“A week. Officially.”
He turned down the corner of his mouth with the disillusion of one betrayed. “It’s very little.” He let it rest as he sipped the mate, then continued. “But I see another way to proceed, that will perhaps be faster.” La Doctora raised her eyebrows hopefully. “Let me speak to you frankly. Here in Buenos Aires, the technical facilities are very limited. It’s rare that a case is solved with fingerprints and such things. More than that, a good policeman must develop his network of informants. It’s a particular skill. And being of this barrio, working here many years,” he cocked his head, “my sources are not so bad. I’ve already begun to make inquiries. Why don’t you let me take several days to deepen the effort. Then, we’ll see if we can turn something up that way.”
“And what am I supposed to do while you’re doing that?”
He shrugged. “Get to know Buenos Aires. Go to the Café Tortoni, which is a famous literary café over a hundred years old. Go to a show at the Teatro Colon. Visit the famous cemetery at La Recoleta, where the rich are buried.” He opened his arms. “Swim in the waters of the city.”
CHAPTER NINE
In the early evening buzz of Avenida Corrientes, amid the neon and the car horns that rebounded off the plaster finery of the last century, Athena counted down the numbers that separated her from Ricardo Berenski. Calle Brazil, Calle Paraguay. The handsome Argentines streamed past her, their faces turbulent or flirtatious or questioning. Emotions seemed closer to the surface here. People didn’t look away as they did in New York or Washington, but locked eyes briefly, like a challenge or an enticement. It felt like a place where a person might fall in love any minute, but where everyone seemed to be nursing a broken heart.
She couldn’t escape a furtive paranoia as she headed to her meeting with the journalist. Miguel would look poorly on this little side investigation, especially since she was pursuing it in secret. But he had said to swim, she thought, so she was swimming. It wasn’t her fault if she’d strayed out of the shallow end.
The wide, spacious Café Losadas comprised not only a bar and café but also a bookstore, a theater, and a publishing house that printed titles on culture and politics. Behind its agricultural-sized spread of window glass men polluted notebooks with copious words, their eyes trained simultaneously on the elusive phantasm of their literary careers and the women going in and out the front door.
But Ricardo Berenski was no pretender. In the cult of investigative journalism that flourished in Buenos Aires, Berenski was one of the principal idols. Athena expected someone cinematic: tall and dark, with intellectual spectacles and a tweed sports jacket.
The real Ricardo made an almost comical impostor. Short, and saved from baldness by two islands of clipped reddish hair, he resembled the last self-portraits of Van Gogh, but smiling. His pallid skin and slightly bulging eyes made him look sharp-witted and excitable, an effect magnified by a quick gravelly voice that seemed always to be leading to a punchline. He hunched forward when he walked, craned his neck and squinted when he listened. His gnome-like presence defied weightiness, but in fact, Ricardo had splashed a lot of ugliness across the glossy faces of the major media.
When a former torturer of the Dictatorship published a book denying the allegations of his past, Ricardo arranged for him to appear on a national television show to promote it. What the torturer didn’t find out until halfway through his earnest denial was that the other guest was one of his former victims, who lifted up his shirt and showed the audience the scars. Another time, Ricardo had arranged for an actor with a hidden camera to pose as a drug dealer and close a distribution agreement with the highest ranking comisario in Greater Buenos Aires. His book on police corruption had forced the chief of the Bonaerense into retirement and made a stink that had yet to dissipate. Informed people thought that the only thing keeping him alive was his fame.
“Do you ever get death threats and that sort of thing?”
“Ahh!” He tossed his shoulders disdainfully. “If they call you on the telephone, that means they’re not really going to kill you. I tell them, ‘Andate ala concha de tu madre, hijo de puta!’” He stood up to kiss a passing friend. “How’s it going, beauty?” Sitting down again, eagerly sipping his second whiskey. “But this with the police,” he continued, shaking his head, “the complete corporatization, that comes from the Dictatorship.”
“How?”
