever happened to her with any man, not even Romano, who arrested her without reading her rights. Their hands fluttering like falling leaves between their two bodies, so close to each other, pulled together as if by a magnet. They came together cell by cell, blended into one another unhurriedly, like paint settling in a bowl. They sought each other out because someone or something that is not them has already decided they should be together tonight, that they should meet without offering any explanation, two tightrope walkers balanced above the abyss of this strange night, an abyss of only a few hours that will not appear on any official register, ghostly hours they both wanted so much.
A mobile ring tone goes off in the distance, like one of the ambulance or police sirens crossing the city streets in the early hours. Neither Verónica nor Ana bothers to answer: “My phone sounds just like yours,” says Ana. “We’re the same even in that.”
“It might be urgent,” says Verónica, pretending to be worried, but Ana’s warm palm is there, waiting for her wet lips and tongue.
“Gypsy tongue,” says Ana, probing her mirror image, slowly substituting her lips for her hand, then tightening her arms around Verónica’s waist as if she were going to lift her however heavy she was, to rescue her from wherever Verónica’s life might be in danger.
But the only danger Verónica faces tonight is that of falling in love with another woman. Perhaps that is why she claws at Ana’s body to try to break free, and reach out to
grab the mobile that is still ringing and is hers. The ring tone dies—Beethoven filtered through cybernetic acid—before Verónica can light the dial. Ana’s arms rescue her and again pull her irresistibly back to her, her lips close on Verónica’s mouth, her tongue pushes in so deep she can hardly breathe. Verónica ought (whether or not she wanted to, she ought) to fight her off, to be able to see herself as they say those who are about to die float out of their bodies but remain nearby, up on the ceiling, tame specters who brush against the world beyond simply to get a better view of the world down here.
Yet Verónica cannot, does not want, does not have the strength, has never had the strength to break free of desire when the fight is no-holds barred, outside the ring, outside the laws she has been brought up to respect. She gives herself again, opens up, feels how the hands that could be a man’s hands tear her trembling body like a silk gown, strip her bare. She does not care that the voice says “it’s so good to have you, doctora,” when she has always demanded to hear “I love you.”
There are many ways to fuck and be fucked, as many different ways as there have been men on her forty-year-old body, but this time it is different. This time it is an invasion, one body taking over another one cell by cell, replacing them entirely. Miss Bolivia’s hand searches inside her, lights up Verónica like someone lighting candles in a temple that until now has been in darkness and without idols. Verónica is engulfed, pushed, lifted, held. Everything is bright and warm, fire has lips of cool water, the trap is laid like a last supper of the senses.
Too late—intensely, implacably too late—as Verónica turns so that Miss Bolivia can continue to open up her body with more hands than the goddess Kali and opens her eyes trying to find something to cling on to in order to delay a little longer reaching the bottom of her abyss, she sees that there is nothing on the coffee table.
The voracious cold now pushing her legs apart can be nothing other than the barrel of the Bersa.
12
Pacogoya, delivery faun, Che Guevara lookalike in full retreat, is running and running, clinging on to the only weapon he knows how to use with his eyes shut: his mobile phone. His hands are shackled, but his feet are free to fly over the grass like a bisexual spore once he has sent a message to the number of the cop Verónica recommended, the colleague of her first conjugal stiff. “I’m a friend of Verónica’s, a cop in a gray Toyota abducted me,” he texted, ending the message “Pacogoya.” Then the reply that lit up his screen a few seconds later: “Run.”
So Pacogoya runs across the fields. The thistles tear at him, draw tattoos on his translucent guerrillero skin that Sylvester Stallone would love to have on his aging Rambo body. He runs with his hands behind his back, his feet stumbling on mounds of earth and stones. He falls, hits his head, but gets up again like a roe deer chased by a puma: the cop in the gray Toyota might return and come looking for him, shoot him down, and before or afterward tear him apart with the razor-sharp teeth and claws of a corrupt, murdering policeman.
Why bother with all those trips to the sauna, all those massages, all that botox round his eyes, all those hours in the gym and all that waxing, if now he has to run through the night with thorns tearing at him, falling over, struggling back to his feet? Every step takes him still further from the ideal he has pursued for so long in gyms and massage parlors, turning him into a scarecrow, a bag of rubbish at the mercy of any stray dogs that might be around. He plunges on aimlessly; his telephone rings again and the screen lights up: “Run, run as fast as you can.”
Who can this cop friend of Verónica’s be? Why trust him when all cops are the same, why did she send him off to ask the cop for help, why did she push him away from her? Who has the right to cast the first stone, what is so wrong about pointing out millionaires who are only going to be held for a few hours? Why is the whole of the civilized world scandalized when one or two hairy guys are kidnapped, but nobody turns a hair when a thieving kid is shot down in cold blood? Or when they rob a workman of his seven hundred pesos pay as he gets off the train in Quilmes and kill him if he refuses? Things like that never appear in the papers; the president carries on sleeping, the ambassadors continue their game of golf, their wives a game of bridge; the Pope goes on scrawling encyclicals to comfort the poor in their eternal, celestial poverty.
