Holy City (37 page)

Scotty smiles. He finds it hard to imagine a skeleton falling in love: how can someone so full of holes and leaks as Carroza manage to feel any burning passion? Fourth whisky.

“Go and get some sleep, Carroza. The case is closed, that magistrate is never going to arrest you. Sleep for eight hours, then take him the report he is asking for.”

Carroza puts his untouched whisky down. He caresses the butt of his
gun, then takes it slowly out of his shoulder holster and leaves it on the table, beside Scotty's whisky glass.

“After this is over I'm going to sleep a whole day. But first of all tell me: why did you saw Martinez's head off, Scotty?”

Carroza has laid down his gun like someone taking off his shoes to go into a temple. Respect, a token of faith, the need to raise his spirit above all this shit. But Scotty is not only not Irish: he is not a priest either. He picks the gun up, equally slowly and ceremoniously, and points it at Carroza as though he were a Catholic priest raising the host above the chalice.

“You went too far again,” he says to Carroza. “Lone wolves like you, with no past, should know better.” Yet he is going to tell him, before he pulls the trigger. “You earned that at least,” he says, taking another drink straight from the bottle, then spitting it to one side.

“Let me guess,” Carroza interrupts him. “Ana Torrente …”

“Yes, it's like a Venezuelan soap opera. A long time ago I fucked an indian woman up in the north of Argentina. The sins of youth, what can you do? That was in 1984. I'd been sent to Tartagal to investigate a gang of smugglers. Three months under that sun, my blood boiling. Those native women get pregnant for nothing, they're as fertile as rats, the scourge of America.”

He went back a few years later to Tartagal, a poor, small town on the border with Bolivia, choked by jungle. He looked into what had happened.

“It wasn't easy. Nobody gives a damn about the indians' young. There are pages and pages missing from the registers of birth in the hospitals. They use them to write betting numbers on, or to wipe their asses with, who knows? But eventually I found out.”

A German couple from Santa Cruz de la Sierra had taken the girl. To them she seemed like a miracle: greeny-blue eyes, blond hair. They of course had no idea that little Goldilocks came together with a secret, a humanoid excrescence the mother had abandoned in the mountains.

“You know what men are like, Yorugua. Don't move or I'll shoot, just listen. As I was saying, you know what we men are like: we couldn't care less if we have a child, but as soon as they start growing and are beautiful we want to be the father. Besides, the mother died of septicemia a few hours after giving birth.” So Scotty traveled to Bolivia. In Santa Cruz de la Sierra he met the adoptive parents. “Adopted illegally, of course. They bought the girl for five hundred marks—there were no euros in those days. A fortune to those indian doctors and nurses trained in sugar-plantation yards. I threatened to report them if they did not tell me whose daughter she was. I made no attempt to take her with me. Just imagine me, a confirmed bachelor who still likes chasing skirts, bringing up a baby girl. No way. ‘Give her whatever surname you like,' I told them, ‘but let her know her real father is a cop with the Argentine federal police.' They kept their side of the bargain, but I never saw her again.”

Scotty drives slowly, as if it was his car, as if it was a proper car. Sitting next to him, the skeleton man can feel the handcuffs digging into him: it is the first time he has ever had to wear them. A cigarette is dangling from his lips: he cannot remove it, so the smoke gets up his nose, irritating his eyes, but he prefers that to not smoking.

“Why Verónica?” he asks out of the corner of his mouth.

“You should have bought yourself a car, Yorugua, this is a disaster. Why Verónica? Because she went too far as well. With what she is up to at the Riachuelo market she's going to throw us to the wolves. We
warned her often enough. And you were in the way too, but neither of you paid any attention.”

“Poor Chucho.”

“He was useless.”

“OK, but poor guy all the same.”

It is not that late, only a little after midnight on Monday. The radio gives the weather forecast: 3°, 90 percent humidity, which means there are bound to be early-morning fog, ghosts, melancholy, the living dead. The main European newspapers have already regaled their readers with diatribes against Latin America: corruption, mafias, scum of all kinds—if it were not for swindling greasy South Americans, desperate blacks on their rafts and Arabs with their dynamite lifejackets, the world would be a paradise.

