No-One Loves a Policeman

by Guillermo Orsi, Nick Caistor

Genres: International Crime & Mystery; Noir

Synopsis

It is December 2001 and Argentina is in political and economic meltdown. Pablo Martelli, once in an elite branch of the police force known to all as the 'National Shame', is a shadow of his former self, scraping by as a bathroom salesman. He cannot forget the enigmatic woman he met in a dance hall. She left him when she found out who he was working for, and he has never recovered from the blow. Late one evening, Martelli is summoned to a friend's coastal retreat. He arrives to find his friend dead and is drawn into a bewildering sequence of events, on an odyssey that leads him through vast, empty pampas, along endless highways and into ghost towns seething with danger and brutality, to the ailing heart of his country. Before long he is forced to uncover the truth of his past life. It is a dangerous confession: after all, no-one loves a policeman. A highly original crime novel with a rich, dark humour, a host of extraordinary characters and plenty of smoking guns.

Release date: April 28, 2011

Publisher: MacLehose Press

Print pages: 287

Sample

Five years ago, when I lost the last person I cared about, I vowed never again to answer the telephone after midnight. Since then, my resolve has seldom been put to the test. At my age it is rare for male friends to stay up late, and the women are not permanent fixtures once you are persuaded you are all alone in the world. All of them widowed or separated, and in the early hours they are snuggled up in bed, smearing themselves with creams, or warming their toes on memories of happier times and better lovers (if they have anyone to compare with). If they feel lonely, they call girlfriends. Or the Samaritans.

On the night of December 14, 2001, I went to bed early even for me. Not so much because I was tired, more that I was weary of playing along with such an uninspiring day. There was not a single bit of news I could cling to, none of those hilarious excuses Buenos Aires can be so generous with: an armed bank robbery just when you are trying to withdraw your meagre earnings, or paying the rent for the unheated apartment you have been living in for the past year. A demand from the tax people because you haven’t paid the previous instalment. A friend in his fifties confessing he has at last come out, and could you please recommend an analyst, preferably a young, good-looking one. I had nothing to stay up for, not even bad news on the T.V., apart from the usual ridiculous celebrity marriages, resigning ministers, chaos in the markets making nonsense of the government’s economic policies, and the inevitable run on banks. One of those days when midnight is a watery horizon and you suspect that your ship has sunk forever beneath the waves.

“Gotán, I need to see you as soon as possible.”

“I’m in bed, with the duvet round my ears. The thought of getting up and dressed, taking the car out of the garage and driving half an hour to your place makes me feel quite unwell.”

“Make that six hours. I’m not in Buenos Aires. And you have to leave right now, so that you reach here before dawn.”

It took me a quarter of an hour to dress, pack stuff for two days into a bag, and leave a note to ensure that Zulema, the cleaner who comes on Mondays, put fresh water in the bowl and fed my cat Félix Jesús his balanced diet. He was out that night – with my permission – but he was bound to be back before I was, demanding food and a place to curl up in peace.

Half an hour after Edmundo Cárcano’s call I was driving across the city as fast as a patrol car taking the special giant-size mozzarella from the pizzeria to the police station. There was hardly any traffic as I sped along the highway heading towards the southernmost stretch of the Atlantic coast. I was aiming for a tiny village of not more than a dozen houses, side by side on a bare, windswept beach, with nothing but sand dunes and sea to look at. Mediomundo was its name.

“It was called that by the estate agent who deals in these remote properties. He’s a fisherman, but he uses nets rather than a rod. He catches all kinds of fish and makes stews for the few lost tourists who turn up here,” Cárcano had explained. He reckoned the resort should be called Arsehole of the World. The estate agent owned a bar on the beach called All Kinds of Fish. He was the one who told me on this cold, windy morning that he could not believe it. “Why, just yesterday he was here eating sea bream and drinking sherry. How can he be dead? Poor Edmundo,” he said, referring to my friend Cárcano, shot at point-blank and killed outright, which at the very least cast doubt on the suicide theory put forward by the policeman who had arrived that afternoon from Bahía Blanca.

