Free 17 Stone Angels by Stuart Archer Cohen Page A

woman!” he’d said. “They tell me there’s a study that they’re conducting in the United States that has had success . . .”
    â€œAnd where are we going to get the money to go tramping around the United States? With your fifteen hundred pesos per month!”
    â€œI’ll borrow it,” he’d said, but he knew that with that stratagem she had trapped him. For years he had been accumulating money through his “jobs” for the institution, and for years she had been refusing to acknowledge it. At home, he played the honest policeman.
    It had been easy in the beginning. A traffic stop, some minor infraction either real or imagined. “You just tell them the law,” Sub-inspector Leon Bianco instructed him over a beer at La Gloria. “It’s up to them if they want to follow it.” And the law was always troublesome—there were the hours at the police station filling out papers, the inevitable check of antecedentes . And once antecedentes were examined, some tinge always came through. No one was ever innocent.
    The problem was that Marcela did the family budget, and he didn’t know exactly how to declare it to her.
    â€œLook, Beauty, we have some extra money this month.” “Extra? From where?”
    He looked away and fought off a bashful uncertainty. “It’s a bit like this: with all the subversives around now, our jobs are much moredangerous than before, so sometimes individuals give us tips to keep extra careful watch over them.” It wasn’t totally a lie: they did collect protection money from some of the businesses and factories.
    â€œOh?” Suspicious. “Tell me from who? Who’s giving you extra pay?”
    â€œMarcela,” he said delicately, “in the Institution, it’s a little different from most jobs. They expect us to confront delinquents and subversives, but they pay us a miserable salary. So . . . To a point, we have to autofinance—”
    Her face hardened and she recoiled from him, stepping on his explanation. “Don’t start with that, Miguel! Don’t even start! I didn’t marry a corrupt policeman.”
    He had tried to seduce her with appliances. First, a coffee-maker and, taking heart from that, a washing machine. A week later he arrived home to find an empty space where the machine had been. “I gave it to the neighbor,” she said airily.
    After that he stashed the money in a safety deposit box in the Banco de la Nadon and bided his time. He began collecting from lottery sellers and pimps, devising meticulous schedules filled with names and check-marks. In three years he had ascended to the brigadas, the plain-clothes groups that conducted intelligence operations and mounted raids. He became expert in working with buchones , stool pigeons who could be reeled in on a moment’s notice to face some ancient charge hanging over their heads. He unraveled auto theft networks and raided illegal casinos, bordellos, marijuana stockpiles. When he brought in a killer of three children the newspaper put his name on the front page and the mayor of Buenos Aires gave him a citation. Those were good operations; it was clear who the bad guys were. He noted the shine of admiration in the faces of the younger officers, imagined he could hear them discussing him as they lounged about the streets. “That’s the Fortunato who found the kidnapped girl in San Martin. It’s he who caught the rapist that violated six women.” Marcela worried pleasingly for his safety. As far as she knew, he was the most incorruptible policeman in Buenos Aires.
    The money kept accumulating. He’d assumed that when they had children she would see the way clear to use the money for their sake. But they had no luck with children, in spite of the tests and the prayers to the Virgin of Lujan. Their best hopes went away in a pool of blood when Marcela miscarried a little girl at the sixth