No One Loves a Policeman (17 page)

“Your bladder saved your skin,” Mónica said. “They can be cautious when they need to, but they're not afraid of spilling blood if their business looks as though it will suffer.”

“They would have forgotten all about me if they hadn't seen me with Isabel in that Bahía Blanca restaurant. Worse still, instead of keeping my head down I tried to tackle the guy who came in looking so full of himself with Lorena.”

Poor Lorena had already been their hostage. I had been intoxicated with her scent the one time I had embraced her, but Edmundo had staked everything on her. Their joint account was opened, and the money deposited. They told her that if she signed, she could go free. But they killed her anyway, after screwing her.

“They were waiting for you that night at the Imperio Hotel,” Mónica said. “The receptionist told me. He's a parrot trained to talk if offered money, Argentine pesos or dollars. ‘A couple came and asked for Señor Martelli,' he told me. ‘A portly gentleman and a very pretty young woman.' If you had returned from your nighttime adventure a little sooner, you wouldn't be here now.”

“I was in a police cell. A provincial inspector slapped me around. I was rescued by a forensic doctor who eats steaks from cattle butchered out in the countryside by the light of the moon. They're juicier and cheaper that way, he says.”

While he was waiting, the portly gentleman screwed Lorena, and instead of the conventional cigarette and glass of whisky afterward, he stuck a stiletto under her breast. The finest steel, though.

“Did nobody see him leave?” I asked Mónica.

Apparently from that moment the parrot had stopped squawking.

I could imagine the police's hurried discussions, nervous phone calls, a mobile phone ringing in the overcoat of the man in charge. Instructions to the maids to leave everything clean and tidy once the girl's dead body had been carried out on a stretcher. Nothing ever happened here. The mobile rang again, and the man in the overcoat said “Yes, sir” half
a dozen times or more, then went to talk to the hotel manager and reminded him that if any of this got out to the press, he would personally be checking the hotel's fire safety status that very afternoon.

“But why did they kidnap Isabel?”

Distraught, Mónica looked at me and shook her head as though trying to rid herself of the images of her daughter's abduction. She could still hear her cries: “They dragged her away from me,” she said, struggling to staunch the tears welling up yet again in her eyes, and to stop shuddering at the memory of the terror so that she could tell me clearly:

“I have no idea, Gotán. No-one has contacted me. I thought they would demand a ransom, or some information they thought I must have, but I swear I don't know anything more. All I have is a dreadful feeling about this.”

I gave her a hug. I was becoming an expert in comforting women, although all I could offer were empty words and gestures, a little bodily warmth.

I asked Mónica to move out of her apartment. I promised to talk to a friend of hers who lived on her own not far away.

“Make sure you go,” I told her. “You're in danger here.”

You need to stay out of it as long as you can, I told myself as I left her. You cannot always be on the front line, exposed to the crossfire of those scrabbling for power in this country full of people resigned to their destiny, the sheep who flock to electronic or established churches, the believers in paradises that have been brought crashing down by capitalism's hypnotic charms.

The only paradises left in Buenos Aires are those you find in its streets. Trees that President Sarmiento had brought over from Japan in the nineteenth century. Proletarian sparrows sing in their branches,
sharing airspace with pigeons used to being fed in the public squares. They nest up in the cornices of the tall buildings where they are born, eat, shit on people, and die. The zoology at ground level is not much more diverse: dogs, cats and rats fight over streets and wasteland, although it is the rats that come out way ahead in the basements of the grandiose mansions in the smart neighborhoods and in supermarket storerooms.

Then there are the murderers. People trained to kill if hired to do so, crack shots who no longer bother to blacken their faces or wear balaclavas, but are clean-shaven and wear cologne bought in Paris. But not even the documentaries on the Discovery Channel or Animal Planet show them at work.

We feel sad when a lion tears a deer to pieces. That is the law of the jungle. It is a natural law. The one we are governed by was invented by us. And there is no rational or aesthetic explanation for terror.

It is so nice to come home and find your family all waiting for you.

Even before I opened the door, the smell of spices and fried food reminded me that I rarely cook, but usually eat in canteens, and then survive by taking antacids to put out the flames of heartburn. I went straight in without knocking and headed for the kitchen. Burgos was there, putting the final touches to a lentil stew. He was wearing an apron he had found in a wardrobe, probably belonging to one of the women who very occasionally invade my solitude.

As befitted those of their persuasion, the two policemen were doing
nothing useful. Rodríguez was sprawled on the sofa watching T.V. Ayala was going through my sparse library, apprehensively examining novels and a few philosophical treatises bought by my ex-wife in her student days, which I sometimes browse when I am fed up with T.V., although I invariably come to the conclusion that I am impervious to anyone else's thoughts.

We ate in the kitchen, enveloped in the smell of garlic and watched over by Félix Jesús, who was observing the spectacle from the blue cushion on top of the washing-machine that served as his bachelor bed.

“Let's talk business while we eat,” Burgos said. “Heaven knows what we might run into, and it's always best to meet destiny with a full stomach.”

