He does not even bother to look at Carroza, although he is on the alert and does not lower his arms. He knows he is a cop: all cops know each other, even if they are disguised as a Methodist preacher.
“He’s Oso’s right-hand man,” says Ana.
Carroza is surprised yet again at her powers of recovery. She would make a formidable policewoman.
“The boss has gone to bed,” says the gunman politely. “He’s had a rough night; it’s his asthma, you know. You’ll be able to talk to him later, at midday perhaps.”
The boss’s asthma comes from the nine dead—the six hostages and their three jailers. And from the Colombian drugs baron, who has also had a sleepless night on this estate with no cattle, together with his beautiful girlfriend. But Walter Carroza still has no idea who the boss is.
*
“They’re in that mansion on the estate,” Miss Bolivia had told him when they left the lair on calle Azara, giving him directions on how to get there. “Not even Oso knows. He thinks people from the air force took them, but the military don’t want anything to do with kidnappings these days, they outsource the job. That’s what all firms do now when they don’t have the capacity in house.”
Miss Bolivia suddenly sounded like a marketing graduate. Carroza only asked a few indispensable questions. He knew he had very little time, that the lives of Verónica and Laucha Giménez were at risk.
Often, perhaps even more than necessary, he had risked other people’s lives (and occasionally his own) to solve a case, even though this was never going to lead to a promotion. He has the stubbornness of the lone wolf who smells fear, disenchantment, voracity in someone else and goes for them, if only to see his own face reflected in other mirrors.
If he succeeds in getting at the truth this time there will be no reward either, no medal for gallantry. The government is only concerned with what is said abroad about the hostage crisis, the reaction of markets and heads of state in Europe, the diplomatic and commercial repercussions, and the way that the political opposition in Argentina might try to use the crisis for its own ends. Two hours later, at 8:05 a.m., in the midst of a scrum of journalists and with the building’s concierge looking on impassively, Argentina’s Interior Minister is felled by a bullet to the head. The president himself is secretly delighted, despite the fact that even to his closest associates he continues to deny he was in any way involved in the elimination of the man who was his most serious rival within the party.
Skeleton man is not concerned either way about Laucha’s life. He does not want to see Verónica die, though, if only to keep alive the weak flame that is saving him from complete emotional darkness. Even so, he admires Laucha’s armor-plated courage. She agreed to play the role of someone possessed by the devil without asking for anything more than assurances that Verónica’s life would be saved. Carroza had called her as soon as he finished talking to Miss Bolivia. He would have gone to see her anyway.
“She’s dangerous,” Carroza warned her as he drove unhurriedly along Avenida General Paz, thinking about what had happened with Oso and what to do next, when she answered his call. “Play along with her until I get there, I’m on my way.”
“She’s determined to destroy herself,” Laucha said, referring to Verónica. “As she doesn’t dare kill herself, she takes on any job that will put her in the line of fire.”
“I wouldn’t go as far as that,” said Carroza, trying to soften a judgment which sounds to him as though it has come from the shrink Damián Bértola. “She’s a do-gooder lawyer. She knows what she is up against, but she’s got lots of experience.”
*
“Chopping off heads is an age-old tradition in the history of mankind,” Scotty said when Carroza finally answered. The Descamisados de América massacre had just happened. Carroza had escaped yet again, in his own way, the threat that people like Oso Berlusconi pose to honest cops, even if they are as battered as the Renault Carroza stubbornly refuses to throw away.
“You don’t mean to tell me that a kid like Ana Torrente goes round the world sawing off heads, Scotty. I don’t believe it.”
“I didn’t say it was her, Yorugua.”
“Who then?”
“The Jaguar.”