“During the Repression, the army and the police had two motives. The first was to eliminate all thought that ran against the interests of the national elite and foreign capital. Very noble, no? The other was less exalted: simply to make money. When they took people away, they also robbed them. They had warehouses where they stored the belongings of the people they had murdered. They considered it their natural right in exchange for their heroic service to the fatherland. And the police of today, the big ones, were created during that era. Now they’re more sophisticated. They rent themselves out. They were involved in the bombings of the embassy of Israel and the Jewish Relief Society that killed hundreds of people. Also they have very fluid relations with Carlo Pelegrini and his private security businesses.” He tipped his glass to his mouth, looking past her towards the door. “But what is this about Waterbury? That’s what we came here to talk about, no? Carmen told me you think it might have been a police assassination—nine millimeter, handcuffs, the burning car. All the classics of the genre. The cocaine we can explain away as planted to mislead the investigation, because you told me on the telephone he had no history of drugs. Who’s the judge?”
“Duarte.”
He threw back his head. “Duarte! Now we’ve passed from genre to parody.”
“What do you mean?”
“We call him Sominex, you know, like the pills, because he’s so good at putting cases to sleep.”
Athena put her face in her hand. “This is too much.”
Berenski laughed, pounding her on the shoulder. “Strength, chica! Strength! Now you’re in the game! And the Selección Argentina doesn’t play by North American rules. What more have you got?”
“I have a phone number taken from his pants pocket and a friend who he knew from his days at AmiBank ten years ago.”
“AmiBank. Ah, this is interesting! And the police never investigated them?”
“No.”
“Now, yes …” He tilted his face upward and sniffed the air, circling his hand slowly in front of his nose. “I smell that odor of shit! Give me the number before we go. I have a friend who sometimes traces these little things for me.” His next words pricked her like an electric shock. “You know, I met Waterbury once.”
“You met him?”
“At the Bar Azul, in San Telmo. San Telmo is a barrio a bit, artistic, let’s say, with little experimental theaters that mix Nietzsche and Marcel Duchamp and the complete works of Eric Satie played backwards. That type, the demi-monde, and many go to the Bar Azul after the shows. Thursday night they bring in a tango group and play tango with half-price whiskey. That’s where I met him. He was going around with some French tango dancer. A woman absolutely disagreeable. One of those people who know nothing about anything, but they’re so certain of it that they dominate the conversation. But very pretty. And the girl could dance. Waterbury was a bit of a trunk, but she found someone who could dance the tango and then her whole demeanor changed. She was a character we used to see around in the bars: half-actress, half … I don’t know, she circulated in odd things. We called her La Francesa, but I think her name was … Paulé.”
Athena felt uncomfortable as she thought of Waterbury going around with a young French dancer while his family waited for him at home.
“I knew her because a friend of mine, an actress, or, better said …” He lifted his arms gaudily, “artiste, knew her and La Francesa invited us to their table. There was another woman also, a slightly older woman, but very well-maintained. I think she was of some money, because we were drinking champagne and she was the one who kept asking for mo
re. The best, eh? Dom Perignon. Veuve Cliquot. The nacional was an insult to her. She and La Francesa got into an argument about which champagne was better, and things turned ugly. La Francesa was trying to bank on her expertise as a native Parisian, but the older woman finally tired of her and said, ‘Yours is a Paris of shopgirls and waitresses. What do you know of champagne?’” Ricardo lowered his voice and leaned forward. “Then she says, ‘If you’re so at home in Paris, what are you doing selling your cum in Buenos Aires?’” He raised his eyebrows. “At this, everything went rotten! La Francesa calls her a wrinkled old pig in that little French voice and walks out, and Waterbury’s left planted there with this rich woman, holding on to his champagne glass like a lifesaver in the middle of the ocean. He and the woman left a minute after that.”
“Did you talk to Robert Waterbury?”
“Very little. To be honest, Waterbury impacted me as a bit confused. He said he was a writer, but he hadn’t published anything in some years. He told me he’d come to Buenos Aires to research another book. And when he said this he and the rich woman looked at each other, and of course, one always speculates. The whole episode was a matter of some thirty minutes.”
