17 Stone Angels

by Stuart Archer Cohen

  He glanced at his watch and calculated the time. Seven o’clock now, nine o’clock at the Sheraton for Athena, ten o’clock at the ballroom to interview the French woman, and near midnight an expected summons from Cacho for his fifty thousand dollar interview. At some point he had to call Domingo to see what plans he had for killing Vasquez. That was the night he’d planned. What plans the man in the car had he couldn’t know.

  Fortunato went to the wardrobe and quickly opened the compartment where the neat rows of green money looked back at him. He took out three bundles and stuffed them into his pockets for any necessities that came up. Thirty thousand dollars. Along with that, a thousand in pesos and a subway token from his dresser. The rest of the money he quickly loaded into his briefcase with the vague notion that he might never come back.

  Fortunato took his Browning from its holster and switched off the safety, chambering the first round and laying it on the seat of his car. He unlocked the metal doors of the carport and swung them open, then started the engine. If they were going to move on him, it would be right now, as he was backing out to the street and securing the carport behind him. He swung his vision in an arc that included the Peugeot, stuck the nine millimeter in his belt, and edged his Fiat into the roadway. The surveillance car didn’t move. Fortunato closed the doors and then turned straight for it, glancing at it as he drove past. One man in a brown sports jacket, age about thirty-five, black hair cut short, sunglasses. He pretended to be reading a newspaper as Fortunato passed. As Fortunato glanced in his rear view mirror he saw a white Toyota pickup coming around the corner from his house with two occupants. It must have been out of sight, waiting for the Peugeot to radio. Fortunato went another block then checked his mirror again. The Toyota lagged him by a block, and the Peugeot was making a U-turn. Mierda!

  He stayed calm, considering how to lose them. A half-kilometer away lay a block of abandoned factories with alleys in back of them, but if he lost them there, it would be obvious. Better to make an idiot face, be a gil on an evening drive to the pizzeria.

  He ran through the scenarios that included the car behind him.

  Maybe the Federales; they might know enough now to call him a suspect. Maybe they’d examined the expediente, talked to the clerk at the San Antonio, been tipped by Fabian. Maybe Athena had told them something, or the FBI. Pelegrini the other possibility: one of those efficient men in suits arming a capacho, as he’d armed one for Waterbury. And in that case, could Bianco know about it?

  He drove all the way to Palermo and brought his car into the parking garage of the elegant new shopping that had opened the previous year and was already taking business from the traditional stores on the street. The Toyota was two cars behind him in the entrance line, the Peugeot out of sight. His tires squealed as he drove up the ramp as fast as he could. He found a space near the entrance, then grabbed the briefcase of cash and hurried into the shopping. It was one of those shoppings that had opened up in the past few years, all with the same stores and the same smell of climate control and floor polish, Northamerican style. This was a new Argentina, foreign to him, glossy and without a trace of tango or history, a collection of brand names. He walked quickly along the indoor street with its fountains and potted shrubbery. He wanted to take off his jacket, but he couldn’t with his black pistol strapped in its shoulder holster. He came to what he was looking for, a point where the mall had exits to either side. He paused for a moment behind a swath of greenery to glance behind him. No one. He ducked out the exit and made for the subte station across the street, then took the train three stops out before getting off. From there, he hailed a taxi. Easy to stop one: with his briefcase and his suit jacket he might be a travel agent or an insurance salesman, a man who sat at a desk all day, making arrangements. A man nearing the end of an undistinguished career. “To Lomas de Zamora, maestro,” and then he could sit back and rest for a moment, craning his head once in a while to look behind him. The initial victory dissipated the fear that had been trying to move in from the edges of his consciousness. He was Fortunato the clever, the master of reality. Too clever to fall.

