17 Stone Angels (8 page)

“Yes.”

“And the United States State Department has sent you here?”

“Yes. The family requested that the murder be investigated.”

She raised her eyebrows. “That's interesting! We have never found the State Department to be so sentimental. What is your official job with them?”

The question flustered her a bit. “I don't work for the government. I teach political science at Georgetown University, in Washington.”

“A full professor? At your age? You are what: twenty-six? Twenty-seven?”

“Twenty-eight.” She tried to say it nonchalantly but it sounded petulant. “I'm an assistant professor, actually.”

“Ah! An assistant professor. Of course.” The lawyer leaned back in her chair. “And what have they done for you here? They've given you the assistance of the FBI? Introduced you to the Minister of Justice?”

Athena swallowed. “I'm mostly working with the Buenos Aires Provincial Police.”

“The police.”

“Yes. With a Comisario Fortunato, of the Brigada de Investigaciones in San Justo. That was where the murder took place.”

The long-haired woman burst into a brief withering laugh. “And has Comisario Fortunato been very helpful?”

She felt hemmed in. “I think he's trying.”

“Then why are you coming to me?”

“Well . . .” Her professor had warned her that INCORP had an ideological bias, but she hadn't been prepared for this hostility. “I do have some confidence in the Comisario, but I think even the police have limits.”

“I'm not sure what you are trying to tell me, Doctor Fowler,” Carmen said with a faint smile. “Here we see the Buenos Aires police as tireless crusaders for Justice and Truth. Like the United States government itself.”

“Well . . .” Athena felt her face going red as she struggled for an answer. In her confusion she ended up mouthing something she knew was a lie even before she had finished saying it. “I don't think they would send me here if they weren't serious about getting an answer to this murder.”

Carmen Amado gave her a friendly smile. “Here is my advice, Señorita. I suggest you take a few cafés, do some shopping on Calle Florida and then,
please, go home. Just go home. Go and write your report and get a citation from the State Department because here, we don't have time to entertain you. We are four lawyers against security forces that kill hundreds each year and abuse and extort money from tens of thousands. We are not interested in a phony investigation sponsored by the United States Department of State for the purpose of convincing their own people of how virtuous they are.”

“But—”

“Go on. You don't need our services to please your employers.” She looked at her watch, then again at Athena. “Please . . .”

Athena took a long breath but didn't move. She was close to bursting into tears, wavering between anger at the attack and the shame at having her motives stripped so bare. Carmen Amado had hit that one part of the truth so perfectly square that it momentarily eclipsed everything else. But it was only part of the truth, and if she couldn't get past it now then she might as well fold up the investigation and go home just as the lawyer had suggested.

“I think I need to make something clear to you,” she began quietly. “I don't represent the United States government. I represent a five-year-old girl and a widow whose father and husband died a horrible death on a trip to Buenos Aires and came back as ashes in a plastic jar. That's who I represent.” She took a breath. “And I assure you that woman has made every phone call and written every letter and begged favors from every stranger who would listen, all so that someone would come down here and find out why her husband was tortured and murdered in a country she's never even been to.” Athena felt a tear at the corner of her eye and brushed it away angrily. She could hear her voice fluttering up and down. “And you're right! They deserve somebody better than me! I know that! Everybody knows it!” She stopped to compose herself again. “But I'm the one who's here!” She wiped away another tear and then her voice was dead calm. “So you tell me: should I go back and explain that you wouldn't help them because you don't like the United States government?”

The lawyer stared silently at her, shifted backwards in her chair. She considered a while, then took a packet of tissues from her desk and pushed them across to Athena. “I'm sorry.” Her voice warmed up a little. “Why don't you tell me about the crime. What was the victim's name?”

Athena felt relieved as she reached for the tissues. “Robert Waterbury.”

She nodded. “I remember that one.” She took out a cigarette and paused just before lighting it. “It's okay?”

“Of course.”

Blowing a fog of blue smoke towards the open window: “They found him in the car in San Justo, no? Shot several times, then finished with a nine millimeter. That was the detail that captured me, the nine millimeter. That's the standard police bullet. Also, he was wearing handcuffs, which made me suspicious. You read the
expediente
, no? Do you remember the brand of handcuffs they used?” When Athena hesitated, Carmen said, “Was it Eagle Security?”

“I think so.”

Carmen nodded. “That's the brand the police use. Exported to them by one of your hardworking companies in New Jersey. The same company also sells them pepper spray, teargas, and metal detectors, also anti-riot gear, up to water cannons and armored trucks.” She smiled. “But not the
picana electrica
, for torture. That is still
industria nacional
. In that respect, at least, we are resisting globalization.”

She waved the hand with the cigarette. “But I'm sure your Comisario Fortunato told you this.”

Athena resisted the impulse to defend him. “No, he didn't mention that.”

“All the same,” she said cheerfully, “with fifty thousand nine millimeter pistols running around Buenos Aires province, there must be a few that don't belong to the police. What did the Comisario say?”

“The theory right now is that it was a settling of accounts between drug dealers. Or a drug deal that went bad.”

“Ah! The old “settling of accounts!” That's almost as popular as the “shot due to mistaken identity” line, and the classic “shot while attempting to escape!” They're very traditional in their literature, the police. They don't like New Fiction.” Her voice took on a girl-to-girl intimacy. “
Chica
, let me tell you about our defenders of the public well-being.”

