The truth was, Hell felt curiously invigorating. He drove down the dark blighted street, with Vasquez riding along in the trunk like a piece of evidence sequestered for an investigation in which all the answers were already known. He was guilty, guilty of everything and yet innocent in some peculiar way.
He thought of Bianco in a blue suit, or his white one. Bianco at La Gloria and in his office at Central. Bianco smiling and Bianco wearing that hard expression of resolve. Bianco in 1976, beating that newborn baby to make the mother talk. Bianco, the brotherly superior who had brought him up through the ranks.
His cell phone chirped and he patted his body until he found the phone the Chief had given him.
“Comisario!” Domingo addressed him with his usual slick mockery. Bar music was blaring in the background.
Fortunato remembered that he and Domingo were scheduled to cut Vasquez that night, but the mortal remains of Christian Vasquez were currently riding along two meters behind him. Now Domingo would say that he couldn’t locate the target and that they would have to cut him another night. Everything fine. The night would never come, the matter would fade. He would figure out how to deal with Domingo later. And the Chief? Better now to play the boludo.
“Where are you?” the Inspector Fausto demanded.
“I’m at a petrol station on the Accesso Norte, just outside of Lomas de San Isidro.” He was actually in Liniers, fifteen kilometers from the Accesso Norte.
“What are you doing out there?”
“I went to a friend’s birthday party. What’s the plan?”
“I’m at the Cyclone, near Liniers. Vasquez is waiting for me outside.”
Domingo sounded so certain that Fortunato had to reassure himself that he’d just killed Vasquez twenty minutes ago. It took Fortunato a moment to come to grips with the realization that Domingo could only have one reason for claiming that Vasquez was with him.
The eternal reflex: an idiot face. “Very good. Has anyone seen you with Vasquez?”
“No.”
In that, at least, the hijo de puta spoke the truth. He imagined the puffy face, oily and pocked, the face of the schoolyard bully grown into an adult. “So, what plan do you have?”
“I’ll pay him for Onda, and after I give him the money I’ll invite him to go to a kilombo in San Justo. Do you know the one at the corner of Conde and Benito Perez?”
“Near the old appliance factory,” Fortunato offered. It had once been a whorehouse for factory workers of the zone, but as the factories were globalized they had adjusted by expanding into an hourly hotel for illicit lovers. The bureaucrat at the back of his head noted that they paid a thousand pesos on the tenth of each month.
“That’s it.”
“It’s a good choice,” Fortunato complimented him coolly. “It’s half-deserted. Tranquil.”
“Exactly. Vasquez and I have gone there before, so it’s nothing unusual. I’ll park around the corner in front of the loading door of the factory. I’ll make sure he’s had some drinks and some merca. You wait in the lot next to the factory. We pull up from the direction of Triumvirato. He gets out the car, you step out behind and finish him and we load him into the trunk. We can do it all in fifteen seconds. If there’s someone around I pass a minute looking for my cigarettes on the floor of the car, and then you cork him.”
“And the body?”
“I have a place in Tigre, in the swamps. Do you have a clean iron?”
“Yes. When do you want me there?”
“In a half-hour, around one. I’ll show up with Christian between one and one thirty. Está?”
Fortunato could get to the whorehouse in ten minutes. “That’s too soon,” he said, letting his voice weaken a little at the protest. “I might hit traffic. Give me until one-fifteen.”
“Fine. Between one-thirty and two I’ll bring him.”
The Comisario let a note of sincerity warm his voice. “Thanks for arranging this, Domingo. We’ll all rest better afterwards.”
Domingo hesitated for a few seconds. “Clearly, Comiso. But you can thank the Chief.”
Fortunato held the dead plastic to his ear after Domingo hung up. So they were going to kill him. The dull recognition that he should be frightened passed before him, but that fear gave way before a sense of insult. They wanted to kill him! Him! A Comisario Mayor with thirty-seven years of service in the Institution! When had that decision been made? He could imagine the conversation between the Chief and Domingo when they’d decided to cut him. He’s spent, the old man. He was always too soft. Too weak! That from Bianco, his “friend.” He’s incompetent, Domingo would answer. A coward. Better we get rid of him before he turns pink and starts singing. Maybe one of Pelegrini’s men had been there too, in his fine suit and his military cut, still not realizing that Waterbury’s accidental death had been planned from the beginning. We should have cut him the first time he fucked up, the idiot. Or saying nothing, just smirking. He’ll be as easy to kill as Waterbury.
They would expect him to be stupid, to walk right into the muzzle of a gun like a retard. How rapid they’d all imagined themselves in arranging Waterbury’s murder! So easy to kill an innocent. Because Waterbury, in the end, was in other things, he was in his world of destiny, of writing his books and returning home to his family. He didn’t pay attention. But he, Fortunato, was now without family or hope. And they certainly had his attention. Now they would see who was more piola. He turned the car towards the abandoned factory.
The Comisario felt a rush of feeling he’d never known before. Maybe this was how it was supposed to turn out. Maybe he was on a new path now, or the path he’d once had a foot on but left behind to climb the ranks of the Institution. He, who’d never believed in destiny or in causes, had become the avenger. A proxy. The man who had to finish Waterbury’s novel.
A contrary thought blew in. He could still escape. With the half-million in his briefcase he could drive to the border of Paraguay and have himself smuggled across, get a new passport and identity. Easy for him in Paraguay, with his policeman’s nose. From there, to Brazil, someplace near the beach, with flowers on the porch. Invent a past in insurance or real estate. El Porteño, people would call him. A half-million could last a long time in such a place, living simply, investing well.
