“Forget it, Miguel.” He stood up again, but he couldn’t make himself walk away. “Where do you see Berenski in this?”
Fortunato was heartened by the reprieve. “I’m still not sure where he enters.” He thought of telling about RapidMail and Pelegrini, but it was too vague in his own mind and it might spook Cacho. “But I know that Berenski had started to investigate the Waterbury case when they killed him. If Vasquez knows who really killed Waterbury, maybe it will tell us who put down Berenski.”
Cacho seemed drawn into the possibility for a few seconds then shook his head. “You talk about it as if it wasn’t you! You’re selling something! This is a trap!”
Fortunato heard him out and didn’t bother with denials. “You don’t believe me, Cacho. With reason. I’m an hijo de puta and if there is justice in Argentina I’ll end up rotting in Devoto for that crime and many others. Maybe it will turn out that way, but those are things that will be arranged later. In this case, I’m simply trying to do what is just.”
He stopped talking. Cacho was considering it and Fortunato could sense him handling the contours of his own history and whatever fierce idealism had once sent him on operations so unlikely that only the most visionary hopes for the future could induce a person to begin.
“Three green sticks,” he said at last. “And you pay me in advance.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Athena had never been a liar, she’d always clung to the Truth as some sort of holy text which automatically sanctified one’s cause. The Truth had failed her miserably here. It upheld no righteous banner, attracted no allies other than Berenski and Carmen Amado de los Santos, who were unable to help her now. All she had left were lies, and the facts of the murder as revealed in the faulty expediente. Her mentor was Comisario Fortunato.
She picked up the small packet of business cards and looked at them. It amazed her how the tiny print and pasteboard of a business card could wipe out in one stroke her entire identity. How easily one erased and remade oneself. Now she was Helen Kuhn, a Vice President of Development at American Telepictures. She handed out the card as she made the rounds of the tango schools. She was looking for a dancer named Paulé who had been suggested for a role in a movie they were shooting. Who had recommended Paulé? Why, the maestra of the classes at the Confiteria Ideal, or of the Dance Club El Arrabal, or the Escuela de Tango Carlos Gardel. She acquired a list of names and facts as she went, dropping them casually into her inquiries. Edmundo, the booking agent at Carlito’s, had spoken highly of Paulé, and Norma, of the Teatro Colon, had attested to her thick French accent.
To her surprise, the lying came easily and not unpleasantly. The faces she spoke to always brightened credulously at her introduction, eager to slip into the world she created for them. For someone like her, passing through Buenos Aires without history or future, it didn’t really matter who she pretended to be. She became a memory as soon as they turned their backs, a story they might tell their husbands that night and remember as the vague blonde woman with the disappearing face. She became like the lurid characters of Fabian’s movie script, or the violent personages delineated by Enrique Boguso in his first, false confession: a vapor in a world made of vapor.
Nevertheless, after three days something real began to emerge from all the half-truths. Paulé had moved some months ago, a dance teacher said, and had given instructions to keep her new address strictly private. Something of a too-insistent ex-boyfriend, although she wondered if it might be problems with immigration. But for the chance at a film role! Why not come here to the ballroom at ten o’clock the following night, when she would surely come to teach the beginners!
Athena called the Comisario as soon as she reached her hotel. “I found her!”
“Where?”
His eagerness made her cagey. “At a ballroom in Palermo. She’ll be there at ten tomorrow night. Why don’t you come and get me at nine at my hotel and we’ll go over there together.”
“Which ballroom is it?”
“Just come and get me!”
She heard a brief, hurt silence. “Bien,” he said. “At nine.”
For Fortunato, the string was getting tighter. Thirty thousand American dollars had persuaded Cacho to pick up Vasquez and bring him to his house for questioning, but the following day he had almost backed out. “It’s too hot, hombre. It’s a nest of vipers.”
