17 Stone Angels (19 page)

“All reformed,” the patron said proudly. “Afterwards, I'll give you the tour.” He unlocked the door to the observation room and Athena walked into the dark closet-like space with two metal chairs similar to the ones at her kitchen table back home. The Comisario of #33 sat down beside her and she looked for the first time at the suspect.

She had trouble reconciling the man in front of her, slouching alone in orange coveralls, with a man who would brutally murder and torture. Undersized and skinny, he sat in the chair with his manacled
hands folded together on the table. His stubbly black hair revealed several scars lying like little white worms along his skull, and his knuckles were covered with black tattoos, but his thin, young face looked surprisingly composed and receptive.

Fortunato came in followed by a clerk. The clerk sat at the table with a pad and Fortunato pulled a chair directly across from the criminal at a distance of about a meter and settled into it.

“Do you know why I'm here, Enrique?”

“Yes. Over the gringo,” the suspect returned. He had a higher voice than she expected, slightly reedy.

“That's right. The one we talked about three days ago, Robert Waterbury. And have you been physically pressured or threatened?”

The criminal shook his head. “No, Señor.”

“Have you been coerced in any way?”

“No, Señor.”

“Enrique, we are referring to events that happened the night of October 16, last year, one week before that matter with the bricklayer and his wife. Correct?”

“Yes.”

“Why don't you tell me again what you were doing that night?” The killer went into a description of drinking beers at a club called the Liverpool, in San Telmo. He'd been with a friend that they called
el Uruguayo
, whose first name was Marco, last name unknown. They'd taken various
papelitos
and some small chalks. Did they take them to sell? Yes. Had they sold at the Liverpool before? Yes, many times. How many papers? How many chalks? About forty
papelitos
and . . . he hesitated, six or seven chalks.

“And can you describe for me the
papelitos
?”

“They were of blue metalized foil, about two centimeters on each side.”

Athena remembered the blue cocaine packets from the
expediente
, and hearing them cited so precisely by the criminal lent a strange authority to the mass of documents she'd spent so many hours examining, as if they themselves had created Boguso and his actions. The door to the observation room opened and Athena looked up as Judge Duarte walked in, putting his fingers to his lips and shaking hands with her and the Comisario of #33.
Sominex
, Berenski had called him. He seemed wide awake now as he stood in the darkness watching the confession.

Boguso continued, describing the events as any young man might describe a boring night out with a friend. They'd fallen into conversation with Waterbury and the gringo said he was researching some book that he was writing. They'd given him some
merca
to sample, then told him that they had a better quality in the car. While Waterbury was in the bathroom, Marco, the Uruguayan, said, “The gringo has a lot of
mangos, viste?
Let's take him and get money from his credit card,” because it was a thing that Marco had done once before.
You keep them all night and drive them around to different bank machines and make them withdraw the limit at each one
.

Athena kept trying to imagine Waterbury being stupid enough to go outside with Boguso and the missing
Uruguayo
. Even as literary research into the Buenos Aires underworld, it seemed a strangely reckless move for a former banker with a family and mortgage payments to consider.

Boguso went on with his story. At the car Marco had taken out the gun and put on the handcuffs, then they'd pushed him to the floor of the back seat.

“And Waterbury didn't resist?”

Boguso gave a light shrug. “He resisted a little, but we hit him a few times and he went along. We told him that after we finished with the credit cards we would let him go.”

“Did you have the intention of letting him go?”

“I wasn't really thinking about it,” Boguso explained easily. “I was just thinking about the money. It was, like, a job.”

The callousness of the words would have angered Athena if the whole tone of the confession had not felt off-kilter. She knew from other research that stories of inconceivable cruelty always brought their own surreal atmosphere, but something else felt strange about this confession: Boguso seemed almost cheerful.

They'd taken eighty pesos from his wallet and then tried the credit card at a bank on Avenida Regimiento de Patricios, only to have it be overdrawn on the first try. “Marco got angry. He thought the gringo was giving us the wrong identification number, and moreover, he was half-crazy from
milonga
.”

“By
milonga
you mean cocaine?”

“Yes. He was snorting from the chalks, which were pure, and he hits the gringo and says “
Hijo de puta
, are you trying to screw us?” And then I hear him beating the gringo with the butt of his pistol.”

“You are driving?”

“Yes.” Boguso glanced in the direction of the observation mirror. “A 1992 Ford Falcon sedan, colored metalized gray, with an interior of light brown. Marco had a .32 pistol, I believe the ammunition he used was Remington, I had a nine millimeter in the glove compartment, an Astra, and I was using cartridges of the make Federal—” Something too rehearsed here! It was too much detail, too fast, in the very language of the
expediente
! She glanced across the dim closet toward the Comisario of #33 and the judge, expecting them to return her look of skepticism, but the two of them watched without flinching. Was it just her? After all, here was a man confessing to a murder six feet in front of her face. People lied to proclaim their innocence, not their guilt!

Comisario Fortunato reacted to Boguso's rush of strangely wooden description. “Slow down, Enrique. What happened then?”

“I heard the gun go off and Waterbury made a terrible scream: he was shot in the hand and I think the body.”

Fortunato questioned him a bit more sharply. “But you told me the gringo was lying on the floor. How could you see it?”

Boguso hesitated, then went on like a student with the right answer. “I couldn't see the gringo. But I could see Marco, and how it all turned out after.”

Fortunato nodded and Boguso went on with the description: how they had panicked and driven him to San Justo, how the Uruguayan, in a frenzy, had shot him several more times and how, arriving at the vacant lot, he himself had finished Waterbury with the nine millimeter.

