Holy City

by Guillermo Orsi

  “Trust makes you relax. It can be deadly,” he says to a Verónica whose indulgent gaze for some reason reminds him of the dogs in San Pedro.

  It is the fifth house along the dirt track called the Limes. A house every hundred meters; five hundred meters and nothing more than that hand-painted sign at the start. Groves of fruit trees at the far end. An intense perfume of oranges seeps into the Porsche, reminding Pacogoya he must have the bodywork looked at. Maybe rust was getting into it, and he cannot allow such an expensive car to go to rack and ruin.

  There is a number, also painted on a piece of wood from a fruit crate: 59. Alongside the nondescript house stands a Ford Falcon, which must already have been ancient by the time they were used to “disappear” people during the dictatorship. From its design and the shape of the bonnet, Pacogoya calculates it is from the 1960s. It probably does not even work and has been left there for time or tramps to strip the carcass.

  He claps his hands: there is no bell for him to ring. Better to pass for a Bible seller than shout who he is when he has no idea who might be inside. It is a fine winter morning; the sun is as hot as in January, but the air is cool. The kind of day it would be nice to be greeted by a friendly face, to be asked in for a cocktail beneath the climbing vine in the garden, to leave with the gift of a bag of oranges.

  “San Pedro oranges are really sweet and juicy,” Verónica chips in.

  No-one comes out of the house; not even a dog. The ones in the street have lost all interest in him and gone back to their fleas. No neighbors either. Or children. And too late, Pacogoya realizes there aren’t even any birds.

  He takes a couple of steps back, still facing the shut door and windows, but he knows he cannot leave empty-handed. If he does not get the goods, no-one will buy from him again: in this business, reputation is everything. And once you have lost it, there is no way to get it back. And it is good money, always bulging in his pockets. No, he won’t give that up just because of a moment’s weakness. Besides, Uncle would not deliberately send him to the slaughter. “Fifteen years, nephew,” he tells himself, hearing the dealer’s affectionate voice in his ear, encouraging him to open the door.

  “So he does telepathy as well as drugs,” Verónica scoffs.

  “I swear I could hear his voice. But he should have been telling me: get out of there, don’t go in, don’t get your hands dirty, go back to being a cruise-ship Romeo—you may earn less but as long as there are no shipwrecks, you’ll live to a ripe old age.”

  “You will live to a ripe old age, Paco. Anyway, you’re already old, it’s just that you can’t accept it.”

  The delivery faun stares at her. He really does seem to have aged after the race to San Pedro, then the terror in that rundown house by the orange groves.

  He finally goes in. The door is not locked. It opens noiselessly as though the hinges have recently been oiled. It is dark inside; there is no electricity, only a shaft of sunlight halfway down the corridor. It falls vertically and is as round as the hole in the roof that lets it in, as round as the face of the man lying there, eyes wide open, staring up at this miserly midday zenith.

  “You should have left the way you came.”

  “But trust makes you relax. And curiosity killed the cat, Verónica.”

  He had gone there to get what was his, on Uncle’s recommendation. Never so much as a drop of blood before then. You get used to the world appearing to be something it’s not.

  He opens the door wide behind him to let in more light, but the corridor is still in darkness. It is obvious the man is not sleeping, but he could have had a heart attack. If anyone killed him, they must be far away by now. The best thing would be to leave straightaway without touching anything. Pacogoya does not follow his own advice, because he still wants to believe that if he goes further along the passage he might find what he came for.

  He trips over something and comes to a halt, terrified. It is the feet of the dead man. He reaches down and pulls, to drag the body toward the light from the open door. It is only a couple of meters. The body is not heavy; it slides along easily.

  He should never have taken money for orders he could not fulfill; he should not have driven to San Pedro; he should not have gone into the house. But you venture into the unknown thinking you are only going into the next room.

  “I bent over the body looking for something; a piece of paper, a key, some clue, something.”

