17 Stone Angels Read Online Free

that,” he shrugged, “they’ll privatize the air.”

CHAPTER THREE
    M iguel Fortunato’s comisaria sat in a three-story building in Ramos Mejia. Though fifteen miles distant from Buenos Aires proper, Ramos enjoyed a relative degree of prosperity, supporting a bustling five-block commercial zone and spreading out into the small neat concentrations of houses of the middle class. Further out the houses got smaller and crouched behind walls topped with broken glass. Here transpired the modest lives of the working class, for the last decade focused on the continual belt-tightening as their wages sank and their factories closed. In the ten years since the ascension of the down-thief President Menem, all except the wealthy were struggling to hold their places.
    The Ramos Mejia Brigada de Investiciónes had a reputation for yielding a good haul. It was wealthy in stolen cars, drug distribution, clandestine lottery outlets and a rich network of protection rackets that took weekly payments from ambulant vendors, small businesses and the few remaining factories. These were the classics, but a good comisario could multiply his profits by making files disappear, freeing criminals, neglecting to arrest fugitives, or arresting those fugitives who could be squeezed for extra pesos. Fortunato kept a list of such unfortunates to be arrested and squeezed on a rotating basis. In a good month, the Brigada might bring in $100,000, and Fortunato parceled out the income according to a preciseformula: a quarter for himself, a quarter for the patotas who made the collections, and half to be sent upstairs to the Chief.
    Despite its robust income, the comisaria was innocent of the gleaming technology Fortunato saw on the North American police shows. Its communications room held a simple radio and several maps with colored pins to mark various crimes—red for robbery, blue for theft, black for assault. Typewriters hammered out denuncias on violet carbon paper. There was no fingerprint lab or interview room, and the evidence locker consisted of an old strongbox at the sole disposal of the one man most certain to compromise it: the Comisario.
    Nonetheless, in the week before the gringa’s arrival Fortunato had tried to polish the fiction of crisp professionalism. The prisoners had been ordered to put a new coat of paint in the waiting room and to scrub the floor tiles with stiff brushes. Desks were neatened and the calabozos that housed the delinquents rinsed with antiseptic. They even dusted off the picture of the Virgin of Lujan that hung above the dispatch radio. He was telling a story now, a story of a hardworking detective eager to crack a case. A bit weary perhaps, a bit cynical, but nonetheless trustworthy and capable of wringing from the Buenos Aires underworld any justice that could be had.
    The morning of La Doctora’s first visit seemed blessed by good omens. The night before they had arrested a pair of delinquents suspected in a series of auto thefts that had been allocating many red pins to the crime map in the Sala de Situaciones. He’d instructed the Sub-Comisario to leave their filed-down knives and key blanks on display to show the gringa when she arrived. As a bonus, one of the patotas had called in after tracking down a load of hijacked merchandise to a grocery store.
    â€œFive thousand,” Fortunato told the Inspector over his cell phone.
    â€œI tried five thousand, Comiso, but he says for five thousand he’ll take it up directly with the judge.”
    â€œTell him five thousand and if he doesn’t pay put him in cuffs right there and bring him in for processing. Tell him you’re seizing all the questionable merchandise and closing the store until the investigation is complete. When you get him in the car, tell him seven thousand, and that if you have to bring him here, it’s ten thousand. If not, he can try his luck with the laws of the Republic.”
    â€œFine,