17 Stone Angels (48 page)

A knock at the door,
someone calling his name. He struggled to the window and dropped a key between the bars, then collapsed backwards onto the bed again.

“Miguel!”

“Here, Marcela.”

In a moment a vague flicker filled the doorway of his bedroom and came closer until she hovered beside his bed. His bedside lamp popped on.

“Miguel! What's happened to you?”

“Marcela! They got me.”

“I'll call the hospital! Hold on!”

“No, old woman. It already
is
. Get the money. In the wardrobe. It was there all the time. I'm sorry.”

Marcela didn't move, was doing something with the telephone. “The money! Get it now!” he said with as much force as he could muster. “In the wardrobe.” The old woman was still fiddling with the telephone, flipping through the telephone guide. “Get it! Get it! We'll go to that clinic in the United States for your treatment.”

She bent down into the wardrobe. “There's nothing, Miguel!”

“Now is not the time to change your clothes! The other side! It's there! Get it out!”

She kept fumbling around. “There's no money here!”

He forced out a hoarse whisper. “Get it out! It's all dirty! Everything!”

She bent her face down and she was crying, and he saw that it was not Marcela. It was Athena, with her blonde hair, wiping something from his mouth with the side of the bedspread. Marcela had drifted off to the doorway, watching them. “Athena. In my briefcase. There!” He tried to indicate the case but the effort was too much for him.

“What happened, Miguel? Who did this?”

It was Athena, and she was asking about the night. “Don't worry yourself, daughter. We won this round. I killed them all tonight: Leon, Domingo, Santamarina, Vasquez.” He grimaced in an attempt at irony. “Even myself. But . . . I couldn't find Renssaelaer. I couldn't finish it.”

Another wave of pain came over him and the room faded out before it. When he could see and hear again Athena was back above him. “Forgive me, Athena. I killed Waterbury.
I
killed him.”

“Miguel—!”

“It was a mistake. I thought it was just to frighten him, but Domingo and Vasquez. . . they . . . ” He felt a blockage in his throat and then his breath getting shorter and shorter, as if his lungs were shrinking. “They shot him with the .32. I killed him to end his misery. But the guilt is mine. I'm guilty of everything.”

“No, Miguel!”

“Ask my forgiveness from the family. And give the money to his daughter.”

Tears were falling from Athena's eyes onto his face. He was losing the ability to speak, but he had already said everything. Athena touched a cloth to his face, asking him something that it was too late to answer. Marcela had come back into the room, was standing at the foot of his bed with a secret humor. With great effort he caught his breath and managed to give what he imagined was a smile. “
India
!” he muttered at last. “You look good in that dress.”

He said nothing else, rattled
through the last contortions of the dying and then went empty. Athena reached down and closed his eyes, then sat for a moment in the silence of the room.

So it had been Miguel. She understood now the frantic struggle revealed in the
expediente
in the light of the Comisario's final confession, sensed that in his last hours he had pieced together some personal salvation through his own private apocalypse. It should have disgusted her, but somehow the evil of Miguel was pushed aside by the sight of his drooping mustache and the terminal exhaustion of his face. A little boy had turned into an old man while the world flickered past him, changing horses to motorcars, tangueros to rock stars, giving loved ones and then withering them before his eyes. So strange, this life. People dreamed themselves and then went tumbling after their vision, maybe never understanding what the vision really was until they no longer had the strength to escape it. She barely knew Miguel Fortunato. Why was she weeping now?

The world collapsed briefly into a tiny pool of her own sorrow, then began to expand again to new and different dimensions. Fortunato had chosen to step up rather than lie low, and by doing so had exposed the outlines of the entire crime, from the sordid murder of one inconvenient witness to the vast gray movements of RapidMail, Grupo AmiBank and Carlo Pelegrini. Now the case would have to be laboriously excavated from the ruins of the night. Facts would be obscured and documents destroyed, but there was still Judge Hocht, and the journalists, and some ragged hope for a better society that no government or tyrant could ever completely extinguish. Maybe that was one of the few noble things about the human race, about Miguel Fortunato. Now he had left everything up to her.

