“You might learn something from a prostitute.”
“Beast! Don’t talk to me like that!” She moved to slap him again, but he caught it in mid-air and held it there. For a moment their eyes were locked together in an angry stalemate, and just as he began to break into a smug little laugh she came up from below and slapped him with her other hand, catching him on the jawline with a crisp snap that could be heard by all the nearby spectators.
He looked at her with disbelief. “Puta!” he said. His playboy superiority was gone and for a moment she thought he might hit her back.
Fortunato appeared suddenly between them. “Fabian—” the Comisario said calmly.
“Leave her alone, tarado,” another man shouted excitedly. “Or I’ll explode you!” It was one of the two men she had been flirting with ten minutes earlier.
“Keep swelling, boludo, and you’ll spend the next three months in the calabozo.”
“And you’ll spend the next three months in the hospital!” The man swung his fist around Fortunato’s shoulder and clipped the top of Fabian’s head. Fabian exploded from the knot of people and flung himself at him.
The Comisario put on his best peacemaker voice. “It’s fine, Fabian. We’ll go. You stay here and enjoy yourself.”
They moved quickly through the crowd as Fabian continued the exchange with the two men. When Athena glanced back from the stairwell the three were embroiled in a knot of pushing and punching, and the bouncers were moving towards them. In a few seconds they were out in the bright quiet lobby.
“Did he really grab you?” Fortunato asked her.
She tipped her head towards her shoulder, giving a little frown. “It was an accident.” She arched her eyebrows. “But he was guilty of something.”
The Comisario laughed the deepest longest laugh she’d ever heard from him. He was still laughing when they got to the sidewalk. They both went silent when they realized that they had come face to face with Paulé.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Her hair had grown longer than in the picture, falling now to her shoulders, and she was dressed in a black one-piece dress and a red sweater. She wore lipstick and eye shadow and carried a black athletic bag towards the ballroom of the Armenian Mutual Benefit Society. Athena’s heart pounded as she recognized her, as though she were seeing a celebrity. “Paulé!” she greeted her.
La Francesa looked at her, trying to recognize her. “Do I know you?”
“No. My name is Athena Fowler. I’m a human rights investigator from the United States. Could I talk to you for a few minutes?”
Paulé’s face suddenly closed. “I’m sorry. I’m too busy. I have to teach a class.”
“Please. I’d like to talk to you about Robert Waterbury.”
The Frenchwoman mustered as much hauteur as she could, but the fear was starting to undermine it. “What are you talking about? I don’t even know Robert Waterbury! With your permission …” She pushed on the door but Athena held it.
“Don’t go down there.”
“What?”
Fortunato came forward now and when Paulé saw him she began to panic, pushing on the door. “Let me pass!”
“Señorita!” Fortunato said in his kindest voice. “Don’t go down there. They’re looking for you.”
She let go of the door and then put her hands stiffly at her sides and stamped her foot on the pavement. After a few seconds she began to cry.
Closer up, she looked older than Athena had expected. Though her pale skin was virtually unwrinkled, something about her face made Athena place her in her late thirties. What was it? A hardness around the eyes? The set of her mouth? She was a pretty woman, but Athena thought it a harsh sort of beauty, stiffened with cosmetics and wariness. So this was Waterbury’s Patron Saint of Desperation. Athena wondered for the first time if Paulé had ever really said that, or if the whole story was Waterbury’s fictionalization of his own life—or Fabian’s—or some combined fiction with which the two of them had created a world that each, for his own reasons, preferred. Where was the Truth in a world like that?
They walked to a quiet café and took a seat in the corner, calmed Paulé with a pastis and a business card. She talked in a wistful voice.
“What can I tell you about Robert Waterbury? A very gentle man. He was very kind to the children who live in the streets. He wanted to write a story about the abandoned children that live around the Plaza Misereres, that they were the angels on the fountains that came to life at night. He was like that: a man always living half in his imagination. He told me he used to work in finance, but he must have been a very bad banker.”