Cárcano had built himself a simple, beautiful chalet with what he had saved from his oil-company salary. When I arrived, I could find no trace of the blonde, almost an adolescent and nearly as lovely as the house, who he had said he loved and with whom he planned to share this seaside eyrie. Not a lipstick or a sanitary towel, never mind underwear or a toothbrush. It looked as though no-one was visiting or living with Cárcano in his marine hideaway. That was the conclusion of the inspector, detective or traffic policeman from the provincial force who turned up in Mediomundo to investigate what he termed “this unfortunate event”.

“If he called you at midnight it was probably because he didn’t feel too good. Older people do get these bouts of depression at night,” the inspector said. He was little more than thirty, and his nose for sleuthing had already been dulled by easy money from gambling and prostitution.

I asked him if he was going to check for fingerprints, but he said the forensic team would do that when they got here the next day or the day after. “We’re up to our ears in work,” he boasted, looking me straight in the eye. If the murdered Edmundo Cárcano was hoping for justice, he was not going to come by it by way of this bureaucrat, disturbed in his so-crowded routine eight long hours earlier by a friend of the victim. A friend who, rather than end up with the car wrapped round his head, had driven unhurriedly for six seemingly endless hours, and who as soon as he arrived felt sorry he had not once exceeded the speed limit, but had travelled singing a duet with Lucila Davidson on the radio, even allowing himself the luxury of closing his eyes for a few seconds so he could imagine her beside him, the two of them looking out over a sea of delirious fans. Closing his eyes up on stage with her, dreaming his erotic dream even if the car several times swerved onto the verge, blissfully unaware of what awaited him in this remote seaside village in the south-east of Buenos Aires province.

I knew I had arrived too late as soon as I opened the door of my friend’s charming chalet. Day had dawned half an hour earlier, but even without touching the body, lying in a pool of blood, I could tell Cárcano had not lived to see its first pale light.

The house was clean and tidy; typical of my friend, for my taste a little too concerned with keeping things shipshape. No wardrobe door was open, and the only thing strewn on the floor was his body. The murderer appeared to have focused on what he had come for. He had not forced a door or window, so Cárcano must have known him and trusted him enough to let him in. Perhaps when he called me the man was already with him, pressing a gun to his head.

Edmundo was not the kind to get mixed up in anything dangerous. In recent years he had some wild scheme for making fuel from grain crops. He had found a backer, a banker willing to underwrite his research and then invest in the small business or co-operative Cárcano set up, of which he was chairman and general secretary. The other members were geeks, people obsessed with changing the molecules of whatever came within their grasp, building new worlds from the leftovers of the present one. In other words, people willing to give themselves a hard time to show uncaring humanity that if we have made planet Earth a dangerous place to live in, there is nevertheless still time to save it.



When I called Cárcano’s daughter to tell her the news she sobbed at the end of the line, but said she had been afraid that something like this was going to happen. She is about the same age as her father’s girlfriend.

“Since he left my mother for that tart he’s been getting mixed up in funny business,” Isabel said. She was as indignant as ever about her father’s betrayal: to her way of thinking, his lustful adventure had exploded like a depth charge in their happy home. “He neglected his job. Thirty years with the same company! He was going to retire next year, and the firm was going to give him a gold medal. They had even promised to pay him extra to make up for the crappy state pension he had been contributing to all his life. He and Mummy had planned to travel to Italy, to visit our grandparents’ house in Bologna.”

Isabel cried for three pesos and forty-two cents’ worth of my longdistance call. From the public telephone box I could see the sea and a cold, clear night falling over the deserted beach. I was thinking what a good idea it would be to have a little nest of my own in a place like this.

“What ‘funny business’ did your father get involved in?” I asked when it seemed the tears were drying up.

Isabel, in Buenos Aires, hesitated, sniffed, took a deep breath, sighed.

“We need to meet. I don’t trust any phone in this country of informers, where half the population is listening in to what the other half is saying.”

“O.K., but do tell your mother, and the burial is in Bahía Blanca.”

When I mentioned the burial, a lump came to my throat. A steadfast friend who died in Mediomundo, a beach that does not appear on any tourist map, down round the arsehole of the world.

He and I met when there was still military service in Argentina. Serving the fatherland for eighteen months, preparing mate tea for the sergeants, cleaning the latrines in the officers’ mess, going out in the early hours on sordid military operations to frighten the civilians. We were thirty-six when a drunken general gave the order to invade the Malvinas. Too old to fight a war that was lost before it began, and yet two decades later my friend abandoned his wife Mónica for a twenty-year-old blonde who was scarcely born when another general surrendered Port Stanley to save the lives of thousands of soldiers, not to mention his own.

