If he could squash that vermin tonight, he would sleep soundly for a few days at least and would not be so skeptical about his children’s future. But it is already 4 a.m. and his heart, which does not so much beat as clench on hatred like a fist round a dagger handle, tells him it could be too late.
*
Since she came into the apartment she has been sitting in a corner without saying a word. Nor has Verónica asked what she is doing there or why she is not untying her, what Laucha has got to do with Ana Torrente, why they want her a prisoner, what has she ever done to them except try to help?
They simply stare at each other. As if they spoke different languages, the way Africans piled in their canoes stare at each other and then, if they manage to land in Algeciras or the Canary Islands, stare at the white men in uniform who fish them out of the sea only to take them back to Africa.
After a few minutes, Laucha gets up and goes into the kitchen. There is a smell of coffee, the sound of cups being taken out. Verónica cannot believe she is behaving like a normal host. “It’s not Laucha,” she tells herself, “she’s been drugged or hypnotized”—but still does not dare speak to her. She is scared things will only get worse for her, that Laucha will react badly if she asks any questions. She does not want to be beaten again: she trembles, closes her eyes, tries to think none of this is happening.
*
There is not much time; deadlines are looming. The early hours are always a truce, even gravely ill patients believe they can get better when they are sailing through the depths of early morning, or walking along gazing at the sea along the tranquil beaches of sleeplessness.
In Europe, though, it has been day for hours now. In Paris, Berlin and Rome the stock exchanges are reacting. Shares are dropping and twenty-four-hour pundits are busy interpreting the nervousness of the markets. “Investing in Latin America is always a risky business,” says a bald man with a pipe dangling from the left side of his mouth, the Sherlock Holmes of finance who is discovering gunpowder five hundred years later than the Chinese. “They are volatile markets,” he says. “There are political plots, violence, irresponsible behavior, the rules of the game are not respected, that’s why the profits are so good. We Europeans need to know what risks we run when we invest in Latin America.”
“And the same is true of our tourists,” says a Spanish sociologist appearing on French television. “My country should reconsider its relations with such a hostile continent, warn its nationals who are there, demand guarantees, make sure they punish populist governments, the corrupt, those who do deals behind the backs of their citizens.”
Damián Bértola has just woken up. Knowing he will not get back to sleep, he makes himself a maté tea and switches on his television. He is bored by the pundits the press consult like oracles—they all repeat the same formulas, loudmouthed parrots who learned their spiels in the Sorbonne or Madrid’s Complutense and spout them to virtual audiences who like him scarcely listen to them, but who need someone to interpret, analyze, tell them what on earth is going on in the world, why it does not behave as it should, tell them who these dark-skinned half-breeds are, or those others who look so similar to Europeans but obey the laws of the jungle found in other continents.
As soon as he has drunk a couple of matés he will switch off the television and revise the notes he left unfinished the previous evening. At 9 a.m. the first patient will be ringing the door bell, even though the last thing he needs today is to see them, sit opposite him or her, look as if they have all his attention, defended by his wall of books and the latest Lacan to defend them from anxiety, worldweariness, compulsive desires.
No, not today. Today he does not have the strength, his pact with the Freudian devil is slipping and not because he is so sad from all he lost when his partner left him or his children went to live far away: all that has been taken on board, he needs so little to live, he never was ambitious when it comes to happiness. It is something else, something indefinable, vague, spectral, a shadow which takes shape at this twilight hour, even if it fades with the break of day.
If he were not a psychoanalyst, a qualified headshrinker, he would say this is a presentiment, a premonition, but these are words he does not like, words he refuses to admit into his professional vocabulary, that only confuse the patient and he himself, ambiguous, slippery words.
Like someone who wakes up in pain or anguish in the middle of the night and fumbles on the bedside table for the pills that will ease the problem, he does not bother to walk over to his landline, but picks up his mobile and dials.
He does not care if he is waking her up, if she curses him when she replies. He even imagines she might end up telling him she should be the patient and him the analyst. Even so, he needs to talk to Verónica Berutti as soon as he can.
*
The guard at the outer perimeter of the estate does not know whether to jump to attention or raise the alarm. The first thing he does is the former, which seems more reasonable because the driver of the Renault identifies himself as a cop and not just any cop: deputy inspector in the federal police, serious-crime squad, not just a local sergeant. Only slightly lower in rank than the cop who has just left. Something big must be going on; the lights in the big house have been on all night.
But as soon as the Renault has passed through the gate and is making its way along the avenue lined with eucalyptus leading to the mansion, the guard calls his boss on the walkie-talkie. “We’ve got visitors,” he tells him. “Someone called Carroza, a deputy inspector with the feds. And a blond girl, a baby doll with incredible tits.”
The lights of the mansion glitter in the darkness of the vast, flat pampa. Carroza drives carefully, at the speed of a funeral procession going into a cemetery. He keeps his eyes peeled on the winding, potholed track that manages to destroy his Renault a little bit more.
