Holy City

by Guillermo Orsi, Nick Caistor

Genres: International Crime & Mystery; Noir; Thrillers

Synopsis

A passenger liner runs aground on the muddy banks of the Río de la Plata. One by one, its passengers are abducted by Buenos Aires' criminal classes. As the kidnapping of three foreign businessmen sends stock markets into freefall, the job of solving the chaos falls onto the weary shoulders of Deputy Inspector Walter Carroza of the serious-crime squad. But top of his agenda is former Miss Bolivia Ana Torrente. Why are the bodies of the men who try to take her to bed always found minus a head?

Release date: March 1, 2012

Publisher: MacLehose Press

Print pages: 322

Sample

TOURIST GUIDE: JESUS CHRIST HAS HIS OWN THEME PARK IN BUENOS AIRES

Buenos Aires (A.F.P.). – The crowd cannot contain its wonder at the sight of Christ crucified on Golgotha. Some of them cross themselves. Not far away, Roman soldiers keep watch, ignoring the peasant women in garish costumes who are selling Oriental sweets … this is the Holy Land theme park.

Although only the heat is reminiscent of the banks of the River Jordan, here every weekend on the shores of the Río de la Plata in Buenos Aires the founders of the Holy Land religious park are recreating the real atmosphere for a cardboard Jerusalem.

Next to the airport for domestic flights, this park, which according to its owners is “unique in the entire world”, is entirely dedicated to religion, above all the Christian beliefs. Although its seven hectares also contain a “mosque” and a “synagogue”, the park concentrates on the Christian religion and the life of Christ.

From the first moment, visitors are invited to witness the birth of Christ in the kind of staging that is repeated throughout all the “attractions” in the park.

Deep inside a cave, a life-sized polyester crib takes the visitor back to Christmas Eve alongside an ox, an ass and articulated Three Kings.

The Catholic Church has given the park its blessing. The archbishop of Buenos Aires has called it a “place of cultural and spiritual enrichment”.

WATERFALLS, TANGO, STEAKS, GLACIERS AND WHALES AT KNOCKDOWN PRICES

Buenos Aires (United Press). – Savage devaluations are the means by which the economic powers in Argentina regularly carry out their “profit-taking”. The one that took place in 2002 – which tripled the value of the U.S. dollar – made fortunes overnight for the country’s grain exporters and brought in foreign tourists like flies to honey.

A country which has glaciers that crumble on cue, which shares with Brazil the biggest waterfalls in the world, which has leaping whales and a capital city with echoes of Europe where you can dance the tango and eat the best grass-fed beef in the open air is, without a doubt, a wonderful bargain for visitors.

The cop leaning on the door of his patrol car smoking a cigarette under the Avenida Mosconi bridge is dimly aware of a car zigzagging along Avenida General Paz at 140 k.p.h. He ought to put out a call for the driver to be pulled in for speeding and reckless driving. Instead, he prefers to take another lungful of his ghastly blond tobacco. Some day he’s going to give up smoking, he tells himself, but when? Not as long as he’s a policeman, that’s for sure.

In the boot of the car veering from one side to the other as it careers down the highway, its driver skilfully dodging all the traffic, is Matías Zamorano. His hands are tied; he is gagged and blindfolded. He is not suffering from being tied up or because he can hardly breathe, but because he knows this journey is his last. The car racing along like an emergency ambulance is his hearse. The two gunmen should have killed him where they found him, in the toilets of the Central Market, but preferred not to run the risk of being recognized. They are in the pay of Councillor Pox, a.k.a. Alberto Cozumel Banegas, a man always known by his nickname. Everyone calls him the Pox, even though he has inherited one of the many empires built on the squalid outskirts of Buenos Aires: the absolute ruler of an area twenty blocks square in the district of Matanza.