Carroza confesses he never believed any of the rumors he heard. No more than gossip, the kind of badmouthing that goes round all police stations and means some get promoted while others do not.

“I always defended you. You're a good cop”

“Thanks.”

“But why chop the head off a colleague who died of A.I.D.S.? You didn't answer me before.”

“To add to the Jaguar's reputation, obviously. Who'd have thought you would stick your nose into such a macabre business?”

“Why get involved with Counselor Pox?”

“Money, Yorugua, lots of money. You don't care about it, but I do. We're different, that's all there is to it. Spit that cigarette out if you don't want to smoke any more. After all, it's your car and anyway, if you set fire to it, there's no great loss.” Scotty had met Cozumel Banegas in Bolivia. He did him favors in return for locating little Goldilocks. Documents, magic formulas so he could get into Argentina without the bluebottles swarming round the rotten meat. Once he was inside Argentina, the recycled Bolivian did well: people from the party gave him the space to grow. His businesses prospered and so did his
political career. He earned the nickname Counselor Pox and never forgot the public servant who had helped him climb out of the slime. “He was already selling drugs in Bolivia, but he made a couple of mistakes and got put away.”

“So you saved his life.”

“I don't save anyone, Yorugua. That's what God and the electronic churches are for. People save themselves if they want to, if they get their teeth into life.”

“Like the Jaguar.”

“Poor kid.” Scotty smiles.

“Poor Jaguar, poor Chucho, poor Laucha Giménez,” says Carroza. His lips are free to recite the rollcall of the dead: he has spat the cigarette butt out of his mouth and crushed it underfoot.

“That poor mouse was eaten by your cat, Yorugua. All that psychoanalysis went to your head and you believed her. Then sent her to her death.” Carroza has never felt so imprisoned. It is a lie when they say the truth will set you free: truth is a pincer, the gallows rope, the handcuffs cutting into his wrists and his bare-boned pride. He had to get to the bottom of it, find Osmar Arredri, discover who was the circus master. To do that he had to buy time. The only danger to Verónica came from Miss Bolivia: she had abused her and fantasized that her mythical Jaguar would arrive, her trusty childhood avenger. “You weren't wrong about one thing, Yorugua. Miss Bolivia finished off that pervert in San Pedro who wanted to fuck her up the ass. Good for her. She also sent Matías Zamorano to the slaughter by tipping off Counselor Pox. She was climbing the greasy pole, thanks to her cop lovers.”

“She was searching for her father,” says Carroza, and cannot help but laugh at himself. Scotty joins in.

“That couch really got to you, didn't it?” he says, and the two of them guffaw like partners in a patrol car who need to relieve the tension. What Scotty did not know is that Ana had a brother. “The father of twins, think of that! I only realized when I saw those files.”

“Why did he decapitate them, Scotty? Did you find that out as well?”

“Only speculation, that adds little but might explain something. The Jaguar always looked for holy places to live in, or whatever it was that kept him halfway in this world. Abandoned chapels or churches, cemeteries, the fake Jerusalem on the banks of the Río de la Plata. There's a redeemer lurking somewhere inside his deranged brain, someone wanting to save himself and Ana. The two of them reunited, of course, on some unlikely day in their already doomed future. I don't know if you're aware of it, Yorugua, because if you're not interested in the history of crime or any other history, you'll be even less interested to learn that the holiest of all places, Golgotha, Mount Calvary, where they crucified the guarantor of the entire sordid system we live in, means literally ‘the hill of skulls.'”

“So the Jaguar piled up unwanted skulls like someone else might pile up bricks.”

“Not just any head, only those from the bodies his little sister left in her wake. But yes, his idea was to build his own private altar of resurrection and eternal life. Try explaining something like that to those Crónica reporters.” In the meantime Goldilocks grew up with one idea in mind: to escape from Bolivia one day and go and find her father who was a cop—perhaps to embrace him, perhaps to kill him. “You were the closest she got, Yorugua. I never even spoke to Oso Berlusconi.”