“If they come out shooting, I’m going to use you as a shield, Miss Bolivia,” comes his rusty growl in the dark car, his bony skull glazed in the glow from the dashboard.
Beneath her porcelain skin, Ana Torrente does not move a muscle. His threat means nothing to her: she is utterly sure of herself, determined to clamber up to where she should have been from the start, from the moment she came into Argentina through Salta. Next to someone really powerful, the king on the board, not one of the lesser pieces.
Carroza had finally answered his mobile when the shootout at Descamisados de América was over, and he was free of Oso Berlusconi and the momentary desire they both had to kill each other.
It was her, Ana.
“I’ve got what you’re looking for,” she told him, “but I need your help.” They agreed he would wait for her in his lair on Azara, but he had not foreseen she would be there before him. He had never taken her there: the skeleton man was not in the habit of taking women to his hideout. He made an exception with Verónica and look what happened: an even more complicated night than he had feared. “Poppa knows what he’s doing; he never uses intermediaries.”
She means Oso Berlusconi. Carroza suspects Miss Bolivia knows less than she thinks.
He does not like this place: the main house of an estate that shows no sign of any agricultural activity, the perfect black hole where cops like him or Oso are only allowed entry once they have abandoned all scruples, when they have pledged allegiance in late-night initiation ceremonies to officials without any fixed position, or to ambassadors without a country.
As he does whenever he is thinking or talking, Carroza is driving very slowly.
“If Poppa is in there, I want you two to make it up,” says Ana. And she is serious: in her nursery world, walking dolls do not say “Mamma,” they say “fuck me,” and all the dead bodies are fluffy toys. “I love you both,” she says in her best maternal voice. “I couldn’t live without you, but not without my teddy bear either.”
It was only a few minutes ago that Carroza had gone into his Azara lair gun in hand, ready to shoot at anything that moved. Only to find that Miss Bolivia was
there waiting for him, with Verónica kneeling beside her, bound and gagged, and with bruises on her face.
He dragged Miss Bolivia into the kitchen and waited for her to speak. He did not ask any questions, as if this was just the continuation of something they had started together and which he knew as much about as she did.
“The Jaguar is going to come,” she said, giggling conspiratorially. “He has been following me since I was a little girl, I could never shake him off. Poor doctoral.”
She gave a heavy sigh.
“Is that what you had for me?” asked Carroza, disappointed.
“Of course not. I called you because Poppa is in trouble. I didn’t know you and he work together.”
“Out of necessity. There aren’t many good marksmen in the federal police; there are too many bureaucrats, pen pushers who don’t know how to kill.”
“But you do. And Poppa as well.”
Miss Bolivia is proud of her men, of the steps up the ladder she is trying to climb to the top of.
“So what the hell do you have for me?” asked Carroza, anxious to put an end to this game with blond dolls and headless corpses, forgetting for a moment that in his apartment, bloodied and tied up, was the woman he would have liked for himself.
“Osmar Arredri,” said the blond doll who once upon a time was crowned Miss Bolivia. “And his beautiful girlfriend, Sirena Mondragón.”
3
The Interior Minister Manuel Pandolfi hates his job. The paranoid middle classes accuse him of doing nothing to prevent them from being robbed, raped, or murdered. The federal police, of whom he is meant to be in charge, are a bunch of wild cats in a mafia it is impossible to clean up, an inward-looking corporation that survives every change of government with the same team of undesirables.
Even more than his job, he hates the president who appointed him just to ruin his political career. An upstart who is not even a party activist, chosen for the post by big business and going round pretending to be a democrat and backed by the serious media, the ones who control newspapers, radio stations and national television channels, when everyone knows (though no-one says) that he was actively involved in the trafficking of new-born babies during the 1976 military dictatorship.
“You’re going to be late,” his wife reminds the minister. “The concierge called and said he is fed up with all the reporters outside. He wants to hose down the pavement but they’ve been there since five in the morning, smoking, drinking coffee from their thermoses. He says the entrance is like a nightclub.”
“Let the bastard clean it at night,” the minister protests. “I didn’t call those crows here. They’re getting fat on those dead tourists; anyway, I’m going to resign today.”
His wife softens her tone. She is always accusing him of settling for second best in his political career—it should be him who is president.
“If you resign, they’ll be celebrating in the Casa Rosada. Be strong, Manolo,” she encourages him, suddenly affectionate.
She is right, the presidency would sit better on him than it does on that baby trafficker. Manolo Pandolfi has worked for the party all his life, he has not just been parachuted in. He lived in Mexico during the dictatorship. Lived well, he has to admit, he never went short of anything and he never had anything to do with that bunch of exiles who gave all the P.R.I. government bureaucrats such a hard time. They even signed an open letter denouncing abuses and human-rights violations against the militants opposing the Mexican government, the ungrateful wretches. “They’re biting the hand that protects them. They ought to be sent back to Argentina to see how they get on with the wolves down there,” the minister remembers commenting to his first wife, whom he was to divorce shortly afterward.
