No One Loves a Policeman (16 page)

“She's dead too.”

There is not much point trying to discuss things with someone who is already half-drunk, but the other two were out for the count, so there was nothing else for it.

“The fact that the body was moved, and the way the forensic report was suppressed, means that it was not that maniac, or any other one, who killed her. She was planted on me—first alive, then dead—because I was Cárcano's friend.”

“And who was Cárcano? A two-bit employee who stuck his hand into the petty cash so he could show his bit of fluff a good time.”

I poured more martini into Ayala's glass. He knocked it back like medicine. His eyes glazed over, and he called to Félix Jesús. He even tried to stroke him, but the cat sneaked behind the curtains that shaded the room from the harsh midday sun.

“Cats are bad luck anyway,” Ayala muttered. Then he leaned back on the sofa, and he too fell fast asleep.

I wondered what I would find when I returned if I left the three of them sleeping off their journey and their excesses. But I could not
hang about for them to come to life. I had to go out and check on a few things.

I scribbled a note saying that I would be back soon, then left without locking the front door, hoping that no robber would dream of burgling an apartment where two policeman and a forensic expert were sleeping like dormice.

The city looked marvelous. It positively glowed in the sunlight. The streets were full and all the stores were packed with people buying T.V.s, fridges, even cars, as if they had just popped out to buy a packet of biscuits at the corner shop. The ones with cash were buying dollars or high-priced items. Nobody knew when the fire alarm would go off, but they were not waiting to hear the sound of sirens before they began rushing for the exits.

I called Wolf from a public telephone, but all I got was his answer machine: “Take to the rafts, the ship is sinking.” Then there was a peep … and a silence where I could record a message.

I hung up, annoyed, then called Mónica. She was one of the few people in Buenos Aires who had not rushed out to buy dollars. Just for a change, she started sobbing over the phone.

“I'm sorry I spoke to you like that last night. I know you're the only one who can help me, but I'm very confused. My whole life has been turned upside down, Gotán.”

There was the familiar sound of her trying to choke back her tears, then the request:

“Come round now. I've got something to tell you.”

My taxi dropped me off forty minutes later outside the apartment block where Mónica lived. We could have got there in ten had we not run into striking workers who had cut off the avenue and forced us, with much blaring of horns and swearing, into a long detour. The urban pressure cooker was building up steam. It was only a matter of days, or maybe hours, before everything hit the ceiling.

I told Mónica I could not stay long, because my place had been taken over by a bizarre trio from the Bahía Blanca police.

“I've no idea what's brought them here. Must be a sense of pride. No policeman likes having somebody else's problem dumped on them.”

“What kind of problem?” Mónica said distractedly.

“Dead bodies.”

Her next comment took me by surprise.

“Including Edmundo's.”

Mónica did not keep cats. What she did have was a pair of canaries. Crazed by being shut in their tiny cage, they sang at all hours of the day and night. Isabel called them “my political prisoners” because they had been locked away without a trial. She would have liked to set them free, but her mother insisted they brought moments of joy to her sad existence.

She stared at them as she talked, perhaps to avoid having to look at the way my face fell as she made her confession.

“Edmundo was not what he seemed,” she began.

“I'm beginning to discover that.”

She took such a deep breath it was as if she were about to dive underwater.

“Nor am I, and nor is Isabel. Nobody is who they seem, Gotán.”

“Bingo! Why do you think I like the tango so much?”

“Don't hate us for what I'm about to tell you.”

The problem with confessions is that they always come at the wrong time. A president tells us how his life in office was made impossible. But he does this when he has been ousted and is powerless to prevent people being fooled by the next democratically elected fraud. If only he had come clean the day after his inauguration, with the applause and shouts of “Long live the president!” still ringing in his ears, then the people could for once have taken justice into their own hands and rampaged through the main square to string up all those white-gloved crooks who shamelessly passed the milch cow of the state from one to the next. But of course he did nothing of the sort. He kept his mouth shut, because he liked hearing the applause (who doesn't?) and because he dreamed of getting his hands on the udders too.

If Mónica had spoken out earlier, then Edmundo would still perhaps have been alive. Poorer, but alive.

“I never believed the stories about him getting promotion and bonuses,” she said. “What bonuses, if he was not selling anything, or involved in any of their so-called strategic plans? Besides, the oil is there underground. You extract it, refine it, and use it to prop up the whole economy. By selling it abroad.”

“I know a bit about economics and politics. That's why I prefer to read thrillers.”

“Edmundo was never a team player. ‘One of these days I'm going to screw them,' he used to say. ‘And I'm not going to let them screw me. Then you and I can go on a world tour, starting with Italy. I owe you that.'”

“And the ‘New Man Foundation' gave him that opportunity.”

“How do you know that?”

I told her.

