No One Loves a Policeman (40 page)

On the other hand, there were no upper-class protesters on the streets of Buenos Aires. The ass-lickers of power had fortified their positions and dug their trenches in the Cayman Islands, Switzerland or Panama. In the streets of the so-called elegant neighborhoods it was the smallest petits bourgeois who were walking along like zombies
expelled from Port-au-Prince, or vampires thrown out in the midday sun from a certain infamous boarding house in Transylvania.

“Why didn't you give them that damn code?” I said when Isabel pulled up a block away from the house of Mónica's friend, where she was going to meet her mother. “They could have killed you: is it worth dying for money?”

“Your tango-dancer friend was not going to kill me,” Isabel replied. “Nor you either.”

Shortly after Edmundo's call in the early hours of December 15, 2001, his killers left the chalet in Mediomundo.

With the old, old excuse of going to the toilet, Lorena had managed to escape. She ran through the deserted streets of the resort until she found a public telephone that did not swallow all her coins. She told the police not only what she feared was going to happen in the chalet, but also about the G.R.O. plot to overthrow democracy. The officer at the other end told her to calm down and go back home: “We cannot guarantee the safety of a woman on her own in such a desolate place,” the voice said. The same concerned voice immediately got through to my reception committee and convinced them they had best make themselves scarce before I arrived.

Lorena fled Mediomundo, but came back the following night in the hope of finding some trace of the money that Edmundo had set aside for them to enjoy. When she stumbled on me, she decided to use me as a chauffeur to take her to Piedranegra. She thought the G.R.O. high command assembled there putting the finishing touches to their plan would protect her from the jackals who had eliminated Edmundo. She thought
the internal war going on was between pawns for the loose change. She may have been right, but she did not get the chance to prove it.

“Poor Lorena,” I said.

Another useless
nom de guerre
, Catalina Eloísa Bañados, seduced by a '70s revolutionary who, unable to accept the passage of time, had tried to double-cross a gang of ideological murderers so he could buy his fountain of youth.

With Edmundo dead, the tango dancer received orders to take care of his lover and Cordero, the other corner of the triangle Lorena had formed to make sure she would not be left without savings in her old age. Edmundo knew nothing about Cordero: he, too, was a believer in love at first sight.

“If only you could see yourselves in the mirror,” Isabel said. I discovered, six hundred kilometers too late, that she still had Burgos' jacket wrapped round her shoulders. She took it off and asked me to make sure I gave it back if and when the famous reunion of the four musketeers ever took place.

“If Debora killed Lorena and Cordero, and if she drove that stiletto into me without bothering with an anesthetic, and would have killed me too if my heart had not been over to the right—why do you say she wasn't going to kill us? I'm disgusted at the thought of her making love to Lorena before she sacrificed her, and the games she and the others played with Cordero's corpse.”

“You're disgusted because she was unfaithful to you. You were happy enough to make love to her again yourself, though, even if you knew it might cost you your life. Your heart isn't over to the right, Gotán. She could have pierced it without you even knowing, and had her revenge.”

“So why didn't she? Why didn't she finish us all off?”

Finally she looked at me. Her eyes were like yours, staring at nothing, or at a God in the wrong place too, a God whose son has died but is alive, in a heaven as dark as those mine works, where no-one has ever found what they were looking for.

“She was expecting you. When you arrived at last, something went click. She realized something that shook her to the core.”

“She realized her father shot people in the back as well, Isabel.”

“She isn't, or wasn't, any different from you, Gotán. Twin souls existed long before cloning came into fashion. She left you to avoid having to fulfill her promise to avenge her father's death. She left hoping you would never come looking for her. But you went on calling: how could you accept such an insult to your macho vanity?”

When the G.R.O. retreated to Piedranegra after their defeat, Isabel thought her time had come.

“But the tango dancer saved my life. After all the shooting, instead of finishing me off she dragged me to the far end of the mine works. She no longer trusted anyone, but she knew you would come looking for her.”

“Get out of here when everyone outside has finished killing each other,” she told me when we reached the place where you found me. “There's only this one shaft. It's three hundred meters to the tunnel mouth, and Piedranegra is less than twenty kilometers from the highway proper. When you see him, tell him the truth. I'm sure he will survive. Even if I had pushed the blade right in, he would survive with a severed heart.”

She tied me up so that I would not stop her doing what she had decided to do. She gagged me so I would not cry out in horror, then leaped like a panther up onto a rock that one of the miners had carved out there, the one that in the dark looks like an altar. Then silently, without a word, she plunged the stiletto into her heart.”

“But why, Isabel? Why didn't she finish me off instead, if that had been her reason for living?”

