Holy City (21 page)

An hour later, Pacogoya boards the bus that will take him non-stop to Esquel. It is a long journey, but what a relief to be able to sit comfortably and safely next to the window, to watch the city gradually losing density, dissolving into itself, into its suburbs, into increasingly open spaces, green pastures, flat green pampa, wheat, soya, green cows,
ciao
Buenos Aires,
ciao
Verónica menopausal Berutti,
ciao Queen of Storms. Adios:
the Che Guevara lookalike is heading for mountains
where there are no malaria, Bolivians, or Rangers, only a rich Swede with whom he can fuck and fuck until the end of the world.

Scarcely half an hour has gone by when the bus pulls up at a toll booth. Pacogoya has already dozed off, but is woken up by the flashing red and blue lights of a police checkpoint by the roadside. A couple of Alsatians, held on a long leash by a cop with a gun in his right hand. Another two cops protecting him with shotguns. The dogs board the bus and before Pacogoya can even touch his backpack they are barking at him like hounds round a wild boar at bay. The cop with them orders him off the bus.

“Yes, you, sonny, the guy with the backpack. Get off the bus, you asshole!” If the other passengers had been a jury, they would already have found him guilty. A guy with a backpack and a straggly beard: he must be a drug addict. Under his jacket he is wearing a T-shirt with the image of the real Che on it. To the stake with him! Pacogoya is hustled off the bus. One of the dogs has its jaws clamped round his calf. A signal or whistle from its master and it would rip him to pieces. “What a weight he's carrying,” the cop says, taking the backpack from him.

The bus speeds off, heading for Sweden.

Pacogoya promises himself he will call Verónica again as soon as they let him use a phone. She will curse him of course, but deep down she is not a bad sort and will end up being concerned about him, she will call a magistrate and get him legal protection, he will be alright. He would have been far worse off with the gang of kidnappers, waiting to be executed in that filthy shack by the Riachuelo.

“You must be Pacogoya.” A rasping, distant voice, like that of someone who is already dead and buried but still has something to say. “Tourist guide, friend of Verónica Berutti, the lawyer who's such a good friend to criminals …” Somehow there is a friendly note to the voice. It has the sound of someone who never sleeps, the monotonous drone of a person reading a script without bothering too much about it. The
guy is huge, the size of a mountain. The other cops slip away into the darkness and the dogs settle back meekly beside the patrol car, no doubt waiting for the next bus and the next asshole like him. “Where were you going?”

“To Esquel.”

“Wow, a paradise on earth! Just a tourist visit?” Pacogoya knows this is the way cops ask questions. They never say anything straight out, like doctors do. Yes, just a visit, a few days, possibly a couple of weeks, someone is waiting for him. “You don't say! Who is waiting for you, so far from the rest of the world?”

“A young lady.”

Pacogoya sketches a smile he hopes will get the cop on his side. He would have had more luck with the Alsatians.

“Poor woman, she's going to grow tired of waiting.”

Still without raising his voice, the man twists Pacogoya's arm behind his back, handcuffs him, and drags him over to a gray vehicle parked a few meters from the federal and provincial patrol cars. A young woman is sitting in the front passenger seat. When Pacogoya is pushed into the back of the car, she turns toward him.

“Are you Paraguayan?”

The young woman is very pretty. She pronounces her s's like a Bolivian and seems friendly.

“I was born in the capital, Asunción,” says Pacogoya, trying to recover, although he is still grimacing from the pain in his right arm. “But as a student I lived in Buenos Aires, then I traveled all over.”

“I'm Ana Torrente.”

She is blond and blue-eyed, as friendly and beautiful as the death awaiting someone who has nothing left to lose.

“But she's known as Miss Bolivia.”

This is not necessary, but the cop is enjoying himself as he clambers into the driving seat. He is glad he has annoyed her and looks into the rearview mirror to see if there is any reaction from Pacogoya. Then he
pulls out onto the motorway and starts to plunge back into the bowels of Buenos Aires, siren blaring on the gray Toyota.

He accelerates and, although he is not hungry, Oso Berlusconi licks his lips, imagining the feast.

