17 Stone Angels (13 page)

Athena felt uncomfortable as she thought of Waterbury going around with a young French dancer while his family waited for him at home.

“I knew her because a friend of mine, an actress, or, better said . . .” He lifted his arms gaudily, “
artiste
, knew her and
La Francesa
invited us to their table. There was another woman also, a slightly older woman, but very well-maintained. I think she was of some money, because we were drinking champagne and she was the one who kept asking for more. The best, eh? Dom Perignon. Veuve Cliquot. The
nacional
was an insult to her. She and
La Francesa
got into an argument about which champagne was better, and things turned ugly.
La Francesa
was trying to bank on her expertise as a native Parisian, but the older woman finally tired of her and said, ‘Yours is a Paris of shopgirls and waitresses. What do you know of champagne?'” Ricardo lowered his voice and leaned forward. “Then she says, ‘If you're so at home in Paris, what are you doing selling your cum in Buenos Aires?'” He raised his eyebrows. “At this,
everything
went rotten!
La Francesa
calls her a wrinkled old pig in that little French voice and walks out, and Waterbury's left planted there with this rich woman, holding on to his champagne glass like a lifesaver in the middle of the ocean. He and the woman left a minute after that.”

“Did you talk to Robert Waterbury?”

“Very little. To be honest, Waterbury impacted me as a bit confused. He said he was a writer, but he hadn't published anything in some years. He told me he'd come to Buenos Aires to research another book. And when he said this he and the rich woman looked at each other, and of course, one always speculates. The whole episode was a matter of some thirty minutes.”

“Who was the woman?”

“That I don't know. Tamara, Teresa . . . Something with a “T.”” Athena felt a surge of excitement. “Teresa?”

“I think, yes.”

“That phone number I told you Robert Waterbury had in his pocket when he was murdered had the name Teresa written with it! The surgeon found it before the autopsy!”

“Did you call the number?”

“Not yet.,

Now Berenski was peering at her intently, but at the same time considering something else. “Don't call it. Let me trace it first. Then we'll go forward well-armed.”

“What about the Frenchwoman? Paulé. Could we talk to her? We could go to the Bar Azul tonight, if you're not doing anything.”

He held up his hand. “
Tranquila, amor
. Don't give the number such importance. If I walk out of here and some drug addict puts a cork in me, will your telephone number in my pocket tell them who murdered me?” His lips twisted into a sideways grin, “
Bueno
, if that happened they'd arm the biggest party in the history of the Buenos Aires police, but looking at it theoretically . . . ” He shrugged. “We'll see. Of
La Francesa
I don't know. She's not on the scene these days. Maybe she went back to her land.”

Athena watched him go at his drink again, and took a slow sip of her own. She was thinking about her afternoon with Miguel and his promise to intensify his efforts. “Ricardo, do you know a Comisario Fortunato? In San Justo?” She handed him Fortunato's card.

Berenski furrowed his brow. “In Investigaciones, eh?” Tapping his glass absently on the table. “Yes. He's older, very soft, very smooth. I met him once. One of his men uncovered some cars with phony papers, and they followed them back to a comisario in Quilmes. More than this, I don't know.”

“He's my main contact with the police. To me,” she pictured his melancholic smile, “he seems very decent. Do you think I can trust him to investigate this crime?”

“Trust him?” Ricardo wagged his head to the left, and then to the right. “You can trust him up to the point where you can't trust him. He's police.” He considered something, then, on the verge of a proposal, changed his mind. “No,” he muttered, “I can't put you in with him.”

“Who?”

Taking in a long breath: “I know a sort of specialist on the police in San Justo. He would know all about your Fortunato. But I'll tell you directly, he's a criminal, and for this he has a relation with the
cana, the “cops
.””

“You know him from your investigations?”

