17 Stone Angels

by Stuart Archer Cohen

  He thought of Bianco in a blue suit, or his white one. Bianco at La Gloria and in his office at Central. Bianco smiling and Bianco wearing that hard expression of resolve. Bianco in 1976, beating that newborn baby to make the mother talk. Bianco, the brotherly superior who had brought him up through the ranks.

  His cell phone chirped and he patted his body until he found the phone the Chief had given him.

  “Comisario!” Domingo addressed him with his usual slick mockery. Bar music was blaring in the background.

  Fortunato remembered that he and Domingo were scheduled to cut Vasquez that night, but the mortal remains of Christian Vasquez were currently riding along two meters behind him. Now Domingo would say that he couldn’t locate the target and that they would have to cut him another night. Everything fine. The night would never come, the matter would fade. He would figure out how to deal with Domingo later. And the Chief? Better now to play the boludo.

  “Where are you?” the Inspector Fausto demanded.

  “I’m at a petrol station on the Accesso Norte, just outside of Lomas de San Isidro.” He was actually in Liniers, fifteen kilometers from the Accesso Norte.

  “What are you doing out there?”

  “I went to a friend’s birthday party. What’s the plan?”

  “I’m at the Cyclone, near Liniers. Vasquez is waiting for me outside.”

  Domingo sounded so certain that Fortunato had to reassure himself that he’d just killed Vasquez twenty minutes ago. It took Fortunato a moment to come to grips with the realization that Domingo could only have one reason for claiming that Vasquez was with him.

  The eternal reflex: an idiot face. “Very good. Has anyone seen you with Vasquez?”

  “No.”

  In that, at least, the hijo de puta spoke the truth. He imagined the puffy face, oily and pocked, the face of the schoolyard bully grown into an adult. “So, what plan do you have?”

  “I’ll pay him for Onda, and after I give him the money I’ll invite him to go to a kilombo in San Justo. Do you know the one at the corner of Conde and Benito Perez?”

  “Near the old appliance factory,” Fortunato offered. It had once been a whorehouse for factory workers of the zone, but as the factories were globalized they had adjusted by expanding into an hourly hotel for illicit lovers. The bureaucrat at the back of his head noted that they paid a thousand pesos on the tenth of each month.

  “That’s it.”

  “It’s a good choice,” Fortunato complimented him coolly. “It’s half-deserted. Tranquil.”

  “Exactly. Vasquez and I have gone there before, so it’s nothing unusual. I’ll park around the corner in front of the loading door of the factory. I’ll make sure he’s had some drinks and some merca. You wait in the lot next to the factory. We pull up from the direction of Triumvirato. He gets out the car, you step out behind and finish him and we load him into the trunk. We can do it all in fifteen seconds. If there’s someone around I pass a minute looking for my cigarettes on the floor of the car, and then you cork him.”

  “And the body?”

  “I have a place in Tigre, in the swamps. Do you have a clean iron?”

  “Yes. When do you want me there?”

  “In a half-hour, around one. I’ll show up with Christian between one and one thirty. Está?”

  Fortunato could get to the whorehouse in ten minutes. “That’s too soon,” he said, letting his voice weaken a little at the protest. “I might hit traffic. Give me until one-fifteen.”

  “Fine. Between one-thirty and two I’ll bring him.”

  The Comisario let a note of sincerity warm his voice. “Thanks for arranging this, Domingo. We’ll all rest better afterwards.”

  Domingo hesitated for a few seconds. “Clearly, Comiso. But you can thank the Chief.”

  Fortunato held the dead plastic to his ear after Domingo hung up. So they were going to kill him. The dull recognition that he should be frightened passed before him, but that fear gave way before a sense of insult. They wanted to kill him! Him! A Comisario Mayor with thirty-seven years of service in the Institution! When had that decision been made? He could imagine the conversation between the Chief and Domingo when they’d decided to cut him. He’s spent, the old man. He was always too soft. Too weak! That from Bianco, his “friend.” He’s incompetent, Domingo would answer. A coward. Better we get rid of him before he turns pink and starts singing. Maybe one of Pelegrini’s men had been there too, in his fine suit and his military cut, still not realizing that Waterbury’s accidental death had been planned from the beginning. We should have cut him the first time he fucked up, the idiot. Or saying nothing, just smirking. He’ll be as easy to kill as Waterbury.

