17 Stone Angels (47 page)

The autopista flew away beneath him, skating majestically above the buildings and into the heart of the city. Through Constitución and San Telmo, down to La Boca, a world of smaller buildings and narrower streets. The Mouth of Buenos Aires, eagerly devouring the goods of the world, articulating Argentina's language of beef and cereals on a multitude of rusty freighters. These beaten buildings that formed its teeth, ragged and decayed. Foreign sailors and the poor dressed up for evenings out. He left his car in an alley beside the bar, was delayed when he suddenly had to bend over and vomit. The pain was getting worse now. When he looked up he could see that the angel above his head was laughing.

The Comisario walked ten paces
and stopped for a moment at the window. The Chief was in the midst of a song, a white canary before the three slouching musicians of the band. Out the open door came the sound of the bandoneon. He was singing “Tabaca', the one about the man who sits awake at midnight, seeing the figure of the woman he wronged in his cigarette smoke. An elegy to regret and the corrosive effect of guilt. Ambitious, the Chief. Even the best struggled with that one. An ironic choice for a man who never felt regret.

Fortunato stepped in the door with the nine millimeter hidden under a newspaper he'd found in the alley. He was coming in from behind the Chief,
but those on the other side of the room could see him and he could tell that the carnage of his jacket was upsetting them. He wished he'd worn the navy blue today. He was feeling a bit light-headed, so he leaned up against the wall. Norberta was looking at him in horror and came rushing over.

“It's only paint, Norberta. Don't worry yourself.”

Now every eye in the room was on him and the Chief noticed that he had lost the crowd's attention. He glanced over and stopped singing with a startled pop of the eyes. The musicians dragged on a few more bars and came to a ragged denouement, turning, like everyone else, to the Comisario.

Fortunato raised his hand. “Continue! Continue, Leon. I didn't want to steal your audience!” He moved over to a table in front of the band, only two meters away from the Comisario General of the Buenos Aires Provincial Police. He half-sat, half-collapsed onto its edge.

“You're badly off, Miguel,” the Chief said. Perhaps to the others in the room he sounded concerned, but Fortunato could read the fear in his voice.

He waved his hand. “It's only makeup. Like the song.” He intoned a few lines.
Mentiras! Son mentiras tu virtud
. . . The effort was too much for him and he stopped. He saw the Chief glance worriedly at the sheet of newspaper that covered his right hand.

“What happened?” he asked. “You're covered with blood!”

“Do you mean why have your men failed to kill me? Is that what you want to know? I'll tell you. It went well at first. They knocked me out, they put me in the factory. They even tied the noose around my neck. But amigo,” he shook his head in mock condolence, “it all went badly from there. Depending on your point of view.”

Osvaldo the pimp had good intuition and Fortunato saw him reach down for his gun. “
Tranquilo
, Osvaldo. This has nothing to do with you. Enjoy the show.” Glancing towards the owner. “And Norberta, please do not call the police. There's no drama here. Besides, it's sure they're going to find some violation of your license and separate you from a few
mangos
. Is it not thus, Osvaldo?”

“Thus it is, Capitan!” The pimp answered with the enthusiasm of one with front row seats to a long-awaited heavyweight bout.

“No, amigos. My complaint is with this
tanguero
, who tried to have me killed tonight.” A deathly quiet came over the 17 Stone Angels. The Chief stood by the band in his ivory suit like the master of ceremonies.

“They're all dead now,” Fortunato went on. “Domingo, Santamarina, the other two—”

The Chief interrupted him loudly. “You're badly off, Miguel! I don't know what you're talking about!” Looking towards Norberta and raising his voice, “Someone call an ambulance!”

“No!” Fortunato shouted, clearing the gun from the newspapers and pointing it at the Chief's white breast. “I came here to make you confess!” The musicians put their instruments down and evaporated away to the sides.

“To what, amigo? You're confused by your injuries.”

