In the early evening buzz of Avenida Corrientes, amid the neon and the car horns that rebounded off the plaster finery of the last century, Athena counted down the numbers that separated her from Ricardo Berenski. Calle Brazil, Calle Paraguay. The handsome Argentines streamed past her, their faces turbulent or flirtatious or questioning. Emotions seemed closer to the surface here. People didn’t look away as they did in New York or Washington, but locked eyes briefly, like a challenge or an enticement. It felt like a place where a person might fall in love any minute, but where everyone seemed to be nursing a broken heart.
She couldn’t escape a furtive paranoia as she headed to her meeting with the journalist. Miguel would look poorly on this little side investigation, especially since she was pursuing it in secret. But he had said to swim, she thought, so she was swimming. It wasn’t her fault if she’d strayed out of the shallow end.
The wide, spacious Café Losadas comprised not only a bar and café but also a bookstore, a theater, and a publishing house that printed titles on culture and politics. Behind its agricultural-sized spread of window glass men polluted notebooks with copious words, their eyes trained simultaneously on the elusive phantasm of their literary careers and the women going in and out the front door.
But Ricardo Berenski was no pretender. In the cult of investigative journalism that flourished in Buenos Aires, Berenski was one of the principal idols. Athena expected someone cinematic: tall and dark, with intellectual spectacles and a tweed sports jacket.
The real Ricardo made an almost comical impostor. Short, and saved from baldness by two islands of clipped reddish hair, he resembled the last self-portraits of Van Gogh, but smiling. His pallid skin and slightly bulging eyes made him look sharp-witted and excitable, an effect magnified by a quick gravelly voice that seemed always to be leading to a punchline. He hunched forward when he walked, craned his neck and squinted when he listened. His gnome-like presence defied weightiness, but in fact, Ricardo had splashed a lot of ugliness across the glossy faces of the major media.
When a former torturer of the Dictatorship published a book denying the allegations of his past, Ricardo arranged for him to appear on a national television show to promote it. What the torturer didn’t find out until halfway through his earnest denial was that the other guest was one of his former victims, who lifted up his shirt and showed the audience the scars. Another time, Ricardo had arranged for an actor with a hidden camera to pose as a drug dealer and close a distribution agreement with the highest ranking comisario in Greater Buenos Aires. His book on police corruption had forced the chief of the Bonaerense into retirement and made a stink that had yet to dissipate. Informed people thought that the only thing keeping him alive was his fame.
“Do you ever get death threats and that sort of thing?”
“Ahh!” He tossed his shoulders disdainfully. “If they call you on the telephone, that means they’re not really going to kill you. I tell them, ‘Andate ala concha de tu madre, hijo de puta!’” He stood up to kiss a passing friend. “How’s it going, beauty?” Sitting down again, eagerly sipping his second whiskey. “But this with the police,” he continued, shaking his head, “the complete corporatization, that comes from the Dictatorship.”
“How?”
“During the Repression, the army and the police had two motives. The first was to eliminate all thought that ran against the interests of the national elite and foreign capital. Very noble, no? The other was less exalted: simply to make money. When they took people away, they also robbed them. They had warehouses where they stored the belongings of the people they had murdered. They considered it their natural right in exchange for their heroic service to the fatherland. And the police of today, the big ones, were created during that era. Now they’re more sophisticated. They rent themselves out. They were involved in the bombings of the embassy of Israel and the Jewish Relief Society that killed hundreds of people. Also they have very fluid relations with Carlo Pelegrini and his private security businesses.” He tipped his glass to his mouth, looking past her towards the door. “But what is this about Waterbury? That’s what we came here to talk about, no? Carmen told me you think it might have been a police assassination—nine millimeter, handcuffs, the burning car. All the classics of the genre. The cocaine we can explain away as planted to mislead the investigation, because you told me on the telephone he had no history of drugs. Who’s the judge?”
“Duarte.”
He threw back his head. “Duarte! Now we’ve passed from genre to parody.”
“What do you mean?”
“We call him Sominex, you know, like the pills, because he’s so good at putting cases to sleep.”
Athena put her face in her hand. “This is too much.”
Berenski laughed, pounding her on the shoulder. “Strength, chica! Strength! Now you’re in the game! And the Selección Argentina doesn’t play by North American rules. What more have you got?”
“I have a phone number taken from his pants pocket and a friend who he knew from his days at AmiBank ten years ago.”
“AmiBank. Ah, this is interesting! And the police never investigated them?”
“No.”
“Now, yes . . .” He tilted his face upward and sniffed the air, circling his hand slowly in front of his nose. “I smell that odor of shit! Give me the number before we go. I have a friend who sometimes traces these little things for me.” His next words pricked her like an electric shock. “You know, I met Waterbury once.”
“You met him?”
“At the Bar Azul, in San Telmo. San Telmo is a barrio a bit, artistic, let’s say, with little experimental theaters that mix Nietzsche and Marcel Duchamp and the complete works of Eric Satie played backwards. That type, the demi-monde, and many go to the Bar Azul after the shows. Thursday night they bring in a tango group and play tango with half-price whiskey. That’s where I met him. He was going around with some French tango dancer. A woman absolutely disagreeable. One of those people who know nothing about anything, but they’re so certain of it that they dominate the conversation. But very pretty. And the girl could dance. Waterbury was a bit of a trunk, but she found someone who could dance the tango and then her whole demeanor changed. She was a character we used to see around in the bars: half-actress, half . . . I don’t know, she circulated in odd things. We called her La Francesa, but I think her name was . . . Paulé.”
