17 Stone Angels (39 page)

His eagerness made her cagey. “At a ballroom in Palermo. She'll be there at ten tomorrow night. Why don't you come and get me at nine at my hotel and we'll go over there together.”

“Which ballroom is it?”

“Just come and get me!”

She heard a brief, hurt silence. “
Bien
,” he said. “At nine.”

For Fortunato, the string was getting tighter. Thirty thousand American dollars had persuaded Cacho to pick up Vasquez and bring him to his house for questioning, but the following day he had almost backed out. “It's too hot, hombre. It's a nest of vipers.”

The reason had been written in the afternoon newspaper: Chief Bianco's name appeared for the first time alongside that of Carlo Pelegrini. It wasn't a large mention, merely that Pelegrini's security man, Abel Santamarina, had called Bianco's cell phone twice in the days prior to Berenski's murder. A lawyer might have called a detail like that circumstantial but Fortunato knew that the circumstances could only be damning and it dropped a stone at the bottom of his stomach. The journalists and investigators were working their way down the chain, from Pelegrini to Santamarina to Bianco, and within a day or two they would connect Santamarina to
Boguso's fabricated story about Waterbury, and then,
chico
, the race would be on. And this would be a race with a lot of losers.

“It's not for so much, Cacho! A few questions and I turn him loose to find his own destiny.”

“That's the point, Miguel. I don't want his destiny to become my destiny.”

Fortunato snorted. “You're immortal, Cacho. You had a whole army trying to assassinate you and they failed. But I'll g1ve you another two green sticks.”

“Five?”

“Five.”

The phone went quiet as Cacho considered the suspiciously high price of fifty thousand dollars for a simple conversation with a petty
puntero
. His voice became cold as he dictated his terms: “You play me, and I'll kill you.”

Fortunato thought about the threat
as he drove to meet the Chief for a little talk. All the old relationships were shifting, relationships whose mutual agreements about how the world
was
had formed the foundation of his career. The Chief had summoned him to his residence, and though Leon hadn't said so, Fortunato assumed it was because he didn't want to be seen meeting in public.

The five-bedroom house lay enclosed by a high concrete wall with sharp wrought iron points crisscrossed at the top. Embedded metal plaques from the Chief's private security company implied dire consequences for whatever
gil
was stupid enough to try and break in. Bianco liked to explain that he'd gotten the money to buy the big house, and another at the beach, through various business opportunities that he'd been fortunate enough to grasp over the years. His company provided security for homes and businesses and rock concerts, and he couldn't help it if friends had included him in lucrative real-estate ventures. Fortunato had watched his economic status rise over the years, neither resenting nor wanting to imitate it, but when Marcela saw the house go up ten years ago she had begun subtly putting distance between themselves and the Biancos. Pleasant enough when they met on Fridays at the 17 Stone Angels to listen to tango, she'd found ways to refuse invitations to the house itself, so that Fortunato hadn't been there in five years.

This afternoon the Chief himself let him in at the heavy iron gate, from
which Fortunato inferred that no one else was home. Bianco led him into the dark, cool house, filled with carved gilded furniture and various paintings of Spanish street scenes. When he brought him a cola on ice he served it with a little too much solicitation. Fortunato had never seen Bianco look this nervous before; the smile came a little too rapidly to his face and seemed to go slightly rotten before he could finish uttering the pleasantries. Fortunato noticed a copy of the morning newspaper on the coffee table.

“Miguel,” he began at last, “the situation is getting complicated.”

Fortunato didn't bother answering.

“Re-complicated,
amor
. I've heard that
La Gallega
is extending her investigation to include the
Caso
Waterbury. They're federalizing everything. They want you off the case and they want all the files.”

Fortunato refused to react, and Bianco hurried to minimize the bad news. “It's all spectacle! If they suspected you, they would have sequestered everything with an order of the judge. They just want to show the Press how hard they are trying.”

They both knew the last part was a lie. The footsteps were getting closer and their reverberations were shuddering through the Chief's twitchy eyes. He managed to recover some of his old command presence as he laid out the course of action. “They're going to requisition the files in the next day or two. I want you to revise absolutely everything: the
expediente
, your personal archives.” He thumped his fingertips on the table. “Every
declaración
and every
diligencia
must be in perfect order. Likewise, revise your own files so that there is no record of any activities which could embarrass the Institution. For the doubts, take them to your home until all this cools down again.”

The Comisario knew what he meant. Ten years of
arreglos
had to be purged before Faviola Hocht's investigators started holding them up to the light. He rocked his head forward slowly. “Those of the
Caso
Waterbury I can clean out in an hour, but the rest would take weeks. If they want to re-open and explore every case—”

“It's not for so much! It's a precaution.” Bianco shrugged disdainfully. “Two weeks and they'll be busy with the next scandal. But promise me you'll take care of that cursed yankee as soon as you leave here.”

“Fine.” Fortunato thought of lighting a cigarette but he didn't see an ashtray at hand and didn't want to ask for one. He swallowed to steady his voice. “I saw that Onda was cut.”

Bianco put his hand up to show that he knew where Fortunato was going with it. He spoke in a quiet, serious voice. “You enter on the other theme, Miguel. I'll tell you directly: Vasquez also needs to be put down. People like him and Onda aren't reliable. They make deals when they get squeezed.” He put some gravel in his voice. “They're not hombres!”

“And?”

“Domingo needs someone to help him. Since you're the one responsible you're going to have to do it.”

It took Fortunato a moment to absorb it. He looked at Bianco carefully, wondering what he knew. “I'm starting to think I wasn't responsible,” he said calmly.