Time can take on weird dimensions, like the elongated shadows in this sharp evening light. If, as the tango says, “twenty years are nothing”, they are far too much when it comes to two lives as far apart as Edmundo’s and his near-adolescent and now-vanished blonde. All the past, all the memories you carry with you as a camel carries its hump simply do not exist for someone whose over-riding concern is the future. How could the two of them have set out on a journey together? Where could they go? Whichever direction they took, it would be tearing something apart.

The sun set over the beach. Rather than travel another fifty kilometres to Bahía Blanca, I decided to spend the night in my dead friend’s house.

We take some decisions in only a few seconds, but soon find that the rest of our life is not time enough to regret them.

The house was better equipped for a good time than for a death. The fridge was full, there was a shed at the end of the garden piled high with firewood, whisky and cognac in the bar, two T.V.s with a satellite dish, bookshelves stocked with bestsellers enough for anyone not concerned to explore the mysteries of serious literature, a sound system with C.D.s of the Rolling Stones, Julio Sosa and the Leopoldo Federico Orchestra; Eduardo Falú singing Castilla and Leguizamon; Mozart, Charly García, Skinny Spinetta; Lita Vitale and Tita Merello. You could sit on the sofa in the small, warm living-room and wait peacefully enough for a giant wave to come and sweep everything away.

But tsunamis do not ring the doorbell. And it is only in the movies that beautiful women call to say hello after dark. That was why when somebody rang the bell I thought it must be Edmundo they were looking for and I would find myself confronted with a lovely face pouting with disappointment.

“Isn’t it horrible?” the blonde said, as though we were old friends. She swept past me without explaining who she was, although it was not difficult to work out that she must be the Lolita who had brought a little joy to Edmundo’s autumn years.

“Pablo Martelli,” I said, holding out my hand, but she turned and clung to me as if I were a piece of driftwood on the high seas after her ship had gone down.

Her hair was damp from the evening mist. It gave off an enchanting fragrance of wild strawberries in a wood, if you could imagine that smell with your eyes closed when you’re being clung to as though you were a drowning woman’s only hope.

“I’m Lorena.”

She said this with her head pressed against my shoulder, her face buried in my shirt – the only clean one I had brought, thinking I would be gone two nights at most.

“They murdered him. They shot him like a dog before he had the chance to explain he wasn’t going to keep the money. Poor Poppa, dying like that just when we had all we needed to start a new life and be happy.”

If what she said was true, I could well understand her dismay. Losing a still attractive, intelligent and healthy man in his sixties, especially someone as relatively well off as Edmundo, must be a real blow in times like these when there is so much unemployment and the young have to face so many existential uncertainties. As far as I could recall Cárcano saying, Lorena was not a career woman, although she had studied for a degree in something or other at a private university. She had been wasting her time in employment agencies or multinationals where they employ graduate students to run bank errands, when all of a sudden: bingo! she runs into Edmundo.

“Tell me what happened,” I said, not at all impatient to come out of our embrace. “I didn’t know Edmundo had enemies.”

When I said this, she cast off her life raft. She headed for the bar to pour herself a whisky. It was only after she had gulped it down that she seemed to realise I was still there.

“You shouldn’t stay here,” she said. “It’s not safe.”

“You’re right. Besides, as you’ve been living with Edmundo, this is your place, and I’m an intruder. But my only other choice was to go to Bahía Blanca. Isabel is arriving tomorrow.”

My news disturbed her. She did not ask why Edmundo’s daughter was coming because the answer was obvious. She went to the picture window as though she could see the ocean outside despite the dark night under a new moon.

“Poppa wanted to get away from his family,” she said.

“But Isabel was his only daughter, and therefore his favourite.”

She smiled a wan smile.

“We have to get out of here.”

She walked back towards me. I wondered how long it had taken her to seduce her “Poppa”. Two months, two weeks, two days, two hours, two minutes? She could have broken her record with me if the body had not been lying there still so fresh in its pool of blood, and Edmundo’s eyes were not staring so intently at us, fixed at the moment of his death.



Half an hour later we were speeding down Route 3 on our way to nowhere. Lorena warned me not to call Isabel or anyone else from my mobile.