“Who was the woman?”
“That I don’t know. Tamara, Teresa … Something with a “T.”” Athena felt a surge of excitement. “Teresa?”
“I think, yes.”
“That phone number I told you Robert Waterbury had in his pocket when he was murdered had the name Teresa written with it! The surgeon found it before the autopsy!”
“Did you call the number?”
“Not yet.,
Now Berenski was peering at her intently, but at the same time considering something else. “Don’t call it. Let me trace it first. Then we’ll go forward well-armed.”
“What about the Frenchwoman? Paulé. Could we talk to her? We could go to the Bar Azul tonight, if you’re not doing anything.”
He held up his hand. “Tranquila, amor. Don’t give the number such importance. If I walk out of here and some drug addict puts a cork in me, will your telephone number in my pocket tell them who murdered me?” His lips twisted into a sideways grin, “Bueno, if that happened they’d arm the biggest party in the history of the Buenos Aires police, but looking at it theoretically … ” He shrugged. “We’ll see. Of La Francesa I don’t know. She’s not on the scene these days. Maybe she went back to her land.”
Athena watched him go at his drink again, and took a slow sip of her own. She was thinking about her afternoon with Miguel and his promise to intensify his efforts. “Ricardo, do you know a Comisario Fortunato? In San Justo?” She handed him Fortunato’s card.
Berenski furrowed his brow. “In Investigaciones, eh?” Tapping his glass absently on the table. “Yes. He’s older, very soft, very smooth. I met him once. One of his men uncovered some cars with phony papers, and they followed them back to a comisario in Quilmes. More than this, I don’t know.”
“He’s my main contact with the police. To me,” she pictured his melancholic smile, “he seems very decent. Do you think I can trust him to investigate this crime?”
“Trust him?” Ricardo wagged his head to the left, and then to the right. “You can trust him up to the point where you can’t trust him. He’s police.” He considered something, then, on the verge of a proposal, changed his mind. “No,” he muttered, “I can’t put you in with him.”
“Who?”
Taking in a long breath: “I know a sort of specialist on the police in San Justo. He would know all about your Fortunato. But I’ll tell you directly, he’s a criminal, and for this he has a relation with the cana, the “cops.””
“You know him from your investigations?”
“No.” Ricardo scratched nervously at his nose. “I know him from the Ejercito Revolucionario del Pueblo, of the Seventies.” For the first time Ricardo seemed serious. “The last of our revolutionary dreams. Then I woke up and went into exile for eight years. I worked more in the informational part, producing The Red Star. But this muchacho, no. He was really a warrior type. Very valiant. Very dangerous. Very dangerous,” he repeated, awed by his remembrance. “He killed a heap of Fascistas. When the ERP kidnapped General Lopez and subjected him to a revolutionary court, it was Cacho who executed him. Don’t look so shocked, Lopez was an hijo de puta. Murderer. Torturer. Thief. He deserved to die. But to kill someone defenseless, in cold blood …” He tilted his head, blew out a puff of tension. “Muy pesado.” Very heavy. Now Berenski shivered, and his voice took on a troubled mix of sadness and what sounded almost like shame. “But it went bad for him, just like it went bad for everyone. They killed his younger brother, an adolescent that had nothing to do with politics. They killed his wife. They captured Cacho, they tortured him … And there’s a bit of a shadow among us that survived the war, because now he’s working with the same people we fought against.” He shook his head. “I don’t know. Of that war, some survived intact and some survived broken. Cacho is broken.”
“But you’ll introduce me to him?”
The journalist shook his head. “Bueno. Between Cacho and me, it’s complicated. Sometimes he gives me information. But at the same time, he gets very aggressive. Resentful. I think it’s disagreeable for both of us when we meet.” He shook his head, looking at the table. “The man is bent.”
CHAPTER TEN
Fortunato did his best to look enthusiastic as he strode through the musty smoke of La Gloria to meet with the Chief. Bianco had just gotten a haircut that day and his white hair had been razored into fine clean edges. Fortunato could smell the barber’s lilac water as he leaned in to kiss him. To Fortunato’s relief Bianco had left the monkeys at home.