  It is then that horror tears at his guts and takes his breath away, as if he had brushed against a high-voltage cable. Far from the body, at the spot he had dragged the corpse from, the sun is still plunging like a knife into the dead man’s open eyes.

  8

  By 6 a.m. next day Verónica is already in her office at the Riachuelo market. It is a circus caravan furnished with a notebook, printer, telephone, coffee machine and a whale calf, her bodyguard, two meters tall and weighing 120 kilos. He would find swimming difficult, but on dry land he can kill without turning a hair.

  The smell of freshly brewed coffee cannot disguise the stench from the Río Riachuelo. Day has only just dawned, but the stallholders have already begun to pack up. They tell her it was not such a good night. There were bomb threats. One of the stallholders was kidnapped on the Camino Negro: he was taken to Lomas cemetery, made to dig his own grave, then brought back to the market.

  It is not yet 7:00 a.m. when she calls the magistrate at home in Lomas de Zamora. The maid who answers reminds her rudely that it is Saturday, that his honor went to bed late the previous night because he had a social engagement, that if she phones him on Monday she is sure she will find him in.

  “If his honor doesn’t come to the phone at once, I swear on oath as a lawyer that tonight he’ll be in the headlines of Crónica,” says Verónica, without raising her voice a single decibel.

  The whale calf gives a half-smile of approval. It is obvious the lawyer’s methods coincide with his idea of how conflicts are meant to be resolved outside his marine world.

  “I’ve only just got to bed,” the magistrate tells her, as if anyone were interested in his carousing. Verónica responds in kind, informing him that she didn’t sleep at all, that in the early hours the cable channels repeat every program, including the news. “So why didn’t you sleep? I never told you to go to the market at night. Going there a while in the morning is more than enough.”

  “I can assure your honor that if you were told one of these nights that someone had been decapitated, that there had been a bomb threat and a Bolivian had almost been buried alive, you wouldn’t sleep either.”

  She takes a deep breath to replenish the oxygen she used up in giving her little speech. Silence at the far end of the line. The sound of someone clearing their throat, then more silence. He must be writing it all down, Verónica guesses. Magistrates note everything they hear down on a bit of paper, just in case.

  “Where was this decapitated body?”

  “In San Pedro, Buenos Aires Province.”

  “My jurisdiction is Lomas de Zamora. Tell me about the bomb alert and the abduction of the Bolivian.” It is Verónica’s turn to fall silent. She finds it hard to focus on what the magistrate wants to hear, to forget about the headless body in the orange groves. There is no apparent connection, so the magistrate dismisses it: he is keen to return to bed. “Don’t let it affect you,” he advises her, after Verónica has told him what she was told. “Is Chucho there with you?”

  “Chucho?”

  The whale calf flaps his flipper and blinks as though he is having his passport photo taken. His way of showing his delight at being included. Verónica hands him the phone and Chucho listens to his instructions. He nods several times in rapid succession and waves his flippers again—as if he was in the pool catching fish thrown to him, thinks Verónica.

  When Chucho hands her back the phone, the magistrate has already hung up.

  “He’s gone off to sleep, the bastard!”

  If Verónica quits now she will lose a lot of money and will
return in a bad mood to her apartment, where she will find Pacogoya sleeping like a fallen angel on her sofa, after trying to force her down onto the living room carpet like the second-rate porno movie actor he imagines he is. A knee to the balls from Verónica finally convinced him of one thing: that violence had become part of what until then had been a comfortable existence as a cheap seducer.

  “You’ve got nothing to fear, doctora,” says Chucho. He seems to have grown even bigger—probably due, thinks Verónica, to the words of encouragement from the magistrate.

  Verónica smiles, pretending to be flattered. She feels slightly sorry for this hulk with his Magnum .44 and the Uzi in the boot of his gray car with tinted windows that he uses to fetch and carry her to and from the market. He seems like a nice kid, a baby whale, no pretensions to know everything like her, but not someone who takes advantage of the fact that he is armed and two meters tall to extort money from taxi drivers or shopkeepers, like so many youngsters of his age do. Youngsters Verónica springs from police stations so they can be shot from any passing patrol car without even leaving the neighborhood.

