17 Stone Angels (44 page)

“I know nothing more! I swear!”

“Comisario Bianco?” he said sharply.

“I don't know!”

“And Fabian Diaz?”

“I told you everything!”

He stepped back from the prisoner and walked in a tight aimless circle. His gaze ended up on Cacho. “You see!” he growled. “You see! I didn't kill him! They played me! They played me, the
hijos de puta!
” He crossed quickly to Vasquez and shouted at him. “You played me!”

“It was Domingo-”

“What,
Domingo
! Don't put it on Domingo! You beat the gringo! You terrorized him! You shot him to start everything!”

“
Tranquilo
, Miguel,” Cacho warned. “You already have your information. You need to get out of here and settle accounts somewhere else.”

The enraged policeman clenched his fists. “Shut up, Cacho! He played me!”

Cacho's black eyes started to blaze. “Get out!”

“But they played me!”

Cacho's protection made Vasquez swell up again. “So they played you,” the criminal sneered. “What's it matter? You're as dirty as the rest of them, you son of a bitch!”

Fortunato whipped out his gun and raised it, blanking Vasquez' features with surprise and fear. In the corner of his mind he heard Cacho shout “Noooo!” and then the Browning exploded in his hand, and Vasquez's body lunged backward in its chair and then slumped down, an angry red stain blossoming over his heart. The fist in which Fortunato held the pistol seemed far away from him, as if it was floating out there, attached to someone else's body. The savory smell of the gun's exhaust filled the room, and he became aware that Cacho was still screaming at him. “
Hijo de puta
! Are you crazy? Are you crazy?” The words faded again as he saw Vasquez twitch a few more times. Slowly, he lowered the gun and turned his face to Cacho. The criminal had his pistol out and was holding it with both hands in front of him,
pointing it at the side of Fortunato's head as he screamed a torrent of swear words. “Drop it! Drop it!” Two of Cacho's gang were standing at the door with their weapons drawn on him. He lowered his gun slowly, dazed, and put it into his holster.

Cacho was screaming. “Look what you did, you son of a bitch! This is your shit! Not my shit! Now what am I supposed to do with him? You take him away!”

The bloodstain had spread down to Vasquez” waist now, reddening the tops of his blue jeans. Fortunato looked at Cacho, spoke in an even voice. “Vasquez killed Waterbury. He had to die.”

Cacho didn't lower the gun, but he seemed to relax into a wary disbelief. “
Estás loco, hombre!
You're crazy.
Chiflado!
I should kill you for dragging me into this.” He nodded towards the door. “Get out and take this piece of shit with you!”

They dragged the body out to the courtyard and slumped it into the trunk of Fortunato's car. Cacho kept his pistol in his hand the whole time, pointing the gun at the Comisario. He didn't relax as Fortunato climbed in and started the engine.

Fortunato put the car in gear and then glanced up at the former subversive. For a moment Cacho's anger dropped away and a softer expression came over his face.

“What are you going to do, Miguel?”

Fortunato looked straight through the windshield and then back at Cacho. “A wrong has been committed. One has to rectify the situation.”

Cacho stared at him silently, finally speaking in a gentle voice. “You poor idiot.” He leaned down towards the open window. “Welcome to the Revolution.”

CHAPTER
THIRTY-ONE

T
he truth was, Hell felt curiously invigorating. He drove down the dark blighted street, with Vasquez riding along in the trunk like a piece of evidence sequestered for an investigation in which all the answers were already known. He was guilty, guilty of everything and yet innocent in some peculiar way.

He thought of Bianco in a blue suit, or his white one. Bianco at La Gloria and in his office at Central. Bianco smiling and Bianco wearing that hard expression of resolve. Bianco in 1976, beating that newborn baby to make the mother talk. Bianco, the brotherly superior who had brought him up through the ranks.

His cell phone chirped and he patted his body until he found the phone the Chief had given him.

