Read Online Holy City by Guillermo Orsi - Free Book Online

jumps from the bed, naked and with her hands above her head, her tits dazzle the four feds training their guns on her.
    â€œPoppa’s out for the count. We drank a lot last night because the ship didn’t leave,” Sirena explains, pouting and looking so sad the leader of the group gives her a handkerchief to wipe away her tears.
    They shake Poppa roughly, then throw the fresh orange juice that room service brought up with the rest of his breakfast a few minutes earlier in his face. Poppa sits up, cursing them; when he makes to reach for his 9 m.m. gun sleeping like a cat on the bedside table, a karate-expert federal cop smashes his hand, then with the same imperceptible movement sends him crashing against the mini-bar.
    Down below in reception the manager is sweating like a boxer working at the punchbag. Half a dozen employees are nowhere near enough to look after the dozens of tourists complaining about the night they spent in the hotel corridors. They have mutinied, or something close to it, and are refusing to pay a single dollar or euro unless they are offered somewhere decent to spend the nights until their cruise liner is repaired.
    â€œWe came here to dance tango and eat your famous steaks, and we get treated like immigrants, for God’s sake,” one of them protests in an unidentifiable Spanish accent. He explains to his partner, who has an equally unidentifiable Spanish accent, that Argentines are more Italian than Spanish and that’s why you can’t trust them. They promise you one thing and do something completely different, for God’s sake.
    The manager watches as the posse of feds leaves without so much as a thank-you. The Colombian couple are only half-dressed; he stumbles along, but she is as upright as if she were on the catwalk at a Cacharel fashion parade.
    â€œI’ve got one free room,” the manager shouts to the line of first-world refugees. There is uproar, shouts of “I was here first,” while helooks meaningfully at one of his minions for him to go upstairs and see what damage the feds have caused.
    *
    It is four hours later, toward midday (by which time the stranded, mutinying tourists have formed a gypsy encampment in the lobby) and the classic red headlines of Crónica Television announce two breaking stories to the world: “Ghastly beheading on outskirts of San Pedro,” screams the first. Then, after the weather forecast—“30° in the shade: no let-up to the summer!”—the second news item: “Kidnapping in central hotel: fake feds rifle minibar and abduct Colombian couple.”

9
    â€œUrgent service needed for oil levels in my noddle,” says Verónica when she recognizes Damián Bértola’s voice on the phone.
    â€œIt’s Saturday night and I have a private life too.”
    â€œWhat does a psychoanalyst do with his private life on Saturday nights?”
    â€œIf he’s a Lacanian, he reads Freud. If he’s Freudian, he examines the interpretation of Jung’s dreams. If he’s a vegetarian, he could invite a criminal lawyer to come and eat a decent barbecue on his roof terrace.”
    â€œWhat about your children?”
    â€œFine, thanks. The boy’s in Spain, the girl in Mexico.”
    â€œYou’re on your own? You were going to make a barbecue just for yourself?”
    â€œMy dog’s with me. He’s the only patriot who hasn’t left Argentina. And that’s only because they won’t give him a European passport.”
    In less than half an hour the lawyer and the psychoanalyst are standing side-by-side in front of the glowing barbecue, the spicy smoke from grilled sausage fat swirling round them.
    Bértola lives alone in a large house he kept after his divorce. The children left seven years ago. Villa del Parque is a quiet neighborhood; the burglars walk on tiptoe, the serial killers go about their business quietly, the streets are lined by chinaberry