“The Last Supper,” Rodríguez said, with a rumbling laugh that had the same effect on us as a reheated meatball.

Yet we did not really get round to talking about what was worrying us until we had finished eating. Instead we talked football. Ayala told us he would have liked to become a professional footballer rather than a policeman, but had never got beyond the youth team of a Bahía Blanca club playing in the provincial championships. Even in those tournaments, he said, the results were fixed. The skillful players were offered a few dollars so they would all of a sudden become paralyzed when it looked as though they were about to score, leaving the team that had been backed to come out on top to win the game.

“If anyone did not accept the rules, they made sure his leg was broken in the next game,” Ayala said. “While the referee was attending to the bunion on his left foot.”

Ayala gulped down a glass of table wine that he had filled to the brim, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and said:

“That's why I joined the police. If there are bones to be broken, I prefer them not to be mine.”

Burgos had encountered something similar in his profession. When he was a student he discovered that the top doctors used the public
hospital as a shop-window for their talents. They would appear as experts on T.V. and then the next day parade along the corridors and operating theaters like national heroes. The transfer of patients and even hospital supplies to their private consulting rooms and clinics, not to mention the use of public facilities for experiments the medical council would never have approved of, was common currency in the anthropomorphic trade where they earned their fortunes.

“I prefer to practice medicine on the dead,” Burgos concluded, stacking the plates and carrying them to the sink like a good housewife. “I don't have to compete with any social climbers who use the Hippocratic oath to conceal the dirty business they're involved in, and I don't run any risk of being sued for malpractice.”

Rodríguez did not seem to want to add to this stock of confessions. He preferred to dig out scraps of food with a toothpick and the help of his little finger, spitting whatever he found onto the floor. He was a true provincial policeman, someone who had never had anything like an ambition. He earned enough to allow him to live in a small house on the outskirts of Bahía Blanca that he had never finished building. According to Ayala, it was the only house within a 200-meter radius, and was regularly lashed by freezing Antarctic winds.

“To make matters worse, he built the bedroom facing south, so in winter he never has enough blankets or ponchos to wrap around him when he's trying to get to sleep in the deep freeze.”

“Anyone can make a mistake,” Rodríguez said grimly. “That's why I bought a weathervane, one of those tin cockerels that turns with the wind. When his backside faces south, I sleep in the kitchen.”

“What about you, Martelli?” Ayala said, emboldened by the cheap wine. “How come you start out as a policeman and end up a toilet salesman?”

I settled in my seat. Félix Jesús threw me a glance of encouragement or compassion. It is hard to tell with cats, although I was pretty sure that the glint in his ever-changing eyes was one of solidarity.

“First of all, I don't sell toilets. I market bathroom furniture. And that's far better than getting my ass shot off in a city full of hypocrites where everybody wants the police to be teachers and social workers rather than to put crooks where they belong. And secondly, I'm still a policeman, even if I don't have the badge or the gun any more. People are born policemen, it's not something you choose, like becoming a dentist. The only thing that happened when I was thrown out was that I lost my pension.”

“And why did they throw you out, if you don't mind my asking?”

Félix Jesús arched his back on the blue cushion. One look from me would have been enough for him to launch himself at Ayala. I turned my back so that he would calm down.

“I do mind,” I said calmly. “You didn't come six hundred kilometers with a mad doctor at the wheel to hear my confession.”

Burgos greeted my reply with a guffaw from the kitchen, where now he was washing the dishes.

“You're right, Don Gotán. You'll have to excuse the inspector, he's as curious as that cat of yours, who's staring at us trying to understand why we've invaded his territory.”

Ayala did not like being compared to a cat. “They're disloyal creatures,” he said, clearly unaware of the true feline character. Then he said he was about to pee himself, got up and shut himself in the bathroom. His subordinate focused on me as if he had only just discovered I was there. This was how these two functioned. If one of them switched off, the other came into play, suddenly alert to any possible threat from outside.

I was definitely outside. They accepted Burgos, to a certain extent, because his skill had little to do with police work, which consists of bringing brute force to bear on a specific object. But I was cut from the same cloth as them, even if I was slightly different. That made me dangerous. Worse still, I was from the federal force, which was hated and feared from Ushuaia in the south to La Quiaca in the far north. Even
though I had been thrown out, I remained for them a stuck-up enemy from Buenos Aires, the police's police, someone who could never accept them as equals. And were they right!

I met Rodríguez's stare without flinching until Ayala sat down again and he looked away. I had the uncomfortable feeling that if there was a shoot-out in the four crazy days we were going to spend together, I would have to keep my eyes peeled to see from which direction the bullets were coming.

“Let's talk turkey,” Burgos said.

“What have we got?” I said, as if this was a card game.

Accustomed as he was to being a teacher—he was, it transpired, qualified to teach in schools in Bahía Blanca and Carmen de Patagones—Burgos led off with what we knew and what we were guessing.

A police car from Tres Arroyos had been out to inspect the farm I had visited that dark and stormy night. They had gone because Ayala, who was a friend of the local inspector, had asked them to do him a favor.