Target in the Night (17 page)

That's when the prosecutor Cueto took center stage and started making decisions designed to put a stop to the scandal. He maintained that Croce's hypotheses were wildly ridiculous and served only to hinder the investigation.

“We don't know what the alleged suspect that Croce is looking for has anything to do with the murder. No one around here knows that man, he has no connection to the victim. We're living through some pretty chaotic times, but we will not allow an old country inspector to go around doing whatever he wants.”

He had the state police transfer Yoshio right away to the jail in Dolores, for his own safety, as he said, while he proceeded with his own prosecutorial investigation. They hadn't found the murder weapon, but there were eyewitnesses who placed the suspect at the
place and time where and when the crime had been committed. Cueto did everything necessary to close the case and label it a sex crime. In a low voice, to whoever wanted to hear, the Prosecutor assured people that the Inspector could no longer be trusted and that he had to be removed. In the meantime, Croce continued to go about town as always, waiting for some new development. No one really knew what he was thinking, or why, or why he believed that Dazai wasn't guilty.

One night, at dinnertime, Renzi ran into Croce at the Madariaga Tavern. Sitting at the table by the side window, the Inspector was eating a rump roast with French fries, drawing small figures on the paper tablecloth with a pencil while he ate. Every once in a while he'd stop moving and stare into space, holding up his glass of wine.

In his work as a reporter, Renzi occasionally covered police stories, and he'd met a number of inspectors. Most were thugs without any morals who just liked having their position on the force so they could get women to sleep with them (especially the prostitutes) and acquire an upper hand into as many shady deals as possible. But Croce seemed different. He had the peaceful air of a paisano you could trust, Renzi thought—and all of a sudden he remembered the opinion that the editor at his newspaper, Luna, had about police inspectors.

“Who wouldn't want to be an inspector?” Old-Man Luna said to him one night. “Don't be so naïve, kid. Inspectors are the real heavies. Over forty, they've already put on some weight, they've seen everything, most have a few kills under their belts. Inspectors are men who've lived a lot, they have a ton of authority, they spend their time with delinquents and political strongmen,
always out at night, in cathouses and bars, getting whatever drugs they want, making easy money because everyone greases them: bookies, dealers, mafiosos, neighbors. They're our new heroes, kid. Always armed, they can get in anywhere, form a gang, knock down doors. They're specialists of evil, the damned, their job is to make sure idiots sleep at night, they do the dirty work on behalf of the beautiful. Moving between the law and the world of crime, they fly in between. Half and half, if someone changed the balance on them they wouldn't be able to survive. They're the guardians of our security. Society delegates to them the role of taking care of what no one wants to see,” Luna told him. “They do politics all the time, but they never get in as politicians, when they get involved in politics it's to take down some mid-level puppet, a mayor, a representative or two, but they never go any higher. They're clandestine heroes, always tempted to run themselves, but they never do. If they did they'd be done, they'd become too visible,” Luna told him that night over dinner at El Pulpito, schooling him, once again, on real life. “They do what they have to do and they endure beyond all the changes, they're eternal, they've always been there—” Luna hesitated at that point for a moment, Renzi remembered, then continued: “There's been famous police inspectors ever since the times of Rosas, sometimes they lose, like anyone else, they get killed or retired or sent to jail, but there's always another one right behind them to take their place. They're malevolent, my dear, but the level of evil in them is minimal compared to the men who give them their orders. Cops will give it to you straight, they're the ones in the trenches,” Luna concluded. “So don't be crazy, just write what they tell you.” I'm
going to do what he said, Renzi thought, remembering Old-Man Luna's advice when he saw Croce gesturing for him to come over.

“Join me for something to eat?” Croce asked.

“Yes, sure,” Renzi said. “It'll be a pleasure.”

He sat at the table with Croce and ordered a strip of short ribs and a lettuce and tomato salad, without onions.

