Holy City (35 page)

Carroza is wrong. The great masters of the history of painting would be lost if the preservation of their works depended on curators like Uncle's thugs, who did not think twice about using heavy artillery and even a tear gas canister on the room.

An old-fashioned public servant, an admirer of female beauty since the days he had a little more flesh on his bones in the first flush of youth, Carroza steps in front of the women and the inferno of bullets ricocheting off the walls. They would have died anyway if the deceased Arredri's girlfriend had not shouted that she knows where the money is, all of it, and that if they kill her she will take the secret to her grave.

“I'm afraid to have to tell you our graves are out there in the pigsties,” says Carroza.

But someone has heard Sirena and orders a ceasefire. The order takes a few seconds to be respected, during which stray bullets still bounce around as if looking for bodies to sink into. Finally the assault dies down, and Carroza and the two beauties come out, coughing and spitting, blinded by the gas. They stumble their way through a cloud that could be a forerunner of the ones which, if traditional iconography is to be believed, float around in paradise.

“You could have saved so much damage, Sirena, if you had said that
a few minutes earlier. Osmar would be alive, perhaps.” The protestations come from Uncle, who has heard the news and arrived limping on the scene of the brief, unequal but intense gun battle. Although Carroza has never seen him before this morning, he has heard of Uncle's activities, an untouchable drug trafficker who alternated his business deals with cultural events in the Florida Garden put on by performers as corrupt as he is, matinée idols recycled as directors of opera houses, aged dames who had done more work in Victorian beds than on stage, but who gave themselves the airs of great interpreters of classic texts. And all of them unconditional customers of Uncle who, sitting at his table by the window looking out onto calle Paraguay, had watched the second half of the twentieth century go by as he wallowed in gossip about sex and filthy money. “He would still be alive and could even have taken his cut with him.”

Uncle keeps on about poor Osmar and only spares a glance at the dead body of the tiny play actor, his adoptive nephew, who could also still be alive—although nothing was lost with his death—if the beautiful Sirena Mondragón had only spoken out a few minutes earlier.

“My baron would not have allowed me to talk, he would have stabbed me with the dagger he always carries with his handkerchief,” explains Sirena, as beautiful as Maria Felix, Ingrid Bergman, or Rita Hayworth.

“And he was not wrong. It's a lot of dough. We businessmen have to protect ourselves from love as much as from our enemies.”

Instinctively, as if he were the only thing still afloat in this tomb where all the dead have sunk to the bottom, Ana clings to Carroza. The narrow gap between bones and skin must prevent his blood from flowing freely round his body, because he does not react in any way. Frozen stiff, he simply lets himself be embraced, as if he is taking precautions so that the definitive cold does not add pneumonia to the unpleasant list of symptoms that accompany our passage to the next world.

“How much are we talking about?” asks the skeleton man, as if he were an equal partner in the discussion.

“So much that not even a corrupt pig like Oso Berlusconi could imagine it,” boasts Uncle, the only one left standing after the obstacle race. And he goes on, not because anyone is interested in hearing it, but because the way he got his limp must still stick in his throat: “That bastard shot me in a dive on Alsina. I wasn't trying to resist arrest; I've never been violent. He emptied his gun into my right leg. I almost bled to death, just because he wanted a share in my deals.”

“As far as I know, you don't have any police record, you're clean,” says Carroza, who remembers the files the way others can recite Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz from memory.

“He shot me but didn't arrest me, that's true. Despite all those medals, Oso was never much of a cop.” Carroza could add a few details about Oso's exploits in the dictatorship's torture chambers, but he does not like to speak ill of the dead. “We're talking about three hundred million dollars. Clean money, in pension funds. Future pensioners in France, Italy and Germany think they can rely on them for a happy retirement.”

“What about the dead hostages?”

“A sad and stupid accident. My nephew chose the ones who ended up as stiffs. They were from rich countries; it's normal, their citizens are the ones with most money and power. But the final result which Oso's stupidity brought about has threatened funds which nobody was even thinking about a few hours ago.”

