17 Stone Angels by Stuart Archer Cohen

again. “Where is he?”
    At this the mother began to sing, naming his sister, his brother, his friends from the union, any possible place he might be, knowing only that he had gone out to watch a football game! That he was for River! That he sometimes bet five pesos! They called in reinforcements to raid the houses she had named and sat down to wait. Fortunato was ringing with shock, watching in disbelief as one of the plainclothes men began to catalog all the appliances and furniture in the little apartment. Twenty minutes later the husband came home and they arrested him without a struggle. Bianco made a phone call. In the end they took them all away, the mother and children crying softly. After that soldiers came in and started loading the furniture onto an army truck. “See,” Bianco told him, dismissing his initial worries about the operation. “Nothing happened!”
    In the next days Marcela found him distracted and moody, and he finally unraveled the story as they sipped on a morning mate . “They were subversives, of course, or at least, the father was . . .” He let the sentence trail off, and she didn’t answer.
    She sat silently for a half-minute, looking at the floor, then hid her face in her hands and shook. “It’s so horrible!” She sobbed for a minute without control, then took her hands away from her wet face. “Don’t get in with those people, Miguel! I’m begging you! Or someday . . .’with a shudder, “you’ll be the one beating the baby.”
    He heeded her, ducking Bianco’s summons for other operativos until Bianco finally stopped inviting him. The Sub-Comisario treated him with a tinge of scorn after that, as if Fortunato lacked the necessary masculinity to own up to the task. In contrition, he’d devoted himself to the three things required for advancement in the force: he collected money, he arrested criminals and he protected his friends. The field became smooth again. Now Bianco had ascended to Comisario General, atop the Division de Investigaciones, and he had taken his friend Fortunato up the ladder with him.
    Fortunato finished his mate and went to his bedroom to dress for the evening. From the large wooden wardrobe he selected his best jacket, a fine Italian wool woven in large black and white houndstooth checks. Marcela had gotten it for his birthday twenty years ago at a high priced store in the center, even though he insisted they could get the same thing cheaper in the suburbs. He still remembered the jacket’s magical radiance when he’d worn it out of the store, not realizing that two decades later the small lapels and bold pattern had gone ludicrously out of fashion. He matched it with a crimson tie and his black loafers, fished an old pair of cuff-links from a little box on the shelf. Peering into his wallet he was dismayed to find it a bit light. One should always have a bit extra for an evening out.
    He pulled a screwdriver from his night table and quickly unscrewed the floor of the wardrobe, prying it carefully up from a thin groove he’d cut in the corner. Looking back at him from beneath the panel, in orderly rows of tight green bundles, sat half a million dollars in United States currency.
    The money had accumulated almost by itself, secreted into the little space when Marcela was out. He had dispensed some of it to needy fellow policemen or to crime victims who especially moved him. The children near the police station knew him as an infallible source of toys and sweets. But still it kept piling up, nearly filling the compartment allotted to it so that soon he would need to start a new compartment.
    What good had it done him, really? Even at the end, with Marcela, when he invented a new fiction of a special medical fund for policemen’s families, she’d refused. “It already is , Miguel. I prefer to die with dignity in my home, not chasing after impossible hopes.”
    He sat on