No One Loves a Policeman by Guillermo Orsi, Nick Caistor

out, and hit the smooth-cheeked kid on the side of the head. I followed this up with a head-butt, then kicked out at the taller one, who had come over to help his friend kill me. I caught the .38 in mid-air and stuffed it into my belt. I carried on kicking the two of them on the floor until I could see from their rolled-up eyes that they had lost consciousness.
    The barman stood behind his counter like a waxwork dummy. Still clutching his stomach, Wolf asked if that was how I persuaded my customers to buy toilets and washbasins. The old lady lay face down on her table, either dead or in a faint, clinging to the pen she had been about to use to sign away all her chances of a dignified old age. Her seducer had vanished.
    Incredible as it may seem, I was already reproaching myself foralmost beating the life out of those two young thugs who, as soon as they left hospital and were released by the magistrate because they were minors, would find somebody else to shoot sooner than I would find Isabel or Edmundo’s killers.
    Wolf straightened up and poured himself another whisky. I called the real police to come and take care of things. When I hung up, Wolf and I stared at each other like two police frogmen at the bottom of a sewer.
    â€œThe country is on the skids, Martelli,” he said. “Buy dollars.”

3
    La Tarde
was a free sheet published by Argentina’s biggest-selling daily. It was handed out at rail and underground stations throughout Buenos Aires. Thousands of worker bees read this and similar publications while they clung on for dear life to the straps in the crowded carriages transporting them back home every evening. The fortunate few who managed to find a seat probably fell asleep by page two or three; those who had to stand perhaps got as far as page eleven, where Wolf had published under a banner headline:
    BLOND MODEL IS COASTAL KILLER’S THIRD VICTIM. BODY FOUND IN IMPERIO HOTEL BAHÍA BLANCA .
    Beneath, in smaller type:
    DOUBLE KIDNAPPING IN SAME REGION: MOTHER RELEASED; DAUGHTER STILL MISSING
.
    Wolf had taken a chance linking the two events. I called the paper to thank him. Distorted by a cheap synthesizer, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” kept me entertained while the operator searched for their chief crime correspondent. Without success.
    â€œParrondo isn’t in,” I eventually heard a woman’s voice say.
    â€œIs he sick?”
    â€œWho’s asking?”
    â€œA friend.”
    This time she hesitated before replying.
    â€œYou can probably find him at home.”
    It took some persuading to convince her that although I was Parrondo’s friend I did not have his home number. I explained who I was, and what had happened the day before. All the ambulances and patrol cars must have caught the attention of everyone working at the paper: they even took photographs, I said, although none of them were published.

    â€œDid you like the splash I gave your story, Martelli?” Wolf said, when finally I tracked him down. “Instead of congratulating me, they sent me on gardening leave. When they fire me and pay me compensation, I’m going to buy myself some love. So far, they’ve only given me a warning and a suspension, so I’m all alone.”
    He was in a good mood, which was rare for somebody whose job consisted of interviewing police informers, eating with drug traffickers and talking to victims’ relatives demanding justice. More often than not their loved ones had been murdered by the same police whose bosses he was trying to bribe over the meals he bought them.
    â€œIt’s like one of Dante’s circles in Hell,” he used to say when he tired of the comedy and was ordering another whisky with no ice in the bar where we had been attacked. “The people giving the orders to steal andkill, who sometimes even carry out the killings themselves, are the very ones protesting at the upsurge of violence here.”
    That was nothing