Uncle is angry. And with reason. Globalized finance has its safeguards; the neutron bombs that explode from time to time on the world's stock markets come from rumors, unexpected resignations, sex scandals that transcend bedroom walls and send interest rates sky high; false reports, rotten flesh that brings down the yen or undermines the euro until the moment that two or three men settle in their ringside seats, governments hold crisis meetings and miraculously everything stabilizes once more.

“A pension fund of a little more than three hundred million would not affect world markets,” Uncle explains to Carroza, the only person he can talk to among the half-dozen mindless thugs surrounding them. The skeleton man realizes he has become a sort of Bértola for Uncle, a shrink with a federal-police badge. “No-one would have batted an eyelid if it was cashed in during one of the frequent crises in South America. Sooner or later, Argentina is going to devalue its worthless currency. People with savings will be banging on the doors of the banks again, banging saucepans, raiding supermarkets, blocking the streets, presidents will be toppled. In the midst of all that chaos, who is going to worry about there being a few dollars less?”

“But they do sit up and pay attention when three top multinational executives are killed,” Carroza deduces, still with Miss Bolivia clinging to him.

“Traffickers,” Uncle corrects him. “They are no better than your servant here. Except that international diplomacy defends them, where-as I have to look out for myself.”

Touching, Carroza thinks. Uncle and Osmar Arredri, two South-American orphans of the system, lost in a sea of pirates sailing under a flag, black Africans drifting in their canoes, searching for somewhere to land with the money from consumers of cocaine and heroin. The pension fund was a good beach, a no-man's-land or the land belonging to lots of people who would never unite to make any demands. But Osmar Arredri fell into the temptation of thinking he could get there on his own, thinking he could throw Uncle and his gammy leg overboard so that he would end up in the jaws of the sharks circling round.

“Where's the money?” Uncle says, bringing the time for confessions to a close. He is growing impatient: by now it is day all over the world and no-one is going to stay there with their arms folded knowing there are all those dollars waiting for someone to rescue them.

His thugs train their guns on Sirena, but she is not someone who
will allow herself to be intimidated by the stinking barrels of half a dozen automatic weapons.

“No slimy Argentine is going to get his hands on a single note unless there's a guarantee I get out of this place alive and a millionairess.”

Sirena says this as if she were singing it. A golden, mythical sculpture, with her fish's tail and her strongbox heart.

“Put your guns down, you idiots,” Uncle orders them, hobbling toward the lovely recent widow. “Let's negotiate”

All the time they were laying waste to South-East Asia with their napalm bombs, the North Americans were negotiating in Paris with the North Vietnamese. How many deaths and mutilations, how much destruction of cities and villages, how many massacres of entire families could have been avoided if they had only been serious about the negotiations from the start, when their diplomats sat in shiny conference rooms in the City of Light, nodded their heads and shook hands, ate well every day in the best restaurants, slept soundly and, at the end of pleasant nights in luxury hotels, switched their televisions on to watch the bombing of Hanoi, attacks in Saigon, villagers fleeing with their bodies on fire, field hospitals where the wounded were piled on the bodies of the dead?

“You can't negotiate in libraries lined with the complete works of Borges, or flicking through the three volumes of Marcel Proust's
À la recherche du temps perdu
, which are unreadable even in times of peace. Nor by appealing to Freud or Lacan, of course. You negotiate on top of the mounds of destruction and death produced by both sides.”

This is Damián Bértola speaking, a shrink qualified at the University of Buenos Aires. It is Monday night-early Tuesday morning in Europe, where the news of the hostage killings has already been assimilated and the usual “profit taking” has started, where those who never lose have won again, while the losers commit suicide in their offices or run off to the Bahamas with their secretaries and the bag of cash they have managed to filch.

