Holy City

by Guillermo Orsi

  “My very own stuff, do you realize? I myself sold it to that asshole,” he says, pointing to the Che Guevara lookalike, who has still not recovered from the beating he took in the police station and the ride to the estate in the boot of the Renault. “It’s a shame, I was fond of him. He went round the world, fucking and being fucked. He told me stories about his trips; all those adventures in sea cabins were very funny. On his last journey he wanted to take advantage of the Queen of Storms running aground to expand his business. But to do that you need capital, capital and balls.”

  A moaning sound came from behind the backs of Deputy Inspector Carroza and Ana Torrente, in view of the wax mask of the big white chief. Carroza regretted not having got rid of Pacogoya. He should have dumped him in some field, left a few pesos in his backpack so he could at least carry on down south, to his distant Sweden, and take the drugs with him. But there was no time, so he took everything with him: Miss Bolivia, the Che Guevara lookalike, the cocaine. And now here they all were.

  Another moan. Pacogoya floats down from the world beyond, perhaps with the single aim of identifying the chief, the one in charge, the one who had never been or ever would be a cattleman.

  “Uncle,” said Pacogoya. And lost consciousness once more.

  *

  Dracula, the vampire, used to live up to his name, flying in through a poorly closed window, or coming down the chimney like an evil Santa Claus.

  Ovidio Ladislao Torrente Morelos arrived in his own way, first by the number thirty-seven bus, then walking several blocks until he came to Azara, looking for the almost illegible number the street kid gave him on a piece of paper written in a hurry by someone. “Jaguar” it said at the top. That was what she always called him.

  “You have to do this for me,” Deputy Inspector Carroza had said to Laucha Giménez. “For Verónica. She doesn’t believe in any of this, but she’s the one in most danger.”

  “She herself is the Jaguar,” said Laucha (ten years on the couch).

  “That’s as may be, but there’s another one, a real flesh-and-blood one, and he’s on the loose.”

  Scotty had just explained it to him; that is why Carroza was trying to get through to Bértola. He needed his opinion as a qualified shrink, but he was in bed with some patient or other.

  “He’s never tried it on with me,” Laucha said in his defense, “and when he had his opportunity with Verónica, all he did was give her a peck on the cheek.”

  “If they take ten years to start to cure people, perhaps they need a whole lifetime to get a woman into bed,” Carroza mused, in his usual existential and biological void.

  The favor Carroza was asking from Laucha was for her to act out a role in front of Ana Torrente. He had not yet gone back to his apartment, and had only just learned from Laucha that Miss Bolivia was already comfortably installed there and was keeping Verónica prisoner. Until then he had known she was crazy, but not to that extent, although Scotty had warned him she was dangerous.

  Bértola also realized this at the end of his restless night, although nobody called to tell him so. Perhaps it was due to comments by Verónica which he had paid no attention to at the time, because when it came down to it she was not his patient, only someone whose rent he helped pay. But if they came back so strongly into his mind now, it must be because something was about to happen. Or had already happened: and it was that possibility that sent him running out into the street.

  The Jaguar on the other hand needed no convincing of anything. He did not have to wait for some dark metabolism to decant in his brain, ruined as it was by years of glue sniffing and cheap rotgut. All he need was the scrap of paper, the handwriting only he could decipher because it had not changed since childhood, when he came down from the mountain to her house in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, to live in hiding and protect her.

  “That’s a very moving story, Scotty. I feel sorry for murderers because at the source of their abuses you always find a whole soap opera,” said Carroza. “But where can I find him, before he kills again?”

  He had to explain to Carroza, in a few words but as convincingly as possible because there was no time and anyway his mobile battery was running out, that this human reject, abandoned as soon as he was born in the Bolivian mountains, humiliated a thousand times by Ana Torrente Ballesteros’ adoptive parents, driven out of their lives like some recurrent bacteria, an illness that Ana cultivated in secret and which became chronic when she was crowned Miss Bolivia, was not in fact the killer.

