Holy City

by Guillermo Orsi

  Her manager, a shady mestizo who wore blue, yellow and red check shirts, a shiny formal waistcoat and black jacket with jeans, told her to be patient. They would soon reach the big capital cities and there she would be inundated with contracts for the catwalks of Europe. But they did not even reach Lima. A group of survivors from the Shining Path guerrillas intercepted their motorbike in the middle of the jungle, anxious to collect the debt the manager owed them for drugs from the tour he had made with the previous year’s beauty queen. Once they had shot the manager and the leader of the gang had raped Miss Bolivia, the perpetually fleeing guerrillas melted away, pleased with their day’s work. Rescued some hours later by a police patrol, Ana was returned in rags and bleeding to the place she had left by the wrong path.

  Few people were surprised—and little was made of it, because it is well known that Shining Path are a bloodthirsty lot—that the body of the shot manager was missing its head when it was found.

  *

  Early Tuesday afternoon sees the arrival of the trucks, vans of all kinds and carts pulled by horses or pushed by squat, powerful Bolivians. Along with them come dozens of other Bolivians and indians from the north of Argentina. They carry huge bundles on their backs that often weigh more than they do. They are as laden down and blind as ants, and seem equally determined to reach their allotted destination. Each of them has their spot in the five hectares of the market on the banks of the Riachuelo. They have paid for the right to be in that exact place and will defend it, waving papers that have no legal validity. If anyone should question them, or try to take their pitch, they will pay with their blood.

  “They’re peaceful people,” the Lomas de Zamora magistrate told Verónica, to convince her to accept the post of inspector at the market. “They only become violent if somebody tries to cheat them. Even then it’s not individual violence: they organize as a group to defend themselves.”

  It is not violence from these miserable creatures struggling to survive that Verónica is afraid of. The judge is right: he spouts phrases and facts he has read and stored in his memory, although Verónica suspects that his only experience of the world beyond Lomas de Zamora is more related to Paris or New York, when someone powerful is set free in a case of faked bankruptcy or smuggling, in return for a new make of car, a nice house, or a trip abroad for his honor.

  But the whale calf appointed by the magistrate to fetch and carry Verónica to and from the market does not agree with his honor’s description of the market vendors.

  “They’re all filthy thieves,” says Chucho as he drives along, more concerned to spy on his passenger’s reaction in the rearview mirror than to pay any attention to the vehicles that insist on crossing in front of him. He wrestles the wheel from side to side to avoid them and tells her: “Never trust a Bolivian, doctora. They shouldn’t be allowed into Argentina. We should do what the Spaniards do with all those black Africans. They don’t offer them land to plant their potatoes or hold their markets on. No, they drown them like kittens. Or send them back the next day, take them to the borders and let them loose in the desert.”

  “I see you don’t have many Bolivian friends,” says Verónica, more worried by Chucho’s driving than his ecumenical racism.

  “They aren’t even friends with each other, doctora. They’re treacherous. They’re indians, so what can you expect? My little sister got the hots for one of them once. She even brought him home and wanted us to treat him like a proper boyfriend. He had money and he wasn’t even Bolivian. He was from Jujuy in Argentina, but all indians are the same, aren’t they? If you follow me.”

  “Yes, I follow you … mind out for that bus, it’s almost on top of us!”

  Chucho swung his arms and returned to more important matters.

  “The mestizo did his best to ingratiate himself, but their dirty blood always gives them away. Those shifty eyes they have, they never look you in the face. When he had the nerve to ask me for Catalina’s hand—I’m the eldest, you see, and with the old man pushing up the daisies I’m the one in charge in the family—I bust his nose with this fist here, see?” He shows Verónica his left hand, taking it off the steering wheel to do so. The car bounces off the avenue’s central reservation. “I hit him with the jack I use for the car. He didn’t cause any more trouble. He disappeared for good.”

  “What about Catalina?”