But no. Fortunato didn’t run. Better to die in one’s own law than to flee the rest of his life. Something he had always respected in Cacho and the doomed integrants of the People’s Revolutionary Army. Most of them died rather than flee. This life was over. Only the exact time and place remained a mystery; a mystery whose solution he intended to find right away.
He reached Ramos Mejia. The dark facades of the upper-story buildings faced each other in the air, laden with flowers and shields. Frozen garlands of victory draped over shabby doorways, wrapped across grimy columns. The sound of the transit trains muttering along Rivadavia bumped in through the open window carrying a cargo of intense nostalgia, a sound of his childhood. A memory came to him of standing beside the tracks with his father, holding a pail of something. Every traffic light seemed a supernatural red or green, like the overly intense colors of the broken television screen. Heartbreakingly beautiful colors; the most beautiful he’d ever seen. He was a dead man now. Nothing more than a spirit, living in a city of spirits. From a great distance he observed the lovers clustered together at the street corners and the diners above their steel plates in the wide glowing windows of the restaurants. All of life was burning around him, filled with people believing intensely in their loves or their scanty hoards of knowledge. He’d always kept away from passion, from believing in anything too deeply. That was the realm of teachers and soldiers, of the crusading human rights workers and the great lovers. A world of delusion, filled with false ideas like Waterbury’s destiny or Athena’s mission. Life was always payable in cash, he told Marcela. Not in silly dreams. In the end, his own life had come payable just like all others.
He bore down on the situation at hand, cool again, thinking like a cop. He would reach the abandoned factory in five minutes. He had to be rapid now, more rapid than he’d ever been in his life. Domingo intended to get there first to ambush him when he arrived. His one chance: to get there before Domingo and kill him as he stepped out of the car. If anyone were with him he would kill the passenger first, through the side window, then take out Domingo before he knew which direction the attack was coming from.
A dead man now, he had to think like a dead man, without fear or excitement. In five minutes he had reached the area of the kilombo. He stopped his car two blocks away and walked up to the corner to have a look. The streetlight down there didn’t function and the darkness looked musty. The uncertain shadows bore no sign of Domingo’s car, but Domingo wouldn’t be so stupid as to park right in front. Racking his memory of a place he’d driven past a hundred times over the years as a young ayudante and sub-inspector, back when the factory had clanged in double shifts and the trucks had roared off from the loading dock filled with products stamped Industria Argentina. What remained? An opening now covered over with corrugated metal, an empty lot that had once held sheet steel and enamel paint. In his mind it merged with the space they’d left Waterbury in: another flat weedy rectangle.
Fortunato took out his Browning and snapped off the safety, chambering the first round with a dry mechanical click. It occurred to him he should have gotten a clean gun, but there hadn’t been time for that. A good policeman had to improvise.
He began walking carefully towards the factory, keeping close to the wall on the other side of the street. The leaves had fallen from the plane trees and he could hear the wide dry platters scraping beneath his feet, as loud as cannonfire. The air had the curry smell of autumn, of dust and motor oil, of metal. He expected that they might have a lookout at the next corner, and the emptiness of the street encouraged him. He kept walking, slowly, passing the side of an abandoned warehouse, an overgrown spur of track that had once served the local factories. A breeze rustled through the branches overhead and the dim charcoal light that penetrated them slithered over his shoulders in little pieces. No sign of anyone. He surveyed the shadowy limits of the factory and the lot and saw a dark space at the back. He remembered now that a narrow passage cut from the back of the lot over to the next street: his escape route. Fine; that was covered. But how to ambush them? If he succeeded in that, he wouldn’t be needing an escape route.
Domingo had told him to wait in the empty lot, then to step out and cork Vasquez after he parked the car. They would assume that Fortunato would park his car on the least trafficked street, where he had. They would assume he was approaching from the south, in which case they would want to have someone against the south wall of the empty lot. They would station a lookout a block away with a radio, he would give the signal, and when Fortunato came up he would step out: tock! tock! Adios, Comiso.
So they would want to kill him in the lot. Here the first good fortune: an old guard shack made of corrugated tin was collapsing in the front corner near the street, where Fortunato was supposed to wait. It looked dark and diseased; no good even for the destitute madmen who had begun to pile up around the city. The silhouette of the roof slanted at a ruinous angle to the walls, one of which was tumbling slowly inward. The door formed an opaque black rectangle, as if printed on a piece of paper. He could wait there until Domingo approached, as perhaps Domingo had been planning to wait for him. The window that had once looked out on the street had been partly covered by a piece of wood, and the vertical gap at its edge gave him a narrow field of vision and room to stick the barrel of his nine millimeter. After that, there was no predicting.
He heard rats scratching around the back edges of the lot, and as he approached the tin structure he heard their metallic skitterings inside. The shack had the odor of human feces and a form of decay he didn’t want to identify. He tried to let his eyes adjust but he could make out only a few slanting timbers in the darkness. Rusty corrugations flexed beneath his feet with a low booming sound as he picked his way through. He moved over to the crack and waited.