  He directed the taxista to let him off in front of a restaurant, then walked two blocks to a mechanical shop he knew. The proprietor specialized in repairing and selling stolen autos and Fortunato had done business with him when he’d been a sub-comisario in the area. He looked over the cars. “Give me a clean one, Mario.” He pulled fifteen thousand dollars from his jacket and picked up a blue Ford Taurus with falsified papers. The vendor’s nervous twitch made him give an involuntary wink. “For you, Comisario, I’ll guarantee the motor for six months.” Fortunato didn’t answer. He wouldn’t be needing it that long. He took several more bundles of money out of the briefcase and stuffed them into his jacket, then dialed Cacho’s number.

  “It’s Fortunato. How’s it going with the matter we spoke of?”

  “We’ll go fishing at the Cyclone. Be ready after midnight.”

  “Ready,” Fortunato said agreeably, and hung up. He looked at his watch. Eight fifteen. His official cell phone rang. Bianco. In the background he could hear the faint strains of a tango.

  “Miguel. Where are you?”

  In the fraction of a second before he answered Fortunato tried to weigh the exact intent behind the Chief’s voice. “I’m in Lomas de San Isidro,” he lied. “I’m going to visit my cousin for his daughter’s birthday.”

  “I’m going to give you a number. Are you ready?”

  Fortunato wrestled his notebook from his pocket. The Chief hadn’t pressed him for details, as he would if he were trying to get him back under surveillance. So it might be the Federales alone watching him, or Pelegrini alone. “Listo.”

  The Chief dictated the number. Fortunato felt reassured by his voice. “Call that number on the phone I gave you.”

  “Bien.” He pulled out the clean cell phone. Domingo answered.

  “The Chief said to call you.”

  “Sí, Comisario.” Fortunato cringed at the slightly mocking tone that always hung in Domingo’s thick voice when he addressed him by rank. “We have a little job to do.”

  Fortunato stalled. “I read about Onda.”

  Domingo allowed an ironic tone to color his regret. “Yes, killed robbing a kiosk. They break their mothers” hearts.”

  The Comisario pictured Domingo’s fleshy cheeks and fat lips. “I’m not putting myself in this.”

  “You’re already in it, Comiso. Don’t grow a conscience now. Vasquez is a piece of shit that nobody’s going to miss.”

  “That point, I have to concede.” Even so, he had no desire to kill him. To talk to him, yes. But not to be dragged into another homicide. A delicate pass here. If he agreed to kill him, it would be difficult to turn back. If he refused, though, the numbers might shift to the other side of the equation. “It’s not going to be so easy. It’s sure he knows Onda fell. He’s not going to go marching into an alley with his hands on his head.”

  Domingo laughed. “You’re too sentimental, Comiso. Who do you think helped set Onda up? I still owe him five lucas for that little work. Tonight I pay him.”

  Fortunato swallowed. “What plan do you have?”

  “I’m still arranging it. It depends on his schedule. The important thing is that you be ready between one and two tonight. I’ll call you on your cellular. You call me back and we’ll finalize it.”

  “It’s very soon, Domingo. One should control him for a few days, to find the right moment, the right place.”

  “There’s no time to whine, Fortunato! It already is. I’ll call you between one and two. Está?”

  Domingo’s dismissive tone angered the Comisario. “Está,” he said coolly. “We’ll see each other.”

  But, happily, he knew he wouldn’t see Domingo that night. Cacho would grab Vasquez for their little chat, Domingo would be unable to find him, and the whole operativo would evaporate. After that, who knew? Maybe things would solve themselves.

  He drove to Palermo and
parked beside a dim little pizzeria some five blocks from the embassy, taking a few more bundles of bills from the satchel. His own phone might be tapped, so he flashed his badge and borrowed the phone in the tiny back office to call Athena.

  “It’s I, Fortunato.”

  “Are you downstairs?”

  “No. I’m at a pizzeria some five blocks from your hotel. Listen. There’s a little change in plans.” He described the location, then continued in as casual a voice as possible. “What you should do is find the service elevator. Take it to the basement then leave the building by the service entrance. Avoid the lobby.”

  She didn’t answer immediately but when she did he could hear the nervousness in her voice. “What’s happening, Miguel?”