  “He simply cuts the heads off, Yorugua. You have already met death, you just have to look it in the eye.”

  7

  This was how he got into the house of Ana’s adoptive parents in Santa Cruz de la Sierra. From the back, climbing over walls, balancing like a circus acrobat on ledges, padding like a cat across sloping roofs until he appeared at her window, panting but happy. “My jaguar,” she would say, smiling, and that, together with her calling him her “jaguar,” was all Ovidio Ladislao Torrente Morelos wanted in this world—her smile and to feel that he was hers, because she never smiled at anyone the way she did at him.

  “One day we’ll run away together,” Ana would say. “Far away, to a city that will be unlike this one or any other one, a city without sinners, my jaguar. Help me find it.”

  They laughed together. He would have liked to be able to put into words all that he felt for her, promise her everything it occurred to him they could do if they were together with nobody else in the way.

  But others did get in the way. There was violence that increased, became intolerable. They threw him out the first time, thinking he would not come back. After that, they reported him to the authorities and he was shut up in a gray, freezing ward with other silent, unhappy jaguars. He fled as soon as he could and went back to her. That was when they tried to kill him, shooting him in the back one night on some waste ground on the outskirts of Santa Cruz de la Sierra. He almost bled to death, stretched out on the ground, howling his pain uncontrollably, blood and rage beneath the stars.

  He survived. He was cured in a small hospital, where they fed him until one morning, before they could shut him up again, he ran off again. He promised himself nobody would ever abandon him again. He lived on charity and petty thieving, always staying close to Ana, although by now he did not dare be with her.

  Until one night he saw her there, resplendent up on the stage they had built in the square, applauded by the crowd. He had to rein in his raging sadness, to bite his hands until they bled to stop himself shouting, or running toward her howling so that they could finally die together in her smile.

  But Ana had forbidden him to approach her again—“Never,” she warned him. “You must never be with me again. I will take care of you, look after you, I promise, and you can watch over me, but from a distance.”

  And so he decided to be her distant shadow, the burden of dreams that every traveler forgets in his nights, the restoring solitude you can never return to. He followed her, always keeping his distance, invisible, although she could sense his presence, although she knew she was never alone, that it would be impossible for the two of them to be apart.

  That is why his first reaction is one of surprise when he breaks into the apartment through the kitchen window and finds the bodies still alive, hears Laucha’s scream of terror and sees the tied-up Veronica’s horrified gaze. This has not happened to him before, either in the Peruvian jungle or in San Pedro, or with that woman cop smashed to bits after her fall from a forty-story building.

  None of those bodies was like these two, hot, throbbing with life, a woman pushing him away with a mixture of repulsion and terror, threatening him, forcing him to back off by brandishing a kitchen knife and a stool she wields like another weapon. If only he could talk to her, tell her he has not come to hurt anyone, that all his miserable life he has slipped among the shadows of the dead, following their tracks, sniffing them out without appetite; that he is someone who no longer expects anything, someone who has be
en weaned on neglect and now searches out the dark corners of the world to accumulate in his makeshift dens those jewel boxes of thought and memory but also of pain, those fleeting treasures that all too soon rot to nothingness, turning to putrefaction and dust, bones that disintegrate like the promises they would always be together, like all the fine words he heard from Ana’s lips but that he himself could never say.

  He does not want this to happen. He did not come here just to change into what he has always fled from. This time he was fooled, or something has gone wrong and she is in danger. What is he to do now, when he has never even been able to guess what her next step might be? Always following her, always her shadow, her memories, so close and yet so unreachable.

  He pulls back, crossing his arms in front of his face to defend himself from this furious woman. But the tip of her knife searches out his heart; he feels the stab even before Laucha lunges at him, his cry of pain is like a secret he shares with the devil he has never deliberately sought to rouse.

