Holy City (32 page)

“Don't let those Crónica reporters get up my nose,” the minister tells him, anticipating the press pack waiting for him on the ground floor. “I'll only talk to Bermúdez from
Clarín
and Oviedo from
La Nación
. Remember that—you know them both well. Keep the others away.”

Highlife knows all about these meddlers. In the good old days it was
different. There was respect for hierarchies; journalists asked for an interview and addressed their interviewees politely. “Yes, colonel; what do you think of this or that, brigadier?”

“Don't worry, minister, no crow is going to eat from my hand.”

“Good, Highlife. And put a hundred pesos on forty-eight for me, I've got a feeling.”

The lift door opens on the ground floor and the tsunami of journalists sweeps over them. Highlife pushes forward like a bulldozer. His strength comes from the uncontrollable repulsion he feels toward all those who can read and write in a way he never learned to do, fluently and with a rich vocabulary they use to poison the hearts and minds of simple people, leading them to think that good is bad, that social justice, human rights and all the crap of democracy are important.

Highlife forces his way through to Oviedo. He cannot see Bermúdez anywhere.

“He's off sick,” a twenty-year-old woman reporter tells him.

“No-one from
Clarín
, then,” Highlife decides without consulting the minister, who anyway is far too busy facing the swarm of cameras, cables, and microphones. “Come with me,” Highlife tells Oviedo. “The minister doesn't have the whole morning to waste with you lot.”

Highlife quells the avalanche of protests from reporters and television presenters, and uses his elbows to push Oviedo close to the minister.

The minister has already prepared and rehearsed in front of the mirror the reply he is going to give to the media on the hostage crisis in the Descamisados de América shanty town. He will place responsibility on the incompetence of certain sectors in the federal police, while at the same time suggesting (though not explicitly) the existence of foul play by the opposition. He will hint that they interfered in the precise instructions he gave the police to respect the lives of the foreign hostages. Even so, the day that is only just beginning promises to be a tough one: his wise wife has already warned him not to lose his
temper, to balance Prozac with diazepam, to meditate and remember their masters Sai Baba and Deepak Chopra, but above all never to forget for a single moment, however great the pressure from journalists or politicians, that Manolo Pandolfi was born to be president of the nation.

Then all at once nothing, a blank, silent lapse: the speech he had prepared for Oviedo and Bermúdez vanishes without trace. “There is no pain,” he would declare if given the opportunity to return like so many charlatans from beyond the grave, “only the feeling of leaving the body, of rising like a rocket toward a destination you never reach.”

Oviedo, from
La Nación
, writes in his paper that he saw the minister turn pale only centimeters from him and suddenly give off the stench of an unburied body the moment the red circle appeared on his forehead. Highlife simply regretted that with all the uproar going on he forgot to put the hundred pesos on the number the minister had given him, which won the prize that lunchtime.

No doubt about it: they are being greeted with bullets.

Carroza is not worried about the state of his Renault, which has already been hit by gunfire and even by a couple of hailstorms. Using an old car is like being faithful to your first love: you know there is no point trying to keep the bodywork intact, or being tempted by a brand-new model, or a blond like the one in the seat beside him—although she is definitely not the example he would choose tonight if he had the chance.

He stamps on the brakes and tries to back up, but a car has blocked the way and half a dozen thugs are already piling out. Carroza switches the lights on inside the car and puts his hands up. Miss Bolivia stares at him, unable to believe that someone like him can surrender so easily. He did not even try to use her as a shield, like he promised.

The gunman who appears to be in charge advances toward the rear of their car, while three others who have suddenly appeared out of the trees like wood sprites approach them from the front. The first gunman recognizes Miss Bolivia.

“Miss Ana, what a surprise!” Miss Bolivia has turned pale and feels sick: she has aged ten years. Not even when they cut off Counselor Pox's right hand has she been so close to death. “I think he's just left,” the gunman adds, in public-relations mode. Ana understands he must be talking about Oso Berlusconi. “Who's this?”