“They trace all the calls,” she said. “They’ll be onto us before you hang up.”

“If I’m not at the funeral tomorrow, she’s going to feel even worse than she does now.”

As soon as the words left my mouth, I regretted them: the look the blonde gave me said it all – finding my dead body next to Poppa’s would be no comfort to his daughter either. I did not do much better when I asked who it was who was tracing the calls.

“If I knew that, we wouldn’t have been caught by surprise in such an isolated spot, playing the happy couple,” she said. She lit a cigarette, drew on it as if it were a condemned prisoner’s last, then passed it to me. The filter tip was sticky with fragrant lipstick.

“It’s not so disastrous to die happy.”

“Poppa didn’t have many friends,” she said. “People he could trust, I mean,” she added, disturbed by what I had said.

“Who was with him when he called me last night? Who does the money that he wasn’t going to keep belong to?”

A blonde silence, smoke drifting up between the windscreen and me, the straight line of the road disappearing ahead like the sides of a triangle whose apex we were travelling towards at 140 kilometres per hour. She did not know who he was with: she had gone on to Bahía Blanca on her own, and come back alone.

“My cousin is in hospital there. She’s in intensive care. Her parents both died in a car accident; my cousin survived, but she’s paralysed down one side of her body, and the rest of her doesn’t know what’s happened yet.”

I gave an involuntary shudder. Lorena might be beautiful, but she could be a twenty-year-old Fate who spelled the end for any amorous, comfortably off old man who came within reach. She was making a big mistake with me, though. She obviously had no idea how uncomfortably off I was.

I did not believe a word of her story.

“We could turn off to Bahía,” I said. “The city’s only five kilometres from here.”

At this, she dropped a delicate white hand on the steering wheel. I was forced to hold on as tightly as I could, then had to pull hard to straighten up to avoid the truck hurtling towards us, horn blaring, on his side of the road. I could imagine the curses he was screaming to himself in his lonely cabin.

“So where are we headed?” I said as we sped on past the turning to the city. “Why can’t we go into Bahía Blanca, for Chrissake?”

She said nothing, and I relented. That was my second big mistake of the night.



Three more hours driving and we were leaving Viedma behind. At this time of the morning it was a ghost city, and the whole day through it would be the small, insignificant capital of Rio Negro province, a place to which an ex-president with grandiose ideas once announced that he was going to transfer the capital of Argentina. There must be so little oxygen in the stratospheres of power that the politicians’ neurones stop working. They come up with ideas that even an astronaut lost in space would realise were the product of their delirium or the junk food they are given in their ration pills.

I asked once more who the money belonged to, and where we were going, but this time Lorena was fast asleep. When she was awake she scarcely looked the twenty-four she claimed to be, but lying there asleep she was Nabokov’s heroine updated for the twenty-first century.

I stopped to fill the car with adulterated petrol – served by an attendant who looked as if he had come back from the grave. Sunken-cheeked and silent, all he managed to grunt was the price. When I handed him a hundred peso note, he gave it straight back.

“If you’ve no change, you’ll have to stay here until someone who has turns up,” he said with all the grim authority of a prison warder. He wiped his hands on a filthy rag and spat his phlegm onto the ground. “It’s damn cold out in this desert. Come inside and have a mate.”

I suspected that, apart from a thermos of hot water and the mate, and perhaps a packet of crackers, in his lair he was probably hiding a loaded shotgun, just itching to fire at the first client who used the excuse of having no change to drive off without paying. I bowed to the inevitable: the girl was sound asleep, and I had no urgent wish to carry on with a journey to the uttermost south.

“I’m going to the toilet,” I said. “No sugar with my mate.”

In the broken mirror, lit by an anaemic bulb, I hardly recognised the face staring back at me.

I thought of my cat Félix Jesús and the disappointment on his round, battered face when he got back and discovered I was not in the apartment. The only comfort he and I have is that we occasionally coincide, and can rub against each other like Aladdin’s lamp and rouse early morning genies to make us feel less alone.

When finally I emerged from the toilet, my car and the girl had disappeared.

“Two men pulled up in a Ford Fiesta,” the ghoulish attendant said. “One of them stayed in the driving seat; the other got into your car. He drove off with the girl, with the Fiesta as escort. Anything to do with you?”

