No One Loves a Policeman (22 page)

Burgos puffed out his cheeks. He seemed to hesitate, as if pondering the value of the information he had uncovered. He lit a cigarette and inhaled the smoke like someone waking up and going out in the early-morning mountain sunlight.

“I talked with my colleague in La Plata for a good while,” he said.
“Apart from recalling the old days, and the good times that are harder to reconstruct in memory than the most complex crimes, he told me there was blood on the blond model's body.”

“Naturally: she was murdered.”

“There's no ‘naturally' about it: the blood wasn't hers.”

I said nothing and waited for him to elaborate.

“Don't expect me to tell you whose it was,” he said. “I don't have a portable laboratory with me, and however influential my friend may be, he can't determine who it came from. He could only say it was a different blood group.”

“And the same sex …”

“You're the one saying that,” he cut in. “I only know what my friend said: there was no semen found on the body.”

“But there was on the other victims,” we suddenly heard Ayala say. He had crept up on us like a mischievous boy.

“So we do have something,” Burgos said, trying to dispel my pessimism. “Where's Rodríguez?” he asked the inspector.

“On a date. He hit it off with the attendant at the police museum and they agreed to meet here tonight. She's on overtime, and he's on leave and six hundred kilometers from home.”

He pointed to the rapidly dispersing group of journalists. We could see Rodríguez and his date talking and laughing in the midst of them. Another wartime romance, inevitable now that both sexes take part in police raids and massacres. Unforgettable love stories that will some day be sung by the lyreless poets of the internet age.

We laughed at Rodríguez, whose new companion looked about the same size and weight as him. “A perfect couple,” Ayala muttered, envious that his subordinate had managed to find happiness in such an improbable spot as the police museum.

However spectacular the show had been, I still thought that it was a wasted night. Sometimes suspicion sticks to things like moss to a stone, and prevents us picking up on small details.

The detail here was the man I had spotted with Lorena the last time I had seen her alive, in the Bahía Blanca restaurant. When I had first inspected the heap of bodies with Burgos, I had not noticed him. Now it was as though he was whistling from beyond the grave to attract my attention. I recognized his features, although his face was frozen in the grimace with which he had hoped somehow to evade death. Just another body in the first light of day, the sixth in the silent row laid out on the ground. Who could say how far this corpse had traveled?

At 6:00 the next morning we had a working breakfast at my apartment. Burgos, Ayala and me, with pastries and more
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. Rodríguez was absent with permission. “That police museum attendant is hot, and I'm not going to miss out on a night of free sex in Buenos Aires, chief,” he told Ayala, who replied saying he should not expect to win any medals or stripes for heroism in action.

Ayala told us he had left the police caravan when it crossed the Sarmiento railtracks, and had headed for the Santiago Cuneo hospital with his trusty companion.

“I was just following a hunch,” he said.

Burgos explained that in its early days the Santiago Cuneo had been a model hospital, but with the passage of time, and above all of governments, it had become what it was now: a vast ruin which devoured taxpayers' money to pay the salaries of hundreds of employees, only a quarter of whom had a real position. In other words, the other three-quarters sat on their backsides doing nothing or did not even bother to turn up for their supposed jobs. Yet at the same time the hospital could not cope with the huge numbers of poor and very poor patients who flooded there from all over Buenos Aires province, then waited for hours to be told in five minutes whether they had a cold or cancer. After that, they were sent home with a next appointment three or four months later.

“There's a genocide going on right in front of our noses,” I said, refusing the
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Ayala was offering. “Liberals rend their garments over what happened in the former Yugoslavia, or those Afghan women buried alive, or the abuses the Yanks commit in Iraq, but they can't see what's going on under their noses.”

Ayala dismissed my social conscience with a scornful look. Burgos did not deign to pay me any attention. I could see that there was no prospect of setting up a revolutionary cell with those two.

Ayala continued with his account of the visit he and Rodríguez had made to the hospital.

“We went in through Admissions. It was deserted. At that time of night, the whole hospital was a tomb-in-waiting, inhabited only by patients and rats.”

Nobody stopped them, asked where they were going, or why they were there. Perhaps this was because of the bulges under their left arms, or because anyone could see they were policemen: Ayala with his slicked-back hair, Rodríguez with his razor cut. The pair of them wearing dark glasses in the middle of the night, and the lofty, disdainful way they looked down on anyone they met. Despite this, they are human, and Ayala was shocked at the state of abandonment in the hospital.

“Palestinian refugees live like kings compared to the patients wandering up and down the corridors in there,” he said. “Or the people lying in bed waiting for death as though on a street corner for a bus.”

“Lots of doctors work for free in public hospitals,” Burgos said in defense of his profession. “And lots of patients are cured. It's also true that sometimes their relatives just dump them and never reappear. There are men and women who after a couple of general anesthetics and a few weeks lying there all alone cannot even remember who they
are or where they are from. They cry like babies when they're turfed out so that somebody else can occupy their beds.”

