Holy City (14 page)

The old, refurbished Victorian station (built over a century ago by the English) is an opera house where baritone and tenor voices, sopranos and contraltos, respond discordantly to questions put to them by a
group of very young journalists all trying to get a scoop. They are there because their editors have shouted at them to “come back with a big story, really big, or you can start looking for another job.” They are pushing and shoving each other and shouting even louder than the bleating tourists. The office sheep on the way home from their daily slaughterhouses stare in astonishment at this impromptu performance, although most of them rush straight past without looking in order not to miss their daily commuter train. Both the foreign tourists and the office sheep are travelers. They share a desire to continue with their journey; the only thing that distinguishes them is how much they have paid to arrive at their destination.

On the television screen that the two captives cannot see on the fortieth floor of the Alas building, Rosamonte and Sergeant Ramón Capello watch the rowdy press conference that is being shown live from Retiro. Sergeant Capello is not from the federal police but the air force. He is a “redneck,” as the air-force officers like to call their N.C.O.s. He is there under orders from Group Captain Castro, who is a close associate of Oso Berlusconi. Castro lives on the twenty-third floor of the same building with his no-longer young wife and spinster daughter. She is almost as unattractive as Rosamonte and he has already given up hope that one day someone will take her off his hands.

Oso personally asked Captain Castro to do him this favor. At night it is hard to find policemen to guard the prisoners; nearly all of them are trying to earn a bit on the side in private security firms, or as stewards at football games. So there is a gap of six hours before he, Oso, can come to interrogate the prisoners himself.

“I'll send my adjutant up,” Captain Castro told Oso. “He's a trustworthy redneck from Chaco Province. He can deal with any emergency; he was brought up in the hills slitting pigs' throats.”

Oso is wary of Castro's boasts. Castro is someone whom his comrades-in-arms would not have in their airports scam and who is trying to curry favor so that he is not kicked off what they call the
“drugs jumbo,” a virtual airline that comes and goes, passing with its cargo through all the controls without a problem, carrying more cocaine than passengers and never showing a profit. Oso does not trust Castro after he heard the story that he chickened out in 1987 when the rebel army officers were about to topple the constitutionally elected president Raúl Alfonsín. In those days, Castro was a flight lieutenant in charge of a helicopter gunship that was meant to strafe all those traveling in the presidential limousine. The mission failed when he asked over the radio if all the rebels were off their heads, landed his helicopter at the port of Olivos, then embarked on a yacht with his lover, the daughter of a big landowner. The attempted coup was a failure. Castro was saved from the purges that followed, but he never reached the rank of brigadier and was still living with his family in an apartment block where the rats ran the tenants' association.

An expert in survival techniques, Castro had managed to keep a mistress on the seventeenth floor of the same building. She was the widow of an air-force captain who had served with the United Nations in Afghanistan. He had died of fourteen stab wounds a year earlier while on patrol on the outskirts of Kabul—or more exactly, inside a whorehouse, where he was killed for the gold watch awarded him by the air force for his years of looping the loop.

At 10 p.m., bored with staring at the silent television and of having to listen to all Rosamonte's sentimental misadventures (and fearing that before midnight he might find himself obliged to reject her explicit invitation to have sex), Sergeant Capello calls Captain Castro's apartment to tell him there is no news and ask if he can leave. He hears the sleepy voice of the captain's wife answering, “Of course I'm asleep, it's night time, isn't it? But I don't know where that bastard is. Sometimes when he can't sleep he goes down to have a chat with the night guard.”

The sergeant knows the captain well enough to suspect he does not go downstairs to talk to the guard at that time of night, but to climb into bed on the seventeenth floor.

“Captain Castro, sir? Sergeant Capello here.”

“I told you not to phone me here unless it's important. What the fuck do you want?”

“To leave, Captain, sir. Police officer Montes is giving the little birds their supper. They're very quiet and no trouble. I'm bored up here.”

“You'll be even more bored in the brig if you leave now. Wait for your replacement as per your instructions.”

“How long will you be there, Captain, sir?”

“What the fuck is that to you?”

“Just in case I have to report anything, sir. I wouldn't want to wake your lady wife again.”

“So she's already asleep is she, that witch? She takes pills, that's why she's out of it so early. You're right, call me here if there's anything to report. I'll be at this number until two or three in the morning, when I've cured my insomnia.”

Captain Castro gives a squeaky laugh like a contented mouse that has found a cheese store in the cellar. The wife of the airman who died on a whorehouse mission in Afghanistan snickers alongside him.

Rosamonte has removed the two prisoners' handcuffs and gags. Silently, they eat the cold meats with Russian salad she has brought them from the nearby foodstore, together with a white wine she swigged half of before splashing the rest into plastic cups for them. She apologizes to Capello for not bringing him anything. She is not going to have anything either; she prefers to wait until their replacements arrive and then, if the sergeant goes with her, they can get a meal at a restaurant she knows where lots of actors go after their shows—it is open till 4 a.m.

Capello shudders to imagine how Rosamonte's breath will stink of raw onion and booze if, as he suspects, she gets heavy and wants to finish the night's entertainment in a cheap bed nearby. As he was told on his first day at N.C.O. training school, the armed forces do not mix with the security forces. Not even rednecks like him.

“What actors?”

Rosamonte finds the sergeant's question hilarious.

“Why, are you going to ask for their autographs?”

“Why not?” replies Capello, opening his briefcase as he does so. It is a plain black leather case, like those office juniors carry when they go to banks, or brokers use to carry their receipts and purchase orders in. Out of the corner of his eye he glances at the little birds eating their seed. They respond stealthily in the same way, as though exchanging a silent password.

A crash startles them. The door between the two rooms has slammed shut. The building starts to sway almost imperceptibly.