  In the living room, behind the kitchen door that Laucha slammed shut when the Jaguar burst in, Verónica struggles furiously with her bonds until she manages to loosen them and break free. She cannot understand—and never will—what happens in worlds apparently so close to each other, what combination of despair and impotence unleashed Laucha’s uncontrollable strength in such a cruel, definitive manner.

  As if this was some crazy fable that has no moral to it, she finds Laucha and the person she later discovers is called the Jaguar silently entwined on the kitchen floor, clutching each other in a pool of blood. The knife plunged into the Jaguar’s right armpit is a telltale sign of whose turn it was to die this time. Even so, Verónica feels the need to bend down, touch the blood, raise it to the abyss of her lips.

  “Our compulsion to stare into the abyss,” is Bértola’s verdict when he arrives, too late as always, and embraces the two women in their separate worlds of ashes.

  8

  It is 2 p.m. in Europe, 8 a.m. in New York, and the markets have still not recovered. The three foreign men slaughtered in that absurd Latin-American country known only for tango, beefsteaks and Maradona were top executives in important companies closely followed on the world’s stock markets. The ambassadors in Buenos Aires have received strict instructions: they are to make strong protests to whatever corrupt government is in power, threatening to withdraw all promised capital—from both their local subsidiaries and the officials’ Swiss bank accounts—if within a few hours the whole force of the law is not brought to bear on those responsible.

  They give the president no time to shed tears in public for his murdered minister, or to celebrate in private that he has been rid of the political rival he most feared. As if that were not enough, the gutter press is already speculating that this Oso Berlusconi was little more than a paid assassin, that more powerful interests are in play beyond him. The media is hinting that the minister’s death will become one more in the long list of crimes that go unpunished, one of those endless cases that are eventually closed because, behind the scenes, that is what is demanded by the institutions of this banana republic and the continued smooth running of business.

  At that same hour, in an estate without farmers or grazing cattle close to Exaltación de la Cruz, it has been decided that the cop skeleton, the Bolivian beauty queen and the delivery faun are to be shot in the pigsties, and fed to the porkers. This sentence, delivered without any right of appeal by the one they call “Uncle,” makes no concession for the fact that for many years Pacogoya was his favorite nephew. Uncle does not want any witnesses, even though the Che Guevara lookalike swears by all the Cuban exiles in Miami that he will not say a word about him, that he could not give a damn what they do with the cop and the Bolivian sweetie; Uncle knows he can trust him, that he has never betrayed him and he is going to bring him the attractive bundles of cash that Uncle pockets after every trip on a cruise ship where Pacogoya has been a tourist guide.

  “You’re right, I don’t much like the idea that the few starving pigs on the estate should eat you,” Uncle admits. “But I’ll sleep more soundly with you out of this world. I don’t trust queers, they’re hysterics as well as perverts. Anyway, this is a three-for-two bargain: if I’m tried for murder, the number is unimportant. If you don’t believe me, ask the military-junta leaders.”

  The three of them are hustled out of the room. Pacogoya throws himself to the floor and has to be dragged out, sobbing and still promising he will hand over whoever Uncle asks him to, he does not care. He does not want to die so young and for no reason he pleads, until one of Uncle’s thugs shuts his mouth with a well-aimed kick with the tip of his boot. Pacogoya moans and spits out his upper front teeth, then howls like a dog run over on the road as he is pulled along behind Carroza and Miss Bolivia. Unlike him, they keep a proud silence as they are marched to the scaffold full of mud and pig shit.

  With no weapon or mobile, Deputy Inspector Carroza is forced to accept that his life is in the out-tray, waiting for this jumped-up smuggler, this new rich usurper of such patrician surroundings, to press the “enter” key and send him flying forever through cyber space. Nothing so surprising about that, after all: he never expected anything else, there was never a lasting love in his home port, nothing to stop him slipping his moorings, no island with sirens waiting for him. People can live permanently voyaging, without having anywhere to return to, surrounded on all sides by water, with no radar or lookouts, indifferent to whichever way the wind blows. Once you have achieved this and the only point of the compass is to drift aimlessly, then you can say (as Carroza sometimes does when staring in the mirror or at a glass of rum) that happiness is for fools and madmen, and that death is not the end or the start of anything, neither of this dirty reality nor of better possible worlds.

