No One Loves a Policeman (36 page)

But there was nobody in the bar still breathing. I was pleased to think that one of the two I had shot must have been the dog killer from Tres Arroyos.

My instinct for self-preservation is strong and persistent. The bureaucrat's voice inside me was telling me to get out of there, out of that sinister building, that imitation Wild West saloon, before death stripped me naked again and tempted me with a well-rehearsed fellatio.

Of course, I had not come this far, half-dead already and with the stabbing pain in my chest, merely to finish off the jackals who had killed an old colleague and a defenseless, loyal farm dog. Nor had I come to put an end to a bunch of revolutionaries recycled like organic waste, people who refused to see that, however much it cost to admit it, in Argentina we were living in a democracy ruled by crappy governments elected by the people.

I had lost my radio. Toto's was beneath his body sprawled out in the street. There were no signs of life from Burgos and Ayala: they must have set off in the 4×4 in the opposite direction, and would by now be racing back up the highway to Bahía Blanca, which they should never have left in the first place. I was all on my own, and yet again I was treading on dead bodies.

But I was sure there was someone still alive, on the “
PST RS
” floor of the wrecked bar with no vowels.

It was time for me to end that life as well.

Stairs so rotten they crumbled underfoot, and the inevitable creaking that competed with the gale of sand beating against the banging shutters.

You were expecting me. You could have come out as soon as I burst into the ground floor and shot me from up here. I was so busy trying to rid myself of our attackers, and so furious I had not been able to save Toto Lecuona from death a second time, that I would not have had to time to react.

Inexplicably, I no longer felt rage. I would have been disappointed not to find you, although that feeling soon changed.

The upper floor was little more than an attic. I had to bend my 1.90 frame to walk along the corridor. This part of the building was better preserved. I could tell from the little details that a woman must have lived here: flower pots with the dusty remains of once pretty, exotic plants, woodcuts and a pair of watercolors of lovers who invited the spectator to join in their game. Decay had left some lines untouched. Beauty resisted defeat.

I checked out two small, empty rooms without doors. I wasted no time on the locked door of the third. I fired at the lock and kicked it open. As it bounced back toward me, I prevented it from closing with my foot. A shot from inside the room skimmed my head.

I could scarcely make you out, but I knew you had missed on purpose. I would not have had time to take aim if you had fired again, at me this time, but you lowered your rifle and I stepped inside the room.

“This time you did know I would come.”

“I did the last time, too. I know you, Gotán. As I once told you, you pursue your prey like a man possessed. You're a killing machine.”

“Look who's talking.”

“We have a cause. Everybody kills for a reason. For ideals, money, passion.”

“I'm the exception to the rule. I did not come here for you.”

You turned your back on me and stared out of the window at the deserted street invisible in the storm of sand and dust. I wondered if I could wound you with words, if they were your weak point, if a word could be the
coup de grâce
I would never dare give you.

“Isabel is alive,” you said, still looking away from me. “We were going to let her go. She can't harm us any more.”

“How could she have harmed you?”

At this you turned to face me, weary of the game, knowing how absurd it all was.

“She knows the security code to Edmundo's account in Europe. He had money from the C.P.F. that never reached the N.G.O. it was destined for, which meant we didn't get it either.”

“I didn't know. She didn't tell me.”

“I'm not surprised, and neither should you be. What girl could trust someone with your record?”

“Isabel doesn't know anything about it. My past is my own, I don't advertise it.”

“You advertise bathroom appliances. But her mother did not know the code either. That's why she made that deposit in Spain: she must have been afraid of what might happen and that $250,000 was all she had time to transfer.”

“Not a bad haul.”

“Both of them are rich. You could marry whichever of them you managed to seduce.”

“Where is she?”

“I'm not going to tell you. You find her, if that's what you really came for.”

“Who put Lorena's body in my room? And who shipped around that transvestite Cordero?”

“The G.R.O. has its intelligence unit, Gotán. The dirty war in the '70s left a lot of highly trained personnel who found it impossible to live on unemployment benefit. But they weren't the ones who disposed of Cordero. That was a group of disillusioned Muslims who passed the death sentence on him from Paraguay. The difference between ordinary crime and political murders is that the latter make it to the front pages. The serial killer on the coast acted as a shield. In the end, Edmundo Cárcano and his young lover, who was so devoted to Edmundo she betrayed Cordero and our organization along with him, chose to be common crooks rather than revolutionaries. They must have known nobody can double-cross an organization like ours.”

“So it was you who made love to Lorena?”

Your face lit up joyfully. You laughed silently, staring at me, waiting for me to laugh as well or ask you for details. We men are aroused by lovemaking between women, and you were expecting me to ask why and how you seduced her, how you lured her to your secret corner, the same one perhaps as the one I had stumbled into … but before I could ask, you told me anyway.

“We made love in your room at the Imperio Hotel in Bahía Blanca. The night porter gave us the key.”

“Mónica was told Lorena came in with a man. Was the porter one of you as well?”

“We don't recruit service personnel, but in hotels they get paid like immigrant workers, so they try to make money on the side by allowing prostitutes in. When I gave him the equivalent of his Christmas bonus, the porter was happy to let us do whatever we liked. The Bahía Blanca police were ordered to keep you away that night you went and got drunk in the local dive. They did their work well, because you didn't turn up until the next day.”

“I was back before dawn, in fact,” I said, as if it mattered.

