Authors: Stuart Archer Cohen
17 Stone Angels (32 page)
“To betray Pelegrini is a death sentence. Boguso looked for a way to stop the investigation before it touched Pelegrini and his chief of security. Thus he might at least go on living even in prison, and probably with the hope of Pelegrini's help in arranging a quiet parole in a few years. Now . . . “ Fabian shrugged. “His future is not so very brilliant.”
Fabian precluded any more questions by looking at his watch. “
Carajo
!
The afternoon is escaping me. Athena . . . ” he leaned down and quickly kissed her. “I'll call you at the hotel. Comiso,” he gave him a little salute, “we'll see each other.” Backing away from the table with a little grin. “Don't worry about the bill. I'll arrange it later.” With that, he fluttered out the door and onto the sidewalk like a flake of green confetti in a parade.
Athena watched him go, sipping
at the last of her soda water, trying hard to conceal her resentment. “What do you think?” she asked in an even voice.
Fortunato shrugged. “Much must be true. Either that, or he has a grand career ahead of him as an author.” He paused. “Berenski had it right. He mentioned the missing diary.”
“But how would Fabian get it? And who would be doing a parallel investigation? The Federales? Besides, if it's true, where are the documents that he claims Teresa Castex gave Waterbury? It seems like those would be enough to bring down the government.”
“Athena, at this altitude I don't even want to guess. Did Boguso assassinate Robert Waterbury?” He swallowed before laying out the lie. “I believe, yes. But that of Pelegrini's woman and this
Francesa
. . . I don't know more than you.”
There was a short silence as Athena let her thoughts drift out the big window. “What bothers me is that he has no feelings about it at all. It's just a game to him.”
Fortunato allowed himself the luxury of taking out a cigarette without answering. He could feel that he had lost her trust, but he had to put that aside for the moment. In the last two hours, everything had changed. Fabian's group was running things now. They wanted the man at the top of the pyramid, and as long as Boguso held up in the role of material author, they might spare the rest along the way. But Boguso would never hold up. Fortunato scratched a flame from his lighter and squinted through the smoke. Some detached part of him realized that it was only a matter of time.
He and Athena lobbed desultory comments back and forth for another twenty minutes, though with Fabian gone the waiter no longer came to offer them anything. In the end Athena threw a few bronze coins on the table and they walked out.
Fortunato listened absently to Athena as he drove her to the Sheraton. She was asking all the relevant questions about Fabian's story, but in a
half-hearted disconnected manner, as if she didn't really expect answers from him. As he fended her off he was thinking about the one discrepancy of Fabian's narrative that stood out above all the others for him, a discrepancy that only an intimate witness to Waterbury's last hours could pick out. Throughout Fabian's long story, with its personages both expected and unexpected, a single name had been left out, a name that Waterbury himself had uttered in the half hour before he died, suspecting that he, and not Pelegrini, might have brought down on him the terrible events of that night. Berenski too had blanched at that name. Another Northamerican, with a long history in Buenos Aires: William Renssaelaer.
They arrived at the hotel
and Athena paused with one leg out the door. Fortunato felt a pang at seeing her leave. “What are you going to do?”
She turned to him. “I suppose I'll try to extend my stay.”
He smiled. “At least it will be good to have you around a bit longer.”
She ignored his attempt at irony and swung her other leg out of the car. The Comisario felt a stab of panic as she began to shift to the pavement.
“You know who we should talk to?” he said brightly. “Ricardo Berenski. He's the expert on Pelegrini, and he knew something of what was going on between Pelegrini and the RapidMail/AmiBank group. Maybe he has some idea about the missing documents of Teresa Castex.”
“I have his number,” she said noncommittally. “Adios.”
He watched her walk towards the entrance of the Sheraton, a flood of grief and loneliness sweeping over him as it had when the morgue had taken Marcela's body away. He felt his throat clogging up and he fought back the sorrow. It was too much. Too much of explanations that explained nothing, of disdainful looks. Too much knowledge of Robert Waterbury.
Athena turned back and looked
towards Fortunato from the door of the Sheraton, regretting her harsh departure in spite of herself. The car was still there: he was sitting at the wheel staring straight ahead. She thought of going back and saying something, but she considered the whole stupid sham of an investigation and turned back towards the lobby. She was done with Fortunato.
In truth, she'd known since early in Fabian's speech that she would be
calling Ricardo Berenski as soon as she left the café. She would tell Ricardo the details and he would laugh and laugh, and within thirty seconds he would have some new insight, a possible lead, and a friend he could contact to corroborate a detail. Ricardo would straighten things out.
By the time she reached for the telephone to call him, Ricardo Berenski was already dead.
T
he killing had been done in classic style: wrists wired together, a single shot to the back of the head and the body set on fire and left smoking at the dump among the stinking potpourri of garbage. Burying the body would have been easy, but the killers wanted not to conceal the mutilated corpse, but to expose it to the world. A throwback to the days of the white terror, when the Allianza Anticomunista Argentina had made showy murders the most effective sort of postcard: bodies would turn up at roadsides, dumps, sprawling face down or sunwards with that embarrassing tactlessness of the dead.