Yet Scotty knew that Osmar Arredri was in Oso's hands. Air-force officers, uniformed rats from the Alas building, had told him so. All he had to do was transfer him to Uncle and then later, when everything had calmed down, turn up and get paid.

“Poor Group Captain Castro,” says Carroza.

“There was nothing poor about him, that military scum. A second-rate seducer. Uncle's troops put paid to him.”

“He wasn't on his own when he was taken out.”

“No, he was in bed with the widow of another bastard officer like him. How pathetic can you get? You can't operate on a liver cancer
without removing half the pancreas with it, Yorugua. Since when were you so squeamish?”

“What about the female cop who was guarding the Colombian couple?”

“The lesbian from public relations? Only an idiot like Oso would put a queer public-relations expert in charge of two such valuable hostages. It took her a long time to hit the ground, apparently. Perhaps she was an angel, who knows?”

“How much do you get, Scotty? How much did they promise you?”

“Fifteen percent. It may not sound a lot, but the amounts are so big …”

Carroza does not bother to tell him that the three hundred million has gone down to two hundred, or that he will probably get there too late. Why put him off, especially as he seems determined to go on killing?

“How many more, Scotty. Who else?”

They have finally pulled up outside Damián Bértola's house in the quiet, leafy suburb of Villa del Parque. The radio is playing country music, as if it were a station somewhere in the Mid-West of the United States. Only a few lights are on in the deserted street: it is the early hours of Tuesday morning, people have gone to bed already; they are either asleep or fucking with their televisions still on. Carroza wonders whether Bértola has also got Verónica in bed with him. That is one reason why he does what Scotty tells him:

“Call her on her mobile.”

Carroza half hopes she will not be there, that she has gone to the Riachuelo market. That is hardly likely, but with Verónica you never know, she does not give up, she is not one who lets fear paralyze her. Laucha was right, she wants to die.

Bad luck: Verónica answers.

“I have to see you,” Carroza says, with Scotty's .38 pressed against his temple.

Silence. She has not hung up, though: there is a sigh—she must be shaking that lovely black hair of hers, staring in disbelief at the small screen that leaves her feeling as lost as an astronaut in the stratosphere. Carroza can imagine Bértola looking on expectantly and Mauser turning his head when the mobile starts to ring in her bag.

“I don't want to see you, Walter.”

It feels good to hear her call him Walter, even if she does not want to see him. He is gladder than ever that she is rejecting him.

“Alright …”

But the pressure of the gun barrel against his left temple is persuasive.

“… I can understand you don't want to see me, Verónica. But it's only for a minute. I'm outside, in my car.”

He wishes he could send out ultrasound waves, like bats do, to somehow warn her.

“Only for a minute then,” she agrees.

Condemning herself.

“I left you clues, Yorugua,” Scotty told him as he drove the clapped-out Renault as slowly as if he were the proud owner, trying to save the suspension as he drives along the potholed streets as slowly as a taxi for hire. “But you paid no attention. You were obsessed with the Colombian, determined to win promotion. Perhaps you will,
post mortem.”

It was true, he could have hunted down the Jaguar himself. He would have discovered that, like the giant mice in amusement parks, the
stitches showed on the seams of this wild animal. Carroza never really believed in his cruelty anyway: he has had his fill of serial killers, twisted creeps who are only trying to be the center of attention, frustrated actors, politicians who never found a party, Don Juans who one night discover they are the needy blond and go out to kill, Yankee B-movie or pulp-fiction characters, social workers in hell.

“Don't kill her.”

“Of course not,” says Scotty. “Why do you think I brought you along?”

*

At the same time as the Renault pulls up in the deserted street outside Damián Bértola's house, two Range Rovers leave De La Noria Bridge and speed down the bank of the Río Riachuelo.

The federal and provincial cops who watch them cross the bridge blink as if they had seen a vision of Chinese dragons or Saint George riding his fiery steed. They radio each other: “Did you see what we saw? Those guys aren't going on any picnic, let them go wherever they want,” they agree, “There're at least a dozen of them and they must have weapons coming out of their asses.”