He does not even bother to look at Carroza, although he is on the alert and does not lower his arms. He knows he is a cop: all cops know each other, even if they are disguised as a Methodist preacher.

“He's Oso's right-hand man,” says Ana.

Carroza is surprised yet again at her powers of recovery. She would make a formidable policewoman.

“The boss has gone to bed,” says the gunman politely. “He's had a rough night; it's his asthma, you know. You'll be able to talk to him later, at midday perhaps.”

The boss's asthma comes from the nine dead—the six hostages and their three jailers. And from the Colombian drugs baron, who has also had a sleepless night on this estate with no cattle, together with his beautiful girlfriend. But Walter Carroza still has no idea who the boss is.

*

“They're in that mansion on the estate,” Miss Bolivia had told him when they left the lair on calle Azara, giving him directions on how to get
there. “Not even Oso knows. He thinks people from the air force took them, but the military don't want anything to do with kidnappings these days, they outsource the job. That's what all firms do now when they don't have the capacity in house.”

Miss Bolivia suddenly sounded like a marketing graduate. Carroza only asked a few indispensable questions. He knew he had very little time, that the lives of Verónica and Laucha Giménez were at risk.

Often, perhaps even more than necessary, he had risked other people's lives (and occasionally his own) to solve a case, even though this was never going to lead to a promotion. He has the stubbornness of the lone wolf who smells fear, disenchantment, voracity in someone else and goes for them, if only to see his own face reflected in other mirrors.

If he succeeds in getting at the truth this time there will be no reward either, no medal for gallantry. The government is only concerned with what is said abroad about the hostage crisis, the reaction of markets and heads of state in Europe, the diplomatic and commercial repercussions, and the way that the political opposition in Argentina might try to use the crisis for its own ends. Two hours later, at 8:05 a.m., in the midst of a scrum of journalists and with the building's concierge looking on impassively, Argentina's Interior Minister is felled by a bullet to the head. The president himself is secretly delighted, despite the fact that even to his closest associates he continues to deny he was in any way involved in the elimination of the man who was his most serious rival within the party.

Skeleton man is not concerned either way about Laucha's life. He does not want to see Verónica die, though, if only to keep alive the weak flame that is saving him from complete emotional darkness. Even so, he admires Laucha's armor-plated courage. She agreed to play the role of someone possessed by the devil without asking for anything more than assurances that Verónica's life would be saved. Carroza had called her as soon as he finished talking to Miss Bolivia. He would have gone to see her anyway.

“She's dangerous,” Carroza warned her as he drove unhurriedly along Avenida General Paz, thinking about what had happened with Oso and what to do next, when she answered his call. “Play along with her until I get there, I'm on my way.”

“She's determined to destroy herself,” Laucha said, referring to Verónica. “As she doesn't dare kill herself, she takes on any job that will put her in the line of fire.”

“I wouldn't go as far as that,” said Carroza, trying to soften a judgment which sounds to him as though it has come from the shrink Damián Bértola. “She's a do-gooder lawyer. She knows what she is up against, but she's got lots of experience.”

*

“Chopping off heads is an age-old tradition in the history of mankind,” Scotty said when Carroza finally answered. The Descamisados de América massacre had just happened. Carroza had escaped yet again, in his own way, the threat that people like Oso Berlusconi pose to honest cops, even if they are as battered as the Renault Carroza stubbornly refuses to throw away.

“You don't mean to tell me that a kid like Ana Torrente goes round the world sawing off heads, Scotty. I don't believe it.”

“I didn't say it was her, Yorugua.”

“Who then?”

“The Jaguar.”

“Don't give me that: what kind of animal are you talking about? I know about pickpockets, rapists, bank robbers, people who murder poor old women, shit-eaters, vampires who imitate Dracula with acrylic fangs, transvestites who blackmail top executives, priests who abuse young boys, generals who in their bunkers in the officers' mess take it up the ass from twenty-year-old recruits; a drag-queen rabbi even once called me to investigate photos taken of him at a party in high heels and
scarlet lipstick. Everything is possible in the mud and crap we're constantly fighting, Scotty. But jaguars?”