“Journalists. Always digging dirt. Just like the police. The dirty work is not so much gathering all the stuff, but deciding what to do with it. ‘This one should be locked up, that one should stay out because he's up to his neck in it and could be useful as an informer, that other one is no use to us, throw him off a bridge and make it look like an accident.'”

“You make it sound disgusting.”

“That's why I sell bathrooms and am on my own. I have a daughter in Australia, two grandchildren I don't know, even from photographs. The bedroom I was keeping for her has been invaded by a bunch of deadbeats. There's not much room left for disgust, Mónica. Tell me more—I don't know everything.”

I'm not crying for you, Mireya. Nor for anyone else: I hate pity, and self-pity is even worse. It is like stabbing yourself in the stomach to impress other people by spilling your guts rather than really trying to kill yourself. And it's nothing short of a scandal for a sixty-year-old who has had the power of life and death over the defenseless. I was even given a medal for shooting a teenager who had stabbed his own grandmother and cut up his younger brother with a broken beer bottle.

The kid ran out of a shack in the Villa Diamante shanty town, hands high in the air. “Don't shoot,” he shouted, “I'm innocent.” He was too young even to shave, and was crying like my daughter when she failed her first exam or when she broke up with her childhood sweetheart.

I knocked him to the ground with a blow from my gun-butt and charged inside the shack. After I saw the bodies, I spun round like a turnstile and cut him in two with a burst of fire. My police partner came over, picked up a kitchen knife, and forced it into his hand. There was
an official inquiry. The prosecutor accused me of using excessive force, my defense lawyer argued it had been self-defense, and my companion said he did not see exactly what had happened, that by the time he had run over from the patrol car the kid was already dead. I was on the T.V. news and in all the papers. Next to that of the smooth-cheeked victim, my portrait looked like Frankenstein's monster after its third operation. “Another itchy trigger-finger: How long must this go on?” screamed the tabloids.

No, I'm not crying for you, Mireya. You didn't even take the trouble to find out what had happened in my life. For you it was enough to learn that before I sold toilets I had killed people. “What kind of justice are you talking about?” you asked, the first and last time we talked about it. “I'm sure if you were a policeman during the dictatorship you must have been a torturer. You ought to have died, Gotán. You're dead to me.”

I ought to have explained. If only explaining were as easy as raising a weapon and firing when rage rises in your throat as though the soul were leaving a dead body through the mouth. I'm not crying for you, I never have done, but I did not put up a fight either.

You did like me calling you Mireya though. “It sounds kitsch,” you would say, “but in your arms I'm swept away by the music, the lights, the show you're putting on, Gotán. Take me away from here, anywhere out of this world.”

Who would ask a shipwrecked sailor to quit his island, his palm tree, his coconut? The ocean is dark, deep, and cold. From out on the waves you shouted “Murderer!” You never called “Goodbye.”

Mónica's version was not all that different from Wolf's. A few details, a million pesos here, a million there; the number of people involved, some of them well known, others the anonymous worker bees of corruption. Edmundo came somewhere between the two. He was busy on
the telephone at his office in C.P.F. headquarters. Occasionally he went to a meeting either at a posh restaurant in Puerto Madero or a few blocks closer to the port, among the dark rows of containers.

Mónica found out when the institutional relations manager's earnings could no longer be concealed, at least from his wife, because they had joint accounts. “Although he also opened one in the islands,” she said, meaning the Cayman Islands, one of the many safe havens for the savings of the good, the bad and the ugly in the parallel economy.

Edmundo did not trust his bosses, either as employers or as partners in this siphoning-off of funds. “They drop you in it at the first opportunity,” he would say to Mónica whenever the situation depressed him, whenever he realized what a huge betrayal of business ethics he was caught up in. “They're always cutting each other's throats, they pursue the person they want to get rid of until he has a heart attack and dies. Then they send the biggest wreath to the funeral, give his wife medals, and even grant her a pension. It's spare cash to them.” And if there was no heart attack? “Plan B,” Edmundo told Mónica, predicting his own fate.

While Edmundo was diverting the small change from these shady deals into his joint account, the honest gentlemen of New Man turned a blind eye to everything. Just about everyone was getting their hands dirty. And if they formed a brotherhood of traitors, they could hardly expect some sucker with a halo and wings to come down and offer them redemption like Jesus at the Last Supper.

But the account Edmundo opened in the name of Catalina Eloísa Bañados was the last straw for the organizers of the fraud. A tribunal of dinosaurs in old-fashioned waistcoats and gold watch chains gave him the thumbs down. Lorena was right to get in my car and tell me to take her as far away as I could from Mediomundo; she was hoping that by losing herself in the depths of Patagonia she would have time to think. But she did not even have time for a pee in the service station before they caught up with us.