  “Don’t worry yourself, nothing’s happening! I’ll explain it when you arrive. There’s no danger of anything. It’s for the doubts …”

  She agreed to it reluctantly and he ordered a coffee and sat down to wait for her.

  Boca was beating Almirante Brown on a television screen whose distressed tube showed the world in supersaturated colors. The field was the same brilliant lime green as Fabian’s jacket. Smeary jerseys in blood red or a celestial blue arced and sizzled across the electric turf while the paper-colored light of the fluorescent tube rained down on his shoulders. The descriptions of Robert Waterbury kept coming back to him. A decent man; he could tell that from their short acquaintance. In the car he’d had a certain calm that innocent people can sometimes maintain in the face of extremities. That sympathetic little look he had thrown to Fortunato, as if recognizing that they were two good men thrown into a bad situation. “Mirá, Waterbury. The matter is this: I didn’t know the whole story. I thought it would turn out fine.”

  But you were the one who picked me up. You organized it. If it wasn’t for you—

  “Someone was going to pick you up. At least I had good intentions. I tried to control the situation -”

  Who are you trying to deceive? You spent your whole life putting yourself in that situation.

  Fortunato felt his blood pounding through his temples and glanced up at the tiny scrambling figures on their hyper-real palette. The referee was blowing his whistle and motioning frantically with his arms.

  Marcela broke in at the back of his head, the young and alluring Marcela. She was in one of her exasperated moods when she got down to the reality. “What did you expect? You pretended to be the virtuous police, and all the while you were sucking money out of the people like every other corrupt one. Moreover, you couldn’t even father a baby!”

  Fortunato recalled without wanting to the vision of her near the end, shrunken in her bed, her beautiful Inca nose filed into a narrow hook. Their whole life together had passed between those two points, and his whole career as a man and a policeman, and what remained now? A botched squeeze and a pile of lies. Orders to go with a piece of shit to kill another piece of shit. He had given up his family for the backslaps of liars and criminals in the hallways of provincial comisarias, for the glorious comradeship of the Institution, and now the Institution was spitting him out.

  Fortunato put his forehead in his palm as the television erupted into a burst of tinny noise. The frantic wail of the commentator: “Go-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-l-l-l-l-l-l!” The Comisario looked up. Boca had just scored another goal. Boca: the mouth that devoured everything. They were unstoppable this year.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Athena found him ten minutes later in the back of the dingy restaurant. She could see from the speed with which he came to his feet that his imperturbable calm had worn thin, but his sad-eyed, weary presence still reassured her.

  “You look very pretty,” he told her.

  She’d chosen a navy suit and white blouse, wanting to look convincingly professional when they met the Frenchwoman. “I want to know more about who might be following me.”

  “That’s nothing,” he said as he steered her out of the pizzeria. “It’s a precaution. We want to keep our interview confidential, so we take these small precautions. Look! I’m all prepared for tonight.” He took something from his pocket and pinned it to his lapel. Leaning closer in a streetlight, she could see it was a dove with an olive branch in its mouth: not typical adornment for the Buenos Aires police.

  Fortunato made a grand flourish. “I present you to Dr Miguel Castelli, lawyer. Specialist in Human Rights. Assessor for Amnesty International.”

  She looked at the newly minted human rights lawyer. “Miguel … We’ll leave this part out of the report, okay?” He opened the door of the blue Ford, and she looked at it quizzically before getting in. “Whose car is this?

  “It’s borrowed. Mine has … problems.”

  The ballroom was in the basement of the Armenian Mutual Benefit Society, some fifty meters long with a bar at one end and seating for two hundred or more around the polished dance floor. At the moment Argentine rock music was bouncing through the speakers but at ten o’clock, the bartender said, they would change to tango and all the beginners could get free lessons. “Will the Frenchwoman be teaching tonight?” Athena asked him. He returned a sour look. “With her, who knows?”

