Holy City (10 page)

“Who does the magistrate report to?”

“I suppose he has his own convictions.”

The accountant spews out a guffaw and Verónica finally breathes more easily. His cynicism clears the air. In the end, what she wants is the same as the accountant: to live a quiet life, get paid what is owed her, then head off so that she can be a long way away when the shooting starts.

“Sort out all the figures on that,” she says, pointing to a diskette which, even if there were electricity, the museum-piece computer would refuse to read. “Put them in a nice folder, like at secondary school, and make a neat cover with my name on it. I'll sign whatever you like, but let's get it done before the weekend so we can go home and wait for their call for us to come and collect our money.”

The accountant's eyes clouded over as quickly as if he had taken an overdose of diazepan. A suicide on his window ledge would have been more reassuring, and would have had a less complicated immediate future, than having to face sitting at a working computer to draw up a financial report that did not blow up in the face of anyone daring to read it in public. Verónica knows as much and so she says: come on, Rosales.

“Come on, Rosales, you've done more complicated and less well-paid jobs than this. We're working for the state and the state doesn't really care about anything.”

Touched by the magic wand of a witless fairy, Rosales confesses he had thought of visiting Disneyworld.

“To Disneylandia, as we used to call it. My two grandchildren asked me to go. I thought that with what I earn from this crap and with some of my savings, I could treat them. The kids are very excited about it: there are real Mickey Mouses, Red Indians who attack stagecoaches, giant hamburgers and roller coasters as high as our national debt.”

If granddad Rosales gives up now, the whole precarious edifice created by the Lomas magistrate will come crashing down. The people across the river, the ones betrayed by Miss Bolivia and her bullet-ridden lover, are not going to stand around waiting with their arms folded. In fact, they are probably already enlisting their mercenaries. The slaughter could start at any moment.

“You can trust Rosales,” the magistrate had told Verónica. “He's an honest sort. He's worried at already having reached pension age—‘I've managed to put a bit aside,' he told me, ‘but they pay so little.' People
like him move me,
doctora
. Their lives go by and yet they always respect the system. They don't make Argentines like that anymore.”

“It's one week of hard work, Rosales. Possibly less. I promise I'll talk to his honor. You'll be able to go to Disneylandia without having to smash your piggy bank.”

He gives a distant smile, a smile from the other side of a misted-over window. Rosales is no fool, but it is his grandchildren peering back at Verónica through his gray eyes, as well as Donald Duck, Daisy, Goofy and Walt Disney himself before he was cryogenically frozen.

“Nobody's going to kill us, are they?” he asks, still expressionless, his eyes lacking any spark.

“One week, Rosales. Then you can pack your bags for your trip with the kids. And don't forget to take an overcoat. It gets cold at night in Disneylandia.”

The presenter announced the two runners-up before he opened the envelope with the name of Miss Bolivia in it. As he did so, Ana Torrente looked up into her still-adolescent sky, trying to find the stars that the stage spotlights prevented her from seeing. She closed her eyes to invent for a few seconds at least her own small firmament. She was just nineteen and had recently broken off her relationship with a fifty-year-old Colombian coffee grower whom she had fallen in love with when she saw his palace in Santa Cruz de la Sierra's most elegant neighborhood. “I live here peacefully,” he had told her, “but if I go back to Colombia I'm a dead man.”

Even before she was crowned Miss Bolivia, Ana Torrente realized that the coffee her Colombian grower sold was the color of milk. She imagined him shot dead by associates he had cheated or impatient rivals, with her lying beneath him on his bed, unable to force her way out as he stared at her through unseeing eyes and she had no idea why she was not dead too. This was no nightmare: it happened soon enough, but Ana was not in the bed at the time. Instead she was waiting, eyes tight shut, for the master of ceremonies to read her name out on the stage of the packed theater in Santa Cruz.