“The car was mine. The girl was a friend’s.”

“Ah,” said the attendant. He offered me a frothy, bitter mate with crackers.

Everything has its positive side. Pessimists say the world is going to end tomorrow or the day after; optimists insist it is born anew each day when we wake up alive. The sum of biological processes the earth is made up of are blithely uninterested in this sterile debate. The same nonsense gets created and recreated while poets wander about like scalded cats, skulking from their former loves so they can write about them.

The positive side to the fact that Lorena had been abducted in my car was that two hours later I was on board a Skania travelling up from Patagonia with a load of sheep, was able to jump down at the outskirts of Bahía Blanca at 9.00 in the morning, and arrived on time for my friend’s funeral. I did not tell either Mónica, his distraught wife, or Isabel about my night-time excursion with Lorena. That would only have fuelled their hatred, and this, as everyone knows, is the enemy of consolation and not to be recommended in the peace of a cemetery.

The topic came up anyway, because Mónica could not get it out of her mind that if “that little tart” had not appeared in Edmundo’s life the two of them would by now be on that trip of a lifetime in Europe.

“He was never a philanderer. I don’t understand it,” she sobbed. A couple of paces behind her, Isabel was waiting for the chance to tell me what she had found out about the funny business her father had been involved in. “He was never unfaithful,” Mónica cried. “Never a hair on his clothes that wasn’t his; never any lipstick or perfume that wasn’t mine.”

I envied my friend his widow’s poor memory. As I put my arms round her so that she could let it all out, I recalled the nights Edmundo had turned up at my apartment because Mónica had thrown him out after discovering passionate love letters to him, or telephone numbers scribbled on paper napkins which were answered, when she rang them, by sleepy, sensual voices.

“The old goat,” was Isabel’s version when the two of us were alone together. “He used to drive her mad, but he had that knack of making us feel sorry for him which meant we all loved him despite his weaknesses. I thought that with his prostate problems he had changed his ways, that he would actually keep his word and give Mummy a peaceful old age, take her to see some of the world he had become so disenchanted with. How wrong can one be?”

“I suppose he wanted to play his last card, but by then he was already a loser. Why was he killed?”

We had arranged to meet at midday at a restaurant in the centre of Bahía Blanca. Exhausted by the journey and her distress, Mónica had stayed in their hotel. This might be the only chance Isabel had to share her discoveries and her theories with me.

“He made a very big mistake when he fell in love this time.”

“We always make mistakes. Otherwise it wouldn’t be love, it would be convenience.”

“I found these papers in his desk.”

Isabel took a folded brown envelope from her bag and put it on the table next to the bottle of mineral water. I opened it uneasily: after the night I had spent, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know about any of my friend’s little schemes. I would much rather have taken a bus back to Buenos Aires that same day, got home, shut myself in with Félix Jesús and taken a delicious, replenishing siesta.

If only I had.

“They’re about the research my father and his group of assistants were doing,” Isabel said when she saw me staring at a swirl of numbers and equations all over a hand-written report I could make nothing of, partly on account of the handwriting and partly because the technical stuff was beyond me.

“I know they were working on methods to change sunflowers into petrol or something like that,” I said.

“It was maize,” Isabel corrected me with a smile. “But a lot of people are doing similar research. In fact, they’ve already been successful in several countries. They call it bio-fuel. It’s an interesting development, but it’s not going to make the sheikhs paupers. Not in the near future, anyway.”

Having discarded Al-Qaeda and the possibility that Edmundo and his friends’ research might damage O.P.E.C.’s interests as the reasons for his demise, Isabel focused her anger on Lorena and her not inconsiderable charms.

“She used to call him at all hours of the day and night. I don’t think Daddy ever seriously considered leaving Mummy, but it got so that it was impossible for them to be together. He would answer the phone in bed and beg the little tart to hang up, while beside him Mummy was crying her eyes out and could not understand why, yet again, when they were of an age to be looking after grandchildren, her husband’s wanderlust was pushing her to do something she hated doing.”

“Throwing him out.”

That was what she did, and this time it was for ever, or so she said. And that was how it turned out, because a bullet fired at point-blank prevented Edmundo from coming back from wherever his lust had taken him.

“But it was three months from his leaving home to when he was shot,” Isabel said. “If you . . .