  She took a small table while the Comisario excused himself, and two young men a few seats away smiled at her and struck up a conversation. Did she know how to dance the tango? Where was she from? She glanced past them around the room while she answered their questions. In the midst of it she saw a face that gave her a clammy sensation along her ribs.

  Fabian was leaning against the wall in a nondescript tweed sports jacket, looking at her. When their eyes met he pushed his face into a grin and lifted his arms as if to say, “Of course!” He made his way toward her through the crowd.

  “Fabian! I thought you hated tango!”

  “I’m giving it another opportunity. It’s my culture, no? And moreover, there’s a certain movement here that I like.”

  She didn’t believe the lie, but she put on her idiot face. “It’s the women!”

  He shrugged. “You already know me, Athena. But you see; perhaps it was destiny that you and I should tango together. I am here. You are here—”

  “Actually, I’m here with Comisario Fortunato. He said I shouldn’t leave Buenos Aires without learning a few steps.”

  “Even better! We can all sit and drink a bottle of champagne together! I will join you!”

  She gave her best imitation of enthusiasm and he wedged himself between the tightly packed tables and pulled a chair up. The two young men at the next table looked disappointed. “You’re dressed very quietly, Fabian. I would have expected more.”

  “I was in a quiet mood, Athena. Sometimes a man is more contemplative. But you!” He ran his eyes along her body. “Very … ” He squared his shoulders. “Thus. Super competent! Professional! But still with that touch of sensuality that is yours alone.” His words seemed slightly mechanical and he kept glancing over her shoulder toward the entrance as he spoke. “Ah, here is the Comisario! This is perfection!”

  Fortunato approached. “Good evening, Fabian.”

  “Comiso! What a pleasure. I insist that you let me invite you to a bottle of champagne!”

  “I didn’t know you were an aficionado of tango.”

  “The truth is I’m more for rock and roll. I’m not a tanguero like you, Comisario, or like Comisario Bianco. He sings, no?”

  “He sings,” Fortunato said absently.

  While Fabian tried to attract a waitress Athena exchanged glances with Fortunato. They understood each other: Fabian had come to find the Frenchwoman. If they wanted to talk to her alone their best chance now would be to wait outside on the street and intercept her there, and to do that, they would have to shake their unwelcome host. The champagne came and she tried to feign the proper gratitude as Fabian poured out three glasses. She waited a few minutes and then put a distressed look on her face.

  “Oh! Miguel.” She squirmed a bit, adopted that reluctant anguish perfected on a dozen bad
dates. “I’m sorry, I have to go back to the hotel right away.” The two men looked at her with concern. She shrugged. “It’s a feminine thing. I wasn’t prepared … I’m sorry, Fabian. Let me give you money for the champagne.”

  Beneath his graciousness he seemed slightly alarmed. “No! Don’t even mention it!”

  “Better that we go quickly,” she told the Comisario, standing up.

  Fabian also rose to his feet. “I’ll accompany you! I’ll walk you to your car.”

  “But the champagne—”

  “It’s nothing!”

  “Really, Fabian: we can go alone!”

  “No, no!”

  She was desperate to get rid of him. The Frenchwoman would be arriving any minute and if they couldn’t shake him, they would lose their best chance. She searched furiously for an excuse as they began to thread their way through the tightly packed tables, but Fabian stuck to her like a leech, only inches behind and with no intention of letting go. The music stopped, the crowd of dancers came flooding their way back to their seats, and a knot of boisterous young men accidentally jostled her backwards a halfpace. She felt Fabian brush inadvertently against her behind, and after the flicker of indignation the idea came to her. It was so right in so many ways that she didn’t question it. Without deliberation, she turned and slapped him across the face so hard that her hand tingled.

  “Stop grabbing me!”

  Fabian was rocked backwards by the shock of the blow, struggling to comprehend the unexpected attack. “It was an accident!”

  “That’s a lie! You’ve been after me since the day I arrived! You think you can touch me like an animal in a room full of people? What’s your problem? Why don’t you go find a prostitute and pay for it!”