Holy City (34 page)

“One day we'll run away together,” Ana would say. “Far away, to a city that will be unlike this one or any other one, a city without sinners, my jaguar. Help me find it.”

They laughed together. He would have liked to be able to put into
words all that he felt for her, promise her everything it occurred to him they could do if they were together with nobody else in the way.

But others did get in the way. There was violence that increased, became intolerable. They threw him out the first time, thinking he would not come back. After that, they reported him to the authorities and he was shut up in a gray, freezing ward with other silent, unhappy jaguars. He fled as soon as he could and went back to her. That was when they tried to kill him, shooting him in the back one night on some waste ground on the outskirts of Santa Cruz de la Sierra. He almost bled to death, stretched out on the ground, howling his pain uncontrollably, blood and rage beneath the stars.

He survived. He was cured in a small hospital, where they fed him until one morning, before they could shut him up again, he ran off again. He promised himself nobody would ever abandon him again. He lived on charity and petty thieving, always staying close to Ana, although by now he did not dare be with her.

Until one night he saw her there, resplendent up on the stage they had built in the square, applauded by the crowd. He had to rein in his raging sadness, to bite his hands until they bled to stop himself shouting, or running toward her howling so that they could finally die together in her smile.

But Ana had forbidden him to approach her again—“Never,” she warned him. “You must never be with me again. I will take care of you, look after you, I promise, and you can watch over me, but from a distance.”

And so he decided to be her distant shadow, the burden of dreams that every traveler forgets in his nights, the restoring solitude you can never return to. He followed her, always keeping his distance, invisible, although she could sense his presence, although she knew she was never alone, that it would be impossible for the two of them to be apart.

That is why his first reaction is one of surprise when he breaks into the apartment through the kitchen window and finds the bodies still
alive, hears Laucha's scream of terror and sees the tied-up Veronica's horrified gaze. This has not happened to him before, either in the Peruvian jungle or in San Pedro, or with that woman cop smashed to bits after her fall from a forty-story building.

None of those bodies was like these two, hot, throbbing with life, a woman pushing him away with a mixture of repulsion and terror, threatening him, forcing him to back off by brandishing a kitchen knife and a stool she wields like another weapon. If only he could talk to her, tell her he has not come to hurt anyone, that all his miserable life he has slipped among the shadows of the dead, following their tracks, sniffing them out without appetite; that he is someone who no longer expects anything, someone who has been weaned on neglect and now searches out the dark corners of the world to accumulate in his makeshift dens those jewel boxes of thought and memory but also of pain, those fleeting treasures that all too soon rot to nothingness, turning to putrefaction and dust, bones that disintegrate like the promises they would always be together, like all the fine words he heard from Ana's lips but that he himself could never say.

He does not want this to happen. He did not come here just to change into what he has always fled from. This time he was fooled, or something has gone wrong and she is in danger. What is he to do now, when he has never even been able to guess what her next step might be? Always following her, always her shadow, her memories, so close and yet so unreachable.

He pulls back, crossing his arms in front of his face to defend himself from this furious woman. But the tip of her knife searches out his heart; he feels the stab even before Laucha lunges at him, his cry of pain is like a secret he shares with the devil he has never deliberately sought to rouse.

In the living room, behind the kitchen door that Laucha slammed shut when the Jaguar burst in, Verónica struggles furiously with her bonds until she manages to loosen them and break free. She cannot
understand—and never will—what happens in worlds apparently so close to each other, what combination of despair and impotence unleashed Laucha's uncontrollable strength in such a cruel, definitive manner.

As if this was some crazy fable that has no moral to it, she finds Laucha and the person she later discovers is called the Jaguar silently entwined on the kitchen floor, clutching each other in a pool of blood. The knife plunged into the Jaguar's right armpit is a telltale sign of whose turn it was to die this time. Even so, Verónica feels the need to bend down, touch the blood, raise it to the abyss of her lips.

“Our compulsion to stare into the abyss,” is Bértola's verdict when he arrives, too late as always, and embraces the two women in their separate worlds of ashes.