She went down the list with the insistent cadence of a well-used speech: illegal imprisonment, torture, trigger-happy officers, and extra-judicial executions committed in cold blood. “Eighty-eight percent of the population has a negative image of the police, and fifty percent fear them outright. Of every hundred robberies denounced, only one results in a conviction. Of every ten murders, three are solved. One quarter of all killings in Buenos Aires province are committed by the police themselves.”

“A quarter?” She tried to match that statistic with the half-dozen police
she'd met in her day at the comisaria, and the face she came up with was the officer who had run over the dog and then shot it in the middle of the street.

The police, Carmen went on, had become a corporation, with an organized hierarchy and a sophisticated system of collection and distribution. Their loyalty was to the corporation, and officers suspected of disloyalty would end up marginalized, or even dead. “In the last week, three policeman have been killed, all of them victims of “attempted robbery,” while they were off-duty. That,
chica
, is a settling of accounts.”

Athena thought of the Comisario, with his kind face and his weary sigh. “Well,” she tendered, “don't you think there can be
some
good police?”

“No.” She could tell that the flat answer hadn't satisfied Athena. “I tell you simply: no. Exemplary husbands, there might be. Loyal friends, gentle fathers. There must be. But not good policemen. And San Justo? Where your friend Fortunato is a Comisario? It's one of the most corrupt districts there are.”

Athena shook her head. “But this man has investigated corrupt police himself. I think he wants to do good things. Maybe he's constrained by the system.” The lawyer didn't answer, and Athena went on hesitantly. “But there are a few elements that make me uncomfortable.” She described the dues left unexplored, including the missing friend named Pablo at AmiBank and the phone number found in Waterbury's pocket: Teresa. “It's frustrating, but since I'm here basically at their indulgence I'm not in a position to make any demands. I'm just hoping something will happen.”

The lawyer deliberated for a moment. “Okay.
Athena
, no?”

“Athena.”

“Fine. Here is what I can offer you, Athena. If you will get the widow to retain INCORP as her representative, I can get a copy of the
expediente
and we can begin an investigation. But the papers take time. Perhaps you will have to return to Buenos Aires in a month.”

Athena's hopes spiraled downward again, and Carmen must have seen it. “Or,” she added slowly, “I have a friend who can perhaps help. He's a journalist who has written much about the police. A case like this might interest him.” She took out her address book and looked up a number, then dialed it:
Con Ricardo Berenski, por favor? De parte de Carmen Amado
. As she waited, “Ricardo is half-famous here. Now he's working on an investigation of a businessman named Carlo Pelegrini.”

Athena recognized the name. “I saw a couple of his articles.”

Ricardo had come to the phone and Carmen's voice became playful. “
Amor
, I wanted to find you before Pelegrini's men do.
Sí, querido
. Every time I open the newspaper you're putting your foot in his ass.
Sí
. Look, Rici, I have a girl here from the United States investigating a murder of one of her countrymen. About four months ago. Yes, Robert Waterbury.” A pause. “Me too. It had that odor . . .”

She made the arrangements to meet for a drink the following evening, then hung up and turned back to Athena. “
Bien
,” Carmen concluded, “talk to the widow and we'll see.” She stood up and Athena stood up with her. “And,
ojo
,” she said, tapping beneath her eye, “be discreet.” She pointed to the phone, and Athena shuddered at her next words. “They're listening.”

CHAPTER
SIX

T
he smell of the sulphur hissed into Fortunato's nostrils, and he set the votive candle next to his favorite picture of his wife. Marcela in black and white, at the age of twenty, a few days before they'd married at the Metallurgical Syndicate Hall. She'd just graduated from the teachers” college, a tall, big-boned woman with a lanky waist and fluid hips that he found intriguing and erotic for their strength as much as their feminine grace. He loved her handsome dark face, with its long Inca nose and framing tendrils of black hair.
Mi Negra
, he'd called her, or
India
. Her father had used his connections as secretary of the Union to get the hall at a discount, and had welcomed him into the family with a long toast filled with high-flown words and tears. As a cadet in the Academy, Fortunato was looking forward to a steady career and a decent pension at the end. The people had still liked the police in those days, before all that mess with the subversives made everything go rotten.

He looked around the room, whose objects implied his life in the same way that an
expediente
implied a crime. A portrait here or there, a souvenir
mate
purchased on a vacation to Cordoba. They were like pieces of evidence, but like all
expedientes
they lent themselves to a certain amount of fraud. Four little rooms in the suburbs of Villa Luzuriaga formed a paradoxical home for the Comisario of one of the most lucrative stations of the Buenos Aires police galaxy.

He went into the little kitchen and put a kettle of water on the stove. Maybe a
mate
would lift his spirits. He filled a gourd with herb and a silver straw, dousing it with lukewarm water and watching the pale green flakes swell. She could never bear to take her
mate
bitter, always insisted on sugar.
And cut me a little slice of lemon, Miguelito
. Now he drank it bitter every day.

He'd been severely depressed since Marcela's death, but it had started long before that when it first became apparent that her illness lay beyond the power of doctors. The diagnosis had fallen, and when they went to the specialists in hope of some new information, it had fallen just the same, fallen again and again until it became inescapable. Marcela seemed to have accepted it before he did, counted her fifty-eight years as sufficient and prepared herself for the torture that would soon be meted out to her. For him, it had been harder to submit. He kept trying to make an arrangement.

“Old woman!” he'd said. “They tell me there's a study that they're conducting in the United States that has had success . . .”

“And where are we going to get the money to go tramping around the United States? With your fifteen hundred pesos per month!”