Holy City (16 page)

To Ana's surprise, he switched the police siren on.

“I didn't know you had a siren on your Toyota.”

“We cops have sirens in our assholes. Get out, I don't want to see you.”

She had difficulty climbing out of the car. Oso had parked some way from the curb, in a puddle. She tottered on her high heels, then finally managed to straighten up and feel more sure of herself.

“Don't do anything to my godfather.”

She slammed the car door shut, knowing that having his car door slammed made Oso more furious than any insult. She slipped her hand inside her bag and felt reassured at the cool touch of the Bersa. The Toyota pulled away, its siren howling like a dog that has had its tail trodden on.

Ana ran her tongue over her bloody lip and realized something. She had been right to come here from Bolivia.

*

But no-one can escape from hell. It accompanies us wherever we go: when we die there are no surprises, we are on familiar ground.

In his lair on Azara in the Boca district not far from the Río Riachuelo, Deputy Inspector Walter Carroza is looking at photos he has downloaded from the Internet. He bought a computer a couple of months earlier and is still learning how to use it, but it already has become indispensable. He threw out the last woman who dared leave a pair of knickers and a toothbrush behind, then reappeared the next day aiming to cook dinner for him. He gets more turned on by porn on the
net than by the dregs of womankind who, because of his age, history and economic situation, are all he is able to pick up. The rotting hulks on the banks of the Riachuelo are closer to Atlantic liners than these conquests to any real woman.

Miss Bolivia is not love. Both of them are clear about that, yet it feels good to meet her now and then, to caress each other while there is still some warmth in their bodies, to console one another like shipwreck victims who drink a toast in salt water on their liferaft.

He dreams of Verónica. Even when he is with Miss Bolivia he closes his eyes and dreams of Verónica as a bride in white, with an orange-blossom bouquet. A choir of drug-addict angels is singing the Ave María while he whispers in her ear and she laughs softly, although he is not whispering words of love but telling her in great detail how Romano was shot and who did it, and how they celebrated afterward, just as when Boca Juniors football team wins a championship. After all, if Romano beat her the way she claims he did, if he smashed her face like that, the world is not as unjust as preachers say it is.

It is 2 a.m. and Carroza has been staring at photos for three hours. He has printed out half a dozen of them, but he is not happy about the way they came out. They were better on screen, the depth behind their gazes, the splinters of hell glittering in their pupils.

He had downloaded the file that afternoon at headquarters and put it on his hard disk earlier that night. These are not ordinary murderers, people who simply kill to get rid of someone out of lust, passion, or greed. These are beasts that would make even Beelzebub cross himself if he saw them. Carroza too, although he is little more than a skeleton held together by memories and a certain sadness, finds them repulsive, finds it hard to look at them peering out so defiantly from the screen: powerful, invincible, even though some of them (he does not know how many or whom) are already dead.

It was Scotty's idea that he glance at this gallery of rapists, murderers and shit-eaters genetically programmed or sent by God, the hard
core of the accursed seed from which the universe once germinated.

“There they are,” Scotty said. “Nobody pays them any attention. Some are already stiffs, others are still cooking human flesh or eating it raw, but they make no noise about it, they go around silently, disguised as ordinary people. Every so often I see myself in them, it's better than looking into a mirror.”

Somebody, on some occasion, arrested them, took them in for a misdemeanor that was more than just a parking ticket. Somebody knew what they were, even though most of them were never accused of anything and had to be released, lions with their appetites sated, part of the pack.

The computer program lets Carroza group them together in an album. Just as when he was a kid and collected stickers with famous actors, football stars, heroes from history. They have all done something: they cannot hide it, unable to pretend they are innocent even if their faces were burned away with acid. Nor would they want to, it is obvious: they are proud of themselves, they are free forever of any torment of guilt.

“One of them looks familiar to me.”

Scotty asks who the sweet Jesus is talking at 2:30 a.m.