Always the devil, this waiting. This might be his last fifteen minutes, and he was spending it sitting in a tin coffin with the smell of shit in his nose and the scurrying of rats in his ears. Maybe it was a fitting end. Outside the shack the little sliver of night world looked dreamy and calm. His eyes had adjusted to the dark and he could see the black tree trunks against the translucent penumbra on the other side of the street. Something beautiful about even such a simple sight, of the dim sparkle of the pavement, the arching forms of the weeds in the dirty pink city light. A tiny fragment of the Buenos Aires that he now felt receding from him even as it had never seemed closer. He remembered this area from when he’d been a child, all grassy fields and ditches filled with singing frogs. Gone now. He’d never been a dishonest child or adolescent. Not even one of those cops who go around flashing their badges and asking for handouts. Who could foresee all the forces that pushed a life this way and that? His mother had always said that a simple sense of decency is the only guide a person needs in life, but when those around you had a different sense, one learned to see the world their way.
A figure came walking up to the lot, and he recognized Domingo’s portly silhouette. He held something in his hand, but Fortunato couldn’t make out what it was. The Inspector looked around, then called softly, “Comisario! Comisario!”
Domingo waited and Fortunato held absolutely still. The soft, respectful timbre of the call brought on a strange nostalgia, and he had an unexpected urge to answer back. Maybe then everything would return to how it had been before: Domingo and Fabian the dutiful inferiors, everyone loyal to the Institution and the game. He drifted for a moment in that quiet fantasy, then Domingo dispelled it by taking a walkie-talkie out of his pocket and murmuring into it. In a minute a second man came walking up from the same direction. In the pale pink light reflected from the clouds Fortunato recognized Santamarina. They hissed through the weeds into the shadow of the factory wall less than three meters away from him. Fortunato reasoned that he could always stand there and do nothing until they gave up and went away.
“It was very considerate of him to advise us he might be late,” Santamarina said.
“The Comiso is always very punctual. A man of great confidence.”
They laughed, and the rats, emboldened by the renewed stillness in the shed, began to scurry among the metal. Both men looked towards Fortunato.
“It’s rats,” Domingo said. Santamarina examined the shed a while longer, then turned away. Domingo continued, “What if he has his gun in his hand when he shows up?”
“You’ll just have to be a good actor. “Oh, Comisario! Forgive me!” Look regretful: that Vasquez wandered off, that the operativo is canceled. Things like that, until you can get close to him.”
“I can tell him we had to put it off because I didn’t finish the necessary paperwork!” Domingo joked. “That’s his style.”
Fortunato’s stomach hardened. Laugh, gil. Laugh. Any thought of waiting quietly for them to leave disappeared. One had to confront it. Slowly, he raised his gun to the opening. He would shoot Domingo first, a quick one into the back, then get Santamarina before he had time to realize what had happened. With luck he could get out the back opening to the lot before the lookouts knew who had gone down. After that, perhaps Paraguay.
Slowly, careful not to shift his weight on the corrugated tin, he brought the gun towards the gap. Both were facing away from him. A pity. He would have enjoyed shooting Domingo in the front. Better thus. Even now, one could still blunder and get killed. A little more, threading his arm around the encumbrances of a fallen shelf and a nail. Another two seconds and Domingo would be in his sights.
The incongruous beeping sang out from his hip with the force of an air raid siren. For a couple of pulses he simply listened to it in disbelief. His cell phone!
The two men snapped around. “In the shed!” In an instant they were moving in opposite directions, and before Fortunato could take aim they had both gotten out of the line of sight of the crack, Santamarina circling behind him and Domingo moving across in front, hidden by the wall of tin.
Fortunato lurched towards the door, desperate to get a shot off at Domingo before the Inspector could prepare himself. He still had the advantage. They couldn’t see into the dark shed, and he might be some other cop, or another operative. They would have to try to see who it was before they opened fire. He scrambled over the tin, thrusting his left hand into the darkness to ward off any obstructions, but then something caught at his foot and as he tried to lurch onto his other leg a piece of tin seemed to clamp down on it at the ankle.
Slowly he fell, sickeningly, with all the time in the world to realize what a failure he was, shot to death in a tin shack that smelled like human shit. He landed unevenly on his stomach, bruising his forearm, his head and shoulders sticking out the doorway into the impossibly clear and open night air. A pair of trousers flickered at the edge of his vision and then a soft white light seemed to go off in his head along with an impact at the base of his skull.
Fortunato remembered a time he’d played in the ocean as a child. A wave had knocked him down and tumbled him over and over through the surf. Strange to have it happening again now. He felt himself being lifted and turned, unevenly carried through a frothing white noise. A dull cold ache pulled at his wrists. Vague phrases at the edge of the long tranquil gulf.
“He must weigh a hundred kilos, the pig! He’s worse than the journalist!”
A high resonance in his head, like the humming of an electric current. The wave receded and left him lying on his back on a hard even surface. He kept his eyes closed, listening to the world with a sleepy contentment.
A voice he didn’t recognize: “Here’s the rope.”
The lethargy receded slowly. Domingo, Santamarina. The shed. A rope.
“How is he?”
His eyelids turned into an orange curtain as a flashlight beam played across his face. “He’s still out,” Domingo said from just above his head. “If we hurry there’s no great drama.”
“Maybe we should strangle him first,” the unknown third one suggested.
Santamarina answered. “No. Let’s do it clean. I don’t want problems at the forensic examination.”
“Comisario Bianco can take care of that,” Domingo offered, but no one answered.
It was becoming clear. They would hang him. For that reason he’d been told to clean out his files: they would make it look like the last desperate act of a guilty cop. Leon would be the one explaining things. His friend, Leon! Poor Fortunato. He was never the same after his wife died! And the pressure of having his role in the Waterbury murder exposed . . . It was too much! Fortunato heard a soft scraping high over his head and then something flopping beside him. The rope had been thrown over a beam. Domingo knelt by his head, probably fashioning a noose. What would he do? Three adversaries, his gun gone. He could feel the cuffs on his hands. Cuffed in front, like Waterbury.
