Holy City (19 page)

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.

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 347
B
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.”

“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.

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 ground floor,” Pacogoya says. “She didn't even say hello; I don't know what you've been telling her about me.”