  “She cried for a while, but now she’s got a proper boyfriend, a skinny guy from a good family. They live out in San Isidro, but he’s not one of those long-haired youths you often get there. He’s a skinhead and knows what’s what.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “You should see him! I think the kid’s German, or ought to be. He knows the whole history of Germany. Those are proper countries, aren’t they, doctora? No nonsense from Jews or Commies: look how they pulled down the wall they’d built. There may be democracy here now, but it won’t last.”

  “So the boy’s from a good family?”

  “The best in San Isidro.”

  5

  Not all the vehicles unload their contents at the market. One gray pickup, with seats for carrying workmen, turns left a few meters before it reaches the stalls. It travels along a track for another five hundred meters, then makes its way into the Descamisados de América shanty town, a running sore on the wet ground close to the bank of Argentina’s most polluted river; a tumor made up of hundreds of shacks, most of which are built out of cardboard, wood from fruit crates, planks stolen from construction sites and lots of bits of metal. Some of the roofs are corrugated iron, but the rest is scrap from the clandestine car yards which abound in the desolate realms of Buenos Aires Province.

  The pick-up which turned left is a latest model Hiatsu 4×4. Air conditioning on so that the German couple inside reach their destination comfortably and without becoming dehydrated. Their carefree wandering round the newly laid-out streets of Puerto Madero in the center of Buenos Aires was rudely interrupted by four armed men who abducted them in broad daylight, wearing no masks and only two hundred meters from a naval guardhouse.

  The German couple had left their five-star hotel at 10 a.m., following the sort of abundant breakfast that only northern Europeans can stomach. They wanted to stretch their legs for a while before they sat down again in a restaurant where for a modest twenty dollars tourists can stuff themselves with the kind of juicy rump or sirloin steaks they could not get for three times as much in Europe.

  The language of Goethe is not very popular in Argentina, despite the considerable number of German immigrants who settled in the northern suburbs of Buenos Aires and in the provinces of Córdoba and Rio Negro, drawn to Argentina by the fall of the Third Reich and guarantees from the government of the time that they would not be bothered by the fanatical Jews who after the war tried desperately to seek redress for some of the Nazi atrocities. The couple cried out for help in German, but before any polyglot could translate their pleas, they were beaten into silence and forced into the Hiatsu. Several passersby looked on indifferently, turning away from them just as their parents had done back during the dictatorship in the 1970s, even though the people being kidnapped then were shouting in Spanish.

  With this couple—a man and a woman in their sixties who both have very blond hair—now being asked to get out of the car at gunpoint, that makes six passengers from the Queen of Storms, staying in three different hotels, who have been abducted. So far no reports, no official complaints have surfaced in the media. Nothing to disturb the tourists grounded in Buenos Aires. Not so much as a rumor. The three kidnappings were clean, lightning operations carried out by professionals. All of them took place almost simultaneously, in the street and far from their respective hotels, while the victims were walking along without a care in the world, but separated from the rest of the herd.

  “The Babel of a city you see before you is best enjoyed if you walk around it without following any fixed route, wandering as you please,” each couple was informed by one of the guides from the sh
ip, the one who often gets given books written by his revolutionary lookalike, or T-shirts with his image printed on them. “You’ll always come across a local who will be happy to help and direct you if you are lost,” Pacogoya told them by way of encouragement. “We Argentines are very friendly toward all foreigners, provided they don’t come from Bolivia.”

  Only the capture of the drugs baron Osmar Arredri and his beautiful girlfriend Sirena Mondragón appears to have aroused the interest of the charlatans in the press, if not the police. The latter are well aware that the Colombian drugs-mafia boss’s kidnappers come from within their own ranks. The credentials they showed to get into the hotel were real. Worst of all, and what most infuriates Deputy Inspector Walter Carroza of the serious-crime squad in the federal police, is that he is sure several of those involved work in his own office at headquarters. Possibly they even sit very close to him and smoke his cigarettes while they are writing their reports.

