Holy City

by Guillermo Orsi

  “Now tell me the truth, Walter. What is there between you and Ana? What do you have in common, what did you discover tonight that was so urgent to tell me?”

  They are traveling in Carroza’s car, a battered old Renault with garish-colored bodywork that makes it look like an old underground train or one of those provincial buses that clatter along colonial cobblestones always on the point of falling apart.

  “I’m not in love with Ana.”

  “Why should I care about that?” Verónica laughs, astounded at how stupid Carroza can be. As if he could ever be in love with anyone.

  “I guess I’m like a father to her,” he says, determined to continue with the kitsch.

  “A father who fucks her. But Ana is an adult. And Miss Bolivia.”

  “Why did you give her the Bersa? I didn’t want her to be armed, Verónica. She would have made sure others did the shooting for her. Like in the Peruvian jungle. Who is going to keep her on the leash now?”

  “Where is she? Who does the third head belong to?”

  The Renault runs on natural gas. Carroza says it’s safe, there’s no risk it will explode.

  “You can’t imagine the money I save. I charge the federal police for ordinary unleaded petrol and keep the difference.”

  “If Miss Bolivia doesn’t cut off the heads, who keeps the trophies—and whose is the third head?”

  “It belongs to a woman,” Carroza finally admits. “A policewoman, if you must know. She worked overtime babysitting for a Colombian drugs boss and his girlfriend. The federal cops arrested them three days ago.”

  “I saw it on T.V.,” Verónica remembers. “It was a smart operation, it looked almost like a movie. But it wasn’t all strictly legal then?”

  “That was the first mistake.” Carroza is driving increasingly slowly along the deserted avenue, as if he is about to pass out. He justifies himself by saying he cannot talk and press his foot down on the accelerator at the same time.

  “They came to Argentina with the group of tourists on the cruise liner that ran aground on the river sandbanks. He didn’t intend to stay here: he was traveling incognito, but somebody here was expecting him.”

  Carroza is driving close to the curb. He has put his flashing light on to warn people he is going very slowly. Speed distracts him, he explains to Verónica. It is a drug and he has had enough of druggies. If one day he kills himself it will be by putting a bullet in his brain, not crashing into a truck. By now Verónica is convinced he really is a desperado, a skull and nothing more, someone who for a reason as yet unknown to her has crossed over to death and come back, and can still talk.

  “Who was expecting him?”

  “Not one but several people. A senator on the government side, a loyal judge, people very closely associated with our Argentine way of life, Verónica. Osmar Arredri, the drugs baron, had not come to go whale-watching in Puerto Madryn or to see the glaciers melting in Patagonia. People like him couldn’t care less what tricks nature gets up to. He was coming to give his blessing to his network of distributors in the south of the continent, the ones he affectionately called his oil-slick penguins. A drugs baron is like the Pope, or perhaps the Pope is like a drugs baron: they only travel once the business has been set up and is functioning. They come to receive the applause of their subjects and to see their faces. They want to get a good look at all those who they are going to have killed tomorrow or the next day.”

  “Why was he arrested?”

  “Abducted, you mean. They couldn’t take him to court, because there are no charges against him. He’s not wanted by Interpol and he’s a great respecter of human rights. But he was declared persona non grata. He was coming to try to ruin things for the bosses in Neuquén, people born and bred in Patagonia. What is the Colombian mafia doing in Patagonia? We’ve got enough on our hands with the English, the Yankees and the Italians. They’ve bought up half of southern Argentina and fenced it off.”

  “So it’s a question of sovereignty?”

  “Sovereignty over drugs. The main dealer in the area happens to be in the provincial government house. But that of course is not and should never be known. Drugs are a very profitable business, Verónica, and competition is frowned upon.”

