No One Loves a Policeman (33 page)

There were no names amongst the documents, apart from mine on the three sheets of paper in the orange file that Quesada had been clinging to. When I heard his name, I almost tore out the tubes to ask what had happened to him, but my rescuers did not give me time to do so.

“He is in the mortuary of this very establishment,” Burgos said, apparently under the influence of the rhetoric within the files they had discovered.

“He was not as lucky as you,” Ayala said.

Burgos promised there would be a proper autopsy, although it hardly seemed to matter if he had died when they first started shooting at us, or later, perhaps under torture. The poor magistrate: in the end, he knew no more about what was going on than any low-grade stool pigeon at work in the corridors of the Law Courts.

I closed my eyes while Burgos and Ayala went on explaining. I wanted to believe it was all a stupid nightmare, that in this first dawn of the twenty-first century it could not be true that the Argentines were at it again, searching for or offering themselves as cheap messiahs. Still thinking they were unique, better than all the rest of humanity, kicking over the table like provincial hoodlums, like small-town schemers who ruined their neighbors' reputations with the same pleasure as they stuck toothpicks into bits of cheese and salami while drinking themselves silly in the only bar on some ghastly main street.

In Buenos Aires they had already brought on a substitute president who, after receiving a standing ovation from Congress for declaring a moratorium on the country's debts to the pack of foreign hounds baying for blood, was to be kicked out through the back door only a week later. In the midst of this farce, political parties and popular organizations were boasting how they had got rid of a constitutional president as if he had been the very worst banana republic dictator.

I closed my eyes and disguised myself as a corpse again, but I could not avoid hearing the details of how Burgos and Ayala had made their way to the roofless ranch.

When they had reached Bahía Blanca, they found the real serial killer, the family man, waiting for them at the police station. He signed his confession and asked to be left alone in his cell until the trial had been prepared. He said he was tired of arguing with his wife all the time. He decided in the end to make her his final victim, although he claimed in his defense that this murder had been a
crime passionnel
: fights between husband and wife start easily enough, but you never know how they are going to end.

When the serial killer turned himself in, Inspector Ayala saw his last chance of promotion before retirement vanishing out of the window. So as not to get too depressed about it, he suggested to the doctor they try to find Isabel's kidnappers. The closest place for them to start looking was the ranch I had been to, although they had to get the estate agent
to show them the way. After they pitched up there, they not only had to give me mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to make sure I made it to hospital, but they also had to revive the poor estate agent, who almost had a heart attack when he saw what had been going on in a property he had been trying to sell as unoccupied.

In the end, nobody even knew there had been a plot. The businessmen who had included the G.R.O. as part of their portfolios dismissed the idea the same night the president was taking his last trip with official bodyguards. The arms stored in the Santiago Cuneo model hospital would be duly shipped out to an unknown destination on a caravan of trucks that did not even attract the notice of the staff working there, used as they were to daily shoot-outs in the neighboring shanty towns, the constant toing and froing of the police, and to seeing notorious gang leaders swaggering along the corridors with the assurance of top surgeons.

One day Argentina should seriously consider exporting the sophisticated know-how behind the way it strips governments of power without waiting for them to complete their constitutional terms. Throughout the twentieth century it has had more practice at this kind of thing than any but a few countries in Africa. We are world leaders at it.

My saviors had little more to tell. Ayala seemed glad to have discovered I did not leave the National Shame out of a fit of the vapors: “That's for pregnant women, not police officers,” he said. Burgos was more aseptic and skeptical. He said he was reserving his opinion until I either recovered or died, which would be obvious soon enough. I am not sure whether he was trying to encourage me or finish me off.

After announcing that Argentina was going hell for leather for disaster yet again and that there was nothing I could do about it, they said they would leave me to rest or breathe my last. They would be back the
next day to say goodbye, whether I was still in my bed or by then being fitted for a wooden overcoat. The tubes supplying me with air and sustenance prevented me from cursing them roundly for all they had done for me.

I closed my eyes, and in the middle of the night dreamed that someone came and took all the tubes out of me and bundled me away into the boot of a car. From there they took me heaven knows where, and two “male figures” unloaded me while a “female figure” issued instructions and talked on a mobile to a fourth person whose sex I could not determine.

I woke up in even more pain and feeling weaker than on the previous day, only to find that certain dreams are the confused prologues to even worse nightmares.

There are two ways of immersing yourself in violence: either of your own accord, or by letting yourself be swept along by it, like somebody falling into a raging torrent. I would have preferred the former, but found myself in the latter.

When I woke up, I was in a different bed. I had no tubes stuck into me any more, which chiefly goes to show that all this costly medical apparatus is often unnecessary, and only adds to the health service's bills.

I did not try to move, but I was not tied down either. I was in such poor physical shape that my captors must have decided I was in too much pain to attempt an escape. Flat on my back in the hospital bed, I consoled myself with the fact that at least the room had a roof. This gave me a surge of optimism: if I had been abducted from Tres Arroyos hospital and taken in a car boot to another one, that must mean someone was interested not only in keeping me alive, but also in staying in contact with me.

