17 Stone Angels

by Stuart Archer Cohen

  The idea came to her suddenly, and though it seemed absurd at first, as she began to work out the mechanics it started to feel completely appropriate. She took a deep breath and placed two international phone calls, one to New York, and the other to Los Angeles. “Suzanne! This is Athena. I need a favor.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Athena only had to leave one message with Teresa Castex before she received a return call on her new cellular line. It was a voice of luxurious petulance, lathering her ear with honey. “I’m enchanted to receive your call! I’m so glad you found me! The truth is that I’ve wanted to talk about Robert for some time, but here it’s so difficult to find someone who understands these matters. Is this your first time in Buenos Aires? Fantastico!”

  She suggested they meet at the Café Tortoni, a beautiful old confitería in the center where the literary elite had once convened. The Tortoni had changed little since the 1890s: its gilded walls were giddily dressed with mirrors and red velvet, while crisp waiters in white jackets moved efficiently between the marble tables. Period photos and yellowed newspaper clippings told of readings by Borges and Victoria Ocampo seventy years earlier, while other doors led to private salons and a spacious expanse of billiard tables. German and Japanese tourists read guidebooks over cups of coffee.

  Fabian had described Teresa Castex de Pelegrini with superficial accuracy, but she still turned out to be an entirely different Teresa Castex than the one Athena had imagined. Far from being Fabian’s brittle woman wrenched by an unrequited love, Teresa Castex’s beauty had weathered rather attractively, and it crossed her mind that perhaps the unrequited part of the relationship was Fabian’s invention. Slim, around fifty, with artful dark-blond hair and the proud carriage of a model, she was no Inca mummy. She spoke in English to a woman she knew as Suzanne Winterthur, of Avondale Publishers.

  “I was desolated by Robert’s death, Susana, desolated! We were collaborating on a fantastic new work, as you know, and just as we approached the heart of the story that terrible event happened. Fortunately, we had already talked about the ending, so I can be of great help to your project. You may not know it, but I have been a writer since before this sad affair with Robert.”

  She fished two small books out of her soft leather bag and put them on the table. Each was leather-bound and embossed with gold leaf, obviously self-published. Athena opened one of the volumes to the middle and felt herself blushing after reading the first few lines. The poem appeared to be the thoughts of a woman in the midst of a frantic orgy. Another involved a woman waiting in a limousine for her lover. Me masturbo con tu imagen … Athena nodded appreciatively and opened the other book. This one was more tame: a book of poems with titles like “The Boy on the St Germain des Prés,” or “The Florentine Handbag.” They seemed to be existential ruminations on various shopping expeditions Teresa had made.

  She swallowed to clear her throat. “Your style is really … unusual. Are the North American rights still available for these?” Athena asked.

  “Oh!” She waved her hand, unable to contain her pleasure. “Later we can discuss such things. I give you these as a gift. But let’s talk more of this Waterbury project. What do you need from me?”

  “Two things: some biographical information and some idea of how the novel was to finish.” Here Athena let a look of embarrassment come to her. “I’m ashamed to say it, Teresa, but publishing is still a business and we have to listen to the marketing department. They want to use the background of the author’s death to sell the novella.”

  This seemed distasteful even to the wife of Carlo Pelegrini. “They want to use his assassination to sell the book?”

  She shook her head somberly. “It’s a corrupt business, Teresa. But at least this will get your efforts out to a wider audience. The marketing department sees this as some sort of “artist on the way down” story. You know, with the drugs and all that. There’s always something very compelling about an artist who destroys himself just as he’s creating his greatest work. Look what it did for Van Gogh! They’ve even had an offer for the movie rights. Of course his wife was furious, because she said he never used drugs …’She shrugged. “That’s why I was hoping you might know something about his last days here.”

