Holy City (6 page)

His usual dealer meets him in his virtual office in the Florida Garden, a bar on the corner of Florida and Paraguay. Like liners in port, celebrities call in here for a while: local politicians and artists, intellectuals who write for newspapers that the middle class (although fewer and fewer of them) buy so as to know what to think, or more often to line the floors of their apartments with when they are going to paint the walls.

“That's a lot, I can only supply half.”

“Where can I get the rest, Uncle?”

He does not say so, but the dealer knows Pacogoya has got all the money on him. He can tell it from his hands, his eyes: even the way his lip trembles makes him an open book.

“I'll give you an address,” he says, writing on a scrap of paper. “Memorize it, then tear it up.”

Glancing down at the piece of paper, Pacogoya immediately protests.

“But that's not in Buenos Aires! Where on earth is San Pedro anyway?”

“It's close by,
che
. A hundred and seventy kilometers away, no more than an hour on the motorway.” With that he takes the bit of paper from Pacogoya and tears it up himself. “Give me the dough now and call me when you get back from San Pedro.”

Pacogoya is carrying a student rucksack. His thin face disguises the
fact that he is already forty-eight years old. A sparse beard gives him that Che Guevara look which often leads tourists to think he must be a left-wing guerrilla. In reward for his services they thrust books about Che written in French or Italian on him.

He unzips his rucksack and hands the dealer a wad of notes.

“Twenty percent now. The rest tonight, when I've picked up the stuff and returned from San Pedro.”

Despite sixty years of hard living, Uncle's face rejuvenates as soon as he sees the money. The skin around his eyes gets a botox injection when he handles the notes, counts them under the table, then like a conjuror makes them disappear into his jacket pocket.

Although everyone knows him as Uncle, it is only with Pacogoya that he has a real nephew relationship. Pacogoya has known him for fifteen years, since the days when the dealer was private secretary to the vice-president of the Chamber of Deputies, and Pacogoya's own position in the Foreign Ministry allowed him to use the invaluable diplomatic bag to bring shipments in directly from Colombia.

“Those were the days,” says Pacogoya, while the two of them are smoking a cigarette outside the bar, now that the municipal authorities have banned smoking in enclosed spaces. “I should have stayed on. I'd be an ambassador by now.”

“The foreign service is full of queers,” says the dealer, taking a lungful of smoke, then breathing out a dark, polluted cloud that the east wind whirls around the walls of the bar, then off up calle Paraguay. “I'll see you tonight.”

*

Anyone determined to believe God exists will find him on any corner, in the lift, or while he is walking along a lonely road. Any woman equally keen to find love will end up convinced that a noise in the corridor must be her lover coming back at any hour, at 3:30 a.m., for
example. To beg her to forgive him for having stormed off the other night when she refused to give him what he had come to ask her for. For having been so stupid as not to make love to her first, to leave her well satisfied so that, still caught up in the dreamy haze of their second fuck, she would find it impossible to refuse him such a tiny favor, nothing more than three thousand pesos.

But neither God nor love exist, Verónica groans when she hears Pacogoya's voice on the entry phone. Or at least, this is not the way to find them, groping around in the dark, holding back as she gives herself in exchange for a meal and real French champagne in an expensive restaurant, followed by a lovemaking session in a room with a view of the noble dead.

“I thought you were back on your ship. What happened: did they throw you overboard?” she asks when he comes in.

Instead of replying, Pacogoya tries to embrace her, but she slips away like a cat who will not allow itself to be stroked. He lets his arms drop and sinks onto the sofa. He is exhausted.

“You know what happened. The ship ran aground, and …”

“I'm not talking about the cruise ship: what happened to you?”

Pacogoya looks at her in dismay. As though it were possible not to tell her, to say he saw her light was on and came up, to have a drink of the Argentine whisky which is all she has in the little bar she keeps under a table loaded with plants, then make love to her or take her to eat in an all-night restaurant run by fake Italians.

“I have to get up at seven,” Verónica says impatiently. “Give me a quick summary of what happened, then you can go back and sleep in your cemetery.” Pacogoya was always pallid; now his skin is transparent. All he wants is somewhere to spend the night: any corner, the dog kennel if necessary. “I don't have a dog.”

