No One Loves a Policeman (18 page)

“I was left looking a fool,” said Ayala.

The inspector laughed: “Your friend must have seen ghosts. The farmhouse is abandoned. Two of the rooms have no roof, not even a cigarette smuggler would use it as a hiding-place.”

“Didn't they at least find the corpse of the dog that was shot?” I protested.

“Don't go out alone at night,” Rodríguez scoffed, playing the big man. “Least of all if there's a storm.”

“There were three of them,” I insisted. “Two men and a woman. They might have spent the night there and then moved on. The hotels in the region might not be up to much, but nobody would stay in a place like that without good reason. And there were diagrams spread out on a table.”

“You should have taken them,” Ayala said. “We've got no proof now.”

I had to admit he was right. We always think that what is obvious to us cannot be flatly denied the next day. Yet this happens all the time and all over the world.

“But Burgos has some news,” Ayala said. “Go ahead, Doctor.”

“Lorena did not have sex the night she was killed,” Burgos vouchsafed. “At least not with a man.”

He explained that according to the unofficial autopsy his friend had carried out in La Plata, there were no traces of semen in Lorena's vagina or anywhere else on her body. “Not one single damn spermatozoid,” were the words Burgos said his colleague had employed.

“The receptionist told Cárcano's widow he saw her go in with a man. Perhaps the murderer did not penetrate her, but there could have been some foreplay to get her to relax with him.”

“Perhaps he couldn't get it up,” Rodríguez said. “These depraved types often fire blanks.”

“That's possible, but not very likely,” Burgos mused.

After that there was such a prolonged silence that even Félix Jesús stirred, accustomed as he was to the grating sound of our voices provoking all kinds of possibilities. When I asked if that was all the news, none of them spoke, but they all looked at each other as if they were still deciding whether to include me in the game or leave me out.

I tried to calm my provincial colleagues' fears.

“You've stumbled on something important. You don't know what it is exactly, but you know it's serious stuff. I'm not looking for a promotion. I was thrown out of the National Shame and I'm not trying to get back in. All I want is to save the life of my friend's daughter. I've no intention of ever using a gun again either. I'm a civilian now, and besides, I've lost my reflexes. Somebody put a bomb under my car and I didn't even realize it.”

“How did you escape then?” Rodríguez said.

“Pure intuition, and not even mine—a journalist's.”

“We're screwed if the press are in on this,” Ayala protested.

“We shouldn't turn our noses up at alliances,” Burgos corrected him, playing the strategist.

Ayala sighed, breathing fumes of garlic and cheap wine all over us. He respected Burgos even though he was not a policeman. His bloodhound's nose told him that anyone who could read dead bodies as if they were sacred scrolls must possess some mysterious power. The doctor did not boast about his talents, but he was the one who had decided to make the trip to Buenos Aires. The other two had enthusiastically latched on to the idea, partly so they could have an unexpected holiday, and partly in the hope it might lead to promotion and medals for bravery.

My clarification seemed to have had the desired effect. Ayala raised his eyebrows as though to tell his cards partner he was holding all the aces, and Burgos took this as a signal to continue.

“My taste for meat slaughtered out in the open, preferably under a starry sky, may give me hallucinations, but at least it's meat I'm eating, and not ground glass.”

He explained that, fed up with being looked down upon by the “serious” scientific community, forensic scientists like him had got together via the internet and formed local, regional, even international groups. They were even hoping eventually to establish an international society.

“But it's nothing like a sect or a Masonic brotherhood,” he said. “We are not promoting any system of values. What ethical code could we glean from dead bodies when while they were alive most of them were conformists, cynics, or dyed-in-the wool bastards?”

I settled back in my chair to hear the rest. Félix Jesús did the same on his bed.

“Drug traffickers are the lords and masters of half of Colombia,” Burgos said, as though giving a lecture. “They kill not simply to make money; they even claim they want to change the world. In the areas they
control they pursue social policies that would be the envy of Sweden. They have created a perfect synthesis of feudalism and socialism. The poorest of the poor both fear and love them, and don't expect a thing from their bourgeois governments.”