The idea to doublecross the Pox was not his, Matías Zamorano thinks with relief. It was Ana’s: just twenty-two, with the face of a cherub floating on a cloud, but guts enough to manage the gambling dens and whorehouses run by Zamorano, who in turn is run by Councillor Pox – as the Pox is by the governor of the province. Everything was going smoothly, but women, especially if they are young and beautiful, are ambitious. And if they are ambitious, nothing satisfies them. They think they are the centre of the universe, absolute suns of a planetary system that had its Big Bang when they were born, not a second before. And the rest of the world are nothing more than limp and decrepit pricks, stupid dummies with acrylic dentures who swallow half a packet of Viagra and think they have got a hard-on because the women they rent scream, close their eyes, shake like piggy banks while waiting for the old men to finish or be finished off, exhausted or paralysed by a heart attack.

The car leaves Avenida General Paz and speeds into Buenos Aires Province along the extension of Avenida de los Corrales, heading for the rubbish dumps at Tablada, where executioners can despatch the condemned without any problems. Zamorano knows the way: he has done it often enough behind the wheels of other cars, with stool-pigeons and hired guns squashed into the boot, people born of the garbage who return to it with grateful thanks because they can no longer bear being called “sir”, or having some poor woman fall in love with them and demanding fidelity.

Zamorano is not afraid. Above all he is sad: a feeling of tremendous misery and self-loathing. Given the chance, he would have speeded things up, but the Pox does not give anyone a chance. That is why he rules with an iron fist his twenty blocks in the south of Matanza, an open sewer inhabited by the rejects of the system, zombies who steal and kill for food, ragged foot-soldiers in an army whose only discipline is the certainty that if they disobey orders they will starve to death.

Zamorano thinks of Ana as the car slows down and pulls into the street the Pox has chosen. “I want him to be an example and a lesson,” he must have said, because that is a favourite phrase of his. “I want the whole neighbourhood to see how anyone who crosses Councillor Pox ends up.”

The boot is flung open and the two thugs haul Zamorano to his feet. They take off his gag and blindfold. It’s a bad, terrible sign, or perhaps merely inevitable, thinks Zamorano; a routine procedure, the tiniest drop of dignity allowed to the condemned man. There is a third man, probably the one who drove the car here, who taps him gently on the back to straighten him up, then pats his crumpled clothes so he does not die looking like a scarecrow. He wants the locals from the cardboard and corrugated iron shacks, honest Bolivian or Peruvian families, to see the prisoner’s face, the look of terror – or in Zamorano’s case, resignation – that is his last farewell. They need to realize that they at least (the Pox’s men) do not kill just anyone, do not get their hands dirty with tramps or two-bit killers. The cops can take care of the riff-raff, says Councillor Pox, who boasts that his men are elite troops, the marines of these outer suburbs of the Holy City.

“You know who this is,” the driver shouts to the gathered locals, putting an almost affectionate arm round Zamorano’s shoulder. He was comrade Pox’s right-hand man. “You’ve all bought stuff from him …”

He gazes round at the cowed faces of the crowd. A feudal baron condemning the disloyalty of one of his subjects, the black sheep who has to be sacrificed at once.

“We’re going to amputate this right hand so that the infection does not reach comrade Pox. But tomorrow someone else you can trust will take his place. Comrade Pox is like a snake or an iguana: the corrupt limbs we chop off always grow back again.”

He pushes Zamorano forward. Zamorano stumbles but stays on his feet in the centre of the empty space that has opened up between his executioners and the locals around this makeshift scaffold of beaten earth and stagnant water from the last downpour. They have untied him. He could make a run for it and get shot in the back, but he would rather stare at this pair of thugs he has so often given orders to, at the driver who is as accurate with his gun as he was at avoiding the traffic with his foot pressed to the floor.

Zamorano does not say a word, merely stares at them. He could say to them: what I did doesn’t merit being put to death; there are people higher up than us who do far worse, who back-stab all the time and yet win cups and medals, people who double their fortunes with a single shady deal, then get their photos taken with Councillor Pox.

But Zamorano is already dead and the dead do not speak. He closes his eyes to see the cherub more clearly. Blinded by the car headlights, Ana’s face shines in front of his eyelids. She smiles as she recognizes him, as she tells him yet again: yes, I’m with you, I like being with you.