  They would expect him to be stupid, to walk right into the muzzle of a gun like a retard. How rapid they’d all imagined themselves in arranging Waterbury’s murder! So easy to kill an innocent. Because Waterbury, in the end, was in other things, he was in his world of destiny, of writing his books and returning home to his family. He didn’t pay attention. But he, Fortunato, was now without family or hope. And they certainly had his attention. Now they would see who was more piola. He turned the car towards the abandoned factory.

  The Comisario felt a rush of feeling he’d never known before. Maybe this was how it was supposed to turn out. Maybe he was on a new path now, or the path he’d once had a foot on but left behind to climb the ranks of the Institution. He, who’d never believed in destiny or in causes, had become the avenger. A proxy. The man who had to finish Waterbury’s novel.

  A contrary thought blew in. He could still escape. With the half-million in his briefcase he could drive to the border of Paraguay and have himself smuggled across, get a new passport and identity. Easy for him in Paraguay, with his policeman’s nose. From there, to Brazil, someplace near the beach, with flowers on the porch. Invent a past in insurance or real estate. El Porteño, people would call him. A half-million could last a long time in such a place, living simply, investing well.

  But no. Fortunato didn’t run. Better to die in one’s own law than to flee the rest of his life. Something he had always respected in Cacho and the doomed integrants of the People’s Revolutionary Army. Most of them died rather than flee. This life was over. Only the exact time and place remained a mystery; a mystery whose solution he intended to find right away.

  He reached Ramos Mejia. The dark facades of the upper-story buildings faced each other in the air, laden with flowers and shields. Frozen garlands of victory draped over shabby doorways, wrapped across grimy columns. The sound of the transit trains muttering along Rivadavia bumped in through the open window carrying a cargo of intense nostalgia, a sound of his childhood. A memory came to him of standing beside the tracks with his father, holding a pail of something. Every traffic light seemed a supernatural red or green, like the overly intense colors of the broken television screen. Heartbreakingly beautiful colors; the most beautiful he’d ever seen. He was a dead man now. Nothing more than a spirit, living in a city of spirits. From a great distance he observed the lovers clustered together at the street corners and the diners above their steel plates in the wide glowing windows of the restaurants. All of life was burning around him, filled with people believing intensely in their loves or their scanty hoards of knowledge. He’d always kept away from passion, from believing in anything too deeply. That was the realm of teachers and soldiers, of the crusading human rights workers and the great lovers. A world of delusion, filled with false ideas like Waterbury’s destiny or Athena’s mission. Life was always payable in cash, he told Marcela. Not in silly dreams. In the end, his own life had come payable just like all others.

  He bore down on the situation at hand, cool again, thinking like a cop. He would reach the abandoned factory in five minutes. He had to be rapid now, more rapid than he’d ever been in his life. Domingo intended to get there first to ambush him when he arrived. His one chance: to get there before Domingo and kill him as he stepped out of the car. If anyone were with him he would
kill the passenger first, through the side window, then take out Domingo before he knew which direction the attack was coming from.

  A dead man now, he had to think like a dead man, without fear or excitement. In five minutes he had reached the area of the kilombo. He stopped his car two blocks away and walked up to the corner to have a look. The streetlight down there didn’t function and the darkness looked musty. The uncertain shadows bore no sign of Domingo’s car, but Domingo wouldn’t be so stupid as to park right in front. Racking his memory of a place he’d driven past a hundred times over the years as a young ayudante and sub-inspector, back when the factory had clanged in double shifts and the trucks had roared off from the loading dock filled with products stamped Industria Argentina. What remained? An opening now covered over with corrugated metal, an empty lot that had once held sheet steel and enamel paint. In his mind it merged with the space they’d left Waterbury in: another flat weedy rectangle.