“There's nothing new under the sun,” I said.

Burgos scowled at me for interrupting.

“For years now the
favelas
in Brazil have been liberated territory. The drug traffickers have taken them over with guns and violence, love and cocaine.”

I thought of butting in again to argue that Lenin was not Maradona, that Marx had not denounced capitalist surplus value so that states could justify imposing more V.A.T., that the revolutionary dreams of many generations should not be confused with the struggle of worms in garbage. But this was not about me, it was about saving Isabel's life, and perhaps the tainted meat that swelled the fat doctor's stomach contained an ounce or two of proteinic lucidity.

Burgos unfolded a large map of Argentina. Félix Jesús licked his front paws then began to rub his eyes, as if he could not believe what he was seeing.

“In Argentina, the last few forest jungles are being devastated by the multinationals,” Burgos pronounced in apocalyptic tones. “But even if there were more of them, back in the '60s the guerrillas in Tucuman had to eat the roots of the Peronist revolution raw.”

Burgos seemed to be giving his disenchanted, idiosyncratic version of what had happened to the guerrilla struggle in Argentina. “Nobody lifted a finger to create a different society from the sewer we're all living in,” he declared. “Then again, although there are hardly any jungles left for demented revolutionaries to hide away in, we don't have shanty towns like they do in Brazil either.”

Ayala and Rodríguez seemed to have nodded off—they had probably heard it all in Bahía Blanca. I said nothing. I did not want to be dismissed with another withering look. I wanted to see where the
gut-ripper was heading, and decide whether I wanted to go with him.

“No, what we have are ‘emergency zones,' ‘marginal neighborhoods,' houses full of squatters, drunks and male whores under our urban flyovers. Most of them are the underclass. They aren't organized in any way, and their principal objective is to rip somebody off to get a joint, a fix, or a hotdog and a coke. But in some places this situation is gradually changing.”

He paused again to ask for water. I pointed to the cabinet behind his bald head and to the sink in the kitchen. He blew out his cheeks: he did not want to drink tap water, but as I don't believe in mineral water he was forced to continue, however dry his throat.

“A forensic scientist, also a hacker and a member of the society we are creating, hacked into the intelligence services' computer system and downloaded this report.”

“It could be a fake,” Ayala said. “As far as I know, spies don't publish their work on the internet.”

“Inspector Ayala isn't a fan of technology,” Burgos said, winking at me. “But the web was invented by the secret services, so it's reasonable to suppose that they use it.”

As he said this, he handed me two printed sheets. I told him I didn't have my glasses, and asked him to tell me what they said.

“The report mentions two big marginal neighborhoods, both on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. One to the west and the other to the north of the capital. It talks of trucks moving freely halfway across the country to unload their suspicious cargoes in these hotbeds of delinquency.”

“Drugs?”

“And arms! Tens or hundreds of weapons a time. Who knows how many over a period of weeks, months … even years?”

I went to fetch my spare pair of glasses and glanced at the sheets of paper.

They had been printed on an old machine with a dot printer that
was almost out of ink. I told Burgos that if he was thinking of fighting organized crime he ought to buy himself a new one.

“I'm not fighting anyone, Don Gotán. I don't even know how to use a pistol. You have retired from the force, and not even the pickpockets in Bahía Blanca are scared of these two.”

The pair he was referring to shifted uneasily in their seats, but did not quarrel with him.

“Why all those weapons?” I asked. “What those people need is food, work, health centers, a sense of dignity.”

“So our National Shame here is a romantic at heart,” Ayala mocked. Burgos laughed too.

“Don't make us laugh, Don Gotán. You know better than any politician in the country that half of the people in Argentina are lost causes.”

I took a deep breath, held it in, then blew out the air and tried not to think.