  Fed up with waiting for the accountant who promised to meet her at the market but who is probably off fishing in the lake at Chascomús, Verónica leaves the caravan to walk round the market.

  The stallholders are loading their goods onto trucks worth two hundred thousand dollars or onto broken-down jalopies. There is even one horse-drawn cart. Nothing is left of what until a couple of hours before had been a busy market: no underwear from Taiwan, no two-dollar Swiss watches, no brand-name clothes, no M.P.3s or thousand-dollar notebooks selling here for three hundred. Everything disappears onto trucks, jalopies or carts, off on the provincial merry-go-round until Tuesday night’s market brings them all back here once again.

  Birds’ guano is starting to fry on the tin roofs of the shanty town barely a hundred meters from the open-air market. Barefoot kids are already diving into the trash left by the stallholders, searching for what might have been thrown away: radios not even a deaf person would have bought, perfumes that stank as badly as the waters of the Riachuelo, leftover goods that could find no home. There is always something, and the kids are rats with sharp teeth and claws. If any of them happens to stay asleep when the market is being packed up, there will always be a stepfather or some other man to get them going with a couple of slaps.

  There is not much for Verónica to do in her office at the market this Saturday morning: her accountant has gone fishing and the magistrate has put her life in the hands of the whale calf. She asks him—the whale calf, that is—to take her to Liniers. There she gets out of the car and takes a number 28 bus, despite protests from Chucho, who insists his job is to pick her up from her apartment, leave her at the market, then take her home again. Veronica explains she wants to go home alone and that nobody is going to do anything to her. She boards the bus and sits in the back row. She opens the window so that the breeze can ruffle her hair and make her feel more alive, not enveloped in some air-conditioned fishtank, hooked up to telephones that only ring to cause problems.

  She is not surprised when she sees Chucho’s car following the bus, then drawing up alongside in the middle of Avenida Paz. Chucho sounds his horn at her. He was not going to abandon her just because she asked him to, it is the magistrate he answers to, not a female lawyer who is not even from Lomas de Zamora. “Whose idea was it to send her to that den of thieves as inspector?” Chucho must be thinking, if his cetaceous brain is capable of thought.

  *

  While Verónica is traveling on her bus with the whale calf alongside to make sure she comes to no harm, a Colombian couple—a fifty-five-year-old man, a twenty-two-year-old woman—are being led from their room in a five-star hotel in the city center by men armed with revolvers and sub-machine-guns. To reach the room the men—four who go up, two at reception and another two outside the hotel—have had to step over the tourists sleeping in the corridors. “Be careful, they’re coughing up two hundred dollars a night,” the hotel manager told them, after all eight identified themselves as federal-police officers.

  They burst into the room using the magnetic card the manager has given them, after insisting they are not to let on to anyone he made things so easy for them and did not even ask to see a search warrant.

  The fifty-five-year-old Colombian man and the twenty-two-year-old Colombian girl are sleeping in each other’s arms. They look more like a honeymoon couple than the drugs baron Osmar Arredri, boss of the Carrera Cuarta neighborhood in Medellín, and his girlfriend. They are in Buenos Aires because they were on board the Queen of Storms on a pleasure cruise. The blond girl is called (or says her name is) Sirena Mondragón. She is the pleasure in the fifty-five-year-old’s cruise. When she jumps from the bed, naked and with her hands above her head, her tits dazzle the four feds training their guns on her.

  “Poppa’s out for the count. We drank a lot last night because the ship didn’t leave,” Sirena explains, pouting and looking so sad the leader of the group gives her a handkerchief to wipe away her tears.

