Holy City (38 page)

The first people to receive this surprise visit are the defenseless inhabitants of the Descamisados de América shanty town. No-one is really surprised if in the early hours—or at any time of day, in fact—there is shooting in among all the flies and corrugated iron: the gangs know how to sort out their differences in places like this, which all the police forces avoid like medieval cities in the grip of plague. But alarm begins to spread when the explosions and shouting sound more like a North-American invasion of Iraq than a friendly match between rival gunmen. The glow from fires, the smell of gunpowder and petrol, flames that are like slaps in the face of the previously tranquil face of the morning. Within minutes the shanty town is one huge bonfire. The
traders and customers from the nearby Riachuelo market come running to see what is going on and as soon as they find out, they run off again in a chaos of shouts, bullets fired by no-one knows who, people falling to the ground and others trampling on them, while the two Range Rovers turn down the main avenues of the market, the Colombians firing their heavy artillery at will. Although they smash through everything in their way, their main goal is a caravan stationed at the far side of the market, with no lights on inside but already ablaze before the vehicles surround it and open fire on all its tin walls, perforating it like a colander so that nothing is left alive, not even the canary, if there had been one.

Without ever getting out, the hired killers from the painter Botero's native country, the one which long ago God's wayward finger pointed to as the tomb of Carlos Gardel, began to beat a retreat the same way as they had come. No more than ten minutes have gone by when the federal and provincial cops see them speeding back across the bridge in front of their posts again. Their headlights are on and they indicate properly to show they are turning off onto Avenida General Paz.

The first thing tourists and mercenaries learn when they are traveling or murdering far from home is to respect the highway code of the host country.

They knew in the federal-police drugs squad that a “night of the long knives” was on its way, even if the knives had been replaced by the latest military technology the North Americans had frantically developed to
prevent the world from slipping out of their grasp. As soon as they learned Osmar Arredri and his beautiful Sirena Mondragón had been kidnapped, they knew that the blood and thunder would come from Colombia.

Yet there was a lot of confusion, suspicion on all sides, scowls in headquarters corridors, emergency late-night meetings to try to work out which bastard had got them involved in all this. Although Oso Berlusconi was well known to them, they all agreed he was no strategic expert, so there had to be someone pulling the strings, the brains behind the operation.

Carroza reached the same conclusion by pure intuition. And jealousy. The drug-addict delivery faun who was wooing Verónica—and occasionally fucking her—could not have been working alone, he must have a heavyweight dealer behind him to supply all those tourists fascinated by tango and the shanty towns that were the fatal attraction of Buenos Aires. He had followed Pacogoya patiently, watched him coming and going from the apartments of well-known pederasts and occasional rent boys. He imagined his sore ass, envied him the cash that would enable him to buy anti-hemorrhoid creams to soothe the pain. He also saw him coming and going with Verónica: that was the only part of his stubborn mission that he found hard to swallow.

He followed him to San Pedro and although by the time he arrived the massacre had already happened, he poked around some more and at the bus station found a down-and-out waiting to board a coach to Buenos Aires. Something about him caught Carroza's attention, so he showed him his police badge, then opened the bag he was clutching to his chest. If he had found drugs or a stash of banknotes he would have arrested the man without reading him his rights, taken him to a patch of wasteland and interrogated him in a way the filthy beggar would not forget as long as he lived. Instead, what he discovered was the head that was missing from the vulture Miss Bolivia had shot. Carroza did not need to look at it closely to know this: two chopped-off heads are one
too many for a small town like San Pedro. Above all, though, something about the eyes of the poor wretch carrying it in his bag like a pet animal convinced him that if he wanted to get any further in his investigation, he should let him go.

Cops visit horror like time travelers take a trip into the past, making sure they touch nothing, and do not alter the coordinates and meridians of the madness and agonized solitude they encounter. Just like the temple containing an Egyptian mummy, a crime scene should not be trampled on; and it is advisable always to travel with a compass. Even the void has a road map and anyone who gets lost dies.

*

How can he explain this to Verónica, when it has all happened in only a few hours and defies all reasonable expectation? He would need time. And not to have somebody sticking a gun into the back of his head from the rear seat.

“Don't do anything stupid,” says Scotty, removing the handcuffs. “Put your hands on the dashboard where I can see them. Don't say anything, just wait for her here.”

The hope that she may have changed her mind and stayed inside the house is shattered when he sees her silhouette in the doorway. Curiosity is the worst enemy of cats and women.

But it is not for nothing that Verónica has lost two men. Something must have aroused her suspicion: perhaps the shadow she sees in the back seat. As far as she knows, Carroza does not work as a taxi driver in his spare time.

She comes to an abrupt halt in mid-pavement. Carroza seizes the opportunity to leap out of the car and shout for her to run, her life is in danger. Verónica has no idea what is going on until the first shot Scotty fires from inside the car removes all doubt.

Carroza may be the best marksman in the federal police, but at fewer
than ten meters he misses with the two bullets Scotty had left in the magazine. Besides, Scotty is no easy target: he is agile in a way Carroza no longer is. Scotty goes to the gym much more often, keeping himself fit to combat the sedentary life he lives at headquarters since he stopped pounding the beat.

Scotty is not a bad shot either, or perhaps he is just lucky. One of his bullets ricochets and hits Carroza somewhere in the stomach. The blood starts to flow even before a flash of pain sends him to the ground in a heap.

As if in a dream, Carroza sees Scotty get out of the car, ready to take aim and finish off Verónica. Thanks to the ten-centimeter high-heeled shoes women put on to seduce and reject men, she has already fallen after only a few meters, betrayed by the loose paving stones of Buenos Aires' streets.