An upwelling of fear came surging out of his stomach and pumped a jolt of adrenaline into his system. He didn’t want to hang! To die with a rope around his neck, in defeat, with Domingo and Santamarina smoking cigarettes and telling jokes while they waited to make sure. Fortunato the boludo! Fortunato the incompetent, who didn’t have the balls to kill anyone properly without shitting himself about it afterwards.
“What did he say in his note?” Domingo asked aloud.
Santamarina answered. “He confesses to the murder, the puta. That Waterbury tried to blackmail Don Carlo and that when Don Carlo asked the police to investigate it, he killed the gringo in the hope of gaining favor. He mentions Berenski also. After, we’ll tie him to Berenski and calm the whole thing.”
“Did you mention his wife? She always thought she was too good to associate with police.”
“The dear departed wife. Of course. Now they can be together eternally.”
Domingo’s laugh scraped out from two feet above his head, then Fortunato felt his head being lifted and the slithery weight of a rope around his neck. “Give me more light here,” Domingo said, and the soft wall of color before his eyes flickered from dark umber to orange again. He felt Domingo tightening the noose. “You can give my regards to your bitch of a wife.”
Fortunato struggled to control his breath. In only seconds it would be too late, and yet with the adrenaline pumping through his veins he felt acutely alive and molten with hatred. He hated Domingo. He hated the casual Santamarina, and Bianco who had set him up for all this. To die by Domingo’s hand, to be dispatched like that dog on the street three weeks before. Domingo’s look of contentment that time: I was doing him a favor.
The image of that moment flickered back to him; the dead animal and the screaming boy, Domingo’s satisfied face as he knelt to put the .25 back in his ankle holster. Always so proud of that little gun. Always with his ankle holster because he was the Man of Action, the Bad One from the television show who sneered at the victim before he killed him. Domingo and his ankle holster . . .
Fortunato’s mind suddenly veered from its red haze of anger and-became cool again. It was the left ankle that had the holster. The ankle just inches from his head. Domingo would be using both hands to tie the noose right now. Would the safety be on? Would a round be chambered? At least he might put a round into Domingo, force them to shoot him. No. Better to wait. Maybe they were only testing him, or some rescuer would suddenly appear. Absurdly, Fabian’s voice mocked him from the back of his head: “In the detective novel, the hero always goes for the gun.”
Santamarina said, “Point the light up here for a minute,” and Fortunato’s eyelids turned black again. His best chance. One could make all the calculations in the world, but in the end it came down to the moment. Domingo’s shoe ground softly against the dirty pavement. Fortunato took a slow deep breath. If he was going to commit suicide, at least he would do it on his own terms.
He rolled, reaching blindly with his cuffed hands toward the ankle above his head. The smooth leather curves of Domingo’s shoe came under his fingers, then his manacled hands closed on the ankle like two pouncing spiders, working their way quickly under the cuff to where the hard irregular lump of the holster hunched.
“Que. . . .?’ Domingo said.
Fortunato felt the rounded angles of the automatic surging from the leather. He had twisted onto his side now, could see Domingo’s kneeling legs and the black V of his crotch in the flashlight beam. The Inspector tried to stand up but Fortunato yanked at the ankle and brought him off balance. Santamarina, with urgency: “Hit him!”
Now he heard Domingo swearing and felt him tearing at his fingers. He felt a blow at his ear, but he had the gun partly out of the holster, enough to get his finger into the trigger, to flip off the safety. The gun went off only a few inches from his head, shooting through the holster and into Domingo’s leg. A scream, the sudden dark weight across his body. He had the gun now, was pointing into Domingo’s crotch from below. His hand tightened and he felt the hot backblast of the gases against his fist, then a stickiness as Domingo’s screaming became a high choking wail. Domingo’s legs were kicking around his head now and he fired again and the kicking stopped. The flashlight was directly in his eyes now, and he heard another gun go off and Domingo’s body jumped with the impact.
“Give me light! I need my gun!” Santamarina screamed, and Fortunato grasped that Santamarina had put his gun down to manage the rope and couldn’t find it.
The light! Fortunato jerked his hands free and shot in the direction of the light as another roar erupted behind him and another bullet went shuddering into Domingo’s body. He fired again at the bright circle. A strange gasp went through the dark space, and the flashlight fell to the ground, pointing away from him and towards the wall. The radiant afterimage of the light kept burning white in his retina, Santamarina somewhere above him, with a gun now. Another cannon blast and he heard an impact and felt a tingling at the side of his face as little chips of concrete spattered his cheek. He stretched upward with the gun in his manacled hands and Domingo’s black leather shoes sprawled on either side of his face, saw Santamarina’s faint smudge edging the white circle of afterflash. Blinding light, a rush of air along his arm. Another flash, Domingo’s leg flinching at his stomach, then a stab of heat in his gut. Fortunato rolled halfway beneath the dead weight and aimed upside down from the floor. Shooting through the round ghost of light that haunted his retina, he fired, fired again, heard a shout of surprise and pain above the ringing in his ears, then Santamarina went tumbling off the loading dock and onto the floor behind him, writhing slowly against the oil-stained cement.