That is why (the image of Ana beneath his eyelids), an instant before the shots ring out, Matías Zamorano raises his arms and wraps them round his own body.

As he slumps to the ground he is not alone: he is with Ana.

The legal profession is a lonely one. It is looked down on by all those respectable people who bathe their consciences in cologne and perfume, thinking they can disguise the stink. As lonely as a private eye in an American film, as scorned as any cop in any rotten city in the world.

In Buenos Aires, lawyers who defend clients already considered guilty are hissed and booed when they leave court. They are pursued by swarms of cameramen and reporters, who attack them for defending clients that the supreme court of public opinion has sentenced to be hanged from the very first day. It does not matter if there is any evidence to convict the accused thief or criminal, if the body or the stolen goods, the weapon used to kill the wife, the tools they are said to have used to break into a bank vault, have been found: there is a suspect who has been found guilty by the editors of newspapers and television news programmes, and a bonfire waiting for them which burns the twenty-four hours a day that the news channels are on air.

It was two in the morning when someone knocked on the lawyer Verónica Berutti’s door. Verónica had just got rid of a lover who had come to ask her for money before they had even fucked and was watching the repeat on television of a crowd on the outskirts of Buenos Aires trying to lynch a paedophile rapist who the cops were pushing into their patrol car. She was not watching because it interested her, but simply because it was on, as people usually do, especially at that time of night and after the unpleasant scene when she had thrown her lover out. He could be a good lover, but lacked the braincells to tell his muscles to get moving and look for work. “You’re a whore,” her ex-lover shouted as she slammed the door in his face. “Whores don’t pay, they charge people,” she had replied under her breath, then waited until the lift had arrived and the landing light had gone off to add “bastard”.

The peaceful inhabitants of Villa Diamante surround the police car the cops have managed to smuggle the paedophile into. They throw stones and beat on the roof with sticks. They even toss rotten tomatoes at the cop who is trying to ward them off so that the car can get out of there. The knocking on Verónica’s door synchronizes with the beating on the police car roof, which finally succeeds in pulling off down the muddy street. The camera shows it skidding in the mud, and Verónica wonders how many of those wanting to lynch the paedophile are themselves paedophiles or wife-and-children beaters, drunkards on cheap wine, occasional rapists.

A shame she cannot turn down the sound of the hammering at her door, press “mute” on her remote control, and leave the world silent and far away for a while longer.

Although the lens of the spyhole distorts her face, Verónica recognizes the round, pink cherub’s face with its marrow-green eyes, the golden curls, the beauty as polished as in a reliquary.

Why bother to say good evening when it is already nearly dawn and nobody turns up at this time on a social visit. Better simply to heave a sigh and head for the blue corduroy armchair she has sat in before, ask for a glass of water and, pausing for breath, apologize for how late it is.

“But I can see you were still awake, doctora” says Ana perceptively, so Verónica prefers to go into the kitchen, turn on the tap and let the water run for a while before returning with a full glass.

“You’re not the first. It’s been a busy night.”

“Men,” Ana guesses.

“They’ve all gone,” says Verónica. “Who’s chasing you?”

“Nobody for the moment. But I’m in a mess, I think, or I wouldn’t have bothered you like this.”

The lawyer thinks that around now – at this very instant, why not? – she should be climaxing, feeling in her vagina all the virility of the son of a bitch who had come and ruined her night. Exhausted, she collapses into the armchair next to her desk. She prefers the silent television to clients like Ana Torrente, involved in conflicts that last longer than the Middle East War, and with little or no inclination to pay or even reduce the debt she has run up with every appeal, every request for proceedings to be quashed, every postponed hearing, and all the other legal niceties that wear out so much energy, expenses and shoe leather.

“My varicose veins really ache,” Verónica announces. “If I don’t have them operated on this year, I’ll have to employ someone to carry me round the corridors of the court on their shoulders.”