“Don’t give me that: what kind of animal are you talking about? I know about pickpockets, rapists, bank robbers, people who murder poor old women, shit-eaters, vampires who imitate Dracula with acrylic fangs, transvestites who blackmail top executives, priests who abuse young boys, generals who in their bunkers in the officers’ mess take it up the ass from twenty-year-old recruits; a drag-queen rabbi even once called me to investigate photos taken of him at a party in high heels and scarlet lipstick. Everything is possible in the mud and crap we’re constantly fighting, Scotty. But jaguars?”
“The Jaguar, Yorugua. Just one. And with a capital ‘J.’ He exists and he is loose. And he smells human flesh.”
5
Quiet, on the back seat of the number thirty-seven bus. Unnoticed, the way he always likes to be, almost unaware of his own existence. Letting himself be carried along, like those gliders that lift off into the air towed behind a plane with an engine, then float free high in the sky, at the mercy of the winds.
He hates leaving the Holy Land. He dreams (if one can dream when one is nothing, not even oneself) of seeing the real Jerusalem, the one in the desert, the one where once someone carried a cross, the word made flesh but in pain, tormented by his executioners.
For now he makes do with this cheap imitation in painted cardboard with second-rate actors, constructed by the river on the Costanera for provincial tourists visiting Buenos Aires, a shrine for all the dark-skinned poor and so far from Palestine. The watchmen let him stay there; at night he covers himself in cardboard boxes and eats whatever he can find: leftover rice, old scraps of meat, dry bread, rats.
Both Jerusalems are so similar (he dreams) and so different from the true one.
A street kid brought him the message: “There’s a woman, but it has to be tonight.” He handed him the coins he had been given, which he immediately shared with the messenger. “Thank you, Jaguar,” said the kid, eyes gleaming, getting out of there as quickly as he could before he changed his mind.
He had not intended to leave the Holy Land this night. It is cold, the city is damp and oppressive, like an enormous iceberg stranded in this shallow, treacherous, sullen, dirt-brown river. In fact, though, he never thinks of anything, he lets himself be carried along and the thirty-seven bus is taking him now to where he has to go, with coins enough to get him there and get him back. She really does think of everything.
*
“The doorway of Clonfert Cathedral in Ireland is decorated with grinning skulls,” Scotty tells the skeleton man. “My grandfather, who was Irish and who nobody would have dared call Scottish, told me about it. In the 1920s, when serial killers were still a rarity, one was arrested by the Irish police in that very spot.”
“Don’t give me a lecture on the history of crime, Scotty. There’s no time for your ramblings tonight. Where can I find this bastard?”
“That guy, the serial killer before the term had even been invented, could think of nothing better to do with the skulls he was collecting than to put them alongside the stone ones. And he decided that was where he would wait for the police. Don’t be so impatient, Yorugua: a little general knowledge gives one a less narrow view of the world. You shouldn’t cling to your obsessions if you want to get at the truth.”
“The battery on my mobile is running out, Scotty. I’m not a philosopher or an orientalist. I’m about as interested in the truth as you are in the police history of Ireland. Who is this guy who calls himself the Jaguar and where do I find him?”
*
The back-seat passenger knows where he has to go. He knows the city, he has dreamt of it so often there is no corner of it he has not visited some night, shivering with cold, curled up on the steps of the underground, covered in sheets of newspaper on the thresholds of chu
rches and ministries, or out in the open on park benches. That was until one sunny winter’s morning he found the Holy Land, down by the river, and said to himself, “I’ll stay here, this is sacred ground, it will cleanse me.”
How often did he call Bértola after midnight? Certainly more than once and never because of his own personal anxieties: Carroza is not someone who suffers from withdrawal symptoms. Nor is he an addict of any kind, although the shrink (who sees him only reluctantly because, like any self-respecting cop, Carroza thinks he has the right to travel through his subconscious as well without paying) made it clear that there is no merit in not being an addict. “It shows a lack,” he told him. “A lack of desire, and existential stupor.”
But tonight the braincell electrician is not answering anyone. He must have unplugged the phone. Or perhaps he is spending the night somewhere else, most likely in one of his patients’ bed, the pervert.