Fortunato pushed Domingo’s body aside and tried to sit up, but as he did he felt the noose tightening around his neck and a wave of horror lurched through him. As he worked the noose off he felt giddy, as if the old Fortunato had departed and left a new, better version in his place. The protruding slide of the .25 reminded him that it had no more bullets, and he wiped it down quickly on Domingo’s bloody jacket and left it on the floor. Ignoring the pain that minced his stomach, he came to his feet and tried to put some order to the scene that had a moment ago been nothing but sound and flashes.
A weak illumination bounced off the wall from the discarded flashlight. Santamarina was groaning softly and there were faint sounds of movement from the body near the door. Domingo lay still and dark, an evil shadow against the vague surface of the floor. Kill me, you son of a bitch? How stupid is Fortunato now? He kicked him in the side, then made out Santamarina’s gun lying several feet away from him. He picked it up: a ·357 Magnum revolver with three shots expended and three in the cylinder. Santamarina was groaning, curling into a fetal position and holding his chest. Kill me? Cursed torturer! Now who is the owner of life and death? Fortunato bent down and pointed the ·357 at Santamarina’s head. The gun exploded into Santamarina’s skull, and Fortunato moved through the dim light to the doorway. The third man was rolling from side to side, groaning. A lucky shot from that distance: the small bullet of the .25 had hit him in the throat. Santamarina’s colleague from La Gloria three weeks ago. Fortunato put the muzzle of the .357 next to the man’s heart and pulled the trigger, taking in the ferocious report as if it were the opening blast of a symphony. He watched the body jerk and then become still. Strangle me now, bastard! The butt of his own Browning stuck out of the man’s waistband, and Fortunato pulled it out. He picked up the flashlight and looked over three dead men with a feeling of deep satisfaction. A pool of blood was dyeing the noose they’d intended for him. All tranquil now. A good piece of work, eh Domingo? He found Domingo’s key chain and quickly unfastened the cuffs from his hand. “Give my regards to Vasquez.” As if in answer, Domingo moved, and Fortunato pointed the nine millimeter at his skull and ruined his head in a burst of metal and fire. He heard himself say in an amiable tone: “I was doing you a favor, boludo.”
An undefined sense of urgency sprang from the fresh carnage as the analytical part of his mind made its first weak attempts to reassert control. The sound of Santamarina’s radio clicking, a soft statick-y voice. “Que pasa, Abel?” He forced himself back to the scene. A fourth man, the lookout, was wondering about the shots. He would be approaching, checking it out carefully.
Fortunato turned off the flashlight and put it in his pocket. The memory of light persisted in his old eyes as all memories persisted, floating across the screen of the present. He could run, of course. That would be most cautious. But caution felt like something exceedingly frivolous right now, so far from the essential ingredients of the world. The universe had gone out of balance some time ago, and it couldn’t be brought to equilibrium with the old methods. He was Fortunato, now. He had a job to finish.
A granite-colored glow oozed through a gap between the wall and ceiling, barely enough to make out the dim shadows of the bodies against the floor. The sentry would be coming, approaching the closed door with caution and a bit of fear. He would have his gun out, would be wondering what had gone wrong and who had been hit, he might guess that the final rounds had been finishing shots. What he would never suspect would be that Fortunato would be the last one standing. Fortunato waited silently to the side of the closed door, pointing his nine millimeter at the tin in front of him. He heard the sound of footsteps in the leaves that filled the gutter, saw a flashlight playing against the cracks of the crooked doorway. The man approached closer, calling softly. “Abel! Abel!”
The calling stopped, and Fortunato heard his footsteps mount the curb and scutter against the pavement by the door. Only a half meter of space and the thin sheet of tin separated him from Fortunato now. The slim crack of light around the door began to widen.
Fortunato fired through the wall in three evenly spaced shots, heard a cry, then stepped quickly into the doorway. The man had turned and was shooting wildly at the wall, and before he could get his bearings Fortunato fired again and the man went spiraling to the pavement. The Comisario shot him again in the chest, then sent a round into the man’s head, watching him quiver there on the sidewalk like a fish that had just received the sharp hard blow of the club. La concha de tu madre.
The Comisario started laughing, listening to the dry mad sound of his mirth and feeling better than he had in his entire life. They were dead, all four of them, and he was still breathing the night air. He! Comisario Fortunato of the 35th Precinto. The boludo who was supposed to have committed suicide five minutes before to suit the plans of bigger men! He wished Waterbury could see this now, that Berenski could see it. Berenski would shit himself laughing at this. This is better than the SuperClassic, Comi! Fortunato considered trying to wipe off all his prints, but it already was. Fortunato was of spirit now, already departing. He was beyond the laws of the Republic. Now there was only Fortunato’s law. He took the spare clip from his holster and slid it home, then chambered a round. He began to walk towards his car.
The thought came to him gently, with a certain irony rather than alarm: someone somewhere might have called the police. Illicit lovers lifting heads from rumpled pillows, a bored prostitute wandering down for the excitement. They’re shooting outside! Sub-Comisario Pignoli would be the commander on duty. Nicolosi would probably respond first to this sector. Poor Nicolosi: the honest working stiff who’d put in fifteen years of service and never gotten beyond patrolman. For some reason, he’d be ashamed to have Nicolosi see him here. At least Nicolosi, as an honest man, would understand his reasons. I had to do it, Amadeo. It was the only justice that remained.
As he started towards his car the pain began to insist a bit more. It was in his stomach, but better not to look at it. A gooey friction constrained the fingers of his left hand and his clothes were painted with blood. As he neared the car he felt a faint trickle at his thighs. With it, the distant sound of a siren. A first-class crime scene, muchachos. Five calibers of bullets and four suspects who would never talk. One a cop. The others security operatives for Carlo Pelegrini. What a sumptuous expediente this one will inspire!
