No One Loves a Policeman (5 page)

“Son of a bitch.”

“If you ever say that to me again, you're a dead man. Our good doctor doesn't have any scruples when it comes to signing death warrants. He wouldn't be a forensic expert if he cared a great deal about living specimens.”

I believed him. I had no idea why I was so reluctant to answer their questions. There was nothing suspicious about why I had come all this way to Mediomundo, even if I had arrived to find a friend who had been shot and a young blond who had jumped into my car and then vanished along with it.

The doctor came in staring at the floor and did not say hello to anyone. He was a short, bald, plump man in his fifties. He was
sweating, although inside the cell it was as cold as an ice box. His breath anesthetized me while he poked around my stomach with his stethoscope. When he pressed on my ribs, though, I howled with pain. He gave me a strip of gauze to wipe the blood from my mouth, and asked if I had lost any teeth. I said I had not, that I had a dentist who was perfectly capable of doing that for me.

“Did you see who it was?” he asked, keen to play the detective.

“I didn't have time to open my eyes,” I said.

“This is a peaceful city. Violence comes from outside,” he said, handing me a prescription. “Take this for the pain. And make sure you rest. There could be internal injuries.”

He scribbled something else on his pad, then, as though prompted by Inspector Ayala, asked:

“What brought you to Bahía Blanca?”

“Nothing special. A dead friend.”

Ayala, who had stepped back to give the doctor room, nodded his approval. I briefly wondered whether the doctor might be Ayala's ventriloquist's dummy.

“What did he die of?”

“The usual. Shot at point-blank range.”

The doctor looked inquiringly at Ayala's impassive face. The inspector did not disappoint him.

“His name was Cárcano. One of the bosses out at the C.P.F. oil company. Five thousand dollars a month in his pocket, plus bonuses.”

“His widow was right, the dirty old man spent it all on his fancy woman,” I said.

“Five thousand dollars a month! Not even the King of France earns that!” said Officer Rodríguez, consumed with envy in the corridor. “I earn eight hundred and risk my life dealing with all the garbage out on the streets. And when I retire I'll get half that, dammit.”

“Yes, dammit for two reasons. Dammit for the pittance you get, and dammit because the King of Spain might earn that, but not the King of
France, they got rid of him a long time ago,” the doctor said. Then he turned to me. “Go back to your hotel or wherever it is you're staying and take a couple of days' complete rest.”

Ayala seemed to agree with his advice. My face was still aching from the slaps he had given me, but I was warming to him. When he spoke, I changed my mind.

“I think twelve hours will be enough ‘rest.' You could be on your way back to Buenos Aires tonight. I don't think Bahía Blanca needs you any more.”

“I was intending to set off in a couple of hours, with Cárcano's widow and daughter.”

The doctor put away his pad and stethoscope and said with a snort that he would not be held responsible if I died en route.

“When you woke me up I thought it was for something important.”

I left the police station with him. Nobody asked any more questions, or apologized for the beating, or for slapping me around in the cell. The roly-poly doctor was kind enough to drive me back to the hotel. I would never have found it, although it was no more than six blocks away. As I was getting out of his car he told me I really should get some rest, but if the inspector was telling me to leave, then it would be wise to do so. I thanked him for his advice. I could understand his position: it must be unpleasant having to cut open the body of someone you were talking to only a couple of hours earlier.

I got out and went into the hotel.

“Room number 347,” the receptionist reminded me. Day was almost dawning, and I had agreed to have breakfast at 8:00 with Mónica and Isabel before we set off for home. Exhausted, aching all over and still completely at a loss, I threw myself down on the bed without switching on the light. If I sleep on my back my own snores wake me up, so I turned on my left-hand side.

It is every man's dream to find a beautiful, naked woman aged no more than twenty-five in bed beside him. What happens next depends on one's condition and the circumstances. That morning (and from
that moment on) my condition was not what it might have been, but there was still a little something there if sufficiently tempted. The circumstances however could not have been worse.

The naked woman was Lorena. She was dead.

One thing was clear. I was not going to be able to sit and have breakfast with Edmundo's widow and daughter at 8:00 that morning. It was also clear that if I ran out of my room shouting there was a dead body in there I would be thrown head-first back in jail, and I would be questioned even less politely. And this time they would not bother to rouse the police doctor from his nice, warm bed.