*
Another cop, not the one who sent the text “Run” several times on his telephone, but who is so close to him he could almost touch him, is thinking of Pope Leo XIII as he lovingly strokes the butt of Rerum Novarum.
“With sword, pen, or word” says the hymn to Sarmiento. Any weapon will do in the fight for liberty and you can blow anyone’s brains out: the indigenous savages and the unruly gauchos were the enemies of Argentina’s founding father who way back in the nineteenth century admired the United States, and dreamt of erasing the original inhabitants of the barbarous pampas from the face of the earth. Sarmiento used words and the pen, General Roca the army, to spill the blood of gauchos, Tehuelches, Mapuches, Yagans and Comechingons. With sword, pen and word they reduced the proud first peoples to rubble. They wrote the history that even cops like Oso Berlusconi had to learn in primary school. What better name then than Rerum Novarum (a manifesto for the extermination of all undesirables) for the 9 m.m. toy Oso caresses at his waist while he cradles the Czech rifle he chose when he distributed them back in the warehouse? He checked them all, one by one, and kept the best for himself, the mortal Stradivarius which in the hands of a traitor like Walter Carroza could lead to the failure of tonight’s concert, could ruin the night, send him to hell.
“What are we waiting for now, if it’s not a rude question?” asks Carroza, who for the first time in his life is so close to the mythical, despised commander. The damp from the ground is penetrating his bones, bones once protected by flesh and even a layer of fat.
Oso growls and stirs uneasily. He does not like a subordinate asking him questions. He detests nosy people; he never gives press conferences. If he had his way, all journalists would be lined up and shot so they could not interfere with his work anymore. They never have a good word to say about the police, they only encourage thieves and murderers until they have become victims of police brutality; then lawyers, sociologists and communists of every stripe still hiding under the ruins of the demolished Berlin Wall spring up like mushrooms to squawk that criminals are not responsible for their crimes, that it is society as a whole which creates them. Imbeciles.
Oso Berlusconi chews on the stem of a wild flower to avoid having to answer Carroza.
The pager he is wearing on his belt next to Rerum Novarum bleeps twice. That is the signal: everyone to their positions, the game is about to start. He points his Stradivarius at the roof of the first shack and pulls the trigger: a tin sheet two meters long and half a meter wide flies off like a bat.
“Fire at will,” he shouts and the police orchestra launches into its version for Czech rifles of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.
*
Scotty does not hear the shots. He is a long way from the gun battle in the Descamisados de América slum, just leaving his shift at the federal-police headquarters. He is even more convinced than when he started that morning of how useless it is to keep such an expensive mechanism as justice going.
A person, or whatever he might be called, a genetic throwback like the Jaguar, who has a long police record but has always been found not guilty, in and out of the courts’ revolving doors, laughing fit to bust at the victims’ relatives, killing as if he is playing billiards or bowls at his local club, out of boredom and with no sense of guilt, feeding on his perversion like someone slaking his thirst on his own urine.
“Ana Torrente Morelos,” says the file sent by fax by the Bolivian Margaride. “Born on January 23, 1982 in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia. Mother unidentified, presumed dead after giving birth. Father unknown. Presumably given in adoption. No criminal record.”
Scotty’s passion—which his colleagues know nothing about because it is hardly
macho enough for the police—is to restore paintings. He does not do it professionally; he has never studied or been to any workshops. A painter uncle who died in anonymity and was buried with his talent intact taught him the rudiments and passed on the pleasure of rescuing something in danger of being lost. Blurred figures, gazes that were once happy, ferocious, or vacuous, colors fading to nothingness. Removing the veil, driving away the phantoms of decay and oblivion—that is what Scotty devotes his leisure hours to.
He spent his Sunday shift at headquarters with little to do apart from sort out reports, file complaints about domestic violence and sexual abuse, watch a lot of football and sketch the angelic face of Ana Torrente, Miss Bolivia, and the demonic oval of Ovidio Ladislao Torrente Morelos, alias the Jaguar. When he got back to his minimal apartment that night, he pinned both drawings to the living-cum-bedroom wall, then colored them in and stretched out on his sofabed work table to stare at them, like someone arriving home exhausted who collapses in front of the television.
Scotty has lived on his own for the past two years, ever since his wife swapped him for a criminal lawyer, a well-known legal eagle who spent his time preventing middle-class children who spurn an expensive, stressful university career in favor of the easy money to be made out of drug trafficking from ending up in jail and being raped by common criminals or being thrown into a ditch because they used someone else’s capital to start up their own businesses.
Scotty’s wife, a stranger to him after thirty years’ marriage, took with her a mink coat (as in the tango) and the comfortable four-room apartment where they had lived together through three decades of arrests, shoot-outs, lost pregnancies and bitter arguments about the meaning of life. If Scotty has achieved anything it is to live now, aged fifty-five, as he did when he was an adolescent. It is no small thing, to keep going, find yourself again, only to end up being observed deep on a Sunday night by the sketches of a cherub and a devil who (Scotty suspects) have also started out on the road to meeting each other once more.
Holy City Page 19