“No.” Ricardo scratched nervously at his nose. “I know him from the
Ejercito Revolucionario del Pueblo
, of the Seventies.” For the first time Ricardo seemed serious. “The last of our revolutionary dreams. Then I woke up and went into exile for eight years. I worked more in the informational part, producing The Red Star. But this muchacho, no. He was really a warrior type. Very valiant. Very dangerous. Very dangerous,” he repeated, awed by his remembrance. “He killed a heap of
Fascistas
. When the ERP kidnapped General Lopez and subjected him to a revolutionary court, it was Cacho who executed him. Don't look so shocked, Lopez was an
hijo de puta
. Murderer. Torturer. Thief. He deserved to die. But to kill someone defenseless, in cold blood . . .” He tilted his head, blew out a puff of tension. “
Muy pesado
.” Very heavy. Now Berenski shivered, and his voice took on a troubled mix of sadness and what sounded almost like shame. “But it went bad for him, just like it went bad for everyone. They killed his younger brother, an adolescent that had nothing to do with politics. They killed his wife. They captured Cacho, they tortured him . . . And there's a bit of a shadow among us that survived the war, because now he's working with the same people we fought against.” He shook his head. “I don't know. Of that war, some survived intact and some survived broken. Cacho is broken.”

“But you'll introduce me to him?”

The journalist shook his head. “
Bueno
. Between Cacho and me, it's complicated. Sometimes he gives me information. But at the same time, he gets very aggressive. Resentful. I think it's disagreeable for both of us when we meet.” He shook his head, looking at the table. “The man is bent.”

CHAPTER
TEN

F
ortunato did his best to look enthusiastic as he strode through the musty smoke of La Gloria to meet with the Chief. Bianco had just gotten a haircut that day and his white hair had been razored into fine clean edges. Fortunato could smell the barber's lilac water as he leaned in to kiss him. To Fortunato's relief Bianco had left the monkeys at home.

“
Tanguero!
”

“Sit down, Miguel. Sit down!”

A whiskey and a small steel tray indented with peanuts and olives had already been laid on the table next to a liter of beer, and Fortunato noticed two cigarette butts bent into the ashtray. Julio Sosa was crooning his operatic rendition of “Verdemar” over the radio, and the Chief tuned into it for a moment after they sat down as if listening for something he'd missed before. At last he frowned.

“I've never liked Julio Sosa,” the Chief said. “He's too sweet.”

Fortunato grimaced. “He's for the women,” he said, then thought,
better said, he was for the women
. The elegant voice that boomed around the dark bar had been recorded thirty-five years ago. Marcela had been an admirer of Julio Sosa. He used to pretend to be jealous of Sosa, of the fine suit and debonair hairstyle that Sosa wore on the covers of his record albums.
Julio! Julio!
Marcela would tease him.
I'm going to leave you for Julio
.

The Chief continued. “Take someone else, say
El Polaco
, to sing this song, and given the same song, it's going to have that tang of whiskey, with a more complex feeling. This,” he motioned around the dim ether that hung in the decrepit interior of the bar, “this is just a lullaby.” Fortunato said nothing, still thinking of Marcela. “And,” the Chief began, “how are we going with this matter of the gringa?”

It relieved Miguel to get on the theme, because he was on the theme already by himself, wondering again about Waterbury's missing friend Pablo who Athena kept mentioning. Pablo. AmiBank. And that note in the papers about AmiBank and Carlo Pelegrini.

But they were talking now about the gringa. “Look, Leon, the matter is thus: we have to give her something.”

Elena came with another steel dish, this one filled with tiny bread sticks and little pink rounds of sausage. “Bring me a whiskey,
amor
,” Fortunato said quickly.

“Why?” the Chief continued when she'd left. “Why can't you just put on your idiot face for a couple of weeks and let her go home?”

“She's not so retarded, Leon. We went over to see Duarte a few days ago. She was asking things like,” imitating her ingenuous voice: “‘Why didn't anyone talk to the wife? Why didn't anyone talk to his contacts at AmiBank?'”

“And Duarte?”

