No One Loves a Policeman (23 page)

Burgos went off in search of more information. At noon he had an appointment at the Faculty of Medicine with the professor of pathological anatomy, another former university colleague. The two had not met for some time because on his way back from a training course in Europe, Burgos had fallen in love with a beautiful young woman in Portugal and had heeded her pleas to go with her to Bahía Blanca to visit her family. Their passionate romance had been short-lived: she soon grew tired of the smell of formaldehyde and flew the nest, setting off in pursuit of a Swedish anthropologist who had pitched up in the deserts of Patagonia.

As though entering a monastery, Burgos—who at that time was not
yet roly-poly—buried himself in Bahía Blanca, becoming a convinced bachelor and steadily putting on weight. He also became convinced that the medical profession was anything but a way to win respect “in a country full of cows and wheat where hundreds of thousands of kids go without bread or milk,” he said, not to justify his personal sense of failure, but to explain that “solitude is a good hiding place. At least it keeps us out of harm's way. I don't have to kill anyone, Don Gotán, because the patients I get to see are already dead.”

That morning, Mónica rang to say that she had received a strange telephone call.

A muffled voice told her that Isabel was well, that she should not worry about her: “You'll get more news at the appropriate moment,” the voice told her, giving her no time to ask questions, but adding briefly before hanging up: “Make sure that defrocked policeman friend of yours stops stirring things up.”

“Did you record the call?” I asked.

“The answering machine was on. I've also got a call tracer, but they used a public telephone somewhere in the street. The noise of buses makes the voice almost inaudible.”

As soon as I had finished talking to her, Ayala and I went out for some air. The idea was to meet up with Wolf, who had promised to use his contacts to try to find out where the dead bodies we had seen in Villa El Polaco had come from. Particularly the one I had identified.

The center of Buenos Aires creates its own microclimate. The early summer sun was baking the walls of the tall buildings, while the financial measures the government was trying to put in place were frying the brains of the middle classes. They could not get their money out of the banks, and were rushing into the streets like ants when someone pours kerosene on their nest.

Unemployed strikers who usually blocked roads and highways demanding bags of food and money now happily if somewhat warily welcomed the rowdy columns of office workers and housewives
shouting slogans protesting against the finance minister and the banks, shrieking that the time for revolution had come. Some of the more outraged were even suggesting it was time to hang in public the politicians they themselves had voted for. These politicians were trying half-heartedly to convince them of something every banker knows: that the money was not in the banks where the naive customers had deposited it, that it had wings or extraterrestrial powers, and somehow vanished into thin air as soon as it passed over the counter.

On the outskirts of the capital, political activists and gang leaders were handing out money in the shanty towns to encourage people to go to supermarkets and help themselves to whatever they could find. The provincial police were under orders to do what they do best anyway: stand there and do nothing. They looked on impassively, secretly rejoicing at the breakdown of the law and order they had sworn to uphold.

Ayala was amazed at the hive of activity in the city center, although he claimed to hate people from Buenos Aires. The fact was that during those days the whole city was like a gigantic mime artist, gesticulating and grimacing in an extraordinary way. Not even contaminating the water supply with a massive drugs cocktail could have produced an effect as spectacular as the maneuvers of capitalism in flight.

We met Wolf in a cafe where everybody was shouting at the tops of their voices. Signs of the crisis were immediately obvious. Chairs and tables had been removed from the bar area, presumably to avoid them being thrown around if arguments between defenders and critics of the government got out of hand.

“Did you buy dollars?” Wolf said. “That's what everyone's doing. The banks are not selling them any more; all the bureaux de change closed half an hour ago. There's looting in Boulogne and Laferrere, and rumors that they're distributing arms out at La Cava.”

It was only after he had given me all this latest news that he seemed to notice Ayala.

“So now you have a bodyguard?”

“Inspector Ayala is from Bahía Blanca. He came to Buenos Aires for a bit of a rest. Wolf, I'm not interested in the national crisis: tell me what you found out about the bodies at Villa El Polaco.”

Wolf snorted and said nothing, muttering what sounded like the rosary under his breath. In fact, he was doing his sums. He was calculating how much the few pesos he had with him would be worth in dollars, and wondering whether it might not be better to spend them on a ham and cheese sandwich and a soft drink.

Ayala had not watched him come in, and had not reacted in any way to his comments. He was too busy trying to interpret the mood of the crowds outside, to work out where they were heading, or what was going on whenever a small group or a couple came to a halt. Their voices reached us like a distant choir or the sound of animals in the jungle, fusing in a lava of sound flowing from the crater of a volcano and destroying all possibility of human communication as it poured inexorably on.

My journalist friend opted for the sandwich, and this seemed to calm his nerves.

“They were all fake,” he said, biting into it. “I don't mean they weren't dead, but they were all brought to the shanty town from the morgue. Corpses get lent out like that more often than you want to know. The police raid had nothing to do with trying to find drugs or arrest crooks. It was all a publicity stunt: ‘Your police are working for your safety,' or ‘We are here to protect you'; all that crap.”

“And my corpse?”

“His surname was Cordero. I don't know his first name. He was a fixer.”

Wolf's contacts had told him Cordero had been an official who worked in procurement for the Ministry of Defense. Cordero's power came from the independence he enjoyed, because the minister was far more interested in climbing aboard the presidential jet to tour the world than in dealing with everyday affairs of state. That meant he
delegated everything to bureaucrats he had not even spoken to since his appointment.