Deputy Inspector Carroza hears more shots. He realizes at once that Scotty is coming for him, taking his time, that he will put the murder weapon into his hand, force him to shoot himself in the head like someone helping a paraplegic scratch his ear. Scotty's original idea was to use Carroza's own gun for this, but no plan is perfect, not even the ones God thinks up—wars and the starving two-thirds of humanity are his most obvious weak points.

Carroza does not hate this fake Scot who was not even born in Ireland. He does not even blame him: he has his goals in life. No, it is him, Carroza, who is the problem. Bértola has told him as much in one of those emergency sessions that the shrink even wanted him to pay for, as if they were of some use. Carroza ruins everything. He has done to his life what Waldo de los Ríos did to Beethoven's symphonies, always trying to simplify the complex, to use bullets to settle things that need words, silences, the ability to look a bit further than any pet animal does when it is busy eating its balanced diet.

The latest thing he has ruined and which he is about to pay for with his life is the possibility (admittedly very distant, but with women you
never know) that Verónica Berutti might make him her third partner. He is going to be killed before he has even fucked her: how stupid can you get?

By now the loss of blood has disconnected him from the world. He can scarcely hear anything, although he dimly senses the slight vibration of footsteps on the pavement. There is no need for him to close his eyes, because all he sees is the encroaching darkness. Better that way: if those who come back from death are right, he will be able to see Scotty finishing him off from somewhere in mid-air.

But he does make out something: a man, an armed shadow. From the way he handles his gun it is obvious he is a novice who never even did basic training. He must have missed going into the army either because he won the lottery or had flat feet, or because he is young enough to have benefited from the abolition of national service.

It is a shame civilians do not even learn how to shoot, because if he had, Damián Bértola could have finished Scotty off instead of simply wounding him in the leg with the Bersa .38. The same gun Verónica inherited from Romano, then lent to Ana Torrente, who returned it to her the previous night, before they made love and Ana took her prisoner, and which Bértola found in the apartment on Azara when he arrived too late, not sure what he was doing there anyway.

*

“Killing someone is like saying a patient is cured,” Bértola tells Carroza when he wakes up a few days later in Churruca Hospital. “No psychoanalyst can ever do that, we'd die of hunger.”

“Do you think Scotty will become one of your patients?”

“A good one, if he accepts the treatment. I suspect he would be in therapy longer than in jail.”

“We cops are poor payers, remember. But what's the matter with her? Why doesn't she say anything?”

She is standing a meter behind Bértola, like a nurse waiting for a visitor to leave so she can give Carroza an injection. She is somewhere else, staring absently at a wounded policeman who might once, a long time ago, have made up with his silence for the death of another man.

“When you appeared outside my house in Villa del Parque she told me she had already said all she had to say to you. That she was going out simply to listen.”

Carroza shuts his eyes.

He sees her leaving Bértola's house, remembers the sudden sadness he felt at what he was losing, the warm rush of happiness that was seeping out of his body with the blood, a happiness he would never recover, no matter how many transfusions he was given.

He does not open his eyes again. He is too frightened of what he might see: Verónica spinning on those extra-high heels that almost proved fatal, leaving the room still without saying a word, or reaching out for a hand which at some point he raised in the air as though he were still wielding the gun Scotty had ordered him to kill her with.

He spent a week sunk in a kind of existential coma, cut off from the world, deliberately unconscious. He only opened his eyes and accepted some food when the magistrate called in to ask what had happened to the report he had never submitted.

“It's not urgent now,” the magistrate reassured him, sitting by his bed like a relative. “But I'd like to talk to you about that officer they call Scotty.”

It was hot. For a small bribe, the afternoon nurse had brought him a Chinese fan that must be stirring the air in Hong Kong, because it had no effect on the heat in the hospital room in Buenos Aires.

“What about him?”

Carroza's arm was stinging because they had just removed the drip tube through which he had been given saline solution during the days of his selective unconsciousness. When the magistrate mentioned Scotty, he felt an immediate stab of pain in his abdomen.

“We don't have much to go on to arrest him.”

“Naturally, he's a good cop.”

“Oh, yes? Why did he shoot you then?”

“I'm sure he was aiming at someone else.” The magistrate stirred uneasily in his chair, hesitating between arresting the deputy inspector for perjury or waiting for him to recover and then sending a new recruit to bring him in—something any officer saw as a humiliation. He must have decided on the second course, because he stood up and said it was getting late, he would wait until Carroza felt better. “Where is Scotty?” Carroza asked.

“In intensive care. His wounded leg got infected and they had to amputate it.”

“Will he die?”

“You'll have to ask the doctor that, Deputy Inspector Carroza. Biology will decide, not justice.”

*

In a single day, as a consequence of the fire in the Descamisados de América shanty town and what the press called “armed confrontations between rival gangs” in the Riachuelo market, Alberto Cozumel Banegas was stripped by his co-counselors of his position as Counselor Pox and lost the governor's protection. He immediately declared that he would go to the police to give them the names and addresses of
the leading members of the drugs trade in the urban areas of Buenos Aires Province. But he did not have time to do so: he was found hanging from the beams of an old bridge over the Río Riachuelo hardly ever used nowadays, the same bridge from which in the early years of the twentieth century a tram full of workmen had toppled into the water.

No-one else died that week and yet the stocks on international exchanges fell yet again. This time, though, it was not due to the deaths of three multinational executives, but because of those of more than thirty thousand soldiers and some two hundred thousand civilians in Iraq. The military invasion had cost the American treasury far too much and now they had to face the consequences. “In a few days, perhaps tomorrow or the next day, the markets will settle down,” an analyst of financial earthquakes assured the world.

The
Queen of Storms
was finally able to leave the treacherous waters of the river where, sixty years earlier, the German battleship
Graf Spee
had been scuttled, with the subsequent scattering of its crew, adding a further Nazi element to the crucible of nations that is Argentina.