Holy City (36 page)

Uncle knows that before nightfall he has to make himself scarce with the money they found and shared out in a small-town museum only a few kilometers from the country estate with no cattle. It was hidden under a display case exhibiting the
bolas
used by the natives of the
pampa and some silver
maté
gourds said to have belonged to the gaucho who inspired Ricardo Güiraldes for his
Don Segundo Sombra
.

Uncle's troops are a motley bunch, half a dozen cops pensioned off or thrown out of the force because of their bad habits, used to shooting first and keeping the small change from street dealers in suburban neighborhoods. The Colombians on the other hand are an elite group, Rangers trained in Panama night schools by Yankees who naively think that the Colombian “self-defense forces” are really committed to the fight against drug trafficking. If they found Uncle and his bunch of paunchy colleagues, they would finish them off with a couple of bazooka strikes.

This explains why the two sides said goodbye politely in the doorway of the small-town museum and headed in opposite directions. Sirena is sure the others will not get far. “That lame Uncle will be devoured by his own mastiffs,” she prophesied as she got into the back seat of the Renault. “And as for you, I'm going to give you a few dollars so that you can get rid of this heap of scrap and buy yourself a car, inspector.”

Scotty, the Argentine born of Irish parents, is leafing through tourist pamphlets about Ireland. His mother and father never talked to him about their home country: it was as if they had been born somewhere over the fog that was not worth remembering. Like so many immigrants, they preferred to believe they really were born in Argentina and had never crossed the ocean, driven by civil wars and the fear of being
shot in an ambush, or executed in front of a firing squad by one or other of the warring factions.

This was why he was not bothered that they called him Scotty in the force. It was all the same to him: he was born here, with his blue eyes and fair hair, just as much as Oraldo Frutos, the dark-skinned Araucanian who died in a hail of bullets fired by one of the mayor of Lanús' lackeys when Frutos tried to stop and question him in the early hours of a morning when even the patrol car driver had phoned in sick.

Europe never existed for Scotty, just as it did not for García the “Gallego” who was his companion until he was stripped of his rank and kicked out for refusing to testify against the pederast inspector who had recruited him from a slum on Piedras, rescuing him from drugs with the irrefutable argument: “You need to be on the other side of the counter, kid, selling and getting money for it, and not being a consumer. Come with me to the federal police.”

Europe: what on earth does that mean to any of them? This is the first time Scotty has even looked at a pamphlet about Ireland. A country of drunkards, as he understands it, people who hate the English and roll their r's, have good whisky and live somewhere that is cold the whole year long, with rosy-cheeked women that from afar seem quite frigid, although who knows?

“I'll talk to the magistrate, then come and see you,” Carroza had told him two hours ago. Scotty decides he will wait another hour for him, then go to bed. More than likely this time Carroza has had to spend the night in the court.

It is cold in Buenos Aires. A damp mist blurs the outlines of its buildings, soaks the empty streets where a few night owls scurry along, not to mention the occasional toothless vampire on their way to a brothel down by the port or to the woods of Palermo where at this time of night the transvestites roam like gaudy zombies.

The entry-phone buzzer sounds.

A skull on the monitor screen: Carroza has escaped arrest yet again. Scotty opens the street door and waits.

“That bastard magistrate wanted to keep me in a cell.”

Carroza comes in, throwing off his trenchcoat, a filthy imitation of the one Colombo always wore on television.

“He's an honest magistrate.”

“Honest but blind. I know of poor kids who stripped off to show him the cuts and bruises they had suffered, and he replied, poker-faced, ‘Where did that happen, my boy?'”

“All the better, by playing the fool he saves us work. He knows we're playing with radioactive waste. But this time you went too far, Yorugua.”

Carroza does not react. Instead he picks up the pamphlet Scotty was looking at.

“What's this?”

“Ireland.”

Disgusted, Carroza throws it to the floor.

“They should hand us back the Malvinas.”

“This is Ireland, Yorugua, not England.”

“Where the fuck is Ireland anyway?”