He got into the car and began driving from the area. He’d begun to sweat, but he felt elated and confident. He was dead now, anyway. What did it matter, the little ache in his stomach or the blood all over him? Thus the dead should look. You see, Waterbury; at least I’ve evened your score a bit. More than evened it. Only a spirit now, far above the considerations of caution or morality. That was all behind him. He was an angel. The one in the tango who plays it all to recover an insult or an act of infidelity. Maybe this had been his destiny, all those years. All those decades he had been carefully measuring and accumulating, never imagining that in the end all he’d done would be reversed in a few hours.
There remained only Leon. The Chief. His friend and mentor all these years, always ahead of him in rank, directing him in his career and at last, directing its end. Fortunato knew he should feel some anger, but it didn’t come. Perhaps because he was already dead, and the dead don’t feel anger. There were simply things to do and ways to do them, and the rest remained for people still in life, who had egos and hopes to protect.
At his home? Perhaps. Ringing the bell. What say, tanguero! Raising the gun and blowing him backwards. But no. The wife might answer. Moreover, the Chief always went out on weekends. He loved to play the transnochero, taking coffee and whiskey at four in the morning, singing tango at the 17 Stone Angels . . .
Fortunato imagined the Chief in his ivory suit within the fluorescent interior of the old worn milonga. Osvaldo with his gold tooth and all of the regulars filtering in from the barrio. Of course. It had to be thus, as if obeying some law of symmetry not apparent before. Fortunato’s law.
Fortunato turned the car towards the center. It would take him forty minutes to reach La Boca. At two-thirty in the morning the Chief would already have sung four or five songs, would have critiqued poor Gustavo, the ancient sailor, for his lack of tone.
His cellular rang. The voice was trying hard to suppress its excitement.
“Comisario Fortunato, forgive that I disturb you! It’s Nicolosi! There’s been a quadruple murder here in San Justo! Can you come!”
“Where is it?” the Comisario asked calmly.
“Behind the kilombo on Benito Perez. At a factory.”
“Can’t Sub-Comisario Pignoli take it?”
“It’s a massacre, Comisario! Better that you come!” A brief pause. “One of the dead is Domingo Fausto!”
“Inspector Fausto? They killed Inspector Fausto?”
“Sí, Comisario!”
“Are there witnesses?” “No, Comisario.”
Fortunato smiled. “Está Bien, Nicolosi. Remain tranquilo. In this case, at least, justice is at hand. I’m on my way.”
He turned off the cell phone and continued towards the Autopista 25 de Mayo. He turned on the radio and found the all-tango station that they played at La Gloria. Goyeneche was singing “Makeup’, Piazzola’s classic about an illusory world. Lies, they’re lies: your virtue, your love, your kindness . . . Sing, Polack, sing! He turned it up. The booming dissonance of the accordion, the sour strings tearing at the heart. Fortunato felt a glorious sense of belonging. After a lifetime of lies he had finally grasped a bigger truth and was bearing down on its brilliant focal point.
The common sights of the city had never looked more beautiful. Goodbye, little mechanic shop, goodbye, seller of flowers. There was darkness and a pink sky, and the tired glorious buildings. All his life he’d spent in this suburb, this provincial town of church and fields now swallowed up by the endless sprawl of the city. The ditches where he hunted frogs, all gone. The gardens and ragged little football fields with goals made of tin cans. The humming factories, now silent. As a boy everything had seemed so permanent, and one had to live a whole life to realize how transient were the things one most deeply loved. His mother and father, his Marcela. Even the cool luscious air of this autumn night streaming through the windows to caress his cheeks. What a farcical life, hoarding little green papers and the respect of empty men! All those years with Marcela wasted. If only she could see him now. Her low playful voice—“You’re acting well, Miguel. At last you’re arranging things as they should be.”
He crossed Avenida General Paz and entered Buenos Aires proper and continued down Teniente General Dellepiane towards the autopista. The buildings became larger and more ornate with stonework as he passed through the barrios of Flores and Caballito. The city shook off its provincial stupor and began to snap. The store windows were wider, the clothes more elegant. The long-gone boom of Buenos Aires began to assert itself again in columns and curlicues. The whole city was out for the evening, ablaze at two in the morning as if at two in the afternoon. People were dancing and people were trying out love poems and people were getting knifed and snorting merca and launching long slow pirouettes beneath the covers. Every sidewalk and every café window was illuminated now by the burning destinies of the lives that skittered along the thoroughfare and by the vivid afterglow of the legions who had walked those streets before. Thus, Buenos Aires! Thus the furious dream! As if obeying Fortunato’s law, Carlos Gardel took over the radio in his scratchy 1920s voice and began singing the operatic lament that began his most famous song. My beloved Buenos Aires, when I see you again . . . Fortunato intoned along with Gardel’s longing and hope: There will be no more sorrow or forgetting.
The autopista flew away beneath him, skating majestically above the buildings and into the heart of the city. Through Constitución and San Telmo, down to La Boca, a world of smaller buildings and narrower streets. The Mouth of Buenos Aires, eagerly devouring the goods of the world, articulating Argentina’s language of beef and cereals on a multitude of rusty freighters. These beaten buildings that formed its teeth, ragged and decayed. Foreign sailors and the poor dressed up for evenings out. He left his car in an alley beside the bar, was delayed when he suddenly had to bend over and vomit. The pain was getting worse now. When he looked up he could see that the angel above his head was laughing.