I am always upset when young people die. It makes me wonder what I am doing still hanging around, pushing sixty and with a body and ideas that stink to high heaven, unable to instill hope in anyone. I am not even one of those metaphysical gurus that are everywhere these days, the sort who line their pockets writing books and giving talks where they tell you without a qualm that God is in all of us, when it is obvious even to the numbest of skulls that God is not even where he is meant to be, that no-one can find him: he has not even left a note with a clue as to why he has abandoned us like this.

Lorena had not had the time to become disillusioned with mankind, still less to repent of her sins. A stiletto blade had pierced her body
just below her left breast. Somebody had made love to her and then stuck the blade in her like a pin in a voodoo doll. The only sign of violence was the small circle of blood no bigger than the areola of her nipple.

She was flat on her back. No more than thirty seconds could have passed between pleasure, pain, and nothingness. Her legs were splayed open, but I felt a mean-spirited sense of relief when I realized there was no smell of semen. There is nothing more unpleasant than the scent of another man's spunk. I suppose it has to do with the sense of having one's territory invaded; the same feeling a woman has when she sniffs someone else's perfume on her man.

Poor little thing, I said to myself as I examined her body for any other wound or mark. Poor little thing.

I had hardly spoken to her, and she was somehow involved with the people who had stolen my car, but seeing her like that I could not feel angry. She could not run away from me any more as she had done in the restaurant. I was the one who had to get away now. I could not imagine Inspector Ayala looking kindly on my explanation of events, although if he thought about it at all, he would have realized I did not have the time to seduce someone and kill her in the quarter of an hour between me leaving the police station and the discovery of her body. But until the forensic report confirmed this, he would adopt the standard police methods of trying to beat the truth out of me.

The forensic report, I told myself. Perhaps the doctor could help me. I did not even know his name.

“You mean Doctor Burgos,” the man on the front desk told me when I asked him if he knew the person who had dropped me off at the hotel. “Who else in Bahía Blanca or anywhere else in all Patagonia would paint a V.W. Polo sky blue?”

He looked in his address book and wrote a phone number on a piece of paper. He even had time to recommend him.

“He attended my wife each time she gave birth. Four fillies, one a
year.” He added, confidentially: “And he got us out of a real spot of bother last year. There were twin girls on the way …”

A forensic doctor and an abortionist.

I did not see any contradiction there. It seemed to me legitimate to prevent the birth of beings who—as everyone knows—only mess up the environment and not only threaten the future of all the other species but of the planet itself. Seen in this way, an abortionist is only carrying out preventative medicine, and that is highly recommended nowadays as a means of avoiding the astronomical cost of keeping people alive in old age.

A forensic doctor, on the other hand, is a failed writer. Since he has no imagination, he rummages in people's stomachs to try to uncover the mysteries of death. It is not for him to discover them—that is the job of theologians and alchemists—but the forensic doctor is clearly (or obscurely) a stubborn dung beetle digging his own grave in the belief that he is burying others, and with them the answers to all the enigmas they could not discover while they were alive.

“Where's the body?” the roly-poly doctor said. He did not sound in the least bit surprised.

“In my room at the Imperio Hotel.”

“You ought to be a thousand kilometers from Bahía by now. Abroad, if possible.”

“I didn't kill her.”

“Do you think anybody is going to believe you? Here people are pardoned
after
they're burned at the stake. I can't remember your name …”

“It's Pedro Martelli. People call me Gotán.”

“Don't go back to the hotel, Don Gotán. Whoever left the body there is trying to frame you. Do you have a car?”

“The dead woman stole it.”

“Not good. Well then, take a taxi to the railway station and wait for me there. There are no police guards because hardly any trains reach Bahía Blanca these days, and there's nothing left to steal because the place was stripped when they shut the railways down.”

I stopped a taxi in the street and told the driver to pull up outside the hotel for a moment. The porter was surprised to see me back only five minutes after I had left.

“Has anyone been here asking for me?”

When the porter shook his head I plucked up the courage to go over to the receptionist and slide a hundred-peso note under the register.

“That's for you to forget I asked about the doctor in the blue car.”

His sphinx-like expression told me I could put about as much trust in him as an infant deer could in a lion reading her
The Jungle Book
. There was just the slimmest of chances he would not give me away.