“Remember, she could dance as well as you. It wasn't out of respect for another person's life that she didn't kill you. Think about that when you get out of the car. I've nothing more to tell you, and please, don't contact me. I need to have a rest from you for a while. In fact, I would probably prefer never to see you again.”

When a beautiful woman tells me I am
persona non grata
I accept
the verdict. I got out, and only turned round to remind her that the car wasn't hers.

“The person who rented it was called Aníbal Lecuona. We used to call him Toto, but I expect they won't be too concerned about that at the car hire place.”

Isabel switched on the engine, and I set off toward the avenue. I stopped when she caught up with me and wound down her window to thank me for saving her. I could not help imposing on her politeness one more time by asking the stupidest of questions:

“Did she tell you she loved me?”

She gripped the wheel and stared straight ahead, as though she were on a Grand Prix grid.

“No One Loves a Policeman,” she said, hurtling away in reverse.

I walked on. I would have liked to be able to take giant strides to get as far away as possible. I walked steadily, furious, my heart in the right place aching more than ever.

Some day someone will pass through Piedranegra. Thinking they have found a short cut, they will stumble upon the scene of yet another tiny hell. I should have buried you there, alongside Toto Lecuona. After all, it had been your idea to go and find him, to persuade him that social justice could once more be the banner leading to victory. But I decided to leave you where you had chosen to die, on your improvised altar, like the unprincipled, unscrupulous high priestess you were.

Someone will pass through and sound the alarm. The press will fall on the dry bones strewn round the ghost town, and the stories of your comrades or accomplices will be mingled with those of the miners who in reality had been hired hands on their way to the apple harvest in Rio Negro.

But they would not find your body.

I should have buried you, even if poor Toto would have cursed me for having to spend his eternity next to you. If I had, I would not have arrived home and seen, correctly parked and polished as though for
sale, my car that had been stolen along with Lorena in the far south.

I resisted the temptation to go upstairs and get the spare key. Nobody who wants to grow old should accept gifts from the mafia, even if it is only something they are returning.

I called the police and the bomb-disposal squad from a public telephone. The police do not like anonymous tip-offs, so I hung up before they could ask for too many details.

I was not sure they would come, but they did. They could hardly ignore the report of a booby-trap in a car parked in the heart of the city. The political situation was tense. Nobody knew who was pulling the strings of all those scrambling for power. They had to cover their backs.

They arrived in two trucks and three patrol cars. They closed the road to traffic, mobile T.V. units appeared out of nowhere, the police started shouting, nervously giving orders. Curious neighbors gathered to see what was going on. I joined them. We watched as the bomb-disposal experts set to work, the watch-repairers of terror.

When they had cleared the area and prepared everything, bang! Up went my car. I was not too happy thinking the police might identify the owner, and was hoping that the fierceness of the blaze that engulfed the car would help me avoid having to make a statement, tell stories nobody would believe, run the risk that my insurance company would find an excuse not to pay me.

There was a second, smaller explosion. The boot flew open. A know-all in the crowd pronounced that cars running on gas were dangerous even when they did not have a bomb in them. When I went closer I saw that it was not gas cylinders. It was a woman's body.

A policeman stopped me going any nearer. I was on the point of telling him that it was my car, and nobody had asked my permission to put that woman there, but the flames had reached her too, a blue flame enveloping her left arm as it fell out, pointing downward.

We open our eyes thinking we are waking up, hoping that when we rouse ourselves and get out of bed everything will make sense again. That everyday reality will gently put things back in their proper place, and the dead crawl back into their graves.

Zulema, my cleaning lady, left a note warning me that Félix Jesús had come back that morning the worse for wear.

But I find him sleeping quietly in the laundry room. When he notices my presence, he yawns and stretches. He comes to me, tail erect, and rubs himself against my leg. Then he jumps up on top of the tallest piece of furniture in the kitchen, where he sleeps during the day.

I should say that Zulema is a good, discreet cleaner: but she sees visions. She does not distinguish between night and day, and her dreams get mixed together. She can be crossing the road to the bus stop while at the same time (in her mind's eye) she is calmly watching a lion with a camel's hump devour a blond boy on the pavement opposite.

I have no doubt that if Zulema saw it, Félix Jesús was hurt. From his day-time perch on the blue cushion, he stares down at me, though his slant eyes are not fixed on mine. He seems to be staring at something at my chest level that has caught his attention. He yawns again, then curls up to go back to sleep.

I follow his lead. I turn on the T.V. with the sound off and switch the
fan on. I doze off listening to its hum, while on the screen they drape the presidential sash across the chest of Argentina's fourth president in a week.

The ring of the telephone wakes me. I do not need to look at my watch to know it is past midnight.

Let it ring, let them keep on calling until it goes dead.

FINIS