He heeded her, ducking Bianco’s summons for other operativos until Bianco finally stopped inviting him. The Sub-Comisario treated him with a tinge of scorn after that, as if Fortunato lacked the necessary masculinity to own up to the task. In contrition, he’d devoted himself to the three things required for advancement in the force: he collected money, he arrested criminals and he protected his friends. The field became smooth again. Now Bianco had ascended to Comisario General, atop the Division de Investigaciones, and he had taken his friend Fortunato up the ladder with him.
Fortunato finished his mate and went to his bedroom to dress for the evening. From the large wooden wardrobe he selected his best jacket, a fine Italian wool woven in large black and white houndstooth checks. Marcela had gotten it for his birthday twenty years ago at a high priced store in the center, even though he insisted they could get the same thing cheaper in the suburbs. He still remembered the jacket’s magical radiance when he’d worn it out of the store, not realizing that two decades later the small lapels and bold pattern had gone ludicrously out of fashion. He matched it with a crimson tie and his black loafers, fished an old pair of cuff-links from a little box on the shelf. Peering into his wallet he was dismayed to find it a bit light. One should always have a bit extra for an evening out.
He pulled a screwdriver from his night table and quickly unscrewed the floor of the wardrobe, prying it carefully up from a thin groove he’d cut in the corner. Looking back at him from beneath the panel, in orderly rows of tight green bundles, sat half a million dollars in United States currency.
The money had accumulated almost by itself, secreted into the little space when Marcela was out. He had dispensed some of it to needy fellow policemen or to crime victims who especially moved him. The children near the police station knew him as an infallible source of toys and sweets. But still it kept piling up, nearly filling the compartment allotted to it so that soon he would need to start a new compartment.
What good had it done him, really? Even at the end, with Marcela, when he invented a new fiction of a special medical fund for policemen’s families, she’d refused. “It already is, Miguel. I prefer to die with dignity in my home, not chasing after impossible hopes.”
He sat on the bed, looking at the neat compartments into which he had divided his life. In the other half of the wardrobe behind the closed door, Marcela’s clothes would be hanging just as she’d left them, her shoes arranged in tidy pairs at the bottom, her hats on top. Some men carried on affairs, or even had a second family in another part of town. His infidelity had been different; he had cheated with an ideal instead of with another woman, and kept faithful to the lie that they’d shared, the lie of the honest cop and his schoolteacher wife. And then had come Waterbury, and cancer.
He opened Marcela’s half of the wardrobe and the scent of lilac powder came rushing over him. Fortunato wept at the sight of her dresses.
An hour later, he strapped on his Browning nine millimeter and left for the 17 Stone Angels.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Athena was waiting for him in the lobby of the Sheraton in a white silk blouse, her face shining with a bashful eagerness. Appropriate, he supposed, for an evening with a man twenty-five years her senior. One wanted to be well-dressed, but not too alluring.
She seemed slightly nervous as they walked to the car. “What a custom you have here, eating dinner at midnight!”
“Here we eat late, Athena. The trick is, you need a little siesta. Then you wake up, drink a cafécito, and there you are.”
They got into the Fiat Uno and headed down to La Boca. The autumn evening had a blood warmth, still retaining a trace of that humid softness that seasoned the air during summer. It streamed across Fortunato’s face like a swath of velvet. The streets of Palermo looked exceptionally beautiful, with the plane trees casting out pale green platters into the canopy of branches that arched overhead. The splendid old townhouses gave the smaller streets an intimate sense of material contentment, as if the lives they held inside abounded in orderly but sensual comfort. The bigger apartment buildings in this bastion of the upper-middle class showed off well-lit lobbies behind walls of plate glass. One imagined cocktail parties served by a white-jacketed barman with slick black hair. Both sides of the street were lined with balconies trailing vines and houseplants, and from a few of them the blue exhalation of grilling meat was drifting upward. On nearly every corner a bustling neighborhood café threw a warm glow into the street.
“This is Palermo,” he explained to her. “This is a barrio of the middle class and above, though lately it has become very fashionable.”
