Holy City (4 page)

“The standard rate, all above board.”

“Who'll be paying me?”

His honor smiled uncomfortably. A macho man, he had not expected this woman to get down to brass tacks so quickly.

“It's a career opportunity. You can't afford to let it pass you by.”

“What career? In body bags? I've already had two of my men killed. Where else do you think you get if you try to make a career in Argentina?”

The Riachuelo market is an open-air emporium of smuggled and stolen goods. Asphalt pirates steer their commandeered trucks straight for the west bank of the river, where the market has been growing like a delta—the Mekong in Vietnam or the Paraná on the outskirts of Buenos Aires: tiny islands of thieves with permission to steal granted by the provincial police the way Harvard hands out
honoris causa
diplomas.

At midnight four times a week this tiny portion of the rotten geography of the filthy stream separating the snooty Argentine capital from the provincial no-man's-land dresses up like some latter-day Cinderella and all kinds of traffickers have a ball. The customers come from all over the country: who wants to miss out on the bargains when haggling is the order of the day, as if this were some oriental bazaar?

“Who is paying, your honor?” insisted Verónica, fed up to the back teeth of impossible missions where everything ends badly and the good guys are always the losers.

“There are honest tradesmen.”

It was hot both outside and inside the court building. The air conditioning had broken down two years ago, the photocopiers did not work, the computer was on the floor because someone had stolen all the memory chips. All that was left was an empty shell. The hard drive had been installed in the computer of a chief inspector who needed the information for his shady deals and no-one had the will or the desire to raid his office for it. But the magistrate, his
machista
honor, was talking of honest tradesmen who would pay legal money for an inspector.

Verónica hoisted herself out of the padded chair she had warily dropped into a few minutes before.

“Help me,” the magistrate surprised her by saying, sitting behind his desk and stretching his hand out toward her as if he wanted her to pull him out of a well. “Please.”

The guy was on his own. He was on one bank of the river, with justice on the other and in between them nothing, a putrefying mess, the Río Riachuelo. He was in charge of a jurisdiction as empty as his computer, as useless as the air conditioning or the employees who stacked case files on shelves already bowing under the weight of them.

Verónica will never know, she never has known, why she obeys her instinct, intuition, gut feeling or whatever you might call the crazy compass needle pointing due south when all the rest of the flock is heading north as fast as it can, but she accepted.

“Who are you?” she asked the young woman who had stepped forward in front of her in the early hours, during her second visit to the market.

“I'm a beauty queen. Ana Torrente. Everybody here knows me as Miss Bolivia,” the cherub explained.

She became a lawyer to fight the good fight. It has to be said that was another era: a ferocious dictatorship was on its way out, defeated in the military adventure of the Malvinas. Verónica truly believed her university degree could be of some use.

“But power isn't changing hands,” she was warned by a man who shared her classes and her bed. A latterday Marxist, as he described himself, someone who never once tried to make her happy in a relationship that lasted several months, but simply to make her more aware. “The struggle of the people came to an end in the '60s,” he would tell her, between bouts of lovemaking, like a voiceover for the adverts in the middle of a television program. “The revolutions were defeated by revolutionaries who had turned into bureaucrats. The Soviet Union was the gravedigger.”

Another fuck; another round of adverts. “Then came the Pope, the Internet, Bill Gates. Who reads Marx's
Das Kapital
today, or at the very least
What Is to be Done?
by that old baldy Lenin?”

He left her after three months, but by then she was already pregnant with disillusion. Yet during Easter week in 1986 she went to the Plaza de Mayo to condemn the military rebellion trying to oust the democratic government. She shouted with the rest of the crowd that the coup-mongers should be shot. Nobody listened. Three years later, the same president who had decorated the military rebels was forced out on his knees, not by the military this time but by the real powerbrokers, the ones who never let it go. Verónica sought out her Marxist
former lover to tell him at least he had been right. She was passed from one telephone number to another, until at the third try she found him: working as a personal assistant to a consultant for multinationals.

