Holy City

by Guillermo Orsi

  “Who is he, at least? He must have a name.”

  Scotty, a descendant of Irish immigrants born in Argentina, looks at the card as if it were a stamp from Bantusaland, an anonymous eccentricity from a non-existent country.

  “It could be anyone’s photo, Carroza. But they must have got the wrong department, this is the federal police, not the zoo. Underneath it says ‘Jaguar.’ Must be his nickname, his alias, the name the guy wants to be called to keep his spirits up, so that he can go on murdering people.”

  “Who started the file and when? Am I talking to a cop or the zoo?”

  “To the zoo, head monkey here, you asshole. The man who started the file left the force three years ago.”

  “Who is he, where can I find him?”

  “Dardo Julio Martínez, legal clerk. Transferred against his wishes to Lomas cemetery.”

  “Lomas!” Carroza shouts triumphantly, as if a lightbulb has just come on in his brain. “All the crap that’s happened in the past few days has come from Lomas.”

  “But he’s dead,” Scotty reminds him. “Tuberculosis, complicated by pancreatitis, it says here. We’ve got full details of how he died: they keep tabs on us in the force, but say nothing about the criminals. Apparently it was A.I.D.S.”

  “Nobody dies forever, Scotty. Look at Jesus and what a surprise he gave the Jews in Galilee.”

  “But this is Buenos Aires, Carroza. Get some sleep. This isn’t Jerusalem.”

  “Second mistake,” says Carroza, as if he was still talking to Verónica. “Now more than ever, Buenos Aires is a Holy City.”

  *

  A couple, a man and woman in their forties, with two children. A typical family entering a church in Buenos Aires looking solemn, searching for somewhere to sit in the back row of pews in Our Lady of Pompeya church. Nine o’clock Mass, a time for devout Catholics who go to church every week and take communion, regular donors to Caritas: charity is inseparable from doctrine and the Christian way of life, there are so many poor homeless people, so many single mothers, so much abortion.

  The boy and girl go to confession first, then the mother. They return to their pews looking contrite, with their different penances: ten Ave Marías or twenty, depending on the sin. Finally it is the man’s turn. He walks over head down, his sins weighing on him like Jesus’s cross on the streets of Jerusalem.

  The slow, gruff voice emerges from the darkness inside the confessional as if it is coming from hell itself:

  “We’ve got Osmar Arredri. In twenty-four hours he’s going to sing like a canary to the local and international press. You know what you have to do. Remember, two million dollars cash for the community. Ah, and fifty Ave Marías, you have sinned too often, my son.”

  Weighed down still further, genuinely saddened and almost as troubled as the Virgin on the altar who already knows what the future holds for her son conceived without sin, the man leaves the confessional and looks for a quiet corner where he can use his mobile.

  “Those bastards have raised the price. And they’ve brought the deadline forward. What shall we do?”

  He receives instructions, words that only half-reassure him. There is no absolution or condemnation, so he returns to his family and kneels beside his wife.

  “What did the father tell you?” she asks, eyes tightly closed in holy devotion.

  “To keep praying.”

  *

  Oso Berlusconi does not seem surprised by the price hike his subordinate has just told him of.

  The Argentine economy has always been plagued by inflation and then again the Queen of Storms is due to set sail at noon on Monday, so there is no time to tie up all the loose ends. Besides, when it comes to business, improvisation always benefits the speculators.

  Nor are the negotiations over the three couples going smoothly. The people meant to be paying their ransoms are demanding proof they are still alive, guarantees they will be set free once the payments have been made. They want to know who they are dealing with, how reliable they are, if they are really in charge: they do not want to risk wasting the capital of their respective companies. The kidnap victims are not just anyone and Argentina (they insist) is not the Middle East. You can negotiate with the Arabs, they are serious about this kind of thing: if they say they are going to kill, they kill, if they say they are going to commit suicide, they blow their own guts out without a second thought. But Argentine gangsters are tarred with the same brush as their colleagues who operate supposedly on the right side of the law.