She felt the Comisario of #33's hand on her shoulder, as if shielding her from the impact of the murder's final moments, but it wasn't the brutality of the words that bothered her, but rather their perfection. By the time he had finished she knew for certain that his testimony was full of lies, no matter how well they matched the record. Maybe he'd been involved in the murder. Maybe he'd even fired the final shot, but something bigger was being neatly interred in this flawless confession, and she knew no one was going to help her dig it up. Her stomach began to churn. If she took part in this sham she became little more than an accessory to Waterbury's murder.

When Fortunato joined them afterwards in the Comisario's office, he seemed exhausted by the recounting of the crime. His shoulders slumped and
at first he didn't fully involve himself in the conversation with the Comisario of #33 and Judge Duarte. They discussed the whereabouts of the Uruguayan and the procurement of a search warrant for Boguso's apartment so that they could sequester the murder weapon. Judge Duarte, with an uncharacteristic zeal, promised to have the proper papers by the end of the day. Athena brought up the matter of Teresa Castexe Pelegrini's phone number but the three men discarded it as a bit of errata, complimenting her on her admirable persistence. “She's already half Inspector,” Judge Duarte said, but when she began to voice her other objections Duarte lost patience. “Doctora Fowler, when I have a confession that perfectly supports the physical evidence, I don't go inventing reasons why it couldn't have happened that way! We're in the real world here, not the university.” She blushed. When Fortunato drove her back to the Sheraton, he tried to console her with an invitation to go and get the missing Astra the next day.

She paused before she got out, steeled herself. “Boguso is lying, Miguel.”

He kept looking at her with his silent, attentive face. To accuse Boguso of lying after Fortunato had signed off on his story was to accuse Fortunato himself of lying. She backtracked. “I don't know if it's all lies or just partly lies, but there's something wrong here. I can't . . .” She looked away and then back towards Fortunato's gleaming brown eyes. “Miguel, it's lies. I can't go back and tell Robert Waterbury's family that I heard the truth. You know he's lying.”

She thought she saw the Comisario swallow and stiffen in his seat. “It was strange,” he agreed, slightly off-center. “But a murder like this, that's not for money, not for passion . . . It defies you.” The weight of the afternoon seemed to bear down on him all at once and give his words a tired, plaintive tint. “Even when the killer is rotting in Devoto, you can never put things back in balance.” He added in a low, wounded tone, “If I had the power to undo the wrongs—”

The bullying scream of a car horn behind them vaporized the blue moment. The horn let up for a second, then issued a second blast, along with a stream of curses. Fortunato shrugged. “It's a world of insults.” Pulling the door closed. “Let's see how the murder weapon comes out.”

They managed that
operativo
with Inspector Domingo Fausto, the fleshy, slightly sinister officer who had run over and then dispatched the dog the previous week. Something aloof and frightening about the man:
the way he pretended she wasn't there. They raided the apartment without incident; they even had Athena stay and watch the wife while they searched the other room, finding the gun under the mattress as Boguso had indicated. The wife and Athena had a conversation about the price of domestic appliances in the United States. A message from Ricardo Berenski waited for her at the Sheraton, but he didn't answer his phone. Meanwhile other pressing matters prevented Comisario Fortunato from meeting with her again.

In deference to her schedule they expedited the ballistics tests on the Astra and matched them with the bullet the following day. By now the weight of the physical evidence lent an irresistible momentum to Boguso's testimony. Judge Duarte put out an order of capture on the missing Uruguayan, although Fortunato admitted that he might have fled back to his own country by now. If so, he assured her, he would see the extradition through. She tried again to reach Ricardo to tell him the resolution of the case and to say goodbye, but still without success. She did reach Carmen Amado de los Santos at INCORP, who received the news of Boguso's confession blandly. “How convenient that they already had the killer in perpetual chains,” she said. Her tone implied that she'd expected nothing more from the
Bonaerense
and their lackey from the United States.

As the matter of Robert Waterbury's human rights drew to a close, her anger began giving way to resignation. Boguso had satisfied the police and he would satisfy the State Department, and now the name of Athena Fowler would be high on the list when the US government was looking for someone to observe an election or oversee an aid package. However happy the US government might be, though, there would be no such easy sale to Naomi Waterbury. All she could tell her was that she didn't really know.

As she made her reservations to return to Washington, Athena felt for the first time a sense of futility in her own future. Behind all the satisfactory explanations she would parrot back to Washington, Waterbury's mysterious transit through Buenos Aires kept smoking and sputtering through her thoughts. A French
artiste
, a billionaire's wife, arguments about the quality of champagne shouted over a tango: it seemed a life apart from everything she knew. She'd be leaving that enigma here, though. The author's last journals, if they existed, would never be found, and the only other sources were the memories of people whose extravagant voices she would never have time
to collect. Robert Waterbury's final lunge at success would dissolve into the infinity of unfinished tales that would henceforth compose her Buenos Aires, her Comisario Fortunato, her life.

Miguel took her out one
last time—to Carlito's Bar to listen to Melingo, one of the acclaimed new voices of tango. The Comisario wore the same comical-looking houndstooth of the week before, now with a gray ascot that gave him a sense of old man's bravado.

She had expected him to be in good spirits, but his moods shifted rapidly during the course of the night. At times he was his old self, translating the
lunfordo
for her and playing the tour guide about Argentine customs, at other times his gray mustache and thick cindery brows hung slack and deserted across exhausted features.

“What are you thinking of, Miguel?” she asked him after one long pause. “Your wife?”

He looked up slowly, lifting his lips into a ponderous smile. “The truth is, young one, that there are times when one feels abandoned.” She reached across the table and touched his hand. Whatever his role as a policeman she couldn't help caring for him. “Miguel. Your wife didn't abandon you. It wasn't her choice.” She had difficulty voicing her next thought. “And I'm not abandoning you, Miguel. There's limits for me.”