Carroza tries one last time before he pulls off the road into the country estate. Alongside him, Miss Bolivia asks who he is calling.
“My analyst—I have a problem,” replies Carroza. He wishes he really could be in more than one place, be several people so that he could keep an eye on Miss Bolivia, find the Colombian drugs baron, and make sure Verónica is alright.
“I’ll take care of the Jaguar,” Scotty told him. “Leave him to me, I want him.”
The telephone rings in several places at the same time: in Verónica’s empty apartment, in Damián Bértola’s house with a dog, in the spider’s nest.
“Open the door, he must be nearly there by now.”
This is Ana talking on her mobile from Carroza’s car as they head for the estate at Exaltación de la Cruz. Skulking in the kitchen so she does not have to face Verónica, Laucha Giménez answers, then hangs up at once. Something could be going wrong.
She goes back into the living room and talks to Verónica.
“Don’t be frightened,” she tells her, as if that was enough.
Verónica shakes her head slowly. She denies everything: being there, being born, that is the fear.
*
He does not have a mobile. Neither Freud nor Lacan had one, and they were Freud and Lacan. Why should he, Damián Bértola, be forced to go around with a time bomb attached to him, like some terrorist?
He promises to revisit his convictions, though, and buy himself one, if he finds Verónica Berutti alive. Perhaps she is already back at her apartment, and he could save himself the journey and keep some of his muted despair for when it is really needed.
No-one who is seriously contemplating suicide announces it as if they were inviting people to their wedding reception: at least that is what orthodox analysts insist, despite the bodies piling up in the morgues. Verónica never hinted that was what she intended to do. It is Laucha Giménez, or Paloma or whatever species she represents in the zoological categories of his patients, who brings the matter up every now and then. “Perhaps she’s the one who wants to disappear, perhaps it’s all of us,” the shrink tells himself.
He finally reaches the apartment block where Verónica lives and sees her fugitive criminals, and attends his unredeemed patients. He rings the bell, knocks on the door, then opens it with his key. No-one.
There is a telephone number hastily scrawled on a page of a fashion magazine on the coffee table. He dials it, because it is there, because the storm forces him to breathe under water, to admit he has gills and to survive thanks to them. When Laucha answers he can hardly believe it: this is not her number and her voice sounds like that of a dove stuck on a ledge with clipped wings.
“Come quickly,” Laucha moans.
“Where?”
She gives him an address, hurry up.
“Don’t tell me that …”
He is cut off. As quick as he can.
It is not like him to rush in an emergency. If he had wanted that he would have studied medicine rather than psychology: obstetrics or cardiology, the two specializations where you have to go out at night. He trained to be a shrink so he could sleep at home, write, construct fine texts from his patients’ emotional catastrophes, wait for them on his implacable fifty-minute life-raft, watch them struggle through the waves toward him, convince them that learning to swim is not worth the trouble, that he will lead them to dry land, although of course it is far away. If it were just round the corner it would make no sense being an analyst, he says persuasively, and so they stay, even if sometimes they confuse dry land with a desert island.
There is no-one about. He has to stop the car and get out at Parque Lezama to ask a tramp yawning on a bench that has become social housing where calle Azara is. There must be something he cannot detect in his clothes or the way he looks that tells the tramp he is an analyst, because the man starts telling him about his childhood in this very neighborhood, which he has known since the days when trams and Peronists circulated freely round the city. Bértola cuts short his regression by shouting that a woman’s life is in danger if he doesn’t stop rabbiting on and tell him where on earth calle Azara is. The tramp removes the busted hat he uses to cover his damaged head and points out the way. “It’s just down there, four blocks away, get a move on, doctor,” he says, ceremoniously bidding him farewell.
