“I think I need to make something clear to you,” she began quietly. “I don’t represent the United States government. I represent a five-year-old girl and a widow whose father and husband died a horrible death on a trip to Buenos Aires and came back as ashes in a plastic jar. That’s who I represent.” She took a breath. “And I assure you that woman has made every phone call and written every letter and begged favors from every stranger who would listen, all so that someone would come down here and find out why her husband was tortured and murdered in a country she’s never even been to.” Athena felt a tear at the corner of her eye and brushed it away angrily. She could hear her voice fluttering up and down. “And you’re right! They deserve somebody better than me! I know that! Everybody knows it!” She stopped to compose herself again. “But I’m the one who’s here!” She wiped away another tear and then her voice was dead calm. “So you tell me: should I go back and explain that you wouldn’t help them because you don’t like the United States government?”
The lawyer stared silently at her, shifted backwards in her chair. She considered a while, then took a packet of tissues from her desk and pushed them across to Athena. “I’m sorry.” Her voice warmed up a little. “Why don’t you tell me about the crime. What was the victim’s name?”
Athena felt relieved as she reached for the tissues. “Robert Waterbury.”
She nodded. “I remember that one.” She took out a cigarette and paused just before lighting it. “It’s okay?”
“Of course.”
Blowing a fog of blue smoke towards the open window: “They found him in the car in San Justo, no? Shot several times, then finished with a nine millimeter. That was the detail that captured me, the nine millimeter. That’s the standard police bullet. Also, he was wearing handcuffs, which made me suspicious. You read the expediente, no? Do you remember the brand of handcuffs they used?” When Athena hesitated, Carmen said, “Was it Eagle Security?”
“I think so.”
Carmen nodded. “That’s the brand the police use. Exported to them by one of your hardworking companies in New Jersey. The same company also sells them pepper spray, teargas, and metal detectors, also anti-riot gear, up to water cannons and armored trucks.” She smiled. “But not the picana electrica, for torture. That is still industria nacional. In that respect, at least, we are resisting globalization.”
She waved the hand with the cigarette. “But I’m sure your Comisario Fortunato told you this.”
Athena resisted the impulse to defend him. “No, he didn’t mention that.”
“All the same,” she said cheerfully, “with fifty thousand nine millimeter pistols running around Buenos Aires province, there must be a few that don’t belong to the police. What did the Comisario say?”
“The theory right now is that it was a settling of accounts between drug dealers. Or a drug deal that went bad.”
“Ah! The old “settling of accounts!” That’s almost as popular as the “shot due to mistaken identity” line, and the classic “shot while attempting to escape!” They’re very traditional in their literature, the police. They don’t like New Fiction.” Her voice took on a girl-to-girl intimacy. “Chica, let me tell you about our defenders of the public well-being.”
She went down the list with the insistent cadence of a well-used speech: illegal imprisonment, torture, trigger-happy officers, and extra-judicial executions committed in cold blood. “Eighty-eight percent of the population has a negative image of the police, and fifty percent fear them outright. Of every hundred robberies denounced, only one results in a conviction. Of every ten murders, three are solved. One quarter of all killings in Buenos Aires province are committed by the police themselves.”
“A quarter?” She tried to match that statistic with the half-dozen police she’d met in her day at the comisaria, and the face she came up with was the officer who had run over the dog and then shot it in the middle of the street.
The police, Carmen went on, had become a corporation, with an organized hierarchy and a sophisticated system of collection and distribution. Their loyalty was to the corporation, and officers suspected of disloyalty would end up marginalized, or even dead. “In the last week, three policeman have been killed, all of them victims of “attempted robbery,” while they were off-duty. That, chica, is a settling of accounts.”
Athena thought of the Comisario, with his kind face and his weary sigh. “Well,” she tendered, “don’t you think there can be some good police?”
