The woman I loved the most only loved me a little. Nothing new there: we always love what does not love us, and are loved by those we do not love enough. Perhaps the woman who only loved me a little was right: what is the point of loving a policeman? People love winners, those who are lucky, poets, madmen even. But who loves a policeman?
I was nothing to the magistrate fast asleep behind me, although he expected me not to fall asleep at the wheel. I was less than the crooks, rapists and murderers he locked away, or more often allowed to go free for lack of proof, or anywhere to put them.
Yet I have never shot anyone in the back. I always kill face to face, staring into the eyes of the person who is going to die at my hands. I never give them any advantage, of course, or I would not be here.
The magistrate needed me, the woman I loved the most needed me, the murderer needed me. I was their shadow, the echo of their voices when they were alone and told the truth. If I did not exist, what justice would the magistrate dispense? What love would the woman who only loved me a little learn to forget, and who would put an end to the serial killer’s compulsion?
I put my foot down. The speedometer whizzed round into the red. The slightest mistake, if I nodded off for a second or if a wheel touched the verge, and it would be no more magistrate, no more memories for the woman who does not remember me; goodbye, shadow; goodbye, echo; even when they are on their own they can lie. That is all death is: darkened rooms and blank sheets of paper that will never be written on, impunity for those who survive.
We were heading for Mediomundo. Quesada thought that if we searched my friend’s chalet we might find something the forensic team had missed, for the simple reason that there had been no forensic team carrying out a search in the first place.
“It’s a beautiful day,” I heard from the cradle in the back of the car, where after four hours’ deep sleep the magistrate had woken up as pink and rested as a baby.
“We’ll be arriving in half an hour,” I said, like a pilot telling his passengers to fasten their seat belts for landing.
The sun was just coming up over the horizon, spreading across fields full of crops and hundreds of cows, the fertile pampas, the untold wealth of our colonial country. Meat and soya, wheat and maize, sunflowers, pigs and sheep, horses that sniff the ominous odor of the slaughterhouse and gallop off until they are forced to stop by the barbed-wire fences. All of them Argentine, even if they are not human: compatriots watching life go by in a state of contained despair.
“Did you bring a gun?” I said.
“There’d be no point, I don’t know how to use one.”
I opened the glove compartment and passed him Isabel’s .38.
“You’d better learn—we’re going to need it.”
At first he looked at the gun with horror, but then began to examine it.
“If you’re not shooting, make sure the barrel is pointing upward. That lever you’re about to press is the safety catch. As soon as we get there, I’ll teach you how to load it.”
“What about you?”
I showed him the other gun in the glove compartment, an old .45 that was National Shame issue when I was thrown out.
“It’s old, but effective. It belongs to Félix Jesús,” I said, not bothering to explain who he was.
To enter Mediomundo, you have to turn off the highway down a dirt road that is scarcely more than a track, although it is graveled. Lining it are plumed palm trees that look like the Swiss Guards at the Vatican.
“We should have stopped for breakfast,” the magistrate mused.
The track wound past a vineyard, then climbed a sandy hill from which you could see the sea. There was a line of gentle waves rolling in, the sky was an intense blue, and the sun was rising like shares on the New York stock exchange when the Republicans win.
“It’s a beautiful spot,” Quesada said cheerfully.
The track broadened, and we drove into the village. No more than two houses to each block, everywhere well looked after, young pine trees planted to fix the sand dunes. Although that day was the start of the summer holidays, there were only a few cars parked outside the houses: the Argentines were resting from their labors. The day before, they—and not the armed forces—had ousted a president. Nobody knew what was going to happen now: in fact, nobody ever has. Especially not the people who get rid of their presidents. A beautiful day, a beautiful spot.
Edmundo’s house was small: my friend was never ostentatious. It was a simple chalet, like the ones that Italian immigrants have built all along this coast, facing out to sea, toward Italy. The grounds, though, were spacious, and it looked as if a gardener had been to cut the grass only the day before.
I still had the key Lorena had entrusted me with the night we left. Quesada gave me permission to use it. He was being serious: “Of course, I should have spoken to the magistrate in charge of the case,” he said. “But I’ll take responsibility.”
Inside the chalet there was a strong smell of damp, as though it had been shut up for far longer than my last visit. There was still a blood stain in the middle of the floor; nobody had bothered to clean it up. “It’s evidence,” said Quesada. “It’s my friend’s blood,” I corrected him.
“Did he have a safe?”
“I don’t know the house. I didn’t even manage to spend a night here,” I said.
He did have a safe. It was in the wall behind a painting. Of course. Edmundo cannot have had much to hide if it was that easy to find. And to open: it was empty.
“I think we’re wasting our time here,” I said gloomily.
“Look under the furniture, in the kitchen, in the bathroom.”
I started with the bathroom. Traditional fittings, old-fashioned taps, a bath bought from some house clearance. If Edmundo really did have funds in Switzerland, he should have come to me to refurbish the room.