Berenski's assassination hit the media with a noise few people could have predicted. After years of intimidation, beatings, and menacing phone calls, nearly every journalist in Argentina staked out Berenski's charred body as a battleground in what they felt was a desperate struggle for survival. Berenski had gone after the police and the most powerful politicians in the country. He'd turned up the story of Carlo Pelegrini. If Berenski could be killed with impunity, any of them could be killed, and the last line of resistance to the perversion of what had once been a prosperous country would dissolve. Even in the general population it was understood that the battle over the dead journalist had become a struggle for the country itself, for with Berenski and his colleagues lay the last hopes of an honest
government, and no matter how many times the dream was annihilated, that earnest longing remained stronger than all the futility that enveloped it, and it moved events before it.
The death topped the headlines of nearly every newspaper in the country, and special reports broke in on melodramas and variety shows. Berenski's comic smile gazed from every tabloid and television screen, emphasized by the stunning picture of the blackened corpse curled up among sour vegetables and crumpled plastic bags.
The television and radio aired clips of Berenski interviewing famous villains of the pastâthe former Chief of Police protesting an accusation of murder for which he was later convicted, an indignant Minister of Justice denying the bribes he'd taken. These lies cast an aura of parody over the earnest statements of the police about their eagerness to solve the murder. The Governor of Buenos Aires called a press conference to name a special task force to solve the case. Athena noticed Comisario General Leon Bianco standing in the background wearing the same frown of resolve as when he'd sung “Mano a Mano” at the 17 Stone Angels.
The police started their investigation by smearing the victim. Berenski had bounced a check the week before so the question of financial difficulties was raised, and this was carefully expanded to insinuate that Berenski might have been murdered by someone he'd been trying to blackmail. A man stepped forward to insist that he had sold Berenski cocaine, and another, who claimed to be one of the journalist's sources, said that Berenski boasted of mounting something “that would bring him much silver.” A real estate agent in Punta del Este testified that Berenski had come into his agency looking to buy an apartment at the beach, something in the range of $200â300,000, far beyond his modest salary.
The journalists fought back. They exposed the cocaine seller as a longstanding police informant, and placed Berenski in Buenos Aires the day that the realtor claimed to have spoken with him in Uruguay. Berenski's picture began to appear everywhere, a silent indictment of the torpid investigation. Journalists on television held a photo to the camera, press conferences given by film stars or sports heroes included Berenski's face in the background or pasted to the podium with the words “Remember Berenski.” The dead man's image curved around telephone poles and mocked the powerful from train stations and magazine kiosks On the news
programs or interviews where his picture didn't appear, the quick phrases could be heard, “And on this day the 7th of April, let us remember Ricardo Berenski, assassinated two days ago and still without a solution.” “On this 8th day of April, let us remember Ricardo Berenski . . . ” By the 9th of April Carlo Pelegrini's name began to appear in the press beside that of the murdered journalist as the prime suspect, followed, in the mutterings on the street, by the Buenos Aires Police.
By luck, the case fell during the turn of Judge Faviola Hocht. A steely woman in her fifties, descendant of Spaniards and Austrians, she had the reputation of being incorruptible and unappeasable. They called her
La Gallega
for her peasant-like brutishness in the pursuit of truth; she refused to make deals and spurned offers of “consultancies” from the companies and law firms who opposed her. She had her own investigators and her own arrangements with the police. Though she could not always get a conviction or, given a conviction, insure that the criminal would go to jail, everyone in Buenos Aires knew one thing for certain:
La Gallega
's investigations left ruins in their wake.
Certain forces began to agitate to remove her from the case. It came out in the press that Judge Hocht had been a personal friend of Berenski's and, according to the accusations of her enemies, one of his covert sources. Editorials attacked her as a political operative and questioned her competence. Even the President of the Republic, who shed a tear as he remembered the noble Berenski in an interview, privately directed his appointees in the Justice Department to scour the Constitution for a reason to move the case out of
La Gallega's
jurisdiction. The soccer game of the
Caso
Berenski moved up and down the field, cheered by the crowd and misdirected by its corrupt referees. Berenski himself probably would have bet on Pelegrini.
Fortunato had found Berenski's death
waiting for him on the afternoon newsstand, a few hours after the long talk with Fabian. He'd stopped for cigarettes on his way to meet the Chief and there was Berenski's face filling a quarter of the front page, with another photo of his carbonized body below. The shock of it left Fortunato floating on his feet. He drifted there in the first horrible novelty and then, as he walked slowly back to his car with the paper spread out below him, a physical sense of disgust came over him. He remembered
Berenski's laugh and the joy he took in his fake possessions. Berenski understood that they lived in a counterfeit world, where a counterfeit God forgave all fraud. Berenski with his comic appearance and his shamelessness. Now they'd turned him into burnt meat.
“Who was it?” Fortunato inserted quietly into the dusty gloom of La Gloria's back room.
The Chief gave a little laugh. “Who wasn't it? They could have held a raffle for the privilege!” He watched Fortunato carefully as he made the joke. “Why that face? What's Berenski matter to you? It was inevitable that someone was going to cut the
puta
.” With a smirk: “Probably it was the directors of his newspaper. Look what business they're going to do now!”
The Chief leaned to the side and signaled through the door at the barmaid. “Skinny! Two Eisenbachs!” He settled back down. “The problem is that even dead he's making problems. All of this
Who killed Berenski? Who killed Berenski?
” He squinted with distaste, waving his hand across his nose to disperse the imaginary stench. “The problem is that when the journalists see Pelegrini's name on Boguso's new tale, it's going to make our situation a bit more
caliente
.”