“It’s beautiful,” the Doctora said.
“The Porteño enjoys the life of the street,” he explained. “See all the balconies? People like to let the air flow in, to hear the sounds and to look out.”
He saw her watching the well-attired people who strolled tranquilly, or raised their glasses in the golden light of a restaurant.
“Forgive me, Athena, I’m very content that you’ve come and I have great hopes for our investigation, but I still do not understand why they have sent a human rights expert such as yourself and not someone from the FBI.”
The girl tried to be piola, but he could sense a stiffness in her explanation. “I think that’s internal politics, Miguel. The State Department found it more convenient to approach it as a matter of human rights because of jurisdictions and that type of thing.”
Fortunato relaxed. She really meant what the Chief had already said: the gringos didn’t care. Why else would they send a woman with no authority and no credentials? “Of course. There’s always politics. But here is Avenida Corrientes.”
The street became a river of light. Theatrical posters displayed manic actors with comic smiles, and a dozen bookstores had rolled their wooden shelves onto the sidewalk. At eleven-thirty, the cafés were packed and lively.
“This is the theater district. As you can see, the people of Buenos Aires like to live fully. At one in the morning, it is the same.”
“Wow!”
“This is a city with its own culture,” he went on. “There are many famous writers: Borges, Bioy-Casares, Julio Cortazar, Roberto Arldt.” Fortunato knew the names through Marcela’s crumbling paperbacks. “Also, Buenos Aires has its own music and dance: the tango. We have our own food, our own dialect, called lunfardo.”
They rounded the big white obelisk that pointed to the pink infused sky, turned onto the Avenida 9 de Julio. “This is the widest street in the world,” he told her. “Fourteen lanes in each direction. Look there …” He pointed across the vast Plaza de la Republica to where an American hamburger chain had hooked two huge outlets onto the street amongst the restaurants and traditional businesses. “That should make you feel at home.”
“People actually go there?”
“Si, Señorita!” he said. “There are every day more in Buenos Aires. And others like them. Also Wal-Mart and Carrefour: many big corporations from the exterior. Little by little they go eating the old businesses.”
They streamed down the 9 de Julio with a thousand other cars, some, he thought, with false papers like his, most others slightly out of order, with some little coima paid to get them through the inspection. Buenos Aires, the city of the arrangement. And he, a citizen in full.
She was looking all around. “This is really marvelous, Miguel. Thank you for bringing me.”
“Now we’re coming into La Boca. It’s called La Boca because it’s near the port, which was the mouth of Buenos Aires.”
Here the buildings became low and ramshackle. Many were armored with corrugated tin, two-story shacks without balconies or decoration, as if they’d been cut out of sardine cans. They looked tight and mean. “These are conventillos. Here live many poor people. This part of the city can be a bit dangerous.”
They continued through the narrow streets, past fluorescent-lit cafés and dark wooden bars, huddles of rough-looking men with faces inclined towards televised football ga
mes. Fortunato parked the car and gave a little boy permission to watch it for him. “17 Stone Angels,” he said as they approached a single-story building. “Look up there …”
He pointed to the roofline where a long row of the mythical beings looked down from amidst molded sprays of lilies and garlanded escutcheons. Some glared down with turbulent eyes and frothy beards, others smiled, laughed coyly, or turned their lips down at the impulse of some sorrowful mineral thought. Sixteen of them, progressing from sadness at one side to laughter at the other, the whole range of emotion that a life might encompass. Largest of all loomed the one over the entrance, the seventeenth, seeming masculine at one moment and feminine the next, its identity obscured by a blindfold that covered its eyes.
“The owner claims that they were originally carved for the Palacio de Justicia in the last century, but the official in charge of the contract found a reason to reject them. The reality was that he’d taken a bribe to award the contract to someone else. Somehow they ended up here.”
Athena stared up at the outsize statues. “So the blindfolded one is Justice?”