She heard the slight tick
of sheet metal at the door and then a soft footfall in the next room. Her breath caught, and she listened as the stealthy creeping came closer. “Who is that?”

Fabian appeared in the doorway of the bedroom. He'd exchanged his tweed jacket for a black windbreaker and he had his pistol in his hand. “Athena. So many unexpected meetings tonight!”

He was smiling, but it didn't run very deep. The face she'd always considered so handsome now gave off a sense of cold cunning. “You know that your friend Fortunato shot Comisario Bianco an hour ago in front of a full audience at the 17 Stone Angels.”

“No!”

“Sí, Doctora. In cold blood. Not to mention a quadruple homicide some fifteen blocks from here. Among the deceased our own Inspector Domingo Fausto! Very disagreeable: each victim was finished with a shot to the head. My guess is that the ballistics will show that at least one of them was finalized with a nine millimeter bullet from the Comisario's gun. He is also under suspicion in the murder of Robert Waterbury.” Fabian sighed, a parody of his old self. “It's logical, I suppose. The thriller must always end with a bloodbath, where the bad ones take the bullet and the good one dies with the beautiful woman shedding tears above his bleeding body, or goes limping off into the rainy night as the colored lights of the police car—”

“Shut up, Fabian. He already told me that he killed Waterbury. He said it was all arranged beforehand between Domingo and someone else. They tricked him. He thought it was going to be for intimidation, and then the other two shot him. He finished him out of mercy.”

“And you believe him? Who would want to kill a harmless
boludo
like Waterbury?”

She remembered who Fabian worked for, and put on an idiot face. “We never got that far.”

The answer seemed to please Fabian. “To die without knowing the truth. That, yes, seems to me quite sad. He lived in illusion and he died in another set of illusions. That is all we can put on poor Comisario Fortunato's tomb. He was the man who made ten thousand arrangements, and in the end he was played by an inspector and a
merquero
of the lower depths.”

Fabian moved further into the room, his gun still in hand, and noticed the scattered pile of green bundles spilling out of the briefcase. “What do we have here? The Comiso's savings?” He bent over and pawed quickly through it, leafing through the interior of the bundles to check their denominations. “It looks like he still has the first peso he ever stole!” He quickly sifted the bundles. “It must be close to four hundred thousand dollars. What a pretty pension.” He gave a sigh and clicked his tongue, still kneeling by the money. “What a shame, Doctora, that you have to see this. It gives a very poor picture of the Institución. But there it is, all that black silver. Soon the police will get here, and surely the money will go into the first pocket on the scene, or else disappear into police funds.” He looked up at her, no longer smiling. “If I wasn't so honest I would say half for you, half for me, and we leave here immediately and let the Federales take care of this mess.”

“Sorry. That's not my way.”

“No, you're too
idealista
for something so realistic. So it must be . . .” He lifted his gun towards her, the irony stripped from his voice. “All of it for me, and none for you.”

She refused to take him seriously. “You're an idiot, Fabian. They'd catch you in an hour.”

“Oh?” He reached down quickly and took the Comisario's gun from inside his jacket. “In my version of the story, the Comisario did it.” He glanced at the window, seemed to be nerving himself up as he tried out his story. “You come upon the Comiso collecting his money to make an escape. You threaten him, and he shoots you with this gun to protect his escape.” He quickly checked the chamber to see if it was loaded. Now his voice sounded uncharacteristically tense, and he threw his hand spasmodically to the side. “It's not so bad, that story.”

A squeal of tires nearby interrupted the moment. Fabian glanced at the money and at the window. “The reinforcements!” It seemed to confuse him for a moment. “I frightened you, no?” He hurriedly put Fortunato's gun back in its holster. Outside, doors slammed and a voice shouted, “Police! Drop it,
hijo de puta
!”

Fabian lowered his own gun down to his side, shrugged, and looked out the window. “Ah, our colleagues, the Federales. It was a joke, eh? I wanted to give you a taste of the real police life. Just for fun.” He gave her an alligator smile and returned to the window. “I'm Police! Inspector Fabian Diaz,” he yelled, his gun pointing loosely at the ground. “Don't shoot!”