The applause, lights and camera flashes snapping voraciously at her, a check in her name, a fake diamond crown and lots of bouquets of flowers led her to believe, for a few hours, that her life could change, that she was a real queen. The illusion faded when she was taken on tour through wretched villages in the Andes by a manager who promised her all the tinsel in Hollywood while they bucketed around in a clapped-out motorbike with sidecar. Time and again he presented her as the Queen of Bolivia to stony-faced indians packed into the villages squares, while scrofulous dogs and kids clung to her skirts, begging for toys, food, miracles.

Her manager, a shady
mestizo
who wore blue, yellow and red check shirts, a shiny formal waistcoat and black jacket with jeans, told her to be patient. They would soon reach the big capital cities and there she would be inundated with contracts for the catwalks of Europe. But they did not even reach Lima. A group of survivors from the Shining Path guerrillas intercepted their motorbike in the middle of the jungle, anxious to collect the debt the manager owed them for drugs from the tour he had made with the previous year's beauty queen. Once they had shot the manager and the leader of the gang had raped Miss Bolivia, the perpetually fleeing guerrillas melted away, pleased with their day's work. Rescued some hours later by a police patrol, Ana was returned in rags and bleeding to the place she had left by the wrong path.

Few people were surprised—and little was made of it, because it is
well known that Shining Path are a bloodthirsty lot—that the body of the shot manager was missing its head when it was found.

*

Early Tuesday afternoon sees the arrival of the trucks, vans of all kinds and carts pulled by horses or pushed by squat, powerful Bolivians. Along with them come dozens of other Bolivians and indians from the north of Argentina. They carry huge bundles on their backs that often weigh more than they do. They are as laden down and blind as ants, and seem equally determined to reach their allotted destination. Each of them has their spot in the five hectares of the market on the banks of the Riachuelo. They have paid for the right to be in that exact place and will defend it, waving papers that have no legal validity. If anyone should question them, or try to take their pitch, they will pay with their blood.

“They're peaceful people,” the Lomas de Zamora magistrate told Verónica, to convince her to accept the post of inspector at the market. “They only become violent if somebody tries to cheat them. Even then it's not individual violence: they organize as a group to defend themselves.”

It is not violence from these miserable creatures struggling to survive that Verónica is afraid of. The judge is right: he spouts phrases and facts he has read and stored in his memory, although Verónica suspects that his only experience of the world beyond Lomas de Zamora is more related to Paris or New York, when someone powerful is set free in a case of faked bankruptcy or smuggling, in return for a new make of car, a nice house, or a trip abroad for his honor.

But the whale calf appointed by the magistrate to fetch and carry Verónica to and from the market does not agree with his honor's description of the market vendors.

“They're all filthy thieves,” says Chucho as he drives along, more
concerned to spy on his passenger's reaction in the rearview mirror than to pay any attention to the vehicles that insist on crossing in front of him. He wrestles the wheel from side to side to avoid them and tells her: “Never trust a Bolivian,
doctora
. They shouldn't be allowed into Argentina. We should do what the Spaniards do with all those black Africans. They don't offer them land to plant their potatoes or hold their markets on. No, they drown them like kittens. Or send them back the next day, take them to the borders and let them loose in the desert.”

“I see you don't have many Bolivian friends,” says Verónica, more worried by Chucho's driving than his ecumenical racism.

“They aren't even friends with each other,
doctora
. They're treacherous. They're indians, so what can you expect? My little sister got the hots for one of them once. She even brought him home and wanted us to treat him like a proper boyfriend. He had money and he wasn't even Bolivian. He was from Jujuy in Argentina, but all indians are the same, aren't they? If you follow me.”

“Yes, I follow you … mind out for that bus, it's almost on top of us!”

Chucho swung his arms and returned to more important matters.

“The
mestizo
did his best to ingratiate himself, but their dirty blood always gives them away. Those shifty eyes they have, they never look you in the face. When he had the nerve to ask me for Catalina's hand—I'm the eldest, you see, and with the old man pushing up the daisies I'm the one in charge in the family—I bust his nose with this fist here, see?” He shows Verónica his left hand, taking it off the steering wheel to do so. The car bounces off the avenue's central reservation. “I hit him with the jack I use for the car. He didn't cause any more trouble. He disappeared for good.”