Ana Torrente does not take the hint that she should at least open her purse. She is far too busy trying to protect herself from the violence exploding around her because of her business deals. She gulps the water down in one, then leaves the glass on a magazine.

“I don’t want to spoil the surface of your table,” she says, hoping Verónica will repay her consideration with a friendly gesture.

“As I asked before: who’s after you this time?”

Another sigh. Ana searches for a painting, a mirror, a lamp, a file on the lawyer’s desk she can gaze at like someone leaning on their elbows before they speak.

“Nobody as yet. But I’m scared.” Ana explains she had agreed to see Matías: they were to meet at 10 p.m. in the Los Pinches café on the corner of Avenida del Trabajo and Pola. “When I got there they were already stacking the chairs on the tables and the owner was closing up. ‘Someone called on Matías Zamorano’s behalf,’ he said. ‘Don’t bother waiting for him.’”

“It’s two in the morning, so that was four hours ago.” Verónica seems to understand how serious things are. “Why didn’t you come straight here? We won’t find any magistrate awake now”

Ana Torrente buries her face in her hands. It is obvious she is making an effort to burst into tears, because melodrama is not her thing, at least not in front of women, especially someone like Verónica Berruti, this qualified lawyer aged forty-five, who has twice been widowed. Once after her policeman husband was killed in a shootout; the second time when someone took revenge on her by shooting her partner (she had decided never to get married again), an ombudsman, a man of the law who begged her on his knees not to try so hard to get people out of jail and still less to put them there in the first place. “Why put them in jail if you’re only going to get them out again?” he would ask, genuinely anxious and uncomprehending. One cool September morning his car was intercepted only three blocks from their home in the middle of the Villa Devtoto residential neighbourhood and he was shot to pieces before he even had the time to ask why.

“Don’t try to fool me, Ana. I won’t lift a finger for you. In fact I’ll throw you out right now if you don’t tell me the truth.” Ana squirms on the blue corduroy armchair as if she has sat on an anthill. She starts to blink as though suffering an allergy attack so strong not even corticoids can calm it. She is suddenly if fleetingly aware of the seriousness of what she has done. “The truth or the street,” says Verónica, hurrying her up because she still has not lost all hope that the son of a bitch will come back, ring the bell, plead for forgiveness on the entry phone.

Slowly but surely, she hears the truth. She has to disentangle it from all the unconvincing pouts her witness puts on, all her half-truths, her unwillingness to tell her everything. But the truth arrives.

So Verónica concludes, without fear of being mistaken, that Matías Zamorano has already been dropped from Councillor Pox’s team and by his own men. It was not a good idea of Ana’s to try to double-cross him: could not have been worse, in fact, given these first results. “You can’t mess with those who run the game,” Verónica tells her; if they have reached that position, it is because they have learnt a thing or two, because they have people to guard their backs, their asses, the whole caboodle.

Veronica does not tell Ana this last part. She does not want to make her cry for real. She bites her tongue. You’re a racist Bolivian bitch, she would tell her if she really wanted to make her cry. But it is the truth she wants, not tears.

“I’ve had it up to my ovaries with all the crap you Bolivians get up to. You should have stayed in Santa Cruz de la Sierra.”

“Bolivia doesn’t exist. Tomorrow or the next day, Bolivia is going to be more in the news than Iraq or Palestine. A dark night is coming, so don’t talk to me about my home country: they’re nothing more than a bunch of indians on the warpath, the lost tribe of the puna. They think Viracocha is going to come and save them – they’re worse than the Arabs.”

Now Verónica understands what is keeping Ana from seriously crying: her hatred. She hates the place she has escaped from, that prosperous city on the Bolivian flatlands inhabited by cattle ranchers, corrupt bureaucrats and drugs barons. That was where only a year earlier she had been crowned Miss Bolivia: the blonde, slender Ana Torrente, one metre seventy-two centimetres tall, as shapely as high mountains, light-green eyes, a cherub with tropical lips and tits. She signed a contract to take her round the world, “the ambassadress of Bolivian culture and beauty”, as the presenter said in the Santa Cruz amphitheatre to applause, ovations, camera flashes, microphones and a contract she signed while still blinded by all the floodlights, deafened by the shouting and the fireworks set off to celebrate her coronation.