“We heard it wasn’t going well as a writer, either.”
“It went for shit. He had a million complaints about the publishing business and the injustice of it all, and he had resolved himself to write something cheap and like a formula. That’s how he got involved with the wife of Carlo Pelegrini.”
“I understand he was working on something with her,” Athena said.
Paulé scoffed. “Working! He was prostituting himself to her to try to keep his career going. She wanted him to write some sort of monument to her ego. Her life story. She offered him thirty thousand dollars for it.”
“Not two hundred thousand?”
The pale face twisted with scorn. “Don’t be an idiot! She knew how desperate he was. It would be too humane to pay him so much money. For someone like her it’s much more satisfying to pay him the minimum he would accept and then keep him jumping for every penny. She used it as a hook to control him. That’s the part she enjoyed. She knew he was married but she insisted on seducing him anyway. She took pleasure in corrupting him. She’s a good match for her husband.”
“He slept with her?”
The Frenchwoman looked at her with scorn. “I told him not to, but he was half-boludo in that respect. You don’t sleep with the queen and expect that the king won’t cut off your head. Robert was a toy for her. In her advanced age she thinks herself some sort of artist, but she’s the coldest hardest prostitute you ever saw.”
Athena led her. “So you think Carlo Pelegrini killed Robert?”
Paulé glanced away as she spoke. “How would I know?”
Athena sensed she was hiding something, and knew Fortunato had picked it up, too.
The Comisario continued in a soft voice. “Paulé, did Robert ever mention that Teresa Castex had revealed confidential information about her husband’s businesses to him? Things that might make problems for Carlo Pelegrini?”
“No! Robert knew nothing about Pelegrini’s business. He would have told me. We had a very close relationship.” She looked at the two investigators. “We weren’t lovers, because I know that’s what you are thinking. We were friends. Does that seem so impossible? Although …’at this, her eyes began to loosen up and her voice went suddenly high and shaky, “if I had known they were going to kill him I might have insisted, because it was his last days anyway!” Her pretty features warped out of shape at that moment and several tears fell silently down her cheeks. Of all the people Athena had talked to about Waterbury’s murder, Paulé was the only one who had cried.
Fortunato beamed at her with an open, compassionate face, a saint’s face that seemed to open the danseuse up like a flower. “Paulé, has anyone else talked to you about this?”
She nodded, wiping at the tears. “A week after Robert was killed a man broke into my apartment.”
Athena looked at the Comisario in alarm, but he continued calmly. “What did he look like?”
“Short blond hair, well-dressed. Maybe forty-five. Milico-type. He was already inside my apartment when I came home. He wanted to know about Robert.”
Athena broke in. “Did he identify himself? Was he a policeman?”
“He’s going to force his way into my apartment and then hand me his card?”
Fortunato took over again. “What did you tell him, Paulé?”
“I told him that I knew Robert but I hadn’t seen him in
at least a week and I thought he had gone back to the United States. After that I changed apartments.”
Athena and Fortunato considered her answer. Fortunato spoke first, gently. “Señorita Dupere, I understand your situation. It’s frightening. I too would be frightened. But if you don’t tell us, it doesn’t end here. Others also will want the answers to these questions, and they may not be so sympathetic to your situation.”
She turned to Athena. “You’ll get me killed. The United States is famous for that: they use you for their shows and then they leave you to hang.”
“I won’t do that,” Athena said, though she had no idea what protection she could offer. “If you know who killed him, I promise I’ll have him extradited—”
“Are you crazy? There’s not going to be a trial! When these people murder someone they are celebrated in the financial papers because they’re improving the economy for casket makers!”
“What people?”
She shook her head bitterly. “AmiBank!”
“What do you mean?”
“He saw them together.”
“Who?”
“The American who runs Pelegrini’s security.” “William Renssaelaer?”
“Yes! That was the name. Robert saw him with Pablo Maya, of the Grupo AmiBank.”