The reason had been written in the afternoon newspaper: Chief Bianco’s name appeared for the first time alongside that of Carlo Pelegrini. It wasn’t a large mention, merely that Pelegrini’s security man, Abel Santamarina, had called Bianco’s cell phone twice in the days prior to Berenski’s murder. A lawyer might have called a detail like that circumstantial but Fortunato knew that the circumstances could only be damning and it dropped a stone at the bottom of his stomach. The journalists and investigators were working their way down the chain, from Pelegrini to Santamarina to Bianco, and within a day or two they would connect Santamarina to Boguso’s fabricated story about Waterbury, and then, chico, the race would be on. And this would be a race with a lot of losers.
“It’s not for so much, Cacho! A few questions and I turn him loose to find his own destiny.”
“That’s the point, Miguel. I don’t want his destiny to become my destiny.”
Fortunato snorted. “You’re immortal, Cacho. You had a whole army trying to assassinate you and they failed. But I’ll g1ve you another two green sticks.”
“Five?”
“Five.”
The phone went quiet as Cacho considered the suspiciously high price of fifty thousand dollars for a simple conversation with a petty puntero. His voice became cold as he dictated his terms: “You play me, and I’ll kill you.”
Fortunato thought about the threat as he drove to meet the Chief for a little talk. All the old relationships were shifting, relationships whose mutual agreements about how the world was had formed the foundation of his career. The Chief had summoned him to his residence, and though Leon hadn’t said so, Fortunato assumed it was because he didn’t want to be seen meeting in public.
The five-bedroom house lay enclosed by a high concrete wall with sharp wrought iron points crisscrossed at the top. Embedded metal plaques from the Chief’s private security company implied dire consequences for whatever gil was stupid enough to try and break in. Bianco liked to explain that he’d gotten the money to buy the big house, and another at the beach, through various business opportunities that he’d been fortunate enough to grasp over the years. His company provided security for homes and businesses and rock concerts, and he couldn’t help it if friends had included him in lucrative real-estate ventures. Fortunato had watched his economic status rise over the years, neither resenting nor wanting to imitate it, but when Marcela saw the house go up ten years ago she had begun subtly putting distance between themselves and the Biancos. Pleasant enough when they met on Fridays at the 17 Stone Angels to listen to tango, she’d found ways to refuse invitations to the house itself, so that Fortunato hadn’t been there in five years.
This afternoon the Chief himself let him in at the heavy iron gate, from which Fortunato inferred that no one else was home. Bianco led him into the dark, cool house, filled with carved gilded furniture and various paintings of Spanish street scenes. When he brought him a cola on ice he served it with a little too much solicitation. Fortunato had never seen Bianco look this nervous before; the smile came a little too rapidly to his face and seemed to go slightly rotten before he could finish uttering the pleasantries. Fortunato noticed a copy of the morning newspaper on the coffee table.
“Miguel,” he began at last, “the situation is getting complicated.”
Fortunato didn’t bother answering.
“Re-complicated, amor. I’ve heard that La Gallega is extending her investigation to include the Caso Waterbury. They’re federalizing everything. They want you off the case and they want all the files.”
Fortunato refused to react, and Bianco hurried to minimize the
bad news. “It’s all spectacle! If they suspected you, they would have sequestered everything with an order of the judge. They just want to show the Press how hard they are trying.”
They both knew the last part was a lie. The footsteps were getting closer and their reverberations were shuddering through the Chief’s twitchy eyes. He managed to recover some of his old command presence as he laid out the course of action. “They’re going to requisition the files in the next day or two. I want you to revise absolutely everything: the expediente, your personal archives.” He thumped his fingertips on the table. “Every declaración and every diligencia must be in perfect order. Likewise, revise your own files so that there is no record of any activities which could embarrass the Institution. For the doubts, take them to your home until all this cools down again.”