“We're experiencing turbulence, please fasten your seat belts,” jokes Capello the aviator.

Rosamonte smiles. A philologist would be envious of her ability to interpret silences, to read from the lips all that has not been said. She imagines the late-night supper, or rather, the late night without the supper, the room in semidarkness where the aeronautical redneck will undress her with all the urgency of someone putting on a parachute when his plane has gone into a nose dive. She will cling to him and whisper for him not to take off his uniform; the straps excite her, she loves to caress the military jacket and its gold buttons, then to zoom away with that feeling in the pit of the stomach that pilots get when their fighters lift off the flight deck of an aircraft carrier.

Rosamonte realizes too late that the slamming door means that the Colombian and his mermaid are shut in the next room with their hands untied and without gags. The color drains from her face and she turns as white as the corpse she would be if the .38 that has suddenly appeared in the sergeant's hand were fired.

“Open the door.”

“Be careful,” she warns him, sounding maternal. “It's Oso Berlusconi who's in charge of them.”

The first thing Rosamonte was told at her police training school was
to beware of anyone from the armed forces. They are clumsy and stupid. They might be able to hit a fixed target, but they fire wildly and kill anyone and everyone if they have to shoot in the street. And besides—she was warned—they look down on the police.

“Open the door,” insists Capello, stroking the gun in his right hand like a cat wanting some attention. Rosamonte feels for the butt of her regulation revolver, but the sergeant stops her in her tracks. “Don't try it,” he says. “Keep that hand still. Now for the third time, open the door. If I have to ask again, I'll put a bullet between your eyes.”

“What's going on?” Rosamonte asks indignantly. “Do you work for the drug traffickers? You're nothing but a traitor. You open it: who do you think you are?”

She is furious, not because she is afraid he might shoot, but because by now she is not so sure she would enjoy clinging to his jacket, exciting herself by stroking the straps crossing his chest, then lowering her hand until she finds what she is looking for. The wind rising from the wide, muddy brown river howls round the city like a pack of hounds. It whistles along the corridors of the Alas building, but the airman stands firm, used to storms in the sky.

Rosamonte decides to obey and opens the door.

Where does love come from?

Babies, in Spanish at least, come from Paris. Whining, opportunist exiles from Argentina. But where does love come from?

She should not have thrown him out the other night. Three
thousand pesos is not that much money; she has often transferred bigger sums to her expenses. She should have given him the money, or waited until the second fuck to be honest with him: “I cheated you,” she could have said. “God will repay you.”

Where was love when she married her ombudsman?

“Don't complain,” Laucha Giménez told her. “You've had men. And if you lost them it wasn't your fault.”

That was a white lie; it was her fault. Romano had never hit her until the night he punched her in the face. He had not even been aggressive toward her; he worked that off elsewhere, in his work, where he felt no compunction about taking out criminals, even killing those whom he knew were just dreaming of killing a cop and eyed him greedily.

Yet he always came home at peace with himself and without a single bloodstain on his hands. Like a general or a multinational company executive who cause massacres during their working day, then drive home to their families humming songs from their teenage years that are played on the car radio at that time of day.

What unleashed his fury that night? Could she have been stirring it up unwittingly by creating her own world behind his back, a world in which a policeman, an ordinary cop like him, a bandit with an official badge, could never even imagine being included? And if that is how it was, with no love, only speculation and disdain, why did she stay with him?

After his death there was no grieving. She was taken in again soon afterward, this time by her ombudsman. She met him when she was representing one side in a very complex inheritance case. A big landowner's estate had to be divided up and there were three carrion crows—two men and a woman, young graduates from private universities, members of exclusive clubs they would do anything to keep their membership cards for. Verónica was representing the woman, the sister, who thought she was some kind of princess.

In the end, none of them inherited a thing. Creditors started to
appear like cockroaches on a sinking ship or in hospital wards at night time. There were more of them than the trio of crows could ever have imagined. The inheritance proceedings ran aground like the
Queen of Storms
and everyone, lawyers included, was left stranded. Verónica cried on the ombudsman's shoulder. She told him she had been planning to use the money finally to buy an apartment of her own. She had already paid the deposit: who would have thought that an inheritance for land out in the pampas could become so complicated? Every inch a gentleman, the ombudsman took her in his arms and consoled her.

“That wasn't love,” Laucha objects, “it was a property transaction.” Verónica had just turned forty. The menopause had ceased to be a topic in women's magazines and was tiptoeing round her like a specter. She was getting sudden flushes and unexpected pains which meant the ombudsman often had to stay in another room, resigned, unfailingly polite. “A father figure—he was twenty years older than you”

“But I would have liked to have a child with him.”

“With an old man?”

“He wasn't that old. Only fifty-nine.”

“What kind of children can you have with an old man?” Laucha insisted. “Little old men.”

She is certain he died because of her.

“There was no investigation. A guy is killed in the street—and not just anyone, a federal ombudsman—and he gets buried with no questions asked. There wasn't even an autopsy to remove the bullets.”

“You're a lawyer; you could have done something.”

“I was scared stiff. On the night he was killed, I got a threatening phone call. Whenever I went out, for a walk or in the car, I was followed. They were never near enough for me to shout at them, but sufficiently close for me to feel they were on my heels, that they could kill me and disappear whenever they felt like it.”

She lived with him for fourteen months. Every morning when she
woke up she found it impossible to understand what she was doing there, but felt reassured and comforted.

“As I said, he was your father.”

A widow and an orphan, both deaths by shooting. An illness or an accident are shadows in a landscape of sharp contrasts. If they happen, it is possible to live on, make plans, think of something resembling a future.

“But I've lived a war's worth of devastating personal battles, Lauchita.”