Bértola leaps back into his car and races off, but gets lost. He reaches Montes de Oca, then has to come back three blocks, only to find a one-way street that delays him still further. The excuses his patients come up with in order to avoid facing reality are not half as complicated as these short side streets in old Buenos Aires. He ends up sailing past the corner of Azara without the faintest notion of where he is going. He circles round again, sure that this time he will arrive too late, that his desire to be a hero counts for nothing when the plot has been written by gods without scruples, evil idols, when the first light of day—in a city which once boasted it was the Paris of South America—stinks like the waters of the Río Riachuelo.
*
The gunmen who put more dents on the bodywork of the Renault are hospitable. They decide that Ana Torrente and the cop are to stay in the mansion because the chief wants to see them. Only problem: the chief is asleep, his asthma. What asthma? The chief wants to know right now what the devil those two intruders are doing there, he has heard of the cop and has no intention of letting him go, at least not until things have died down in the capital.
But there is little chance of that.
When everyone, journalists and guards, threw themselves to the pavement that the concierge had not been able to hose down, the Interior Minister’s killer became obvious as he tried to run away. The cops on guard at the street corner could not believe their eyes: the mythical Oso Berlusconi hurtling toward them, shouting as he ran, “he escaped that way, the bastard escaped down there.” It took them a few seconds to look at each other quizzically, then decide that no, the only person trying to put something past them was Oso. They shouted to him to stop. “Stop there, Oso, we can talk later but for now drop your weapon,” said one of them, backed up by the other four, all of them training their guns pitilessly on the man who had led so many operations, on Oso Berlusconi, decorated by dictators and democrats, the killing machine in whose honor they themselves had sung the national anthem each time he had a medal pinned to his chest.
They knew that to try to stop the flight of someone as important as Oso, armed and blind with rage at this grisly end to a bad night, was like trying to halt a railway engine by raising your hand and so none of them stepped forward. They let him go by and Oso raced on in triumph, as if he were about to burst through the finishing tape to roars of applause.
The only roar was that of their guns. Oso’s back was red with blood even before he began to crumple to the street, to finish up face down, his mouth open over the smell of sewage from an open drain.
6
The news reaches the man who only three hours earlier sent Oso Berlusconi on his suicide mission almost immediately. The face of the chieftain in this country estate without cattle shows
no trace of asthma, annoyance or satisfaction. It remains a mask as a man almost as skinny as Carroza but much shorter whispers what has happened into his ear.
“Not a good night. But it’s ending well.”
The owner of the mansion is not accustomed to making prisoners of his guests. He made this clear as soon as Carroza and Miss Bolivia were brought before him. He does not like talking to people he might not like.
“That creates a negative energy which spoils any dialogue,” he explained. The two of them had just had their hands tied; something else the chief did not like. “But you have to understand I cannot exactly trust someone who Oso Berlusconi once recommended to me as a perfect killer.”
“I only kill when the state pays,” Carroza clarified. “And with discounts for national insurance and state pension.”
“An honest cop; don’t make me laugh.”
“What have they done to Poppa?” asked Miss Bolivia.
“We’ll learn about that in a little while, if you stay here with me.”
At that point Carroza’s mobile started to throb in his back pocket. A slight flicker in their host’s face indicated to one of his men to get the phone.
“Nobody,” said the man.
“A missed call, you idiot.”
“It was from a public phone.”
Another minimal gesture, perhaps only the second in as many days, and Carroza’s mobile was squashed under the thug’s size forty-four boot.
“You didn’t come alone, or empty-handed,” said their host. “Nobody comes here alone and with empty hands.”
Behind the two prisoners, a prisoner as well although there was no need to tie him up because he was more dead than alive, Pacogoya and the backpack stuffed with cocaine for half the tourists on board the Queen of Storms adorned the carpet in the enormous room.
The big chief explained to his tied-up guests that of all Oso Berlusconi’s mistakes, trying to keep the drugs that this pathetic creature was carrying in his backpack to sell them himself had been the straw that broke the camel’s back.
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