Holy City (39 page)

There were only six deaths to lament among its well-heeled passengers: the three kidnapped couples whom not even international diplomacy had been able to save from the inefficient, corrupt local police. The fourth couple did set sail, although the every day more beautiful Sirena Mondragón avoided pointing out that her beloved lover Osmar Arredri did so without his precious head. This was returned to her when she reached Medellín, Colombia, in a registered package containing a suitably refrigerated box with a message as ambiguous as it was suggestive: “Affectionately yours, Uncle”

“
INTERNATIONAL TOURISM IN CRISIS. BUSINESS LEADERS DEMAND URGENT SECURITY MEASURES
,” ran the headlines in the Argentine press the afternoon the liner finally left the port of Buenos Aires.

The Jaguar's harsh, sad face had its moment of glory that same afternoon. All the news bulletins showed his portrait and attributed his
madness to the need to promote at all costs the attractions of the cardboard Jerusalem where he had been hiding. The owners denied that the Holy Land was a den of thieves, or a hostel for serial killers. “This is a place of spiritual reflection, a theme park for the whole family, a meeting point which, like Jerusalem in Palestine, allows us to reflect on peace and harmony between all religions. Delinquency lies outside its walls, in the cement city,” they declared.

The Mayor of Buenos Aires had sharp reflexes. He responded in a press conference that he governed a city just as holy and no less secure than the real Jerusalem, that the recent violent events had all taken place in the province on the far side of Avenida General Paz and the boundary of the Río Riachuelo. Most of the criminals, he said, were not citizens of Buenos Aires but came into the capital from the poorest suburbs in Greater Buenos Aires—not that this could or should be seen as him saying that all the poor were criminals, he explained without explaining.

*

Deputy Inspector Walter Carroza was discharged from hospital the following Monday. Before leaving, he decided to pay a visit to the good cop to see if he was recovering or was going to die from septicemia like the indigenous mother of his lost children. He was no longer in intensive care, but had been transferred to a room that a female hand had decorated with flowers and flounces.

Carroza did not go in. From the corridor outside he recognized the figure of Ana Torrente, Miss Bolivia, sometime little Miss Goldilocks. She had not come to kill Scotty—not yet, although there was the possibility she might do so one day, in her own way. But at least, and this meant a lot to her, she had found him.

He walked calmly and very slowly out of the hospital, and climbed into a taxi. His Renault was still in Villa del Parque.

As a first step toward ridding himself of his guilt at having suspected this skeleton man, Bértola had offered to help him dispose of that four-wheeled image of his battered conscience. The psychiatrist placed a plastic water bottle on its roof to show it was for sale to any prospective cash buyer—probably a gypsy, as in the Holy City they are the ones who will offer ready money to buy second-hand cars.

As he is paying the taxi driver, Carroza decides he is not going to live a day longer in calle Azara.

He has difficulty getting out of the taxi and walking up to his apartment. It is still being guarded by a uniformed cop, whom he promptly dismisses with a pat on the back. “But the magistrate …”

“I spoke to him. He came to see me in hospital, everything's fine, kid, take the day off,
ciao.”
He shuts the front door and eases himself slowly (so the wound will not hurt) into the only armchair, as twilight falls on the fateful hole where the Jaguar and Laucha discovered what Verónica and he have been searching for in vain. “Not a bad moment to greet Carolina,” he says out loud to himself.

It is a relief to think that welcoming the dark lady at last will mean not having to move again, to start over in another neighborhood, with
new neighbors and doormen who, as soon as they find out he is a cop, waylay him with all the gossip about the others in the building. “Who knows what that skinny, bearded guy on the third floor is up to with that crazy woman on the fourth?”

Enough of all that. And of waiting to be called to investigate a murder, or to shoot it out with a gang of drug traffickers who, however many he kills, will carry on multiplying, like those slot-machine dummies that you knock down but which spring up again as soon as a fresh coin is inserted.

Better to embrace Carolina, once and for all. Two straight whiskies are sufficient to prepare him. He could have met her in the
Pigs' Trough
, but the mere idea of breathing his last in that sordid dive makes his stomach churn. Then again, he has no wish to give the Chink or his wife the pleasure of seeing him writhe in agony on the sawdust floor. Nor does he want the settling of accounts with himself to be a free spectacle for the other hopeless cases who, incapable themselves of taking this final step, would applaud if he killed himself.

Enough of everything, better nothing for eternity, he tells Carolina. Always quick to come when he calls, she is at his side now, helping him position the barrel of the Magnum he has kept specially for this occasion like a vintage wine, to rest it against the roof of his mouth and remove the safety catch with all the pleasure of a wine buff.

“You rotten whore, can't you think of any reason to stop this?” he protests feebly to Carolina, pausing to take the saliva-smeared gun out of his mouth to pronounce the words.

“I can't believe you're talking to yourself, Walter.”

He stares at her as if he is not surprised or bothered that she is there. Perhaps because to Carroza, accustomed as he is to talking to mirages, only the obvious can attain the status of illusion.

Yet he puts the Magnum down.

“You didn't lock the door,” Verónica says, to justify coming in without knocking. “And since I didn't get to listen to you the other night …”

Carroza is struck dumb like a card player who did not expect a royal flush or an ace of spades could turn the game on its head, or completely change the rules. When he recovers the power of speech, he will tell her that bursting in like that showed a lack of respect for Carolina, it was a low blow. Verónica will say that she came in because she thought he was alone and he was—and “anyway, a low blow is better than a bullet in the head, isn't it?” And he will say it was a way of making sure his skull did not end up in the hands of a collector and that he had always thought death had blue eyes. She'll reply, “If you like, I'll wear colored contact lenses and we can have done with it,” which he will counter by saying, “Yes, let's have done with this, even without lenses.”

But for now Carroza is dumb.

Before he can ask or say something that will ruin everything, or before the shooting starts again on some corner of the world, the do-gooder lawyer with a penchant for paleontology grabs hold of this heap of bones as if they were trembling, as if they were still capable of holding up a body, or articulating a hope.

Both the lawyer and the skeleton man are well aware that nothing is forever, but in the meantime, for today at least,
arrivederci
troubles, lock the door, who is this Carolina anyway?

FINIS

GUILLERMO ORSI
works in Buenos Aires as a journalist. His novel
Sueños de perro
won the Semana Negra Umbriel Award in 2004, and
Holy City
was the winner of the Dashiell Hammett Prize.

NICK CAISTOR'S
translations include
The Buenos Aires Quintet
by Manuel Vázquez Montalban and the works of Juan Marsé and Alan Pauls.