“Wuff, wuff,” he says, managing to bring a smile to her face, smothered with creams to make her look young. “I'll tell you in the morning. Go to bed now.”

“You could be dead by morning. The refugees who come here seem to have a tendency to disappear.”

Curiosity to find out what Verónica means has the effect of loosening Pacogoya's tongue.

“Until now everything had been fine. Fifteen years living off it and not a drop of blood.”

“Living off it” meant the tourist guide was a low-level dealer practicing low-intensity corruption, the only explosions coming with sex.

“So who's spattered you with it now?”

He has no idea. All he can do is tell her what happened and curse the dealer, the Uncle who loves him like a nephew, for sending him into that bloody lions' den—to the armpit of the world, a place called San Pedro.

“San Pedro is Saint Peter, so you must have been close to paradise. I know the town, it's a pretty place, surrounded by olive groves and with a beautiful view of the river.”

“Well then, paradise must be next door to hell.”

*

He has a hard time finding the address.

He has driven there at 180 k.p.h., dodging lorries and buses, forcing his way past other drivers, as if he was already aware that someone in the place he is aiming for is bleeding to death.

He finally turns into the street. A dirt track. Its name is on a hand-painted sign, although in reality the road is little more than a line crossing a grid of bare lots, scarcely half a dozen small, poor-looking, unfinished houses. Stray dogs watch Pacogoya's red Porsche go past—slowly, bouncing over the potholes. He tells himself he ought to have left it in his garage and rented something less ostentatious, but a nagging voice told him he had to get there as quickly as possible, without even pausing to think: after all, he could have got the drugs
somewhere else. No, he had been with the Uncle so many years now, he trusted him.

“Trust makes you relax. It can be deadly,” he says to a Verónica whose indulgent gaze for some reason reminds him of the dogs in San Pedro.

It is the fifth house along the dirt track called the Limes. A house every hundred meters; five hundred meters and nothing more than that hand-painted sign at the start. Groves of fruit trees at the far end. An intense perfume of oranges seeps into the Porsche, reminding Pacogoya he must have the bodywork looked at. Maybe rust was getting into it, and he cannot allow such an expensive car to go to rack and ruin.

There is a number, also painted on a piece of wood from a fruit crate: 59. Alongside the nondescript house stands a Ford Falcon, which must already have been ancient by the time they were used to “disappear” people during the dictatorship. From its design and the shape of the bonnet, Pacogoya calculates it is from the 1960s. It probably does not even work and has been left there for time or tramps to strip the carcass.

He claps his hands: there is no bell for him to ring. Better to pass for a Bible seller than shout who he is when he has no idea who might be inside. It is a fine winter morning; the sun is as hot as in January, but the air is cool. The kind of day it would be nice to be greeted by a friendly face, to be asked in for a cocktail beneath the climbing vine in the garden, to leave with the gift of a bag of oranges.

“San Pedro oranges are really sweet and juicy,” Verónica chips in.

No-one comes out of the house; not even a dog. The ones in the street have lost all interest in him and gone back to their fleas. No neighbors either. Or children. And too late, Pacogoya realizes there aren't even any birds.

He takes a couple of steps back, still facing the shut door and windows, but he knows he cannot leave empty-handed. If he does
not get the goods, no-one will buy from him again: in this business, reputation is everything. And once you have lost it, there is no way to get it back. And it is good money, always bulging in his pockets. No, he won't give that up just because of a moment's weakness. Besides, Uncle would not deliberately send him to the slaughter. “Fifteen years, nephew,” he tells himself, hearing the dealer's affectionate voice in his ear, encouraging him to open the door.

“So he does telepathy as well as drugs,” Verónica scoffs.

“I swear I could hear his voice. But he should have been telling me: get out of there, don't go in, don't get your hands dirty, go back to being a cruise-ship Romeo—you may earn less but as long as there are no shipwrecks, you'll live to a ripe old age.”

“You will live to a ripe old age, Paco. Anyway, you're already old, it's just that you can't accept it.”