We were both so occupied—the magistrate in the kitchen and me looking for heaven-knows-what in the bathroom—that we did not hear the front door opening. Whenever somebody enters a house without knocking, they are not doing it to pass the time of day with the people who happen to be there at that moment.
There are ways of being violent without being rude. What is the difference between a louse who kills for a few pesos and a licensed killer? Their way of going about it.
“Welcome to Mediomundo,” said one of the two gentlemen who appeared behind us, brandishing automatic rifles.
“Today’s the first day of summer, although high season only starts after the 31st,” said the other.
“If you’re looking to rent the place for January or February, the owner is away at the moment. He left a few days ago, and we don’t think he’ll be coming back.”
“He was murdered,” I said, staring at the bloodstain on the floor. Every time I say something stupid, I promise myself I will never do it again, but you cannot change bad habits from one day to the next. “I bet he didn’t even get a chance to defend himself.”
When one of the gentlemen hit me I crashed through a rattan table and ended up on the floor. The magistrate took a couple of steps back, worried he would be next, but our friends knew who he was and respected his office.
“We hit him because he’s used to it,” one of them said. “He’s one of us.”
“You’ve taken it out on prisoners in your time, haven’t you, Martelli?” said the other, kicking me in the kidneys with the toe of his boot.
“The police are like fairies: they wave a wand and the innocent become guilty,” they went on explaining to Quesada.
“Get up, you son of a bitch,” they said, talking to me this time. “We don’t want you to die lying down.”
“Remember, whenever you take a statement, nothing is what it seems, and everybody is a liar,” they advised the magistrate. Then one of them knocked me to the floor again with his rifle butt.
The first thing you should always do when you are beating someone up is to take their gun. Our two visitors were so concerned with being polite they had forgotten to do so. Face down on the floor, gasping for breath, I clutched on to my .45 like an asthmatic reaching for his inhaler.
The magistrate stood there as cold and transparent as a stalagmite. He could not believe his eyes: the shots, the violent jerking of our visitors’ bodies, their eyes rolling up as blood spurted from the neck of one and the middle of the forehead of the other, then the two collapsing together in one heap.
“It was luck, not my good aim,” I said with false modesty, trying to see if I could breathe in again.
The magistrate knelt down and put his head between his knees.
“I feel sick,” he said.
He was right, we should have had breakfast before we got to Mediomundo, but the cafés along the way were shut.
At first I thought he was going to pass out, but he recovered, took a deep breath, and went onto the attack.
“There was no need to …”
“If I shoot from such close range, I shoot to kill. Besides, I only did what they were going to do to us.”
Quesada did not say it, but he obviously thought they were going to spare him.
“Who are they?”
“Hounds of the Baskervilles. Dogs with badges, the guardians of the temple. Where’s the .38 I gave you?”
“I left it in the car.”
“It’s not a torch, Quesada. We’re past the point of no return. We have to cover each other’s backs. These people don’t faint at the sight of blood.”
“But who are they?” he insisted. “What’s behind all this?”
“You should know. Look at your infallible orange file. I’m a complete nobody, so if even I am in there, you must have at least some idea of who we’re looking for.”
Quesada could not get over it. He was still more affected by my marksmanship than he was by the mess he had got himself into by coming here.
“Lock the door and we’ll carry on looking,” he said eventually.
All of a sudden he seemed to have forgotten the two fresh corpses on the floor. A strange force was driving him on: he was sure that there must be papers. Magistrates are lawyers, and lawyers are attracted to papers like moths to a flame.
We had talked about it before we left Buenos Aires. A plot had been hatched to depose the president. At the same time, though, there had been another plot, and this one won. A power vacuum is essentially a vacuum, and if one lot do not fill it, another group will.
So who were the ones who had got in first? Those who any newspaper reader already knew about. Nothing new there. People on the streets of Buenos Aires were shouting “Kick them all out!,” but none of them would do it. The protesters would go home or back to work, and when they were asked to, they would vote again for the same people. Anyone who got in first had won the game.
“Who are ‘they?’”
They are no better than the others, Quesada had told me the previous evening. The Trotskyite left; Peronists who felt betrayed by their own party; military officers cashiered for taking part in previous coup attempts; other officers still on active service, who boosted their wages with a little arms dealing; the police mafia; port bosses who dealt in drugs; shipping companies supplying chemical happiness by air, sea, and land; managers in crisis like Edmundo.
“Why don’t they join parties or form new ones? Why not do things democratically?”
“Because they don’t.”
I had spent more than twenty years selling bathroom appliances, but I still had better reflexes for shooting two men with a gun I had never fired before than I did for selling a bathroom suite. We never change, we cannot expect anything new from what seems new, we are suspicious of promises because we have made them before. We know perfectly well we always let down anyone who believes us.
“Here it is!” Quesada shouted from the kitchen.
I ran to see what he had found. He was standing in a small pile of rubble. He had spotted a tile projecting slightly from the wall, had pulled at it, and half the tiles in the kitchen had come down around him.
“Congratulations, you found the treasure!”
“Thanks. But it isn’t going to make us rich.”