“
Comisario
!” Domingo addressed him with his usual slick mockery. Bar music was blaring in the background.

Fortunato remembered that he and Domingo were scheduled to cut Vasquez that night, but the mortal remains of Christian Vasquez were currently riding along two meters behind him. Now Domingo would say that he couldn't locate the target and that they would have to cut him another night. Everything fine. The night would never come, the matter would fade. He would figure out how to deal with Domingo later. And the Chief? Better now to play the boludo.

“Where are you?” the Inspector Fausto demanded.

“I'm at a petrol station on the Accesso Norte, just outside of Lomas de San Isidro.” He was actually in Liniers, fifteen kilometers from the Accesso Norte.

“What are you doing out there?”

“I went to a friend's birthday party. What's the plan?”

“I'm at the Cyclone, near Liniers. Vasquez is waiting for me outside.”

Domingo sounded so certain that Fortunato had to reassure himself that he'd just killed Vasquez twenty minutes ago. It took Fortunato a moment to come to grips with the realization that Domingo could only have one reason for claiming that Vasquez was with him.

The eternal reflex: an idiot face. “Very good. Has anyone seen you with Vasquez?”

“No.”

In that, at least, the
hijo de puta
spoke the truth. He imagined the puffy face, oily and pocked, the face of the schoolyard bully grown into an adult. “So, what plan do you have?”

“I'll pay him for Onda, and after I give him the money I'll invite him to go to a
kilombo
in San Justo. Do you know the one at the corner of Conde and Benito Perez?”

“Near the old appliance factory,” Fortunato offered. It had once been a whorehouse for factory workers of the zone, but as the factories were globalized they had adjusted by expanding into an hourly hotel for illicit lovers. The bureaucrat at the back of his head noted that they paid a thousand pesos on the tenth of each month.

“That's it.”

“It's a good choice,” Fortunato complimented him coolly. “It's half-deserted. Tranquil.”

“Exactly. Vasquez and I have gone there before, so it's nothing unusual. I'll park around the corner in front of the loading door of the factory. I'll make sure he's had some drinks and some
merca
. You wait in the lot next to the factory. We pull up from the direction of Triumvirato. He gets out the car, you step out behind and finish him and we load him into the trunk. We can do it all in fifteen seconds. If there's someone around I pass a minute looking for my cigarettes on the floor of the car, and then you cork him.”

“And the body?”

“I have a place in Tigre, in the swamps. Do you have a clean iron?”

“Yes. When do you want me there?”

“In a half-hour, around one. I'll show up with Christian between one and one thirty.
Está
?”

Fortunato could get to the whorehouse in ten minutes. “That's too soon,” he said, letting his voice weaken a little at the protest. “I might hit traffic. Give me until one-fifteen.”

“Fine. Between one-thirty and two I'll bring him.”

The Comisario let a note of sincerity warm his voice. “Thanks for arranging this, Domingo. We'll all rest better afterwards.”

Domingo hesitated for a few seconds. “Clearly, Comiso. But you can thank the Chief.”

Fortunato held the dead plastic to his ear after Domingo hung up. So they were going to kill him. The dull recognition that he should be frightened passed before him, but that fear gave way before a sense of insult. They wanted to kill him! Him! A Comisario Mayor with thirty-seven years of service in the Institution! When had that decision been made? He could imagine the conversation between the Chief and Domingo when they'd decided to cut him.
He's spent, the old man. He was always too soft. Too weak!
That from Bianco, his “friend.”
He's incompetent
, Domingo would answer.
A coward. Better we get rid of him before he turns pink and starts singing
. Maybe one of Pelegrini's men had been there too, in his fine suit and his military cut, still not realizing that Waterbury's accidental death had been planned from the beginning.
We should have cut him the first time he fucked up, the idiot
. Or saying nothing, just smirking.
He'll be as easy to kill as Waterbury
.