Fortunato sat upright in his chair, his dark eyes incandescent.
Paulé went on unsteadily, intimidated by her own forbidden words. “Robert had met this William Renssaelaer before at Pelegrini’s house, and since they were both Americans they had a little conversation. He knew only that Renssaelaer worked for Pelegrini in security. Some weeks later he saw Pablo by chance in the center and he followed behind him, thinking he would surprise him. Pablo was approaching a limousine with polarized windows, so Robert hurried ahead to catch him before he closed the door and disappeared. When he looked into the car, there was Renssaelaer, the American that he’d met at Pelegrini’s. He didn’t understand at first. And then, with the newspaper articles that had started to come out about Pelegrini’s bribes at the Post Office, Robert developed a hypothesis that Renssaelaer was acting as a sort of spy, that he was really working for AmiBank, destroying Pelegrini from inside by giving his enemies information, that they passed it to the journalists like that Ricardo Berenski. And that, yes, that frightened him, because it put him in the middle. But he trusted in Pablo!” she said bitterly. “The idiot trusted in Pablo!”
Paulé started crying again and Athena turned to Miguel. He had a stricken look on his face, a distant gaze into the surface of the table as if he were watching something unfold before him. She was too stunned to ask him anything but the obvious: “Could Renssaelaer and Pablo Moya have really killed Robert Waterbury to protect their arrangement?”
Fortunato had put his hands to his temples. “Don’t talk,” he said.
“Miguel—”
“Please! Don’t talk!”
She obeyed him, exchanging worried eyes with La Francesa, who was watching the windows and entrance nervously.
“It was Renssaelaer,” Fortunato said, almost to himself. “It was an operation within an operation. Pelegrini wanted him squeezed for sleeping with the wife. Renssaelaer wanted him dead, knowing that after that, if necessary, he and AmiBank could put the murder on Pelegrini. Pelegrini arranged it with Santamarina, Renssaelaer kept his hands off, but he paid someone inside the squeeze to make sure Waterbury ended up dead. It was all Renssaelaer.”
“But Fabian never mentioned Renssaelaer!”
The Comisario gave a long nauseated sigh and looked silently at her for a moment before speaking. “Because that’s who Fabian is working for.”
The pieces were falling into place with a clarity that felt deceptive after so many lies. “So you think Pablo Moya had his own friend murdered?”
“I think that probably Moya found out afterwards, but he has to go along with it. Bankers always hold their nose and protect their capital. For the good of the institution.”
She remembered the feeling of shame Moya had radiated at the interview, as if trapped in his own comfortable little hell. He’d probably get over it. People like him usually did. “But why would Fabian tell us about Paulé if she could lead us to Renssaelaer?”
“That’s an error I’m sure they intend to correct.” He looked at Paulé as he said it and the woman quivered. She’d been growing increasingly agitated as the discussion confirmed Pablo’s involvement in the murder.
“Don’t worry,” Athena told La Francesa. “It’s going to be fine.” Though her words didn’t seem to comfort the woman, Athena was already swelling into a peculiar form of exultation. With this she could open the case, incite the dreaded Judge Hocht and a dozen journalists to rip people like William Renssaelaer and Pablo Maya out of the background and hold them up to the world, along with all their corrupt sponsors. “Do you know what this means?” she asked La Francesa. “With your testimony, we can start a real investigation. You can do something that—”
Fortunato interrupted, touching the dancer’s arm. “Daughter, give me your bag.”
She gave it to him and he shifted around so that he faced the wall and opened it. A purse and a pair of square-heeled black tango shoes were inside. Fortunato reached inside his sportscoat and to Athena’s amazement pulled out three thick bundles of hundred-dollar bills and stuffed them into the bag. He zipped it up and put it in the shocked Paulé’s lap.
“This is thirty thousand dollars. Go back to France and keep your mouth closed. If you stay here, they’ll kill you. Like they killed Waterbury.”
