Athena only had to leave one message with Teresa Castex before she received a return call on her new cellular line. It was a voice of luxurious petulance, lathering her ear with honey. “I’m enchanted to receive your call! I’m so glad you found me! The truth is that I’ve wanted to talk about Robert for some time, but here it’s so difficult to find someone who understands these matters. Is this your first time in Buenos Aires? Fantastico!”
She suggested they meet at the Café Tortoni, a beautiful old confitería in the center where the literary elite had once convened. The Tortoni had changed little since the 1890s: its gilded walls were giddily dressed with mirrors and red velvet, while crisp waiters in white jackets moved efficiently between the marble tables. Period photos and yellowed newspaper clippings told of readings by Borges and Victoria Ocampo seventy years earlier, while other doors led to private salons and a spacious expanse of billiard tables. German and Japanese tourists read guidebooks over cups of coffee.
Fabian had described Teresa Castex de Pelegrini with superficial accuracy, but she still turned out to be an entirely different Teresa Castex than the one Athena had imagined. Far from being Fabian’s brittle woman wrenched by an unrequited love, Teresa Castex’s beauty had weathered rather attractively, and it crossed her mind that perhaps the unrequited part of the relationship was Fabian’s invention. Slim, around fifty, with artful dark-blond hair and the proud carriage of a model, she was no Inca mummy. She spoke in English to a woman she knew as Suzanne Winterthur, of Avondale Publishers.
“I was desolated by Robert’s death, Susana, desolated! We were collaborating on a fantastic new work, as you know, and just as we approached the heart of the story that terrible event happened. Fortunately, we had already talked about the ending, so I can be of great help to your project. You may not know it, but I have been a writer since before this sad affair with Robert.”
She fished two small books out of her soft leather bag and put them on the table. Each was leather-bound and embossed with gold leaf, obviously self-published. Athena opened one of the volumes to the middle and felt herself blushing after reading the first few lines. The poem appeared to be the thoughts of a woman in the midst of a frantic orgy. Another involved a woman waiting in a limousine for her lover. Me masturbo con tu imagen . . . Athena nodded appreciatively and opened the other book. This one was more tame: a book of poems with titles like “The Boy on the St Germain des Prés,” or “The Florentine Handbag.” They seemed to be existential ruminations on various shopping expeditions Teresa had made.
She swallowed to clear her throat. “Your style is really . . . unusual. Are the North American rights still available for these?” Athena asked.
“Oh!” She waved her hand, unable to contain her pleasure. “Later we can discuss such things. I give you these as a gift. But let’s talk more of this Waterbury project. What do you need from me?”
“Two things: some biographical information and some idea of how the novel was to finish.” Here Athena let a look of embarrassment come to her. “I’m ashamed to say it, Teresa, but publishing is still a business and we have to listen to the marketing department. They want to use the background of the author’s death to sell the novella.”
This seemed distasteful even to the wife of Carlo Pelegrini. “They want to use his assassination to sell the book?”
She shook her head somberly. “It’s a corrupt business, Teresa. But at least this will get your efforts out to a wider audience. The marketing department sees this as some sort of “artist on the way down” story. You know, with the drugs and all that. There’s always something very compelling about an artist who destroys himself just as he’s creating his greatest work. Look what it did for Van Gogh! They’ve even had an offer for the movie rights. Of course his wife was furious, because she said he never used drugs . . .’She shrugged. “That’s why I was hoping you might know something about his last days here.”
Now Teresa Castex became wary, took out a cigarette to hide behind. “Of that death . . .’She let it trail off, shaking her head. “It’s a bit confused.” Something passed across her face. “He wasn’t killed for drugs.” She halted on that fat invitation and glanced around the room, then leaned forward. “The police killed him.”
The claim made Athena flutter inside. That hypothesis had surfaced early on and if she’d never completely believed it, she’d never completely dispelled it either.
“The police?”
“I tell you this in confidence, because few know it. But that is the truth, it was the police.”
For the first time since they’d met, Athena felt Teresa Castex was being genuine. “But why would the police kill him?”
She needed little urging. “This will not make a very pretty addition to his legend, but if you would like to know, I will tell you. You see, Robert became involved with a woman here. A French prostitute of the lowest order. She claimed she was a tango dancer, and acted like a woman of twenty-five, but I am sure she was closer to forty. She must have come from the slums of Paris to make her fortune here in Argentina, where she would be exotic. I saw through that, of course, but Robert, he always had a more romantic view of the world. He wanted to see her like a character that appears often in tango, of the Frenchwoman adrift in Buenos Aires. So he fell in with this romanticized view of her, and became involved in her affairs.”
“What about his wife?”
A flash of knowing bitterness. “You are young, Susana, but when you reach my altitude of life, you will understand that a man who was struggling, like Robert, is susceptible to that sort of thing.”
“But how did that get him in trouble with the police?”
