Free 17 Stone Angels by Stuart Archer Cohen

Aires in a month.”
    Athena’s hopes spiraled downward again, and Carmen must have seen it. “Or,” she added slowly, “I have a friend who can perhaps help. He’s a journalist who has written much about the police. A case like this might interest him.” She took out her address book and looked up a number, then dialed it: Con Ricardo Berenski, por favor? De parte de Carmen Amado . As she waited, “Ricardo is half-famous here. Now he’s working on an investigation of a businessman named Carlo Pelegrini.”
    Athena recognized the name. “I saw a couple of his articles.”
    Ricardo had come to the phone and Carmen’s voice became playful. “ Amor , I wanted to find you before Pelegrini’s men do. Sí, querido . Every time I open the newspaper you’re putting your foot in his ass. Sí . Look, Rici, I have a girl here from the United States investigating a murder of one of her countrymen. About four months ago. Yes, Robert Waterbury.” A pause. “Me too. It had that odor . . .”
    She made the arrangements to meet for a drink the following evening, then hung up and turned back to Athena. “ Bien ,” Carmen concluded, “talk to the widow and we’ll see.” She stood up and Athena stood up with her. “And, ojo ,” she said, tapping beneath her eye, “be discreet.” She pointed to the phone, and Athena shuddered at her next words. “They’re listening.”

CHAPTER SIX
    T he smell of the sulphur hissed into Fortunato’s nostrils, and he set the votive candle next to his favorite picture of his wife. Marcela in black and white, at the age of twenty, a few days before they’d married at the Metallurgical Syndicate Hall. She’d just graduated from the teachers” college, a tall, big-boned woman with a lanky waist and fluid hips that he found intriguing and erotic for their strength as much as their feminine grace. He loved her handsome dark face, with its long Inca nose and framing tendrils of black hair. Mi Negra , he’d called her, or India . Her father had used his connections as secretary of the Union to get the hall at a discount, and had welcomed him into the family with a long toast filled with high-flown words and tears. As a cadet in the Academy, Fortunato was looking forward to a steady career and a decent pension at the end. The people had still liked the police in those days, before all that mess with the subversives made everything go rotten.
    He looked around the room, whose objects implied his life in the same way that an expediente implied a crime. A portrait here or there, a souvenir mate purchased on a vacation to Cordoba. They were like pieces of evidence, but like all expedientes they lent themselves to a certain amount of fraud. Four little rooms in the suburbs of Villa Luzuriaga formed a paradoxical home for the Comisario of one of the most lucrative stations of the Buenos Aires police galaxy.
    He went into the little kitchen and put a kettle of water on the stove. Maybe a mate would lift his spirits. He filled a gourd with herb and a silver straw, dousing it with lukewarm water and watching the pale green flakes swell. She could never bear to take her mate bitter, always insisted on sugar. And cut me a little slice of lemon, Miguelito . Now he drank it bitter every day.
    He’d been severely depressed since Marcela’s death, but it had started long before that when it first became apparent that her illness lay beyond the power of doctors. The diagnosis had fallen, and when they went to the specialists in hope of some new information, it had fallen just the same, fallen again and again until it became inescapable. Marcela seemed to have accepted it before he did, counted her fifty-eight years as sufficient and prepared herself for the torture that would soon be meted out to her. For him, it had been harder to submit. He kept trying to make an arrangement.
    â€œOld