The Comisario walked ten paces and stopped for a moment at the window. The Chief was in the midst of a song, a white canary before the three slouching musicians of the band. Out the open door came the sound of the bandoneon. He was singing “Tabaca’, the one about the man who sits awake at midnight, seeing the figure of the woman he wronged in his cigarette smoke. An elegy to regret and the corrosive effect of guilt. Ambitious, the Chief. Even the best struggled with that one. An ironic choice for a man who never felt regret.
Fortunato stepped in the door with the nine millimeter hidden under a newspaper he’d found in the alley. He was coming in from behind the Chief, but those on the other side of the room could see him and he could tell that the carnage of his jacket was upsetting them. He wished he’d worn the navy blue today. He was feeling a bit light-headed, so he leaned up against the wall. Norberta was looking at him in horror and came rushing over.
“It’s only paint, Norberta. Don’t worry yourself.”
Now every eye in the room was on him and the Chief noticed that he had lost the crowd’s attention. He glanced over and stopped singing with a startled pop of the eyes. The musicians dragged on a few more bars and came to a ragged denouement, turning, like everyone else, to the Comisario.
Fortunato raised his hand. “Continue! Continue, Leon. I didn’t want to steal your audience!” He moved over to a table in front of the band, only two meters away from the Comisario General of the Buenos Aires Provincial Police. He half-sat, half-collapsed onto its edge.
“You’re badly off, Miguel,” the Chief said. Perhaps to the others in the room he sounded concerned, but Fortunato could read the fear in his voice.
He waved his hand. “It’s only makeup. Like the song.” He intoned a few lines. Mentiras! Son mentiras tu virtud . . . The effort was too much for him and he stopped. He saw the Chief glance worriedly at the sheet of newspaper that covered his right hand.
“What happened?” he asked. “You’re covered with blood!”
“Do you mean why have your men failed to kill me? Is that what you want to know? I’ll tell you. It went well at first. They knocked me out, they put me in the factory. They even tied the noose around my neck. But amigo,” he shook his head in mock condolence, “it all went badly from there. Depending on your point of view.”
Osvaldo the pimp had good intuition and Fortunato saw him reach down for his gun. “Tranquilo, Osvaldo. This has nothing to do with you. Enjoy the show.” Glancing towards the owner. “And Norberta, please do not call the police. There’s no drama here. Besides, it’s sure they’re going to find some violation of your license and separate you from a few mangos. Is it not thus, Osvaldo?”
“Thus it is, Capitan!” The pimp answered with the enthusiasm of one with front row seats to a long-awaited heavyweight bout.
“No, amigos. My complaint is with this tanguero, who tried to have me killed tonight.” A deathly quiet came over the 17 Stone Angels. The Chief stood by the band in his ivory suit like the master of ceremonies.
“They’re all dead now,” Fortunato went on. “Domingo, Santamarina, the other two—”
The Chief interrupted him loudly. “You’re badly off, Miguel! I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Looking towards Norberta and raising his voice, “Someone call an ambulance!”
“No!” Fortunato shouted, clearing the gun from the newspapers and pointing it at the Chief’s white breast. “I came here to make you confess!” The musicians put their instruments down and evaporated away to the sides.
“To what, amigo? You’re confused by your injuries.”
“Don’t play with me, Leon. I’ve already killed five tonight. You can be the sixth.”
“You’ve killed five?” He turned to the room. “Did you hear that?
He’ll kill us. Osvaldo—!”
“You ordered me to pick up Waterbury so you could have him killed!”
“It’s fantasy, Miguel!”
Fortunato pulled the trigger and a blast of smoke and flame shot through the café. The bullet missed Bianco and burrowed into the wall.
“It was only a squeeze!” Bianco shouted. “I didn’t order his death!”
“But you ordered mine! You sent them to kill me! And not even to die like a man! You wanted them to hang me like a suicide. Like some poor bastard who didn’t have the strength to keep struggling.”
“Hermano, it’s me, Leon!”
Again a blast filled the room with billows of gun smoke that hung in the fluorescent light. Fortunato struggled to rise from the table and walked forward to within a few paces of Bianco. The denizens of the 17 Stone Angels watched without a word. Osvaldo had drawn his pistol but he held it calmly on the table, surveying the drama before him with glittering eyes. Fortunato exchanged a brief look with him, then turned back to the Chief. The Chief’s face looked chalky beneath the cold lights and their reflection off the sky-blue walls.
“Tell them about the baby you tortured in 1976, Leon, to make the mother talk. About the people you kidnapped and murdered so you could sell their furniture! How you conspired to kill Ricardo Berenski because he was approaching the truth. Of how you corrupted all who came under you. Including me.”
“You’re not seeing clearly, Miguel! You’re confused!”
“Al contrario, Jefe. At last I’m seeing cristal.” Fortunato felt an infinite silence come over the world, the timeless space in which all events flickered and roared. “I’m purging the Institution.” He pulled the trigger and the nine millimeter jumped in his fist. The bullet and its shroud of gazes sped from the muzzle and the lead punched the Chief in his clean white breast and knocked him over a music stand and a guitar. As he tumbled he flung one hand out to the side and one over his heart, as if rendering the finale of a tango. One of the women let out a little shriek, but the place was eerily silent as the Chief made a few gasping sounds and then rolled partially onto his side.
