“AND THAT WAS WHEN the shit hit the fan just before we go in. To be honest I don’t know if the Super was already onto Greco or what, he was no fool but the other one was the wiliest old devil you ever seen me he didn’t fool me though I saw right through him right from the start and I told that old baldy Chacón We can go next door to the kiosk now and ask him if you like I told him this one with a gob like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth he’ll have us dancing to his tune when he gets promoted we watch out and start what do they say watching our arses and lo and behold wiser than me old baldy Chacón turned out to be, stuck to the Subsuper like a stamp which was how he got enough cash together to retire and set up the kiosk which is what I should of done if I’d been cleverer. But I never was any good at sucking up, chip off the old block me, and I’m no stoolie like other people whose names I could mention, where was I oh so we got there and the door stroke of bad luck the slaughterhouse door was chained and padlocked fuck me if it wasn’t. And now what we going to do we can’t get the mayor out of bed to ask for the key a padlock this big yer granddaddy’d put on even though there was nothing to nick inside not even mice very careful he was about everything not like the mayor nowadays who only shows up to beg us coppers for funds at election time spend longer at headquarters than in their offices mayors do ain’t that the truth. No, got to be quick off the mark around here, the things I’ve seen in there if I squealed about everything I know not a soul in this town’d be spared right. And the Super who must of been pissed off with the whole business by now takes out his regulation gun and points it at the padlock and pow! and the padlock just sits there and again pow! pow! and all he managed to do was wake the guy up ’cause by that stage he’d nodded off and when he heard the shots he got hold of the queer first corporal’s knees and started crying like a girl, the first corporal couldn’t get him off he didn’t really try maybe he liked it eh? And in his fury the Super forgot the padlock and pointed the gun at Ezcurra and the first corporal goes Don’t shoot Superintendent shitting himself he was I’m telling you looked to me like things was getting a bit out of hand, and when the first corporal the one as was a bit homosexual I’m telling you manages to break loose and the Super does have a clear shot he points the gun at him and I don’t know if he’s looked into his eyes or what, my old man who knew all the tricks used to say to me if you ever have to do it do it but don’t let them look into yer eyes because you’ll never get their eyes out of yer head after that, but anyroad we can all see the Super hesitate and that famous steady hand of his starts shaking.”
Sayago pauses dramatically, conscious of the spell which, not his words as he believes, but the horrific events they drag behind them have cast on us. I take a last toke on a cigarette I seem to have been smoking for hours and, when I stub it out, I see all the others in the ashtray. I feel really sick and fight to turn my oncoming retch into a mere belch. Through the veil of nausea and hatred and alcohol I watch the features of the ex-police corporal as he orders another drink without waiting for my nod.
“To tell you the truth,” says Sayago, downing his drink in one the moment it hits the table, “till then I had full confidence in the Super but well like, to be honest he went down a bit there. I mean a chief say sends you into a confrontation go go go with the bullets flying and watches his own arse what do the troops do then? And I tell you the moment Greco realised he was on him like a wolf on a sick lamb I’ll take care of it if you like sir like that he said it to him in his little arse-licking voice but let’s not kid ourselves at that moment it was the worst insult he could of come out with. And at first the Super stands there struck dumb his eyes bulging, still had his finger on the trigger, and when he gets his voice back he goes You think I can’t do it. So it’s you who’s giving me classes now is it Sonny? What’s wrong, got an itchy arse and think you can scratch it better in my chair do you? You’ll sit in my chair the day the Virgin bangs her son you little dumbfuck, you’re hurrying me up? What if I just don’t fucking feel like it now? eh? What if I feel like waiting a bit? Got a problem with that have you? the Super yells this close to him and Greco sort of pauses and says to him in a different tone Not me Superintendent, but Colonel Carca will, and that was it, the Super couldn’t of stood there stiller if he’d been hit on the head by the slaughterman’s hammer. That was when the man went down in my eyes, me I knew him but he suddenly looked, how can I put it, ten years older, more … Looked like an old-age pensioner he did. Myself if he’d reacted at that moment and stood up to that Judas I’d of stood by him I swear, guns blazing if necessary but the Super he … was gone, vanished, poof, it was suddenly like he wasn’t there any more. But well, no wonder right? Greco, his protégé, his man, his right-hand man, had just fessed up to him he’d been working for the military behind his back,” says the ex-corporal, and for a few seconds he sits there staring into space, his mouth slack, before picking up the drooling thread of his speech. “That’s what Greco was like, soon as yer back was turned he’d stick the knife in, like a woman, ’cause he didn’t have it in him to do it to yer face, you need eyes where the sun don’t shine with his kind, sometimes not even that’s enough I mean look what happened to me and the Super,” mumbles Sayago sinking deeper and deeper into the muddy bottom of self-pity. “From then on the Super may have still been giving the orders but Greco was calling the shots, blew the padlock off with one bullet he did and kicked the door open and if I’m not wrong he went in first then the Super and he says to us Greco does Surround the place he says to us and make sure nobody comes near and closes the door so we can’t see.”
“What about Ezcurra?” I ask.
“What about Ezcurra?” asks Sayago forgetting to disguise his annoyance at the interruption.
“Did they leave him outside?”
For a second Sayago narrows his grim-looking eyes even more, then they swivel back to the empty glass and decide to smile again.
“If they left him outside why would they of gone inside? To give each other some tongue? I told you, the arse bandit stayed outside.”
“With you,” says Licho, and realises too late that his clarification sounds like an insinuation.
“What do you mean?”
Without waiting for my order Nene Larrieu fills Sayago’s glass and diverts his attention just in time. Sayago drains it before going on:
“I swear I can remember it like I was there, sun’d just come up and it was getting warmer, looked like another scorcher, no sign of the storm, blew straight past us in the end, can even remember a chimango on a tree branch, flew off at the shot, the metal walls made twice as much noise. People today still argue about which one pulled the trigger, for me it was the Super ’cause he had more blood on his clothes and besides he was an incredible shot, once went out partridge-hunting with him and he’d bring them down with a twenty-two, and when I counted them he’d hit them every one in the head or the neck, one shot, not one of them did I have to finish off.”
“It’s difficult to miss at five centimetres,” remarks Guido, hating him. Sayago’s too drunk to notice.
“But I can’t get Greco’s face out of my head. He was looking down so the Super wouldn’t realise but I saw he had this grin on him from ear to ear. I reckon if it hadn’t of been for him the Super wouldn’t of done it. Did it ’cause Greco provoked him he did. But there you go … Nene, I ordered another shot of caña for Christ’s sake, are you going to take all night! You tell him not to pour me any more Don? Come on then, what you waiting for? So there they were. It was just getting light and people’d just started walking the streets, not many, it was Sunday luckily, and we hadn’t brought spades or kerosene or anything. Then Sergeant Chacón got this bright idea. My brother-in-law’s smallholding, he says to Greco, it’s just down the road. Off the Fuguet road. We’ll have everything we need there and we won’t have to go through town. So that’s what we did. I didn’t go ’cause after we loaded him in the trunk of the first patrol car — me without looking ’cause the sight of blood makes me queasy — the Super sent us back, me and the Inspector … Bonfanti!”