“Yes,” Fortunato said with a trace of humor. “Because she never sees anything.” Athena looked at him dubiously and he added, “For the same reason, my wife used to insist that it represented Love.”
Fortunato had been coming to the 17 Stone Angels for decades now. He used to come with Marcela. Every Thursday they’d gone to the club in the barrio to dance, and every two weeks they had made the drive here, to La Boca, where the tango had been born, to dance and chat away the night with other regulars over bottles of red wine and soda. He didn’t know exactly why they kept coming. Other than its grandiose facade, the place itself had little to set it apart from a thousand other poor bars in the city. Fluorescent lights bounded off plaster walls, while a mirror of tarnished silver doubled bottles of grappa and mysterious spirits that Fortunato suspected dated to the last century. Some immigrant carpenter had hammered the bar together a hundred years ago out of tropical woods from the North, without pretensions to beauty but plenty strong enough to support the slouch of a guapo coolly watching the proceedings or a body shoved up against it in a brawl. Uncountable milongas had been stepped out by easy women and questionable men, and Fortunato could still feel the presence, in the islands of stained white tablecloths, of that vanished demi-monde.
At midnight, Los Angeles de Piedra had just begun to percolate. Mostly older people, like himself, but also a sprinkling of curious young people who had discovered the place in the last couple of years. He hadn’t been here since Marcela had gotten too sick to dance, some three months ago. Even so, he could see at a glance that everyone had found out.
“Capitan!” Norberta said as he came in the door. The owner kissed him on the cheek then continued talking softly with his arm around his neck. “I’m so sorry about Marcela. All of us, we heard the news and we didn’t know what to do! We thought we’d lost you! Did you get the flowers that we sent to the comisaria?”
“Thank you, Norberta. I received them. It was a comfort.” He turned to the gringa. “Norberta, this is Doctora Fowler, a friend of mine visiting from the United States. She’s here for some police matters,” he clarified, to allay any speculation.
La Doctora was examining the place, and from what Fortunato could tell she looked pleased. He couldn’t get his balance with the gringa. She seemed very self-contained, vaguely prosecutorial, but at the same time he thought he could perceive a tenderness that animated her beneath that surface.
They conferred over the menu and he ordered them a mixed grill, “the most Argentine,” and Norberta brought bottles of red wine and soda along with a small metal bucket of ice. La Doctora crunched on a bread stick while Fortunato poured out her wine and lightened it with a shot of soda. He dropped in an ice cube, then prepared the same for himself. At a corner table the musicians were downing coffee, whiskey and cigarettes.
He leaned towards her. “There are the musicians, over there. A violin, a guitar, and a bandoneon.” She looked at him, puzzled, and he searched for the word. “An … accordion. This is not a tourist place,” he said. “The tourists go to Carlita’s where everything is fine. This place is more … tango.” He told her the history of tango, that it had originated in the Andalusian tangos of the 1850s, then developed in whorehouses here in La Boca and in the southern suburbs at the turn of the twentieth century. Tango was a dance of the underworld, of pimps and prostitutes, of poor men losing their girlfriends to millionaires, of lost connections to the barrio, of knife fights between guapos—”
“What’s a guapo?”
“Guapo is lunfordo for a hard young man who uses a knife. Tango is full of lunfordo. It’s going to cost you to understand what they are saying, but I’ll help you.” He bit into a breadstick and continued his thought. “Tango is all like that: about love, violence, memory … ” He took a sip of his wine. “Corruption. It has much that is dark and bitter, because life is thus.” He leaned toward her and hushed his voice. “This here isn’t the best tango—they’re all spent here, you’ll see—but this is the soul of tango, where it began.” He nodded towards Osvaldo, a man of about sixty whose shaved head and jet black eyebrows enhanced the menacing aura that glittered from his gap-toothed smile and his gold chain. Fortunato leaned in towards Athena Fowler. “That man over there. He’s managed women his whole life. Also, he was famous as a knife fighter. Now he’s getting old, like us all. He carries a little gun in his belt. The other with him is a puntero of the barrio. A dealer of cocaine. And it’s all in the music. There’s tangos about the pimp, and about cocaine. There’s tangos about men like that”—motioning towards another table—“sitting with their whiskey and their smoke, looking sad. There’s tangos about bars like Los 17 Angeles de Piedra.”