  “Let’s meet and talk of old times,” Walter Carroza tells Verónica. She called him when she saw his ungainly figure on television. As ever when facing the press, he made declarations he did not want to make and, like most of his colleagues, resorted to phrases such as “no comment while the investigations are ongoing,” investigations which are always “about to be brought to a successful conclusion.”

  They meet in a bar on calle Alsina. At midday it is full of office workers having lunch, but by this time of evening it has taken on the charm of a refuge. Only a few of these secret hiding places are left in Buenos Aires and this one only stays open since its owner stubbornly refuses to close earlier because, he says, “I like watching couples kissing and cuddling at nightfall over a cup of coffee.” The couples who give pleasure to this immigrant from Ourense in Galicia, who has been living in Argentina for forty years, are penniless adulterers, office workers and shop assistants whose only opportunity to meet, talk of love and play at being happy comes at this time of day, and in hidden corners like this one.

  “You know I can’t talk in the department. All our phones are tapped by the intelligence services, no matter what our rank is or what case we’re on,” says Walter, lighting up a cigarette that the bar owner lets him smoke so long as he keeps it hidden under the table. Verónica did not want to see him for old time’s sake. She is more interested in passing on the information she received the previous night when she went round the market with Chucho. “You should never have accepted that job, Verónica, it’s too dangerous.”

  “Yeah, I could be killed, I know. So what? Every time I open my front door I tell myself: here comes some animal who’s going to beat me up or stab me so he can get his hands on fifty bucks to feed his habit.”

  “Thoughts like that can become premonitions. Try to think positively”

  “Look who’s talking!”

  When he laughs, the teeth Deputy Inspector Carroza reveals are 90 percent nicotine and 10 percent tooth enamel. His sharp, angular features look even more gaunt. This is something he cannot or will not change—“my skull has the right to enjoy life too” is his motto.

  Verónica’s informer at the market is a smuggler from Jujuy, an indian who has made a pile but still likes to take a personal interest in his peripatetic business. From the first day, to win the inspector’s favor he has offered to find her a digital camera or a latest model laptop, at a cost equivalent to half a dozen pairs of the knickers the Bolivian women sell.

  “He lives on the quiet there in the Descamisados de América shanty town. He saw them when they were being taken out of a Japanese 4×4 in broad daylight. In twos: a French couple, then a Japanese pair, then two Germans. All of them elderly and all obviously rolling in it.”

  “If he saw them, others must have done so too.”

  Carroza’s thought is both banal and pointless. Both he and Verónica know that nobody in shanty towns talks to the police. Every shack is a silent tomb.

  “Why haven’t there been any reports of the kidnappings?”

  “There have been, but they’ve all been quietly filed away. The minister spoke in person to the police chief. He passed on the order. When people in power have us by the balls, we cops are even more silent than the shanty-town dwellers.”

  Carroza explains that the minister wants everything sorted out quickly before the news gets out. There are big cheeses in the hotel owners’ associations and tourist agencies. In recent years tourism in Argentina has turned into a gold mine: investment funds have poured millions into the hotel business and so have important money launderers, the kind of people who do not take kindly to a bunch of gunmen spitting on their barbecue. Nor does the minister want the enticing prosperity that comes ever closer with each new hotel built (contravening all the city-planning regulations) to be put at risk by any untimely request for information from the opposition, egged on by members of his own party annoyed that the minister did not invite them to the trough.

  Veronica and Carroza agree that the secret cannot be kept much longer. The money to be made from revealing the kidnappings is increasing with every passing hour. The dealers in leaks to the press (most of whom nest inside the Central Police Department) are simply holding their breath, testing the atmosphere, judging how best to do a deal with the media without getting caught out.

  “Some colleague or loudmouth from the shanty is going to strike a match in the distillery in the next few hours,” says Carroza.

  “Talking of fires, you’re filling this place with smoke. You’ll get the poor Spaniard’s bar closed down.”

  “The fire-brigade chief is a friend of mine,” Carroza reassures her. “Now tell me the real reason you called.”

