17 Stone Angels (45 page)

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.”

“Comisario Bianco can take care of that,” Domingo offered, but no one answered.

It was becoming clear. They would hang him. For that reason he'd been told to clean out his files: they would make it look like the last desperate act of a guilty cop. Leon would be the one explaining things. His friend, Leon!
Poor Fortunato. He was never the same after his wife died! And the pressure of having his role in the Waterbury murder exposed . . . It was too much!
Fortunato heard a soft scraping high over his head and then something flopping beside him. The rope had been thrown over a beam. Domingo knelt by his head, probably fashioning a noose. What would he do? Three adversaries, his gun gone. He could feel the cuffs on his hands. Cuffed in front, like Waterbury.

An upwelling of fear came surging out of his stomach and pumped a jolt of adrenaline into his system. He didn't want to hang! To die with a rope around his neck, in defeat, with Domingo and Santamarina smoking cigarettes and telling jokes while they waited to make sure. Fortunato the
boludo!
Fortunato the incompetent, who didn't have the balls to kill anyone properly without shitting himself about it afterwards.

“What did he say in his note?” Domingo asked aloud.

Santamarina answered. “He confesses to the murder, the
puta
. That Waterbury tried to blackmail Don Carlo and that when Don Carlo asked
the police to investigate it, he killed the gringo in the hope of gaining favor. He mentions Berenski also. After, we'll tie him to Berenski and calm the whole thing.”

“Did you mention his wife? She always thought she was too good to associate with police.”

“The dear departed wife. Of course. Now they can be together eternally.”

Domingo's laugh scraped out from two feet above his head, then Fortunato felt his head being lifted and the slithery weight of a rope around his neck. “Give me more light here,” Domingo said, and the soft wall of color before his eyes flickered from dark umber to orange again. He felt Domingo tightening the noose. “You can give my regards to your bitch of a wife.”

Fortunato struggled to control his breath. In only seconds it would be too late, and yet with the adrenaline pumping through his veins he felt acutely alive and molten with hatred. He hated Domingo. He hated the casual Santamarina, and Bianco who had set him up for all this. To die by Domingo's hand, to be dispatched like that dog on the street three weeks before. Domingo's look of contentment that time:
I was doing him a favor
.

The image of that moment flickered back to him; the dead animal and the screaming boy, Domingo's satisfied face as he knelt to put the .25 back in his ankle holster. Always so proud of that little gun. Always with his ankle holster because he was the Man of Action, the Bad One from the television show who sneered at the victim before he killed him. Domingo and his ankle holster . . .

Fortunato's mind suddenly veered from its red haze of anger and-became cool again. It was the left ankle that had the holster. The ankle just inches from his head. Domingo would be using both hands to tie the noose right now. Would the safety be on? Would a round be chambered? At least he might put a round into Domingo, force them to shoot him. No. Better to wait. Maybe they were only testing him, or some rescuer would suddenly appear. Absurdly, Fabian's voice mocked him from the back of his head: “In the detective novel, the hero always goes for the gun.”

Santamarina said, “Point the light up here for a minute,” and Fortunato's eyelids turned black again. His best chance. One could make all the calculations in the world, but in the end it came down to the moment.
Domingo's shoe ground softly against the dirty pavement. Fortunato took a slow deep breath. If he was going to commit suicide, at least he would do it on his own terms.

He rolled, reaching blindly with
his cuffed hands toward the ankle above his head. The smooth leather curves of Domingo's shoe came under his fingers, then his manacled hands closed on the ankle like two pouncing spiders, working their way quickly under the cuff to where the hard irregular lump of the holster hunched.

“
Que
. . . .?' Domingo said.

Fortunato felt the rounded angles of the automatic surging from the leather. He had twisted onto his side now, could see Domingo's kneeling legs and the black V of his crotch in the flashlight beam. The Inspector tried to stand up but Fortunato yanked at the ankle and brought him off balance. Santamarina, with urgency: “Hit him!”