  Oso Berlusconi visits the three shacks where the couples are being held. It is daytime now and Sunday—“Perhaps some of you would like to go to Mass?” But none of the kidnapped can understand Spanish. Nobody in the Anglo-Saxon world is really interested in a patois spoken only by Chicanos, Colombian drugs dealers, Argentine thugs and the new rich of the far west of Europe. Not in any truly civilized country.

  Oso strolls among the living dead, concealed beneath his hood. Tall, massively built, his voice a rasping growl, muddy boots, he peers at them, assessing their worth. Each of the men is tied back to back with his female partner: the French couple are already sitting in their own shit. Oso gives orders for them to be moved and for the floor to be sluiced before the heat of the day and the smell attract flies. “We can’t hand over damaged goods,” he explains to the guards.

  What pleasure, though, what memories it brings back. Far too many years since he has done this, walking round slowly, clicking his boot heels, gently prodding someone on the floor, or cuffing them round the head, then when they protest or complain, increasing the dose slowly: protest and a blow, complaint and a kick, if someone sobs that merits a boot to the kidneys, or a casual treading on their genitals, howls muffled by their gags, bodies trembling and shaking as if a stick of dynamite has exploded inside them, the cardboard walls of the shack reinforced by thick layers of polystyrene, until one of the guards, a shanty-town dweller he himself hired, timidly suggests he stop, the cries can be heard outside, he whips the butt of his gun across the man’s face, his mouth is smeared with blood, only his eyes are glowing, still fixed on him, “shit-faced cunt, who asked your opinion, remind me to kill you,” and Oso goes on punishing the prisoners until the violence gradually subsides, the kicks are no longer to the kidneys, the blows to the head are little more than his hand touching their matted hair and the sweating bald patches, it is as if Oso Berlusconi was stepping away from himself.

  What pleasure, though, and what memories it brings back.

  5

  Nobody rings Verónica on her mobile with good news before midday on a Sunday. She does not have friends to invite her to come and eat ravioli, she is not a member of any club where she can go and play tennis, a game she gave up years ago when she was widowed for the first time.

  “Verónica, I need to see a magistrate.”

  It is the strangulated voice of Pacogoya. He is so out of breath it sounds as if he has been running all night.

  “There are none around. They’re either on holiday or giving seminars abroad.”

  “This is no time for jokes. They’re going to kill me.”

  “Me too, but I don’t go disturbing people for such trivial matters. What trouble have you got yourself into this time?”

  Pacogoya explains in a brief, confused way. As she listens, Verónica wonders how all these people—Miss Bolivia, Walter Carroza, Pacogoya—have become part of her life, what window she left open. Too late to throw them out now, they are so firmly installed that she herself is in the line of fire as well.

  Laucha Giménez, who has finally woken up, shares a semi-cold coffee with her and departs. “I’ll leave you on your own with your delivery faun,” she says with a laugh, not even wanting to know what the faun has just told her friend.

  “I escaped any way I could,” Pacogoya tells her as soon as he arrives, still out of breath.

  “My friend Laucha as well: she ran off when she heard you were on the way here.”

  “I met her on the gro
und floor,” Pacogoya says. “She didn’t even say hello; I don’t know what you’ve been telling her about me.”

  “She’s still half-asleep. You woke her up when you rang. Why do you think no woman can pass you by without ogling you?”

  Between tremors, Pacogoya bestows her a brief smile. Although it has not rained during the night, he is soaking wet.

  “Don’t tell me you crossed the Riachuelo …”

  “Swimming, yes. It’s not that polluted. That river doesn’t deserve the bad reputation it has. The ecologists have made it a scapegoat; where the painter Quinquela Martín saw beauty, they only find filth. Anyway, I prefer to die poisoned. That at least takes time, you’ve got a better chance than if you’re shot to pieces.”

  “A better chance to do what, Paco?”

  “To say goodbye to my friends, to be here with you now.”