  Fortunato took out his Browning and snapped off the safety, chambering the first round with a dry mechanical click. It occurred to him he should have gotten a clean gun, but there hadn’t been time for that. A good policeman had to improvise.

  He began walking carefully towards the factory, keeping close to the wall on the other side of the street. The leaves had fallen from the plane trees and he could hear the wide dry platters scraping beneath his feet, as loud as cannonfire. The air had the curry smell of autumn, of dust and motor oil, of metal. He expected that they might have a lookout at the next corner, and the emptiness of the street encouraged him. He kept walking, slowly, passing the side of an abandoned warehouse, an overgrown spur of track that had once served the local factories. A breeze rustled through the branches overhead and the dim charcoal light that penetrated them slithered over his shoulders in little pieces. No sign of anyone. He surveyed the shadowy limits of the factory and the lot and saw a dark space at the back. He remembered now that a narrow passage cut from the back of the lot over to the next street: his escape route. Fine; that was covered. But how to ambush them? If he succeeded in that, he wouldn’t be needing an escape route.

  Domingo had told him to wait in the empty lot, then to step out and cork Vasquez after he parked the car. They would assume that Fortunato would park his car on the least trafficked street, where he had. They would assume he was approaching from the south, in which case they would want to have someone against the south wall of the empty lot. They would station a lookout a block away with a radio, he would give the signal, and when Fortunato came up he would step out: tock! tock! Adios, Comiso.

  So they would want to kill him in the lot. Here the first good fortune: an old guard shack made of corrugated tin was collapsing in the front corner near the street, where Fortunato was supposed to wait. It looked dark and diseased; no good even for the destitute madmen who had begun to pile up around the city. The silhouette of the roof slanted at a ruinous angle to the walls, one of which was tumbling slowly inward. The door formed an opaque black rectangle, as if printed on a piece of paper. He could wait there until Domingo approached, as perhaps Domingo had been planning to wait for him. The window that had once looked out on the street had been partly covered by a piece of wood, and the vertical gap at its edge gave him a narrow field of vision and room to stick the barrel of his nine millimeter. After that, there was no predicting.

  He heard rats scratching around the back edges of the lot, and as he approached the tin structure he heard their metallic skitterings inside. The shack had the odor of human feces and a form of decay he didn’t want to identify. He tried to let his eyes adjust but he could make out only a few slanting timbers in the darkness. Rusty corrugations flexed beneath his feet with a low booming sound as he picked his way through. He moved over to the crack and waited.

  Always the devil, this waiting. This might be his last fifteen minutes, and he was spending it sitting in a tin coffin with the smell of shit in his nose and the scurrying of rats in his ears. Maybe it was a fitting end. Outside the shack the little sliver of night world looked dreamy and calm. His eyes had adjusted to the dark and he could see the black tree trunks against the translucent penumbra on the other side of the street. Something beautiful about even such a simple sight, of the dim sparkle of the pavement, the arching forms of the weeds in the dirty pink city light. A tiny fragment of the Buenos Aires that he now felt receding from him even as it had never seemed closer. He remembered this area from when he’d been a child, all grassy fields and ditches filled with singing frogs. Gone now. He’d never been a dishonest child or adolescent. Not even one of those cops who go around flashing their badges and asking for handouts. Who could foresee all the forces that pushed a life this way and that? His mother had always said that a simple sense of decency is the only guide a person needs in life, but when those around you had a different sense, one learned to see the world their way.

  A figure came walking up to the lot, and he recognized Domingo’s portly silhouette. He held something in his hand, but Fortunato couldn’t make out what it was. The Inspector looked around, then called softly, “Comisario! Comisario!”

