No One Loves a Policeman (8 page)

“That way I can stretch out and get some sun,” Ayala said.

“Count me out, boss. Putting all this blubber on display would be too much like sexual perversion,” Rodríguez said, gripping the rolls of his stomach fat.

Burgos drove me back to the Imperio Hotel. He parked half a block away, told me to wait, then went to recover Isabel's car. When he returned, he said that the day-time receptionist, who knew him as well as his nighttime colleague, had asked what kind of a mess he had got himself into: the hotel is crawling with detectives, he said. They found a girl dead in a room where a guy from Buenos Aires was staying. He left without paying or taking his things, and he was the one who was supposed to come and collect the car.

“You owe me a hundred dollars,” Burgos said. “The night porter didn't share the tip you gave him with his colleague. It's getting more and more expensive to keep people quiet.”

I had to hand over the hundred before he let me into Isabel's car, a Renault Mondino that was as impeccable and silent as a cat on the prowl. When I pressed gently on the accelerator, it positively purred.

“Don't get lost,” the doctor said. “Buenos Aires is a city full of temptation.”

He was standing by the driver's window, enviously stroking the smooth paintwork.

“Don't start with that nonsense again.”

“The owner of a car like this must be a fine woman too. Why not fuck her if you get the chance?” he ventured by way of farewell.

What is a clairvoyant? Someone who foresees the future, or someone who determines it by suggesting what is going to happen?

I put my foot down. I was keen to get away as swiftly as possible from Burgos and his going on about my sleeping with whichever women I might bump into. I had not had much luck in that area. The last woman in my bed had been murdered, and I had not so much as touched her, apart from our hug at Edmundo's place when she had turned up in such apparent distress.

So she was not Lorena. Then again, Mireya was not Mireya, although with her I did get a bit further than a filling station lost in the desert.

“What else could you call me but Mireya like the tango, Gotán?”

I had laughed that night as we were leaving the Dos Por Cuatro tango bar half a block up from Boedo on the way to Puente Alsina, a dark, cobbled street from bygone days lit by old-fashioned street lamps you would expect to see in a warehouse or in a San Telmo antique shop window. Dos Por Cuatro was once owned by a Basque dairyman but had now been converted by his grandchildren into a tango bar. It still had its carriage entrance, and there was an old milk cart in the yard, shafts pointing to the sky. Nobody uses horses in Buenos Aires
nowadays, but at weekends they harness some old nag to it and take Yankee and European tourists out for a ride. They cannot go far because they do not want to get into the busy avenues, but the driver and his attendants are glad of the tips in dollars.

“But you're not blond, like Mireya was.”

I was not very keen on calling her Mireya, which made me wonder if it was because I did not really want to name her at all. We lose what we put a name to. It's like shining a bright light on a flower so we can examine it more closely. Love fades, for this and many other reasons, but always, always too soon.

I left Bahía Blanca and sped along the highway at 140. I paid more attention to my rearview mirror than to the road ahead. I am always afraid that the shot will come from behind, or the push into the ravine when we are standing at the top admiring the view.

It may no fun
being
a policeman, but it is worse to
have been
one. The memories weigh too heavily: there is too much past you cannot return to. And yet nothing is dead and buried. Not even the corpses.

Isabel and Mónica were not waiting for me at the Cabildo Hotel in Tres Arroyos. In fact, they had not checked in.

For a brief moment I tried to convince myself they must have headed straight for Buenos Aires. It made sense: what would they have gained by waiting for me? It simply meant they were caught up in an affair that had nothing to do with them, only hours after Edmundo's death.

I called the hotel in Bahía Blanca. According to the receptionist, the two women had left early that morning, in the midst of all the turmoil
over the discovery of the dead body. He obviously fancied his chances as an informer for the yellow press. “They took a taxi to the bus station,” he said.

When I called the bus station they told me there was no morning bus to Buenos Aires, but one to Tres Arroyos. I had told Mónica and Isabel to rent a car, but they must have preferred the bus: Isabel could console her mother while keeping quiet about the mess they were in that was not of their making, and did not really seem to have anything very much to do with Edmundo either.

I went to Tres Arroyos bus station. The bus from Bahía Blanca had arrived on time. “Not many people got off,” the driver told me. He was a lanky, pallid individual who looked as though he had either slept very badly or had just been dumped by a consumptive girlfriend. I found him at the bar of a fast-food stall, tucking into a hotdog with a glass of white table wine.

“Let's see if I can remember,” he said when I asked him if he had seen an older woman and a tall, pretty young woman with good breasts, a nice backside and long dark hair. “Let's see if I can remember,” he repeated, digging into a decayed tooth with a toothpick and gently belching the smell of hotdog and cheap wine all over me. His memory improved when I slipped a ten-dollar bill into his open left hand, resting as if by coincidence on the counter in front of me.

“Yes, they got off here, with a gentleman.”

“A gentleman?”

He shifted uneasily on his stool. The surprise in my voice must have made him realize his information was worth more than I had paid him.

“What was he like?”

“Let's see if I can remember.”

I took out another ten-dollar bill, but this time laid it on top of the paper napkin where the half-eaten hotdog was.

“Either you remember or you don't.”