It is 2 p.m. in Europe, 8 a.m. in New York, and the markets have still not recovered. The three foreign men slaughtered in that absurd Latin-American country known only for tango, beefsteaks and Maradona were top executives in important companies closely followed on the world's stock markets. The ambassadors in Buenos Aires have received strict instructions: they are to make strong protests to whatever corrupt government is in power, threatening to withdraw all promised capital—from both their local subsidiaries and the officials' Swiss bank accounts—if within a few hours the whole force of the law is not brought to bear on those responsible.

They give the president no time to shed tears in public for his
murdered minister, or to celebrate in private that he has been rid of the political rival he most feared. As if that were not enough, the gutter press is already speculating that this Oso Berlusconi was little more than a paid assassin, that more powerful interests are in play beyond him. The media is hinting that the minister's death will become one more in the long list of crimes that go unpunished, one of those endless cases that are eventually closed because, behind the scenes, that is what is demanded by the institutions of this banana republic and the continued smooth running of business.

At that same hour, in an estate without farmers or grazing cattle close to Exaltación de la Cruz, it has been decided that the cop skeleton, the Bolivian beauty queen and the delivery faun are to be shot in the pigsties, and fed to the porkers. This sentence, delivered without any right of appeal by the one they call “Uncle,” makes no concession for the fact that for many years Pacogoya was his favorite nephew. Uncle does not want any witnesses, even though the Che Guevara lookalike swears by all the Cuban exiles in Miami that he will not say a word about him, that he could not give a damn what they do with the cop and the Bolivian sweetie; Uncle knows he can trust him, that he has never betrayed him and he is going to bring him the attractive bundles of cash that Uncle pockets after every trip on a cruise ship where Pacogoya has been a tourist guide.

“You're right, I don't much like the idea that the few starving pigs on the estate should eat you,” Uncle admits. “But I'll sleep more soundly with you out of this world. I don't trust queers, they're hysterics as well as perverts. Anyway, this is a three-for-two bargain: if I'm tried for murder, the number is unimportant. If you don't believe me, ask the military-junta leaders.”

The three of them are hustled out of the room. Pacogoya throws himself to the floor and has to be dragged out, sobbing and still promising he will hand over whoever Uncle asks him to, he does not care. He does not want to die so young and for no reason he pleads, until one of
Uncle's thugs shuts his mouth with a well-aimed kick with the tip of his boot. Pacogoya moans and spits out his upper front teeth, then howls like a dog run over on the road as he is pulled along behind Carroza and Miss Bolivia. Unlike him, they keep a proud silence as they are marched to the scaffold full of mud and pig shit.

With no weapon or mobile, Deputy Inspector Carroza is forced to accept that his life is in the out-tray, waiting for this jumped-up smuggler, this new rich usurper of such patrician surroundings, to press the “enter” key and send him flying forever through cyber space. Nothing so surprising about that, after all: he never expected anything else, there was never a lasting love in his home port, nothing to stop him slipping his moorings, no island with sirens waiting for him. People can live permanently voyaging, without having anywhere to return to, surrounded on all sides by water, with no radar or lookouts, indifferent to whichever way the wind blows. Once you have achieved this and the only point of the compass is to drift aimlessly, then you can say (as Carroza sometimes does when staring in the mirror or at a glass of rum) that happiness is for fools and madmen, and that death is not the end or the start of anything, neither of this dirty reality nor of better possible worlds.

Meanwhile, life—those dregs at the bottom of a glass still to be drained—still offers him the chance to find out about what he came here to discover, more out of professional curiosity than because anyone was going to thank him for it. A long, wide corridor links the main room with the back doors, next to the kitchen and the servants' quarters from when the estate was in the hands of real landowners and not these merchants with no pedigree but their police records. Where housekeepers, lady companions, maids in uniform and butlers in livery once slept, now it is Uncle's thugs who are dozing, a sad bunch of out-of-hours cops and criminals for hire.

“There they are, they haven't killed them yet.”

