The 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!”
“I’ll borrow it,” he’d said, but he knew that with that stratagem she had trapped him. For years he had been accumulating money through his “jobs” for the institution, and for years she had been refusing to acknowledge it. At home, he played the honest policeman.
It had been easy in the beginning. A traffic stop, some minor infraction either real or imagined. “You just tell them the law,” Sub-inspector Leon Bianco instructed him over a beer at La Gloria. “It’s up to them if they want to follow it.” And the law was always troublesome—there were the hours at the police station filling out papers, the inevitable check of antecedentes. And once antecedentes were examined, some tinge always came through. No one was ever innocent.
The problem was that Marcela did the family budget, and he didn’t know exactly how to declare it to her.
“Look, Beauty, we have some extra money this month.” “Extra? From where?”
He looked away and fought off a bashful uncertainty. “It’s a bit like this: with all the subversives around now, our jobs are much more dangerous than before, so sometimes individuals give us tips to keep extra careful watch over them.” It wasn’t totally a lie: they did collect protection money from some of the businesses and factories.
“Oh?” Suspicious. “Tell me from who? Who’s giving you extra pay?”
“Marcela,” he said delicately, “in the Institution, it’s a little different from most jobs. They expect us to confront delinquents and subversives, but they pay us a miserable salary. So . . . To a point, we have to autofinance—”
Her face hardened and she recoiled from him, stepping on his explanation. “Don’t start with that, Miguel! Don’t even start! I didn’t marry a corrupt policeman.”
He had tried to seduce her with appliances. First, a coffee-maker and, taking heart from that, a washing machine. A week later he arrived home to find an empty space where the machine had been. “I gave it to the neighbor,” she said airily.
After that he stashed the money in a safety deposit box in the Banco de la Nadon and bided his time. He began collecting from lottery sellers and pimps, devising meticulous schedules filled with names and check-marks. In three years he had ascended to the brigadas, the plain-clothes groups that conducted intelligence operations and mounted raids. He became expert in working with buchones, stool pigeons who could be reeled in on a moment’s notice to face some ancient charge hanging over their heads. He unraveled auto theft networks and raided illegal casinos, bordellos, marijuana stockpiles. When he brought in a killer of three children the newspaper put his name on the front page and the mayor of Buenos Aires gave him a citation. Those were good operations; it was clear who the bad guys were. He noted the shine of admiration in the faces of the younger officers, imagined he could hear them discussing him as they lounged about the streets. “That’s the Fortunato who found the kidnapped girl in San Martin. It’s he who caught the rapist that violated six women.” Marcela worried pleasingly for his safety. As far as she knew, he was the most incorruptible policeman in Buenos Aires.
The money kept accumulating. He’d assumed that when they had children she would see the way clear to use the money for their sake. But they had no luck with children, in spite of the tests and the prayers to the Virgin of Lujan. Their best hopes went away in a pool of blood when Marcela miscarried a little girl at the sixth month, in that long, bad year of 1976 when martial law came down and the army slapped Argentina senseless with a hard, flat hand. Then they offered him a different sort of work.
Sub-Comisario Bianco called him into his office. “Miguel, we’re going to pinch one of the subversives tonight at his house. Why don’t you come and lend a hand?”
The Communists were everywhere in those days. Not only with guns, but, equally dangerously, in the labor unions and the university. They liked to hide behind the democratic institutions, talking of exploitation and class war, but now the military had decided to tear away the Constitution and show them what war was all about.
The target that night was a member of the autoworkers syndicate at the Ford factory. The factory manager, as a patriotic service, had identified him as a persistent troublemaker in labor matters and “probably a Communist.” This was explained to Fortunato in a few sentences by Sub-Comisario Bianco, at that time with jet-black hair and a crisp military manner. The operation was to go to the house at three in the morning and grab him in his bed. “You just follow along,” Bianco explained. “Nothing’s going to happen. He’ll go quietly. He’s got three children there.”
The subversive lived in a small apartment behind his parents’ house, much like Fortunato’s. Fortunato rode over with Bianco and three other agents in a Ford Falcon. It was summer, but they were wearing suits. They stopped outside the door and lined up, two of the men on either side of the door with submachine guns, while the rest of them drew their pistols and stood back and to the side.
Bianco stepped up to the door and pounded on it three times with all his strength. “Open up!” he screamed. “Police!” There was a sound of rustling inside, and a baby started crying. Bianco pounded again. “Open it! Open it!” He stepped back, summoning his energies, and Fortunato thought he heard a timid voice say, “I’m coming!”
Too late. Bianco fired a round into the lock and then hurled himself against the panel. The door burst open right into the face of the wife, knocking her down and bringing a gout of blood from her nose. Bianco was already beside himself. “Whore! I said open it!” The other plainclothes men came flowing through after him, into the darkened bedroom with their guns drawn, shouting. They found two children cowering in the bed, along with the crying baby. The husband wasn’t there.
“Where is he?” Bianco screamed.