Poor pale-faced Cinderella. The next morning, although her hangover made it hard to focus, she managed to read the small print of her contract. The world promised to her was not the whole planet – it was a tour of Ecuador, Peru and the Bolivian interior, a night in every miserable village of its jungles and high plateaux. She was the bait for the campaign trails of unknown politicians, ambitious subalterns of a power installed to help the affairs of the rich and powerful who do travel in the real world.

Hatred, not tears, lends Ana that look of a fallen angel which so bedazzled Matías Zamorano he completely lost his head and thought he could double-cross the Pox.

“There’s a lot of money in it for you if you help me out. It’s a good deal, if I can get it off the ground.”

Stony-faced, Verónica. “I disconnect my emotional hemisphere,” she says of herself when she listens to possible clients before deciding whether or not to rescue them from hell. She settles in her chair by the desk and listens. She is only briefly distracted when she hears the lift coming up. She cannot help it: once a fool, always a fool, as her faithful friend Laucha the Mouse Giménez tells her. Apart from that she listens closely, notes down some phrases, does the sums, draws little diagrams that help her follow the thread of Miss Bolivia’s confession. Slowly but surely she begins to understand why Ana reacted, tore up the sequinned buffoon’s contract and abandoned her kingdom.

The Queen of Storms is a cruise ship that can carry 1,340 passengers, all of whom, in this misty August morning, are crowding to the rails on the port side of the ship in response to a call from the captain, a what you might call phlegmatic Englishman who has faced the raging seas of Asia, the stormy, cold North and South Atlantic, including Cape Horn, but is now seeing the enormous ship under his command run aground for the very first time in the brown soup of the Río de la Plata.

The tourists’ pirouettes have no effect. They find the situation quite funny, especially since as soon as the mist rises they can see the reassuring outline of the city of Buenos Aires before their eyes. No-one is going to die, except of laughter; some of them even start to try out tango steps on the tilting deck. Eventually six tugboats appear in single file, sent by the harbourmaster. The English captain is no longer so phlegmatic. He was only expecting two of these shabby craft which, like the ticks of underdevelopment, will cling on and take with them a high percentage of the profits made by any luxury liner that ventures into this treacherous river.

Still sleepy, Verónica sits up in bed with her phone to her ear, listening to the story of the complicated disembarkation as told by Francisco Goya (who has the same name as the painter but does not paint): he seduces tourists with his guidebook knowledge of the cities they visit and gets paid in dollars for it. He always gives her a call when he lands for a couple of days in Buenos Aires. He offers Verónica a bit of time out – during those two days she can go to restaurants normally reserved for foreigners, dance in exclusive nightclubs and make love twice a day, so four times altogether.

She laughs, by now fully awake, when Pacogoya (as she calls him) tells him that the first dancers on the listing deck were a gay couple – “and you should have seen how the one who must be the woman in bed crossed her legs,” says Pacogoya with that Paraguayan accent of his that women find so irresistible and which Verónica adopts for the couple of days they spend together. “I’ll be there tonight,” Pacogoya adds, from the huge ship stuck in the silt. “If they don’t free us I’ll swim to shore, but there’s no way you’re going to escape me, princess.”

Verónica cannot help comparing her kingdom to that of Miss Bolivia, who slept on the sofa after keeping her up with the details of her betrayals and with whom she watched Crónica Television when it announced in a screaming red banner strapline that a body riddled with bullets had been found on a rubbish tip near the Matanza shanty town. “The victim is apparently a male linked to a prostitution ring, who was shot in a settling of accounts,” said a provincial police officer to the cameraman and reporter on duty from the sensationalist news channel.

That was the outcome, the foreseeable climax to Miss Bolivia’s declarations before she stretched out on the living-room sofa without shedding a tear. All she did was close her eyes and ask Verónica to wake her up so they could go down to the law courts together.