  Verónica tries to wind down her window, but it is stuck. Carroza shows her how to thump it from the side. She does so and the window drops like a guillotine. It does not let in any air, though. It is a damp, sticky early morning. The police radio forecasts a storm of murders: “Attention base, adult male with deep stab wound on calle Cuzco; attention base, female hacked to pieces on Sarmiento railway line near Liniers station; attention base, brawl involving followers of Saint Cayetano, stones thrown at saint by group of male troublemakers; attention base …”

  Deputy Inspector Carroza hates music, the boleros and tangos the commercial stations play at this time of night, “sentimental pastiches” he calls them. He prefers the reports from patrol cars and the metallic voice of the operator back at headquarters announcing the discovery of dead bodies at different points in the city. In a place like Buenos Aires there is a certain harmony to the crimes; it is like a good, well-established orchestra that has no virtuosi, but where no-one plays out of tune either. Even the adolescents are veterans of a neighborhood war who do not study military manuals, but who were brought up on the Holy City’s human rubbish tips, received their first beatings before they could walk unaided and know they cannot avoid the betrayals that keep them alive. The only thing they feel sorry about is not having killed.

  Verónica finds it impossible to listen to him and the police radio at the same time:

  “Put some music on or I’m getting out, Walter. Here comes a taxi.” Carroza gives a smug smile; he knows she will not carry out her threat. For two reasons—the first (and less important, he suspects) is that she might be killed. Then again, she wants to learn more about Ana Torrente. To keep her happy, he spins the dial. He finds the Los Panchos trio singing the tango, “The Day You Love Me,” a golden oldie as clammy as the weather outside. Veronica is satisfied. “Where does Ana fit with the drugs baron your colleagues kidnapped?”

  “He was taken to a hideout in the Alas building. It’s in the military zone, on the fortieth floor. Not every prisoner gets to fly so high. The operation was coordinated by Oso Berlusconi.”

  “Who is this ‘Oso Berlusconi’?”

  “A professional, Verónica. Like you or me, someone who works for others who want to see results. Don’t ask too much; the less you know, the better for you.”

  Verónica accepts that, in his twisted way, the skull is trying to protect her. He wants her to know only what he considers important: who Miss Bolivia is for example, or why she should give up the job the Lomas magistrate has asked her to do, or about himself, to a certain extent at least.

  Above Oso Berlusconi there are a lot of people giving instructions from their comfortable armchairs in carpeted offices. People who keep accounts and only learn to use computers to make bank transfers. Patagonia is a windswept desert, home to more paleolithic fossils than human inhabitants. It costs twice as much to live there as in the rest of Argentina, so only the Tehuelches and Araucanians even think of staying: the foreigners only come to shoot deer and fence off what they consider to be their land. There are government officials who have become rich simply by looking the other way when the world’s millionaires buy up national parks with deer included—but without Araucanians—they insist, to clinch the deal.

  “But a Colombian drugs baron is a different matter. Imagine the scandal; no politician would survive it.”

  “Was he killed then?”

  Carroza switches off the flashing light and starts to speed up. Glancing in his rearview mirror, he changes up to fourth.

  “The idea was to show him who is in control in Argentina. To keep him until a couple of hours before the cruise ship left and negotiate with him.”

  That was why Oso Berlusconi had gone to the Alas building. The Colombian already had his ow
n people installed down in Patagonia—locals, of course, and opposition politicians in a good position to embarrass the governing party with requests for information if the governor tried to make things difficult for them. The only way to weaken them was by going to the source, to cut off the flow of white stuff: if they wanted drugs, they would have to go to Colombia to get them. They considered killing him and his mermaid, faking an assault in the street (it happens all the time in Buenos Aires) but in some government office or other they discovered the crock of gold and made their move before the two could be killed.

  “So the federal cops saved their lives,” Verónica concludes.

  “You’re learning; we’re not such bad people.”

  But this was no humanitarian gesture; they were following orders. The air force provided the logistics: a couple of group captains and a brigadier. There are always officers happy to supplement the meager wages democracy concedes them. Oso Berlusconi had precise instructions: there were areas that they would allow the Colombian to control, tourist centers still being developed, small but prosperous towns. It was all a matter of negotiation and recalibrating, standard business practice. It would not be quite such a good deal for the Colombian, but it was still a fortune. And the clinching argument: if he did not agree, he would lose his hide.