He is back in his consulting-room. And Verónica is with him. They arrive after having spent hours together at the hospital watching over the unconscious body of Laucha Giménez, waiting for a miracle, until all at once Laucha squeezed Verónicas hand very hard, then must have felt she was losing herself down the tunnel of death, who knows: who knows anything about death? The city mouse who was born the dove Paloma in the warm town of Monteros in Tucumán Province, cradled by serenades in hot, sweet summers in a town surrounded first by sugar cane, then later by killers.

“I never went back to Tucumán,” she confessed to Verónica one sleepless night plagued with sad memories that they spent together, as if watching fearfully over one another. “I never went back to Monteros.”

There was a secret detention center in Monteros, its own tiny version of Auschwitz. Many years later, Paloma learned about her childhood sweetheart, who was ten years older than her, so old she rejected him because, she said, he would be an old man by the time they were married and had a child. He laughed at this and promised to wait until she really had grown up. She learned, this Paloma her friend later baptized as Laucha, that there was no wait, but rather a green Ford Falcon that snatched him like a stray dog and took him off to the “place of sacrifice,” as they called it in Monteros, the unnamed marshes that were the final resting place of so many political militants, union leaders, teachers and even the local priest who used to collect money for the workers laid off after the sugar harvest.

“Perhaps you're returning to Monteros now,” Verónica said in the
Argerich Hospital when after five hours at her bedside she felt the pressure from Laucha's hand fade away. All the blood had drained out of her veins from the cut she herself made with the knife she had just plunged into the Jaguar's side.

Now she would never be able to tell Verónica why she had agreed to go along with Carroza's dangerous plan, when he suggested she pretended to be Miss Bolivia's accomplice.

“Go there right now, make it look as though you're hypnotized, that woman is so crazy she will do anything,” Carroza told Laucha. He also told her he had just spoken to Bértola and that the shrink agreed, because all psychosis is a fire you have to contain so that it does not spread, but which you can never really put out.

“He lied. I didn't talk to anyone last night. I came looking for you on my own account. The first time I've followed my feelings, like a shaman,” says the shrink.

Bértola is disgusted both by the fateful lie Carroza used to get Laucha mixed up in all of this and because he considers giving in to his premonition as a professional failing.

“You can't handle gunpowder with a cigarette dangling from your lips. That walking skull thinks he's Humphrey Bogart.”

“He's your patient,” says Verónica.

“I've just signed him off. Even if he pays me.”

*

They get back after midday. The apartment on Azara has been ransacked, with clothes strewn everywhere and a smoky residue from black tobacco hanging in the air. A uniformed cop is on duty outside. He salutes Carroza when he sees him arriving with two splendid women.

“I'm sorry, inspector. There was a violent incident here while you were away. The magistrate is expecting you at the court room. ‘At whatever time,' he said.”

Carroza goes inside alone to have a look round. He never had or kept anything of value. Everything he uses, including his emotions, are there to be thrown away.

“What happened to the women?” The cop stares at the two with the deputy inspector, not understanding the question. “I mean the ones who were here, sergeant.”

“One of them was badly wounded. They took her to the Argerich Hospital.”

The three of them return to Carroza's battered Renault. Miss Bolivia protests:

“Arrest me or leave me in peace.”

Carroza does not reply. He starts the car and sets off round the city to find a hotel where two beautiful women will not attract attention. Sirena Mondragon has promised to pay. She is convinced Uncle will keep his side of the bargain: it is not every day that you lay your hands on two hundred million dollars in cash. Carroza, though, is more skeptical about blind people and the lame.

“He's going to come for the rest as soon as he can.”

“Let him, if he dares. I'm not on my own.”

Carroza believes her. Only a short while earlier a Cessna landed at Aeroparque carrying ten Colombians armed to the teeth. They did not have to bother with documents or customs: one phone call from an office in the presidential palace and it was red-carpet treatment for the gunmen from García Marquez's homeland. That was the argument that finally convinced Uncle. Plus the knowledge that the mermaid beauty was immune to torture. “Kill me if you want to die cut up in pieces,” she whispered to him in that sweet, warm voice of hers, “or torture me if you prefer to be burned alive.”