“No.” She could tell that the flat answer hadn’t satisfied Athena. “I tell you simply: no. Exemplary husbands, there might be. Loyal friends, gentle fathers. There must be. But not good policemen. And San Justo? Where your friend Fortunato is a Comisario? It’s one of the most corrupt districts there are.”
Athena shook her head. “But this man has investigated corrupt police himself. I think he wants to do good things. Maybe he’s constrained by the system.” The lawyer didn’t answer, and Athena went on hesitantly. “But there are a few elements that make me uncomfortable.” She described the dues left unexplored, including the missing friend named Pablo at AmiBank and the phone number found in Waterbury’s pocket: Teresa. “It’s frustrating, but since I’m here basically at their indulgence I’m not in a position to make any demands. I’m just hoping something will happen.”
The lawyer deliberated for a moment. “Okay. Athena, no?”
“Athena.”
“Fine. Here is what I can offer you, Athena. If you will get the widow to retain INCORP as her representative, I can get a copy of the expediente and we can begin an investigation. But the papers take time. Perhaps you will have to return to Buenos Aires in a month.”
Athena’s hopes spiraled downward again, and Carmen must have seen it. “Or,” she added slowly, “I have a friend who can perhaps help. He’s a journalist who has written much about the police. A case like this might interest him.” She took out her address book and looked up a number, then dialed it: Con Ricardo Berenski, por favor? De parte de Carmen Amado. As she waited, “Ricardo is half-famous here. Now he’s working on an investigation of a businessman named Carlo Pelegrini.”
Athena recognized the name. “I saw a couple of his articles.”
Ricardo had come to the phone and Carmen’s voice became playful. “Amor, I wanted to find you before Pelegrini’s men do. Sí, querido. Every time I open the newspaper you’re putting your foot in his ass. Sí. Look, Rici, I have a girl here from the United States investigating a murder of one of her countrymen. About four months ago. Yes, Robert Waterbury.” A pause. “Me too. It had that odor …”
She made the arrangements to meet for a drink the following evening, then hung up and turned back to Athena. “Bien,” Carmen concluded, “talk to the widow and we’ll see.” She stood up and Athena stood up with her. “And, ojo,” she said, tapping beneath her eye, “be discreet.” She pointed to the phone, and Athena shuddered at her next words. “They’re listening.”
CHAPTER SIX
The smell of the sulphur hissed into Fortunato’s nostrils, and he set the votive candle next to his favorite picture of his wife. Marcela in black and white, at the age of twenty, a few days before they’d married at the Metallurgical Syndicate Hall. She’d just graduated from the teachers” college, a tall, big-boned woman with a lanky waist and fluid hips that he found intriguing and erotic for their strength as much as their feminine grace. He loved her handsome dark face, with its long Inca nose and framing tendrils of black hair. Mi Negra, he’d called her, or India. Her father had used his connections as secretary of the Union to get the hall at a discount, and had welcomed him into the family with a long toast filled with high-flown words and tears. As a cadet in the Academy, Fortunato was looking forward to a steady career and a decent pension at the end. The people had still liked the police in those days, before all that mess with the subversives made everything go rotten.
He looked around the room, whose objects implied his life in the same way that an ex
pediente implied a crime. A portrait here or there, a souvenir mate purchased on a vacation to Cordoba. They were like pieces of evidence, but like all expedientes they lent themselves to a certain amount of fraud. Four little rooms in the suburbs of Villa Luzuriaga formed a paradoxical home for the Comisario of one of the most lucrative stations of the Buenos Aires police galaxy.
He went into the little kitchen and put a kettle of water on the stove. Maybe a mate would lift his spirits. He filled a gourd with herb and a silver straw, dousing it with lukewarm water and watching the pale green flakes swell. She could never bear to take her mate bitter, always insisted on sugar. And cut me a little slice of lemon, Miguelito. Now he drank it bitter every day.
