17 Stone Angels (6 page)

Fortunato stared dumbly at the photo, remembering how it had looked the night of the
operativo
, the haze of gun smoke in the auto, Waterbury's last twitches as he settled into the seat. Behind him Domingo: “You calmed the
hijo de puta
, Comi.” Yes, everything was calm. And then the next day, at the clinic, when the doctor told Marcela why she was losing so much weight, it had just kept getting calmer and calmer. She'd given up and dissolved away, leaving only that calm empty house that found him every evening. Perhaps like the house of Robert Waterbury.

A clerk knocked at the
door and thrust his head in. “Comisario, forgive the interruption. Something has happened outside.”

Fortunato came to his feet and hurried out, followed by the Doctora.

A dog lay bloody and yelping in the road beside an unmarked police car while the driver, Inspector Domingo Fausto, was fending off the furious attack of an eight-year-old boy. Fortunato recognized the dog and the little boy as residents of the house across the street. He always kept a few pieces of candy in his pocket to give him when he passed by.

“
Chico
!” He grasped the little boy's shoulders from behind and pulled him away from Domingo. The boy's face was flushed and shining with tears.

“It wasn't my fault, Comiso,” Domingo began, flustered. “The dog jumped out from between the cars.” He turned to the boy. “Why didn't you hold onto him,
retard!
”

The child's anger collapsed into a whimper and he bent down close to the dog and stroked his head. “Tiger!” he cried. “Tiger!” The dog's front legs waggled uselessly before its crushed body, and Fortunato could assess the hopelessness at a glance. He looked back at Domingo, who dismissed
it all with a click of his tongue and a toss of his head. Beyond them, La Doctora was watching.

“Take care of it,” Fortunato told him under his breath, then he crouched down to the boy's level and turned on him the full sympathy of his weary face. “
Chico
, come with me over to the kiosk. Let's get a soda. I want to explain something to you.”

“But what about Tiger?”

“Tiger is badly off, but we're going to help him. Come on. What kind of soda do you like?” Fortunato put his arm around the boy's shoulders and began leading him across the street to the kiosk. The dog was still yelping, now with a gasping labored chortle in it.

The boy hesitated. “But Tiger—”

“I'm going to get you a new dog.” Fortunato steered the skinny shoulder blades away from the street. The harsh report of Domingo's .25 automatic leapt off the pavement behind them, and the boy broke free and spun around. Domingo was standing over the shuddering animal in a little cloud of gun smoke, and the boy put his hands on his ears and began screaming, his eyes wide open, screaming. He took a step towards Domingo and the dog, looked at it, then turned towards Fortunato with an expression of misery and disbelief. He shook free and ran off down the street with his hands waving above his head, slicing the leafy air with his high-pitched shrieks. Fortunato watched him disappear behind the parked cars of the shady lane.

He walked slowly back to Domingo. The officer's corpulent features reflected the satisfaction of a job well done, the trace of a grin humping up his oily cheeks. “It wasn't my fault. He has to learn to take care of his pets.” He knelt down to put the small automatic back into his ankle holster, oblivious to the intensity of Fortunato's stare. “What a mess,” Domingo said, as he glanced at the ruined corpse. He stood up and gave a tiny shrug. “I did him a favor by killing him.”

CHAPTER
FOUR

A
thena sat back in the conference room and thought about the morning. It wasn't easy getting her bearings after a day like this: first the glad-handing introduction by Wilbert Small, then the graphic photos that had showed her up as an amateur. The bizarre incident with the dog had capped everything. Even the Comisario seemed shaken up by that one: after the little boy's screaming exit he'd left her to examine the
expediente
alone, under the sacred gazes of General San Martin and the Blessed Virgin of Lujan.