  Meanwhile, life—those dregs at the bottom of a glass still to be drained—still offers him the chance to find out about what he came here to discover, more out of professional curiosity than because anyone was going to thank him for it. A long, wide corridor links the main room with the back doors, next to the kitchen and the servants’ quarters from when the estate was in the hands of real landowners and not these merchants with no pedigree but their police records. Where housekeepers, lady companions, maids in uniform and butlers in livery once slept, now it is Uncle’s thugs who are dozing, a sad bunch of out-of-hours cops and criminals for hire.

  “There they are, they haven’t killed them yet.”

  It is Miss Bolivia who makes the discovery. She does not seem in the least bit concerned that her tender young flesh is soon to become a snack for some starving pigs as abandoned to their fate as she is. Carroza follows the direction of her gaze and sees them sitting on a king-size bed as if waiting their turn. Their heads are lowered as if they at least are downcast at the idea of the end most probably awaiting them at the hands of this ambitious Uncle who seems not to care what it may cost him to force his way to heaven knows where.

  “She’s almost as beautiful as you, Bolivia.”

  Jet-black eyes, waves of chestnut hair like Rita Hayworth or Maria Felix, stars of a cinema that no longer exists, a ship of dreams with Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart for crew, saying their endless Casablanca goodbye beneath the shadowless breeze of a lazy ceiling fan. Despite her crestfallen appearance, Sirena Mondragon really is beautiful.

  “Are you going to kill her?”

  No-one but Miss Bolivia could have asked a question like that. She spins on her high heels and confronts one of the two gunmen who are taking them to the pigsties. An unexpected question can sometimes have the same effect as a point-blank shot on what anyone with any common sense might think would happen next. This time it distracts their guards: they do not lower their guns, close their eyes, or turn to see who she is talking about, but they do glance at each other seeking an answer—not so much to Miss Bolivia’s question as to how anyone can be interested in someone else’s fate in the last minute of their own life.

  This
momentary lack of attention is enough for Carroza to revisit the martial arts he has been neglecting since the days he was patrolling the streets chasing pickpockets. He immediately recognizes that he is not at his best, that he has been sitting at a desk for at least seven or eight years and that what previously took him one second now takes two or three. Even so, he disarms the first guard with a well-aimed black-belt kick and follows it up by effortlessly smashing his head against the wall. The other guard, though, has had time to fire twice before Miss Bolivia’s sharpened nails dig into his right cheek, forcing him to drop his Itaca. At the first shot, Carroza feels a sharp sting as if he had cut himself shaving; the second bullet ricochets off the floor in front of his nose and buries itself in the head of the first guard.

  Carroza picks the shotgun up as quickly as in neighborhood cinema matinées Charlie Chaplin used to rescue the baby abandoned on a railway line just a second before the express arrived. The gunman stares at him as though someone has taken his toy. Not even the buckshot in his chest that leaves him choking on his own blood can convince him that an oversight or clumsy movement can knock over a glass of the best wine and bring the party to an abrupt end.

  Miss Bolivia, who never got an answer to her question, feels her appetizing beauty queen’s body being flung by the skeleton man toward the double bed, where she ends up in a heap on top of Sirena Mondragón.

  Trained as he is to transport wads of money in suitcases with false bottoms, to do deals with white-gloved mafiosi, Osmar Arredri has no idea what to do with the dead gunman’s Itaca that Carroza has thrown to him like a lifebelt to a drowning man.

  “Just pull the trigger …” Then, seeing the Colombian hesitate: “Look, like this … or have you never seen a gangster movie?”