“EZCURRA USED TO DO HER, know what I mean?” Sacamata junior asks Guido unnecessarily and winks at him. “That chinita of Neri’s, La Nena they used to call her. Got enough for the first one?” he asks his partner, Licho, who mutters, “They’re yours,” eyeing the only card on the table, my dodgy six of cups. “That’s the reason the only reason Neri whacked him. Mum’s the word,” he says and plays a knave of clubs. “That whole circus of the general inquiry was to hide his real motives,” he goes on and I make the most of the opportunity to give Guido the signal. To get our opponents to bite he opts to bait the hook in silence and make the first with a three of coins to distract them. “Rosas Paz’s request suited him down to the ground and if he played hard to get it was only to throw people off the scent. To the girl he … Call!” he abruptly orders his partner, who shakes his head.
“They’re loaded Batata,” he mutters sceptically. “They’re trying to draw us in.”
“Nah bag o’ nails, look what they played. Call I’m telling you,” he insists, and as a man resigned to his fate, Licho calls an envido that Sacamata and Guido promptly double and triple. “Thirty-three,” I say first, having led, and after the superfluous “They’re good,” Licho plays his three of swords to match my lead and rescue what’s left of the hand. Six beans slide my way over the table.
“They don’t lie but they are tricky,” Licho reflects philosophically, and Sacamata junior adds, “Don’t worry, we’ll get our own back in the second. What can they do to us with the seven of cups and where was I oh yes if you don’t believe me,” he says to Guido, “explain that business about La Nena got off lightly she did with a man’s haircut, shorn for a whore she was and that’s as far as Neri went, after all anyone who’d stoop any lower for a chinita looks like a right berk,” he concludes, while I turn up the corner of the six of swords and give Guido the signal for the seven.
TO SEE IF I CAN LET OFF some of the accumulated anger that’s starting to blind me, I decide to go out running one afternoon with Guido along the edge of the lagoon. Charging into the wind, which is like a hand on my chest pushing me backwards, skipping over strips of tyre, rusty tin cans and dead caracaras littering the verge, I rattle out what’s been eating away at me before I run out of breath.
“I’m beginning to think,” I tell him, “they’re not far wrong — the people who say Neri — wanted to spare Ezcurra — He might’ve really — meant it — he might’ve really believed — that by telling everyone — they’d stop him — and in a way — he became the instrument — the executioner, but not the judge — of what the people wanted — that it was Malihuel, not him — that decided Ezcurra should die — and that afterwards” (I’ve got a pain in the pit of my stomach now) “they washed their hands — saddled him — with the blame” (I can’t draw a full breath) “they made him a scapegoat — and they bad-mouth — him — to cover up their tracks — and he — by killing Ezcurra — was only — complying with — the will — of the people?” I finish with a wheeze and pull up, panting, unable to go any further. Jogging on the spot, Guido offers to wait for me. We haven’t yet completed the first of the eight kilometres he normally covers. I tell him to go on alone, that I’d rather take advantage now that it isn’t too far to walk back, and once his energetic figure disappears round a wooded bend in the path I light up and smoke my cigarette leaning against a post, watching the waterbirds take off and land on the steel-grey waters of the lagoon.
“BEHIND EVERY ONE of the Superintendent’s questions,” states Don Augusto Noel, now as then owner of the Trigo Limpio bakery, ‘Malihuel’s Number One’, “there was a veiled threat. Know what he suggested when it became clear I was reluctant to give him the support he was after? That if we didn’t sort things out ourselves the milicos would move in from Rosario and quite a few more would end up carrying the can. The righteous end up paying for the sinners was how he put it, who knows how he told them apart. Know what else he said? I can remember him standing there clear as daylight. Better if this matter remains in police hands Don Augusto. You know what the difference between the milicos and the police is? Us policemen fish with a hook, the milicos use a net. It’s up to all of you,” Don Augusto recalls, tongs in hand, before asking me, “Shall I put some vigilantes on too?”
AND ONE NIGHT, a Saturday as it happens, my mind, blunted by the exponential proliferation of voices, reaches saturation point and I take to the streets in search of some relaxation too disgraceful to confess to my hosts, who, since my arrival, have generously granted me the use of either of their two Fiat Unos, though out of deference to Guido’s extra headlights and souped-up engine I always take Leticia’s. I park half a block from the infamous Kawasaki Bar and the moment I’m inside I confirm that the good townspeople have been understating their execration. The Kawasaki is a godforsaken dive within whose walls bedecked with cave paintings of fluorescent rockers and laminated posters of motorcyclists and motorists painted in primary and complementary acrylics circulate twenty or so longhairs in leather jackets and big-collared shirts unbuttoned to the sternum, followed around by a barely less numerous band of little cumbia-dancing spades flaunting rotund thighs beneath their skimpy miniskirts or an abundant volume of buttock moulded by the biting white cloth of their trousers. The jukebox oscillates between heavy-metal numbers — outdated before they became dated — and the usual cumbia rhythms. The drinks lined up behind the precarious bar are unalleviatedly foul, and the service slow and gruff — the place is, from one end to the other, exactly what I needed and I soon find what I came looking for. Precariously balanced over the black hole of the toilet I separate two lines of charlie, cut with that other, unnamed soap powder that never passes the test in the TV ads, and further emboldened by a shot of gin I go up to the only face I recognise in the crowd. If she can’t tell from my sudden verbal outpouring and my sparkling corneas, she must have a very good nose because, after a few minutes, she accepts my proposal unquestioningly and walks at my side the few blocks that separate us from the darkest dirt streets. For half a joint of the more than decent local weed and what’s left of the soapy coke she lets me fuck her against the shadowy corner of a deserted hallway; I could have driven her out to the Mochica but I’m aroused by the echo of my vague teenage memories, and the cold on her nipples that no bra separates from her T-shirt. It isn’t love, but for once it spares me the tiresome process of spanking one out in a house not your own. Two days later, when I go into the telephone exchange, Soledad predictably pretends not to recognise me, or more accurately, pretends only to recognise the man who makes regular if ever less frequent visits, asking for a booth to call Buenos Aires.