He’d been severely depressed since Marcela’s death, but it had started long before that when it first became apparent that her illness lay beyond the power of doctors. The diagnosis had fallen, and when they went to the specialists in hope of some new information, it had fallen just the same, fallen again and again until it became inescapable. Marcela seemed to have accepted it before he did, counted her fifty-eight years as sufficient and prepared herself for the torture that would soon be meted out to her. For him, it had been harder to submit. He kept trying to make an arrangement.
“Old woman!” he’d said. “They tell me there’s a study that they’re conducting in the United States that has had success …”
“And where are we going to get the money to go tramping around the United States? With your fifteen hundred pesos per month!”
“I’ll borrow it,” he’d said, but he knew that with that stratagem she had trapped him. For years he had been accumulating money through his “jobs” for the institution, and for years she had been refusing to acknowledge it. At home, he played the honest policeman.
It had been easy in the beginning. A traffic stop, some minor infraction either real or imagined. “You just tell them the law,” Sub-inspector Leon Bianco instructed him over a beer at La Gloria. “It’s up to them if they want to follow it.” And the law was always troublesome—there were the hours at the police station filling out papers, the inevitable check of antecedentes. And once antecedentes were examined, some tinge always came through. No one was ever innocent.
The problem was that Marcela did the family budget, and he didn’t know exactly how to declare it to her.
“Look, Beauty, we have some extra money this month.” “Extra? From where?”
He looked away and fought off a bashful uncertainty. “It’s a bit like this: with all the subversives around now, our jobs are much more dangerous than before, so sometimes individuals give us tips to keep extra careful watch over them.” It wasn’t totally a lie: they did collect protection money from some of the businesses and factories.
“Oh?” Suspicious. “Tell me from who? Who’s giving you extra pay?”
“Marcela,” he said delicately, “in the Institution, it’s a little different from most jobs. They expect us to confront delinquents and subversives, but they pay us a miserable salary. So … To a point, we have to autofinance—”
Her face hardened and she recoiled from him, stepping on his explanation. “Don’t start with that, Miguel! Don’t even start! I didn’t marry a corrupt policeman.”
He had tried to seduce her with appliances. First, a coffee-maker and, taking heart from that, a washing machine. A week later he arrived home to find an empty space where the machine had been. “I gave it to the neighbor,” she said airily.
After that he stashed the money in a safety deposit box in the Banco de la Nadon and bided his time. He began collecting from lottery sellers and pimps, devising meticulous schedules filled with names and check-marks. In three years he had ascended to the brigadas, the plainclothes groups that conducted intelligence operations and mounted raids. He became expert in working with buchones, stool pigeons who could be reeled in on a moment’s notice to face some ancient charge hanging over their heads. He unraveled auto theft networks and raided illegal casinos, bordellos, marijuana stockpiles. When he brought in a killer of three children the newspaper put his name on the front page and the mayor of Buenos Aires gave him a citation. Those were good operations; it was clear who the bad guys were. He noted the shine of admiration in the faces of the younger officers, imagined he could hear them discussing him as they lounged about the streets. “That’s the Fortunato who found the kidnapped girl in San Martin. It’s he who caught the rapist that violated six women.” Marcela worried pleasingly for his safety. As far as she knew, he was the most incorruptible policeman in Buenos Aires.
The money kept accumulating. He’d assumed that when they had children she would see the way clear to use the money for their sake. But they had no luck with children, in spite of the tests and the prayers to the Virgin of Lujan. Their best hopes went away in a pool of blood when Marcela miscarried a little girl at the sixth month, in that long, bad year of 1976 when martial law came down and the army slapped Argentina senseless with a hard, flat hand. Then they offered him a different sort of work.
Sub-Comisario Bianco called him into his office. “Miguel, we’re going to pinch one of the subversives tonight at his house. Why don’t you come and lend a hand?”
The Communists were everywhere in those days. Not only with guns, but, equally dangerously, in the labor unions and the university. They liked to hide behind the democratic institutions, talking of exploitation and class war, but now the military had decided to tear away the Constitution and show them what war was all about.
