Holy City (27 page)

Laucha is worried that Verónica does not reply either on her land line or her mobile, but tonight she is more worried about her own loneliness. It is Sunday, the edge of the abyss that opens every Friday, the shifting sands that threaten to engulf her with nowhere to cling on to. Men have become disgustingly polite toward her. She has to admit they never amounted to much, but of late all she has met with is suspicion, shifty expressions behind unconvincing smiles, unbelievable excuses and, worst of all, silence: her telephone never rings, every sound in her apartment sounds like thunder, so do footsteps in the corridor, voices in nearby apartments or in the street, the engine of every car pulling up outside.

It is midnight on Sunday when all her credit is used up, when Monday is late arriving with its antidote to the poison (not cyanide, only loneliness) that paralyses her all weekend. And tonight, as if that were not enough, there is Verónica. Her silence, her unexplained absence, the worry growing, becoming more solid with every hour, the dreaded phantom of violence.

Not even Damián Bértola, to whom Laucha who is Paloma has tried to explain some of Verónica's mysteries, has been able to define what it is that keeps her in such a mess. “Seeing she has two dead men on her conscience,” says the psychologist, as if she had killed them herself. “She ought to stop, come to a halt, work it out.”

“Work what out?” Paloma challenges him. “That life is nothing more than death which comes on stage, all dolled up, strutting around under the floodlights, soaking up the applause? Then what? After the curtain has fallen, then what?”

Bértola laughs.

“Shakespeare in skirts,” he says. “If Laucha is Paloma, anything is possible. Bravo!”

She ends up laughing as well, or slamming the door on him, if there
is a door available. She is not going to allow a cheap shrink like him to start analyzing her.

Laucha who is Paloma looks at herself in the mirror of the television set. A sad-eyed charlatan brought in urgently is giving his spiel about the bloody rescue attempt in the Descamisados de América shanty town. “As in Russia,” says blabbermouth, “in 2002 at the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow, 129 hostages died. Here it was only six, but it's the same thing”—he goes on, shamelessly—“six dead people whose fortunes total nothing less than 129 million euros. Some coincidence, isn't it?”

And this numerical coincidence is then discussed by a charlatan in a dyed toupée that looks like a virtual turban, an astrologist with a degree from a university in the Arizona deserts. With no proof apart from his own audacity, he attributes to a stray moon of Saturn “the responsibility for the tragic events which have left the international community in mourning.” He will not hear of any heavily armed bipeds being guilty of the massacre. “We are the playthings of destiny,” he declares, proud of the set of false teeth stuck to the roof of his mouth with the same glue that is sponsoring the program. Playthings of destiny, fluffy toys, battery-run men and women with the power leaking out so they no longer have the energy left to find the way out, open the door, flee or give themselves up.

Paloma who is Laucha trembles but controls the anxiety she feels when she hears the telephone at midnight. Who else but Verónica and about time too? Late, but about time.

“Where did you get to?”

“Laucha … I'm sorry to call you that, but they do call you Laucha, don't they?” Although she recognizes the voice, she does not admit it, asks who is calling. She is annoyed that this unscrupulous Bolivian calls her Laucha. And at midnight on Sunday. “You know me. We've met at the
doctora
's several times. She's told me about you. She talks a lot about everybody, so it's as if we know each other without really ever having seen each other.”

“It could be,” Laucha admits grudgingly. “Has something happened to Verónica?”

“Why do you ask that? I haven't seen her lately: is she ill?” Laucha does not reply. She hangs up, shaking her head as if to get rid of something, cobwebs, that is what she is shaking off, cobwebs, when she is so keen to keep her apartment clean, cobwebs on her face. She cannot see them, but they are stuck to her eyes, she breathes them in, feels them flapping across her cheeks. The telephone again; again it is not Verónica. “The call got cut off. It must be because I'm on a mobile,” says Miss Bolivia, plaything of destiny. Laucha is struck dumb. The sting from a Bolivian voice has injected some kind of poison into her bloodstream. “What were you doing when I called?”

She asks as if they were friends. Laucha's reply is the poisoned apple that Snow White coughs up.

“What's that to you? What do you want?” Then, reacting all of a sudden: “Who gave you my number?”