In Argentina, there are more supporters of the final solution than there are of Boca Juniors football club. After the last attempt to achieve it by those in power, our economic and social ruin has been so plain for all to see that preachers forecasting the end of the world have sprouted like mushrooms. Even Mónica was a member of an electronic church which saw no hope of changing reality and suggested death as the only path to redemption—after signing over all her worldly goods to the pastors of the church, of course.

But I had not allowed the three musketeers over my threshold to discuss theology or politics. What I wanted was their help to find a lead that would give me at least a vague idea of who had killed my friend and abducted his daughter.

“A couple of the leaders or co-ordinators of the organization must have been meeting in that ‘country house' you so rashly visited to the other night,” Burgos surmised. “We don't really know whether Ayala's inspector friend was telling the truth. They undoubtedly left some traces.”

“Condoms in the room with the roof,” I suggested.

“He said there was nothing, not even a cigarette butt. Either you were imagining things or he's lying.”

As Burgos resigned himself to having to drink tap water, I told them what “Wolf” Parrondo had discovered. I explained that despite his profession he was a decent sort who had saved my life (as well as his own) and had taken a risk publishing the story.

When I went on to tell them that Mónica had been released in Haedo, the fat doctor clenched his fists and pursed his lips. The few hairs on his head stood on end, as if he were Einstein lighting on the theory of relativity.

“They didn't go far to release her.”

It was all in the report. Burgos asked me to read it out loud, so I would know what it said and to refresh his companions' memory.

Badly written and with spelling mistakes suggestive of a not-too-bright adolescent, the report contained the results of six months of the alleged tracking of well-known dealers in Haedo and Ramos Mejia, in the Buenos Aires suburbs, including their visits to police stations supposedly under arrest, although this was in fact a sham that allowed them to visit police chiefs in their own offices without witnesses, recorders, or indiscreet C.C.T.V.

About once a fortnight, a container lorry made its way into Villa El Polaco, a continuation of the Carlos Gardel shanty town that had grown like a barnacle on the side of Haedo hospital.

The traffickers were never held for more than twenty-four hours. The police log-books said they were taken in for questioning after anonymous tip-offs which somehow always proved groundless. And oh! what a surprise, this procession through the police stations invariably took place the night before the truck's arrival.

A month earlier, with a copy of this intelligence report in his hands, a public prosecutor by the name of Gorostiza had decided to intercept one of these trucks on Route 8. Two provincial police patrol cars and an
armored vehicle from the capital blocked the road at the exit to Pergamino. This was at the end of a bridge where there were no verges, so the driver had no choice but to stop in the middle of the road. The traffic behind him started to build up. While the lorry was being searched, from 8:15 to 9:30 at night, a queue of cars, other lorries, and buses stretched almost a kilometer back along the road. People got out to protest, but even though the reason given was that there had been an accident, those who walked as far as the lorry were shouted at to get away. Some were shoved and even offered violence by the armed police carrying out the search.

“A magistrate friend of mine got his hands on a copy of the lorry inventory,” Burgos said.

There was nothing about it in the intelligence report, but in the container the prosecutor had found sixty-six M.K. 40 rifles, twenty of them equipped with night-sights; some recycled old .45s, sixty 9 mm pistols, and half a dozen mortar shells. All this hardware was carefully stored underneath two dozen Thonet chairs the lorry driver had to deliver to Casa F.O.A., an interior design exhibition held annually in Buenos Aires.

“What happened to the cargo? Whose legal jurisdiction was it? Where was the news published?” I wanted to know.

“At 9:30 Route 8 was cleared, and the lorry headed the procession onwards. The lorry driver was able to deliver his furniture to the exhibition on time.”

“And the weapons?” I asked.

“That same night, the prosecutor had a telephone call telling him to be very careful about what he made of his discovery. The next morning, after writing a letter to the investigating magistrate saying he was at his wits' end with depression, Gorostiza hanged himself. The magistrate sent his condolences to the prosecutor's young widow, and after that silence reigned. If family and friends said anything, none of it came out. The fact that a prosecutor in Pergamino had decided to hang himself was not considered newsworthy by the national papers.”