From the time she'd gotten off the plane she'd been trying to focus on the inquiry, bur the buzz of arrival kept sweeping her away. It was cool to have a delegation of cops pick her up at the airport, to have the clerks at a big fancy American hotel call her Doctor Fowler and charge it all to Uncle Sam. Just to be in Buenos Aires investigating felt spy-like and thrilling. Despite the murder at the center of this inquiry and the vertigo of potential failure, some small dirty part of her kept patting herself on the back. Now, though, she had to produce some results. She began leafing through the stack of documents before her.

She had seen plenty of pompous Latin American documents before, but the
expediente
had the surreal feel of a story by Cortazar. The initial pages had to do with the crime scene and the evidence found there, but after
that the paperwork began to multiply in number and complexity. Declarations were made by ambulance attendants and tow-truck drivers. Forensics tests were ordered and carried out. The police dragged the hapless owner of the stolen car in for questioning and, as a final irony, processed him for an unpaid traffic ticket. Several
declaraciónes
attested to the trajectory of the body's paper-strewn final tour, with receipts signed by the responding police officer, the ambulance driver, the clerk at the morgue, the forensic surgeon, the mortuary, and a bill of 198 pesos accepted by the United States Consulate for cremation. Despite the copious information, the scene yielded surprisingly few clues. Waterbury's body had been stripped of identification and had lain in the morgue for two weeks before the missing persons reports plucked him out. Somewhere beneath all the cold, objective description, the man who had been Robert Waterbury had endured his last brutal minutes of fear and pain.

One document emerged from the blur to claim her attention. The coroner had inventoried the victim's clothing, analyzing the blood stains and the entry and exit holes of the various bullets. There, in that long list,
One pair of pants, type Khaki, with a label that says “Allesandro Bernini, Industria Italia, Pura Cotone” stained with a redbrown substance consistent with human blood, with a hole in the right thigh, front part
. Then, in a detail that seemed to have been overlooked by the responding officers,
In the watch pocket of the pants, a blue piece of paper inscribed 4586I92I—Teresa
.

Teresa. What did it mean to find a woman's phone number in a dead man's pocket? Athena copied it into her notebook, resolving to keep it to herself for the time being.
Teresa
. Maybe nothing: the telephone of a woman who did clothing alterations, an employee at a photocopy shop. The real problem with the number was the fact that no one had yet bothered to call it.

The investigation up to that point had been almost willfully torpid, and Comisario Fortunato had as much as admitted it. Nothing shocking about that. The
Bonaerense
had a damning resume in the files of the various human rights organizations she had contacted, and she had known that their methods wouldn't conform to the strictures of the police handbooks she'd read as preparation for this assignment. What made things weirder was the knowledge that all policemen older than their early forties had been active during the time of the Dictatorship. Who were these middle-aged men that greeted her, these Sub-Comisarios and Sargentos that shook her hand with
such formal courtesy in the hallways? Nightmare panoramas kept ghosting through her imagination: a Sub-Co standing above a hooded prisoner or hustling someone into an unmarked car. On the other hand, Comisario Fortunato seemed all the opposite. His exhausted dignity had something comforting about it. He'd admitted the mistakes of the previous investigation and taken responsibility for them. As the single person in the
Bonaerense
on whom her success depended, she had no choice but to get along with him, but it went deeper than that. At a level she hated to admit to herself, Fortunato's weary face and quiet manner reminded her of her father.

She put her pen down on the
expediente
and slumped into her chair. Her father had always been a man to play along, an Insurance Adjuster given to describing things in measured and reasonable terms even when a situation was patently obscene. It had infuriated her growing up; she'd preferred the fearless combative style of her mother, whom she had once seen slap a clerk for insulting a black woman. In the end, though, she had learned from her father. At dozens of State Department cocktail parties and conferences she had played the bright young technocrat, discussing American training of torturers or aid to fascist regimes with the cheerful detachment of one who
had no political bias
. She learned to discuss those horrors the way the remote language of the
expediente
described Robert Waterbury's murder, speaking of devastated Latin American economies as if they were simply imperfect markets, stressing that human rights had to be viewed “in context.” She sent a hundred follow-up letters and placed a thousand business cards with all her father's insurance-man thoroughness. All in the hope that when it came time to send someone to El Salvador to observe an election, or to author a report on the effect of crop substitution in the Bolivian
Chapari
, they might remember her name and face, the authentic sound of the Spanish words dropped into conversation. At last her acting paid off in a phone call from Senator Braden's office. There was a matter in Argentina to investigate, a question about a human rights violation of an American citizen. Might she be available?