“Don't be angry with me,
Laucha”
the Bolivian voice emphasizing the nickname, showing her scorn. “There's something that unites us. There's no reason for you to get angry, it's something very deep, a secret.”

Laucha leaves the phone on the table but does not hang up. As if Miss Bolivia were watching her, she walks round her neat single woman's apartment, where everything is in its place, there is no smell of men or dogs. She enters the bathroom for a moment, shuts herself in like a punished child, stares at herself in the mirror as if she could see herself in the Bolivian's face, looking at her patiently, calmly, coldly, from the other side.

She finally returns to the phone. She picks it up, Miss Bolivia is still there. Who knows how long she has been waiting for her?

“What do you want from me?”

Her voice is shaking, because she knows. She has seen the answer in Miss Bolivia's eyes on the far side of the mirror.

“I want you to come and visit us.”

She shakes her head again, but no-one can see her, not even Miss Bolivia, who can see everything. Why now, she wonders, why Verónica?

“Let me talk to her.”

“The
doctora
doesn't want to talk to you. That's why I called. She just wants you to come here.”

She gives her an address, which Laucha notes down as best she can, trying to overcome her fear, without even asking herself how she is going to get there. At that moment someone in an adjoining apartment slams a door, or the wind does. There is a gust of air that interrupts the call and at last Miss Bolivia is on the other side, it is no use Laucha shouting “Hello! Hello!” or looking for the number on the call register which for some reason is not working, no use her running back to the bathroom and staring at herself desperately in the mirror, so crazy she ends up smashing it, cutting her forehead as she lunges forward at herself.

Of all the unholy bars in this Holy City, the
Pigs' Trough
is the worst. A hole-in-the-wall on the corner of Moreno and Combate de los Pozos, no more than three blocks from police headquarters. It has swing doors like a Western saloon and behind them a filthy, clinging, black curtain that stinks as much as the towel of a boxer in the last break before he is knocked out.

Scotty peers through the smoke-filled, red-tinged gloom inside, where the customers' silhouettes look like bodies under a huge gray
sheet. Strange that Carroza, whose life Scotty sees as a game of billiards played by two blind men, should ricochet into somewhere like this, full of sacked cops, or ones who have been pensioned off at forty, the dregs of an institution that protects the Buenos Aires middle classes, men still dazed from the violent deaths of their colleagues, shot on the pleasant streets of the neighborhoods of Barrio Parque, Recoleta, or Belgrano.

“He's not here. He didn't come yesterday either. The last time he was here I had to throw him out. He went crazy after drinking some hooch an inspector brought. He started shouting at some woman called Carolina, though he was the only one who could see her: he was punching the air, shouting ‘you whore, I'm going to kill you.' Just think, Scotty: OK, I know the cops who come here are all washed up, but scenes like that drive even them away. They come here to forget: this is a bar, not an interrogation room.”

“What rat poison did you give him, Chink?” The Chink's eyes widen like a cat's in darkness. He knows Scotty's reputation, that he is a cool customer who kills without showing any emotion and has the rare ability to draw up brilliant, convincing reports that are like literary masterpieces. “Don't treat your friends like that,” Scotty advises him, taking him by the throat as calmly as if he were simply stretching out to lift a glass. “Just because they're fed up with the crap lives they lead doesn't give you the right to treat them like your guinea pigs. What poison did you give the Yorugua?”

“I told you, nothing,” splutters the Chink, who was born no closer to China than the province of Catamarca, but is copper-skinned, and has a face as round and shiny as a balloon. He was once a cop himself, but his only claim to fame was shooting his wife's lover and then smashing her to pulp. She waits on tables in her wheelchair, taking orders and serving the drinks without so much as a good evening. The Chink shows him the pot-bellied bottle with no label on it. “Inspector Rodrigué brought it. You know him, the guy they sacked from Interpol for smuggling. I have no idea what it is; they say it tastes of oranges.”

“That means you've never tried it. Now's your chance, go on.”

Scotty picks up the bottle with his free hand, pulls the cork out with his teeth, then forces it into the Chink's mouth. He stares at Scotty wild-eyed, but refuses to swallow any. The liquid starts to dribble out of the corners of his mouth. Scotty takes his hand away in disgust and pushes him toward the back room of the bar. Standing there at the counter, he hears the other man throwing up.