“It's you, Yorugua, who else could it be? At this hour in the morning everyone's either asleep or fucking. Only you would think of doing overtime.”

“More than familiar, he's someone from my close circle, Scotty. As if it was your own face but for the moment you can't remember your name.”

“I'm not one of your close circle,” Scotty defends himself. “What you've got is called Alzheimer's. I can recommend the pills my father-in-law takes. They'll at least stop you talking all this shit.” With that he hangs up, but since the person who called is Carroza, the line stays open until Scotty picks it up again. He feels as though he is being watched by a pitbull in the middle of the night, its eyes fixed on his neck like a bone
in an
osobuco
, just waiting for him to shut his eyes so he can leap on dinner. “What do you want?” he asks.

“You to tell me where you got those photos.”

“I told you, off the Internet, from search engines, broadband genius. Once you've learned how to use your P.C. you won't be such a balls-breaker. What does your relative look like?”

“Big forehead, but it's intelligence, not baldness. The evil is concentrated in his eyes. Even if he was blind it would still shine. And he's not my relative.”

Carroza hears the sound of springs from Scotty's bed, female protests—the woman sleeping beside him is being pushed aside so that he can sit up and read a notebook or consult his mental archive. Scotty stores a database of criminals where others have thoughts.

“Write this down. Then get off the line and let me sleep. I'm on duty tomorrow and besides, I'm not sleeping on my own like you are. Your relative is called Torrente. Ovidio Ladislao Torrente Morelos, to give him his full title. His surname comes from an army officer who they say took charge of him when he was newly born in the mountains. That officer was known for such heroic feats as being part of the personal bodyguard of General Banzer, the dictator who ousted Torres. You'd know who he was if you had the slightest idea about the recent history of Latin America.”

“I couldn't give a flying fuck about the recent history of Latin America,” says Carroza. “What has this Torrente got to do with Ana Torrente?”

“I thought Miss Bolivia would have told you her story, Yorugua. I like to know who I'm taking to bed.”

“She doesn't say anything. She's an angel and angels don't have stories, Scotty, they come down from heaven and are at your side when you need them. You tell me. If you gave me his photo it's because you knew him and knew I would recognize something about him.”

“All right, you've ruined my night now anyway. But put your light
on, make sure the street door is locked and bolted. Believe me, it'll scare you rigid.”

*

He hangs up on Scotty, but immediately calls Verónica directly on her mobile. He does not care if she is asleep or locked in the embrace of someone who has descended from the ships, he has to talk to her, to share the information with her at least. If he is going to be killed tonight he does not want to take all this hangover to the grave with him; his motto is to go to bed on an empty stomach so that he will not have nightmares.

Verónica is not in bed. She is at the Riachuelo market and she is wide awake.

“I never heard from her again,” she says, referring to Miss Bolivia.

“I have, that's why I want to talk to you.”

“Come to the market. You can find everything you want here, at the best prices. The market's crammed with people, Walter.”

Verónica is the only one who remembers his name, which is another reason he loves her: she preserves his identity as if it were something valuable. “People come from all over to buy here. People with lots of money; some of them even bring their bodyguards. The market is like a convention of bankers, gypsies and gangsters.”

“Talking of bodyguards, where's yours?”

“Right beside me, like my shadow,” Verónica lies.

Chucho has fallen asleep in the caravan that serves as her office. Boredom and gin have left him curled up in a corner, watching the
doctora
working on her laptop. This was the opportunity Verónica was looking for to slip out and walk through the market without drawing any attention to herself, mingling with the crowd.

Carroza promises to be there in fifteen minutes. This is not exactly good news for Verónica: he is a bird of ill-omen, an owl with a police
I.D. She would not be surprised if he swivels his head round 180° when he prowls the dark streets of Buenos Aires. It is not that he is afraid of being shot in the back, more that he wants to see the face of whoever has fired at him. He has put so many people “to sleep” that he has lost count. But he has never received a reprimand or an official warning, although his bosses do not consider him a hero either. Romano liked him, but admitted in private that you had to be careful with him: he lives on his own in rented rooms, never in the city center and never for longer than six months. His number is not in the phone book; he does not use credit cards; he does not leave any traces or befriend any shopkeepers. He turns his collar up or looks the other way when he meets a doorman.