As if drawn on by some secret current, the provincial bloodhounds found themselves in a corridor lit only by two 25-watt bulbs. The spectacle in the wards had been grim enough, but now they felt they were in some passageway to hell. “The dead who have no relatives to pay for their funeral must be sent down here,” Rodríguez had apparently told Ayala. Like the good Sancho Panza he was, he had a word for each occasion.

“I must say I was shit scared,” Ayala said. “My service revolver is useless for shooting corpses. They've already bought it, so they have nothing to lose.”

“But dead people don't kill,” Burgos said, either to reassure him or in a fit of spontaneous metaphysical inquiry. “I dream of them the whole time. They reproach me for my autopsy reports. They ask me why I open them up when worms are perfectly capable of disposing of them, and eternity is there to bleach their bones. But their condition is not contagious. Death is not a virus, it does not make you ill or threaten your health. It's the end, that's all it is.”

Ayala did not seem convinced.

“That doesn't matter. I'd prefer to face a whole gang of drug traffickers than a corpse on the move.”

“Talking of corpses on the move, my journalist friend is trying to track down the one I recognized in the line of bodies at the shanty town. He said he'd call as soon as he found something.”

“I wouldn't expect too much,” Ayala said. “Witnesses or curious onlookers are never going to get to the bottom of this.”

Perfectly true, but I had no option at that moment other than to “outsource” the investigation.

Halfway down the gloomy corridor, the two policemen had come across a ward that seemed to house neither men nor women. Nor were there any doctors or nurses: the only people in view were a couple of
bad-tempered giants who raised their rifles as soon as they saw the pair approaching.

“I think you're lost, the bathroom is upstairs,” one of the guards said.

“Who the fuck are you, anyway?” the other said.

Ayala raised his hands so that the jacket he was wearing would fall open to reveal his gun and his provincial police badge—which in that gloom shone like an F.B.I. agent's credential.

“One of our colleagues has been shot. He's bleeding to death up in Admissions. Where are all the doctors in this hospital?” he said, sounding as indignant as he knew how. The two giants stared at each other, then the one who seemed to be in charge spoke into his walkie-talkie. Nobody responded.

“Where the fuck have they all gone?”

Telling his companion to keep an eye on the two intruders, the first guard said he would go up and find out what was going on. Despite his foul temper he must have believed Ayala, because he left his rifle with his companion. Perhaps he wanted to avoid frightening the patients who were wandering along the corridors thinking they were in a hospital.

“Who wounded him?” the second giant wanted to know.

“Some shanty-town dweller he stopped and asked for his documents only a couple of blocks from here.”

“He got what he deserved. The shanty-town people around here all have state-of-the-art firepower. Why did he stop him?”

“Because he looked like a man with something to hide.”

“If your friend doesn't die, tell him not to stick his nose in where it's not wanted. This area is run by demons. No priests or police from other areas can get in. It's the guys from Fuerte Apache who run the show here.”

Fuerte Apache is a neighborhood of tall gray buildings built to house working-class families from greater Buenos Aires. The buildings are interconnected by high walkways—the architects who designed
them must have been off their head on coke, just like the workers who moved there imagining they would be starting a new life.

Everything in Fuerte Apache was half-finished. The money to complete the job went elsewhere, and the dream soon turned to a nightmare. By now it had virtually become a kingdom of darkness, where different tribes fought for influence, drugs, and territory. They fought for each corridor, each inch of space, and the blood of these warriors of nothingness ran like sewage down the drains.

The giant who had gone up to Admissions came back in an even fouler mood.

“It's true there's no-one there, but there's no injured officer either. Who are you two?”

He did not have long to wait for an answer. Rodríguez hit him over the head with his gun and sent him to sleep before he had even closed his eyes. Before the other giant could react, Ayala had stuck his .38 in his ribs, and snatched his rifle from him so cleanly that if it had been a bull-fight the entire audience would have been waving their handkerchiefs in approval.

“Their weapons were duly confiscated,” Ayala said with the language of someone used to filing reports. “We locked the sorry pair of them in a broom cupboard. Then we went into the ward.”

There, in the basement of the Cuneo hospital, was the arsenal that the combined police forces had raided Villa El Polaco for in vain. There were neat rows of explosives, handguns and rifles, together with spare parts, all waiting to be dispatched to their intended destinations.

Ayala and his assistant surveyed the weaponry with the same delight as they had shown earlier in the police museum. Never in their Bahía Blanca police station, or anywhere else in the provinces for that matter, would they see such a collection of light and heavy arms.

“There are two more rooms,” Ayala concluded his report. “They're connected to the first ward, but they're empty. They're newly built, but I'm sure they're not for patients.”

“Medicine is a sacred mission,” Burgos snorted. He was fed up with the weak
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that was loosening his stomach, but even more so with the society we had created in Argentina, where the most disgusting, corrupt events reflected us back at ourselves more clearly than any mirror.

Nobody in Argentina could be surprised that a hospital was being used to stockpile weapons. In the past, union headquarters and ministries have become arsenals. Of course, when gunpowder, gelamon and trotyl replace alcohol, gauze and antibiotics, that means something is about to happen. But at the end of 2001 we were not at war—or so we thought.