They would expect him to be stupid, to walk right into the muzzle of a gun like a retard. How rapid they'd all imagined themselves in arranging Waterbury's murder! So easy to kill an innocent. Because Waterbury, in the end, was in other things, he was in his world of destiny, of writing his books and returning home to his family. He didn't pay attention. But he, Fortunato, was now without family or hope. And they certainly had his attention. Now they would see who was more
piola
. He turned the car towards the abandoned factory.

The Comisario felt a rush of feeling he'd never known before. Maybe this was how it was supposed to turn out. Maybe he was on a new path now, or the path he'd once had a foot on but left behind to climb the ranks of the
Institution. He, who'd never believed in destiny or in causes, had become the avenger. A proxy. The man who had to finish Waterbury's novel.

A contrary thought blew in. He could still escape. With the half-million in his briefcase he could drive to the border of Paraguay and have himself smuggled across, get a new passport and identity. Easy for him in Paraguay, with his policeman's nose. From there, to Brazil, someplace near the beach, with flowers on the porch. Invent a past in insurance or real estate. El Porteño, people would call him. A half-million could last a long time in such a place, living simply, investing well.

But no. Fortunato didn't run. Better to die in one's own law than to flee the rest of his life. Something he had always respected in Cacho and the doomed integrants of the People's Revolutionary Army. Most of them died rather than flee. This life was over. Only the exact time and place remained a mystery; a mystery whose solution he intended to find right away.

He reached Ramos Mejia. The dark facades of the upper-story buildings faced each other in the air, laden with flowers and shields. Frozen garlands of victory draped over shabby doorways, wrapped across grimy columns. The sound of the transit trains muttering along Rivadavia bumped in through the open window carrying a cargo of intense nostalgia, a sound of his childhood. A memory came to him of standing beside the tracks with his father, holding a pail of something. Every traffic light seemed a supernatural red or green, like the overly intense colors of the broken television screen. Heartbreakingly beautiful colors; the most beautiful he'd ever seen. He was a dead man now. Nothing more than a spirit, living in a city of spirits. From a great distance he observed the lovers clustered together at the street corners and the diners above their steel plates in the wide glowing windows of the restaurants. All of life was burning around him, filled with people believing intensely in their loves or their scanty hoards of knowledge. He'd always kept away from passion, from believing in anything too deeply. That was the realm of teachers and soldiers, of the crusading human rights workers and the great lovers. A world of delusion, filled with false ideas like Waterbury's destiny or Athena's mission. Life was always payable in cash, he told Marcela. Not in silly dreams. In the end, his own life had come payable just like all others.

He bore down on the situation at hand, cool again, thinking like a cop. He would reach the abandoned factory in five minutes. He had to be rapid now, more rapid than he'd ever been in his life. Domingo intended
to get there first to ambush him when he arrived. His one chance: to get there before Domingo and kill him as he stepped out of the car. If anyone were with him he would kill the passenger first, through the side window, then take out Domingo before he knew which direction the attack was coming from.

A dead man now, he had to think like a dead man, without fear or excitement. In five minutes he had reached the area of the
kilombo
. He stopped his car two blocks away and walked up to the corner to have a look. The streetlight down there didn't function and the darkness looked musty. The uncertain shadows bore no sign of Domingo's car, but Domingo wouldn't be so stupid as to park right in front. Racking his memory of a place he'd driven past a hundred times over the years as a young
ayudante
and sub-inspector, back when the factory had clanged in double shifts and the trucks had roared off from the loading dock filled with products stamped
Industria Argentina
. What remained? An opening now covered over with corrugated metal, an empty lot that had once held sheet steel and enamel paint. In his mind it merged with the space they'd left Waterbury in: another flat weedy rectangle.

Fortunato took out his Browning and snapped off the safety, chambering the first round with a dry mechanical click. It occurred to him he should have gotten a clean gun, but there hadn't been time for that. A good policeman had to improvise.