He never goes to cemeteries, they are not his style. Not even for the funerals of colleagues killed in action, or to visit relatives whose faces and personal histories are buried along with them. But this rainy, gray Sunday afternoon he has made an exception. He can feel his body rejecting the idea: the sensation that if he leaned over any grave it would be to vomit.

Class divisions do not end when life does: they go on discriminating against the dead. Some are buried in vaults with fine stained-glass windows and proud marble walls. Others are filed away in endless rows of niches, while the poorest are tipped straight into the ground, where profaning dogs dig up their bones at night.

This afternoon, Deputy Inspector Carroza is another of these dogs. The chief attendant warns him the cemetery is going to close in half an hour: why doesn't he leave his car outside in the street, because he has to lock the main gate at six on the dot? If he comes in on foot, he will be able to leave by the little side gate that, if he would like to contribute to the municipal pension fund, he would be happy to leave unlocked.

Carroza does not even bother to get out of his car. He asks where he can find Dardo Julio Martínez's grave.

“The register is closed today. It's Sunday.”

“So what happens on Sundays? Do the dead come back to life, and go and watch football, or have picnics?”

The attendant's nervous giggle is silenced by a ten-peso note, but he waves an arm as if to suggest that is not enough to open the files. He does not have the key: with the transfer of another ten pesos it appears as if by magic. Well, Carroza thinks to console himself, he saves enough using gas for his car: he can allow himself the little luxury of bribing a poor wretch like this rather than smashing his teeth in.

“I'll wait for you to come out then,” says the attendant, guessing he might receive a further contribution to the pension fund. The rain keeps beating down, it is only logical that skeleton man does not want to get wet.

How many of all those buried here might have crossed my path? thinks Carroza as he stares at the rows of graves. Lust, riches and that crazy impulse to finish the other off, to erase them from the map. Damián Bértola, the inspector of consciences with whom Verónica shares her office expenses and whom he himself turns to occasionally, has not got the faintest idea, although he does offer some relief. It is not a question of guilt, it is more like the weight on him. That sometimes becomes too much and then the psychoanalyst can help. It is as though he is choking on something and has to flush it out or bring it up. But Carroza pays him for that—or does so occasionally. Bértola does what all witchdoctors, shamans, or exorcists do—a little bit of the devil shared out between everyone, it is impossible to bear the weight of all of it alone.

“What if it wasn't the kid?” Bértola asked him when Carroza told him the story of the old couple slaughtered in their own home in the working-class neighborhood of Floresta. All that was taken was some loose change, a few picture cards of the Virgin, a television set and a gold-plated locket. “And even if he did kill them,” the analyst insisted, “didn't he deserve his day in court? Couldn't he be rehabilitated, offered
the affection he never knew, perhaps even just be fed him properly, so that he understands what he has done?”

Sometimes Carroza wonders if it would not be better to talk to a priest, make donations to Caritas, or help build a new parish church. He does not believe in Him and He does not believe in him, he is sure of that. But they could come to an agreement to collaborate, a pact between informers, with priests as intermediaries. If He really were all-knowing, it could save Carroza unpleasant trips such as this one to a cemetery, finally to locate the grave of Dardo Julio Martínez, the person who started the file on the Jaguar. A wooden cross lost among hundreds of other crosses. Carroza comes to a halt, levers himself out of the car. He immediately gets soaked, but opens the car boot, takes out a spade and starts to dig.

He is grateful for the rain. Alleluia! the earth gives way generously, soft as a whore's vagina or as obliging as a queer's ass. He digs with the same fury as the rain lashing down—alleluia! Perhaps the agreement is already working and the all-seeing He already knows what he is looking for, and he will not be soaked in vain. He reaches the coffin. He does not bother to scrape any more earth off, but instead beats at it with the spade. The rotten top soon splits open. Using the tip of the spade as a lever, he pries up the aluminum sheet nailed over the stiff when he was laid out, just in case he woke up and changed his mind.

It is all too easy. If this was a safe Carroza would be a millionaire by now; all he would have to do is bend down and scoop up the banknotes, the gold coins, the jewels. But there is no treasure trove, only a heap of bones, and alleluia! none of them from a head.