  Now Teresa Castex became wary, took out a cigarette to hide behind. “Of that death …’She let it trail off, shaking her head. “It’s a bit confused.” Something passed across her face. “He wasn’t killed for drugs.” She halted on that fat invitation and glanced around the room, then leaned forward. “The police killed him.”

  The claim made Athena flutter inside. That hypothesis had surfaced early on and if she’d never completely believed it, she’d never completely dispelled it either.

  “The police?”

  “I tell you this in confidence, because few know it. But that is the truth, it was the police.”

  For the first time since they’d met, Athena felt Teresa Castex was being genuine. “But why would the police kill him?”

  She needed little urging. “This will not make a very pretty addition to his legend, but if you would like to know, I will tell you. You see, Robert became involved with a woman here. A French prostitute of the lowest order. She claimed she was a tango dancer, and acted like a woman of twenty-five, but I am sure she was closer to forty. She must have come from the slums of Paris to make her fortune here in Argentina, where she would be exotic. I saw through that, of course, but Robert, he always had a more romantic view of the world. He wanted to see her like a character that appears often in tango, of the Frenchwoman adrift in Buenos Aires. So he fell in with this romanticized view of her, and became involved in her affairs.”

  “What about his wife?”

  A flash of knowing bitterness. “You are young, Susana, but when you reach my altitude of life, you will understand that a man who was struggling, like Robert, is susceptible to that sort of thing.”

  “But how did that get him in trouble with the police?”

  “You see, the police control the prostitutes here, either through the pimps, or directly. This Frenchwoman belonged to the police. She saw Robert simply as a way to get money, but as happens sometimes, I’m told, Robert began to want to save her from her chosen occupation.” She pulled her mouth to the side. “He was half-retarded in that aspect. He threatened to expose the policeman, and the policeman decided to get rid of him. After, of course, they mounted a little sham of an investigation, but in Buenos Aires …’She puffed some air and looked at the ceiling.

  “Do you know what policeman this was?”

  Her eyes widened. “Chica, if I knew, he would already be in jail! I know this much only because Robert confessed it to me in the course of our creative sessions. I felt sorry to see him go down that path.”

  “But if Waterbury needed money himself, how much could this prostitute get out of him?”

  “Maybe it was not so much …” The Señora’s face filled with disdain. “But for that pretentious little whore, enough.”

  “And do you know where I might find this woman?”

  The question seemed to strike Teresa Castex the wrong way, and she retreated into a suspicious silence for a moment. “Why do you ask that?”

  With a nervous little jump of her hands that felt like a huge gesture: “Oh … For more background. The ambiance of the book.” Teresa became pleasant again in a less casual way. “I understand. But let’s talk about the book. Do you have the manuscript with you?”

  She felt a slight vertigo. “I don’t. You see, our trade division decided to go ahead with the book last week, and since I was already in Chile on other business they had to send it by courier. Unfortunately, it seems to have gotten lost somewhere between here and New York.”

  The older woman gave a smile that seemed uncomfortably wide. “But my husband owns the delivery service! Just give me the receipt and we’ll have it by tomorrow morning!”

  “Great!” Athena said. “I’ll give it to you before we leave.” She hurried ahead.
“I haven’t seen the manuscript, but evidently he had finished about one hundred and fifty pages.”

  “Tell me where he left off. I didn’t see him for almost a week before he was killed, and from what you say he made great progress.”

  Athena hesitated for a moment. According to Fabian, the book had traced the relationship between a billionaire and his wife as he climbed the ladder of corruption to the top. But Fabian had said a lot of things. Teresa Castex was watching her with an ominously encouraging grin.

  “Well…As you know, the book was tracing the career of a businessman and his wife. He was a bit, I would say, opportunistic.” She went as far as Fabian’s version allowed, watching Teresa Castex’s face for some indication of her success but encountering only the same pleasant attentiveness. “And at the part we left off, there was some issue of bribes paid to the government … It was meanelusive.”

  Teresa Castex didn’t lose her faint smile. “Who are you?”