Athena was too stunned to be angry. “Miguel, what are you doing? This is …”
The Comisario kept talking to La Francesa in a soft voice. “Athena can’t protect you. Neither can I. They’re already looking for you. If I were you I would go tonight. Don’t even pack your clothes.”
The tanguera looked from one to the other and clutched at the bag. “Who are you? You’re not lawyers, or … or professors!” She stood up.
“Paulé! Wait a minute! I really am—”
“It’s enough! I’m going!” She was backing away from the table.
Athena stood up. “No! Please, Paulé. We need to punish Robert’s murderers!”
La Francesa looked from one to the other of them, trembling between fear and disbelief. “Estás loca!” She turned and reached the door in a few strides, seeming desperate to get out into the open a1r.
“Paulé!” Athena cried. “Please! For Robert!”
Waterbury’s Patron Saint turned one last time towards Athena, clutching the bag that held her tango shoes and thirty thousand dollars. The face of the pornographic grimace and of cynical hope reflected a sorrow that seemed to spring from her own sense of profound failure. “I can’t!” She flickered out the door.
Athena began to go after her when she felt Fortunato’s hand on her forearm.
“Let her go,” he told her. “She’s marked. They’ll kill her if they have to, or even for the doubts.”
“But only she can—!”
“You have nothing to offer her, Athena. Let her go.” Athena was still pulling away and he spoke more forcefully. “Let her go or I swear I’ll make you identify her body after they put a bullet in her head!”
Now La Francesa was gliding across the front window of the café in the dark night. Athena turned to Fortunato and looked into his weary beaten-dog face. Whatever she needed to say was obstructed by her rage and frustration, and instead she pounded her fists against his chest. “How could you do that! How could you do that!”
Fortunato let her hit him, impassive before her blows and the alarmed expressions of the spectators. “Do you want her dead?”
“We need her testimony!”
“For who? Who? For the Federales? Don’t joke with me! For the FBI? The FBI is controlled by your State Department, and who do you think controls your State Department? It’s not your friend Carmen Amado!”
Athena looked at him, stunned. “How do you know about Carm
en Amado?”
Fortunato didn’t care. He was tired of lying. “Of course I know you went to INCORP! Of course! Do you think the police are going to hold their hands over their heads while you put your finger in their ass?”
“You’ve been spying on me the whole time?”
“You have been spying on me! With INCORP, with Berenski! Don’t play the innocent!”
“This was all a farce! All of it! Your job was just to spy on me and keep me from finding the truth, because it was the police that did it, wasn’t it? That’s why you sent her back to France! To protect your friends!”
“I sent her back to save her life! Only that!”
“Then where did you get thirty thousand dollars? Where?” Fortunato felt it all exploding in his head. “I’m corrupt!” he shouted in a low intense voice. “Corrupt! Corrupt! Do you understand? Do you know what that is? You, that always takes the good side? You that has never dared? I did difficult things! I did things other men are afraid to do! Of the forty-five thousand integrants of the Buenos Aires police only one in one hundred become comisarios, and I succeeded! Do you think you could have done that?”
“Some difficult things aren’t worth doing.”
“Yes. Very legalistic! I expect that from you. But I caught a man who was killing children! He had already killed three! I caught him! Was that worth doing? Another was a man who had violated six women! Another who had kidnapped an adolescent! I saved her life! The same as I just saved the Frenchwoman’s life, that you were ready to throw away to make yourself a better résumé!”
“Don’t drag me into your sewer! This has nothing to do with my resume! You think you can justify taking bribes, and extorting money and killing people, like the police did in the Dictatorship? You—”
“I never killed anyone!” Fortunato was so carried away by the passion of his denial that in that moment he believed it. Vasquez had killed someone. Domingo had killed. “How can you accuse me of that?”
“If you cover for assassins then you’re an accomplice!” She grabbed her purse and began walking towards the door, then whipped around to face him. “How did you explain all this to your wife, Miguel? What did you tell her when you brought home your bribes?”
17 Stone Angels Page 30