No One Loves a Policeman Read Online Free PDF Page A

through that door over there,” she said. I gazed in the direction she was pointing, but all I could see were other girls, the barman and the dish-washer coming in and out.
    â€œHe comes in, sits down right where you are now, and bums acigarette off me. He never bought his own, but smoked all kinds, and marihuana too—it was all the same to him. ‘Take care,’ he says when he comes to see me, ‘and try to find another job, because I don’t want a sister who’s a whore.’”
    I had no doubt the redhead’s story was true, that her brother came in just as she said, spoke to her, then stayed for a while, smoking his borrowed cigarette without saying a word. And that she waited until he had left to avoid upsetting him by seeing her sell her body, a body firm now only in this half-light, her flesh gouged by the toothless night-sharks.
    I sat watching her silently, just like her brother who never reached the Malvinas. I only left when the Swede said he was no longer serving, that the evening was over. It was not yet 3:00. The Pro Nobis sign clicked off above my head, the woman’s thighs frozen in the night.
    I should never have left the hotel, I told myself. My words of wisdom proved prescient when two giants straight out of a body-building ad sprang from a car parked a few feet away and proceeded to wipe me from the map with a few well-aimed punches.

6
    No way of knowing how long I was unconscious. It cannot have been for very long, because when I came round day had not dawned. I felt groggy and with a stomach pain that this once I could not blame on my chronic ulcer. I heard people speaking, but was afraid I might get another beating if I opened my eyes, so I clung stupidly to the hope that all this was a bad dream. When I began to tremble with cold I realized that it was not.
    â€œWrap this round you,” said a hoarse smoker’s voice. A leather jacket hit me on the head. More curious than fearful, I opened my eyes.
    â€œDon’t worry, you’re with friends,” the same voice told me.
    Before I could properly make out his features, I saw the glow of a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. I pulled the jacket round my shoulders.
    â€œThe men who attacked you took your coat. They thought the beating was enough, but hoped you might freeze to death as well.”
    â€œI don’t think they were muggers,” said another, reedy voice.
    The first man was sitting opposite me. They had laid me on a bare bunk with only a blanket on top of its springs. The one with the reedy voice was speaking from the corridor on the far side of the bars, as though he was a visitor. When I tried to sit up, the pain in my stomach paralyzed me. My neighbor helped me with the jacket.
    â€œStay where you are for a while,” he told me. “The doctor is on his way. We had to wake him, he was out flat. We don’t get many emergencies around here,” he went on, as though to justify the doctor being asleep. “This is only a small town, there’s no dangerous violence like there is in Buenos Aires.”
    I understood that what had happened to me was not dangerous, simply a demonstration of small-town high spirits.
    They had not taken me to the infirmary, but had dumped my unconscious body in a cell. It was lit only by a fluorescent tube in the corridor. The man opposite me was big enough to have been one of my attackers, and the man outside could have been his companion, but it made no sense for them to have beaten me up before they brought me in. They could simply have arrested me: I usually do not resist polite requests to accompany people to a police station.
    â€œI wonder what led a middle-class guy from Buenos Aires to leave his warm hotel room in the middle of the night and end up in a dump like Pro Nobis? What was he looking for?” my hoarse-voiced friend asked.
    â€œWho are you?” I managed to stammer, as if he could ever have been anything else but a