  “I don’t understand your question.”

  Teresa Castex shook her head. “That’s not what our book was about at all! Our book was about corrupt police who try to blackmail a businessman. They want to make him a bed for the murder of a journalist and a writer, and they even hire a whore to come in and try to trick his wife. But the ending is thus: the woman is an amateur! She can’t even tell the right story, and the wife knows she is a liar and a whore! That’s what our book was about! It’s realistic, no?”

  Athena felt her mouth drawing outwards to a stupid grin, reacting without will to Teresa Castex’s false cordiality.

  “So comic! Who do you work for? Ovejo? AmiBank? Or do you work directly for RapidMail? They are so jealous that an Argentine might own the business they think should belong to them!” She stood up to leave, and Athena noticed a large man in a dark suit and sunglasses coming towards them.

  “You disgust me!” Castex went on. “You’ll do anything to get at my husband! No lie is too low! Why do you come to me when you’re the ones who killed him!” She snatched the books off the table, then picked up the waterglass and dumped it into Athena’s lap. There was a shock of icy cold, and then Athena felt the moisture running down her legs.

  “And for your information, I am a writer on my own merits! I do not need Robert Waterbury to authenticate me!” Now she picked up the other glass of water, but before she could empty it Athena sprang to her feet and grabbed her hand.

  “Excuse me,” she said in a low, venomous English. “You must have mistaken me for your fucking doormat!”

  “Your mother’s cunt!” the other woman murmured in Spanish.

  Athena twisted the glass from her hand and flung the water into Teresa’s face with such force that it splattered the two files of tables behind her. She saw the water dripping from the Señora’s make-up, heard the complaints of the patrons behind her, then felt herself knocked off her feet by a wall of dark cloth. She tripped over her chair and clattered into a brass flower pot that banged to the floor like a clash of cymbals ringing in the final note of a symphony. Teresa Castex was standing above her beside her bodyguard, shaking her finger. “You people killed him! You killed Robert to make a bed, puta, and you can write that in your report!” She stared after them as they stepped out into the sunlight.

  When they were gone a waiter came over and brushed the soil off her career-girl outfit. From behind her she heard someone make a hissing cat sound, and the low laughter of men. She was soaking wet and speckled with potting soil. Her lie had been uncovered, and in almost every way her little operativo had been a failure. But as she left the gilded walls of the Tortoni her mind had suddenly opened to a possibility that felt lurid and monstrous, yet oddly plausible in a cold, corporate way: Waterbury’s killer had been working for AmiBank.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Comisario Fortunato, meanwhile, was settling in to what promised to be a very bad day. He had told Fabian by telephone to come to his office at nine in the morning, but the Inspector hadn’t shown. When he’d picked up the morning paper Pelegrini’s name appeared across the front page in large letters across from a photo of Berenski’s grieving widow. Below it, in a sidebar, the phrase “Pelegrini also implicated in murder of North American.” After that came the FBI.

  Agents Castro and Foshee coursed across the threshold like two blocks of fabric topped with wooden faces. A federal comisario from Central accompanied them. The Federales had sold it as an inter-agency liaison session, but Fortunato knew at the first handshake that it was an interrogation. He ordered the requisite coffees and forced himself into his expression of solicitous calm.

  “You’re ahead of us on this investigation, Comisario Fortunato, so I want to ask you some questions that you probably know the answers to.”

  “At your orders,” Fortunato answered.

  They started out with the usual simple queries: how long had he been a police officer, what divisions had he worked in? Stupidities about the case they could know from reading the expediente. They were casual about it, but he knew the method. They wanted to see what gestures and vocal inflections he used when he told the truth. After they established that, they began to heat it up a bit.

  “The victim was found with handcuffs of the same sort used by the Buenos Aires police,” the older agent, Castro, said in his Caribbean-tinged Spanish. “Moreover, the fatal bullet, according to the coroner, was a nine millimeter round, a round which is used by the police. Did you ever investigate the possibility that there might have been police involvement in this case?”

