Target in the Night (14 page)

“You can set up here, then, at my desk, if you need to type anything. The teleprinter is in the back, Dorita can help you. You can use our telephone, too, if you'd like, it'll be our pleasure.” He paused. “If it's possible, I would ask only that you mention our small, independent newspaper,
El Pregón
. We've been here since the times of the Indian Wars, my grandfather founded the paper to keep the agricultural producers connected. Here, let me give you my card.”

“Yes, of course, thank you. I'll send something tonight, before they go to press in the Capital. I'll use your telephone now, if I could.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” Gregorius said. “Go on, certainly, go on,” he said, leaving Renzi alone in his office.

After dealing with the long-distance operator, Renzi was able to get through to the newsroom in Buenos Aires.

“How's it going, Junior? This is Emilio, let me speak with Luna. I'm calling from this shitty little town. How's everything there? Any women asking for me? Any recent suicides in the newsroom?”

“Did you just get there?”

“I was going to call you from the bar, but you can't imagine what an ordeal it is to make a phone call from the provinces. Anyway, let me speak with Luna.”

After a pause and a series of rustling, rattling noises, like wind blowing against a chicken coop wire fence, the thick voice of Old-Man Luna came on the line. Luna was the newspaper's editor.

“Come on kid, remember, we're ahead of the game here. There was a small mention on Channel 7, but we can beat everyone to the scoop on this. The town's not the story. The story's that an American was murdered out in the countryside.”

“A Puerto Rican.”

“Same shit.” There was a pause. Renzi could picture Old-Man Luna lighting a cigarette. “Apparently the Embassy is going to step in, or the Consulate. Just imagine, what if he was killed by some guerrilla group.”

“Stop kidding around, Mr. Luna.”

“See if you can make something up that we can use, everything's
under water around here. Send a photograph of the dead man.”

“No one really knows why he came to town exactly.”

“Go with that,” Luna said. But, as usual, he was already onto something else, he did ten things at once and said more or less the same thing to everyone. “Hurry up, kid, we'll be going to press soon,” he yelled. Then there was a strange silence, like a hollow, and Renzi realized that Luna was pressing the mouthpiece of the telephone against his body and speaking with someone else in the newsroom. He held on, in case there was anything else.

“And where am I supposed to get a photograph?” But Luna had already hung up.

Everyone at
El Pregón
was watching a television, set up on a sliding cart off to one side of the room. Channel 7, from the Capital, had requested a coaxial connection with the channel from the town. The local newscast was going to be shown nationwide. On the screen, behind the gray stripes that went up and down repeatedly, was the front of the Plaza Hotel, with the prosecutor, Cueto, entering and coming back out, very active, smiling. He was explaining, giving his version of the events. The camera followed him to the corner. There, looking directly into the camera with a smug little smile, the prosecutor concluded that the case was solved.

“Everything has been cleared up,” he said. “But we have some differences with the old policeman in charge of the investigation. The issue is a procedural matter that will be settled in court. I've asked the judge in Olavarría to declare preventive custody for the accused and have him transferred to the prison in Dolores.”

The channel resumed its local programming, covering the
preparations for a horse-and-duck polo match between the civilian and the military teams at the summit near the town of Pringles. Gregorius turned off the television and walked Renzi to the door of the newspaper offices.

The reporter from
El Mundo
checked in at the Plaza Hotel, rested for a while, and went back out to take a look around town and interview a few of the residents. No one would tell him what everyone knew, or what was so well known to everyone that it needed no explanation. They all looked at him sarcastically, as if he were the only one who didn't understand what was going on. It was quite a strange story, with different angles and multiple versions. Like any other, Renzi thought.

By the end of the afternoon Renzi had gathered all the available information and was ready to write his article. He returned to his hotel room, looked over his notes, and made a series of diagrams, underlining several phrases in his black notebook. Then he went down to the dining room and ordered a beer and French fries.

It was after midnight when he went back to the offices of the local newspaper, knocked on the iron shutters, and was let in by the night guard, Don Moya, who always hobbled around with an odd-looking limp, having been thrown in '52 by a horse that had left him with a bum leg. Moya turned on the lights of the empty newsroom for him, and Renzi sat at Gregorius's desk and typed out the article on a Remington with a missing
a
.

He wrote his first story in one fell swoop, looking at his notes, trying to make it what his editor Luna called a colorful article with a hook. He started with a description of the town because
he realized that this would be of interest in Buenos Aires, where almost all the readers were like him, city people who thought the countryside was peaceful and boring, sparsely populated with folk who wore Basque berets, smiled like idiots, and said yes to everything. A world of simple, honest people who spent their lives working the land, faithful to the Argentine tradition of the gaucho and loyal friendships. Renzi realized that it was all a farce, in just one afternoon he had heard more mean and hostile comments than he could have imagined. In one version Durán was what is known as a carrier, someone who brings in undeclared money to negotiate, on behalf of a fictitious company, the prices for the purchase of the harvest to avoid paying taxes.
¹⁵
Everyone had told Renzi about the bagful of dollars that Croce had found in the storage room in the basement of the hotel. This was probably the main clue needed to solve the crime. The most interesting aspect, of course—as is often the case in these matters—was the dead man. Investigating the victim is the key to every criminal investigation, Renzi wrote, and to this end everyone who had interacted or had business with the deceased had to be questioned. Renzi maintained the suspense, centering the affair on the foreigner who arrived in the small town without anyone knowing why exactly. He alluded vaguely to a romance with one of the daughters of one of the main families in town.