He tosses the spade into the boot and gets back into his car. He could back up twenty meters to the end of this section of graves in order to turn, but he has had enough. He does a U-turn across the graves, hearing some of them crack and knocking over at least half a dozen crosses. Back on the asphalt, he puts his foot down.

The attendant, who had been hoping for a further contribution to
the pension fund, sees him racing in his direction like a Formula One driver. He rushes out to open the gate, but is too late. The crash as the bonnet of Carroza's Renault smashes open the locks causes great enthusiasm among the group of flower sellers and tardy relatives seeking cover from the rain on the pavement opposite.

“One of the dead is escaping!” someone shouts and they all cheer, just as they heard the fans cheer Boca's third goal against Chacarita on the florist's radio.

*

Something very serious has to happen for ambassadors to interrupt their Sunday leisure pursuits. Those of the rest of the week as well, but especially on Sundays, because then they are far away from their embassies, playing golf or sailing their yachts on the Delta.

At least the afternoon's heavy rain makes it less of a sacrifice to return to the city in such a hurry. The ambassadors of France and Italy have been summoned by their German colleague to his private apartment two blocks from the embassy, a mansion in Palermo Chico copied from a Parisian town house. Possibly due to nostalgic feelings inherited from a great uncle who was an officer in occupied France, Günther Weber feels at home in French-style surroundings, neighborhoods or residences that retain or have restored the ruins of a civilization that had no need to respect human rights to come out on top. Almost everywhere in the world, German official buildings have fallen foul of a detestable modernist aesthetic that makes them look exactly the same as those of the North Americans, their victors.

André Villespierre and Giácomo Montegassa arrive on time, one coming from the north, the other from the south. The French diplomat was playing golf until he was floating in water like a poached egg at an estate in San Andres de Giles, about a hundred kilometers from Buenos Aires. The Italian was cantering along the windy beaches deserted at this
time of year between Cariló and Pinamar, followed by a pair of bodyguards who are veterans not of any colonial war but of trying to save their own lives and keep up with him.

The German Ambassador, who had not left Buenos Aires, received a call from a friend who worked as a Reuters correspondent. At a barbecue for foreign journalists, his friend had just heard about the kidnapping of the three couples from the cruise ship. The bearer of the news was an Argentine from Cordoba, a friend of the owner of the house who turned up uninvited, downed a bottle of Vents du Bourgogne and then called for silence so that he could tell everyone his story. No, he said, it was not a joke like the ones that made people from his province so famous, but something that his source, a government official who was usually very careful about what he said, had made him swear to keep secret until at least Monday afternoon.

If the devil were to turn up in a Carmelite convent, it is only logical that despite their vows of silence the nuns would run off screaming. But the man from Cordoba could not understand what happened to everyone, where they all got to, when the foreign journalists suddenly ran from the barbecue in search of their laptops and mobile phones in order to transmit the scoop to their respective employers.

“All Europe knows about it,” the host Günther Weber tells his colleagues. “The news is already on the Internet, but the bunch of
arrivistes
in this government are still calling for discretion.”

“Precious hours have been lost,” says André Villespierre.

“
Mascalzone, porca miseria
,” adds Giácomo Montegassa.

The German Ambassador pours brandy into goblets bearing the embassy crest. It's a vintage drink, he explains, that the communists used to make for several decades and kept well hidden in their East Berlin cellars.

“Those communists didn't do everything so badly: this brandy is excellent,” the Italian enthuses.

“Almost French,” André tops him.

They make a toast to the European Community of hedonists, laugh in their different languages, down the brandy and pour themselves another glass. Then they want to hear what else Günther has to tell them.

“While you were traveling back here,” he says, “I got through to Jennifer González, the Interior Minister's private secretary.” Two lustful glints appear in the German's eyes. He is not yet fifty, a meter ninety-five centimeters tall, blond and athletic, the superior race. It is obvious, at least to his community colleagues, that he is not happy sleeping with his wife who is ten years older than him, despite the fact that the companies she owns offer him a valuable safeguard against the always unpredictable fortunes of a political career like the one he is pursuing in his own country. “Thanks to Jennifer …”