“You see, the police control the prostitutes here, either through the pimps, or directly. This Frenchwoman belonged to the police. She saw Robert simply as a way to get money, but as happens sometimes, I’m told, Robert began to want to save her from her chosen occupation.” She pulled her mouth to the side. “He was half-retarded in that aspect. He threatened to expose the policeman, and the policeman decided to get rid of him. After, of course, they mounted a little sham of an investigation, but in Buenos Aires . . .’She puffed some air and looked at the ceiling.
“Do you know what policeman this was?”
Her eyes widened. “Chica, if I knew, he would already be in jail! I know this much only because Robert confessed it to me in the course of our creative sessions. I felt sorry to see him go down that path.”
“But if Waterbury needed money himself, how much could this prostitute get out of him?”
“Maybe it was not so much . . .” The Señora’s face filled with disdain. “But for that pretentious little whore, enough.”
“And do you know where I might find this woman?”
The question seemed to strike Teresa Castex the wrong way, and she retreated into a suspicious silence for a moment. “Why do you ask that?”
With a nervous little jump of her hands that felt like a huge gesture: “Oh . . . For more background. The ambiance of the book.” Teresa became pleasant again in a less casual way. “I understand. But let’s talk about the book. Do you have the manuscript with you?”
She felt a slight vertigo. “I don’t. You see, our trade division decided to go ahead with the book last week, and since I was already in Chile on other business they had to send it by courier. Unfortunately, it seems to have gotten lost somewhere between here and New York.”
The older woman gave a smile that seemed uncomfortably wide. “But my husband owns the delivery service! Just give me the receipt and we’ll have it by tomorrow morning!”
“Great!” Athena said. “I’ll give it to you before we leave.” She hurried ahead. “I haven’t seen the manuscript, but evidently he had finished about one hundred and fifty pages.”
“Tell me where he left off. I didn’t see him for almost a week before he was killed, and from what you say he made great progress.”
Athena hesitated for a moment. According to Fabian, the book had traced the relationship between a billionaire and his wife as he climbed the ladder of corruption to the top. But Fabian had said a lot of things. Teresa Castex was watching her with an ominously encouraging grin.
“Well. . .As you know, the book was tracing the career of a businessman and his wife. He was a bit, I would say, opportunistic.” She went as far as Fabian’s version allowed, watching Teresa Castex’s face for some indication of her success but encountering only the same pleasant attentiveness. “And at the part we left off, there was some issue of bribes paid to the government . . . It was meanelusive.”
Teresa Castex didn’t lose her faint smile. “Who are you?”
“I don’t understand your question.”
Teresa Castex shook her head. “That’s not what our book was about at all! Our book was about corrupt police who try to blackmail a businessman. They want to make him a bed for the murder of a journalist and a writer, and they even hire a whore to come in and try to trick his wife. But the ending is thus: the woman is an amateur! She can’t even tell the right story, and the wife knows she is a liar and a whore! That’s what our book was about! It’s realistic, no?”
Athena felt her mouth drawing outwards to a stupid grin, reacting without will to Teresa Castex’s false cordiality.
“So comic! Who do you work for? Ovejo? AmiBank? Or do you work directly for RapidMail? They are so jealous that an Argentine might own the business they think should belong to them!” She stood up to leave, and Athena noticed a large man in a dark suit and sunglasses coming towards them.
“You disgust me!” Castex went on. “You’ll do anything to get at my husband! No lie is too low! Why do you come to me when you’re the ones who killed him!” She snatched the books off the table, then picked up the waterglass and dumped it into Athena’s lap. There was a shock of icy cold, and then Athena felt the moisture running down her legs.
“And for your information, I am a writer on my own merits! I do not need Robert Waterbury to authenticate me!” Now she picked up the other glass of water, but before she could empty it Athena sprang to her feet and grabbed her hand.
“Excuse me,” she said in a low, venomous English. “You must have mistaken me for your fucking doormat!”
“Your mother’s cunt!” the other woman murmured in Spanish.
Athena twisted the glass from her hand and flung the water into Teresa’s face with such force that it splattered the two files of tables behind her. She saw the water dripping from the Señora’s make-up, heard the complaints of the patrons behind her, then felt herself knocked off her feet by a wall of dark cloth. She tripped over her chair and clattered into a brass flower pot that banged to the floor like a clash of cymbals ringing in the final note of a symphony. Teresa Castex was standing above her beside her bodyguard, shaking her finger. “You people killed him! You killed Robert to make a bed, puta, and you can write that in your report!” She stared after them as they stepped out into the sunlight.
When they were gone a waiter came over and brushed the soil off her career-girl outfit. From behind her she heard someone make a hissing cat sound, and the low laughter of men. She was soaking wet and speckled with potting soil. Her lie had been uncovered, and in almost every way her little operativo had been a failure. But as she left the gilded walls of the Tortoni her mind had suddenly opened to a possibility that felt lurid and monstrous, yet oddly plausible in a cold, corporate way: Waterbury’s killer had been working for AmiBank.