No One Loves a Policeman by Guillermo Orsi, Nick Caistor Page A

new in Argentina, I would remind him on the afternoons we used to spend together after he called me—like someone calling a doctor in an emergency. I recalled Perón saying that violence up above creates violence down below.
    â€œThat’s nonsense, empty words for the young idiots in that antediluvian era you managed to escape from. Just look what happened when they were in power back in ’73—a complete disaster. Don’t talk to me about politics, Martelli: all politicians care about is power, they grow fat like leeches on other people’s blood.”
    But this afternoon he was almost happy, or at least relieved, and excited too, because he thought he had got hold of one of the threads of the skein I was trying to disentangle.
    I picked him up at his place in Almagro. As he climbed into Isabel’s car he looked refreshed and triumphant, as if the assault and being suspended from the paper had been a tonic for him.
    â€œThere’s always a price to pay,” he said, once he had settled in the passenger seat and stroked the dashboard as if he were caressing a woman’s body. “I published the story not because I believed you but because I found out a couple of things about your dead friend which didn’t match the memories you seem to have of him.”
    â€œWe don’t choose our friends for their good behavior,” I said.
    â€œAlright, but we shouldn’t believe myths about them either. Let his widow cry for him if she likes. Talking of which, this car isn’t yours.”
    I pulled up at a corner simply to eye him with astonishment.
    â€œHow do you know that?”
    Drivers behind me began to sound their horns.
    â€œThe light’s green,” Wolf said. “You’d better move or we’ll be lynched.”
    He waited until we had set off again to talk about his sixth sense, his experienced journalist’s nose for seeking precise information rather than letting himself be taken in by appearances.
    â€œYou don’t earn a lot selling toilets.”
    â€œBathroom furniture.”
    â€œLet’s face it, not even with your ex-policeman’s pension on top would you be able to buy and run a car like this.”
    â€œI was thrown out of the force, so I don’t get a pension.”
    â€œWhich only goes to show how right I am. The car must belong to some widow or other, and the only one you’ve been dealing with recently is your friend’s.”
    â€œWhy does it have to be a widow? It could be a rich heiress, a businesswoman—a princess.”
    â€œSure, Cinderella.”
    Wolf lounged back in his seat, and would have put his feet on the dashboard if his arthritis had let him.
    â€œSo what have you found out, apart from the fact that the car could belong to the widow?”
    â€œLet’s go to the National Library,” he said, to my surprise, when he saw the outline of the massive building by the park off Avenida Figueroa Alcorta.

    The National Library is a futuristic palace that grew old before its time because they never finished building it. Now it has computers but no programs, and employees paid next to nothing. Wolf asked for a book by William Faulkner, and we went to sit in a corner of the reading room.
    â€œThis Yankee revived literature and won the Nobel Prize, back in the days when it was still a prize they gave to outstanding writers and not those in a particular clique. Nowadays the only people who read Faulkner are students like my son, Martelli.”
    â€œWe didn’t come here to read
Light in August
,” I said, whispering the words as Wolf had done to avoid us being thrown out. “Tell me onceand for all what on earth you found out about Edmundo Cárcano’s secret life.”
    â€œDon’t you realize you’ll never understand anything about the complexities of the human soul if you haven’t read writers like Faulkner? What do you read, Martelli?”
    â€œWhen I