“What about Catalina?”

“She cried for a while, but now she's got a proper boyfriend, a skinny guy from a good family. They live out in San Isidro, but he's not one of
those long-haired youths you often get there. He's a skinhead and knows what's what.”

“I can imagine.”

“You should see him! I think the kid's German, or ought to be. He knows the whole history of Germany. Those are proper countries, aren't they,
doctora?
No nonsense from Jews or Commies: look how they pulled down the wall they'd built. There may be democracy here now, but it won't last.”

“So the boy's from a good family?”

“The best in San Isidro.”

Not all the vehicles unload their contents at the market. One gray pickup, with seats for carrying workmen, turns left a few meters before it reaches the stalls. It travels along a track for another five hundred meters, then makes its way into the Descamisados de América shanty town, a running sore on the wet ground close to the bank of Argentina's most polluted river; a tumor made up of hundreds of shacks, most of which are built out of cardboard, wood from fruit crates, planks stolen from construction sites and lots of bits of metal. Some of the roofs are corrugated iron, but the rest is scrap from the clandestine car yards which abound in the desolate realms of Buenos Aires Province.

The pick-up which turned left is a latest model Hiatsu 4×4. Air conditioning on so that the German couple inside reach their destination comfortably and without becoming dehydrated. Their carefree wandering round the newly laid-out streets of Puerto Madero in the
center of Buenos Aires was rudely interrupted by four armed men who abducted them in broad daylight, wearing no masks and only two hundred meters from a naval guardhouse.

The German couple had left their five-star hotel at 10 a.m., following the sort of abundant breakfast that only northern Europeans can stomach. They wanted to stretch their legs for a while before they sat down again in a restaurant where for a modest twenty dollars tourists can stuff themselves with the kind of juicy rump or sirloin steaks they could not get for three times as much in Europe.

The language of Goethe is not very popular in Argentina, despite the considerable number of German immigrants who settled in the northern suburbs of Buenos Aires and in the provinces of Córdoba and Rio Negro, drawn to Argentina by the fall of the Third Reich and guarantees from the government of the time that they would not be bothered by the fanatical Jews who after the war tried desperately to seek redress for some of the Nazi atrocities. The couple cried out for help in German, but before any polyglot could translate their pleas, they were beaten into silence and forced into the Hiatsu. Several passersby looked on indifferently, turning away from them just as their parents had done back during the dictatorship in the 1970s, even though the people being kidnapped then were shouting in Spanish.

With this couple—a man and a woman in their sixties who both have very blond hair—now being asked to get out of the car at gunpoint, that makes six passengers from the
Queen of Storms
, staying in three different hotels, who have been abducted. So far no reports, no official complaints have surfaced in the media. Nothing to disturb the tourists grounded in Buenos Aires. Not so much as a rumor. The three kidnappings were clean, lightning operations carried out by professionals. All of them took place almost simultaneously, in the street and far from their respective hotels, while the victims were walking along without a care in the world, but separated from the rest of the herd.

“The Babel of a city you see before you is best enjoyed if you walk around it without following any fixed route, wandering as you please,” each couple was informed by one of the guides from the ship, the one who often gets given books written by his revolutionary lookalike, or T-shirts with his image printed on them. “You'll always come across a local who will be happy to help and direct you if you are lost,” Pacogoya told them by way of encouragement. “We Argentines are very friendly toward all foreigners, provided they don't come from Bolivia.”

Only the capture of the drugs baron Osmar Arredri and his beautiful girlfriend Sirena Mondragón appears to have aroused the interest of the charlatans in the press, if not the police. The latter are well aware that the Colombian drugs-mafia boss's kidnappers come from within their own ranks. The credentials they showed to get into the hotel were real. Worst of all, and what most infuriates Deputy Inspector Walter Carroza of the serious-crime squad in the federal police, is that he is sure several of those involved work in his own office at headquarters. Possibly they even sit very close to him and smoke his cigarettes while they are writing their reports.