Ayala and Rodríguez. So they had picked me up outside the bar on orders. Cervantes would never have written
Don Quixote
with those two as his main characters.

“Who gave the order?”

“A top mafia man in Puerto Belgrano. He controls all the white-slave traffic in the region. He makes his contacts internationally each year when he sails with the navy's training ship. They say the whores in Jordan are especially hot.”

You laughed openly, defying me, then like someone raising their champagne glass, you raised the rifle level with my face.

“Are you going to kill me?”

“There would be no point, Gotán. I am death.”

“You tried it once before.”

“Do you think I would have failed if that's what I had wanted?”

“The doctors told me it was because my heart is over to the right.”

“You should never believe what doctors say.”

And then, as I had guessed and feared it would, it all started to happen again. Mireya bent her knees slightly, and let the rifle drop gently on the floor, pushing it to one side with her foot.

I did the same. I did not trust her, but thought I had no right to be more mistrustful than she was. That was the strange path we took, and although nothing was said or promised, it was written that nothing between us would come to an end if one of us was still alive.

The two rifle butts bumped into each other, spinning round and then coming to a halt, each one pointing straight back at its owner.

She straightened like a flower bathed in sunlight and early morning dew, and began to take her clothes off. I waited until she was naked to do the same. I had none of her arrogance, though: I felt like a befuddled
old man, or humiliated like a prisoner forced to strip off in jail. Perhaps that really was my situation, and for the first time I felt afraid.

“Did you take all your clothes off with her too?”

She nodded.

“And with you as well, the last time,” she said defiantly.

The pain in my chest surged again, forcing me to hunch up.

“Why did you leave me?”

“Pain makes you look pathetic, Gotán. I left you because I have no idea who you are. A good tango dancer, a toilet salesman …”

“Bathroom furniture in general: bidets, washbasins, fittings. But I'm not on a sales trip to Patagonia, I didn't bring my leaflets or price list. Do
you
know who
you
are, which bosses
you're
serving, Mireya?”

The pain in my chest turned into a burning fire. Mireya standing there naked telling me not to call her Mireya, me saying I was not just a salesman, that I risked my life when necessary, that they could have put me through the meat grinder while I was making my clandestine attempt to save colleagues like Toto Lecuona.

“Just so your school chums could gun him down. That treasurer of yours you screwed while I was sniffing round the roofless ranch like a timid mouse. If I had known it was you I would have peppered you both with bullets in bed—then we wouldn't have been here like this today, and poor Toto would still be alive, instead of lying out there in the street with sand and brushwood blowing over him.”

“That's his fault, Gotán. He had instructions to finish you off, but instead he wanted to help you, to pay you back for the favor you did him that night in '78. Like you, none of your friends have any ideology, only nostalgia.”

She moved around the room on tiptoe, as though she were wearing high heels. Each step made her breasts quiver, and as she turned away I saw her firm, wonderful backside. She shook her head as she turned toward me again, her hair alternately covering and revealing her features, while her breasts seemed to grow firmer at the touch of her long
tresses, as her pupils grew in the semidarkness. It was only when she whispered to me to come closer that I realized the wind had dropped. Closer, she begged me. Closer.

I tried to concentrate on her hands. I was never very good at spotting conjurors' sleight of hand: anything can grow from a closed fist, from the passing of the palm of a hand. Any trick of the light can lead to a string of handkerchiefs, a rabbit, a dove, a stiletto. She insisted she could have killed me if she had wanted to, that she told her “comrades” I was dead. That was why when they saw me arrive in the ghost town they stopped trusting her, and locked her up in this room on the top floor of the bar with no vowels.

“Aren't you going to come here?”

She held out her arms. I took hold of her hands, feeling every pore, trying to discover betrayal in every cell of her skin. I asked her again why she had reacted the way she did when she found out I was a policeman. “What did you expect to find apart from ugliness?” I pleaded that night, my real face is not beautiful, running after her until she dived into a taxi. This ugly mess is my true face, the same as that of all the living dead who thought we were fighting for something, but we were merely scratching the surface, digging our own graves.

“Don't think,” you said. “Put your arms round me.”

I relaxed my grip and slid my hands slowly and gently along your arms, still wary but already yielding to the pressure of desire I could feel in my body. “Only your stomach is flabby,” you said, your own hand seeking out my sex. Your fingers closed around its taut urgency. In the end Eros and Thanatos search each other out like neighborhood gangsters on every corner of the human condition. There is nothing we can do to separate them, to prevent the inevitable clash, the blind duel that is no more than a pretense, the fake death of the Messiah who, while everyone is crying over him, comes back to life without a word and like you tiptoes out of the back door or climbs out through the skylight and makes a beeline for heaven, from where he can look down on us.

Anybody would be happy to die if they could guarantee an outcome like that.

“And yet you're scared,” you said, as if you could read my mind, that other ruined bar with no vowels or chimeras where a couple of ideas scratched themselves for fleas, as bored as the whores in this same room when the prospectors for easy gold realized their mistake and left them without customers. “Don't think. If you feed your fear, it will only grow. Come closer, Gotán. Everything in your life is bringing you to me. You and I were born for this. I never stopped loving you.”

My hands reached your shoulders. Your hand on my prick would bring it to its natural berth. You are that berth, but I know there is no solid ground, no shoreline, that it was just a word spoken far too long ago for me to believe you now, a word tossed into the void, with no possible echoes or resonance.