“It's not that I'm against democracy,” he insisted when they met in the Las Artes bar opposite the law faculty. “But this system is a bourgeois farce. I prefer dictatorship.” Nowadays he combed his hair across his head to hide his bald patch and had dark circles under his eyes. “I've got some good stuff,” he said. “Let's find a quiet spot.”

She said fine. “I'll be back in a minute” As she stood up, she ruffled his gelled hair to reveal his bald pate. She walked toward the toilets, but then skipped into the kitchen. She raised her finger to her mouth to keep the dishwasher quiet and he led her to the service entrance. She ran out.

“That was fifteen years ago,” she says. “And I'm still running.” She is talking to Damián Bértola, the psychoanalyst she shares her office with on calle Tucumán, two blocks from the law courts.

“You ought to stop, sweetheart. Sometimes it pays to call a halt and look at yourself. Today for example. Who did you sleep with last night to end up with a face like that?”

“No-one. I spent the night waiting for news from a blond princess. First on the phone and then, toward dawn, on the radio or T.V.”

Bértola listens. It is part of their agreement, although it is not in the contract: they listen to each other when they need to share their concerns or their expenses. One day a heartache, the next an inheritance.

The original idea had come from the blond, Miss Bolivia, Verónica explains. A group of her fellow countrymen—petty smugglers, peasants selling their produce outside supermarkets—wanted to create a cooperative somewhere in the Buenos Aires area. They could not work in the city center anymore: the police there made life impossible. The police chiefs had gone crazy. They all wanted to live the high life, drive
imported limousines, buy houses in the gated communities where the jet set live.

“Cozumel Banegas offered them protection. All they had to do was set up in the zone he controlled. The tax they paid him would be reasonable, he told them—‘it's not for me, it's for the cause.'”

“What cause?” asks Bértola. Used to listening to his clients in silence, he gets his own back when it is Verónica who is talking.

“The Party,” she replies, scarcely able to believe the fantasy world the shrink lives in: the Freudian ivory tower where everything is solved by discovering at what stage in childhood their client was raped by the bachelor uncle, the mother's brother, who when he was alone at home dressed as a woman.

“The Peronist Party?”

“What other party is there in Argentina?”

“I dunno … the Radicals, the Socialists …”

“Let's be serious, Damián. I'm telling you a real-life story, not a clinical case like the ones you and your colleagues collect as if they were rare postage stamps.”

Bértola smiles, unconcerned. The bullets whistling past Verónica's head make no sound in his ivory tower.

“Cozumel Banegas,” he writes in his notebook, as if he was a client. “Why do they call him ‘the Pox'?”

“Because … he's earned the nickname, don't try to find any Lacanian interpretation to it. I guess it's because he leaves indelible marks, scars, on those who don't end up dead.”

“Bolivian, is he?”

“As Bolivian as Miss Bolivia. They did him the favor of granting him Argentine nationality. Payback time. For years he supplied many of the bigwigs in the province. He's earned his fame. Someone at the top of the tree decided it was time to keep him close. It's useful to have a general in the rearguard, far from the battle.”

“San Martín always led his troops,” Bértola reminds her.

“And look where it got him. Him and Bolívar. And look what became of the America they fought for.”

“So where does the blond fit into this bi-national chess game?”

Telling all this to Bértola allows Verónica to recap on the missing lady's biography. She had been brought from Santa Cruz de la Sierra to Salta in Argentina by an agent who wanted to sell her on the cheap. “Salta is horrible,” Miss Bolivia told Verónica. “There are almost as many filthy indians there as in La Paz.”

So she climbed onto a bus and eighteen hours later disembarked at the terminus at Retiro in the center of Buenos Aires. Within a few days, as her money began to run out, she discovered that the capital was a jungle with no Tarzans to rescue her, an artificial garden where the roses and jasmine are fake, where the rich live in neighborhoods built on rubble or the bones of the dead.

