No One Loves a Policeman (2 page)

Edmundo was not the kind to get mixed up in anything dangerous. In recent years he had some wild scheme for making fuel from grain crops. He had found a backer, a banker willing to underwrite his research and then invest in the small business or cooperative Cárcano set up, of which he was chairman and general secretary. The other members were geeks, people obsessed with changing the molecules of whatever came within their grasp, building new worlds from the leftovers of the present one. In other words, people willing to give themselves a hard time to show uncaring humanity that if we have made planet Earth a dangerous place to live in, there is nevertheless still time to save it.

When I called Cárcano's daughter to tell her the news she sobbed at the end of the line, but said she had been afraid that something like this was going to happen. She is about the same age as her father's girlfriend.

“Since he left my mother for that tart he's been getting mixed up in funny business,” Isabel said. She was as indignant as ever about her father's betrayal: to her way of thinking, his lustful adventure had exploded like a depth charge in their happy home. “He neglected his
job. Thirty years with the same company! He was going to retire next year, and the firm was going to give him a gold medal. They had even promised to pay him extra to make up for the crappy state pension he had been contributing to all his life. He and Mummy had planned to travel to Italy, to visit our grandparents' house in Bologna.”

Isabel cried for three pesos and forty-two cents' worth of my longdistance call. From the public telephone box I could see the sea and a cold, clear night falling over the deserted beach. I was thinking what a good idea it would be to have a little nest of my own in a place like this.

“What ‘funny business' did your father get involved in?” I asked when it seemed the tears were drying up.

Isabel, in Buenos Aires, hesitated, sniffed, took a deep breath, sighed.

“We need to meet. I don't trust any phone in this country of informers, where half the population is listening in to what the other half is saying.”

“O.K., but do tell your mother, and the burial is in Bahía Blanca.”

When I mentioned the burial, a lump came to my throat. A steadfast friend who died in Mediomundo, a beach that does not appear on any tourist map, down round the asshole of the world.

He and I met when there was still military service in Argentina. Serving the fatherland for eighteen months, preparing
mate
tea for the sergeants, cleaning the latrines in the officers' mess, going out in the early hours on sordid military operations to frighten the civilians. We were thirty-six when a drunken general gave the order to invade the Malvinas. Too old to fight a war that was lost before it began, and yet two decades later my friend abandoned his wife Mónica for a twenty-year-old blond who was scarcely born when another general surrendered Port Stanley to save the lives of thousands of soldiers, not to mention his own.

Time can take on weird dimensions, like the elongated shadows in this sharp evening light. If, as the tango says, “twenty years are nothing,” they are far too much when it comes to two lives as far apart as
Edmundo's and his near-adolescent and now-vanished blond. All the past, all the memories you carry with you as a camel carries its hump simply do not exist for someone whose over-riding concern is the future. How could the two of them have set out on a journey together? Where could they go? Whichever direction they took, it would be tearing something apart.

The sun set over the beach. Rather than travel another fifty kilometers to Bahía Blanca, I decided to spend the night in my dead friend's house.

We take some decisions in only a few seconds, but soon find that the rest of our life is not time enough to regret them.

The house was better equipped for a good time than for a death. The fridge was full, there was a shed at the end of the garden piled high with firewood, whisky and cognac in the bar, two T.V.s with a satellite dish, bookshelves stocked with bestsellers enough for anyone not concerned to explore the mysteries of serious literature, a sound system with C.D.s of the Rolling Stones, Julio Sosa and the Leopoldo Federico Orchestra; Eduardo Falú singing Castilla and Leguizamon; Mozart, Charly García, Skinny Spinetta; Lita Vitale and Tita Merello. You could sit on the sofa in the small, warm living room and wait peacefully enough for a giant wave to come and sweep everything away.

But tsunamis do not ring the doorbell. And it is only in the movies that beautiful women call to say hello after dark. That was why when somebody rang the bell I thought it must be Edmundo they were
looking for and I would find myself confronted with a lovely face pouting with disappointment.

“Isn't it horrible?” the blond said, as though we were old friends. She swept past me without explaining who she was, although it was not difficult to work out that she must be the Lolita who had brought a little joy to Edmundo's autumn years.

“Pablo Martelli,” I said, holding out my hand, but she turned and clung to me as if I were a piece of driftwood on the high seas after her ship had gone down.

Her hair was damp from the evening mist. It gave off an enchanting fragrance of wild strawberries in a wood, if you could imagine that smell with your eyes closed when you're being clung to as though you were a drowning woman's only hope.

“I'm Lorena.”

She said this with her head pressed against my shoulder, her face buried in my shirt—the only clean one I had brought, thinking I would be gone two nights at most.