The floor of the
Pigs' Trough
is strewn with sawdust. Scotty walks out as if he were crossing a graveyard of bones, stepping apprehensively like a forensic expert who has seen everything but cannot avoid the sharp, cold stab of the obvious, the ghastly evidence of a face that not even the worst assassin wants to have to confront.

He is not worried about this mausoleum of stiffs who are not even aware they have died, but the fact that he has lost contact with Carroza. He is disturbed by what he has seen in the eyes of Ana Torrente and Ovidio Ladislao Torrente Morelos, Miss Bolivia and the Jaguar. During his Sunday shift at headquarters he has realized that he and Carroza are going to collide at some point in this investigation that both wish they had never got involved in.

*

Not far from the
Pigs' Trough
, down toward the river, rolling down Callao as the ballad by Astor Piazzolla has it, the three ambassadors meet up again in one of their residences. This time it is long past office hours, at 2 a.m. in Buenos Aires—although in Europe it is 7 a.m.

“It's on the front pages of
tutti i giornale
,” complains Giácomo Montegassa. He is hosting the other two and searches in vain in the exquisite Renaissance sideboards for a chestnut liqueur he says the domestic staff deliberately hide from the lesser members of the embassy: the consuls, secretaries, cultural and military attachés, the entire load of useless cretins paid for by Italian taxpayers—“well, the taxpayers in the north,”
he clarifies. “In the south, the people pay their taxes to the Mafia.”

“This is no time for a
trrink”
thunders Günther Weber as he tells them yet again, red-eyed as if in a poorly shot photograph, about one of the hostages shot by the Argentine police, a personal friend of his.

“We can't accuse the police of that,” says André Villespierre, trying to calm him down. He has sympathy for the corrupt guardians of order in the Third World. Of course they have to behave differently to the police in Paris, specially trained in the basements of the Sureté to knock the stuffing out of North African immigrants or to set fire to rooming houses crammed with Ukrainians. Only a few minutes earlier, the French prime minister gave him instructions, having his breakfast of milky coffee and croissants while glancing at
Le Monde
and
Le Figaro
, those two bastions of the petit-bourgeois press that Parisians follow as devotedly as Islamic fundamentalists follow radical versions of the Koran. “
Sans scandale
,” the prime minister told him,
“nous sommes les principaux postulants pour la licitation de la téléphonie mobile des forces de sécurité de l'Argentine
.”

Only Günther refuses to takes things calmly, at the same time as he is refusing a drink.

“Those
figli di putana
hid that chestnut liqueur well,
porca miseria”
says Giácomo, handing round the Campari.

After all, it is nothing more than a police matter, however much the European press blows it out of proportion: “
POLICE BUTCHERS”
screams the headline in a Roman rag, where the red of blood is the most prominent of the colors.

This late-night meeting is so that they can coordinate the protest letters the three of them are going to present as soon as the Argentine Foreign Office opens its doors. Letters that the inevitable pack of news-hounds is going to tear from their hands as they come out, desperate to give the lie to the misinformation their own government has given in order to cover up such drastic events, but which the international press has seen through at once.

“Big fat ones,” says Giácomo, then excuses himself in case either of his guests thought he was somehow referring to their distinguished diplomatic selves: “the best game chips from Piedmont,
senti qué crocantes
, they really crunch in your mouth.”

“He was my best friend,” the German insists soulfully, lost in the dark night of his spirit and forcing his colleagues to pretend they are listening to him. Günther and his fellow countrymen shot down in the shanty town had studied together at the University of Hamburg, then lost sight of each other until they met up again at a reception in the Yugoslav Embassy in Berlin before the country built like Frankenstein's monster by Field-Marshal Joseph Brodz, alias Tito, blew itself to pieces like a suicide bomber. They talked of the good old days at university and did a deal on a shipment of Russian arms that would arrive in containers of humanitarian aid sent by the Moscow mafia to the Croats via the Berlin that had once been communist. First-rate weapons at unbeatable prices: the ambassador's friend mentioned the figure for the commission and, rejuvenated by the money, the ambassador left his wife of many years without a
pfennig
and hooked up with the top model that he then brought with him to his diplomatic posting in Buenos Aires. “He didn't deserve to die like that,” sighs Günther. “Those murderers!”