Holy City by Guillermo Orsi Read Free Book Online

Arecho, a “for-export” town on the edge of the pampas where tourists are taken to eat barbecued beef and gawp at the gauchos with their daggers and baggy trousers. The gauchos, though, do it with young steers. They upend them with a single flip, but that is where their prowess ends: they soon let theanimal go, then stand up to receive the applause of their grateful audience.
    But the German never understood that Pacogoya was not shrieking with pleasure. His own eloquent gestures were meant to convey how pleased he was, because normally he suffered from premature ejaculation, yet this time had managed to contain himself for another couple of minutes. In fact he was so delighted he gave Pacogoya the gold wrist-watch he had bought for the ungrateful girl who had left him high and dry in Piraeus.
    Pacogoya spent the next seven nights flat on his stomach in his narrow cabin, until the German did not re-embark at Rio de Janeiro. He got lost in the city, probably enamored of some young
garoto
whom he doubtless rewarded, if he broke the record established by the tourist guide, with the necklace or earrings he had also bought for Miss Ungrateful of Greece.
    Whenever river silt, Antarctic icebergs or a strike lead to a cruise ship being delayed in port, Pacogoya takes it easy. He tries to be his own tourist guide. He looks for amorous adventures outside the routine and for the business opportunities that all cities offer to those who know how to take advantage of them.
    In Buenos Aires he is helped by the fact that he knows his way around. In recent years, as well as places to dance tango and restaurants where the tourists can stuff themselves with beef, the so-called Queen of the Río de la Plata has seen the growth of an activity that calls for speedy reflexes and a well-developed network of contacts. Selling drugs to foreign tourists is not the same as supplying the local pimply adolescents in their discos, schools or universities. The foreigners have no problem paying, but they insist on top-class stuff. They might spend silly money on a set of gaucho
boleadores
from some tourist trap on calle Florida, but when it comes to coke, they are experts. And not every dealer can get them what they want.
    Pacogoya took their orders the night before. News of the delay inBuenos Aires meant they were doubled. Anything unexpected creates anxiety among those who think they have bought every single minute of the rest of their lives, only to discover that the world, “external reality” as airheads and new-age psychologists call it, obeys its own laws. In the end, Pacogoya was scared by how much they wanted: he usually only made fifty- or sixty-gram deals; this time he was expected to come up with almost half a kilo of topnotch cocaine. In addition, absolutely all of them had paid up front and in Argentine pesos, banknotes adorned with portraits of national heroes completely unknown to them, looking on sternly as if they had helped found a real nation.
    His usual dealer meets him in his virtual office in the Florida Garden, a bar on the corner of Florida and Paraguay. Like liners in port, celebrities call in here for a while: local politicians and artists, intellectuals who write for newspapers that the middle class (although fewer and fewer of them) buy so as to know what to think, or more often to line the floors of their apartments with when they are going to paint the walls.
    â€œThat’s a lot, I can only supply half.”
    â€œWhere can I get the rest, Uncle?”
    He does not say so, but the dealer knows Pacogoya has got all the money on him. He can tell it from his hands, his eyes: even the way his lip trembles makes him an open book.
    â€œI’ll give you an address,” he says, writing on a scrap of paper. “Memorize it, then tear it up.”
    Glancing down at the piece of paper, Pacogoya immediately protests.
    â€œBut that’s not in Buenos Aires! Where on earth is San Pedro