Nobody would come to save her. She realized as much by the time she had signed up for several model agencies and found herself employed, with other girls from the “book,” to bring a bit of life to a private party being held in a Ramos Mejía mansion one January night. But Ana Torrente had not been crowned Miss Bolivia to end up in some lackey's bed; her stomach churned as she entered the house and her blue eyes surveyed this court of pretentious no-hopers dressed in clothes where the brand names stood out like those of the sponsors on football players' shirts. Fat slobs with massive bellies, and teeth and hair implanted at a thousand dollars a time. Flabby bodies and heads perfumed and cosseted on the outside, but with braincells inside devastated by coke and booze. The only thing left standing in this Hiroshima of the human condition was the desire for power, the need to elbow or shoot their way to the top, until they could reach somewhere that offered protection: become a mayor, win a seat in parliament or on the city council, become a union boss.

With a pout here, a purr there, Miss Bolivia crossed several of them off her list, until finally she found someone who was not quite as
revolting as the rest. She danced on the table, like they do in Chicago gangster movies, drank all the five-hundred-dollar champagne she could take and more, then bedded Matías Zamorano.

Composers of tangos and boleros know it well: there is only a step between love and betrayal. Out of love for Miss Bolivia, the Pox's right-hand man was willing to stab him in the back. He handed the Bolivians and their market over to a Lomas de Zamora crook. “A nice little deal,” he explained to the cherub in their dimly lit rented suite—king-size bed, with a water-fountain at the foot that was a replica of the Iguazú Falls—“20 percent of all they make for us and the rest for the Lomas council boys.”

When she learned just how much that 20 percent was, Miss Bolivia let him fuck her like never before, as the waters of the artificial Iguazú splashed all over her. The Lomas de Zamora boys controlled territory ten times the size of the Pox's fiefdom: they had an army of professionals who made sure it was kept neat and tidy, and dealt with any trouble. When the Bolivians refused to leave their benefactor in the lurch, the boys from Lomas went to fetch them in trucks. They carted the families and their goods to the far bank of the Riachuelo and told them: “It's this or you can be repatriated first thing tomorrow. The documents are just waiting for the president's signature: one call from us and welcome back to Bolivia.”

“I can't see the president getting mixed up in stuff like that,” Bértola protests in disbelief.

“Not personally,” says Verónica, happy to explain things for him. “His puppets, the puppets of his puppets. Everything is linked: there's a clever spider spinning away. It never stops making and spreading its web; if one part gets damaged, it patches it up somewhere else. To govern is to bring in money.”

“‘To govern is to bring in people,' is what President Sarmiento used to say. That's why he filled Argentina with immigrants. So that they would work. And he filled the country with schools too, to convince
them it was better to be Argentine than wops, dagos or russkies.”

“Bravo, doctor. Do you want to go on with your patriotic rant or should I finish telling you about Miss Bolivia?”

A few nights before the boys from Lomas de Zamora trespassed into the Pox's territory, there was another party, in another mansion. This time the lottery at the gangsters' ball was won by the counselor himself. Miss Bolivia allowed herself to be embraced, caressed, drooled over. She imagined she was being possessed by the Marlon Brando she had seen in old films on television, in the days when Brando was young and not this cheap Don Corleone she had to shout encouragement to, like the punter urging on the old nag he has bet on out of nostalgia, the nag who of course trails in last.

The plan was to stay close to the Pox while he was being fleeced, so that she and Zamorano would be the last people he suspected. The idea was to get rich without ending up dead in a ditch.

But anyone who does deals with power runs the risk of becoming part of the deal himself.

“The crooks in Lomas didn't want a fight with the people in La Matanza. Not because of the Pox, who's a nobody, but because of the politicians and the police chiefs there, who between them control all the drugs and prostitution in the province. You have to take care of your image when it comes to peddling influence. After they took the Bolivians to the other side of the Riachuelo, the two bosses did a deal.”

“And the loose change from the deal was the names of the traitors,” says Bértola, hazarding a guess.