The delivery faun stares at her. He really does seem to have aged after the race to San Pedro, then the terror in that rundown house by the orange groves.

He finally goes in. The door is not locked. It opens noiselessly as though the hinges have recently been oiled. It is dark inside; there is no electricity, only a shaft of sunlight halfway down the corridor. It falls vertically and is as round as the hole in the roof that lets it in, as round as the face of the man lying there, eyes wide open, staring up at this miserly midday zenith.

“You should have left the way you came.”

“But trust makes you relax. And curiosity killed the cat, Verónica.”

He had gone there to get what was his, on Uncle's recommendation. Never so much as a drop of blood before then. You get used to the world appearing to be something it's not.

He opens the door wide behind him to let in more light, but the corridor is still in darkness. It is obvious the man is not sleeping, but he could have had a heart attack. If anyone killed him, they must be far away by now. The best thing would be to leave straightaway without
touching anything. Pacogoya does not follow his own advice, because he still wants to believe that if he goes further along the passage he might find what he came for.

He trips over something and comes to a halt, terrified. It is the feet of the dead man. He reaches down and pulls, to drag the body toward the light from the open door. It is only a couple of meters. The body is not heavy; it slides along easily.

He should never have taken money for orders he could not fulfill; he should not have driven to San Pedro; he should not have gone into the house. But you venture into the unknown thinking you are only going into the next room.

“I bent over the body looking for something; a piece of paper, a key, some clue, something.”

It is then that horror tears at his guts and takes his breath away, as if he had brushed against a high-voltage cable. Far from the body, at the spot he had dragged the corpse from, the sun is still plunging like a knife into the dead man's open eyes.

By 6 a.m. next day Verónica is already in her office at the Riachuelo market. It is a circus caravan furnished with a notebook, printer, telephone, coffee machine and a whale calf, her bodyguard, two meters tall and weighing 120 kilos. He would find swimming difficult, but on dry land he can kill without turning a hair.

The smell of freshly brewed coffee cannot disguise the stench from the Río Riachuelo. Day has only just dawned, but the stallholders have
already begun to pack up. They tell her it was not such a good night. There were bomb threats. One of the stallholders was kidnapped on the Camino Negro: he was taken to Lomas cemetery, made to dig his own grave, then brought back to the market.

It is not yet 7:00 a.m. when she calls the magistrate at home in Lomas de Zamora. The maid who answers reminds her rudely that it is Saturday, that his honor went to bed late the previous night because he had a social engagement, that if she phones him on Monday she is sure she will find him in.

“If his honor doesn't come to the phone at once, I swear on oath as a lawyer that tonight he'll be in the headlines of Crónica,” says Verónica, without raising her voice a single decibel.

The whale calf gives a half-smile of approval. It is obvious the lawyer's methods coincide with his idea of how conflicts are meant to be resolved outside his marine world.

“I've only just got to bed,” the magistrate tells her, as if anyone were interested in his carousing. Verónica responds in kind, informing him that she didn't sleep at all, that in the early hours the cable channels repeat every program, including the news. “So why didn't you sleep? I never told you to go to the market at night. Going there a while in the morning is more than enough.”

“I can assure your honor that if you were told one of these nights that someone had been decapitated, that there had been a bomb threat and a Bolivian had almost been buried alive, you wouldn't sleep either.”

She takes a deep breath to replenish the oxygen she used up in giving her little speech. Silence at the far end of the line. The sound of someone clearing their throat, then more silence. He must be writing it all down, Verónica guesses. Magistrates note everything they hear down on a bit of paper, just in case.

“Where was this decapitated body?”

“In San Pedro, Buenos Aires Province.”

“My jurisdiction is Lomas de Zamora. Tell me about the bomb alert
and the abduction of the Bolivian.” It is Verónica's turn to fall silent. She finds it hard to focus on what the magistrate wants to hear, to forget about the headless body in the orange groves. There is no apparent connection, so the magistrate dismisses it: he is keen to return to bed. “Don't let it affect you,” he advises her, after Verónica has told him what she was told. “Is Chucho there with you?”