The denial annoyed the Chief, but he seemed inclined to humor his inferior. “Of course not! The idiot was responsible for his own stupidities. But it was you who let it get out of control.”

“What I'm saying is that maybe it was supposed to get out of control. Maybe Vasquez killed the gringo for reasons of his own. It was rare how Vasquez started shooting. There was no real reason for it.”

“He's a violent criminal with a head stuffed full of
merca
and you have to look for a reason?” Anger was hardening the Chief's voice. “Don't go inventing something to find a way out of this, Miguel! You have to take care of Vasquez. You and Domingo. Get over your weakness and finish what you started.”

Bianco was glaring at him with disgust. Fortunato thought of revealing the bits he'd learned about Pablo Moya and the mysterious Renssaelaer, but suddenly he didn't really care to. He'd found it on his own, in his private investigation, and that information didn't belong to the Chief or anyone else at the Institution. Let the Chief go on sweating for a while. Moreover, he wasn't so sure Leon was telling him everything either.

As to Vasquez; if someone had to die, Vasquez made an excellent candidate. A drug addict, bully, thief and
puntero
, the “somethings” he was guilty of were anything but vague. Of course, he'd make them find someone else to do the job, but better to play along with the Chief for the moment. Refusing might have other consequences. “When do you want to do it?”

“Tonight. Domingo is setting it up.” He handed him a small phone. “Here's a clean cellular. Domingo will call you later to arrange the program.”

Fortunato took the cellular and slipped it into his pocket. He thought about his own interview with Vasquez that he'd scheduled for that night, and
reflected that his fifty thousand dollars might be buying Vasquez another day of life. The silence started ticking away and Bianco stiffly offered him another cola as a way of reminding him it was time to leave. “It will all come out well,” he encouraged as he led him to the iron bars. “You'll see.”

Fortunato drove back to the
comisaria. The weight of
La Gallega's
investigation was beginning to flatten him. Beyond the fear, it was the humiliation of the whole situation that stung him most intensely. The entire comisaria had become aware of the tension surrounding the Waterbury case, and as the news of his removal trickled out the respect he had earned with his decades of cautious management would begin to erode. Federal officers would come in to take possession of the files, someone in Hocht's office would trumpet it to the journalists and his name would appear in an article the next morning, in small print or large, depending on that particular day's toll of catastrophe:
Federal Police Remove Comisario From Case
. Everyone would see it: his subordinates, his colleagues, his neighbors, Athena.

Even Marcela, somewhere, would see it.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN

H
e began to clean out his files, as he'd promised the Chief. The sins of the Waterbury
expediente
involved lack of ambition rather than much fraud, so he had little challenge with that. Aside from the ballistics tests he had substituted to match “Boguso's” Astra, they were relatively clean. The ledgers in which he accounted for the various institutional maneuvers and the formula for dividing their proceeds could be packed into his briefcase. The rest he could only clear out by setting fire to the office. Scores of cases had died without a prosecution or displayed other irregularities, and it wouldn't take a grandiose investigation to start picking them apart. As he leafed through them he also came across some of his best cases. Now he recalled them: the Bordero case, where he'd found the gang rapists; the Pretini case, with its fatal robbery; the
Caso
Gomez; the
Caso
Novoa. So many many cases that had ended with the gratitude of the victims or their families, their handshakes, and their knowledge that on some battered imperfect level, there was justice in the world. Why must they all be erased by the
Caso
Waterbury?

He called in his sub-comisario and told him he was going home early, then returned to his house with the files. Winter had sent its outriders into the city that day, giving the walls a frigid, tomb-like feeling. He looked at the pictures of Marcela as he came in, glanced reflexively through the half-open door at the hospital bed in her death room. He filled the kettle and prepared
the
mate
. Berenski kept coming to mind, along with Waterbury. That desperate appeal he'd made over the seat at him:
I have a wife and daughter
. And all the time, Waterbury hadn't been a blackmailer at all, just a man who had believed his own ruinous stories and was struggling to make them real with one last play. Like him, Miguel Fortunato.

The Comisario poured the hot water over the herb and pulled at the straw, watching the pale green foam sink into the leaves. He'd put a lemon in it again, and sugar, the way Marcela liked it, and the
mate
had the foreign taste of when she had been alive and sitting across from him. He remembered her as she was before she'd gotten sick, with her strong fleshy arms and those wise eyes.

“It's a mess,
Negra
. I tried to do something and it went for the worst.” The sound of his own voice had a comforting effect, like the prayer of a man without religion. At last he could say out loud all the things whose concealment had calcified his life. He could never reveal this to the real Marcela, but to this shadow Marcela he could confess everything. “Thirty-seven years I've gone along with the Institution. No, not always to your measure, but at least within the bounds of the normal. I enforced the law, in our fashion. I arrested many criminals. Remember the child molester that I trapped? They wrote it up in
El Clarin
and gave me a medal. Who gave more to the police family fund than I? Even this last, with the writer: that was an accident. They tricked me into it,
Negra
. That was Domingo and Vasquez. I didn't want it to turn out that way.”

The fantasy Marcela took on a look of tender absolution. “It's fine,
amor
. Life brings these situations sometimes and one arranges it as one can. You did what you could for the writer. It was the other two, that Leon assigned you. It doesn't erase those years of good work. How many children were saved when you captured that murderer?”

His chin had sunk into his hand and the white plaster walls gave off a cold silence. The water in the kettle had gone tepid, and the herbs in the
mate
were washed clean. Without any thought about it, he felt himself being drawn into the bedroom to sit on their marital bed, facing the wardrobe.