No One Loves a Policeman (20 page)

“The violence is the same,” you said when I tried to explain in order to keep you with me. “There's no difference between blowing a crook's brains out or a student of sociology's. You're a killing machine and you don't realize it.”

How could I accept what you said without losing you? How could I spill my heart out without you feeling so disgusted that you shut your eyes, turned on your heel, and left?

I spent the whole evening trying to find a way to explain what a mess I had made of my life, to convince you that we do not live in Disneyland, that Donald Duck went quack quack quack when you were a little girl, but you never understood a thing, that there is no such thing as a society where the police spend the entire day helping old ladies and blind people across the road.

You were never going to read all that nonsense, Mireya. It was nothing more than a way of filling the evening, just like going to see an old friend from university to talk about the clandestine struggle against fake autopsy reports or sordid prostitute murders. Or going to the police museum to get kicks out of the smell of formaldehyde that bits of bodies were floating in. Nightmares that become routine for forensic
doctors or policemen who have done more than direct the traffic or give directions.

Vain dreams; moments when every horizon looks black and every breath leaves you gasping for air. I tore up all the sheets of paper I had struggled with for hours.

At 9:30 I met Wolf in a bar on Avenida del Trabajo and Tellier. The whole neighborhood stank of abattoirs. Nothing unusual in that: if the roly-poly doctor had been around he would have been as emotional as a country boy in the city when the smell on the breeze took him back to his childhood down on the farm.

“Did you bring your reporter's notebook?”

“If a diary where I write all my heartaches will do instead, here it is.”

I showed him a blank book, missing the pages I had thrown away.

“If anybody asks, you work on the paper with me. I do the crime reporting, you cover the social side of things.”

“What happens if there's shooting? Where do I hide?”

“Don't play the fool with me, Martelli. If you've brought a weapon, you can stay here.”

I undid my jacket and lifted my arms. Wolf shrugged as if to say “come off it” and looked away. There were just the two of us in the bar, apart from the waiter watching the football on T.V. The street outside was deserted.

“This isn't the Normandy landings,” Wolf said eventually, leaning across the table toward me. “This kind of operation is planned in advance. It doesn't come from some headstrong magistrate—the police have taken their precautions. They have informers all over the shanty town. They would never move in otherwise.”

“What are you trying to tell me, Parrondo? I'm a toilet salesman, remember.”

“Times have changed. Fundamentalism is for the Arabs. In Argentina nowadays everything is up for grabs.”

We walked three blocks to the local police station. Nobody stopped us at the entrance. Wolf introduced me to the officer who owed him a favor. As he had promised, there were spaces for each of us in a patrol car that had the insignia, searchlight, and sirens to prove it was working on behalf of us all. I felt a tug of nostalgia, although Wolf was right that times had changed. The car was nothing like the ones I had known so well: the dashboard was as full of instruments as a jet plane. A keyboard and a small screen made the interior look yet more futuristic. Over the radio I could hear the control-room voice above those of police patrolling the streets. The city was calm, apart from some insignificant demonstrations in Palermo and Belgrano. “Middle-class assholes protesting that they can't get at their money,” said one of the cops. “They're more hysterical than a bunch of transvestites.”

“This is going to be a walk in the park,” said the man Wolf had latched on to. “But just in case, don't take any risks, and don't run off to the first layabout who calls you over to complain about police brutality. You might get taken hostage, and if anything happens to you, I'm the one who'll get it in the neck. Understood?”

Yes. If Ayala's suspicions proved correct, we would not be the only real or fake journalists taking part in the raid. The government was trying to convince public opinion that it was fighting crime without massacring anyone, showing respect for thugs and criminals as though they were tender young schoolgirls—even though the greater part of that public opinion (family heads, practicing Catholics, orthodox Jews, rich businessmen or mediocre public- or private-sector employees) were in fact calling for tougher measures: “That's enough taking people into custody and allowing them their rights, they need to be shown
what's what,” these people said. “Tear out their fingernails, grab them by the balls. I'm against the death penalty, but I don't mind seeing them get blown away,” they said, say, will always say every time they face the prospect of being mugged in a dark alleyway, hear a noise at midnight in the charming houses they are sweating blood to pay for, or feel a drug addict's knife pressed against their neck.

The police caravan—eight patrol cars, three armored vehicles and at least a dozen motorcyclists—set off with no lights on across the city. We barely paused crossing Avenida General Paz and met up with the provincial police also participating in the raid. There were at least three times as many of them, and they made no attempt to conceal who they were or where they were going.

They took the lead, roaring down General Paz with sirens blaring, forcing the few vehicles on the highway at that time of night onto the curb. We roared down Rivadavia at the same speed, slowing only slightly to avoid any of the vehicles tipping over and providing the press and the T.V. with headlines about an embarrassing police pile-up.

When we reached Haedo the signs announcing
QUIET—HOSPITAL
seemed to excite everyone still further. We were in enemy territory now, there was no going back and getting home for a good night's sleep.

