Target in the Night (10 page)

They found two small balls of opium toward the back of the closet.

“I'm not innocent,” he said. “Because no one is innocent. I have
my transgressions, but they are not the ones that others attribute to me.”

“No one is accusing you … yet,” Croce said, addressing him informally. Yoshio realized that the Inspector distrusted him, like everyone else. “There's no need to get defensive ahead of time. Tell me, what did you do today?”

He had woken up at two in the afternoon, like always, he had had breakfast in his room, like always, he had done his exercises, like always, he had prayed.

“Like always,” Croce said. “Did anyone see you? Can anyone vouch for you?”

No one had seen him, everyone knew he was off from his nighttime duties in the afternoon, but no one could vouch for him. Croce asked him when he had last seen Durán.

“Not seen him today,” Yoshio answered, imitating gaucho-speak. “I haven't seen him the whole blessed day,” he corrected himself. “I'm the night porter, I'm a porter and I live by night and I know the secrets of everyone's life in the hotel, and everyone who knows that I know fears me. Everyone in the hotel knows that at the time Tony was killed I am always asleep.”

“And what do they fear, the ones who fear you?” Croce asked.

“Children pay for the sins of their parents. Mine is having slanted eyes and yellow skin,” Yoshio replied. “And that's why you're going to find me guilty, for being the most foreign of all the foreigners in this town of foreigners.”

Croce slapped him in the face with the back of his right hand, unexpectedly, hard. Yoshio's nose started bleeding, and he closed his eyes without making a sound, affronted.

“Don't get contrary with me, and don't you lie to me,” Croce said. “Write down that the suspect hit himself against the corner of the open window.”

Saldías, shocked and nervous, jotted down a few lines in his notebook. Yoshio dried his blood on his small, embroidered handkerchief. He was on the verge of crying.

“It wasn't me, Inspector. It wasn't me, it wouldn't ever be me,” Yoshio was standing stiff, livid. “I…I loved him.”

“It wouldn't be the first time that someone is killed for that reason,” Croce said.

“No, Inspector. He was very good to me, he was a friend, he honored me with his trust. He was a gentleman—”

“So why was he killed?”

Croce moved about the room restlessly. His hand hurt. He had done what he had to do, he wasn't there to feel sorry for anyone, he was there to interrogate a criminal. Sometimes he got carried away with an excess of anger that he couldn't control, the servant-like humility of the Japanese man exasperated him. But the slap across the face had forced him to react, and now Yoshio was starting to give his real version of events.

He said that Durán was unhappy, that just yesterday he had insinuated that he intended to leave soon, but he had certain affairs to resolve first. He was waiting for something, Yoshio didn't know what. That is all the Japanese man declared, in his own way he explained everything he knew, without actually saying anything.

“You're going to need a lawyer, my man,” the Inspector said to him, and became pensive. “Let me see your hand.” Yoshio looked at him, surprised. “Like this,” Croce said, turning Yoshio's palms face
up. “Squeeze my arm. Harder. That's as hard as you can squeeze?” Yoshio looked at him, confused. The Inspector released his hands; Yoshio kept them like that, in the air, like two dead flowers. “We'll take him to the station,” Croce said. “There'll be trouble, for sure, when we take him out of the hotel.”

And there was. The neighbors crowded around the hotel entrance, as soon as they saw Yoshio they started insulting him, calling him a “murderer,” and trying to strike him.

An old man named Unzué threw a rock that hit Yoshio on the forehead. Calesita the Madman started spinning in place and screaming obscenities. Souto's sister rushed up, pushed against Saldías's arms (who was trying to cover Yoshio), bent her gray face forward, and spit on the criminal's face.

“Murderer!” the woman yelled, hatefully but with an impassive look, as if she were reciting a line, or sleeping.

Prosecutor Cueto showed up in the middle of the mess. He told everyone to settle down, assuring them that he was there to make sure justice was carried out. He was a man of about forty years, thin and tall, although from a distance he looked deformed. There was a moment of calm, and the Prosecutor went into the hotel to speak with Inspector Croce.

“What does the police have to say?” he said as he walked in. When Yoshio saw the Prosecutor come in, he turned away and stood facing the wall.

Cueto had a stealthy way of moving, at once violent and sly, and he insulted everyone as a matter of principle. He produced a stiff smile and brought his left fingers together as if he were about to ask something.

“And what does the pansy Jap have to say for himself?”

“Nothing's settled yet. Yoshio's been detained, we're going to take him to the station as the leading suspect. Which doesn't mean that he's guilty,” Croce explained.

Cueto looked at him with a false expression of surprise, and smiled again.

“Give her a good beating first, that'll get her talking. A simple procedural suggestion, Inspector. You know.”

“Our opinion has already been formed,” the Inspector said.

“Mine too, Croce. And I don't understand that plural of yours, ‘our.'”

“We'll be writing up the report and we'll present the charges tomorrow. You can proceed with your work after that.”

“Can you tell me,” Cueto said, addressing Saldías, “why you didn't investigate that mulatto as soon as he arrived? Who was he? Why did he come here? Now we have this whole scandal to deal with.”

“We don't investigate people without cause,” Croce said.

“It's true, he didn't do anything illegal,” Saldías added timidly.

“That's exactly what you're supposed to find out. A guy shows up out of nowhere, he settles here, and the two of you don't know anything? Now that's strange.”

He's pressuring me, Croce thought, because he knows something and he wants to see if I know what he knows, too. And he wants to shut the case quickly by declaring it a sex crime.