  But Oso Berlusconi arrived too late. Someone else had got there first.

  “Someone betrayed him,” spits Carroza, still peering into the rear mirror. “We’re being followed,” he says, moving up into fifth and accelerating.

  Alarmed, Verónica turns to look behind them. There are lots of cars and headlights, any one could be tailing them. Carroza’s instinct is working overtime.

  *

  A few hours earlier, two men in flight lieutenants’ uniforms enter the Alas building. They respond to the ground-floor guard’s salute by touching the visors of their peaked caps and head straight for the lifts before he has time to ask them where they are going or if they are from the building.

  As it draws closer to the thirty-ninth floor, the lift judders like Carroza’s Renault. “It’s like a Douglas D.C.3 in the midst of a storm,” says one of the lieutenants. “Don’t tell me you’ve flown a D.C.3,” the other lieutentant says admiringly. “I’ve never been in a plane in my fucking life,” replies the first man. Their laughter adds to the cocktail-shaker effect of the lift.

  They walk up the stairs to the fortieth floor. The door to the disused radio transmitter converted into a hideout opens, and Sergeant Capello greets them with all the formality of a court flunkey receiving the King and Queen of Spain. Sitting as if waiting to see their dentist, Osmar Arredri and Sirena Mondragón smile at the newcomers. On the floor next to them what looks like a rolled-up carpet is a rolled-up carpet, but with a filling. Although she is bound and gagged, Rosa Montes from police public relations looks relieved to see the newcomers: they are members of the armed forces and the armed forces are men of their word. They fight in wars and sacrifice their lives for the fatherland, but they do not touch women. To them, every woman is a mother, girlfriend or sister. All the same, she quickly decides to close her eyes again in case they think she might give them away.

  One flight lieutenant takes the untied Colombian couple with him. When asked, they say they have been well treated and follow him down the corridor. The other lieutenant orders Capello to take care of Group Captain Castro. Of course he will and more than willingly, replies Capello. “What about her?”

  “I’ll see to her,” says the air-force lieutenant who has never been in a plane.

  No sooner has the sergeant left to carry out his orders than the lieutenant lifts the filled carpet at one end and drags it over to the window. He opens it and maneuvers the carpet out onto its launching pad.

  It is useless for Rosamonte to try to claw at the carpet to prevent the ejection of her poor, stick-thin body. The lieutenant shakes the carpet out of the window frame and Rosamonte falls through the air like a rocket that has run out of fuel, a stray bullet buffeted by the wind that is still blowing strongly. For a brief second it lifts her and pushes her toward calle Madero. She shuts her eyes more tightly than ever, just as she did when she was a little girl and Snow White’s stepmother came to offer her an apple, or when the man with the sack came into her room to steal it from her. A sudden gust of wind, which high up among these buildings around Retiro has gathered enough strength to become almost an urban hurricane, lifts her once more and carries her across the railway lines of the port like a sheet of paper or an angel.

  The Californian tourist who is coming out of a restaurant, singing the praises of juicy Argentine beef, suddenly feels the wallet where he has stashed his gold card snatched from his grasp. By the time he recovers from his surprise, his wife is still shrieking with terror at the sight of the body that has splattered against the pavement right in front of them.

  The tourist’s wallet was the last thing Rosamonte desperately tried to clutch at after freeing herself in mid-air from the ropes round her wrist. Perhaps she was trying to fly, or to soften the impact; perhaps she was trying finally to switch her bedroom light on and put an end to her nightmares.

  *

  A hundred and twenty. Now Carroza is having real difficulty speaking: reasoning while racing along at what for the battered Renault is break-neck speed is highly dangerous. Every now and then the car glides out of control across the soaked asphalt. “It’s called aquaplaning,” he manages to say to a female lawyer who is beginning to suspect this night could be her last. The car shudders as if they were going at two hundred k.p.h. Their pursuers must be having a high old time, splitting their sides laughing at the Yorugua’s feeble attempts to get away from them. They flash their headlights for him to stop: what is the point, they must think, of putting off the final moment for a minute or two? But when Carroza does not see sense, they accelerate and pull up alongside.

