The occasional desultory business interrupted the modest houses: a butcher, an ice-cream shop that also sold tickets for the quinella, a sickly-looking hardware store. They passed the uninterrupted brick wall of an abandoned factory. “Here they used to make televisions,” the driver said, “but it’s been globalized, thanks to your friends at the IMF. Now we have Sony and Sanyo. Over there, in that other block, they made electric fans. Also globalized. They couldn’t compete with los chinos. I know because I used to be their accountant.”
The remisero, it turned out, had a degree in economics from the University of Buenos Aires, and the rare presence of an American ear made him voluble. “Thus the neo-liberal model, Señorita. The glory of Free Trade as imposed by your experts from the universities of Chicago and Harvard and promoted by the global corporations. Cut the importation duties, open the market to foreign corporations, privatize state enterprises. Then, when the national factories go broke, the multinationals can write in their annual reports that they have conquered a new market. Thus is the game. But don’t worry: when they’re finished with us, they’ll do the same thing to you.”
“What do you think is the solution?”
He spit out a dry laugh. “A long brick wall and a few good machine guns.”
Something on the street caught her eye. “What’s happening there?”
Three men had pinned someone in a sports jacket against a white plaster wall. One of them, in a blue jogging suit, cuffed the victim on the head and spat on him, then pulled several bank-notes from the man’s wallet and threw it on the ground. The window was open and she could hear the assailant in the jogging suit cursing as they passed. He slapped the man across the top of his head once more and turned to face the remis, fixing Athena with a glare so malevolent that she turned away. The driver punched it through the intersection.
“It’s troublesome, this barrio,” he said. “Globalizado.”
He dropped her at the corner she’d requested and drove off. The even files of small working-class houses died out here into unfinished brick walls and vacant lots, with yellow dirt footpaths lapping at the street. A few meager dwellings squatted behind weedy lawns and hopeful little plantings of hibiscus or avocado. A guard dog barked through an iron fence a hundred yards away. At three in the afternoon, the cracked and crumpled sidewalks buckled footless down the block.
Athena took out the piece of paper Ricardo had written for her and tried to orient herself. Cacho’s house sat behind an empty lot with no address and Ricardo’s diagram was ambiguous. She ambled hesitantly down the street, then returned, stopping before the concrete slab of an aborted construction project. Behind it she could see a brick wall with a few strange slit windows in it. She heard a car approaching behind her. Before she realized it, the car had pulled over to the curb and disgorged three men who quickly closed in on her. In the next second, she recognized the blue jogging suit, the dark, frightening rage. He tilted his chin up and glared. “What’s happening with you? Eh? What are you doing here?”
She glanced up and down the street but the only movement was the dog several houses away, throwing itself against the iron fence. “Excuse me,” she said, sounding overly polite even to herself. “I’m looking for someone. Perhaps you can help me. Do you know Cacho Rivera?”
One of the men laughed, the other kept her targeted in his harsh black glare. “On whose part?” the jogger said.
“On the part of Ricardo Berenski. It’s a personal matter.”
He stared at her over a long, unpleasant pause. She’d place him in his late forties. His black hair and dark skin stretched over sharp features and a prominent nose that had been broken and set back crookedly. With his shaggy hair shot with gray, he might have been an aging hippy, but he had nothing relaxed or benevolent about him, and the wrinkles and small irregular scars around one of his eyes layered a patina of violent experience over his face as though something inside was burning through to the surface. He had a hairspring intensity about him. “Bien,” he said at last. Turning to his cohorts, “Muchachos; as we said, eh?” They melted off towards the car and he motioned towards the brick building. “Let’s talk inside.”
She followed him around the corner to a heavy metal door, which he unlocked and opened for her with a small polite gesture of welcome. She hesitated a moment before entering the isolation of the dim room. He was Berenski’s friend, right? She went in and he locked the door behind them.
