Holy City by Guillermo Orsi Page A

she would be back so late—“look what time it is, what motel have you come from, you whore?” The landing outside was filled with shouts and the faces of their neighbors, consortium hyenas roused by the smell of blood.
    She left him, but he followed her across half the city before tracking her down to a room in a boarding house in Lanús Este, lent as an emergency measure by a fellow university student. He went down on his knees and begged forgiveness. He loved her, he never thought he could stoop so low: “But you have to understand, I’m under a lot of pressure, I work with the dregs of society,” he said, trying to justify himself. “They’re clearing everything out because democracy is on its way. They don’t want to be sent to jail or lynched.”
    â€œPoor Romano, I could have saved his life. ‘I’ll resign tomorrow,’ he told me, ‘we’ll go far away, into the interior if you want. We can live in peace there. You set up your lawyer’s practice and I’ll open a shop, a baker’s for example. My old man was a baker, so I know the trade, it’s great.’”
    She almost agreed. She imagined herself in a typical small town. Just another local couple, the lawyer and her baker husband. Dawns with the smell of bread and freshly baked cakes, happiness with yeast.
    â€œIf I had said yes, maybe he wouldn’t have done what he did.”
    But she was scared. She might not be a psychoanalyst like Bértola, but Verónica knew that men who turn to violence are almost always hopeless cases. And she had not studied the law all those years to end up as a punchbag for Kid Baker. She imagined the scandals there would be in that small town, the fingers pointed at her as she went by with her bruised face. She said no.
    Out of spite, or because he was really convinced (she would never know which), the next day Romano went to see a magistrate and denounced what was happening in the federal police: files being burned, threats so that no-one said anything. The mafias thought democracy would not last long, so all they had to do was resist. Everyone was to stay quiet below ground until the triumphant crowing of the communists had died away again and the mustachioed Kerensky who had won the elections by reciting the preamble to the Constitution had been brought down a peg or two.
    â€œRomano obeyed his conscience,” says Bértola.
    â€œHe’d already fired the bullet that blew his brains out the day he went to see the magistrate a month later,” Verónica concludes.
    Still Bértola did not make a move, sitting primly opposite her, holding a glass of whisky (made in Argentina, to boot) that would be mostly water by the time the ice melted. All he could say was that she should stop collecting all these ghouls, should let go a little, try something different. He advised her to keep away from the scrounger she had taken in the previous night. She told him at least she had not given him a gun, as she had Miss Bolivia.
    â€œYou don’t mean to say that …” She did mean to say that. The Bersa was the same one that Romano, “presumably and according to all the evidence,” used to kill himself—as stated in the report she was sent, together with the few belongings he kept in his police locker.
    â€œYou should have got rid of that revolver.”
    Bértola’s years of study cannot cope. He would need to be a guru, shaman, North-American psychiatrist and Middle-Eastern ayatollah allrolled into one even to begin to understand the beautiful woman sitting opposite him. He says goodbye to her with a kiss on the cheek. As soon as she has climbed into the taxi and he has shut his front door, he gulps down the whisky she left untouched.
    Back in her apartment, Verónica finds Pacogoya sprawled on her living room sofa, fast asleep in front of the television. On the screen there is a boxing match going on. Two overweight