  He reaches out for her, but Verónica pushes him away. The thought that he has been swimming in that sewer is enough to stifle any attempt at seduction.

  Pacogoya does not tell her the full story. The kidnappers wanted to kill him because he had become an obtrusive witness; but he does not mention the part he played in the kidnappings. It does not take Verónica long to see through his subterfuge, though: what was he doing in the shanty town, why did they take him there if he had only been in touch with them when Uncle disappeared?

  “They made me do it,” Pacogoya says, trying to justify himself. “I had no choice if I wanted to stay alive.”

  “I defend self-confessed murderers, Paco. The dregs who write ‘life sentence’ with a ‘v,’ who cut their girlfriends or their mothers to pieces. But what I really can’t stomach are informers, grasses. Get out of here.”

  “Don’t abandon me now.”

  “You abandoned me first. You said the ship was about to leave when you knew it wasn’t and you were already choosing human beings to do a deal with. Get out and don’t come back.” The shudders running through Pacogoya’s puny body become uncontrollable. This T-shirt revolutionary, this seducer whose batteries have run out: Verónica is not going to protect him, she is not going to call any magistrate or allow him to hide in her apartment. If she is about to be killed, she prefers it to be for something she herself has done, not for somebody else’s misdemeanors. “If I had the Bersa, I’d shoot you myself, for being such a creep.”

  Pacogoya still looks at her incredulously, his grimace saying: you cannot be serious, this is a game, isn’t it? You relented just now and let me in. “Let’s have a rest together.”

  He stretches out his arm. His intention is to brush against her cheek with the warm hand Verónica has so often leaned her weary head on, breathing in the smell of imported perfume: lotions from France, oranges from Paraguay. This time, though, his hand stinks of the Riachuelo, of a watery grave, of someone resurrected who has stopped to ask the way when he has already come to the end of the road.

  “Go to the bus terminus in Retiro. I’ve got friends in Tucumán, good people, friends I share with Laucha. They could help you if I tell them to.”

  “What does it depend on?” he asks, still shaking.

  “You have to go to the police first.”

  Sore from exhaustion and having to swim across a filthy river, Pacogoya’s eyes flash.

  “A magistrate! That’s why I want to see a magistrate, to get some legal protection.”

  “I’m not taking you, Paco. I don’t believe in magistrates. Or in you anymore.”

  Bemused, Pacogoya adopts the pose of a fencer preparing to lunge in what he knows is an unequal fight. He protests:

  “You’re not going to tell me you believe in the cops, are you?”

  “In one cop, just one,” says Verónica.

  *

  Whenever a corpse gets too heavy for him, Deputy Inspector Carroza unloads his emotional baggage onto a psychoanalyst. Only occasionally: it is not therapy, nothing serious. Damián Bértola regards them as unofficial visits; he does not like thrillers, although he does admit to Carroza that perhaps one day he will sit down and write about some of the horrors he has described. Enough to make Chandler’s hair stand on end.

  “Give me time to die first,” says Carroza. At that they laugh, and sometimes Carroza even pays the analyst for the session and the others for which he still owes him. Why some corpses and not others? What is the difference? What sort of death makes a professional pause and stare it in the face? “The death of a fifteen-year-old kid, for example.”

  Bértola listens to the story on the telephone. He writes one word, “patience,” in his notebook. Carroza lights a fresh cigarette from the tip of the one he is smoking. He needs to smoke himself down to the bones, to disappear behind his nicotine cloud so that he can tell the story: he went into the poor-looking house in Floresta, one of the working-class districts built during the first Peronist government at the end of the 1940s, when Perón was still keeping his promises. The old couple were lying on the kitchen floor. The old man’s throat had been slit, the old woman gasped her last breath in his arms.