The Comisario knew what he meant. Ten years of arreglos had to be purged before Faviola Hocht’s investigators started holding them up to the light. He rocked his head forward slowly. “Those of the Caso Waterbury I can clean out in an hour, but the rest would take weeks. If they want to re-open and explore every case—”
“It’s not for so much! It’s a precaution.” Bianco shrugged disdainfully. “Two weeks and they’ll be busy with the next scandal. But promise me you’ll take care of that cursed yankee as soon as you leave here.”
“Fine.” Fortunato thought of lighting a cigarette but he didn’t see an ashtray at hand and didn’t want to ask for one. He swallowed to steady his voice. “I saw that Onda was cut.”
Bianco put his hand up to show that he knew where Fortunato was going with it. He spoke in a quiet, serious voice. “You enter on the other theme, Miguel. I’ll tell you directly: Vasquez also needs to be put down. People like him and Onda aren’t reliable. They make deals when they get squeezed.” He put some gravel in his voice. “They’re not hombres!”
“And?”
“Domingo needs someone to help him. Since you’re the one responsible you’re going to have to do it.”
It took Fortunato a moment to absorb it. He looked at Bianco carefully, wondering what he knew. “I’m starting to think I wasn’t responsible,” he said calmly.
The denial annoyed the Chief, but he seemed inclined to humor his inferior. “Of course not! The idiot was responsible for his own stupidities. But it was you who let it get out of control.”
“What I’m saying is that maybe it was supposed to get out of control. Maybe Vasquez killed the gringo for reasons of his own. It was rare how Vasquez started shooting. There was no real reason for it.”
“He’s a violent criminal with a head stuffed full of merca and you have to look for a reason?” Anger was hardening the Chief’s voice. “Don’t go inventing something to find a way out of this, Miguel! You have to take care of Vasquez. You and Domingo. Get over your weakness and finish what you started.”
Bianco was glaring at him with disgust. Fortunato thought of revealing the bits he’d learned about Pablo Moya and the mysterious Renssaelaer, but suddenly he didn’t really care to. He’d found it on his own, in his private investigation, and that information didn’t belong to the Chief or anyone else at the Institution. Let the Chief go on sweating for a while. Moreover, he wasn’t so sure Leon was telling him everything either.
As to Vasquez; if someone had to die, Vasquez made an excellent candidate. A drug addict, bully, thief and puntero, the “somethings” he was guilty of were anything but vague. Of course, he’d make them find someone else to do the job, but better to play along with the Chief for the moment. Refusing might have other consequences. “When do you want to do it?”
“Tonight. Domingo is setting it up.” He handed him a small phone. “Here’s a clean cellular. Domingo will call you later to arrange the program.”
Fortunato took the cellular and slipped it into his pocket. He thought about his own interview with Vasquez that he’d scheduled for that night, and reflected that his fifty thousand dollars might be buying Vasquez another day of life. The silence started ticking away and Bianco stiffly offered him another cola as a way of reminding him it was time to leave. “It will all come out well,” he encouraged as he led him to the iron bars. “You’ll see.”
Fortunato drove back to the comisaria. The weight of La Gallega’s investigation was beginning to flatten him. Beyond the fear, it was the humiliation of the whole situation that stung him most intensely. The entire comisaria had become aware of the tension surrounding the Waterbury case, and as the news of his removal trickled out the respect he had earned with his decades of cautious management would begin to erode. Federal officers would come in to take possession of the files, someone in Hocht’s office would trumpet it to the journalists and his name would appear in an article the next morning, in small print or large, depending on that particular day’s toll of catastrophe: Federal Police Remove Comisario From Case. Everyone would see it: his subordinates, his colleagues, his neighbors, Athena.