There was a silence, then she heard a thunder and the whine of bullets bouncing through the room. Bits of chipped plaster sprinkled in her hair as she threw herself to the floor, and she saw Fabian flung backwards into a pirouette, hitting his face on the bedpost as he collapsed. He tried to reincorporate himself for a moment, pushing his torso up, then a burst of fire from right outside the window cut the last strings. Everything was quiet for a moment.

Athena wasn't sure what to do. They had executed Fabian as efficiently as any firing squad, and she didn't know if she might be the next. “It's me!” she shouted. “Doctora Fowler of the United States! Don't shoot!” She heard footsteps running up to the door, then suddenly three men in plainclothes stood around her in a semicircle, all of them pointing at her with shotguns or
pistols. She could see the officers look at each other, as if wondering whether to pull the trigger once more, then their commander came into the room, a man of about forty-five dressed in a leather jacket.

“What are you doing here?” the Federal Comisario shouted at her.

“Señor Fortunato called and asked me to come.”

The Federal stared down at her aggressively, a man accustomed to having his questions answered. “What about him?” he asked sharply, indicating Fabian's body. “Did he say anything?”

“Him?” Athena came slowly to her feet and leveled her cool green eyes on those of her interrogator. “He was talking about the Boca-River game.”

It seemed to confuse the Federal: he looked for guidance to a man that lurked in the doorway. The man had thinning hair combed over a bald spot and a navy blazer. He examined her coldly, like a carpet cleaner examining a troublesome stain. There was a long, nerve-wracking pause.

Suddenly a voice came from the next room. “I'm Nicolosi, of the
Bonaerense
,” it announced, and an officer wearing the uniform of the Buenos Aires Provincial Police walked in. “Inspector Nicolosi!” he said stiffly, pulling out his identification. “Of the precinct of San Justo!” His mouth dropped open as he got sight of Fortunato's ruined body, then formed into an “o” as he noticed Fabian. He shook his head to clear it, then looked at Athena with astonishment.

“Doctora Fowler,” he asked her gently. “Do you need assistance?”

The Federal Comisario turned to Nicolosi and motioned towards Fabian. “He's a bad cop, and we had reason to believe the girl was in danger. He raised his weapon at us.” To Athena, “You saw him raise his weapon, didn't you?”

“It was difficult to see from my angle, Comisario.”

“Hernandez!” he barked at another policeman. “She didn't see anything! Get her
declaración
right now!”

CHAPTER
THIRTY-TWO

T
he initial explanation by the Federales was the classic: a settling of accounts between a band of corrupt police had left four police and three civilians dead in what would soon become known as the Night of the 17 Stone Angels. A few days later, at a press conference with Doctora Athena Fowler, a very different story was told, one that began a new frenzy of journalistic activity around the Grupo AmiBank, Carlo Pelegrini and the previously unknown name of William Renssaelaer. Questions were raised as to why Fabian Diaz had been shot when his weapon was pointed harmlessly at the ground, and why William Renssaelaer, a foreign citizen, had accompanied a Federal task force to that final execution. Judge Faviola Hocht widened her investigation to the Grupo AmiBank and RapidMail. In the most bizarre and comic iteration of the entire scandal, a top executive of the Grupo AmiBank appeared on the front page of
Pagina/12
under the headline
Pablo Moya: Red Hot and Wet!

Much was made of the
fantasma Francesa
referred to by Doctora Fowler, but without her testimony no intellectual author could be definitively linked to the murder of Robert Waterbury, and it appeared that the material authors had already submitted to an alternative and more exacting justice system. Athena Fowler stayed four more weeks in Buenos Aires, a guest in the home of Carmen Amado de los Santos. By the time she departed all plans to
privatize the Argentine Post Office had collapsed under the eye of public scrutiny. Beyond that, without the presence of the mysterious Paulé or other hard evidence, neither Carlo Pelegrini nor William Renssaelaer could be officially accused of anything.