The room had a cool, stony smell, despite the heat of the day, and was surprisingly clean and well-furnished. The smoothly finished plaster spread from floor to ceiling like a fresh sheet of paper, interrupted by various expensive wall fixtures and several paintings and drawings in neat glassed-in frames. A leather sofa faced an oversized television screen, along with two stuffed leather chairs. A stack of unopened boxes containing video cameras stood in the corner. She noticed that the windows were barred and shuttered with steel. An assault rifle leaned against the television set.
He motioned towards the leather sofa and she settled nervously into the cool squeaking cushions. “Who are you and why did Berenski send you to me?”
She spoke as if they were sitting in an office somewhere. “I’m Doctor Athena Fowler. I’m trying to find out about the murder of a United States citizen and Ricardo thought you might be able to help.”
It seemed to annoy him. “Then maybe you should go and talk to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. We’ve got thirty thousand people murdered with the best wishes of Tio Sam, and their families want to know what happened, too! That’s the reality here in Argentina.”
She kept her voice level as she answered, though her blood was pounding. “Reality is wide and deep, Señor Rivera, and we all have our feet in it. If you want to talk about injustice, let’s start with you and me. Why did you have that man against the wall ten minutes ago?”
His black features coiled at her question, then suddenly eased. He laughed. “You’re very fierce, friend of Berenski. Would you like a drink?” He poured her a glass of red wine. “Soda?” he asked politely.
“Please.” He squirted some seltzer into the wine. The astringent bubbles of the mixture writhed on the surface of her tongue, refreshing her. Athena had to listen carefully to understand him: he had a thick barrio accent laded with lunfordo she knew wouldn’t be found in any Spanish dictionary but, despite the slang and the coarse-sounding inflections, his speech betrayed the uneven polish of self-education.
“So, tell me how you know Berenski. Are you a journalist also?”
“No. I’m a teacher at Georgetown University, in Washington DC.” She told him how she’d met Ricardo, not hiding the lack of support from the embassy or the FBI. She knew that in Cacho’s world the cardboard faces of official standing were of no importance, and the chance to speak honestly refreshed her. “The victim had a wife and daughter,” she finished, taking a line from her encounter with Carmen Amado. “That’s who I represent.”
He went on quizzing her casually about where she was staying, her contacts in the city. Something about Cacho’s physical presence exhilarated her: she could sense in him a man who had played it all many times before and was capable of doing so again without a second thought. He’s very dangerous, Ricardo had warned her. He killed a heap of Fascists. At the moment, pulling open the steel shutters to let in the mid-morning light, he seemed tidy and domestic.
“So tell me about this murder,” he said, sitting down on the leather chair across from her, “and why you’ve come to me.”
“The victim was a man named Robert Waterbury. He was murdered in this neighborhood.” She watched his face for a reaction but saw only a steady attention. “Ricardo said you know a lot about what happens around here.”
He tipped his head. “I heard about that one. They made shit out of some gringo over on Avellaneda. They burned the car, I believe there were a few chalks of milonga … ”
“The police thought it might be some sort of settling of accounts related to drugs.”
/> “And Ricardo agreed with them?”
“No. He thinks it’s more complicated than that.”
Cacho didn’t voice his opinion. He seemed to be calculating something. “And how does it go with the police? Who are you working with?”
“With Comisario Fortunato, of the Brigada de San Justo.” She watched his face but Cacho displayed nothing. “Do you know Comisario Fortunato?”
Cacho squinted as he reached for the soda bottle and sprayed another shot into his glass. “Very little. I know him more than anything by his reputation.” He drew his head back and peered at her intently, then changed the subject. “You’re an athlete, aren’t you?”
The sudden appraisal surprised and flattered her. “I’m a runner.”
“Of what distance?”
“Marathons.”
He raised his eyebrows as he considered it. “I could tell you were an athlete by the way you move. The way you sat down on the couch. You dominate your body. Some people are like that.”
“You’re very observant.”
“In my profession, one has to be observant. Observe, gather information. That’s the difference between the fuck-ups rotting in the Tombs and those of us breathing the free air. That, and luck. But now you’ve interested me in this gringo who got cut. What was he doing in Buenos Aires? Why would someone cut him?”
“He was a writer, looking for background material for a new book. It could be that he put himself in something by accident.”