All were looking at the Comisario, who pushed the gun painfully into his waistband and backed towards the door. His head went fuzzy again and he had to steady himself against the wall for a moment until his senses returned. To Norberta he said calmly: “Perdón, amigo, that I leave you with this mess.” He reached into his jacket and took out a bundle of ten thousand dollars, threw it towards him. The throw was weak and ended up on the floor. “Buy champagne for everyone. And use the rest to pay the necessary bribes when the police come.” A sickened little shrug, the ghost of one of his rare smiles. “And that you can’t remember my name for a while when they do.”
As he backed out the door he heard a single pair of applauding hands and Osvaldo’s unmistakable voice. “Bravo! Bravo! That is tango!”
When he reached the alley he looked back to see Osvaldo and the puntero hurrying into the night with the fresh news. The place would be empty long before the cops came. He was legend now, a story more powerful than a man. Maybe they would write a tango about this someday. The tango about the old policeman who exacted his revenge for a lifetime of corruption, who turned Good at the end and purified himself with blood.
So he was only a song now. Nothing left for this life, only to go home before the police arrived and die quietly. They would get their suicide. He was beginning to have bouts of light-headedness. His soaked pants cuffs were flapping at his heels. He groaned into the car and vomited again before beginning the long drive back to Villa Luzuriaga. He had gotten the Chief and the others, but where were Pablo Moya and Pelegrini? Where was William Renssaelaer? They were everywhere around him, in every building and in the pavement that glittered beneath his headlights. Where are you, William Renssaelaer? Where are you?
The pain was growing more intense and crowding out other thoughts. At Liniers he had to pull over and woke up after a few minutes feeling hazy and spent. It took some effort to dial Cacho’s number, but he managed it through the blur and held the receiver to his ear as he got the car underway again. “Cacho!”
Cacho began swearing at him and the Comisario cut him off. “Leave it, leave it! There’s no time. I’m calling you on a clean line. I wanted to tell you that I avenged Waterbury and Berenski.”
That quieted the criminal. “What?”
“It was Bianco who had Berenski cut. Bianco, working for Carlo Pelegrini. So that you know: he was singing at a tango bar and I sent him a cork in the middle of ‘Tabaco’.”
A moment of wonderment, and then Cacho’s voice without any patina of toughness. “Truly? You killed him?”
“Truly.”
“And Domingo?”
A weird labored chuckle. “I killed Domingo and three others when they were trying to hang me.” He grinned vaguely. “Estilo Hollywood: in a rain of lead.”
A short silence as Cacho seemed to grapple with the idea. He sidestepped the matter. “You sound half-dead, Miguel.”
“They got me in the stomach. I’m going home to die.”
He hadn’t expected any remonstrance to go to the hospital and none came. Cacho understood what he was telling him. The line stayed quiet as the buildings slid past outside his windshield, but he knew Cacho hadn’t left him.
“You did well, Miguel,” Cacho said at last. “You did well.”
Cacho’s approval affected the Comisario and he felt an unaccustomed bond with the former revolutionary. “Mirá, Cacho. We’re not friends. But maybe we’re compañeros, in some sense. For this I wanted you to know what I discovered and what you’ve forgotten. We pass our lives among garbage. But beneath, it’s a world of spirit, hermano. It’s a world of spirit. He clicked off the phone to relieve Cacho of any necessity of answering.
He fumbled through the buttons again. A few seconds later Athena’s groggy voice came to him.
“It’s me, Fortunato.”
“Miguel! It’s three in the morning!”
“You must come to my house now. I need you.”
“You sound strange.”
“I’m dying, chica. The end has arrived. At least I arranged everything as it should be.”
A wary silence, then her uncertain voice. “You sound terrible, Miguel. What’s wrong? Do you need a doctor?”
“No, daughter. It already is. Please come to my house right now. I need you very much and there is no other person to call. Please. I have much to tell you about the Waterbury case. I can tell you everything now.”
“Can’t this wait until tomorrow?”
“No. There is no tomorrow. Will you come?”
There was a short silence on the line. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
An eternity for him now. As he pulled down the familiar streets near his house he thought he saw a herd of cows chewing grass in the intersection, the old candy store on the corner, where it hadn’t been in thirty years. There might be someone still watching his place, whoever it was. He knew a way to enter from the far side of the block, passing through a neighboring courtyard to his own house, and he parked his car out of sight and stumbled the last block to his patio door. As an afterthought he dragged along the briefcase with four hundred thousand dollars in it.
He lay down on his bed in the dark to die unmolested. The pain was ringing in his stomach like an infernal bell, resounding through his body in molten pulsating waves. In the half light that came in the windows he could see the outlines of the room, and though a part of him recognized it as his own it all seemed incredibly distant. Thus was life: it disappeared behind you. You turn around, and there’s nothing.
The floor was rocking and he tried to put one leg down to steady it—the old drinking trick. It seemed to work for a moment and the events of the night came back to him in a skiffle of violent images. He’d settled what accounts he could. Beyond his reach though, there were still the Joseph Carvers and Pablo Moyas, for whom the violent passions played out that night represented only a bit of turbulence on the way to new markets and new profits, and whose exploits in Argentina would be lauded in the financial pages by which their deeds were measured. The criminal geniuses of the age, always clean.
He was the last piece of evidence, and when he died it would all be irrelevant. Pelegrini would fall. William Renssaelaer would go to work for AmiBank, RapidMail would take over the Post Office, and make guaranteed profits from the People. The plunder would click forward as it had for the last thirty years: a continuous ring of business, politics and police always devising new forms of stealing and decorating it in new forms of propriety. Moving the ball up and down the field at the behest of the crooked referee, who always ruled for The Mouth and always against The People.
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.”
“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!”