No One Loves a Policeman (30 page)

I still had the key Lorena had entrusted me with the night we left. Quesada gave me permission to use it. He was being serious: “Of course, I should have spoken to the magistrate in charge of the case,” he said. “But I'll take responsibility.”

Inside the chalet there was a strong smell of damp, as though it had been shut up for far longer than my last visit. There was still a blood stain in the middle of the floor; nobody had bothered to clean it up. “It's evidence,” said Quesada. “It's my friend's blood,” I corrected him.

“Did he have a safe?”

“I don't know the house. I didn't even manage to spend a night here,” I said.

He did have a safe. It was in the wall behind a painting. Of course.
Edmundo cannot have had much to hide if it was that easy to find. And to open: it was empty.

“I think we're wasting our time here,” I said gloomily.

“Look under the furniture, in the kitchen, in the bathroom.”

I started with the bathroom. Traditional fittings, old-fashioned taps, a bath bought from some house clearance. If Edmundo really did have funds in Switzerland, he should have come to me to refurbish the room.

We were both so occupied—the magistrate in the kitchen and me looking for heaven-knows-what in the bathroom—that we did not hear the front door opening. Whenever somebody enters a house without knocking, they are not doing it to pass the time of day with the people who happen to be there at that moment.

There are ways of being violent without being rude. What is the difference between a louse who kills for a few pesos and a licensed killer? Their way of going about it.

“Welcome to Mediomundo,” said one of the two gentlemen who appeared behind us, brandishing automatic rifles.

“Today's the first day of summer, although high season only starts after the 31st,” said the other.

“If you're looking to rent the place for January or February, the owner is away at the moment. He left a few days ago, and we don't think he'll be coming back.”

“He was murdered,” I said, staring at the bloodstain on the floor. Every time I say something stupid, I promise myself I will never do it again, but you cannot change bad habits from one day to the next. “I bet he didn't even get a chance to defend himself.”

When one of the gentlemen hit me I crashed through a rattan table and ended up on the floor. The magistrate took a couple of steps back,
worried he would be next, but our friends knew who he was and respected his office.

“We hit him because he's used to it,” one of them said. “He's one of us.”

“You've taken it out on prisoners in your time, haven't you, Martelli?” said the other, kicking me in the kidneys with the toe of his boot.

“The police are like fairies: they wave a wand and the innocent become guilty,” they went on explaining to Quesada.

“Get up, you son of a bitch,” they said, talking to me this time. “We don't want you to die lying down.”

“Remember, whenever you take a statement, nothing is what it seems, and everybody is a liar,” they advised the magistrate. Then one of them knocked me to the floor again with his rifle butt.

The first thing you should always do when you are beating someone up is to take their gun. Our two visitors were so concerned with being polite they had forgotten to do so. Face down on the floor, gasping for breath, I clutched on to my .45 like an asthmatic reaching for his inhaler.

The magistrate stood there as cold and transparent as a stalagmite. He could not believe his eyes: the shots, the violent jerking of our visitors' bodies, their eyes rolling up as blood spurted from the neck of one and the middle of the forehead of the other, then the two collapsing together in one heap.

“It was luck, not my good aim,” I said with false modesty, trying to see if I could breathe in again.

The magistrate knelt down and put his head between his knees.

“I feel sick,” he said.

He was right, we should have had breakfast before we got to Mediomundo, but the cafés along the way were shut.

At first I thought he was going to pass out, but he recovered, took a deep breath, and went onto the attack.

“There was no need to …”

“If I shoot from such close range, I shoot to kill. Besides, I only did what they were going to do to us.”

Quesada did not say it, but he obviously thought they were going to spare him.

“Who are they?”

“Hounds of the Baskervilles. Dogs with badges, the guardians of the temple. Where's the .38 I gave you?”

“I left it in the car.”

“It's not a torch, Quesada. We're past the point of no return. We have to cover each other's backs. These people don't faint at the sight of blood.”

“But who are they?” he insisted. “What's behind all this?”

“You should know. Look at your infallible orange file. I'm a complete nobody, so if even I am in there, you must have at least some idea of who we're looking for.”

Quesada could not get over it. He was still more affected by my marksmanship than he was by the mess he had got himself into by coming here.

“Lock the door and we'll carry on looking,” he said eventually.

All of a sudden he seemed to have forgotten the two fresh corpses on the floor. A strange force was driving him on: he was sure that there must be papers. Magistrates are lawyers, and lawyers are attracted to papers like moths to a flame.

