Holy City (11 page)

“Let's meet and talk of old times,” Walter Carroza tells Verónica. She called him when she saw his ungainly figure on television. As ever when facing the press, he made declarations he did not want to make and, like most of his colleagues, resorted to phrases such as “no comment while the investigations are ongoing,” investigations which are always “about to be brought to a successful conclusion.”

They meet in a bar on calle Alsina. At midday it is full of office workers having lunch, but by this time of evening it has taken on the charm of a refuge. Only a few of these secret hiding places are left in Buenos Aires and this one only stays open since its owner stubbornly refuses to close earlier because, he says, “I like watching couples kissing and cuddling at nightfall over a cup of coffee.” The couples who give pleasure to this immigrant from Ourense in Galicia, who has been living in Argentina for forty years, are penniless adulterers, office workers
and shop assistants whose only opportunity to meet, talk of love and play at being happy comes at this time of day, and in hidden corners like this one.

“You know I can't talk in the department. All our phones are tapped by the intelligence services, no matter what our rank is or what case we're on,” says Walter, lighting up a cigarette that the bar owner lets him smoke so long as he keeps it hidden under the table. Verónica did not want to see him for old time's sake. She is more interested in passing on the information she received the previous night when she went round the market with Chucho. “You should never have accepted that job, Verónica, it's too dangerous.”

“Yeah, I could be killed, I know. So what? Every time I open my front door I tell myself: here comes some animal who's going to beat me up or stab me so he can get his hands on fifty bucks to feed his habit.”

“Thoughts like that can become premonitions. Try to think positively”

“Look who's talking!”

When he laughs, the teeth Deputy Inspector Carroza reveals are 90 percent nicotine and 10 percent tooth enamel. His sharp, angular features look even more gaunt. This is something he cannot or will not change—“my skull has the right to enjoy life too” is his motto.

Verónica's informer at the market is a smuggler from Jujuy, an indian who has made a pile but still likes to take a personal interest in his peripatetic business. From the first day, to win the inspector's favor he has offered to find her a digital camera or a latest model laptop, at a cost equivalent to half a dozen pairs of the knickers the Bolivian women sell.

“He lives on the quiet there in the Descamisados de América shanty town. He saw them when they were being taken out of a Japanese 4×4 in broad daylight. In twos: a French couple, then a Japanese pair, then two Germans. All of them elderly and all obviously rolling in it.”

“If he saw them, others must have done so too.”

Carroza's thought is both banal and pointless. Both he and Verónica know that nobody in shanty towns talks to the police. Every shack is a silent tomb.

“Why haven't there been any reports of the kidnappings?”

“There have been, but they've all been quietly filed away. The minister spoke in person to the police chief. He passed on the order. When people in power have us by the balls, we cops are even more silent than the shanty-town dwellers.”

Carroza explains that the minister wants everything sorted out quickly before the news gets out. There are big cheeses in the hotel owners' associations and tourist agencies. In recent years tourism in Argentina has turned into a gold mine: investment funds have poured millions into the hotel business and so have important money launderers, the kind of people who do not take kindly to a bunch of gunmen spitting on their barbecue. Nor does the minister want the enticing prosperity that comes ever closer with each new hotel built (contravening all the city-planning regulations) to be put at risk by any untimely request for information from the opposition, egged on by members of his own party annoyed that the minister did not invite them to the trough.

Veronica and Carroza agree that the secret cannot be kept much longer. The money to be made from revealing the kidnappings is increasing with every passing hour. The dealers in leaks to the press (most of whom nest inside the Central Police Department) are simply holding their breath, testing the atmosphere, judging how best to do a deal with the media without getting caught out.

“Some colleague or loudmouth from the shanty is going to strike a match in the distillery in the next few hours,” says Carroza.

“Talking of fires, you're filling this place with smoke. You'll get the poor Spaniard's bar closed down.”

“The fire-brigade chief is a friend of mine,” Carroza reassures her. “Now tell me the real reason you called.”