“The Jaguar, Yorugua. Just one. And with a capital ‘J.' He exists and he is loose. And he smells human flesh.”

Quiet, on the back seat of the number thirty-seven bus. Unnoticed, the way he always likes to be, almost unaware of his own existence. Letting himself be carried along, like those gliders that lift off into the air towed behind a plane with an engine, then float free high in the sky, at the mercy of the winds.

He hates leaving the Holy Land. He dreams (if one can dream when one is nothing, not even oneself) of seeing the real Jerusalem, the one in the desert, the one where once someone carried a cross, the word made flesh but in pain, tormented by his executioners.

For now he makes do with this cheap imitation in painted cardboard with second-rate actors, constructed by the river on the Costanera for provincial tourists visiting Buenos Aires, a shrine for all the dark-skinned poor and so far from Palestine. The watchmen let him stay there; at night he covers himself in cardboard boxes and eats whatever he can find: leftover rice, old scraps of meat, dry bread, rats.

Both Jerusalems are so similar (he dreams) and so different from the true one.

A street kid brought him the message: “There's a woman, but it has to be tonight.” He handed him the coins he had been given, which he immediately shared with the messenger. “Thank you, Jaguar,” said the
kid, eyes gleaming, getting out of there as quickly as he could before he changed his mind.

He had not intended to leave the Holy Land this night. It is cold, the city is damp and oppressive, like an enormous iceberg stranded in this shallow, treacherous, sullen, dirt-brown river. In fact, though, he never thinks of anything, he lets himself be carried along and the thirty-seven bus is taking him now to where he has to go, with coins enough to get him there and get him back. She really does think of everything.

*

“The doorway of Clonfert Cathedral in Ireland is decorated with grinning skulls,” Scotty tells the skeleton man. “My grandfather, who was Irish and who nobody would have dared call Scottish, told me about it. In the 1920s, when serial killers were still a rarity, one was arrested by the Irish police in that very spot.”

“Don't give me a lecture on the history of crime, Scotty. There's no time for your ramblings tonight. Where can I find this bastard?”

“That guy, the serial killer before the term had even been invented, could think of nothing better to do with the skulls he was collecting than to put them alongside the stone ones. And he decided that was where he would wait for the police. Don't be so impatient, Yorugua: a little general knowledge gives one a less narrow view of the world. You shouldn't cling to your obsessions if you want to get at the truth.”

“The battery on my mobile is running out, Scotty. I'm not a philosopher or an orientalist. I'm about as interested in the truth as you are in the police history of Ireland. Who is this guy who calls himself the Jaguar and where do I find him?”

*

The back-seat passenger knows where he has to go. He knows the city, he has dreamt of it so often there is no corner of it he has not visited some night, shivering with cold, curled up on the steps of the underground, covered in sheets of newspaper on the thresholds of churches and ministries, or out in the open on park benches. That was until one sunny winter's morning he found the Holy Land, down by the river, and said to himself, “I'll stay here, this is sacred ground, it will cleanse me.”

How often did he call Bértola after midnight? Certainly more than once and never because of his own personal anxieties: Carroza is not someone who suffers from withdrawal symptoms. Nor is he an addict of any kind, although the shrink (who sees him only reluctantly because, like any self-respecting cop, Carroza thinks he has the right to travel through his subconscious as well without paying) made it clear that there is no merit in not being an addict. “It shows a lack,” he told him. “A lack of desire, and existential stupor.”

But tonight the braincell electrician is not answering anyone. He must have unplugged the phone. Or perhaps he is spending the night somewhere else, most likely in one of his patients' bed, the pervert.

Carroza tries one last time before he pulls off the road into the country estate. Alongside him, Miss Bolivia asks who he is calling.

“My analyst—I have a problem,” replies Carroza. He wishes he really could be in more than one place, be several people so that he could keep an eye on Miss Bolivia, find the Colombian drugs baron, and make sure Verónica is alright.