  “Bien,” Fortunato began. He knew not to raise his hands to his face, or to look sideways as he spoke. But to interject a little word like bien to buy time, that was a mistake. Better to answer directly, without evidence of thinking too much. “That of the handcuffs and the bullet certainly raised our suspicions, but at the same time there are other sets of handcuffs and other nine millimeter pistols in the hands of non-police. We did a survey of private security companies in the capital and found eight firms that use this variety of handcuffs.”

  “I didn’t see that survey in the diligencias,” Castro said.

  Fortunato made a puzzled expression. “It should be there. If not, I’ll get you a copy.”

  The federal comisario came to his aid. “Sometimes that happens,” he explained to the Northamericans.

  They didn’t seem convinced but they didn’t press it, so Fortunato continued. “One also can’t ignore that these cuffs also end up in the hands of people who have nothing to do with law enforcement. I don’t think that the presence of the cuffs necessarily indicates the police.” He swallowed. “It’s a similar case with the nine millimeter shell. The victim had been wounded four times with a .32 caliber round, a cheap pistol used very much by common delinquents here in Buenos Aires, and as you pointed out, finished with the nine millimeter, which also circulates among the criminal element. The Astra nine millimeter used by Enrique Boguso is in wide circulation, as well as those of the marks Llama, Smith and Wesson, Ruger, Beretta, Browning and many others.” The men were listening without expression, and Fortunato grew more confident in his story. This was the one piece of evidence he had sealed perfectly. “For the doubts, we did a ballistics test and, as it turned out, the bullet matched the Astra nine millimeter that the suspect Boguso indicated to us as the murder weapon.

  “I saw those tests,” Castro said, “but there was a problem with them. Some of the pictures of the bullet don’t match the bullet that’s in evidence now.”

  Fortunato wrinkled his brows. Had they found a set of the original pictures in a file somewhere, or were they bluffing him? “You don’t say! I haven’t heard anything about that.”

  “Haven’t you been leading this investigation?”

  The two hard-cop faces stared back at him, men who had a lifetime of experience separating lies from truth. “Of course, but one has to assume that the expediente is intact. If the evidence has been compromised, I’ll look into it immediately. But I can assure you that when the evidenc
e left my office, everything was completely in order.”

  The FBI men didn’t answer, merely stared at him. Finally Agent Castro spoke. “The coroner’s report showed a piece of paper in the victim’s pocket with a phone number registered to Carlo Pelegrini. And yet your investigation made no effort to trace that number. Why not?”

  Fortunato reached up and scratched his forehead. A bad move. Very bad. “Of course we traced it. But as you well know, surrounding any murder are a mountain of clues, many of which have nothing to do with the murder itself. We knew about the Pelegrini phone number -”

  “It’s not in the expediente,” the younger gringo said.

  “You are correct, Agent Foshee, and the reason is thus: the police must follow the instructions of the judge in mounting an investigation. Sometimes, though, to save time, we do things outside of the judge’s strict orders, and these results may be found in our files, though perhaps not in the expediente itself. In the case of the phone number, we had reliable information that Enrique Boguso committed the crime, and during the course of questioning, Boguso confessed. Now, he has changed his story, and thus the matter of the telephone number assumes new importance. As we go on deepening the investigation—”

  The senior agent interrupted with his annoying rudeness. “Can you think of a reason why Boguso would change his story so suddenly?”

  “None. This was a very recent and surprising turn and I have not yet had the chance to question the suspect about his change. As you know, San Justo has no scarcity of crimes to investigate, and the Waterbury murder, being already more than four months old, must take its place behind those that are a bit fresher.” He decided to poke back. “To be honest, Señor Castro, it’s only recently that the Federales and the FBI have taken an interest in the case, for reasons that remain a bit mysterious to me.”