“They murdered him. They shot him like a dog before he had the chance to explain he wasn't going to keep the money. Poor Poppa, dying like that just when we had all we needed to start a new life and be happy.”

If what she said was true, I could well understand her dismay. Losing a still attractive, intelligent and healthy man in his sixties, especially someone as relatively well off as Edmundo, must be a real blow in times like these when there is so much unemployment and the young have to face so many existential uncertainties. As far as I could recall Cárcano saying, Lorena was not a career woman, although she had studied for a degree in something or other at a private university. She had been wasting her time in employment agencies or multinationals where they employ graduate students to run bank errands, when all of a sudden: bingo! she runs into Edmundo.

“Tell me what happened,” I said, not at all impatient to come out of our embrace. “I didn't know Edmundo had enemies.”

When I said this, she cast off her life raft. She headed for the bar to pour herself a whisky. It was only after she had gulped it down that she seemed to realize I was still there.

“You shouldn't stay here,” she said. “It's not safe.”

“You're right. Besides, as you've been living with Edmundo, this is your place, and I'm an intruder. But my only other choice was to go to Bahía Blanca. Isabel is arriving tomorrow.”

My news disturbed her. She did not ask why Edmundo's daughter was coming because the answer was obvious. She went to the picture window as though she could see the ocean outside despite the dark night under a new moon.

“Poppa wanted to get away from his family,” she said.

“But Isabel was his only daughter, and therefore his favorite.”

She smiled a wan smile.

“We have to get out of here.”

She walked back toward me. I wondered how long it had taken her to seduce her “Poppa.” Two months, two weeks, two days, two hours, two minutes? She could have broken her record with me if the body had not been lying there still so fresh in its pool of blood, and Edmundo's eyes were not staring so intently at us, fixed at the moment of his death.

Half an hour later we were speeding down Route 3 on our way to nowhere. Lorena warned me not to call Isabel or anyone else from my mobile.

“They trace all the calls,” she said. “They'll be onto us before you hang up.”

“If I'm not at the funeral tomorrow, she's going to feel even worse than she does now.”

As soon as the words left my mouth, I regretted them: the look the
blond gave me said it all—finding my dead body next to Poppa's would be no comfort to his daughter either. I did not do much better when I asked who it was who was tracing the calls.

“If I knew that, we wouldn't have been caught by surprise in such an isolated spot, playing the happy couple,” she said. She lit a cigarette, drew on it as if it were a condemned prisoner's last, then passed it to me. The filter tip was sticky with fragrant lipstick.

“It's not so disastrous to die happy.”

“Poppa didn't have many friends,” she said. “People he could trust, I mean,” she added, disturbed by what I had said.

“Who was with him when he called me last night? Who does the money that he wasn't going to keep belong to?”

A blond silence, smoke drifting up between the windscreen and me, the straight line of the road disappearing ahead like the sides of a triangle whose apex we were traveling toward at 140 kilometers per hour. She did not know who he was with: she had gone on to Bahía Blanca on her own, and come back alone.

“My cousin is in hospital there. She's in intensive care. Her parents both died in a car accident; my cousin survived, but she's paralyzed down one side of her body, and the rest of her doesn't know what's happened yet.”

I gave an involuntary shudder. Lorena might be beautiful, but she could be a twenty-year-old Fate who spelled the end for any amorous, comfortably off old man who came within reach. She was making a big mistake with me, though. She obviously had no idea how uncomfortably off I was.

I did not believe a word of her story.

“We could turn off to Bahía,” I said. “The city's only five kilometers from here.”

At this, she dropped a delicate white hand on the steering wheel. I was forced to hold on as tightly as I could, then had to pull hard to straighten up to avoid the truck hurtling toward us, horn blaring, on
his side of the road. I could imagine the curses he was screaming to himself in his lonely cabin.

“So where
are
we headed?” I said as we sped on past the turning to the city. “Why
can't
we go into Bahía Blanca, for Chrissake?”

She said nothing, and I relented. That was my second big mistake of the night.

Three more hours driving and we were leaving Viedma behind. At this time of the morning it was a ghost city, and the whole day through it would be the small, insignificant capital of Rio Negro province, a place to which an ex-president with grandiose ideas once announced that he was going to transfer the capital of Argentina. There must be so little oxygen in the stratospheres of power that the politicians' neurones stop working. They come up with ideas that even an astronaut lost in space would realize were the product of their delirium or the junk food they are given in their ration pills.

I asked once more who the money belonged to, and where we were going, but this time Lorena was fast asleep. When she was awake she scarcely looked the twenty-four she claimed to be, but lying there asleep she was Nabokov's heroine updated for the twenty-first century.