It was not you, Mireya. That was my first disappointment when I came back to life, thanks to having my heart in the wrong place. Who was it then? Who had taken the risk of secretly abducting me and transferring me to another hospital?

The door to my room opened. Finally I got the answers.

At the end of June 1978, while the Argentine football team was winning the World Cup, to the euphoria of the populace and the satisfaction of the military dictatorship, one of the top police chiefs, Anibal “Toto” Lecuona died in an ambush in the Tigre Delta outside Buenos Aires. The commander of the First Army Corps gave immediate instructions to the owners of the national newspapers and news agencies that nothing about his death should emerge. That night crowds poured onto the streets to celebrate winning a manipulated tournament lavishly promoted to show the world an Argentina that had returned to peace, had an economy that was growing as fast as savage capitalism allowed, and was exporting middle-class tourists flush with money from all the exchange-rate and other fiscal juggling going on.

The murdered police chief was far from having been the dictatorship's blue-eyed boy, but to order his death in the midst of all the patriotic rejoicing must have seemed like a dangerously dissident initiative to the monolithic armed forces. The man had in fact been a fifth columnist for the Peronist
guerrilleros
, but he enjoyed the protection of a big cereal wheeler-dealer who, like the good progressive bourgeois he was, made sure he was affiliated to the Communist Party. He donated
as much money to their campaigns as he did to the Rotary Club, of which he was also a member, just in case. The Argentine Communist Party had swapped its copies of
What Is to Be Done
by Lenin for color pamphlets of the Kremlin, whose gerontocracy were delighted with our dictatorship because it had disobeyed the underhand boycott imposed by the Carter regime in Washington, and sold them wheat on better terms than it had to the European Community.

Only a loose cannon, or a fundamentalist in the murderous crusade known as the Process of National Reorganization, could have thought it would be a good idea to shoot the police chief on the same night as the football triumph was being celebrated, and anyone who did not dance was a Dutchman.

Whoever drew up the orange file was generous with the space devoted to that hidden episode, giving it the equivalent of a center spread in a newspaper. My name and even my nickname Gotán figured prominently in this well-thumbed document originally intended for a restricted circulation, which Burgos and Ayala had pried from Patricio Quesada's dead hands. But why, almost a quarter of a century later, was anyone still interested in an episode that in no way altered anything written about the last Argentine military dictatorship? Did some eager, democratically minded researcher into those atrocities want to shed more light on the shadowy goings-on of that period, to expose me to public condemnation, and send my weary bones to jail?

My involvement in the affair made it less of a surprise that Toto Lecuona was still alive than it was to see him coming through the door, healthy and smiling, with the apparent intention of embracing me.

“None of your bones are broken, and the blood you lost was partly replaced in Tres Arroyos hospital. They finished pumping up those flabby muscles of yours in here,” he said by way of a greeting, even though we had not seen one another for almost a quarter of a century. He came over and hugged me. “You old crock … I had to get you out of that provincial hospital—they were planning to kill you.”

“What, again?”

He guffawed and sat beside me on the bed. He was right, I was well enough to sit up with his help and lean back against the headboard, even though a sharp pain in my chest reminded me of Mireya's reappearance in my life.

“You're an inconvenient witness, the missing link in a chain rusted by time, Gotán. If you are killed now, there is no-one who can contradict what it says in that orange file.”

“I've no intention of contradicting it. I was happy selling toilets.”

“But you put on the masked avenger's cape and flew off to bring justice to Gotham City.”

“Don't talk to me about justice. Tell me instead why you came back?”

“I have my pride, even if I've retired to the Canary Islands with my adolescent girlfriend.”

“All my friends seem to be doing the same. Why can't they settle for the truth, that they're nothing more than living mummies?”

“Look who's talking, the tango dancer.”

“Mireya is thirty-nine, almost an old woman.”

“And it's because of her that you're here instead of enjoying a happy retirement.”

“Where is she?”

“Disappeared without trace. Everyone in the G.R.O. has vanished, and left me in the lurch.”

Since this time I had no tubes, I asked once again what on earth G.R.O. stood for.

“‘Group of Revolutionary Officers' … Until a few hours ago, they hoped to seize power. Now they're the initials on a rubber stamp.”

“The military again?”

“But these are youngsters, Gotán. They're the internet and mobile phone generation. They admire Chávez in Venezuela, and they support Evo Morales in Bolivia.”

“Bingo!” I said triumphantly. “But what brings you here?”

He stood up and paced round the room. He lit a cigarette, filled the air with smoke, and then asked if I minded him smoking.

“What I mind is dying without finding out why nobody will let me go back to my peaceful job, why they keep bringing up the past, why they want to make me guilty, why they make up a story I can no longer be bothered to deny. And I'd also like to know who Mireya—or La Negra, as she calls herself with these people—really is, where Edmundo's daughter is, and more than anything, why Edmundo was murdered. He was a good guy, he also put his money on a less crappy world once upon a time.”