“You’re in a good mood, doctora. Or something’s aroused you.”

“How would you know?” snaps Verónica. She has just had a shower and is examining her breasts when she sees Miss Bolivia standing in the bathroom doorway.

“I can see it in your face. And from your hard nipples: that’s not because of me, is it?”

Embarrassed, Verónica gathers up the bath-towel and covers herself. In her mid-forties and with two dead partners on her conscience, she still feels a sense of shame that, despite being only just twenty, Ana Torrente seems to have shed completely.

“Get dressed or we’ll be late,” says Verónica. “The magistrate isn’t going to wait for you just because you’re the Queen of Santa Cruz de la Sierra.”

“All magistrates are skirtchasers,” Ana replies, pushing Verónica gently out of her way in front of the mirror with a swing of her hips. “The scent of woman is the only code they really respect.”

“Get a move on,” Verónica repeats as she leaves the bathroom. She is resigned to the fact she is going to have to spend the morning with Ana at the law courts. She cannot think of any other way to get her some protection and is sure that if she abandons her it will not be more than a few hours before the discovery of another body is reported with the same screaming headlines on Crónica Television.

The magistrate does not receive them, but his secretary does.

“His honour has taken a short vacation,” he tells them, his eyes fixed on Miss Bolivia’s chest as if it were a teleprinter he was reading the words off. “But you needn’t worry,” says this individual, a fat, balding man in his forties, with thick lips and the slanted eyes of a lecherous pig, as Miss Bolivia describes him when they have left his office. They needn’t worry, because his honour has taken every measure to ensure that the days of Councillor Cozumel Banegas are numbered: “There is far too much evidence against him for the provincial government to go on protecting him; he will be judged and stripped of his position any day now,” he promises in a reedy voice, thrusting his snout and dribbling lips up against Miss Bolivia’s face. She leaves the court wiping off the microscopic spots of saliva.

“Stay at my place for a couple of days, at least until that skirtchasing magistrate gets back and puts some protective measures in place and gets you a police bodyguard.”

“I don’t want a bodyguard. I don’t trust your country’s police, doctora, I don’t trust any cops. And I don’t want to be in your bed when you turn up with one of your men; I don’t like threesomes and tourist guides aren’t exactly to my taste, particularly if they’re Paraguayan.”

“So you were listening behind the door. But who said I was going to bring him home? Pacogoya’s got a fabulous apartment in Recoleta, with a balcony that looks out on our illustrious dead, and in an area with the best restaurants in town, or at least the most expensive.”

With the air of a lodger who pays her rent and after extracting a promise she will not have to witness someone else’s sex, Ana Torrente agrees to stay in Verónica’s apartment. She won’t sleep in the living room, won’t leave even to go shopping, won’t open the door even if she hears Leonardo di Caprio’s voice on the entry phone and under her pillow she’ll keep warm the Bersa .38 that Verónica’s first husband left her.

“You take off the safety catch, raise the gun, keep your arm steady and bang!”

“What happens if it really is Leonardo di Caprio?”

“I’ve heard he doesn’t do visits – they take women to his hotel suite.”

Pacogoya is waiting for her at La Biela, a café packed with foreign tourists and local clients who fill the interior and spill out onto the broad pavement outside. It is mid-winter, but the weather is like a humid summer evening; costly furs are dangling over chair-backs, and bags stuffed with Buenos Aires souvenirs catch the greedy eyes of pickpockets who come and go, watched by their old acquaintances from the nearby police station. La Biela’s owner pays the cops to put in an appearance every now and then.

“Wow, it’s hot for August,” says Pacogoya. “Hotter even than in Asunción.”

He gives her a brotherly peck on the cheek and then in response to a gesture Verónica only just catches out of the corner of her eye, the florist from the flower stall on the nearby avenue enters, bearing two dozen freshly cut roses. He attracts everyone’s attention and the envy of all the women. Pacogoya is good at these touches of an opulent lover, or a soap-opera star who can no longer tell fiction from reality and really bel. . .