Cordero was responsible for small-scale purchases, although these usually consisted of at least a hundred heavy weapons and missile components for low-intensity warfare. The illicit buyers were not plotting to overthrow puppet governments in Asia or doing the dirty work for corrupt Latin American democracies: they were small- and medium-sized drug trafficking organizations in Bolivia and Colombia, who always needed the most up-to-date equipment for their gangs. The arms were sold anonymously and without any guarantee apart from the assumption that if the rifles jammed, or the missiles returned like boomerangs to their launchers, then future contracts would be canceled.

Our Cordero was not the only one involved in the business, Wolf went on after he had finished his sandwich. He was but a link in the network. All you had to do was click in the right place, and you could find a huge selection of arms for sale. Devotees of the free market, the arms dealers competed fiercely with each other, offering seasonal bargains and all kinds of novelties, including weapons not produced in Argentina but easily obtainable elsewhere. The merchandise was stored in containers broiling in the sun at the port of Buenos Aires while the customers sorted out payment.

Cordero must have got the thumbs down from God or the Devil when a surreal brigade of Argentine policemen arrested one of the customers from the border town of Ciudad del Este in possession of a recently arrived container. Instead of accepting their cut in the deal, they handcuffed the businessman and promptly dispatched him to appear in court in Argentina, not bothering with any diplomatic formalities. The Paraguayan consul in Iguazú called his Argentine counterpart in Ciudad del Este (for once not to arrange a date for a game of golf followed by a couple of joints in the residence of one or other of them) to protest at what he called “the violation of Paraguayan
sovereignty by a gang of uniformed pirates from your country, which could cause an international incident of unforeseen consequences, dear fellow.”

The traffickers in these sensitive border regions employ informers to listen in on all judicial, police and diplomatic communications. They soon informed the frustrated purchasers what had happened. The would-be buyers were a newly formed Islamic group which genuinely or just for the sake of it claimed to be behind all the explosions that the sons of Allah inflicted on the enemies of the Koran throughout the world. Cordero's name was noted and passed on to other even more shadowy figures. A week later, he came to the kind of end that Wolf was now telling me about, with a mixture of admiration and disgust, in a bar crammed with savers who had suddenly found their savings all seized by the government.

“They found Cordero in the same Bahía Blanca hotel you stayed in.”

This piece of news immediately brought Ayala to life. He pushed a sweaty office worker on his lunchbreak out of the way, drank the rest of Wolf's Coca Cola, and asked him where the fuck he had heard that. Wolf did not blink or even look in his direction. “I never reveal my sources,” he said to me. Ayala put a hand round the back of Wolf's neck, yanked him forward, and kneed him as hard as he could in the groin. Wolf collapsed against the counter, gasping for breath. It was his second such assault in a very few days.

If anyone near us noticed what had happened, they gave no sign of it. Wolf's eyes rolled up and he went white as a sheet. I gestured to Ayala to let him go, then made sure Wolf did not fall to the floor. I offered him a glass of water, and a dry cough suggested he was managing to breathe again. A little color seeped back into his cheeks.

“If this bastard is a friend of yours, I'm out,” he said furiously.

“This is his first trip to Buenos Aires,” I whispered in his ear. “He doesn't know how to behave in big cities.”

“When we left Bahía Blanca a day and a half ago, everything was quiet,” Ayala grumbled. “Now there's yet another body. Normally years go by before we have any stiffs at all. And this when I'm away from my post.”

Wolf paid his bill and left without saying goodbye. I followed him, signaling to Ayala to stay where he was.

“You're surrounding yourself with garbage again, Martelli,” Wolf shouted at me when I finally caught up with him. “I understand that once a policeman, always a policeman, but I'm a journalist and I'm collaborating with you because at the bottom of all this mess is a dead man who happened to be your friend.”

“And his daughter is still missing.”

Wolf stopped and looked round to see if Ayala was following us.

“He's a bit rough and ready, but he's an honest policeman,” I said, not entirely convinced.

Wolf set off again, pushing his way through the streams of people wandering aimlessly along the road as if there had been a mass escape from a lunatic asylum. No-one knew where they were heading, but they were too scared to stop and rest.

“They found the body of the man you saw with the blond model at the Imperio Hotel in Bahía Blanca. Strangely enough, in the room you had been in two nights earlier, Martelli.”

“He made a quick journey to Buenos Aires, then.”

“Quicker than if he had been alive. But what is strangest of all, and something tells me I should take advantage of being suspended from the paper to go on a long holiday and not get mixed up in this any further, is how he was killed and what state he was in.”

He came to a halt, and made me do the same. The people behind bumped into us, then went on their way without apologizing. They were all completely bound up in their visions of the imminent apocalypse,
counting the coins they could take home to buy food and medicine.

Wolf had become my mirror. Looking at him, I saw my own face. My own testicles began to ache. I could see he was afraid, and felt the fear as my own.

“When they found him he was wearing women's clothes. Miniskirt and a skimpy top. High heels, and made up as if he was going to a party.”

“Was he a queer?”

I was taken aback that I was asking such a stupid question, but Wolf seemed as much at a loss as me.

“Not that I know of. It's a message, Martelli. They dressed him up as a whore either before or after killing him.”

“How did they kill him?”

“With a stiletto. Somebody stuck it under his left nipple and plunged it into his heart. The maid who found him fainted on the spot. In less than half an hour, the transvestite corpse was loaded into an unmarked ambulance, a van with tinted windows that set off at full gallop for Buenos Aires, flying through police controls without even slowing down, as if it had a critically ill patient on board. But there is no record of the body being listed in any morgue. It was taken straight to Villa El Polaco, and by the time it was laid out there he was dressed as a man again.”