“Tanguero!”
“Sit down, Miguel. Sit down!”
A whiskey and a small steel tray indented with peanuts and olives had already been laid on the table next to a liter of beer, and Fortunato noticed two cigarette butts bent into the ashtray. Julio Sosa was crooning his operatic rendition of “Verdemar” over the radio, and the Chief tuned into it for a moment after they sat down as if listening for something he’d missed before. At last he frowned.
“I’ve never liked Julio Sosa,” the Chief said. “He’s too sweet.”
Fortunato grimaced. “He’s for the women,” he said, then thought, better said, he was for the women. The elegant voice that boomed around the dark bar had been recorded thirty-five years ago. Marcela had been an admirer of Julio Sosa. He used to pretend to be jealous of Sosa, of the fine suit and debonair hairstyle that Sosa wore on the covers of his record albums. Julio! Julio! Marcela would tease him. I’m going to leave you for Julio.
The Chief continued. “Take someone else, say El Polaco, to sing this song, and given the same song, it’s going to have that tang of whiskey, with a more complex feeling. This,” he motioned around the dim ether that hung in the decrepit interior of the bar, “this is just a lullaby.” Fortunato said nothing, still thinking of Marcela. “And,” the Chief began, “how are we going with this matter of the gringa?”
It relieved Miguel to get on the theme, because he was on the theme already by himself, wondering again about Waterbury’s missing friend Pablo who Athena kept mentioning. Pablo. AmiBank. And that note in the papers about AmiBank and Carlo Pelegrini.
But they were talking now about the gringa. “Look, Leon, the matter is thus: we have to give her something.”
Elena came with another steel dish, this one filled with tiny bread sticks and little pink rounds of sausage. “Bring me a whiskey, amor,” Fortunato said quickly.
“Why?” the Chief continued when she’d left. “Why can’t you just put on your idiot face for a couple of weeks and let her go home?”
“She’s not so retarded, Leon. We went over to see Duarte a few days ago. She was asking things like,” imitating her ingenuous voice: “‘Why didn’t anyone talk to the wife? Why didn’t anyone talk to his contacts at AmiBank?’”
“And Duarte?”
“He def
ended himself! All that verse about la justicia, the scarce resources, the usual,” Fortunato said sourly. “But the chica wasn’t buying that merchandise.” Fortunato worked a cigarette out of the box and picked up the Chief’s lighter.
“So you went back to the theme of the narcos?”
Fortunato finished pulling the flame into the tube before answering. “Of course! But then she says, again, “I still don’t understand how drug dealers would kill him for drugs and leave six chalks of pure cocaine in the car!””
“But I told her—”
“Yes, you told her, and I told her too, but don’t be so sure that we’re the only ones making cara de gil here.”
The Chief twisted his mouth downward, knocked his knuckles absently on the table a few times as if to clear his head.
“Yes,” Fortunato said acidly. “I think we can say that she senses a certain lack of professionalism in the management of the Caso Waterbury.”
“You were supposed to manage it, Miguel!”
“I was managing it! Domingo’s merquero was shot with his own gun, did you forget that? Did you want him turning up at the hospital with a bullet wound? I took him over to one of our clinics. I managed it!” The Chief frowned, and Fortunato felt himself looking once more at Waterbury’s shuddering corpse, felt Domingo’s smug baby face invading his mind again. You calmed the hijo de puta, Comi. He pushed it away, tasted the sour fizz of the beer. “Look, Leon, something, we have to give.”
The Chief nodded. “You’re right, Miguel. As always. She’s been talking to the Instituto Contra La Represión Policial. She also met with Ricardo Berenski.”
Fortunato said nothing, but the feeling of betrayal burned at his ears. Everybody knew Berenski. His book had created a surge of literary activity in the Buenos Aires police as the entire force had rushed to see whose name appeared in it. For a while they’d had a picture of Berenski taped into one of the urinals. Other photos made their way to the shooting range. “When did she meet with Berenski?”
17 Stone Angels Page 9