Scotty patiently explains where Ireland is and that it has nothing to do with the British Empire. “But they speak the same language, drink whisky and shit on us,” Carroza argues, if only to change the subject, to forget the honest magistrate who threatened to keep him in a cell and the forty-year-old suicidal mouse he used as bait so that Miss Bolivia would not be suspicious and would call the Jaguar. “You promised me you'd take care of that scum,” he complains.

“But he came over the rooftops.”

“While you were sitting in your car, smoking and listening to Tango F.M., expecting a mad criminal to come and ring the doorbell at my place like some Bible seller.” Scotty pours them whisky. A horrible Argentine whisky, the cheapest he could find in the supermarket. Carroza merely moistens his lips with it. “You were the one who
convinced me he was a dangerous madman. But you stayed sitting in your car.”

Scotty lets him come, to advance into his territory. If he left now, in this angry mood, he would never admit anything, would only shut down again. The next day or the day after he would quit his apartment on Azara and look for another den at the opposite end of the city, moving from south to north or out to the suburbs. Carroza, constantly changing his hideouts, feeling hunted, on the defensive.

“You're right,” says Scotty. “I stayed in the car. But you knew.”

*

“Did he know?”

This is Verónica speaking, her eyes as wide open as those of Mauser the dog. They are both staring up at Bértola, even though tonight he has not laid on a barbecue, simply taken her to his house in Villa del Parque. “You can't sleep alone”—to which she replied, “I can go to my job, after all, I'm in my element where there's a war going on.”

Eventually, though, she accepted the invitation, so here they are: Verónicas red-rimmed, tear-stained eyes staring at him as she twists the fur on the woolly head of the dog that has come to sit beside her as if he too wants to hear what the shrink makes of it.

“Of course he listens to me,” says Bértola, referring to Mauser. “Every analyst needs someone who listens. And at least the dog isn't a Lacanian.”

“If he knew, why did he let all this happen, Damián? Why didn't you at least warn me?”

“I can't foresee the events that my patients' pathological tendencies might unleash, Verónica. I'd be in a loony bin within the week.”

“But you must have suspected something. He was your patient too.”

“He hardly ever paid. And he was always suspicious. Whenever he came into my consulting room he kept looking for microphones.”

Bértola is exaggerating, trying to break down Verónicas unwillingness
to accept a reality he was not the only one who should have foreseen. But it is too soon for that; violence is still crackling in the atmosphere like the electricity from a storm that has not completely passed. It is not yet midnight.

“Why does someone choose to be a cop, Verónica?”

“No idea. To be on the side of those who win, to direct traffic, to carry a weapon? I was married to one, but he was always a stranger.”

All at once Verónica lets go of Mauser's head, leaps to her feet and confronts Bértola.

“Did Carroza have something to do with Romano's death?”

Bértola folds his arms. People ask too much of him. His patients all the time, without any extra payment, and now the colleague he shares the office rent with, the do-gooder lawyer, twice widowed, wants him, a humble neighborhood psychoanalyst, to tell her it has stopped raining and the little birdies are singing.

“This is war, Verónica. Everyone goes into it quaking with fear, knowing they're going to die in the trenches, blown apart by a grenade. That skull has not come straight out of the police academy. He has lived. And died, if you allow me the poetic license. From what I can tell—and I should point out that I don't consult my colleagues, or even Mauser here, about this kind of thing—the dead talk to him just like I'm talking to you now.”

“Let's see if I understand you: he couldn't care less.”

“Probably not. Did he go to the hospital, for example?”

Verónica shakes her head. He did not even bother to call her. He put Laucha in the line of fire and left her in charge of a situation no-one could possibly control, although her poor friend resolved it in her own way.

“In her own way, yes. Killing an innocent man.”

Verónica sits down again. She announces that she is not spending the night with anyone. “I'm going to the market,” she tells him. “I need to hear the sound of bullets whistling past me.”

“Do what you like, just make sure you don't shut your eyes. Laucha Giménez cared more for your life than her own, Verónica. She embraced the Jaguar hoping he would devour her, but discovered he was no more than a fluffy toy, with plastic teeth. Other people were the killers.”