It is Miss Bolivia who makes the discovery. She does not seem in the least bit concerned that her tender young flesh is soon to become a
snack for some starving pigs as abandoned to their fate as she is. Carroza follows the direction of her gaze and sees them sitting on a king-size bed as if waiting their turn. Their heads are lowered as if they at least are downcast at the idea of the end most probably awaiting them at the hands of this ambitious Uncle who seems not to care what it may cost him to force his way to heaven knows where.

“She's almost as beautiful as you, Bolivia.”

Jet-black eyes, waves of chestnut hair like Rita Hayworth or Maria Felix, stars of a cinema that no longer exists, a ship of dreams with Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart for crew, saying their endless
Casablanca
goodbye beneath the shadowless breeze of a lazy ceiling fan. Despite her crestfallen appearance, Sirena Mondragon really is beautiful.

“Are you going to kill her?”

No-one but Miss Bolivia could have asked a question like that. She spins on her high heels and confronts one of the two gunmen who are taking them to the pigsties. An unexpected question can sometimes have the same effect as a point-blank shot on what anyone with any common sense might think would happen next. This time it distracts their guards: they do not lower their guns, close their eyes, or turn to see who she is talking about, but they do glance at each other seeking an answer—not so much to Miss Bolivia's question as to how anyone can be interested in someone else's fate in the last minute of their own life.

This momentary lack of attention is enough for Carroza to revisit the martial arts he has been neglecting since the days he was patrolling the streets chasing pickpockets. He immediately recognizes that he is not at his best, that he has been sitting at a desk for at least seven or eight years and that what previously took him one second now takes two or three. Even so, he disarms the first guard with a well-aimed black-belt kick and follows it up by effortlessly smashing his head against the wall. The other guard, though, has had time to fire twice
before Miss Bolivia's sharpened nails dig into his right cheek, forcing him to drop his Itaca. At the first shot, Carroza feels a sharp sting as if he had cut himself shaving; the second bullet ricochets off the floor in front of his nose and buries itself in the head of the first guard.

Carroza picks the shotgun up as quickly as in neighborhood cinema matinées Charlie Chaplin used to rescue the baby abandoned on a railway line just a second before the express arrived. The gunman stares at him as though someone has taken his toy. Not even the buckshot in his chest that leaves him choking on his own blood can convince him that an oversight or clumsy movement can knock over a glass of the best wine and bring the party to an abrupt end.

Miss Bolivia, who never got an answer to her question, feels her appetizing beauty queen's body being flung by the skeleton man toward the double bed, where she ends up in a heap on top of Sirena Mondragón.

Trained as he is to transport wads of money in suitcases with false bottoms, to do deals with white-gloved
mafiosi
, Osmar Arredri has no idea what to do with the dead gunman's Itaca that Carroza has thrown to him like a lifebelt to a drowning man.

“Just pull the trigger …” Then, seeing the Colombian hesitate: “Look, like this … or have you never seen a gangster movie?”

As he slams the door shut and blocks it with a chair, Carroza suddenly realizes he has left the Che Guevara lookalike outside moaning in the corridor. His moans soon come to an end anyway: a group of thugs arriving at a run finish him off.

No-one will write about his death, or sing to the memory of this fearful clone, a ship-cabin
guerrillero
who was nobody's voice even though he did once manage to seduce Verónica. Carroza is sorry he did not keep the privilege of taking him out for himself, knowing it would have meant less to him than finishing off a wounded horse.

A fresh burst of gunfire tears these thoughts to shreds. Carroza no longer wants to die; outside he can hear the pigs grunting, bibs tucked
round their throats, alarmed by all the noise. Osmar Arredri smashes the window with the butt of his gun and leaps through the gap. The cuts that broken shards of glass make in his flesh are merely a foretaste of the wounds that explode in his body from the salvo of shots that put an end to his brief escape attempt. Cursing the fact that he gave him the shotgun, Carroza promises himself he will empty the magazine of his own revolver into the first two or three thugs he gets in his sights. It is not very much, of course, but it is all he can think of to defend all that beauty cowering on the double bed. He briefly consoles himself by thinking they will not be killed: no-one with a scrap of sensibility would go into the Louvre in Paris or the Reina Sofia in Madrid to shoot the “Mona Lisa” or kill the poor women of “Guernica” a second time.