“This store and tavern was the first thing built in town. The migrant laborers used to eat here at harvest time.” Renzi realized right away that the Inspector needed company. “When one is an inspector one starts to believe that one has managed to reduce the scale of death down to a personal dimension. And when I say death I mean murder. Somebody can be killed by accident,” Croce said, “but you can't
murder
someone by accident. If Mrs. X hadn't walked back home yesterday, for example, and if she hadn't turned at a certain corner, could she have avoided being murdered? She might have died anyway, that's true, but murdered? If death isn't the intended goal, it's not murder. That's why there's always a decision, and a motive. Not just a cause, but a motive.” He stopped. “Which is also why a pure crime is rare. If there's no motive, it's an enigma: we have the dead body, we have the suspects, but we don't have the cause. Or the cause doesn't correspond to the execution of the murder. This seems to be the case now. We have the dead body and we have a suspect.” He paused. “What we call motivation could be an unseen meaning, not because it's a mystery, but because the network of determinations is too vast. We have to concentrate, synthesize, find the fixed point. We have to isolate an item of fact and create a closed field, otherwise we'll never be able to solve the enigma.”

Drawing small figures on the tablecloth, the Inspector reconstructed the facts for himself, but also for Renzi. He always needed someone to speak to, someone to help him break out of his internal discourse, the words that went around and around in his head like a tune. When he spoke with someone he was forced to choose certain thoughts, it was impossible to say everything, he always tried to have his interlocutor reflect with him and arrive at his own conclusions even before him. That was how he could trust his reasoning, because someone else would have thought it with him. In this he was like everyone who was too intelligent—Auguste Dupin, Sherlock Holmes—and needed an assistant to think with him, and to keep him from falling into delirium.

“For Cueto the criminal is Yoshio and the motive is jealousy. A private crime, no one else is implicated. Closed case,” Renzi said.

“It seems to me that Cueto is always saying that things that appear to be different are really the same, while I'm interested in showing that things that appear to be the same are really different.
I'll teach them differences.
¹⁹
See?” he asked. “It's a duck, but if you look at it like this, instead, it's a rabbit.” Croce drew the outline of the duck-rabbit. “What does it mean
to see
something such as it is? It's not easy.” He looked down at the drawing he had sketched on the tablecloth. “A rabbit and a duck…

“Things are what we know them to be
before
we see them.” Renzi didn't understand where the Inspector was going. “We see things
according to
how we interpret them. It's called foresight: to know beforehand, to be forewarned.
²⁰
Out in the country, you follow the trail of a calf, you see the footprints on the dry earth, you know the animal is tired because the tracks are light, you orient yourself because the birds land to peck on the trail. You can't just randomly look for footprints, the tracker must first know what he's looking for: human, dog, puma. Then he can see. I'm like that too. You have to have a base first, only then can you can make inferences and deductions. That's why you see what you know,” he pointed out, “and why you can't see what you don't know. Discovering something is seeing what no one else has perceived yet in another way. That's the point.” Strange, Renzi thought, but he's right. “On the other hand, if I don't think of him as the criminal, his actions, his behavior, they don't make sense.” He paused, thinking. “Understanding,” he said when he snapped out of it, “is not discovering facts, or extracting logical inferences, and even less constructing theories. Understanding is simply a matter of adopting the right point of view to perceive reality. A sick man doesn't see the same world that a healthy man sees,” Croce said, losing himself in his thoughts again, but snapping
right out of it this time. “A sad man doesn't see the same world as a guy who's happy. Likewise, a policeman doesn't see the same reality as a journalist—begging your pardon,” he added, smiling. “I know reporters write with the solid intention of learning about the matter later.” He looked at him with a smile. Although he agreed, Renzi couldn't respond, he had food in his mouth. “It's like a game of chess, you have to wait for your opponent to make a move. Cueto wants to close the case, everyone in town wants the case to be closed, and I'm waiting for the evidence to break. I already have it, I know what happened, I saw it, but I can't prove it yet. Look.” Renzi moved closer to see what Croce was looking at. It was a group of people on a horse in a photograph from the newspaper. Croce had circled the figure of a jockey. “You know what a
simile
is.”

Renzi looked at him.

“It's all about distinguishing what something is from what it appears to be,” Croce continued. “
Noticing
something means stopping there, in front of it.” Croce stopped, as if he were waiting for something. The telephone rang then. Madariaga answered, looked at Croce, and made a cranking motion with his hand.

“A call from the police station in Tapalqué,” he said.

“Aha,” Croce said. “Good.” He got up and walked to the counter.

