No One Loves a Policeman (37 page)

Then there was the pain.

I took hold of your hands, as if by wrapping mine round them you could not hurt me, as if by halting the magician there would be no more tricks, no more doves or knotted strings of colored handkerchiefs. But the pain was unbearable: my heart was not over to the right as the roly-poly doctor had said, it was where it should have been, but there was a stiletto shard still in it, that same stiletto you had used on Lorena and Cordero. That was why you had put your weapon down, calling for an armistice that ended in this other pretense.

“The doctor at Tres Arroyos did a good job,” you whispered in my ear. “He was one of us too. But don't think, Gotán. Just fuck me, that's what you and I were born for.”

Terrified, I suspected my stiff prick was simply an anticipation of the rigor mortis of my whole body. You removed a hand and grasped me behind my back to pull me toward you, as if you wanted to penetrate me again, but this time with your entire body, to devour me so that our insides would merge and become one, howling their dismay in a single, androgynous being. I would have played along, Mireya, but for the
tearing pain in my chest: nothing I had left to lose could be more important than you. This time, I hesitated. I could kill in cold blood, but looking in the mirror at my own death was suicidal, impossible. My rifle, though, was too far away, and seemed to be locked together with yours as desperately as the two of us were, steel and gunpowder strained to the limit.

The only way out was an explosion. Almost unconscious, I slipped inside you. It was you in all your fury and ragged despair who opened yourself to me, tearing yourself to pieces. The groans when I reached orgasm were the groans of death. I ejaculated a trickle of blood which fell from my mouth onto your face.

After that there was a long silence, as if my tomb had just been sealed. I did not have the strength to open my eyes, and was too frightened to confront my horror. Then I felt something moving, and it was not my body but yours freeing itself from me like someone throwing off a blanket because they are too hot.

I can reconstruct what happened next because it is not hard to imagine.

You got up, still full, in a vampire-like trance that must be a genetic trait in women like you, Mireya. A no less authentic or treacherous reply than any other to the painful questions of love.

You picked up the Kalashnikov the G.R.O. had given you to help force your way into trade union headquarters or government offices if your coup had succeeded. You aimed at my head, still undecided whether finally to put an end to my agony. Farewells are impossible, Mireya. We do not want to admit that whatever we do we will end up as we began. Alone.

“Ciao, Gotán.”

Paralyzed by the pain in my chest, I closed my eyes. My voice, faint but steady in the rubble of my collapse, failed me. I wanted to thank you.

Later there were other voices happy to supply the details of what occurred between my brief absence and my stubborn return to those who think they are alive.

“When we heard the shooting, I tried to convince Burgos it was time for us to join the assault on the Winter Palace,” Ayala said. He had read the history of the Russian Revolution in a weekly serial.

But Burgos had still not worked out how to get the safety catch off his Czech rifle, “reconditioned”—that is to say disguised—in the military factory at Azul, in Buenos Aires province, before being shipped abroad again. He had cheerily lifted the rifle to his shoulder, though, and closed one eye to take aim. He must have chosen some target in his subconscious, because the bullet ignored the jammed safety catch and perforated the roof of the 4×4 in which he and Ayala were bringing up our rear.

“You missed my head by
that much
,” Ayala said, holding up his thumb and forefinger as he stretched out his other hand and clipped the doctor round the ear.

“We decided to make a detour round the town, to at least confuse them if they were lying in wait for us with heavy artillery,” Burgos said. He had got behind the wheel and hurtled off into the countryside, the 4×4 plowing through the swirling sand like a ship through fog.

“We couldn't see a thing, so when we came across a gunman armed to the teeth I thought it was one of those apparitions you sometimes get in the countryside, especially after you've eaten meat slaughtered by rustlers.”

Robocop turned out to be Rodríguez, our Sancho Panza presumed lost in the arms of the police museum spider.

“Love is luggage in transit,” Sancho said with a hint of melancholy. His only similarities to Schwarzenegger were his lantern jaw and an unshakeable fascism that left him invulnerable even to a tragic love affair. “As soon as I split up with her, I called Inspector Ayala: ‘I'm once again at your command,' I told him. She used the idea of me joining the federal police as bait to seduce me, but I can't get on with Buenos Aires women, even if they're the same rank as me. ‘You smell like a farm laborer,' she told me the first time we fucked. When she compared me to an inspector from the capital who wore Paco Rabanne perfume, I realized that even if I did join the National Shame I would always be a bumpkin, the sort of lumpen from the provinces they send in to shoot other lumpen in the shanty towns, not to fight crime, but to try to get us to wipe each other out.”

“I ordered Rodríguez to follow us,” Ayala said. “I didn't really trust your friend Lecuona. Nor you either, mind. But I had to get to the bottom of all these crimes, and when the serial killer handed himself in I was at a loss.”

Ayala had managed to steal to steal Burgos' car keys, so Rodríguez was able to follow us from Buenos Aires to Piedranegra in the V.W. When the doctor saw Rodríguez standing there like a centaur in the middle of the desert next to his beloved vehicle, he thought the time had come for him to give up not only drink but his post as forensic expert too, although everything seemed far too real to be simply a case of delirium tremens.

