Holy City by Guillermo Orsi Page B

with waiting for the accountant who promised to meet her at the market but who is probably off fishing in the lake at Chascomús, Verónica leaves the caravan to walk round the market.
    The stallholders are loading their goods onto trucks worth two hundred thousand dollars or onto broken-down jalopies. There is even one horse-drawn cart. Nothing is left of what until a couple of hours before had been a busy market: no underwear from Taiwan, no two-dollar Swiss watches, no brand-name clothes, no M.P.3s or thousand-dollar notebooks selling here for three hundred. Everything disappears onto trucks, jalopies or carts, off on the provincial merry-go-round until Tuesday night’s market brings them all back here once again.
    Birds’ guano is starting to fry on the tin roofs of the shanty town barely a hundred meters from the open-air market. Barefoot kids are already diving into the trash left by the stallholders, searching for what might have been thrown away: radios not even a deaf person would have bought, perfumes that stank as badly as the waters of the Riachuelo, leftover goods that could find no home. There is always something, and the kids are rats with sharp teeth and claws. If any of them happens to stay asleep when the market is being packed up, there will always be a stepfather or some other man to get them going with a couple of slaps.
    There is not much for Verónica to do in her office at the market this Saturday morning: her accountant has gone fishing and the magistrate has put her life in the hands of the whale calf. She asks him—the whale calf, that is—to take her to Liniers. There she gets out of the car and takes a number 28 bus, despite protests from Chucho, who insists his job is to pick her up from her apartment, leave her at the market, then take her home again. Veronica explains she wants to go home alone andthat nobody is going to do anything to her. She boards the bus and sits in the back row. She opens the window so that the breeze can ruffle her hair and make her feel more alive, not enveloped in some air-conditioned fishtank, hooked up to telephones that only ring to cause problems.
    She is not surprised when she sees Chucho’s car following the bus, then drawing up alongside in the middle of Avenida Paz. Chucho sounds his horn at her. He was not going to abandon her just because she asked him to, it is the magistrate he answers to, not a female lawyer who is not even from Lomas de Zamora. “Whose idea was it to send her to that den of thieves as inspector?” Chucho must be thinking, if his cetaceous brain is capable of thought.
    *
    While Verónica is traveling on her bus with the whale calf alongside to make sure she comes to no harm, a Colombian couple—a fifty-five-year-old man, a twenty-two-year-old woman—are being led from their room in a five-star hotel in the city center by men armed with revolvers and sub-machine-guns. To reach the room the men—four who go up, two at reception and another two outside the hotel—have had to step over the tourists sleeping in the corridors. “Be careful, they’re coughing up two hundred dollars a night,” the hotel manager told them, after all eight identified themselves as federal-police officers.
    They burst into the room using the magnetic card the manager has given them, after insisting they are not to let on to anyone he made things so easy for them and did not even ask to see a search warrant.
    The fifty-five-year-old Colombian man and the twenty-two-year-old Colombian girl are sleeping in each other’s arms. They look more like a honeymoon couple than the drugs baron Osmar Arredri, boss of the Carrera Cuarta neighborhood in Medellín, and his girlfriend. They are in Buenos Aires because they were on board the
Queen of Storms
on apleasure cruise. The blond girl is called (or says her name is) Sirena Mondragón. She is the pleasure in the fifty-five-year-old’s cruise. When she