“Don't play with me, Leon. I've already killed five tonight. You can be the sixth.”

“You've killed five?” He turned to the room. “Did you hear that?

He'll kill us. Osvaldo—!”

“You ordered me to pick up Waterbury so you could have him killed!”

“It's fantasy, Miguel!”

Fortunato pulled the trigger and a blast of smoke and flame shot through the café. The bullet missed Bianco and burrowed into the wall.

“It was only a squeeze!” Bianco shouted. “I didn't order his death!”

“But you ordered mine! You sent them to kill me! And not even to die like a man! You wanted them to hang me like a suicide. Like some poor bastard who didn't have the strength to keep struggling.”

“
Hermano
, it's me, Leon!”

Again a blast filled the room with billows of gun smoke that hung in the fluorescent light. Fortunato struggled to rise from the table and walked forward to within a few paces of Bianco. The denizens of the 17 Stone Angels watched without a word. Osvaldo had drawn his pistol but he held it calmly on the table, surveying the drama before him with glittering eyes. Fortunato exchanged a brief look with him, then turned back to the Chief. The Chief's face looked chalky beneath the cold lights and their reflection off the sky-blue walls.

“Tell them about the baby you tortured in 1976, Leon, to make the mother talk. About the people you kidnapped and murdered so you could sell their furniture! How you conspired to kill Ricardo Berenski because he was approaching the truth. Of how you corrupted all who came under you. Including me.”

“You're not seeing clearly, Miguel! You're confused!”

“
Al contrario, Jefe
. At last I'm seeing
cristal
.” Fortunato felt an infinite silence come over the world, the timeless space in which all events flickered and roared. “I'm purging the Institution.” He pulled the trigger and the nine millimeter jumped in his fist. The bullet and its shroud of gazes sped from the muzzle and the lead punched the Chief in his clean white breast and knocked him over a music stand and a guitar. As he tumbled he flung one hand out to the side and one over his heart, as if rendering the finale of a tango. One of the women let out a little shriek, but the place was eerily silent as the Chief made a few gasping sounds and then rolled partially onto his side.

All were looking at the Comisario, who pushed the gun painfully into his waistband and backed towards the door. His head went fuzzy again and he had to steady himself against the wall for a moment until his senses returned. To Norberta he said calmly: “
Perdón
, amigo, that I leave you with this mess.” He reached into his jacket and took out a bundle of ten thousand dollars, threw it towards him. The throw was weak and ended up on the floor. “Buy champagne for everyone. And use the rest to pay the necessary bribes when the police come.” A sickened little shrug, the ghost of one of his rare smiles. “And that you can't remember my name for a while when they do.”

As he backed out the door he heard a single pair of applauding hands and Osvaldo's unmistakable voice. “Bravo! Bravo!
That
is tango!”

When he reached the alley
he looked back to see Osvaldo and the
puntero
hurrying into the night with the fresh news. The place would be empty long before the cops came. He was legend now, a story more powerful than a man. Maybe they would write a tango about this someday. The tango about the old policeman who exacted his revenge for a lifetime of corruption, who turned Good at the end and purified himself with blood.

So he was only a song now. Nothing left for this life, only to go home before the police arrived and die quietly. They would get their suicide. He was beginning to have bouts of light-headedness. His soaked pants cuffs were flapping at his heels. He groaned into the car and vomited again before beginning the long drive back to Villa Luzuriaga. He had gotten the Chief and the others, but where were Pablo Moya and Pelegrini? Where was William
Renssaelaer? They were everywhere around him, in every building and in the pavement that glittered beneath his headlights. Where are you, William Renssaelaer? Where are you?

The pain was growing more
intense and crowding out other thoughts. At Liniers he had to pull over and woke up after a few minutes feeling hazy and spent. It took some effort to dial Cacho's number, but he managed it through the blur and held the receiver to his ear as he got the car underway again. “Cacho!”