As I slammed down the banknote, the half-eaten hotdog rolled onto
the floor. I ordered another one and more white wine, but something drinkable this time.

“I have to leave for Tandil in fifteen minutes.”

“The wine's for me. What did this ‘gentleman' look like?”

He licked his lips as though cleaning the rim of a glass, ready to try the chilled Torrontes wine the barman was busy opening.

“There were two of them,” he said, as though he had just remembered.

“Two gentlemen?”

“Yes, and two ladies. What's so strange about that? Are you a policeman?”

I filled his glass and poured a half for myself. He tossed the wine down in one gulp and held out the empty glass for more.

“It's nice and cool.”

I refilled it. This time he drank only half of it. The wine seemed to refresh his memory.

“Those two were policemen as well. I can smell them,” he said, wrinkling his hooked sommelier's nose. “Built like tanks. Not very tall, about my height. But built like tanks. Lots of gym and steroids.”

He sat there staring at the counter, pretending to be lost in thought. I knew that if I seemed anxious, he would want more money. I said I was leaving.

“They all got into a car that was waiting for them,” he said in a rush.

“What kind of car?”

“One of those 4×4s they have in the country. Tires as fat as airplane wheels. Red. A Chevrolet, I reckon.”

“Did you see anything unusual or threatening? Did they push the women into the vehicle for example?”

He fixed his cloudy eyes on me. They were as cold as the wine.

“Gentlemen, I said. Not killers. All muscle, but polite.”

I paid for the wine and the second hotdog, which he had not touched. I commended him to get a relief driver for the Tandil run.

“I like people who try to help,” he said, patting me on the back. “Tandil is just up the road. It's all dead straight, and there isn't much traffic. Thanks, though.”

With that he swallowed another glass of wine, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and winked at me as he left.

All muscle but polite, two gentlemen had kidnapped Isabel and Mónica.

Some time later I heard on the radio that a bus on its way to Tandil had left the road on one of the few bends on the highway from Tres Arroyos, had sailed over the roadside ditch and come to a halt in a soya field.

All I had was someone else's car and a fake I.D. card. There had been a beautiful blond waiting in bed for me, but she was dead. And the friend who had kindly invited me into all this mess had been dropped from the catalog too.

Tres Arroyos is one of those hundreds of Argentine country towns that are pretty enough to the people living there but have nothing to tempt a visitor to spend so much as a night there. The inhabitants know their charms, and try hard to conceal the sheer boredom of the clean, deserted streets, the grid of avenues round the main square, where town hall and church silently confront each other.

If the vehicle that Isabel and Mónica were taken away in was a 4×4, that probably meant they were being kept on a nearby
estancia
, in some shack in the middle of the countryside that would be difficult to locate and hard to get to.

I decided to give Tres Arroyos a chance by staying there a night. I registered at the Cabildo Hotel with my brand-new identity: Edgardo Leiva, married, commercial traveler. The plan I had hastily arranged with Don Quixote, his sidekick and the fat forensic specialist, fell apart if Isabel and Mónica had disappeared. The idea had been to take them back to Buenos Aires so they could quickly get back to their normal lives and not become involved in something none of us knew the true dimensions of.

A pair of muscular but polite gentlemen had pushed in before me.

I visited half a dozen estate agents, and found out all about farms, market gardens, and dairy outfits for sale or rent in the region. Everything was as I had expected: the pampas around Buenos Aires are the last redoubt of that rich Argentina that in the early years of the twentieth century our leaders used to dazzle millions of European immigrants with. They did not, of course, tell them that the really fertile land was already owned by others, most of them descendants of the soldiers who had robbed the Indians of it in the first place. All that was left to distribute was rough, parched land that needed a lot of brute strength and a great deal of money to make anything of.

The immigrants, driven out of Europe because imperial wars had left them starving, supplied the brute strength. The rewards for all their hard work were waiting for them in their graves.

“What exactly are you looking for?” the man in one of the last agencies I visited asked me exasperatedly.

I told him my interest was not strictly commercial, for the moment at least. It could be a farm that had not been worked for a while, with a rundown or abandoned shack on it. I did not care because I was not going to live there. I wanted to buy something cheap.

“You're not going to find anything cheap around here,” he warned me.

He got out some maps and spread them across his desk. There were
three properties that might interest me: farms of less than a hundred hectares. On two of them there had been a building of some kind or other. One was in ruins; the other was very run-down, with the roof missing over half of its six or so rooms.

“I'm interested in that one.”

“The owners live in Buenos Aires. I'm sure there's no-one there. We could go now, it's not far.”

I asked him to tell me how to get there. We could go early the next morning, I suggested.

“No, the morning's impossible for me,” he said. “Give me a call and we'll arrange a time.”

I shook his hand, looking as pleased as if we had just done a fantastic deal. He was obviously interested in selling something; I was more concerned about getting him off my back. I had the information I was looking for. If the two polite gentlemen had taken Isabel and Mónica to some out-of-the-way place, it could be the half-ruined ranch on a neglected farm. There would be no witnesses. On any working
estancia
, market garden or dairy farm there are farmhands, cows. If the estate agent was right, on this one there would be nothing more than thistles and a ramshackle wind-pump.