  Carroza leapt out into the yard, climbed onto the dividing wall and spotted the kid squatting in the next door yard, staring at him. He had not had time to escape and so sat there calmly, waiting for a moment’s inattention or to be taken before a judge for minors. He was clean, no trace of blood on his clothes, crouching there like a goalkeeper preparing to save a penalty. The knife was in the kitchen and more than likely had no fingerprints on it: the boy had taken the precaution of wearing gloves, like a real goalkeeper, like someone he might be if he were given the chance to grow up and play in the youth team of a club like River Plate or Boca Juniors, if he was good enough.

  But Deputy Inspector Carroza did not give him that chance. Perched up on the wall, he shot him twice, right between the eyes. He split his head in two like a fig, then dropped back down into the old couple’s yard. A dog that must have been their pet, a mongrel that had been shut in until it was let out by the cops who followed Carroza into the house, suddenly started barking at him as if he was its owners’ killer.

  The same feeling, but for different reasons, takes hold of Carroza now, as he stares at the photo of the Jaguar. When he finds him, he will have to kill him. His instinct tells him he is still alive, that at some point their paths are bound to cross, that he will have to kill him. And for some reason or none, but due to something hidden like a marked card in the cardsharps’ game he finds himself playing, he will once more feel the weight, the weary, choking sensation of a death like so many others.

  The man in the photo, and what he has learned so far about the Jaguar, has something about him that disturbs Carroza. It is a family likeness that immediately put him on Carroza’s most-wanted list, made him someone he takes mental note of, someone he is already on the lookout for all the time, even in his dreams.

  Yet his criminal career is no different from that of other monsters who kill for pleasure rather than obvious gain. The only distinctive feature about the Jaguar’s handiwork is that his victims arrive incomplete at the morgue. Sometimes the heads turn up two or three days later; at others, they never appear. Plus something else: the ones that do appear are empty, like those of so many people who go through life pretending to human beings. The brain, eyes and tongue have been scooped out, like pumpkins on display at Hallowe’en.

  “Why do you tell me these things, Walter? They sicken me.” This was Verónica’s protest the night before, but that was why he had been to see her, to tell her the story. The dead bodies Ana Torrente had been leaving in her wake, like the prints from Cinderella’s glass slippers, were all headless. The manager executed by the remnants of the Shining Path, the San Pedro dealer Miss Bolivia had gone to see thanks to Carroza and before him Matías Zamorano, the amputated right hand of Counselor Pox. Carroza has just found out that he too had been decapitated after his death. “It can’t have been her,” Verónica protests yet again. “She didn’t have the tools or the strength. Although I’m no forensic expert, I suppose you c
an’t cut a head off with a single blow.”

  “I’m not saying it was her,” says Carroza, drawing tobacco smoke down as far as his soul, then expelling everything, soul included.

  “Her manager was killed by the Shining Path; Zamorano by Pox’s men. As far as we know, she was nowhere near Mary Poppins, the flying policewoman. The only death she could be accused of is that of the dealer. And with my Bersa.”

  “I checked yesterday and the gun isn’t registered. It never was: it’s a phantom gun, so don’t worry on that score.”

  “I’m not losing any sleep over him. Scum like that deserve to be where they are,” says Verónica. “How else can they be got rid of, except by exterminating them?”

  “What about the law?” Carroza said, amused at the sudden outburst of violence that has turned Verónica’s usually pale skin bright red.

  “Law authorizes violence. Every law is a cross on a headstone.”

  “And in some of those tombs lie bodies who have something missing, Verónica. Corpses whose heads are somewhere else.”

  6

  Now he is all alone.

  He searches for a public telephone he can call Uncle from without giving away his identity. Perhaps Uncle has been resurrected and will answer, “Nephew, what a surprise”; perhaps he has come back from the dead and all this is no more than a nightmare he has just woken up from, which is why he has such a headache, is shaking so much and feels he is about to collapse, and is utterly alone in a way you can only be alone in cities like Buenos Aires.

  There is no reply. He imagines Uncle’s apartment stripped bare, with even the furniture gone. Someone who was always such a private person and would not even let his nephew come near. How things can change from one day to the next, thinks Pacogoya, in a tango moment.