“He defended himself! All that verse about
la justicia
, the scarce resources, the usual,” Fortunato said sourly. “But the
chica
wasn't buying that merchandise.” Fortunato worked a cigarette out of the box and picked up the Chief's lighter.

“So you went back to the theme of the
narcos?
”

Fortunato finished pulling the flame into the tube before answering. “Of course! But then she says, again, “I still don't understand how drug dealers would kill him for drugs and leave six chalks of pure cocaine in the car!””

“But I told her—”

“Yes, you told her, and I told her too, but don't be so sure that we're the only ones making
cara de gil
here.”

The Chief twisted his mouth downward, knocked his knuckles absently on the table a few times as if to clear his head.

“Yes,” Fortunato said acidly. “I think we can say that she senses a certain lack of professionalism in the management of the
Caso
Waterbury.”

“
You
were supposed to manage it, Miguel!”

“I
was
managing it! Domingo's
merquero
was shot with his own gun, did you forget that? Did you want him turning up at the hospital with a bullet wound? I took him over to one of our clinics. I managed it!” The Chief frowned, and Fortunato felt himself looking once more at Waterbury's shuddering corpse, felt Domingo's smug baby face invading his mind again.
You calmed the hijo de puta, Comi
. He pushed it away, tasted the sour fizz of the beer. “Look, Leon,
something
, we have to give.”

The Chief nodded. “You're right, Miguel. As always. She's been talking to the Instituto Contra La Represión Policial. She also met with Ricardo Berenski.”

Fortunato said nothing, but the feeling of betrayal burned at his ears. Everybody knew Berenski. His book had created a surge of literary activity in the Buenos Aires police as the entire force had rushed to see whose name appeared in it. For a while they'd had a picture of Berenski taped into one of the urinals. Other photos made their way to the shooting range. “When did she meet with Berenski?”

“Two days ago, at the Losadas, on Corrientes.”

Fortunato nodded silently. He'd seen Athena yesterday, had even asked her
What have you done in Buenos Aires? Where have you gone?
and recommended her a music store with a good tango collection. She hadn't said a word about Berenski.

The Chief went on softly, comprehending. “Don't take it so seriously, Miguel. That's how they are. They talk, they exchange their little complaints . . .” He threw a limp hand, clicked his tongue. “Nothing happens. But I want to close this and get her back to her land before Berenski starts trying to sell newspapers with it. What it means is that you're going to have to tell her a story. I think we need to deepen the drug theme. Maybe it was a clumsy play, but that's what we have right now and the chalks have already been introduced as a prop.”

Fortunato made an effort to calm the unpleasantness in his head.

They had an investigation to conduct, a case to solve. He turned the details over in his mind. “Fine,” he said after a pause. “But if we're going to tell a story, we need characters.”

The Chief smiled, back to his old self. “
Che
! I've got just the man!”

CHAPTER
ELEVEN

E
nrique Boguso had never been a very thorough criminal, but he tried to compensate for his poor planning skills with a brutal decisiveness. He styled himself a bold improviser, able to coolly murder his way through the occasional untidy situations that resulted from his less-than-meticulous preparation. As insurance, he provided information to the police and they turned their attention elsewhere. Finally, though, he'd gone too far, committing a crime of such singular horror that even the police lost their patience.

An aficionado of the Repression and its death squads, Boguso read avidly the human rights reports and often imitated their methodology in his own crimes. On his fateful night, the twenty-five year old and a friend had broken into the house of a bricklayer in Quilmes with the information that he had a fortune stashed in his wall. Boguso had brought an electric prod and other accoutrements of the Dictatorship and proceeded to torture the family one by one, strapping them to the bed with a black hood over their heads. But the story, its thousands, and the nights of cocaine and whores it promised, had been illusory. The criminals turned up two hundred pesos in the course of murdering both parents, and in a dispute over the spoils Boguso's partner had shot him in the leg. They'd arrested him at the hospital the next day, sentenced him to perpetual chains in a remarkably speedy trial, and now he awaited his final disposition in a holding cell at Comisaria 33, in Quilmes.