“Romano,” says Verónica, point blank. “I want to know who killed him.”

Carroza crushes out the cigarette on the floor. The bones of his skull stand out as if it were Hallowe'en. He leans back in his chair, shaking his head slowly from side to side.

“What for, Verónica? Knowing who it was won't change anything”

“Do you know?”

She has been asking him this ever since he has known her. Almost from the time, soon after their marriage, that she and Romano invited him to dinner. Before turning up, Carroza went down to the port. Ignoring the tramps in the street, he called in at a bar on the corner of San Martín and Córdoba where the ladies of the night gather, and picked out the one who looked least like a professional whore. After speaking to her for a minute to make sure she did not swallow her “s”s, he told her to go to the bathroom, wipe off her make-up and come with him. “I'm not arresting you,” he said. “We're going to have supper at a friend's place.”

“It was a nice evening, really pleasant,” says Verónica when Carroza mentions it now to ease the tension.

“That whore was a good sort, they don't make them like that anymore. Even Romano was fooled into thinking she was my girl.” They both laugh, but laughter is not much protection in the middle of a storm. Ever since the recent evening with Bértola, Verónica cannot escape the memory of her ex-husband. As if he were coming out of the dark to look after her. Or to beat her again. “You know I have no idea who killed him. I suspect everyone on the roster, but they're very careful. There was some kind of plebiscite, Verónica, and Romano got the thumbs down.”

“Did you vote too?” Carroza does not defend himself. He has never been one to pray for the fallen. He never sheds a tear when he goes to the funeral of a colleague gunned down on duty or shot by the kind of petty crook who boards buses to steal people's spare change. Romano's
death did not move him any more than that of any other guinea pig used by the system to try out their medicines. It is true, he was his friend, but he could have kept his mouth shut. He does not like saying it, but Verónica is forcing him to. “You could have prevented him being killed. He would have asked to quit the force and nothing would have happened, if only you'd agreed to go into the interior with him.”

“And probably today Kid Baker's little wife would be dead thanks to him and buried in the bucolic cemetery of Villa Dolores or Serrezuela. But you didn't tell me whether you voted as well …” Deputy Inspector Carroza stands up. He has no more cigarettes anyway and it is true the bar reeks of tobacco. If a health inspector came in now, the Spaniard would have to bribe him to avoid having the bar closed and Carroza would end up paying. Verónica is still sitting there, not looking at him. “I'll go and see what I can do with the information that grass gave you, before my colleagues start using it.”

At that moment another couple comes in. They are young: she is short, he is on the lanky side, wearing a worn suit and shirt. The pair of them have obviously been at work for the past ten hours. The brides of Dracula at dawn would look healthier than they do, but they keep going in the knowledge that for the price of a couple of coffees they have half an hour to stroke each other's hands across the table and stare into one another's eyes as though they were someone and somewhere else.

Verónica does not turn round, either to look at the couple entering the bar, or to say goodbye to Carroza, who is paying the bill with the owner, parapeted behind the counter.

“You shouldn't smoke so much,” the Spaniard tells him in a fatherly way.

“I promise to stop when I make inspector.”

Carroza turns to leave the bar. He pats his empty pocket just in case a last cigarette has fallen down the lining. He is as on edge as he always is almost twenty-four hours a day, and fed up with cops' widows. He sees the car screech to a halt outside the plate glass window.

Verónica, who was expecting him to walk past her without a word, cannot understand why Deputy Inspector Carroza suddenly flies though the air from the counter and lands on top of her, knocking her to the floor and smashing the table, their empty cups and the two glasses of water as he does so.

Carroza's flying dive must have disconcerted the gunman in the car too. Bewildered, he fires and cuts down the lanky lovelorn clerk before he has even got properly settled and begun to whisper sweet nothings to his Cinderella. The car disappears long before she closes her eyes, feels the tears welling up and lets out the funereal howl common to all women who have lost their man.