  “Hold on tight and get down!”

  Verónica throws herself to the floor, but can find nothing to hold on to but Carroza’s leg as he pushes his foot to the floor. The Renault starts to spin like a giant top round the vast illuminated expanse of the bridge over Avenida Cabildo. By some miracle, it ends up heading toward the exit—except that this is no exit, it is the entrance to the motorway, which Carroza speeds down the wrong way. The bored driver looking at the timetable on his bus cannot believe his eyes when he sees the Renault passing him by on the wrong side of the road. He looks into his rear mirror expecting to see it crash, to hear the smash of metal against the barrier, but all he glimpses for a fleeting moment are its red rear lights and the car disappearing round a bend. He curses a thousand times having to work on Saturdays—“It’s a night for drunks, they ought to pay us double,” he protests out loud to the passenger in the front seat who complains, “the police should do something to stop those idiots getting behind the wheel.”

  “Less than an hour went by between the forced landing of the public-relations policewoman and her arrival at the morgue,” says Carroza. He is again dawdling along at twenty k.p.h., but this time in the leafy, quiet and empty streets of Saavedra. “Goyeneche used to live in this neighborhood,” he says nostalgically.

  “So now you like tango, do you?”

  “I used to like Goyeneche. And the neighborhood he lived and died in. Saavedra, where the trees provide shade even at night, the birds sleep but sing in the dreams of the local kids. Even in their nests there is sadness.” Verónica stares up at the trees, trying to imagine the birds, their nests, the sadness. “She arrived without a head.”

  This is what Deputy Inspector Walter Carroza says, as he crawls along at twenty or less per hour with the widow of the murdered cop who was his buddy.

  “Who cut it off? Who could cut off the head of a body smashed to smithereens after falling forty floors? And in the middle of the street?”

  “Or in the ambulance,” speculates Carroza. “First aid”

  “The Last Binge” Goyeneche would have sung if he had been there now, at 4 a
.m., on the stoop of the house where he spent all his life, on calle Melián, in the shade of the shade, so deep in the night as always, drawing a curtain across the heart.

  4

  She finds Laucha asleep on the living room sofa, with the television still on. It is showing a repeat of an interview program with politicians. It is 5 a.m. on a Sunday, but there they are, smooth-tongued as ever, oozing hypocrisy, talking about democracy, about the disasters the government is committing and the action each of them would take—one of them to restore order, the other to bring in a revolution—when they come to power. “They’re ridiculous at any time of day,” Verónica tells herself, “but they’re especially pathetic at this hour of the morning.”

  She does not switch the set off because that might wake Laucha. She prefers to sit in the armchair opposite and stare into space, zapping between channels until she too dozes off, knowing that if she goes to bed she will not get a moment’s sleep. She should have said yes to Carroza’s invitation and gone with him to his lair on calle Azara to look at his gallery of photos of serial killers as if they were holiday or wedding snapshots. But Verónica has had her fill of criminals: “That’s enough for one day,” she told the skeleton man. “Anyone can be a murderer, it doesn’t matter what they look like,” she added by way of a goodbye, demonstrating a wisdom Carroza acknowledged with a grunt.

  One of those faces means Carroza joins the band of brothers who spend another sleepless Buenos Aires night. The face has seared itself into his memory not so much because of the mad intensity of the gaze, or the inevitable scar. No, it is something else, a similarity, a family likeness.

  “It’s number 347B in your gallery,” he tells Scotty, who answers him at 7 a.m., sounding as if he has got up this early on Sunday to go and play tennis rather than to work his shift at headquarters.

  “Let’s see …” He flicks through the files, the cardboard indexes of the computer age, trying to find more information while he juggles with the black coffee he had just made himself when his extension rang. “Here it is. But it doesn’t add much. There’s just a photo; whoever stuck it on is an idiot. He must have put it there, then gone to the toilet for a wank and forgot all about it.”