“Without doubt.” He clicked his tongue scornfully. “Boludo!” Retard. He shook his head, then took a fresh breath. “You see, Athena, I’m the one asking for information from you. Forgive that I’ve wasted your time.”
She felt him wriggling away from her. “That’s fine. But you said you knew Miguel Fortunato by his reputation. What is his reputation?”
Cacho hesitated, threw his shoulders up. “He doesn’t have fame of being a torturer. He doesn’t mount those little operettas, where they set up a muchacho with a job and then kill him in a phony shootout. He’s a good man. Taking into account that he’s police, of course.”
She looked for a delicate way to phrase it. “Is he…Does he make arrangements with people?”
“Chica! He’s a comisario!”
“Which means what?”
His look signaled that answering such a stupid question would be a waste of breath. “I’ll tell you this: he knows how to investigate. And he knows the barrio very well.”
The validation, such as it was, heartened her. So maybe he’d compromised a little to reach his position; Maybe he’d had no choice.
The criminal sat watching her with his legs crossed and his chin resting on his hand. She had a sense of her own exoticism in his life, just as he felt exotic to her. She’d never met a revolutionary before, or terrorista, as they’d been called at the time. “Ricardo said you two know each other from the Seventies.” She stopped, then prompted him. “That you were in the Ejercito Revolucionario del Pueblo together.”
He looked irritated, assessing her with an acid look. “Yes. Us and some six hundred retards against forces of security that numbered 400,000. Our average age was twenty-three.”
The thought of a few hundred youths arrayed against an entire state gave her a depressing sensation of hopelessness but, at the same time, a certain awe for the man in front of her, as if he were the incarnation of something profound and mystical. “How could you join a cause that seems so … impossible?”
“Ché won! Fidel won!” The tough barrio accent gave way to a more philosophical remove. “It’s not a thing of the numbers. It’s a way of seeing. You’re the vanguard of the Revolution, the sacred Liberators fighting for the People. The side of Good. Of Justice. Of Historical Destiny.” He shrugged. “Stupidities like that.”
He made a bitter little show of teeth. “I’ll tell you how it was, Profesora, so you can write it up for your classes. Our leader, Santucho, had been defying the statistics for so long that he lost contact with the reality. In his mind, we would triumph because of our wills of steel. Win or die for Argentina, that was our slogan. He imagined that the masses would rise up to support us, that our six hundred conscripts were the beginning of sixty thousand. That was the dream. But they tortured our sympathizers and murdered our families and in the end it was they who ambushed us, they who had the stronger intelligence. It was a ring of iron that Santucho couldn’t break with his transcendent thought.”
Her eyes drifted past the vapors of sad history to the pile of stolen video cameras. He went on in a sonorous voice. “We had too many amateurs, people with shaky hands and bad judgment. Those are the ones who get you killed. Then begin the meetings where your contact doesn’t show, or where you drive past the safe-house to find a plainclothes cop or a pair of milicos smelling up the whole block. Your friends start to fall. Clara falls, Luis falls, the Buffalo falls. This one is taken prisoner at his mother’s house, another is killed in a gunfight; some you never find out what happened, they’re just gone.” He continued the soft hypnotic eulogy. “Claudio falls, Carlos falls, Elena falls, Billy falls. Mario falls, Rodolfo falls, Oscar and Juana, el Pibe Loco, Sandra and Silvia and Mauro and Nestor. They all fall. All of them.” Resentment stiffened his voice. “But Ricardo doesn’t fall, because Ricardo’s out of the country. Because Ricardo ran to Mexico.”
He fell silent and Athena could tell that his mind had gone back twenty-five years, to long-dead people who gazed back at him with smooth hopeful faces. And he, with all the skills of the brilliant guerrilla gone adrift, his own fall so utterly complete. She remembered what Ricardo had said; that some survivors were intact and others broken. Her last question was so awkward and intrusive that she didn’t dare phrase it as a question. At the same time, she couldn’t keep from saying it.
“So you left the Revolution.”