After that the interview with Waterbury's wife, still oppressed by the murder and its clumsy inquiry. Naomi Waterbury had met her at the door with a grievous, distrustful stare, her handsome features spoiled by the loose crescents under her eyes and the bitter turn of her mouth. She described her husband's life carefully, struggling to keep a distance from her grief. The
State Department's sudden flourish of goodwill had not appeased her, and as they talked her manner seemed to churn slowly through resentment, nostalgia and a mutilated sort of hope.

Her husband, she said, was a writer. He had freelanced for various magazines and had written two novels. The first novel had gone well, and the second had gone badly. He'd gone to Buenos Aires to research a third, a detective thriller, which he'd hoped would resuscitate his career. “He wanted to write something commercial,” she said. “His first two books were literary, and after the second one failed, he thought he should just try to write whatever the market wanted. I hated to see him setting out to write something mediocre, just for the money.” She sighed. “I supported him in it because he was desperate. We were all desperate.”

“Mrs Waterbury, did your husband give any indication that he was involved in anything dangerous? Did he show any sort of alarm?”

She hesitated as she braced herself against the memories. “At first he talked about the people he'd met, how good it was to be back in Buenos Aires. He used to see one of his old banking friends, I think his name was Pablo. Then, he started to sound a little . . . evasive. He said he was on to something that would take care of us, but he wouldn't say what. He seemed a little ashamed of it. I think something
was
going on, but he didn't want me to worry about it, which of course worried me more. The last time he called he sounded tired and upset. He said he'd had enough, he was coming home.” Her face suddenly seemed to lose its internal structure and to twist into something child-like and hurt. “That was the day before they found his body!”

It was devastating to watch, and it made Athena say something she never should have, an unkeepable promise uttered in a low voice as she reached out and touched the widow's shoulder: “I'll find out what happened to your husband, Naomi.”

The fastidious details of the
expediente
had become impenetrable now. She sighed and picked up yesterday's newspaper from the Comisario's desk. A certain Carlo Pelegrini was decorating the headlines in a scandal which she'd arrived too late to make sense of. Something complicated about bribery and the Argentine postal service. She saw the name of the president
and various Air Force officers. Someone knocked on the door. A cloud of green wavered in the frosted glass.

“Ah, Doctora Fowler! I see you're already on the march.”

Fabian was lighting up the gray confines of the police station with a parrot green sports jacket and a pink shirt, an outfit he could carry off by virtue of his handsome face and thick blond ringlets. Gold roosters crowed on his silk tie.

“Inspector Diaz!”

“Please,” he said in English, giving her one of those handsome-man smiles, full of laughter and warmth. “I am Fabian!” He came into the room without an invitation, and she caught his eyes traveling quickly down her body to her waist with a brief, almost professional scrutiny. As he bent down to kiss her on the cheek she smelled his cologne: a pleasant, spicy aroma, slightly intoxicating.

“Fabian. I didn't realize you speak English.”

He stumbled on, his smile becoming slightly more labored. “Of course . . . I can speak!” He shrugged. “Of course!”

“That should serve you well in Hollywood.”

The grin hung on to his open mouth as he struggled to decide whether she was mocking him or not. “Actually,” he retreated, “I read English better than speak. Look . . .” He pulled an American paperback from his briefcase and continued in Spanish. “I'm studying the formula. Formula is everything.” He passed it to her and she glanced at the back cover.