Out of nothing, or rather out of the fog caused by smoke drifting over from the rubbish tips in Villa Soldatti, three helicopters joined the party. I could feel a sense of patriotic duty stirring within. When I left the police force, I swore to myself I would never again allow this demon to possess me, the strange excitement you feel when you know you are about to wreak violence on the weak and defenseless, those who are different from you, those who in the name of ideology or religion spit on the hand that feeds them, reject their masters, want absurdly to be free.

I must admit that rather than identifying with what was going on like a veteran, I felt more like a kid at the local cinema sucking chocolate peanuts and cheering on the Palefaces in their bitter struggle against the savage Red Indians.

“We've been laying the trap for days,” the officer told us like a tour guide. “Keeping a discreet eye on things. We were just waiting for the merchandise to arrive.”

The truck with the merchandise had arrived the previous evening. The routine worked as smoothly as a Swiss watch: two days later, after the cargo had been sorted, it would be handed out to local distributors and neighborhood leaders, closely watched by the police, as if it all belonged to them. Which it did, to a certain extent, although not exclusively. Taking part in the trade was the only way to try to control the army of outcasts the drug traffickers depended on to win and keep hold of their markets.

Wolf's man was merely repeating his lines: the only reason the police were going in shooting was to reassure the public, to surprise middle-class public opinion with a frontal assault on the shanty towns they so hated. “At last something is being done,” opinion-formers in the media would bleat. “Respecting the rights and guarantees set out in our national constitution, unlike during dark periods now happily put behind us, last night a surprise operation was carried out against Villa El Polaco, the headquarters of antisocial gangs bringing terror to Buenos Aires.”

While the policeman was busy responding to his superiors' commands on the radio, I told Wolf I could not care less about the motives for this farce, or what the results might be. Clamping his hand over my mouth, he growled that if I was sorry I had come I could get out there and then, but no way was I going to ruin his story for him now that he was out on the pitch with the game about to start.

As though performing aerial acrobatics, the helicopters converged on the same point in the sky. There was a loud bang, and the night sky suddenly became as bright as day. The assault vehicles fanned out: some
of them screeched to a halt, while others roared round the edge of the shanty town, careering over the potholed roads and dirt tracks. Armed men wearing helmets and bullet-proof vests leapt out with their rifles and tear-gas launchers. A few seconds earlier, when the flare had lit up the central area that was meant to be deserted at that time of night anyway, motorcycle patrolmen had ridden down the narrow alleyways between the shacks, shouting: “Everybody inside! Those with honest jobs have nothing to fear, but we'll blow the heads off anyone who comes out.”

When the action started, Wolf's policeman told us to “cover your backs,” then jumped out of the car as the driver steered it into one of the entrances to the slum. Instead of getting out to back up his boss, the driver lit a cigarette and sat calmly smoking at the wheel, like a taxi driver waiting for his client.

I thanked Wolf because without his contacts I could never have got into the shanty town, then I too jumped out of the car, ignoring his shouts of “Where the fuck are you going, you idiot?” Inside the slum, bullets slammed into the walls and the dirt alleys like beetles on a hot summer's evening. Women were screaming, and I could imagine them rushing to protect their kids in the shacks' promiscuous bedrooms, praying to the Virgins of their home provinces to protect them, while their husbands flung themselves to the floor.

I ran bent double, my hands covering my head as though they were a steel helmet. I reached a corner that was no more than a gap between two rows of shacks, and flattened myself against a wall. I pulled out the .38 Ayala had lent me when he heard I was going in armed with nothing more than a notebook. “Don't get yourself killed,” he had said. “If you do, the union of journalists will wash its hands of all responsibility. They'll say you weren't one of them, and the police will spit on your still-warm corpse when they learn you were thrown out of the National Shame.”

I checked the gun was loaded. I could not quite see why somebody
who had slapped me around in the Bahía Blanca police station should be so keen to see me stay alive now. It was anyway too late to change my mind because the gunfire was tracing red and white lines to and fro in the darkness. The police must have been ordered to fire at will down the alleyways. There would be time enough to justify the police actions as self-defense by putting weapons in the hands of all those who died.

I saw a motorcyclist racing toward me. Before he could shoot, I held up my old police badge (a relic I keep for nostalgic reasons, and which I had polished that very afternoon). I made sure my hands were in the air, and pointed the .38 skywards. I gestured to him to cover me. He looked perplexed, but just managed to maneuver his bike around me, then pull up at the far side of the alley and leave the engine racing in neutral. I took this to mean he was going to cover my back, so I moved forward, staying close to the walls. I pushed my way into some shacks shouting “Federal Police.” The terrified occupants received me like actors in a well-rehearsed performance, entire families in a heap like puppies in a litter, as accustomed to this kind of police circus as they were to the everyday violence the drug traffickers and gang leaders subjected them to.