Athena had never been a liar, she’d always clung to the Truth as some sort of holy text which automatically sanctified one’s cause. The Truth had failed her miserably here. It upheld no righteous banner, attracted no allies other than Berenski and Carmen Amado de los Santos, who were unable to help her now. All she had left were lies, and the facts of the murder as revealed in the faulty expediente. Her mentor was Comisario Fortunato.
She picked up the small packet of business cards and looked at them. It amazed her how the tiny print and pasteboard of a business card could wipe out in one stroke her entire identity. How easily one erased and remade oneself. Now she was Helen Kuhn, a Vice President of Development at American Telepictures. She handed out the card as she made the rounds of the tango schools. She was looking for a dancer named Paulé who had been suggested for a role in a movie they were shooting. Who had recommended Paulé? Why, the maestra of the classes at the Confiteria Ideal, or of the Dance Club El Arrabal, or the Escuela de Tango Carlos Gardel. She acquired a list of names and facts as she went, dropping them casually into her inquiries. Edmundo, the booking agent at Carlito’s, had spoken highly of Paulé, and Norma, of the Teatro Colon, had attested to her thick French accent.
To her surprise, the lying came easily and not unpleasantly. The faces she spoke to always brightened credulously at her introduction, eager to slip into the world she created for them. For someone like her, passing through Buenos Aires without history or future, it didn’t really matter who she pretended to be. She became a memory as soon as they turned their backs, a story they might tell their husbands that night and remember as the vague blonde woman with the disappearing face. She became like the lurid characters of Fabian’s movie script, or the violent personages delineated by Enrique Boguso in his first, false confession: a vapor in a world made of vapor.
Nevertheless, after three days something real began to emerge from all the half-truths. Paulé had moved some months ago, a dance teacher said, and had given instructions to keep her new address strictly private. Something of a too-insistent ex-boyfriend, although she wondered if it might be problems with immigration. But for the chance at a film role! Why not come here to the ballroom at ten o’clock the following night, when she would surely come to teach the beginners!
Athena called the Comisario as soon as she reached her hotel. “I found her!”
“Where?”
His eagerness made her cagey. “At a ballroom in Palermo. She’ll be there at ten tomorrow night. Why don’t you come and get me at nine at my hotel and we’ll go over there together.”
“Which ballroom is it?”
“Just come and get me!”
She heard a brief, hurt silence. “Bien,” he said. “At nine.”
For Fortunato, the string was getting tighter. Thirty thousand American dollars had persuaded Cacho to pick up Vasquez and bring him to his house for questioning, but the following day he had almost backed out. “It’s too hot, hombre. It’s a nest of vipers.”
The reason had been written in the afternoon newspaper: Chief Bianco’s name appeared for the first time alongside that of Carlo Pelegrini. It wasn’t a large mention, merely that Pelegrini’s security man, Abel Santamarina, had called Bianco’s cell phone twice in the days prior to Berenski’s murder. A lawyer might have called a detail like that circumstantial but Fortunato knew that the circumstances could only be damning and it dropped a stone at the bottom of his stomach. The journalists and investigators were working their way down the chain, from Pelegrini to Santamarina to Bianco, and within a day or two they would connect Santamarina to Boguso’s fabricated story about Waterbury, and then, chico, the race would be on. And this would be a race with a lot of losers.
“It’s not for so much, Cacho! A few questions and I turn him loose to find his own destiny.”
“That’s the point, Miguel. I don’t want his destiny to become my destiny.”
Fortunato snorted. “You’re immortal, Cacho. You had a whole army trying to assassinate you and they failed. But I’ll g1ve you another two green sticks.”
“Five?”
“Five.”
The phone went quiet as Cacho considered the suspiciously high price of fifty thousand dollars for a simple conversation with a petty puntero. His voice became cold as he dictated his terms: “You play me, and I’ll kill you.”
Fortunato thought about the threat as he drove to meet the Chief for a little talk. All the old relationships were shifting, relationships whose mutual agreements about how the world was had formed the foundation of his career. The Chief had summoned him to his residence, and though Leon hadn’t said so, Fortunato assumed it was because he didn’t want to be seen meeting in public.
The five-bedroom house lay enclosed by a high concrete wall with sharp wrought iron points crisscrossed at the top. Embedded metal plaques from the Chief’s private security company implied dire consequences for whatever gil was stupid enough to try and break in. Bianco liked to explain that he’d gotten the money to buy the big house, and another at the beach, through various business opportunities that he’d been fortunate enough to grasp over the years. His company provided security for homes and businesses and rock concerts, and he couldn’t help it if friends had included him in lucrative real-estate ventures. Fortunato had watched his economic status rise over the years, neither resenting nor wanting to imitate it, but when Marcela saw the house go up ten years ago she had begun subtly putting distance between themselves and the Biancos. Pleasant enough when they met on Fridays at the 17 Stone Angels to listen to tango, she’d found ways to refuse invitations to the house itself, so that Fortunato hadn’t been there in five years.