The bond forged between them from having served together in the police priesthood and sharing so much shit in their provincial town meant they wasted no time debating what to do. Instead, the three of them advanced on the ghost town like a troop of cavalry, entering the other end of the street from Toto and me. Burgos demonstrated that he would have made an expert tank driver, while Ayala and Rodríguez fired
out of the back of the 4×4 at anything that moved—“Which wasn't a lot,” Rodríguez admitted. “We shot more at tumbleweed and birds stunned by the wind than we did at the enemy.”

The defense of Piedranegra could not compare to the siege of Stalingrad or Madrid. Not even to that of the Malvinas, where starving young conscripts with medieval weapons faced a N.A.T.O. country's army. Half a dozen gunmen posted on the town roofs quickly decided discretion was the better part of valor, and sped off in a half-track they had inherited from the Argentine military.

It was enough thereafter for the three musketeers to reach the bar with no vowels, even if they had to pass the disagreeable spectacle of Toto face down in the dust, the involuntary donor of his old, weary blood to an earth than can never get enough.

“By the time we arrived, the mysterious lady with the dagger had disappeared,” Burgos took up the narrative. He had stayed in their vehicle while Ayala and Rodríguez shot their way into the bar. “As seems to have become a habit, they found you half-dead and carried you out to the car.”

At this point I instinctively felt my body for signs of bullet wounds. It gave me a tender jolt to realize that Mireya had left without shooting me. Perhaps she had the wild idea we could do it all again.

“On the outskirts of Piedranegra there are some old mineworks,” Rodríguez said. “I discovered them because I came cross-country to get here. That V.W. of yours is a tank, Doctor.”

Burgos closed his eyes and gritted his teeth as if he could hear the creaks and groans from his beloved car's long-suffering shock absorbers, but he did not interrupt Rodríguez's tale.

“I told Inspector Ayala what I had found. We headed straight there, reckoning that the best place in the world to hide one or more prisoners would be an abandoned mine.”

“And what happened?” I asked with the faintest of voices, still struggling with the incessant pain in my chest.

Ayala and Rodríguez exchanged glances like experienced hustlers. Burgos, who had been driving the 4×4 at walking pace along a dry river bottom, drove it up an incline and came to a halt. Fifty meters away, I could see the entrance to the mine.

“Nothing happened,” Ayala said.

“But it's going to,” Rodríguez said. He was used to closing sentences and doors for his superior.

The only living thing we are likely to meet if we enter the mouth and penetrate the innards of a fetid body are worms.

“I want to go in alone,” I said.

Toto was dead, and I was about to follow him, so it made no sense for the other three to risk their lives.

In the event, the other three accepted my suggestion without demur—which did not exactly please me either. They were to wait half an hour, and if I did not reappear, they would set off in search of reinforcements, although by this stage it would probably be impossible to get anyone to stir themselves for something that was swiftly vanishing into thin air like another conjuring trick.

“Do your best not to die,” was Ayala's laconic advice.

Weak from loss of blood and in so much pain I could hardly breathe, the Kalashnikov weighed like an artillery shell in my arms. For a
moment, and perhaps due to the sense of distance which those about to pass on are said to experience, I saw myself advancing through the desert like an explorer contracted by the Discovery Channel to find evidence of a lost civilization.

I stopped seeing myself this way, and in fact as soon as I entered the tunnel, I stopped seeing at all.

The first conclusion I came to when I found myself in complete darkness was that this had never been a mine. That was why the British boat never arrived, and why the prospectors had left empty-handed.

Thirsty for mirages, human culture accepts any story that goes a little further than “once upon a time.” The predators who arrived in Peru from Spain, centuries ago, tore apart the stones and heart of Potosí. The bleeding remains of a millenary culture were left drying in the sun. There was once a continent that was even shaped like a cornucopia. Its inhabitants thought the looters and executioners were gods. They realized too late that all the psalms, revelations and holy tablets were a farce.

More recently, the lure of gold brought a swarm of men to this area. They built what was now a ghost town, Piedranegra. These useless mineworks were the vestigial reminder of that fever. But the town continued to grow for a while, even after the hope of finding gold had been extinguished. What were they looking for then, if not an acceptance of defeat, of growing old?

I stroked the walls of the cave as if it was the skin of a woman's body. It was smooth, even warm in places. I was moved rather than afraid: if I was finally going to confront death, this seemed as good a place as any.

For several minutes, I completely forgot I was looking for someone I was hoping to find alive. That no longer mattered. Something was affecting my limited perception of the world around me. Like Jonah, but without a God who had sent me, I wandered through the darkest shadows.

My only guiding light was pain. Touching the cave walls had given
me some relief, but as soon as I groped for my rifle on the ground, I could feel a searing pain in my heart once more. I dropped the Kalashnikov, which would not have been much use in the darkness anyway, and put my hands back on the wall. The pain eased again.

Without intending to, I was touching and caressing the insides of a living being, a geological female who had absorbed my pain and was leading me to her center. Lost to myself, I stumbled along thanks to a life that was not mine.

A faint groan stopped me in my tracks.

It could not have come from far away, although the darkness was so complete I could not fathom from where.

The ebb and flow of my pain was my guide. I moved forward when it lessened, stopped whenever it reappeared, as solid, as merciless as ever. With each tiny but firm step I regained control over my body, and the pain withdrew.

All of a sudden, the groaning seemed to come toward me from a tiny glow, a capsule of light at the far end of the gallery. By now the pain had completely gone, and I ran toward the light. I could breathe as easily as if I were in the open air, although the walls of the gallery narrowed sharply, so that for the last few meters I had to stoop down.

“Isabel!” I said.