It was not easy for Ana Torrente to reach Buenos Aires. It is not the same arriving at Ezeiza airport on an international flight, even if it is from Bulgaria with connections, as getting off a bus at the Retiro terminus following a journey of almost twenty-four hours from Salta. It is not the same kind of people and the smells are very different. At Retiro you disembark amidst the ruins of the city; it is not the atmosphere of the elegant neighborhoods, it is another planet. Although the sun shines for everyone, it is the distance between Pluto and Mercury. The air is saturated with the smell of cheap fried food from the stalls, dark-skinned people are everywhere, street vendors and beggars, thieving youngsters out of their heads on glue who will never reach adolescence.

And Ana Torrente, like so many of the local immigrants, was scared.

“But I didn't stop to look at the Torre de los Ingleses or the Sheraton opposite Retiro square. I went straight to the post at the terminus and asked for you.”

“You did the right thing.” She has come back to him, just as she did the day she arrived. She likes to hear his voice. It does not matter what he is saying, it comforts her, satisfies her, calms and encourages her. It must be something to do with her hormones, because the man beside her is on his way to the scrapheap. In the gloomy, sordid room, stretched out on a bed they are not the first to use, he is like a fake Egyptian mummy, a papier-mâché android, a robot whose only practical use is to listen to her, hold her and, occasionally, to prevent her being killed. “You'll have to get out of here,” he says.

“Where to, Bolivia?”

The noonday sun is glaring even through the slats in the shutters. He almost has to close his eyes when he goes over to look out at nothing, the filthy pavements, people walking past head down, caught up in worlds there is no point getting too close to, worlds that explode every so often, spattering him with blood, wounding him if he is not continually on his guard.

“I nearly got killed yesterday,” he tells her. “Near here, only three blocks away, in a miserable bar on Alsina. The shots weren't meant for me, but I was close enough.” Miss Bolivia is not impressed by his stories anymore. They are all he has to tell her, like a grandfather telling fairy tales. She dozes off, even manages to dream a little. “I've got a friend. Retired from Interpol. He lives in Spain now, in the Canaries.”

“What does he do there, play horseshoes?”

“When he was in service in the mother country he helped organize a network of Latin-American girls. All from the Southern Cone, white women,” he explains. “They're all so contented no-one can persuade them to come back. They're saving in euros.”

“So your friend is an elderly pimp.”

He feels so weary he starts to get dressed. She asks if they can stay a
while longer. She feels sleepy and can never relax outside. It is only in here, with him, that she still feels her life could get better.

“So you're going to stay.”

“There's a job to be done,” she says. He smiles his nicotine smile; he is already desperate for a cigarette, but he has run out of them again. He rescues one of the butts from the floor and lights it. The flame from the lighter singes the bunch of hairs protruding from his nostrils. “You've got more hairs on your snout than on your nut.” Ana ruffles the fuzz on the top of his head. “Of course I'm going to stay, to finish what we began,” she adds. She pulls him toward her while he is taking a drag at his cigarette, laughing at his cough and the wheezing sound like an out-of-tune organ in some abandoned cathedral that comes from his chest. “Afterward, if you like, I'll be a whore in Spain. But let's finish first.”

*

Sometimes he enjoys being like this with women he hardly knows. Although the previous evening his pleasure had been spoiled: first of all by Verónica insisting on knowing who killed her husband, allowing the doubt to ruin her life in a way he cannot conceive, but which leaves him feeling uncomfortable for days.

What's dead is done with. Like the lanky guy who sat in the wrong place and, to top it all, suffered the indignity of the people who took his corpse home having to explain to his widow “in what circumstances the death took place.” The widow, a truculent, obese woman—140 kilos of fat in a ball a meter and a half round—refused to accept the dead body. “Throw him to the dogs,” she said. “Let that little tart bury him. No, better still, let her dig a double grave, because tomorrow I'll find her and kill her.”

Why make a moral judgment about someone who, one sunny morning or evening with the threat of rain in the air, like yesterday, is
gunned down, stabbed to death, or killed in whatever way occurs to the hired killer, whether by accident or design? What's dead is done with.