Even Marcela, somewhere, would see it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
He began to clean out his files, as he’d promised the Chief. The sins of the Waterbury expediente involved lack of ambition rather than much fraud, so he had little challenge with that. Aside from the ballistics tests he had substituted to match “Boguso’s” Astra, they were relatively clean. The ledgers in which he accounted for the various institutional maneuvers and the formula for dividing their proceeds could be packed into his briefcase. The rest he could only clear out by setting fire to the office. Scores of cases had died without a prosecution or displayed other irregularities, and it wouldn’t take a grandiose investigation to start picking them apart. As he leafed through them he also came across some of his best cases. Now he recalled them: the Bordero case, where he’d found the gang rapists; the Pretini case, with its fatal robbery; the Caso Gomez; the Caso Novoa. So many many cases that had ended with the gratitude of the victims or their families, their handshakes, and their knowledge that on some battered imperfect level, there was justice in the world. Why must they all be erased by the Caso Waterbury?
He called in his sub-comisario and told him he was going home early, then returned to his house with the files. Winter had sent its outriders into the city that day, giving the walls a frigid, tomb-like feeling. He looked at the pictures of Marcela as he came in, glanced reflexively through the half-open door at the hospital bed in her death room. He filled the kettle and prepared the mate. Berenski kept coming to mind, along with Waterbury. That desperate appeal he’d made over the seat at him: I have a wife and daughter. And all the time, Waterbury hadn’t been a blackmailer at all, just a man who had believed his own ruinous stories and was struggling to make them real with one last play. Like him, Miguel Fortunato.
The Comisario poured the hot water over the herb and pulled at the straw, watching the pale green foam sink into the leaves. He’d put a lemon in it again, and sugar, the way Marcela liked it, and the mate had the foreign taste of when she had been alive and sitting across from him. He remembered her as she was before she’d gotten sick, with her strong fleshy arms and those wise eyes.
“It’s a mess, Negra. I tried to do something and it went for the worst.” The sound of his own voice had a comforting effect, like the prayer of a man without religion. At last he could say out loud all the things whose concealment had calcified his life. He could never reveal this to the real Marcela, but to this shadow Marcela he could confess everything. “Thirty-seven years I’ve gone along with the Institution. No, not always to your measure, but at least within the bounds of the normal. I enforced the law, in our fashion. I arrested many criminals. Remember the child molester that I trapped? They wrote it up in El Clarin and gave me a medal. Who gave more to the police family fund than I? Even this last, with the writer: that was an accident. They tricked me into it, Negra. That was Domingo and Vasquez. I didn’t want it to turn out that way.”
The fantasy Marcela took on a look of tender absolution. “It’s fine, amor. Life brings these situations sometimes and
one arranges it as one can. You did what you could for the writer. It was the other two, that Leon assigned you. It doesn’t erase those years of good work. How many children were saved when you captured that murderer?”
His chin had sunk into his hand and the white plaster walls gave off a cold silence. The water in the kettle had gone tepid, and the herbs in the mate were washed clean. Without any thought about it, he felt himself being drawn into the bedroom to sit on their marital bed, facing the wardrobe.
He opened up the left half of the chest and Marcela’s talcum powder scent came billowing over him. He filled his eyes with her flower-print dresses and her Evita hats with their net veils, and inhaled deeply. For an instant he felt close to her again, could be transported to her side, to something alive and transcendent, but with each successive breath the smell became fainter and fainter, and finally he was looking only at a closet full of old dresses and shoes, the last remnant of what had been worthwhile in his life.
The doorbell rang. It was the sodero, dropping off six new siphons of seltzer water. The Comisario paid him absently and was about to close the door when something on the street caught his eye.
Most people wouldn’t have noticed it, but Fortunato, with his years of experience in the Division of Investigations, caught it almost immediately and was piola enough to pretend he hadn’t seen anything at all. A half a block away a blue Peugeot sat parked next to the curb, holding a man with sunglasses. Fortunato’s impression of it lasted only a second, imprecise, then he went inside again and glanced out his bedroom window to the other street. Nothing. He picked up a bag of garbage and brought it to the little elevated cage outside his house, taking the opportunity to glance the other way to see how many there were. Only the Peugeot, which meant it was just surveillance, not a grab. It could be federal police: they drove Peugeot. But would they be stupid enough to take a standard-issue car on an operativo? It could be Pelegrini’s men, tracking him.
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