“Ana Torrente,” says the do-gooder lawyer.

“And Walter Carroza,” says the neighborhood shrink.

It is the scavenging press pack that uncovers the Jaguar's hideaway. The local cops knew him, gave him spent cartridges and even a revolver they had appropriated from a young thief. “Let's see if you get inspired and blow your brains out,” they told him, not unkindly, and the Jaguar went leaping like a deer through his wood of junk and stagnant pools, on the stinking shores of the painted cardboard Jerusalem with its extras disguised as Arabs, frequented by tourists who do not descend from cruise ships like the
Queen of Storms
but are bussed in from the provinces.

A crew from Crónica Television got inside the Holy Land with its camera. Two youngsters already expert in crime reporting, one specializing in close-ups of accident scenes, the other who roams the city listening to the police radio and arrives on the spot before they do, snatching exclusive images of the thief being hunted down or riddled with bullets on the pavement, declarations from the father of the family taken hostage by a gang robbing a store a block away, more close-ups of the armed madman shouting for a judge or the mother who gave birth to him in an evil hour.

Poor pay, exhaustion, the ambition to become editors one day
and be able to sleep with top models, kept on their feet by a cocktail of drugs, roaming the city with one ear always on the police radio: they enter the Holy Land as they do any slum, Fort Apache, or Piedra Libre in the south of Morón, beaten-earth streets and dogs as skinny as the nine- or ten-year-old kids who have never been to school.

The red headline on Crónica Television:
“EXCLUSIVE: SKULLS IN HOLY LAND, THE JAGUAR'S HIDEOUT.”

Half a dozen heads severed from their trunks, bones that could belong to anyone and that a medical student could take home if he arrived before the television crews. They are the only ones who seem to care anyway, because the police never show up. The duty magistrate will call the licensees of the Holy Land in to take their statements: why did they allow such an antisocial element to spend the night on their land, did they not realize? “Realize what, he didn't harm anyone,” they will reply, and the magistrate will take advantage of the long August weekend to take a break at the seaside, and quickly archive a file that is as thin as the kids and dogs from the south of Morón.

*

“I knew, Scotty. Of course I knew. You made sure you served me the whole thing on a silver tray. A twin brother and sister born a few hours apart. The brain-damaged boy abandoned in the mountains. The little girl born in a hospital and then handed over for adoption. Am I right so far?” Scotty is on to his second Argentine whisky. He merely stares across at Carroza, who still has not taken more than a sip. “Humiliated, scorned and left for the vultures, the little boy on the mountain turned into a sort of avenging shadow who does not talk but kills—that was your version, wasn't it?”

“That was what the Bolivian police told me.”

“But the poor soul never killed so much as a fly. He simply sawed off heads. A hobby, like someone collecting postage stamps.”

“A colleague of ours started a file on him, if you remember. I passed you that information.”

“And I went to visit him in Lomas cemetery. He was buried without a head.”

“I didn't know that: you never told me. You were always one to keep your information to yourself, Yorugua. And that's dangerous for those of us who work with you.”

“The famous Jaguar never had access to that dead body, Scotty.” Third whisky for Scotty born in Ireland, staring at him blankly, his face as smooth and empty as those of the Martians, who have no mouth because they communicate by telepathy. “The body was in the morgue for two days before it was taken to spend eternity in Lomas cemetery. I was told a federal cop was sniffing round, asked to see the corpse. Why? Dardo Julio Martínez died of A.I.D.S., so why put his body in the morgue and why was a cop sticking his stinking nose into the corpse of a colleague? Loose ends, Scotty, that I had to tie up in a hurry. The magistrate says that if I don't send him a proper report within two hours, he'll have me arrested.”

“You should have gone down to headquarters then. I don't have a computer, friend.”

“I'll make do. So will the magistrate. All we public servants know how to do is draw up reports, fill in forms. And collect our pay at the end of the month. But I need to know, Scotty. One poor woman died trying to save another one's life. And I don't want to lose that other one thanks to your dirty tricks, ‘friend.'”