His second wife (his fifth, in fact—the second legal one, not counting the women he has lived with) understands him better than any of the previous ones. She stands by him, encourages him, she is sure that sooner or later he will be president. She was the one who warned him that the post of Interior Minister was a trap. “He’s put you there so that you get burned like a Buddhist monk. The state’s paid killers are going to ignore you; the crooks do their deals with them without any go-betweens.”
So much wisdom in such a fragile woman’s body, the minister thinks to himself as they say goodbye with the gentle kiss of a couple who share their bed and their credit cards with equanimity.
On the landing his usual bodyguard is waiting for him. He is a retired cop known as Highlife because of his love of women and illegal gambling. Slightly dim, but trustworthy, he has been guarding ministers and secretaries of state for seven years. He knows how to get rid of interlopers without fuss: insistent journalists, people making all kinds of demands, women who throw themselves in front of government officials carrying a baby they say they have fathered, just to get some money for food.
“What a load of crap last night, minister,” Highlife says in the lift, while the minister is checking in the mirror that the lock of hair falling so gracefully and youthfully down his forehead hides his recent hair graft.
“Don’t let those Crónica reporters get up my nose,” the minister tells him, anticipating the press pack waiting for him on the ground floor. “I’ll only talk to Bermúdez from Clarín and Oviedo from La Nación. Remember that—you know them both well. Keep the others away.”
Highlife knows all about these meddlers. In the good old days it was different. There was respect for hierarchies; journalists asked for an interview and addressed their interviewees politely. “Yes, colonel; what do you think of this or that, brigadier?”
“Don’t worry, minister, no crow is going to eat from my hand.”
“Good, Highlife. And put a hundred pesos on forty-eight for me, I’ve got a feeling.”
The lift door opens on the ground floor and the tsunami of journalists sweeps over them. Highlife pushes forward like a bulldozer. His strength comes from the uncontrollable repulsion he feels toward all those who can read and write in a way he never learned to do, fluently and with a rich vocabulary they use to poison the hearts and minds of simple people, leading them to think that good is bad, that social justice, human rights and all the crap of democracy are important.
Highlife forces his way through to Oviedo. He cannot see Bermúdez anywhere.
“He’s off sick,” a twenty-year-old woman reporter tells him.
“No-one from Clarín, then,” Highlife decides without consulting the minister, who anyway is far too busy facing the swarm of cameras, cables, and microphones. “Come with me,” Highlife tells Oviedo. “The minister doesn’t have the whole morning to waste with you lot.”
Highlife quells the avalanche of protests from reporters and television presenters, and uses his elbows to push Oviedo close to the minister.
The minister has already prepared and rehearsed in front of the mirror the reply he is going to give to the media on the hostage crisis in the Descamisados de América shanty town. He will place responsibility on the incompetence of certain sectors in the federal police, while at the same time suggesting (though not explicitly) the existence of foul play by the opposition. He will hint that they interfered in the precise instructions he gave the police to respect the lives of the foreign hostages. Even so, the day that is only just beginning promises to be a tough one: his wise wife has already warned him not to lose his temper, to balance Prozac with diazepam, to meditate and remember their masters Sai Baba and Deepak Chopra, but above all never to forget for a single moment, however great the pressure from journalists or politicians, that Manolo Pandolfi was born to be president of the nation.
Then all at once nothing, a blank, silent lapse: the speech he had prepared for Oviedo and Bermúdez vanishes without trace. “There is no pain,” he would declare if given the opportunity to return like so many charlatans from beyond the grave, “only the feeling of leaving the body, of rising like a rocket toward a destination you never reach.”
Oviedo, from La Nación, writes in his paper that he saw the minis
ter turn pale only centimeters from him and suddenly give off the stench of an unburied body the moment the red circle appeared on his forehead. Highlife simply regretted that with all the uproar going on he forgot to put the hundred pesos on the number the minister had given him, which won the prize that lunchtime.
4
No doubt about it: they are being greeted with bullets.
Carroza is not worried about the state of his Renault, which has already been hit by gunfire and even by a couple of hailstorms. Using an old car is like being faithful to your first love: you know there is no point trying to keep the bodywork intact, or being tempted by a brand-new model, or a blond like the one in the seat beside him—although she is definitely not the example he would choose tonight if he had the chance.
He stamps on the brakes and tries to back up, but a car has blocked the way and half a dozen thugs are already piling out. Carroza switches the lights on inside the car and puts his hands up. Miss Bolivia stares at him, unable to believe that someone like him can surrender so easily. He did not even try to use her as a shield, like he promised.
The gunman who appears to be in charge advances toward the rear of their car, while three others who have suddenly appeared out of the trees like wood sprites approach them from the front. The first gunman recognizes Miss Bolivia.
“Miss Ana, what a surprise!” Miss Bolivia has turned pale and feels sick: she has aged ten years. Not even when they cut off Counselor Pox’s right hand has she been so close to death. “I think he’s just left,” the gunman adds, in public-relations mode. Ana understands he must be talking about Oso Berlusconi. “Who’s this?”
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