Verónica heads down the central aisle of the market. She is still amazed at the brazenness with which smugglers and asphalt pirates display their wares. Even she is almost tempted to buy a twenty-dollar Christian Dior perfume that a circus dwarf who has run away from the circus is waving at the level of her knees and which, despite the difference in their heights, her sense of smell tells her is genuine.

*

It is the time and the day—3 a.m. between Saturday and Sunday—when discos fill with dancers and A&E departments overflow with overdosed addicts and people who have been shot or stabbed. The medics cannot cope, and the police come and go sounding their sirens but always arriving too late to do anything: “Attention base, young male badly wounded; attention base, homicide in street brawl; attention base, female raped and thrown in ditch, no signs of life.”

Deputy Inspector Carroza enjoys the police radio the way others do their favorite nightly music program. Every call is a hit that his police imagination fills in until he has created an Impressionist canvas he would like to paint one day when he has retired—if he is still alive.
He studied art in his beloved Montevideo, back in the days when he never dreamt he would cross the widest muddy-brown river in the world, not to sing tangos like some of his school mates, but to shut himself away in cells, ruin his freedom, sink the wolf's fangs he could never admit to that rose like a nauseating wave of flesh and blood from his throat on that endless night when Carolina was killed.

*

From the depths of the Descamisados de América shanty town, the Riachuelo market looks the way New York does from the Statue of Liberty. Or, less spectacularly, the way Buenos Aires looked to Tito Lusiardo as he leaned with Carlos Gardel over the deck rail of the liner bringing them home from Europe. The lights of thieves and sultans glittering in the dark, the spectacular gleam of all that fake gold and all those costume diamonds shamelessly displayed like a Bible or
Don Quixote
on the bargain tables of the bookshops on Avenida Corrientes.

The three couples snatched near Puerto Madero as they were enjoying the European climate with which Buenos Aires sells itself in travel brochures have been split up in three separate but neighboring shacks. They are resting, in a South-American way, bound hand and foot on earth floors, gagged to the point of suffocation.

They are kept awake by wafts of the warm, rotten stench from the Riachuelo, fouling what little air they manage to suck in through their gags. The guards take turns in the boring task of staring at them like insects. Every three hours a new man or woman appears (because female personnel are also being used in the operation). No-one has told any of them how much ransom is being demanded, if their prisoners are going to die or to be allowed to go home once the payments have been verified in accounts held in distant islands, accounts opened in the names of the typical frontmen who run all the illegal payments that contribute so much to the flow of capital around this globalized world.

It is probable that Oso Berlusconi forced Carroza out of the way as he raced down the Avenida General Paz at 140 k.p.h., on his way to the Riachuelo. During his long police career, Carroza has been more concerned not to use his siren than about the bullets that have whizzed past him or even buried themselves in his meager flanks. Oso Berlusconi enjoys speed. He likes to push his way past unsuspecting motorists, siren blazing, forcing them to skid or to end up on the verges facing the wrong way. That is why he became a cop, as well as to sink an iron fist into the flabby stomachs of the Jews of Once or calle Libertad whenever he is searching for the fences of gold and precious stones after a jewelers' or bank security boxes have been raided.

Oso's gray Toyota turns silently into the main alleyway of the Decamisados de América, looking like just another of the old wrecks that litter the banks of the Riachuelo. Oso was careful to switch off the siren when he left headquarters on this unofficial mission, to enter the shanty town at walking pace, and then pull up next to a heap of bricks and sand that the local worker priest hopes to use to build his church for outcasts, to sell them the Christian illusion that it is possible to save their souls and to multiply the loaves and fishes.