Holy City by Guillermo Orsi Page A

maid who answers reminds her rudely that it is Saturday, that his honor went to bed late the previous night because he had a social engagement, that if she phones him on Monday she is sure she will find him in.
    â€œIf his honor doesn’t come to the phone at once, I swear on oath as a lawyer that tonight he’ll be in the headlines of Crónica,” says Verónica, without raising her voice a single decibel.
    The whale calf gives a half-smile of approval. It is obvious the lawyer’s methods coincide with his idea of how conflicts are meant to be resolved outside his marine world.
    â€œI’ve only just got to bed,” the magistrate tells her, as if anyone were interested in his carousing. Verónica responds in kind, informing him that she didn’t sleep at all, that in the early hours the cable channels repeat every program, including the news. “So why didn’t you sleep? I never told you to go to the market at night. Going there a while in the morning is more than enough.”
    â€œI can assure your honor that if you were told one of these nights that someone had been decapitated, that there had been a bomb threat and a Bolivian had almost been buried alive, you wouldn’t sleep either.”
    She takes a deep breath to replenish the oxygen she used up in giving her little speech. Silence at the far end of the line. The sound of someone clearing their throat, then more silence. He must be writing it all down, Verónica guesses. Magistrates note everything they hear down on a bit of paper, just in case.
    â€œWhere was this decapitated body?”
    â€œIn San Pedro, Buenos Aires Province.”
    â€œMy jurisdiction is Lomas de Zamora. Tell me about the bomb alertand the abduction of the Bolivian.” It is Verónica’s turn to fall silent. She finds it hard to focus on what the magistrate wants to hear, to forget about the headless body in the orange groves. There is no apparent connection, so the magistrate dismisses it: he is keen to return to bed. “Don’t let it affect you,” he advises her, after Verónica has told him what she was told. “Is Chucho there with you?”
    â€œChucho?”
    The whale calf flaps his flipper and blinks as though he is having his passport photo taken. His way of showing his delight at being included. Verónica hands him the phone and Chucho listens to his instructions. He nods several times in rapid succession and waves his flippers again—as if he was in the pool catching fish thrown to him, thinks Verónica.
    When Chucho hands her back the phone, the magistrate has already hung up.
    â€œHe’s gone off to sleep, the bastard!”
    If Verónica quits now she will lose a lot of money and will return in a bad mood to her apartment, where she will find Pacogoya sleeping like a fallen angel on her sofa, after trying to force her down onto the living room carpet like the second-rate porno movie actor he imagines he is. A knee to the balls from Verónica finally convinced him of one thing: that violence had become part of what until then had been a comfortable existence as a cheap seducer.
    â€œYou’ve got nothing to fear,
doctora
,” says Chucho. He seems to have grown even bigger—probably due, thinks Verónica, to the words of encouragement from the magistrate.
    Verónica smiles, pretending to be flattered. She feels slightly sorry for this hulk with his Magnum .44 and the Uzi in the boot of his gray car with tinted windows that he uses to fetch and carry her to and from the market. He seems like a nice kid, a baby whale, no pretensions to know everything like her, but not someone who takes advantage of the fact that he is armed and two meters tall to extort money fromtaxi drivers or shopkeepers, like so many youngsters of his age do. Youngsters Verónica springs from police stations so they can be shot from any passing patrol car without even leaving the neighborhood.
    Fed up