  Domingo waited and Fortunato held absolutely still. The soft, respectful timbre of the call brought on a strange nostalgia, and he had an unexpected urge to answer back. Maybe then everything would return to how it had been before: Domingo and Fabian the dutiful inferiors, everyone loyal to the Institution and the game. He drifted for a moment in that quiet fantasy, then Domingo dispelled it by taking a walkie-talkie out of his pocket and murmuring into it. In a minute a second man came walking up from the same direction. In the pale pink light reflected from the clouds Fortunato recognized Santamarina. They hissed through the weeds into the shadow of the factory wall less than three meters away from him. Fortunato reasoned that he could always stand there and do nothing until they gave up and went away.

  “It was very considerate of him to advise us he might be late,” Santamarina said.

  “The Comiso is always very punctual. A man of great confidence.”

  They laughed, and the rats, emboldened by the renewed stillness in the shed, began to scurry among the metal. Both men looked towards Fortunato.

  “It’s rats,” Domingo said. Santamarina examined the shed a while longer, then turned away. Domingo continued, “What if he has his gun in his hand when he shows up?”

  “You’ll just have to be a good actor. “Oh, Comisario! Forgive me!” Look regretful: that Vasquez wandered off, that the operativo is canceled. Things like that, until you can get close to him.”

  “I can tell him we had to put it off because I didn’t finish the necessary paperwork!” Domingo joked. “That’s his style.”

  Fortunato’s stomach hardened. Laugh, gil. Laugh. Any thought of waiting quietly for them to leave disappeared. One had to confront it. Slowly, he raised his gun to the opening. He would shoot Domingo first, a quick one into the back, then get Santamarina before he had time to realize what had happened. With luck he could get out the back opening to the lot before the lookouts knew who had gone down. After that, perhaps Paraguay.

  Slowly, careful not to shift his weight on the corrugated tin, he brought the gun towards the gap. Both were facing away from him. A pity. He would have enjoyed shooting Domingo in the front. Better thus. Even now, one could still blunder and get killed. A little more, threading his arm around the encumbrances of a fallen shelf and a nail. Another two seconds and Domingo would be in his sights.

  The incongruous beeping sang out from his hip with the force of an air raid siren. For a couple of pulses he simply listened to it in disbelief. His cell phone!

  The two men snapped around. “In the shed!” In an instant they were moving in opposite directions, and before Fortunato could take aim they had both gotten out of the line of sight of the crack, Santamarina circling behind him and Domingo moving across in front, hidden by the wall of tin.

  Fortunato lurched towards the door, desperate to get a shot off at Domingo before the Inspector could prepare himself
. He still had the advantage. They couldn’t see into the dark shed, and he might be some other cop, or another operative. They would have to try to see who it was before they opened fire. He scrambled over the tin, thrusting his left hand into the darkness to ward off any obstructions, but then something caught at his foot and as he tried to lurch onto his other leg a piece of tin seemed to clamp down on it at the ankle.

  Slowly he fell, sickeningly, with all the time in the world to realize what a failure he was, shot to death in a tin shack that smelled like human shit. He landed unevenly on his stomach, bruising his forearm, his head and shoulders sticking out the doorway into the impossibly clear and open night air. A pair of trousers flickered at the edge of his vision and then a soft white light seemed to go off in his head along with an impact at the base of his skull.

  Fortunato remembered a time he’d played in the ocean as a child. A wave had knocked him down and tumbled him over and over through the surf. Strange to have it happening again now. He felt himself being lifted and turned, unevenly carried through a frothing white noise. A dull cold ache pulled at his wrists. Vague phrases at the edge of the long tranquil gulf.

  “He must weigh a hundred kilos, the pig! He’s worse than the journalist!”

  A high resonance in his head, like the humming of an electric current. The wave receded and left him lying on his back on a hard even surface. He kept his eyes closed, listening to the world with a sleepy contentment.

  A voice he didn’t recognize: “Here’s the rope.”

  The lethargy receded slowly. Domingo, Santamarina. The shed. A rope.

  “How is he?”

  His eyelids turned into an orange curtain as a flashlight beam played across his face. “He’s still out,” Domingo said from just above his head. “If we hurry there’s no great drama.”

  “Maybe we should strangle him first,” the unknown third one suggested.

  Santamarina answered. “No. Let’s do it clean. I don’t want problems at the forensic examination.”