17 Stone Angels (20 page)

“No,” he murmured. “There are times one feels abandoned by one's self.”

She didn't understand him and the only explanation he gave was to lift his glass of wine and soda and wordlessly toast to nothing.

CHAPTER
SIXTEEN

H
e went alone to the Sheraton the next morning, without the need for an entourage to bolster his image, just as she had dressed in blue jeans for the flight back, no longer needing a professional gloss. She looked young and fresh at the check-out desk. He smiled as he approached her, overcome by a surge of affection. He touched her on the shoulder and she looked up at him. “Miguel! I knew you'd be early! You're in a hurry to get rid of me!”

“No, daughter. Never believe that.” He bent down and kissed her on the cheek, his sight filled for a moment with the filaments of her straight golden hair. For some reason his mind roved back to Marcela, and the emptiness of his house.

Athena cast off the moment. “You'll have to say goodbye to Ricardo Berenski for me if you see him again. I couldn't reach him.”

“Of course. I think Señor Berenski and I have much to discuss.” He excused himself and Athena finished settling the bill and wandered over to the door to wait for him. Outside she could see Palermo Park shining brilliantly in the morning light, overlooked by the wrought iron balconies and lushly carved facades of the buildings that surrounded it. She wanted to memorize it and keep it fresh as an antidote against the regularity of her life, but she could feel the stately black railings and molded adornment of the city begin to fade as soon as she looked away. She had played the game in
Buenos Aires, had gone along without any accusations or denouncements, just as she had played the game to get sent here in the first place. Now she was taking back something counterfeit, whose report would become the official truth and would lead to a career burnishing official truths, like a content provider to some corporate website.

She heard someone calling her. “Athena! Athena!”

To the left she saw a striking green sports jacket, and immediately recognized Fabian coming towards her at a quick pace. He wore his usual open smile, gave off his usual aura of handsome availability. “Doctora!”

She couldn't help but be glad to see him. “Fabian!” She stepped into the circle of his cologne and exchanged kisses.

“Today you depart!”

“Yes, unfortunately.”

He grasped her arm and squeezed it eagerly. “But I had something to tell you about the Waterbury case! I was reading in one of my screen writing books last night, and I think I found a structural element that is critical to this investigation.”

His persistence in this conceit annoyed her. “Fabian. It already
is
. Boguso confessed. We found the murder weapon and they've put an order of arrest out on the other murderer.”

“Yes, but to me, this doesn't feel like the end of the story. You know? It feels more like Act One, where, just as everyone is about to accept the obvious answer to the crime, the detective finds some new piece of evidence that sends the plot in another direction. So let's think: what new clues are there? What clues don't fit in?”

She looked at this strange man in his gigolo clothes, and his theatrical grimace copped from a low-budget rendering of Sherlock Holmes. Fabian played life like a football game, and though she had tired of his tricky passes and feigned injuries, she couldn't resist. After all, she would never see him again. “Fine, Fabian. Here's one: the mortuary found the telephone number of Carlo Pelegrini's wife in Waterbury's pocket? How's that?”

Fabian slapped his forehead. “Of course! The billionaire is inescapable! And there must be a multinational corporation, like a bank. A North American bank, because it's for the North American market and you have to have a few North Americans for interest, like yourself, and Waterbury. This is incredible! It's just like in my film!” He shook his head, beside himself.
“I'm going to tell you about it now, but you have to promise not to steal it. Promise? Because it also belongs to my cousin in Los Angeles; we're both depending on this to get rich. He's already working on it. It starts out with the voiceover of the failed writer, desperate to rescue his career and his family with one best-selling
Policial
.”

Something strange was happening. Fabian put aside his jester persona and began to speak in English. It was tippy and heavily accented, but she could tell immediately that the words had been carefully learned, as if they belonged to someone else. “
I realized on the long flight down that there comes a time when one's imagination has consumed everything else and begins to devour its host. Yet here I am in Buenos Aires, with a stack of primers about police procedure and three cheap handbooks on How to Write a Mystery, making my last ridiculous play
.” Fabian tipped his head and fell silent behind an unnerving smile.

An odd falling sensation came on her, as if all of the lobby were slipping away. “What are you trying to tell me, Fabian?”

Fabian's unsettling expression didn't change. “Here the story becomes a bit complex, Doctora. That's what you must do in Act Two, deepen the plot, as in the formula. If you don't, they shit on you. Like in Waterbury's second book. He didn't follow the formula and they threw it to the wolves. And that was the last of a series of disappointments that sent him running to Buenos Aires, into the path of that final nine millimeter bullet.” He took a breath and let it out in a long nasal breeze, looking directly at her. “I have read the
declaración
made in Comisario #33, and I can assure you that my version is a thousand times more entertaining and, unlike that of Enrique Boguso, based on a true story.” He bore in on her with his eyes, and for the first time she could see his
cara de policia
, a different one than Fortunato's old-fashioned Mussolini face, more devious and sardonic, now changing again into the seductive young leading man. “Shall we take a coffee?”

Fortunato came up on them and Fabian greeted him with his old good humor. “Comiso! Phenomenal!”

The Comisario didn't completely hide his annoyance. “What are you doing here, Fabian?”

“I came to have a chat with you both about the Waterbury case. It seems that new evidence has come to light. There's much more to this than what Boguso has told you. I think we must re-open the case.”

