Holy City (33 page)

“I'll take care of the Jaguar,” Scotty told him. “Leave him to me, I want him.”

The telephone rings in several places at the same time: in Verónica's empty apartment, in Damián Bértola's house with a dog, in the spider's nest.

“Open the door, he must be nearly there by now.”

This is Ana talking on her mobile from Carroza's car as they head for the estate at Exaltación de la Cruz. Skulking in the kitchen so she does not have to face Verónica, Laucha Giménez answers, then hangs up at once. Something could be going wrong.

She goes back into the living room and talks to Verónica.

“Don't be frightened,” she tells her, as if that was enough.

Verónica shakes her head slowly. She denies everything: being there, being born, that is the fear.

*

He does not have a mobile. Neither Freud nor Lacan had one, and they were Freud and Lacan. Why should he, Damián Bértola, be forced to go around with a time bomb attached to him, like some terrorist?

He promises to revisit his convictions, though, and buy himself one, if he finds Verónica Berutti alive. Perhaps she is already back at her apartment, and he could save himself the journey and keep some of his muted despair for when it is really needed.

No-one who is seriously contemplating suicide announces it as if they were inviting people to their wedding reception: at least that is what orthodox analysts insist, despite the bodies piling up in the morgues. Verónica never hinted that was what she intended to do. It is Laucha Giménez, or Paloma or whatever species she represents in the zoological categories of his patients, who brings the matter up every now and then. “Perhaps she's the one who wants to disappear, perhaps it's all of us,” the shrink tells himself.

He finally reaches the apartment block where Verónica lives and sees her fugitive criminals, and attends his unredeemed patients. He rings the bell, knocks on the door, then opens it with his key. No-one.

There is a telephone number hastily scrawled on a page of a fashion magazine on the coffee table. He dials it, because it is there, because the
storm forces him to breathe under water, to admit he has gills and to survive thanks to them. When Laucha answers he can hardly believe it: this is not her number and her voice sounds like that of a dove stuck on a ledge with clipped wings.

“Come quickly,” Laucha moans.

“Where?”

She gives him an address, hurry up.

“Don't tell me that …”

He is cut off. As quick as he can.

It is not like him to rush in an emergency. If he had wanted that he would have studied medicine rather than psychology: obstetrics or cardiology, the two specializations where you have to go out at night. He trained to be a shrink so he could sleep at home, write, construct fine texts from his patients' emotional catastrophes, wait for them on his implacable fifty-minute life-raft, watch them struggle through the waves toward him, convince them that learning to swim is not worth the trouble, that he will lead them to dry land, although of course it is far away. If it were just round the corner it would make no sense being an analyst, he says persuasively, and so they stay, even if sometimes they confuse dry land with a desert island.

There is no-one about. He has to stop the car and get out at Parque Lezama to ask a tramp yawning on a bench that has become social housing where calle Azara is. There must be something he cannot detect in his clothes or the way he looks that tells the tramp he is an analyst, because the man starts telling him about his childhood in this very neighborhood, which he has known since the days when trams and Peronists circulated freely round the city. Bértola cuts short his regression by shouting that a woman's life is in danger if he doesn't stop rabbiting on and tell him where on earth calle Azara is. The tramp removes the busted hat he uses to cover his damaged head and points out the way. “It's just down there, four blocks away, get a move on, doctor,” he says, ceremoniously bidding him farewell.

Bértola leaps back into his car and races off, but gets lost. He reaches Montes de Oca, then has to come back three blocks, only to find a one-way street that delays him still further. The excuses his patients come up with in order to avoid facing reality are not half as complicated as these short side streets in old Buenos Aires. He ends up sailing past the corner of Azara without the faintest notion of where he is going. He circles round again, sure that this time he will arrive too late, that his desire to be a hero counts for nothing when the plot has been written by gods without scruples, evil idols, when the first light of day—in a city which once boasted it was the Paris of South America—stinks like the waters of the Río Riachuelo.

*

The gunmen who put more dents on the bodywork of the Renault are hospitable. They decide that Ana Torrente and the cop are to stay in the mansion because the chief wants to see them. Only problem: the chief is asleep, his asthma. What asthma? The chief wants to know right now what the devil those two intruders are doing there, he has heard of the cop and has no intention of letting him go, at least not until things have died down in the capital.

But there is little chance of that.

When everyone, journalists and guards, threw themselves to the pavement that the concierge had not been able to hose down, the Interior Minister's killer became obvious as he tried to run away. The cops on guard at the street corner could not believe their eyes: the mythical Oso Berlusconi hurtling toward them, shouting as he ran, “he escaped that way, the bastard escaped down there.” It took them a few seconds to look at each other quizzically, then decide that no, the only person trying to put something past them was Oso. They shouted to him to stop. “Stop there, Oso, we can talk later but for now drop your weapon,” said one of them, backed up by the other four, all of them
training their guns pitilessly on the man who had led so many operations, on Oso Berlusconi, decorated by dictators and democrats, the killing machine in whose honor they themselves had sung the national anthem each time he had a medal pinned to his chest.

They knew that to try to stop the flight of someone as important as Oso, armed and blind with rage at this grisly end to a bad night, was like trying to halt a railway engine by raising your hand and so none of them stepped forward. They let him go by and Oso raced on in triumph, as if he were about to burst through the finishing tape to roars of applause.

The only roar was that of their guns. Oso's back was red with blood even before he began to crumple to the street, to finish up face down, his mouth open over the smell of sewage from an open drain.

The news reaches the man who only three hours earlier sent Oso Berlusconi on his suicide mission almost immediately. The face of the chieftain in this country estate without cattle shows no trace of asthma, annoyance or satisfaction. It remains a mask as a man almost as skinny as Carroza but much shorter whispers what has happened into his ear.

“Not a good night. But it's ending well.”

The owner of the mansion is not accustomed to making prisoners of his guests. He made this clear as soon as Carroza and Miss Bolivia were brought before him. He does not like talking to people he might not like.

“That creates a negative energy which spoils any dialogue,” he
explained. The two of them had just had their hands tied; something else the chief did not like. “But you have to understand I cannot exactly trust someone who Oso Berlusconi once recommended to me as a perfect killer.”

“I only kill when the state pays,” Carroza clarified. “And with discounts for national insurance and state pension.”

“An honest cop; don't make me laugh.”

“What have they done to Poppa?” asked Miss Bolivia.

“We'll learn about that in a little while, if you stay here with me.”

At that point Carroza's mobile started to throb in his back pocket. A slight flicker in their host's face indicated to one of his men to get the phone.

“Nobody,” said the man.

“A missed call, you idiot.”

“It was from a public phone.”

Another minimal gesture, perhaps only the second in as many days, and Carroza's mobile was squashed under the thug's size forty-four boot.

“You didn't come alone, or empty-handed,” said their host. “Nobody comes here alone and with empty hands.”

Behind the two prisoners, a prisoner as well although there was no need to tie him up because he was more dead than alive, Pacogoya and the backpack stuffed with cocaine for half the tourists on board the
Queen of Storms
adorned the carpet in the enormous room.

The big chief explained to his tied-up guests that of all Oso Berlusconi's mistakes, trying to keep the drugs that this pathetic creature was carrying in his backpack to sell them himself had been the straw that broke the camel's back.

“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.”

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.