17 Stone Angels (12 page)

“Marcela,” he answered.

“She was a pretty woman. She looks like she had a good sense of humor.”

“She had a marvelous humor!” Fortunato said, remembering her big laugh. “She was very rapid with jokes. And a very good disposition. If you knew her you would say: “What is this woman doing with this dead man?” She was a sort of antidote to my professional life, which can become very heavy, dealing with delinquents and crime all day. Do you want to hear some music?”

He went to his shelf and selected one of the black vinyl discs he and Marcela had collected over the years. Astor Piazzola with his so-called New Tango. He liked to tease Marcela by calling it Bad Tango, but the magazines said it had found a certain acceptance in the exterior, so he put it on.

“Astor Piazzola!” La Doctora exclaimed after the first few bars.

“My wife liked this disc,” he said. “I prefer his earlier style, when he played with Anibal Troilo.” He wet the leaves of the herb with warm water, then added a slice of lemon.

“Did your wife work?” La Doctora said, floating before the pictures. She seemed to be examining the articles of the house casually, but with intent.

“She was a teacher. She taught primary school. Her students loved her. Even in the last year, we couldn't go walking without a student coming up to her, now grown up but excited, like a child: “Señora Jimenez! I was your student in the fourth grade!” And she'd say, like to a little one, “Ah!
Chico!
” and they'd leave so content! She was . . .” He wanted to finish with some superlative, but he felt himself being overcome and he let it trail off. “Thus is life, young one,” he said at last.

He poured the first water into the
mate
and then sucked it out with the straw, spitting it into the sink. “It's too strong at first,” he explained, then sprinkled sugar on top. He poured the second water, passing the frothy gourd to her. “You drink all of it and pass it back,” he said. She put her mouth hesitantly to the silver straw and began sucking, looking like a little girl with a soda. “There's a whole language to the
mate
,” he explained. “Long ago, if the gaucho came to visit a young woman she would prepare him a
mate
. If she used old herb, bitter and half cold, better that he rides on. But if she made him a fresh mate, sweet and with foam, well,” with the trace of a smile, “that was a bit more promising.”

She wrinkled her brow, the straw still between her lips. “It tastes like grass cuttings!”

Fortunato rolled his eyes and muttered to the ceiling: “Why did they send me this gringa?”

She laughed and then finished the
mate
, and he filled it for himself.

“Forgive me, Athena, but you said your father died recently of cancer. What kind was it?”

“The liver. He lasted about three months after the diagnosis.”

He shook his head. “
Terrible
. What was he like, your father?”

She thought quietly for a moment. “You would have liked him. He was very modest. Very generous. He worked for an insurance company. Part of his job was investigating fraudulent claims.”

“Ah! A species of police.”

“In some senses. But he had problems at the end because his company was acquired by another company. The new company was much more aggressive in denying claims, even those he thought were legitimate. They forced him to retire when he testified against them in a lawsuit. After that, at sixty, his options were limited.”

Fortunato thought about it a moment. “But he never regretted his decision, no?”

“Never.” Her gaze fell into a broken smile. “But I didn't understand all that until later. I used to ridicule him for being a company man.”

“It's forgivable. Perhaps from him you get your passion for the truth.” He handed her the gourd again. “Sometimes, when someone important dies, it makes one look inside and crystallize what one really wants to do in life. For you, being so young, at least the pain has this value. You still have time to act.”

“And you?”

“My father died when I was eight. Nothing clear remained.”

“What about your wife? Has her death made you reconsider anything?”

“Reconsider?” The question swelled in the intimate kitchen to an intensity far more profound than Fortunato had been prepared for. He recoiled from it, coming to his feet to fetch some cookies from the cupboard. “I'm nearly the age of your father when he retired,” he said, bringing the packet to the table. “At my altitude you only reconsider whether to have meat sauce or olive oil on your pasta.”

Athena took a cookie and bit it in half, tossing her head to the side. That part of the discussion had ended. “As far as the investigation,” she began, “I want to find out more about what Robert Waterbury was doing here before he was murdered. His wife said he used to see an old friend from his AmiBank days. His name was Pablo. If we could find him he might be able to tell us something.”

There she went with AmiBank again! AmiBank, who the newspapers said was a rival of Carlo Pelegrini! Fortunato remembered following Waterbury to a meeting at AmiBank during the surveillance. Athena was right: Pablo might indeed be able to tell them something. He took his mouth from the straw. “And Pablo's last name?”

“She didn't know. Only Pablo something.”

“Does he still work there?”

“His wife didn't know.”

He cocked his head thoughtfully. “It's a good idea. But there are many Pablos in Buenos Aires, and we don't know if this one used to work for AmiBank or another bank. We could perhaps check the AmiBank records of
a decade ago, and make inquiries at their headquarters in New York. With time . . . Of course. You are here for a month? Six weeks?”

“A week. Officially.”

He turned down the corner of his mouth with the disillusion of one betrayed. “It's very little.” He let it rest as he sipped the
mate
, then continued. “But I see another way to proceed, that will perhaps be faster.” La Doctora raised her eyebrows hopefully. “Let me speak to you frankly. Here in Buenos Aires, the technical facilities are very limited. It's rare that a case is solved with fingerprints and such things. More than that, a good policeman must develop his network of informants. It's a particular skill. And being of this barrio, working here many years,” he cocked his head, “my sources are not so bad. I've already begun to make inquiries. Why don't you let me take several days to deepen the effort. Then, we'll see if we can turn something up that way.”

“And what am I supposed to do while you're doing that?”

He shrugged. “Get to know Buenos Aires. Go to the Café Tortoni, which is a famous literary café over a hundred years old. Go to a show at the Teatro Colon. Visit the famous cemetery at La Recoleta, where the rich are buried.” He opened his arms. “Swim in the waters of the city.”