  “Romano,” says Verónica, point blank. “I want to know who killed him.”

  Carroza crushes out the cigarette on the floor. The bones of his skull stand out as if it were Hallowe’en. He leans back in his chair, shaking his head slowly from side to side.

  “What for, Verónica? Knowing who it was won’t change anything”

  “Do you know?”

  She has been asking him this ever since he has known her. Almost from the time, soon after their marriage, that she and Romano invited him to dinner. Before turning up, Carroza went down to the port. Ignoring the tramps in the street, he called in at a bar on the corner of San Martín and Córdoba where the ladies of the night gather, and picked out the one who looked least like a professional whore. After speaking to her for a minute to make sure she did not swallow her “s”s, he told her to go to the bathroom, wipe off her make-up and come with him. “I’m not arresting you,” he said. “We’re going to have supper at a friend’s place.”

  “It was a nice evening, really pleasant,” says Verónica when Carroza mentions it now to ease the tension.

  “That whore was a good sort, they don’t make them like that anymore. Even Romano was fooled into thinking she was my girl.” They both laugh, but laughter is not much protection in the middle of a storm. Ever since the recent evening with Bértola, Verónica cannot escape the memory of her ex-husband. As if he were coming out of the dark to look after her. Or to beat her again. “You know I have no idea who killed him. I suspect everyone on the roster, but they’re very careful. There was some kind of plebiscite, Verónica, and Romano got the thumbs down.”

  “Did you vote too?” Carroza does not defend himself. He has never been one to pray for the fallen. He never sheds a tear when he goes to the funeral of a colleague gunned down on duty or shot by the kind of petty crook who boards buses to steal people’s spare change. Romano’s death did not move him any more than that of any other guinea pig used by the system to try out their medicines. It is true, he was his friend, but he could have kept his mouth shut. He does not like saying it, but Verónica is forcing him to. “You could have prevented him being killed. He would have asked to quit the force and nothing would have happened, if only you’d agreed to go into the interior with him.”

  “And probably today Kid Baker’s little wife would be dead thanks to him and buried in
the bucolic cemetery of Villa Dolores or Serrezuela. But you didn’t tell me whether you voted as well …” Deputy Inspector Carroza stands up. He has no more cigarettes anyway and it is true the bar reeks of tobacco. If a health inspector came in now, the Spaniard would have to bribe him to avoid having the bar closed and Carroza would end up paying. Verónica is still sitting there, not looking at him. “I’ll go and see what I can do with the information that grass gave you, before my colleagues start using it.”

  At that moment another couple comes in. They are young: she is short, he is on the lanky side, wearing a worn suit and shirt. The pair of them have obviously been at work for the past ten hours. The brides of Dracula at dawn would look healthier than they do, but they keep going in the knowledge that for the price of a couple of coffees they have half an hour to stroke each other’s hands across the table and stare into one another’s eyes as though they were someone and somewhere else.

  Verónica does not turn round, either to look at the couple entering the bar, or to say goodbye to Carroza, who is paying the bill with the owner, parapeted behind the counter.

  “You shouldn’t smoke so much,” the Spaniard tells him in a fatherly way.

  “I promise to stop when I make inspector.”

  Carroza turns to leave the bar. He pats his empty pocket just in case a last cigarette has fallen down the lining. He is as on edge as he always is almost twenty-four hours a day, and fed up with cops’ widows. He sees the car screech to a halt outside the plate glass window.

  Verónica, who was expecting him to walk past her without a word, cannot understand why Deputy Inspector Carroza suddenly flies though the air from the counter and lands on top of her, knocking her to the floor and smashing the table, their empty cups and the two glasses of water as he does so.

  Carroza’s flying dive must have disconcerted the gunman in the car too. Bewildered, he fires and cuts down the lanky lovelorn clerk before he has even got properly settled and begun to whisper sweet nothings to his Cinderella. The car disappears long before she closes her eyes, feels the tears welling up and lets out the funereal howl common to all women who have lost their man.