No One Loves a Policeman by Guillermo Orsi, Nick Caistor Read Free Book Online Page A

the left breast, straight to the heart. None of the three was a prostitute. I’m not saying they were nuns, but they were well-educated girls. At least the first two were, and I’m sure this one was too if she was your dead friend’s partner.”
    I told him about our one and only meeting, how we had been forced to flee, her obstinate refusal to speak during our night drive to nowhere, racing at 140 kilometers an hour along Route 3 until I almost ran out of petrol.
    I do not know whether he believed me when I said we had not stopped for a quick fuck. He would have done, he said in the same tone as one would warn a companion on a long journey that you needed to stop for a pee. Evidently he did not consider the possibility that a beautiful young woman like Lorena would be revolted by the idea that a toad with a stethoscope round his neck might jump on her.
    â€œYou’re not gay?”
    It was a question, but it sounded like a statement as he sat there holding his whisky glass up high like the Statue of Liberty’s torch.
    â€œMe?”
    â€œYes, you, Don Gotán. I’m just curious.”
    I felt as though I had been slapped as hard as in the police station, but this time it gave me a surge of adrenalin.
    â€œDon’t worry,” he said. “Nor am I.”
    I breathed a sigh of relief.
    â€œI lost my wife ten years ago. A galloping cancer that finished her off in a matter of days. It tore into her like vultures eating carrion, but she was lively and lucid to the last. Since then, I take on any job at all hours of the day or night.”
    â€œSuch as being the police doctor.”
    He moistened his lips with a fresh glass of whisky.
    â€œAnd you?”
    â€œI’m not a police doctor.”
    â€œSo what are you?”
    â€œI’m a policeman.”

    My tango woman Mireya could not believe I was a policeman either. Her real name was Debora, and she hated being called Mireya almost as much as she hated my profession. But who on earth in this day and age is called Debora?
    Burgos said this was no time to tell each other our life stories. Plenty of time for that if I was arrested, long years inside waiting for hearings that would be time and again postponed, judges and sentences coming and going, legal chicanery until my dying day. A policeman where, he wanted to know.
    â€œIn the capital.”
    â€œAh yes, the National Shame,” he said.
    â€œDon’t worry about my job, they threw me out.”
    He did not ask me why. Perhaps he was saving the question for my years of retirement in jail, but then again if you’re about to go into battle it is best not to fill your rucksack with books and Bariloche chocolate. Too much information can slow you down. What is the point of discovering that the person meant to be on your side is in fact a psychopath who could dispose of you as easily as a computer virus?
    If we have to put our trust in someone, it is as well not to know too much about them.

9
    In spite of my being from the National Shame, Burgos seemed relieved I was a policeman. At first, his idea that we meet Inspector Ayala and Rodríguez in what he called “neutral territory” seemed crazy. It was like proposing that the Palefaces had something to offer besides pillaging and massacring the wretched natives. I was the Red Indian here, and normally I do not share a single puff of the pipes of peace I smoke locked in my bathroom.
    â€œI’m innocent. I hope that you at least are convinced of that. Otherwise you’ll think I’m double-crossing you.”
    â€œThat’s part of any game between card-sharps,” he said. “I’d do it without a thought. Cheating on a Buenos Aires policeman wouldn’t ruffle my conscience for a second, but it wouldn’t help me achieve the one thing that made me agree to come here: to find the son of a bitch who’s getting a kick out of butchering the sweetest, most interesting young women