Athena felt uncomfortable as she thought of Waterbury going around with a young French dancer while his family waited for him at home.
“I knew her because a friend of mine, an actress, or, better said . . .” He lifted his arms gaudily, “artiste, knew her and La Francesa invited us to their table. There was another woman also, a slightly older woman, but very well-maintained. I think she was of some money, because we were drinking champagne and she was the one who kept asking for more. The best, eh? Dom Perignon. Veuve Cliquot. The nacional was an insult to her. She and La Francesa got into an argument about which champagne was better, and things turned ugly. La Francesa was trying to bank on her expertise as a native Parisian, but the older woman finally tired of her and said, ‘Yours is a Paris of shopgirls and waitresses. What do you know of champagne?’” Ricardo lowered his voice and leaned forward. “Then she says, ‘If you’re so at home in Paris, what are you doing selling your cum in Buenos Aires?’” He raised his eyebrows. “At this, everything went rotten! La Francesa calls her a wrinkled old pig in that little French voice and walks out, and Waterbury’s left planted there with this rich woman, holding on to his champagne glass like a lifesaver in the middle of the ocean. He and the woman left a minute after that.”
“Did you talk to Robert Waterbury?”
“Very little. To be honest, Waterbury impacted me as a bit confused. He said he was a writer, but he hadn’t published anything in some years. He told me he’d come to Buenos Aires to research another book. And when he said this he and the rich woman looked at each other, and of course, one always speculates. The whole episode was a matter of some thirty minutes.”
“Who was the woman?”
“That I don’t know. Tamara, Teresa . . . Something with a “T.”” Athena felt a surge of excitement. “Teresa?”
“I think, yes.”
“That phone number I told you Robert Waterbury had in his pocket when he was murdered had the name Teresa written with it! The surgeon found it before the autopsy!”
“Did you call the number?”
“Not yet.,
Now Berenski was peering at her intently, but at the same time considering something else. “Don’t call it. Let me trace it first. Then we’ll go forward well-armed.”
“What about the Frenchwoman? Paulé. Could we talk to her? We could go to the Bar Azul tonight, if you’re not doing anything.”
He held up his hand. “Tranquila, amor. Don’t give the number such importance. If I walk out of here and some drug addict puts a cork in me, will your telephone number in my pocket tell them who murdered me?” His lips twisted into a sideways grin, “Bueno, if that happened they’d arm the biggest party in the history of the Buenos Aires police, but looking at it theoretically . . . ” He shrugged. “We’ll see. Of La Francesa I don’t know. She’s not on the scene these days. Maybe she went back to her land.”
Athena watched him go at his drink again, and took a slow sip of her own. She was thinking about her afternoon with Miguel and his promise to intensify his efforts. “Ricardo, do you know a Comisario Fortunato? In San Justo?” She handed him Fortunato’s card.
Berenski furrowed his brow. “In Investigaciones, eh?” Tapping his glass absently on the table. “Yes. He’s older, very soft, very smooth. I met him once. One of his men uncovered some cars with phony papers, and they followed them back to a comisario in Quilmes. More than this, I don’t know.”
“He’s my main contact with the police. To me,” she pictured his melancholic smile, “he seems very decent. Do you think I can trust him to investigate this crime?”
“Trust him?” Ricardo wagged his head to the left, and then to the right. “You can trust him up to the point where you can’t trust him. He’s police.” He considered something, then, on the verge of a proposal, changed his mind. “No,” he muttered, “I can’t put you in with him.”
“Who?”
Taking in a long breath: “I know a sort of specialist on the police in San Justo. He would know all about your Fortunato. But I’ll tell you directly, he’s a criminal, and for this he has a relation with the cana, the “cops.””
“You know him from your investigations?”
“No.” Ricardo scratched nervously at his nose. “I know him from the Ejercito Revolucionario del Pueblo, of the Seventies.” For the first time Ricardo seemed serious. “The last of our revolutionary dreams. Then I woke up and went into exile for eight years. I worked more in the informational part, producing The Red Star. But this muchacho, no. He was really a warrior type. Very valiant. Very dangerous. Very dangerous,” he repeated, awed by his remembrance. “He killed a heap of Fascistas. When the ERP kidnapped General Lopez and subjected him to a revolutionary court, it was Cacho who executed him. Don’t look so shocked, Lopez was an hijo de puta. Murderer. Torturer. Thief. He deserved to die. But to kill someone defenseless, in cold blood . . .” He tilted his head, blew out a puff of tension. “Muy pesado.” Very heavy. Now Berenski shivered, and his voice took on a troubled mix of sadness and what sounded almost like shame. “But it went bad for him, just like it went bad for everyone. They killed his younger brother, an adolescent that had nothing to do with politics. They killed his wife. They captured Cacho, they tortured him . . . And there’s a bit of a shadow among us that survived the war, because now he’s working with the same people we fought against.” He shook his head. “I don’t know. Of that war, some survived intact and some survived broken. Cacho is broken.”
“But you’ll introduce me to him?”
The journalist shook his head. “Bueno. Between Cacho and me, it’s complicated. Sometimes he gives me information. But at the same time, he gets very aggressive. Resentful. I think it’s disagreeable for both of us when we meet.” He shook his head, looking at the table. “The man is bent.”