Holy City by Guillermo Orsi

sheets of paper.
    â€œWe’re going now. But we’re watching you. If you’ve got anything wrong, pow!” says the other man.
    â€œHe looks a bit like Che Guevara,” the first one says.
    â€œIt’s true, but Che was a revolutionary and this guy’s a heap of shit. You know what to do—count to a thousand.”
    They leave. Pacogoya cannot believe they have gone, or that the drugs are there, intact, in their pretty little bags on Uncle’s bed. Better not to think about what they made him do. He scoops up the bags, counts to five hundred and goes out into the corridor. They must have walked calmly down the staircase, because the lift is still there with its door open. He gets in and looks at himself, split in two in the cracked mirror.
    â€œEver onwards to victory,” he says, pressing the ground-floor button.

2
    When the moon left the stage and a moist south-westerly breeze sprang up, the two of them went down to Bértola’s living room for a whisky. Only Mauser stayed on the terrace, gnawing bones that had become a reality.
    Verónica was worried Bértola might try something after the whisky, but the guy (he was a psychologist, after all) must have made a mental note of how she had kneed Pacogoya and did not want to repeat theexperience. Or perhaps he really was becoming her friend, as well as sharing the office costs.
    Too much baggage, Verónica told herself later, trying to explain Bértola’s good behavior. She had called him on his night off, then turned up on his terrace with stories more suited to a pathologist than a psychoanalyst.
    Occasionally, when she looked at herself in the mirror on one of her rare self-indulgent mornings—good figure, tits still firm, backside as perky as her nice nose, light-green eyes, thick jet-black hair that was all hers and was never dyed—Verónica forgot she was twice a widow and that men are superstitious about women who have buried their men.
    Bértola was a saint. He had put up with her—for free—on his night off. He had fed her the steak and everything else he had bought to share with his dog. He must have taken pity on her when he saw how bowed down she was by the weight of all her worries.
    â€œYou were very young when you married your cop.”
    â€œI was twenty. At that age, you don’t understand a thing. You talk about everything, but you don’t get it. You’re an open book—plus I was a student at the time. I have a good memory. I talked and talked, always quoting Greeks and Romans.”
    â€œSo you hooked up with a Roman. You fell in love with his name.”
    Verónica smiles. Her hand grows cold on the whisky glass.
    â€œArgentina was a mess. I wanted to get out. I had all my papers and a contract to work in an Argentine restaurant in Barcelona. I couldn’t give a damn about graduating as a lawyer. Then Romano came on the scene.”
    Bértola bites his tongue to avoid the all too obvious associations: “Chaos looks for authority.” He recalls yet again that it is Saturday night; she is not a client. But it turns out Verónica can read thoughts as well as case files.
    â€œHe was authority and I fell for it,” she says. “I got pregnant beforeI finished university. We used to screw in a cheap motel for cops where they played sirens instead of muzak. Romano had just finished his police training. He swore he’d never tortured anyone; I’ve even got a friend who’s a communist, he told me.”
    â€œHow touching. What happened with your pregnancy?”
    â€œI lost the baby.”
    Romano reacted with a violence he had been careful not to display before. It was her fault, she tried to do too much, she wanted things that normal women did not aspire to. He demanded she stop studying; she refused. Then one night when she came home from the faculty she opened the apartment door and ran straight into his fist. She had not told him