CHAPTER
NINE

I
n the early evening buzz of Avenida Corrientes, amid the neon and the car horns that rebounded off the plaster finery of the last century, Athena counted down the numbers that separated her from Ricardo Berenski. Calle Brazil, Calle Paraguay. The handsome Argentines streamed past her, their faces turbulent or flirtatious or questioning. Emotions seemed closer to the surface here. People didn't look away as they did in New York or Washington, but locked eyes briefly, like a challenge or an enticement. It felt like a place where a person might fall in love any minute, but where everyone seemed to be nursing a broken heart.

She couldn't escape a furtive paranoia as she headed to her meeting with the journalist. Miguel would look poorly on this little side investigation, especially since she was pursuing it in secret. But he had said to swim, she thought, so she was swimming. It wasn't her fault if she'd strayed out of the shallow end.

The wide, spacious Café Losadas comprised not only a bar and café but also a bookstore, a theater, and a publishing house that printed titles on culture and politics. Behind its agricultural-sized spread of window glass men polluted notebooks with copious words, their eyes trained simultaneously on the elusive phantasm of their literary careers and the women going in and out the front door.

But Ricardo Berenski was no pretender. In the cult of investigative journalism that flourished in Buenos Aires, Berenski was one of the principal idols. Athena expected someone cinematic: tall and dark, with intellectual spectacles and a tweed sports jacket.

The real Ricardo made an almost comical impostor. Short, and saved from baldness by two islands of clipped reddish hair, he resembled the last self-portraits of Van Gogh, but smiling. His pallid skin and slightly bulging eyes made him look sharp-witted and excitable, an effect magnified by a quick gravelly voice that seemed always to be leading to a punchline. He hunched forward when he walked, craned his neck and squinted when he listened. His gnome-like presence defied weightiness, but in fact, Ricardo had splashed a lot of ugliness across the glossy faces of the major media.

When a former torturer of the Dictatorship published a book denying the allegations of his past, Ricardo arranged for him to appear on a national television show to promote it. What the torturer didn't find out until halfway through his earnest denial was that the other guest was one of his former victims, who lifted up his shirt and showed the audience the scars. Another time, Ricardo had arranged for an actor with a hidden camera to pose as a drug dealer and close a distribution agreement with the highest ranking comisario in Greater Buenos Aires. His book on police corruption had forced the chief of the
Bonaerense
into retirement and made a stink that had yet to dissipate. Informed people thought that the only thing keeping him alive was his fame.

“Do you ever get death threats and that sort of thing?”

“Ahh!” He tossed his shoulders disdainfully. “If they call you on the telephone, that means they're not really going to kill you. I tell them, ‘
Andate ala concha de tu madre, hijo de puta!
'” He stood up to kiss a passing friend. “How's it going, beauty?” Sitting down again, eagerly sipping his second whiskey. “But this with the police,” he continued, shaking his head, “the complete corporatization, that comes from the Dictatorship.”

“How?”

“During the Repression, the army and the police had two motives. The first was to eliminate all thought that ran against the interests of the national elite and foreign capital. Very noble, no? The other was less exalted: simply to make money. When they took people away, they also robbed them. They had warehouses where they stored the belongings of the people they had
murdered. They considered it their natural right in exchange for their heroic service to the fatherland. And the police of today, the big ones, were created during that era. Now they're more sophisticated. They rent themselves out. They were involved in the bombings of the embassy of Israel and the Jewish Relief Society that killed hundreds of people. Also they have very fluid relations with Carlo Pelegrini and his private security businesses.” He tipped his glass to his mouth, looking past her towards the door. “But what is this about Waterbury? That's what we came here to talk about, no? Carmen told me you think it might have been a police assassination—nine millimeter, handcuffs, the burning car. All the classics of the genre. The cocaine we can explain away as planted to mislead the investigation, because you told me on the telephone he had no history of drugs. Who's the judge?”

“Duarte.”

He threw back his head. “Duarte! Now we've passed from genre to parody.”

“What do you mean?”

“We call him
Sominex
, you know, like the pills, because he's so good at putting cases to sleep.”

Athena put her face in her hand. “This is too much.”

Berenski laughed, pounding her on the shoulder. “Strength,
chica
! Strength! Now you're in the game! And the Selección Argentina doesn't play by North American rules. What more have you got?”

“I have a phone number taken from his pants pocket and a friend who he knew from his days at AmiBank ten years ago.”

“AmiBank. Ah, this is interesting! And the police never investigated them?”

“No.”

“Now, yes . . .” He tilted his face upward and sniffed the air, circling his hand slowly in front of his nose. “I smell that odor of shit! Give me the number before we go. I have a friend who sometimes traces these little things for me.” His next words pricked her like an electric shock. “You know, I met Waterbury once.”

“You met him?”

“At the Bar Azul, in San Telmo. San Telmo is a barrio a bit, artistic, let's say, with little experimental theaters that mix Nietzsche and Marcel Duchamp and the complete works of Eric Satie played backwards. That type,
the demi-monde, and many go to the Bar Azul after the shows. Thursday night they bring in a tango group and play tango with half-price whiskey. That's where I met him. He was going around with some French tango dancer. A woman absolutely disagreeable. One of those people who know nothing about anything, but they're so certain of it that they dominate the conversation. But very pretty. And the girl could dance. Waterbury was a bit of a trunk, but she found someone who could dance the tango and then her whole demeanor changed. She was a character we used to see around in the bars: half-actress, half . . . I don't know, she circulated in odd things. We called her
La Francesa
, but I think her name was . . . Paulé.”