This afternoon the Chief himself let him in at the heavy iron gate, from which Fortunato inferred that no one else was home. Bianco led him into the dark, cool house, filled with carved gilded furniture and various paintings of Spanish street scenes. When he brought him a cola on ice he served it with a little too much solicitation. Fortunato had never seen Bianco look this nervous before; the smile came a little too rapidly to his face and seemed to go slightly rotten before he could finish uttering the pleasantries. Fortunato noticed a copy of the morning newspaper on the coffee table.
“Miguel,” he began at last, “the situation is getting complicated.”
Fortunato didn’t bother answering.
“Re-complicated, amor. I’ve heard that La Gallega is extending her investigation to include the Caso Waterbury. They’re federalizing everything. They want you off the case and they want all the files.”
Fortunato refused to react, and Bianco hurried to minimize the bad news. “It’s all spectacle! If they suspected you, they would have sequestered everything with an order of the judge. They just want to show the Press how hard they are trying.”
They both knew the last part was a lie. The footsteps were getting closer and their reverberations were shuddering through the Chief’s twitchy eyes. He managed to recover some of his old command presence as he laid out the course of action. “They’re going to requisition the files in the next day or two. I want you to revise absolutely everything: the expediente, your personal archives.” He thumped his fingertips on the table. “Every declaración and every diligencia must be in perfect order. Likewise, revise your own files so that there is no record of any activities which could embarrass the Institution. For the doubts, take them to your home until all this cools down again.”
The Comisario knew what he meant. Ten years of arreglos had to be purged before Faviola Hocht’s investigators started holding them up to the light. He rocked his head forward slowly. “Those of the Caso Waterbury I can clean out in an hour, but the rest would take weeks. If they want to re-open and explore every case—”
“It’s not for so much! It’s a precaution.” Bianco shrugged disdainfully. “Two weeks and they’ll be busy with the next scandal. But promise me you’ll take care of that cursed yankee as soon as you leave here.”
“Fine.” Fortunato thought of lighting a cigarette but he didn’t see an ashtray at hand and didn’t want to ask for one. He swallowed to steady his voice. “I saw that Onda was cut.”
Bianco put his hand up to show that he knew where Fortunato was going with it. He spoke in a quiet, serious voice. “You enter on the other theme, Miguel. I’ll tell you directly: Vasquez also needs to be put down. People like him and Onda aren’t reliable. They make deals when they get squeezed.” He put some gravel in his voice. “They’re not hombres!”
“And?”
“Domingo needs someone to help him. Since you’re the one responsible you’re going to have to do it.”
It took Fortunato a moment to absorb it. He looked at Bianco carefully, wondering what he knew. “I’m starting to think I wasn’t responsible,” he said calmly.
The denial annoyed the Chief, but he seemed inclined to humor his inferior. “Of course not! The idiot was responsible for his own stupidities. But it was you who let it get out of control.”
“What I’m saying is that maybe it was supposed to get out of control. Maybe Vasquez killed the gringo for reasons of his own. It was rare how Vasquez started shooting. There was no real reason for it.”
“He’s a violent criminal with a head stuffed full of merca and you have to look for a reason?” Anger was hardening the Chief’s voice. “Don’t go inventing something to find a way out of this, Miguel! You have to take care of Vasquez. You and Domingo. Get over your weakness and finish what you started.”
Bianco was glaring at him with disgust. Fortunato thought of revealing the bits he’d learned about Pablo Moya and the mysterious Renssaelaer, but suddenly he didn’t really care to. He’d found it on his own, in his private investigation, and that information didn’t belong to the Chief or anyone else at the Institution. Let the Chief go on sweating for a while. Moreover, he wasn’t so sure Leon was telling him everything either.
As to Vasquez; if someone had to die, Vasquez made an excellent candidate. A drug addict, bully, thief and puntero, the “somethings” he was guilty of were anything but vague. Of course, he’d make them find someone else to do the job, but better to play along with the Chief for the moment. Refusing might have other consequences. “When do you want to do it?”
“Tonight. Domingo is setting it up.” He handed him a small phone. “Here’s a clean cellular. Domingo will call you later to arrange the program.”
Fortunato took the cellular and slipped it into his pocket. He thought about his own interview with Vasquez that he’d scheduled for that night, and reflected that his fifty thousand dollars might be buying Vasquez another day of life. The silence started ticking away and Bianco stiffly offered him another cola as a way of reminding him it was time to leave. “It will all come out well,” he encouraged as he led him to the iron bars. “You’ll see.”
Fortunato drove back to the comisaria. The weight of La Gallega’s investigation was beginning to flatten him. Beyond the fear, it was the humiliation of the whole situation that stung him most intensely. The entire comisaria had become aware of the tension surrounding the Waterbury case, and as the news of his removal trickled out the respect he had earned with his decades of cautious management would begin to erode. Federal officers would come in to take possession of the files, someone in Hocht’s office would trumpet it to the journalists and his name would appear in an article the next morning, in small print or large, depending on that particular day’s toll of catastrophe: Federal Police Remove Comisario From Case. Everyone would see it: his subordinates, his colleagues, his neighbors, Athena.
Even Marcela, somewhere, would see it.