We had talked about it before we left Buenos Aires. A plot had been hatched to depose the president. At the same time, though, there had been another plot, and this one won. A power vacuum is essentially a vacuum, and if one lot do not fill it, another group will.

So who were the ones who had got in first? Those who any newspaper reader already knew about. Nothing new there. People on the
streets of Buenos Aires were shouting “Kick them all out!,” but none of them would do it. The protesters would go home or back to work, and when they were asked to, they would vote again for the same people. Anyone who got in first had won the game.

“Who are ‘they?'”

They are no better than the others, Quesada had told me the previous evening. The Trotskyite left; Peronists who felt betrayed by their own party; military officers cashiered for taking part in previous coup attempts; other officers still on active service, who boosted their wages with a little arms dealing; the police mafia; port bosses who dealt in drugs; shipping companies supplying chemical happiness by air, sea, and land; managers in crisis like Edmundo.

“Why don't they join parties or form new ones? Why not do things democratically?”

“Because they don't.”

I had spent more than twenty years selling bathroom appliances, but I still had better reflexes for shooting two men with a gun I had never fired before than I did for selling a bathroom suite. We never change, we cannot expect anything new from what seems new, we are suspicious of promises because we have made them before. We know perfectly well we always let down anyone who believes us.

“Here it is!” Quesada shouted from the kitchen.

I ran to see what he had found. He was standing in a small pile of rubble. He had spotted a tile projecting slightly from the wall, had pulled at it, and half the tiles in the kitchen had come down around him.

“Congratulations, you found the treasure!”

“Thanks. But it isn't going to make us rich.”

On the road again. This time Quesada was driving. About a hundred kilometers from Mediomundo we stopped at the service station where I had filled up on the way down. This time the cafeteria was open. The magistrate looked at me intently as we ate our sandwiches. I asked him if I had food on my chin, and he said no.

“So what is it?”

He hesitated. He had seen me in action and was probably having some difficulty trying to overcome his fear and repugnance. He could not bring himself to ask how I could be eating when I had killed two people barely an hour earlier.

“It's been a long time since I killed anyone,” I said out of the blue. He choked on his ham, cheese and tomato special. “You don't get to do that sort of thing when you sell bathroom appliances. That's why I changed my job.”

He insisted that perhaps they had only been trying to frighten us.

“Were they only trying to frighten Edmundo?”

“Your friend was one of them.”

“Well, if that's how they treat their own people, what can the rest of us expect?”

“I don't think your friend called you at midnight and asked you to drive four hundred kilometers just to kill you.”

“If you have a gun barrel pressed to your head, you're apt to betray even the noblest feelings, including friendship. You're right about one thing, though: I don't think he was luring me into a trap. He needed me. But I got there too late.”

“Do you want revenge?”

I swallowed the last bit of my sandwich.

“Not at all. He did what he did. But he never intended to hurt the people he cared for. Now look: his daughter has been kidnapped, his former wife is too scared to go out, and here I am dodging bullets.”

“The people he worked for are not going to get away with it that easily,” the magistrate said.

In addition to dyeing what little hair he had left, Quesada was having trouble chewing his sandwich. His false teeth wobbled when he spoke, and he must have been taking bucketfuls of pills for rheumatism and impotence. Yet he still thought he was the masked avenger of Gotham City. I could just see the board of C.P.F. in London quaking in their boots at the thought of Patricio Quesada launching his crusade against them.

“Let's go,” he said forcefully.

“Show time,” I said.

We did not know if the two corpses in Mediomundo had been alone, if they had seen us arrive, or if an obliging neighbor had sent word. There might be others following us, I warned Quesada. “Make sure you pay as much attention to your rearview mirror as to the road ahead. It's another two hundred kilometers until our next stop,” I told him. “I'm going to try to get some sleep.”

The magistrate woke me in Tres Arroyos. The journey had been quick and peaceful, the road empty, with nobody behind or in front of us. Argentina was like some huge, sleeping beast, a mythical elephant like those the ancients believed held up the world. It had just shaken off a president and all his ministers. It got rid of them because they did not know how to steer it, could only torment it with their absurd
decisions on a journey to nowhere. Today the beast was resting, digesting, occasionally regurgitating its favorite, its only nourishment: madness.

Quesada parked in the main square and began to study the papers he had found, his treasure trove. An inventory, a complete list of names, the organizational structure, confidential reports and even proclamations written by a famous T.V. journalist. It was a shame to throw all that effort and talent down the drain.

“They'll deny everything,” I said. “Nothing is signed. Anyone can write what they like and then attribute it to anybody else. It's one person's word against another's, and there are too many of them for my liking.”