Osvaldo the pimp saw Fortunato looking and raised his thumb towards him. “What do you say, Capitan!”
“Here in the battle, Osvaldo, as always.”
“I’m sorry about Marcela,” the pimp hollered across the room.
“Thus is life,” Fortunato said, returning to La Doctora.
“Everybody seems to know you.”
“I used to come here often.” He sat back, suddenly uncomfortable. “My wife and I would come here to dance.”
Her face filled with compassion again. “I’m sorry,” she said.
Fortunato shrugged. “There are even tangos about the dead wife.”
The grill came, a charcoal brazier topped with ribs, a steak, a half chicken, a pork sausage, a blood sausage, tripe, liver and, as a special gift to him, a soft crispy piece of mollejas, the sweetbreads. Brown and purple and beige, meat colors, glistening with oil. La Doctora looked at it with amazement as Norberta stood it on their table. “We can’t eat all this!”
“This is a poor neighborhood. Nothing will get thrown away.” The musicians took their places now and the guitarist closed his eyes and tuned his instrument as they began to eat. They launched into a milonga, a lively dancing tango, and a few couples got up and began moving across the floor. La Doctora was watching them. “It’s different from the tangos you see on television.”
“Those are show,” the detective said dismissively. “This is tango of the barrio.” Luis and Yolanda were dancing, each of them looking to the side and keeping a stiff back as they advanced and whirled and retreated. Luis was marking her well, moving her from side to side, and never missing a step. They were light and fluid, perfectly entwined. “Notice that the woman’s steps and the man’s steps are completely different, but they match perfectly. He advances, she retreats. She moves to the side, and he closes her off. In tango, the man rules. He leads her, but he allows her to be a woman.” He knew that in the United States, they saw things differently. “That’s how it is here.”
“My father could tango.”
“You don’t say!”
Her father, it seemed, had been quite the dancer in his youth. At family gatherings he would put on his old records and teach her a few steps.
Fortunato had the silly idea of asking her to dance, but just then the music ended and someone got up to sing. Gustavo, a retired sailor of at least eighty years, in a dandruff-covered black suit, mangling “Silencio’. The withered old man sang with one skinny hand in front of his chest and the other trembling out at the side, stretching the dramatic notes like pieces of taffy. La Doctora watched with an amazed smile as he missed note after note.
“He’s the worst!” Fortunato whispered under the music, “but he’s a friend. And he keeps singing!”
The song dated from after the First World War. It was about a woman who had seven sons who were all killed in the fields of France, leaving at last a terrible silence in the soul. As Gustavo was flinging his hand out for the climactic line, Fortunato felt a tap on the shoulder. Chief Bianco was standing over him, smiling.
“Miguel!”
“Jefe!” Fortunato rose to his feet.
The Chief was wearing his ivory dinner jacket, which meant he had come to sing. His wife, Gladys, stood behind him, stuffed into printed flowers. Fortunato made the introductions and everyone kissed. He invited the Biancos to sit down.
“I’m glad to see you out,” Gladys said sympathetically. “We’ve missed you here.”
“Thus is life,” Fortunato answered, trying to inject the proper weight into the tired reply.
“Retard!” Bianco scolded. “Why did you take Señorita Fowler to this place when Soriano is singing at Carlita’s!”
“Ah!” Fortunato waved his hand. “It’s full of tourists.”
“You’re right.” The Chief addressed La Doctora, knocking his fist on the table. “This is the real tango! Without artifice or illusion!” He noticed the pimp and pointed at him. “What say, loco?”
The bald man’s teeth sparkled. “Here listening to the maestros, General!” Nodding to Gladys: “Señora!”
“And …” Bianco focused his square gold-framed bifocals again on La Doctora. “How is Buenos Aires? How is the Waterbury case?”
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