The target that night was a member of the autoworkers syndicate at the Ford factory. The factory manager, as a patriotic service, had identified him as a persistent troublemaker in labor matters and “probably a Communist.” This was explained to Fortunato in a few sentences by Sub-Comisario Bianco, at that time with jet-black hair and a crisp military manner. The operation was to go to the house at three in the morning and grab him in his bed. “You just follow along,” Bianco explained. “Nothing’s going to happen. He’ll go quietly. He’s got three children there.”
The subversive lived in a small apartment behind his parents’ house, much like Fortunato’s. Fortunato rode over with Bianco and three other agents in a Ford Falcon. It was summer, but they were wearing suits. They stopped outside the door and lined up, two of the men on either side of the door with submachine guns, while the rest of them drew their pistols and stood back and to the side.
Bianco stepped up to the door and pounded on it three times with all his strength. “Open up!” he screamed. “Police!” There was a sound of rustling inside, and a baby started crying. Bianco pounded again. “Open it! Open it!” He stepped back, summoning his energies, and Fortunato thought he heard a timid voice say, “I’m coming!”
Too late. Bianco fired a round into the lock and then hurled himself against the panel. The door burst open right into the face of the wife, knocking her down and bringing a gout of blood from her nose. Bianco was already beside himself. “Whore! I said open it!” The other plainclothes men came flowing through after him, into the darkened bedroom with their guns drawn, shouting. They found two children cowering in the bed, along with the crying baby. The husband wasn’t there.
“Where is he?” Bianco screamed.
The woman was crying. “I don’t know. He went to watch a football game with some friends!”
Bianco grabbed her by her hair and pulled her to her feet. “Talk to me straight, whore, or you’re all going in.” She stuck to her story, cowering, despite the blows and the threats and the gathering intensity of Bianco’s fury. For the love of God he went to a football game! Finally Bianco lost his temper completely. “Bring me the boy!” A soldier brought out a little boy, perhaps six years old, and Bianco grabbed his arm, making him cry out. “Where is your father? Where?” He beat the child across the face with the flat of his hand and then gave him such a blow to the head that he went sprawling across the floor. Next he demanded the girl, a bit younger, and beat her as she cried out without comprehension. By n
ow the woman was hysterical, but nonetheless seemed to know nothing about her husband’s whereabouts. “No?” Bianco demanded, beside himself. “No?” He grabbed the baby from the woman’s arms and held it upside down by its feet, swaying it back and forth slightly and delivering sharp slaps across its back. The baby, only a few weeks old, was screaming in its tiny hoarse voice, so far gone that it could no longer catch its breath. “Where is he?” he asked, slapping the baby again. “Where is he?”
At this the mother began to sing, naming his sister, his brother, his friends from the union, any possible place he might be, knowing only that he had gone out to watch a football game! That he was for River! That he sometimes bet five pesos! They called in reinforcements to raid the houses she had named and sat down to wait. Fortunato was ringing with shock, watching in disbelief as one of the plainclothes men began to catalog all the appliances and furniture in the little apartment. Twenty minutes later the husband came home and they arrested him without a struggle. Bianco made a phone call. In the end they took them all away, the mother and children crying softly. After that soldiers came in and started loading the furniture onto an army truck. “See,” Bianco told him, dismissing his initial worries about the operation. “Nothing happened!”
In the next days Marcela found him distracted and moody, and he finally unraveled the story as they sipped on a morning mate. “They were subversives, of course, or at least, the father was …” He let the sentence trail off, and she didn’t answer.
She sat silently for a half-minute, looking at the floor, then hid her face in her hands and shook. “It’s so horrible!” She sobbed for a minute without control, then took her hands away from her wet face. “Don’t get in with those people, Miguel! I’m begging you! Or someday …’with a shudder, “you’ll be the one beating the baby.”
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