Renzi saw him nod his head yes, serious, and move his hand in the air as if the person on the telephone could see him.

“And when was this?

“Is there anyone with him?

“I'm on my way. Thanks, Leoni.”

Croce went up to the counter. “Add the dinner to my tab, my
Basque friend,” he said to Madariaga, and started toward the exit. He stopped at the table where Renzi was still sitting.

“There's been news. You can come along if you'd like.”

“Perfect. I'm taking this with me,” Renzi said, grabbing the paper with the drawing.

Night would have to finally fall before Sofía would clear up for him—“it's an expression”—the story of her family, between their comings and goings to the mirror on the table in the living room with the white lines, which gave them both a few long minutes of exhilaration and clarity, of instant happiness, followed by a sort of dark grief which in the end Sofía valorized by saying that it was only during those moments of coming down—“in the comedown”—that it was possible to be sincere and tell the truth, leaning over the glass table with a rolled-up bill to snort the uncertain whiteness of the salt of life.

“My father,” Sofía said, “always thought that his sons would marry country girls from good families with good last names. He sent my brother Lucio to study engineering in La Plata, because that's what he had done, and when he got there Lucio rented a room in a boarding house on Diagonal 80 which was run by a chronic student, a guy named Guerra. At the boarding house, on Fridays, they'd have this young woman come for the weekend, she rode over on a moped, the Vespa girl, they called her, she was really nice, an architecture student, living the life, as they say. Bimba, is the name she went by. A fun girl, she'd get there on Friday and stay through Sunday, she'd sleep with the six students who lived in the house, one at a time, of course, and sometimes she'd cook them meals or sit with them and drink
mate,
play cards, after doing them all.

“One afternoon, Lucio burned his hands in an explosion in the lab at
the college and had to get his hands bandaged like a boxer, and Bimba took care of him, she looked after him, he couldn't do anything on his own because of his hands. The following week, the next time she came back on Friday, she went straight to my brother's room, changed his bandages, shaved and bathed him, spoon-fed him, and they chatted and had a great time. That same weekend Lucio asked her to stay with him, he offered to pay by himself what all the others paid together so that she would please not go with the others, but Bimba laughed and stroked his hair, she listened to his stories and his plans, and then she went off to bed with the other guys, in the other rooms, while Lucio suffered, lying on the bed, his bandaged hands in the air and his head full of horrible images. He'd go out to the patio, hear laughing, happy voices. They call Lucio ‘Bear' because he's enormous and because he always looks sad, or kind of spaced out. Ever since he was a little kid his problem was always his innocence, he was always gullible, too trusting and too good. That night, when Bimba was in bed with Guerra, where she continued her rounds after Lucio, my brother could hear them laughing in bed, and he lost it. He got up, enraged, his hands bandaged, he kicked Guerra's door in and stormed into the room and knocked over the bedside table and the lamp that was on it. Guerra got up and started hitting Lucio, beating him—and my brother, as weak as he was, with his hands completely unusable, he fell to the ground right away and didn't defend himself, and Guerra kept kicking and insulting him, he wanted to kill him. At that point, Bimba jumped on Guerra, naked, and started scratching and yelling at him to leave Lucio alone, until finally they had to call the police.” Sofía paused. “But the extraordinary thing,” she went on, “is that my brother quit college, he left everything and came back to town and married Bimba. He brought her home, he imposed her on
the family and had kids with her, everyone knows that she used to be a working girl, and my mother is the only one who won't speak with her, she's always pretended that she was invisible, but no one else cares because Bimba is wonderful, she's so much fun. My sister and I love her, she's the one who taught us everything there is to know about life, and she's the one who took care of Lucio during all these lean times and kept the house running with the few savings still remaining from the years of grandeur. My father liked her, too, she must have reminded him of the Irishwoman. Still, he was disappointed, he wanted his sons and his sons' sons to be, as he said, country men, owners of estancias, men of influence and wealth, men with weight in local politics. He could have been a governor if he had wanted to, my father, but he never wanted to get into politics, he just wanted to control it from behind, and maybe what he imagined for his sons was a future as owners of large estancias, as senators or caudillos, but his sons went in a different direction—and Luca, after their confrontation over the factory, never wanted to see him or even step in this house ever again.”