Cacho began swearing at him and the Comisario cut him off. “Leave it, leave it! There's no time. I'm calling you on a clean line. I wanted to tell you that I avenged Waterbury and Berenski.”

That quieted the criminal. “What?”

“It was Bianco who had Berenski cut. Bianco, working for Carlo Pelegrini. So that you know: he was singing at a tango bar and I sent him a cork in the middle of ‘Tabaco'.”

A moment of wonderment, and then Cacho's voice without any patina of toughness. “Truly? You killed him?”

“Truly.”

“And Domingo?”

A weird labored chuckle. “I killed Domingo and three others when they were trying to hang me.” He grinned vaguely. “
Estilo
Hollywood: in a rain of lead.”

A short silence as Cacho seemed to grapple with the idea. He sidestepped the matter. “You sound half-dead, Miguel.”

“They got me in the stomach. I'm going home to die.”

He hadn't expected any remonstrance to go to the hospital and none came. Cacho understood what he was telling him. The line stayed quiet as the buildings slid past outside his windshield, but he knew Cacho hadn't left him.

“You did well, Miguel,” Cacho said at last. “You did well.”

Cacho's approval affected the Comisario and he felt an unaccustomed bond with the former revolutionary. “
Mirá
, Cacho. We're not friends. But maybe we're
compañeros
, in some sense. For this I wanted you to know what I discovered and what you've forgotten. We pass our lives among garbage. But
beneath, it's a world of spirit,
hermano
. It's a world of spirit. He clicked off the phone to relieve Cacho of any necessity of answering.

He fumbled through the buttons again. A few seconds later Athena's groggy voice came to him.

“It's me, Fortunato.”

“Miguel! It's three in the morning!”

“You must come to my house now. I need you.”

“You sound strange.”

“I'm dying,
chica
. The end has arrived. At least I arranged everything as it should be.”

A wary silence, then her uncertain voice. “You sound terrible, Miguel. What's wrong? Do you need a doctor?”

“No, daughter. It already is. Please come to my house right now. I need you very much and there is no other person to call. Please. I have much to tell you about the Waterbury case. I can tell you everything now.”

“Can't this wait until tomorrow?”

“No. There is no tomorrow. Will you come?”

There was a short silence on the line. “I'll be there as soon as I can.”

An eternity for him now.
As he pulled down the familiar streets near his house he thought he saw a herd of cows chewing grass in the intersection, the old candy store on the corner, where it hadn't been in thirty years. There might be someone still watching his place, whoever it was. He knew a way to enter from the far side of the block, passing through a neighboring courtyard to his own house, and he parked his car out of sight and stumbled the last block to his patio door. As an afterthought he dragged along the briefcase with four hundred thousand dollars in it.

He lay down on his
bed in the dark to die unmolested. The pain was ringing in his stomach like an infernal bell, resounding through his body in molten pulsating waves. In the half light that came in the windows he could see the outlines of the room, and though a part of him recognized it as his own it all seemed incredibly distant. Thus was life: it disappeared behind you. You turn around, and there's nothing.

The floor was rocking and he tried to put one leg down to steady it—the old drinking trick. It seemed to work for a moment and the events of the night came back to him in a skiffle of violent images. He'd settled what accounts he could. Beyond his reach though, there were still the Joseph Carvers and Pablo Moyas, for whom the violent passions played out that night represented only a bit of turbulence on the way to new markets and new profits, and whose exploits in Argentina would be lauded in the financial pages by which their deeds were measured. The criminal geniuses of the age, always clean.

He was the last piece of evidence, and when he died it would all be irrelevant. Pelegrini would fall. William Renssaelaer would go to work for AmiBank, RapidMail would take over the Post Office, and make guaranteed profits from the People. The plunder would click forward as it had for the last thirty years: a continuous ring of business, politics and police always devising new forms of stealing and decorating it in new forms of propriety. Moving the ball up and down the field at the behest of the crooked referee, who always ruled for The Mouth and always against The People.