Fortunato didn't react for a few moments, then he dismissed it with an exasperated sigh. “Leave it, Romeo! Don't swell my balls with this nonsense!” Looking at his watch, “It's almost eleven, Athena. Allowing time for any unforeseen inconvenience—”

Fabian implored him. “Comiso! What inconvenience? There's another flight tomorrow! I know the perfect café close by. We can sit and take a
cortado
.” He smiled at the Comisario. “Don't you want to find out the truth?”

Athena was staring fixedly at Fabian, whose parrot-green jacket now looked modern and sophisticated beside the dull camel wool worn by Comisario Fortunato. She could sense a rivalry between the two, the clash between one man on his way up and another, perhaps from this very instant, becoming obsolete. She could sense Fortunato's embarrassment and something that might have been fear, but she had to take sides now. She turned to the Comisario. “I'll fly tomorrow, Miguel.” She nodded at Fabian, who once again basked in theatrical grandeur. “Fine, Fabian. Let's see what happens in Act Two.”

PART TWO

WATER
B
URY'S LA
S
T PLAY

CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN

“T
he character of the desperate novelist is a cliché, is it not? All that well-worn despair and tiresome financial difficulty. And yet, from time to time we have no choice but to find ourselves living those clichés. Like you, Doctora, as the crusading guardian of human rights, or the Comisario here, as the hardened policeman trying to solve his most difficult case. The image of things overwhelms us and turns us to its will. That, it seems, is what happened to our Señor Waterbury.

“The
boludo
had enjoyed some success in the publishing business. His first book,
The Black Market
, emerged in twelve countries and won various prizes. He'd sat on literary panels, given interviews, seen his words in foreign alphabets.

“But success was cruel to Robert Waterbury in a strange way; it made him lose all fear. He had been flattered and greeted with that tone of reverence that seduces all writers:
Ah, Robert Waterbury! You wrote
The Black Market! A fatal voice, one that washes away the foundations of the real world. He heard the call to take his place among the Great Ones of Literature. A quick look at the accounts of his predecessors would have warned that the odds were against him, but in the world of Destiny there are no statistics. He left his position at the bank and moved, with his family, to South Hampton to struggle with his next book. He was a novelist now.
He would say that when he met people, feeling slightly embarrassed by the grandeur of that word:
novelista
.

“With time, though, that mythical life began to call in its loans. The wife was injured in a car accident and could not work for six months. His house needed a new roof. His car gave up and he bought a new one, banking on the income from his next book. He began to borrow from his retirement savings.”

“None of this intruded on
Indigo Down
. He regarded it as his masterwork, structured around the idea of the world as a vast sacred text, a landscape of nouns and verbs whose secret prophecies hung just beyond reach of the characters that stumbled through them. After four years and eight drafts he sent his agent the new novel. But by that time the world had not only ceased waiting for the next work of Robert Waterbury, it had forgotten who he was. And disgracefully, the market for mystical illumination turned out to be rather disappointing. After seventeen submissions his agent got him a modest advance.

“‘Ten thousand dollars!' he told his agent. ‘I could wipe my ass with that!'

‘“Maybe you'll make it back on royalties,' his agent said, without much belief, and then, ‘Hold on, I've got another call.'

“To console himself Waterbury read about the tribulations of great writers in the encyclopedia. Dostoyevsky, who began his career by being condemned to a firing squad. Cervantes, in and out of jail, passing his last years as a guest of a rich friend. Kerouac, the most tragic, whose first book had been his masterpiece. Most great writers' biographies ended ‘died poor,' ‘died a drunk,' or ‘committed suicide.' Even this was of little consolation, because a simple trip to the bookstore reminded him that the majority of writers never became great, simply died in unread obscurity, failed commercial ventures without a myth to hold on to. The possibility that he belonged to this final sad category terrified him. The silver-plated tones with which people had once addressed the distinguished author had worn away, leaving only the dull base metal in which was stamped ‘Failed Writer.'

“So our Señor Waterbury arrives in Buenos Aires with a pair of sports jackets and a suitcase full of good clothes he'd worn ten years ago when he used to work for AmiBank. The plan was simple: to write something formulaic, without a hint of literary or moral ambition. ‘Commercial,' as the publishers put it. Keep the language simple. Populate it with beautiful
women and handsome men. Start out with a murder and leave a trail of bodies all the way to the finale. It would be a thriller of international finance and larceny, set against the background of a country struggling in the wake of a murderous military dictatorship.

“Of that world, as we know, Waterbury had a particular knowledge. A specialist in finance, he had been sent to Buenos Aires for two years by AmiBank to help tidy up the unfortunate loans of the Seventies and Eighties. In those years, the bank had loaned billions to dictators and thieves and had taken the whole country as collateral. Waterbury arrived in the second phase, where the bank was trading its bad debts for our state-owned enterprises. Telephone companies, copper mines, the national airlines, dams, highways, electric utilities: all were up for sale on the kind of easy terms negotiated by officials who kept numbered accounts at AmiBank's offshore subsidiaries. It was a good system, a system that worked, endorsed by American economists and the International Monetary Fund. Waterbury had taken part in this fiesta by helping arrange juicy packages for AmiBank's investors.”