Read Online No One Loves a Policeman by Guillermo Orsi, Nick Caistor - Free Book Online Page A

minutes.”
    â€œThe wine’s for me. What did this ‘gentleman’ look like?”
    He licked his lips as though cleaning the rim of a glass, ready to try the chilled Torrontes wine the barman was busy opening.
    â€œThere were two of them,” he said, as though he had just remembered.
    â€œTwo gentlemen?”
    â€œYes, and two ladies. What’s so strange about that? Are you a policeman?”
    I filled his glass and poured a half for myself. He tossed the wine down in one gulp and held out the empty glass for more.
    â€œIt’s nice and cool.”
    I refilled it. This time he drank only half of it. The wine seemed to refresh his memory.
    â€œThose two were policemen as well. I can smell them,” he said, wrinkling his hooked sommelier’s nose. “Built like tanks. Not very tall, about my height. But built like tanks. Lots of gym and steroids.”
    He sat there staring at the counter, pretending to be lost in thought. I knew that if I seemed anxious, he would want more money. I said I was leaving.
    â€œThey all got into a car that was waiting for them,” he said in a rush.
    â€œWhat kind of car?”
    â€œOne of those 4×4s they have in the country. Tires as fat as airplane wheels. Red. A Chevrolet, I reckon.”
    â€œDid you see anything unusual or threatening? Did they push the women into the vehicle for example?”
    He fixed his cloudy eyes on me. They were as cold as the wine.
    â€œGentlemen, I said. Not killers. All muscle, but polite.”
    I paid for the wine and the second hotdog, which he had not touched. I commended him to get a relief driver for the Tandil run.
    â€œI like people who try to help,” he said, patting me on the back. “Tandil is just up the road. It’s all dead straight, and there isn’t much traffic. Thanks, though.”
    With that he swallowed another glass of wine, wiped his mouth on his sleeve, and winked at me as he left.
    All muscle but polite, two gentlemen had kidnapped Isabel and Mónica.
    Some time later I heard on the radio that a bus on its way to Tandil had left the road on one of the few bends on the highway from Tres Arroyos, had sailed over the roadside ditch and come to a halt in a soya field.

12
    All I had was someone else’s car and a fake I.D. card. There had been a beautiful blond waiting in bed for me, but she was dead. And the friend who had kindly invited me into all this mess had been dropped from the catalog too.
    Tres Arroyos is one of those hundreds of Argentine country towns that are pretty enough to the people living there but have nothing to tempt a visitor to spend so much as a night there. The inhabitants know their charms, and try hard to conceal the sheer boredom of the clean, deserted streets, the grid of avenues round the main square, where town hall and church silently confront each other.
    If the vehicle that Isabel and Mónica were taken away in was a 4×4, that probably meant they were being kept on a nearby
estancia
, in some shack in the middle of the countryside that would be difficult to locate and hard to get to.
    I decided to give Tres Arroyos a chance by staying there a night. I registered at the Cabildo Hotel with my brand-new identity: Edgardo Leiva, married, commercial traveler. The plan I had hastily arranged with Don Quixote, his sidekick and the fat forensic specialist, fell apart if Isabel and Mónica had disappeared. The idea had been to take them back to Buenos Aires so they could quickly get back to their normal lives and not become involved in something none of us knew the true dimensions of.
    A pair of muscular but polite gentlemen had pushed in before me.
    I visited half a dozen estate agents, and found out all about farms, market gardens, and dairy outfits for sale or rent in the region. Everything was as I had expected: the pampas around Buenos Aires are the last redoubt of that rich Argentina that in the early years of the twentieth