  They shake Poppa roughly, then throw the fresh orange juice that room service brought up with the rest of his breakfast a few minutes earlier in his face. Poppa sits up, cursing them; when he makes to reach for his 9 m.m. gun sleeping like a cat on the bedside table, a karate-expert federal cop smashes his hand, then with the same imperceptible movement sends him crashing against the mini-bar.

  Down below in reception the manager is sweating like a boxer working at the punchbag. Half a dozen employees are nowhere near enough to look after the dozens of tourists complaining about the night they spent in the hotel corridors. They have mutinied, or something close to it, and are refusing to pay a single dollar or euro unless they are offered somewhere decent to spend the nights until their cruise liner is repaired.

  “We came here to dance tango and eat your famous steaks, and we get treated like immigrants, for God’s sake,” one of them protests in an unidentifiable Spanish accent. He explains to his partner, who has an equally unidentifiable Spanish accent, that Argentines are more Italian than Spanish and that’s why you can’t trust them. They promise you one thing and do something completely different, for God’s sake.

  The manager watches as the posse of feds leaves without so much as a thank-you. The Colombian couple are only half-dressed; he stumbles along, but she is as upright as if she were on the catwalk at a Cacharel fashion parade.

  “I’ve got one free room,” the manager shouts to the line of first-world refugees. There is uproar, shouts of “I was here first,” while he looks meaningfully at one of his minions for him to go upstairs and see what damage the feds have caused.

  *

  It is four hours later, toward midday (by which time the stranded, mutinying tourists have formed a gypsy encampment in the lobby) and the classic red headlines of Crónica Television announce two breaking stories to the world: “Ghastly beheading on outskirts of San Pedro,” screams the first. Then, after the weather forecast—“30° in the shade: no let-up to the summer!”—the second news item: “Kidnapping in central hotel: fake feds rifle minibar and abduct Colombian couple.”

  9

  “Urgent service needed for oil levels in my noddle,” says Verónica when she recognizes Damián Bértola’s voice on the phone.

  “It’s Saturday night and I have a private life too.”

  “What does a psychoanalyst do with his private life on Saturday nights?”

  “If he’s a Lacanian, he reads Freud. If he’s Freudian, he examines the interpretation of Jung’s dreams. If he’s a vegetarian, he could invite a criminal lawyer to come and eat a decent barbecue on his roof terrace.”

  “What about your children?”

  “Fine, thanks. The boy’s in Spain, the girl in Mexico.”

  “You’re on your own? You were going to make a barbecue just for yourself?”

  “My dog’s with me. He’s the only patriot who hasn’t left Argentina. And that’s only because th
ey won’t give him a European passport.”

  In less than half an hour the lawyer and the psychoanalyst are standing side-by-side in front of the glowing barbecue, the spicy smoke from grilled sausage fat swirling round them.

  Bértola lives alone in a large house he kept after his divorce. The children left seven years ago. Villa del Parque is a quiet neighborhood; the burglars walk on tiptoe, the serial killers go about their business quietly, the streets are lined by chinaberry and jacaranda trees, there are no noisy avenues near the house and the barbecue smells delicious.

  “Just look at that moon.” Bértola points up through the leaves of the chinaberry that is putting on its nightly display above the terrace, creating tiny shadow figures. The moon he is talking about is sitting on the highest branch. “It’s like living in the country,” he says enthusiastically. “But what brings you here? I know, an oil check. I can check the level alright, but changing it takes years. And remember, it’s Saturday.”

  “You talk like a supreme-court judge,” protests Verónica. “You said you lived with a dog, so where is he?”

  From a corner of the roof terrace it is the enormous dog that replies rather than his master. He has been so focused on the barbecue he has hardly even wagged his tail since Verónica appeared.

  “Living on your own is complicated,” says Bértola. “Most people in cities live alone. They say that’s fine, that it’s their choice. Crap.” He turns the meat over and carefully pricks the intestines, adding, “People say that to protect themselves. First came fire, then the wheel and then muuuuch later, in the twentieth century and above all in the well-off parts of Buenos Aires, the word.”