He frowned at her. “Didn’t you hear me? Did I go into exile?” He sat upright. “In 1975, when they killed Santucho and all the little hens scattered for Mexico and Switzerland, I stayed planted! I kept hitting the banks and the comisarias until I was the only one still standing.” He practically spit. “I never deserted the Revolution! It deserted me, revolution of shit!” He became hard again, contemptuous. “I’m a criminal! That’s my political statement! Tell that to Ricardo! I did my service to La Revolución. I brought the final justice to one of the worst hijos de puta that they had, a murderer of dozens, of hundreds. I did it! And you? You can’t even find the killer of one! All you do is make ornaments for the oppressors with your clever little reports!”
“What kind of political statement is it to cooperate with the police who were hunting down your friends twenty years ago?”
The challenge blanked him, and then a murderous fury blossomed in his face. She was afraid in that instant that he might get up and hit her. “Who are you, to come here asking these types of questions? You talk about matters of life and death as if you could judge me! Don’t be so confident! Don’t imagine that your passport protects you here! That was the mistake of your friend Waterbury!”
She fought down her fear. “What do you know about Waterbury?” He glared at her for a few seconds and then let out a disparaging hiss. “Qué concha brava!” What a bold cunt. He looked to the side and then a cool impersonal manner dropped over him like a cloth. He stood up. “Ricardo sent you so I attended you. Now I have things to do.” She followed him to the door and he unlocked it for her. “Wait at the kiosk on the corner and I’ll call a remis to look for you there. And don’t mention me to anyone.”
As she walked out she turned to him and extended her hand. He had something dark and luminous about him, like obsidian. “Thank you for meeting me, Cacho.”
She could see the forces working away behind his harsh agonized face, the struggle between the disinterred revolutionary and the hardened criminal. At last he took her hand, then leaned over and gave her a last cologne-scented kiss. “You’re brava, friend of Berenski. You don’t know what disillusion is yet. I�
�m talking to you from the other side. Stay here a while in Argentina. After, we’ll revise our accounts.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The problem now, Athena thought as she waited for the Comisario in the conference room, was how to tell Miguel that she wanted to bring Ricardo Berenski into the investigation. Elements of the Buenos Aires police had thought highly enough of Berenski to threaten to kill him, and she hadn’t yet sculpted a good excuse for why she had sought him out behind Miguel’s back. Nonetheless, Berenski had turned up a stunning bit of information: the number in Waterbury’s pocket had belonged to Teresa Castex de Pelegrini, the rich woman who Berenski had met with Waterbury that night six months ago, and the wife of Carlo Pelegrini. Fortunato’s authority and experience could help now, and she’d decided to bank on her gut feeling about him. On some unquantifiable level, he wanted to see this through and, as if in confirmation of this, he had announced over the telephone that he’d finally come up with something “of great significance.” When he’d summoned her here for a briefing she’d felt like calling up Carmen Amado to tell her that yes, there was an honest cop in Buenos Aires.
A familiar voice interrupted her thoughts.
“Athena, the Goddess of Love!”
Fabian filled the doorway with his smile, his ash-blond curls as perfect as if he’d just come from the beauty salon. He wore a sports jacket of eggplant-colored suede, matched by a maroon shirt and an olive tie with gold and purple stripes. The combination so surprised Athena that she didn’t bother to correct his mythological error. “Interesting jacket.”
“It’s unique, no? With this color? At first I thought No, Fabian. No. But after … ” He made a discerning little frown, like a chef adding ingredients. “I calm it a little with the shirt and balance it with the green … It remains half-dignified, no?”
“No.”
“Ah!” he said, easing into the room and bending down to give her a patchouli-scented kiss. “You are bitter chocolate!” He put his hand over his heart and broke into an old song, looking deeply into her eyes: “El dia que me quieras …” stopping after the first line. “This is by the immortal Carlos Gardel, who died tragically in an accident of aviation in 1935. I, personally, hate tango, but you can’t argue with Carlos. Every day he sings better!” He slid into the seat across from her. “I can’t stop thinking about your case. That one of Robert Waterbury.”
17 Stone Angels Page 11