“Whatever happens will be your responsibility, Croce, do you understand?” Cueto said, and went outside to harangue the crowd of people on the sidewalk.

He never called him Inspector, as if he didn't recognize the title. In fact, Cueto had been waiting for months for a chance to retire him, but he hadn't found the way yet. Maybe now things would change. From the street they could hear shouts and angry voices.

“We're heading out,” Croce said. “You think I'm afraid of those idiots?”

The three of them walked out and stood outside the hotel entrance.

“Murderer! Degenerate Japo! Justice! We want justice!” the people around the door shouted.

“Get out of the way. I don't want any trouble,” Croce said, moving forward. “Anyone comes close, you get a night in jail.”

The crowd moved back as they moved forward. Yoshio refused to cover his face. Proud and diminutive, very pale, he walked through a sort of corridor that was formed from the front of the hotel to the car as the people shouted and yelled insults at him.

“Folks, we're close to solving the case, I'd ask for your patience,” the Prosecutor said, having immediately taken over the scene.

“We'll take care of it, boss,” one man said.

“Murderer! Faggot!” they shouted again, and started pushing in.

“That's enough,” Croce said, taking out his weapon. “I'm taking him to the station and he'll stay there until he has his trial.”

“You're all corrupt!” a drunk yelled.

A myopic, nervous man approached. He was the editor of
El Pregón
, the local newspaper.

“You have the guilty party, Inspector.”

“Don't write what you don't know,” Croce said.

“Are you going to tell me what I know?”

“I'm going to throw you in jail for violating the confidentiality of the investigation.”

“Violating what? I don't follow, Inspector,” the myopic said. “It's the usual tension between power and the press.” He shrugged, turning toward the crowd to make sure everyone heard him.

“The usual tension of stupid-ass journalists,” the Inspector said.

The editor of
El Pregón
smiled, as if the insult were a personal triumph. The press would not allow itself to be intimidated.

Inspector Flies Off the Handle
—would be the headline, for sure. What did “off the handle” mean? Croce wondered for a moment, while Saldías took advantage of the confusion to get Yoshio into the back of the car.

“Let's go, Inspector,” he said.

What they called the police station was a rural outpost with one guard posted inside. It was basically a hovel with a room set aside to lock up the bums who endangered the crops by lighting fires near the fields to heat up their
mate
, or who slaughtered animals from the ranches in the area to make themselves a little barbeque.

Croce lived in another room in the same small building. That night—after leaving Yoshio locked up in the cell with the guard at the door—he went out to the vine-covered patio to drink
mate
with Saldías. The light from the oil lamp illuminated the dirt patio and the near side of the station.

In the Inspector's mind, the hypothesis that a Japanese night porter, quiet and friendly as an old lady, would kill a fortune-hunting Puerto Rican did not add up.

“Unless it was a crime of passion.”

“But in that case he would've stayed in the room, hugging the body.”

Croce and Saldías agreed that if Yoshio had let himself be driven by anger or jealousy, he wouldn't have behaved as he did. He would have stumbled out of the room with the knife in his hand, or they would have found him sitting on the floor, staring at the dead man's face in shock. Croce had seen a lot of cases like that. This didn't seem to be a case of violent emotion.

“Too much stealth,” the Inspector said. “And too visible.”

“The only thing missing was someone taking a picture of him while he was doing the killing,” Saldías agreed.

“As if he were sleeping, or
acting
.”

An idea seemed to push against the external tissue of Croce's brain. Like a bird trying to get into a cage from outside. His thoughts would escape sometimes, flutter away, so he would say them out loud.

“As if he were sleepwalking, or a zombie,” he said.

As if by instinct Croce understood that Yoshio had been caught in a trap that he didn't quite comprehend. A mass of facts had fallen upon him from which he would never be able to free himself. The weapon hadn't been located, but several eyewitnesses had seen him enter and leave Durán's room. It was an open-and-shut case.

The Inspector's mind had become a flock of mad thoughts flying too fast for him to catch. Like the wings of a pigeon, the uncertainties about the guilt of the Japanese night porter flapped fleetingly inside the cage, but not the conviction about his innocence.

“For example, the fifty-dollar bill. Why was it down there?”

“He dropped it,” Saldías said, following his train.

“I don't think so. They left it on purpose.”

Saldías looked at him, he didn't understand. But he trusted Croce's power of deduction, so he sat still, waiting.

There was over five thousand dollars in the room which hadn't been taken. It wasn't a robbery.
So we'd think that it wasn't a robbery
. Croce started pacing
in his mind
, out in the field, to clear up his ideas. The Japanese had been the barbarians in World War II, but after that they'd been model servants, servile and laconic. There was a prejudice in their favor: Japanese never commit crimes. This was an exception, a detour. That's what it was about.

“Barely 0.1% of crimes in Argentina are committed by Japanese,” Croce said, target shooting in the dark, and fell asleep. He dreamt that he was riding a horse bareback again, like when he was little. He saw a hare in the lake. Or was it a duck? Up in the air, he saw a figure, like a frieze. And against the horizon he saw a duck that turned into a rabbit. The image appeared very clearly in the dream. He woke up and kept talking, as if resuming the paused conversation. “How many Japanese do you think live in our province?”

“In the province I don't know, but in Argentina
¹⁰
,” Saldías improvised. “Out of a population of 23 million inhabitants, there must be some 32,000 Japanese.”

“Let's say there are 8,500 Japanese in the province, 850 in the district. They might be dry cleaners, florists, bantamweight boxers,
acrobats. Maybe a purse maker or two with slender hands, but no murderers.”