The investigation would have to begin with those who had a motive to kill the victim. Renzi soon understood, however, that
everyone in town had motives and reasons to kill Tony Durán. First of all, the sisters, although according to Renzi it was strange to think that they would want to kill him. They would have killed him themselves, as several residents told the reporter. And it's true, because in this town, honestly, one of the hotel managers said, women don't hire anyone else to do their dirty work for them, they go and wipe whoever it is out themselves. At least that's what's always happened around here in crimes of passion, the interviewed reported proudly, as if defending some grand local tradition.

Renzi wrote that, according to sources, the leading suspect, a hotel employee of Japanese origins, had been detained, and that Inspector Croce had discovered a leather bag, brown, with nearly one hundred thousand dollars in fifty- and one hundred-dollar bills, in the storage room in the basement of the hotel. Apparently, Renzi added, the suspect lowered the satchel with the money from the room with a service lift used in the past to send meals up for
room service
. None of this had been officially reported, but several sources in town mentioned these facts. We note, he concluded, that officials have not confirmed or rejected these statements. The editor of the local newspaper (and Renzi took the opportunity to name
El Pregón
) has criticized the way the investigation was being carried out by the authorities. Who was the money for? And why had they left it in a storage room full of lost objects instead of taking it with them? These were the questions with which the article closed.

Renzi made a few corrections with a red pen he found on the desk, and dictated the article over the telephone to his newspaper's typist, repeating every punctuation point, coma, period, paragraph
break, colon, and semicolon. The article opened with a description of the town seen from above, as if it were the chronicle of a traveler arriving in some mysterious territory. This appealed because it lent the town a concrete existence, and for once it wasn't mentioned merely as an appendix of the neighboring, larger town of Rauch.

Coming across the hills, the entire town can be seen below, from the lake from which it draws its name to the large houses on the surrounding hills.

It was a brief article, with a
spaghetti-western
title,
Yankee Murdered in Western Town
, different from the title Renzi had called in. People read it the following day, with the main events synthesized in a ridiculous order (the hotel, the dead body, the bag with the money), as if the reporter from Buenos Aires, after going around asking questions, had allowed himself to be misled by all his informants.

He seemed nervous, out of it, the night guard Moya said, adding that after hearing him dictate the story, he walked him to the door and saw him head toward the Social Club for a drink. He was accompanied at that point by Bravo, the society reporter, who suddenly appeared as if he had been awakened by the sound of the metal shutters of the newspaper offices.

Sofía was silent for a while, watching the afternoon light waning in the garden, then resumed the somewhat maddened rhythm of the story she had heard and repeated, or imagined, many times before.

“My father made himself out to be an aristocrat. That's why he sought out my mother, for her family name. She's an Ibarguren,” Sofía said. “My father married for love the first time around, with Regina O'Connor,
but as I was saying before, she left him for another. My father never recovered, he couldn't conceive of anyone abandoning him or treating him with contempt. Deep down he always doubted if my brother was really his, he treated him with extreme deference, like one would a bastard. And also, unlike my brother Lucio, my brother Luca was always hostile, and this hostility became a kind of demonic pride, an absolute conviction, because when his mother abandoned them and left town, my father rescued him, and brought him back, and since then he's lived with us, at home.”

Renzi stood up.

“What do you mean, where did he rescue him from?”

“He brought him home and raised him, he didn't care where he came from.”

“And the theater director? Was he the father, the possible father?” Renzi asked.

“It doesn't matter, because his mother always said that Luca was my father's son, that you could tell a mile away. Unfortunately, he's your father's son, Regina used to say, you can tell right away because he's so forlorn, and a lunatic. If he wasn't his son, he wouldn't have gotten into the situation he's in now, his mother said, just about killing himself, ruining his life over an obsession.”

“What is this, a melodrama?” Renzi asked.

“Of course, what did you expect? They brought him home and raised him like the rest of us, and he never saw his mother again. She finally moved back to Dublin, she lives there now and doesn't want anything more to do with us, or with this place, or her sons. The Irishwoman. My father still has a photograph of her on his desk. That woman, she was out of place here, can you imagine? She was too standoffish to be an Argentine mother, she could ride a horse better than any gaucho,
but she hated the country out here. ‘What kind of shit do these shits think?' she used to say. She blamed the countryside for everything, the infinite tedium of the countryside, people wandering down the empty streets of the small town like the walking dead. Nature only produces destruction and chaos, it isolates people, every gaucho is a Robinson Crusoe riding on a horse like a shadow. Isolated thoughts, solitary, light as baling wire, heavy as a bag of maize, no one can get out, everyone's tied to the deserted fields, they head out on horseback to inspect their property, to see if the fence posts are in good shape, if the animals have stayed near the watering spring, if the storm's coming—and in the late afternoon, by the time they come back home, they've been made dumb by the boredom and the emptiness. My brother says he can still hear her curse at night, that sometimes he speaks with her, that he always sees her. She couldn't have stayed in this town, the Irishwoman. When she ran away, pregnant, my father made life impossible for her, he wouldn't let her see her other son, by court order, everyone consented to punishing her. He wouldn't let her see Lucio, she would send messages, presents, she would plead, she'd come to the house, but my father would have servants throw her out. Sometimes he'd tell her to wait in the square and he'd pass slowly by in the car so she could see her son, little Lucio looking at her through the window without waving, his eyes full of surprise.” Sofía paused, and smoked pensively. “She was pregnant with Luca (two hearts beating in one body, thump thump) and Lucio looking at her through the rear window of the car, can you picture it? Finally she left the kids and went back to her own country.”