17 Stone Angels
Authors: Stuart Archer Cohen
F
ROM
17 S
TONE
A
NGELS
Boguso seemed to search his information, then said slowly: “You want me to denounce someone?”
“Yes. I want you to denounce Enrique Boguso.”
Boguso's mouth fell open. Even his long history of relations with the police hadn't prepared him for the bizarre demand. “You want me to take responsibility for a murder I didn't even do?”
“
SÃ
, señor.”
Fortunato watched Boguso try to grasp it. The eye seemed to be twitching a little bit faster. “Look,” the older man reasoned, “is it such an extra burden? Your first one was when you were sixteen and once you got your clean adult record you did it again. After this last pair, I don't think one more fake killing will make much difference. It's already perpetual chains, no? We give you the
expediente
to study, you sing your little story for the judge, the gringos write their report and everybody's happy.”
“And me? How am I happy?”
“Well, Enrique. You help us and we help you. Isn't it always like that? I think we could improve your accommodations, at least. Keep you someplace a little cozier, with conjugal privileges. And in a few years, when all the noise goes away, who knows? Someone might find a technical error in your conviction. Or you might escape somehow, or get pardoned.”
“It's
way
crazy, hombre.”
Fortunato hesitated, letting a long philosophical pause elapse before he spoke slowly and distantly. “Yes, son. It's crazy. But it's a crazy world, no? A world of illusion, where the best actor rules.” He sighed. “Think about it.”
17 STONE ANGELS
Copyright © 2014 by Stuart Archer Cohen
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the Publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews, and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Four Winds Press
San Francisco, CA
ebook ISBN: 978-1-940423-09-8
Cover and interior design by Domini Dragoone
Cover and interior images: Window wall © Luca Mason/123RF; Handcuffs © Blake Taylor/Veer; Recoleta angel statues © Jorisvo/123RF, © Jorisvo/Veer, © Ncousla/Veer, and © Fabio Santos/123RF; Jorge Videla from Wikimedia Commons.
9
 Â
8
 Â
7
 Â
6
 Â
5
 Â
4
 Â
3
 Â
2
 Â
1
Distributed by Publishers Group West
CONTENTS
Part Two: WaterBury's Last Play
For my three treasures:
the Queen, the Messenger and the Hunter in the Stars.
En el mundo del Destino, no hay estadistica
.
(In the world of Destiny, there are no statistics.)
âMartin Alberto Vilches,
Voces
R
obert Waterbury's body had been discovered last October in a smoking Ford Falcon on the outskirts of Buenos Aires with six chalks of Chlorhydrate of Cocaine and his skull perforated by a nine-millimeter bullet. Thus these stories often began, and thus they usually ended, except that Waterbury was a North American, so that final tableau kept coming up as a topic of conversation between the United States embassy and the Argentine Ministry of Justice. The politicians had kicked it back and forth through the violent January heat and the fierce cancer of summer. Now the gringos were sending their own person down to investigate and he, Comisario Fortunato of the Buenos Aires Brigada de Investigaciones, was being assigned to assist and support on behalf of the Buenos Aires police.
Fortunato turned loose a long exhausted breath and finished lighting his wife's votive candle, then placed it gently on the windowsill. He glanced at his watch. The feeling of decay that had clung to him since Marcela's death three weeks ago sloughed down on him again, merging with the monotonous autumn overcast that hung over the city like a sentence of perpetual chains. He brushed a cigarette ash off his sports coat and reached for his car keys.
The assignment depressed him. He knew that the Waterbury investigation would be a sham, that it was political, and that the Chief was in on it. He knew that the reason he'd been appointed to head up the
investigation was for the express purpose of
not
finding the killer. He knew that clearly, because he was the one who had put the bullet in the side of Waterbury's head.
The face of Comisario Miguel
Fortunato was that of a weary beaten angel that had had too many losing days at the track and told too many lies. It was a face that seemed to comprehend all human pain. Wide and soft, it was anchored by a thick drooping mustache that presided over stubbly jowls. His large dark eyes radiated a profound melancholy, matched by a voice so low and gentle and courteous that his gaze and a few simple words could console even the most distraught or unreasonable of souls. For that reason he had often been called on to lend his saintly visage to certain tasks within the police department: he greeted the families of victims when they came to identify a body, and got a ten percent commission on the funeral arrangements they entrusted to him; he explained the necessities of enrollment in the police private security program to neighborhood businessmen. As he'd climbed through the ranks, Fortunato's face had brought him the role of the “good” cop in the “good cop, bad cop” game, and that had become his image of himself: the good cop. Over the decades his wavy chestnut hair had gone the color of iron, and his features had softened into a mesmerizing vision of nearly religious intensity. It inspired confessions, like the mournful face of the Virgin.
As Fortunato opened the garage door he glanced reflexively up and down the street. His neighbor was talking to his two teenage sons and the three of them fell silent under his gaze. He eased his car onto the pavement, then closed the sheet-metal doors behind him. He drove a late-model Fiat Uno that he'd gotten through police channels, with falsified papers and a phony bill of sale. He put it into gear and watched the cramped houses of Villa Luzuriaga squeeze past him in a tight continuous line, their windows barred and their walls topped with broken glass.
Fortunato would have preferred to stay home. He didn't like to think about the Waterbury murder, and though it wasn't his style to complain, he knew someone had given him the hide to eat on that one. The day after he'd killed Waterbury, Marcela had received the diagnosis of cancer and a few months later she was dead. Fortunato couldn't help but link those
two events in his mind. He wasn't superstitious, but beyond all ideas of Karma or Destiny he was a cop, an investigator, and given the evidence available he could only feel that they related to the same case: the case of Miguel Fortunato.
La Gloria had been built
longer ago than anyone remembered and lingered on next to a raw-brick building which housed a clandestine mechanic's shop. Lost in the shabby exurbs of San Justo, the bar had survived through the decades nearly unchanged, absorbing the years and the black residue of a million cigarettes into its dark wainscoting. A wooden refrigerator clunked away beneath a picture of the Argentine soccer selection of 1978. The green plaster walls rose twenty feet towards a dim distant ceiling. There was a smell of dust and floor cleaner. Oozing from the loudspeakers came the vaguely insidious chords of the string introduction to the tango “Tabaco.” Chief Bianco liked this bar because they played an all-tango radio station, and the Chief was a semi-professional singer of tangos. They called him
El Tanguero
.
Four old men were playing cards at the entrance, their table heaped with small piles of kidney beans and half-empty bottles of beer. They looked up at Fortunato as he came in. “Miguelito!” one of them said.