The woman was crying. “I don’t know. He went to watch a football game with some friends!”
Bianco grabbed her by her hair and pulled her to her feet. “Talk to me straight, whore, or you’re all going in.” She stuck to her story, cowering, despite the blows and the threats and the gathering intensity of Bianco’s fury. For the love of God he went to a football game! Finally Bianco lost his temper completely. “Bring me the boy!” A soldier brought out a little boy, perhaps six years old, and Bianco grabbed his arm, making him cry out. “Where is your father? Where?” He beat the child across the face with the flat of his hand and then gave him such a blow to the head that he went sprawling across the floor. Next he demanded the girl, a bit younger, and beat her as she cried out without comprehension. By now the woman was hysterical, but nonetheless seemed to know nothing about her husband’s whereabouts. “No?” Bianco demanded, beside himself. “No?” He grabbed the baby from the woman’s arms and held it upside down by its feet, swaying it back and forth slightly and delivering sharp slaps across its back. The baby, only a few weeks old, was screaming in its tiny hoarse voice, so far gone that it could no longer catch its breath. “Where is he?” he asked, slapping the baby again. “Where is he?”
At this the mother began to sing, naming his sister, his brother, his friends from the union, any possible place he might be, knowing only that he had gone out to watch a football game! That he was for River! That he sometimes bet five pesos! They called in reinforcements to raid the houses she had named and sat down to wait. Fortunato was ringing with shock, watching in disbelief as one of the plainclothes men began to catalog all the appliances and furniture in the little apartment. Twenty minutes later the husband came home and they arrested him without a struggle. Bianco made a phone call. In the end they took them all away, the mother and children crying softly. After that soldiers came in and started loading the furniture onto an army truck. “See,” Bianco told him, dismissing his initial worries about the operation. “Nothing happened!”
In the next days Marcela found him distracted and moody, and he finally unraveled the story as they sipped on a morning mate. “They were subversives, of course, or at least, the father was . . .” He let the sentence trail off, and she didn’t answer.
She sat silently for a half-minute, looking at the floor, then hid her face in her hands and shook. “It’s so horrible!” She sobbed for a minute without control, then took her hands away from her wet face. “Don’t get in with those people, Miguel! I’m begging you! Or someday . . .’with a shudder, “you’ll be the one beating the baby.”
He heeded her, ducking Bianco’s summons for other operativos until Bianco finally stopped inviting him. The Sub-Comisario treated him with a tinge of scorn after that, as if Fortunato lacked the necessary masculinity to own up to the task. In contrition, he’d devoted himself to the three things required for advancement in the force: he collected money, he arrested criminals and he protected his friends. The field became smooth again. Now Bianco had ascended to Comisario General, atop the Division de Investigaciones, and he had taken his friend Fortunato up the ladder with him.
Fortunato finished his mate and went to his bedroom to dress for the evening. From the large wooden wardrobe he selected his best jacket, a fine Italian wool woven in large black and white houndstooth checks. Marcela had gotten it for his birthday twenty years ago at a high priced store in the center, even though he insisted they could get the same thing cheaper in the suburbs. He still remembered the jacket’s magical radiance when he’d worn it out of the store, not realizing that two decades later the small lapels and bold pattern had gone ludicrously out of fashion. He matched it with a crimson tie and his black loafers, fished an old pair of cuff-links from a little box on the shelf. Peering into his wallet he was dismayed to find it a bit light. One should always have a bit extra for an evening out.
He pulled a screwdriver from his night table and quickly unscrewed the floor of the wardrobe, prying it carefully up from a thin groove he’d cut in the corner. Looking back at him from beneath the panel, in orderly rows of tight green bundles, sat half a million dollars in United States currency.
The money had accumulated almost by itself, secreted into the little space when Marcela was out. He had dispensed some of it to needy fellow policemen or to crime victims who especially moved him. The children near the police station knew him as an infallible source of toys and sweets. But still it kept piling up, nearly filling the compartment allotted to it so that soon he would need to start a new compartment.
What good had it done him, really? Even at the end, with Marcela, when he invented a new fiction of a special medical fund for policemen’s families, she’d refused. “It already is, Miguel. I prefer to die with dignity in my home, not chasing after impossible hopes.”
He sat on the bed, looking at the neat compartments into which he had divided his life. In the other half of the wardrobe behind the closed door, Marcela’s clothes would be hanging just as she’d left them, her shoes arranged in tidy pairs at the bottom, her hats on top. Some men carried on affairs, or even had a second family in another part of town. His infidelity had been different; he had cheated with an ideal instead of with another woman, and kept faithful to the lie that they’d shared, the lie of the honest cop and his schoolteacher wife. And then had come Waterbury, and cancer.
He opened Marcela’s half of the wardrobe and the scent of lilac powder came rushing over him. Fortunato wept at the sight of her dresses.
An hour later, he strapped on his Browning nine millimeter and left for the 17 Stone Angels.