Target in the Night (31 page)

“Yeah, they pay,” Croce said. “They send money or cigarettes to the girls so they'll stick their tits out the windows upstairs.”

In the vast, empty room with the beds undone, Croce had set up a kind of desk using two old fruit crates. He sat, facing the window, taking notes.

“They left me alone. It's better this way, so I can think and sleep in peace.”

He seemed calm. He'd put on his dark suit and was smoking his
small cigar. His bag was all packed up. When Renzi told him that Luca had accepted the summons from the court, Croce smiled with the same mysterious look as always.

“That's the news I was waiting for,” he said. “Now the matter will be settled.”

He jotted a few things in his notebook, behaving as if he were in his own office. Croce confused the noises he heard through the window—voices, murmurings, distant radios—with the sounds of the past. He thought the footsteps and the creaking noise in the corridor, on the other side of the door, were the footsteps and rubber wheels of the girl who came around the offices in town with the coffee cart. But when he got up he saw it was the nurse with the medicine, a white liquid in a small plastic cup that Croce drank in a single swig.

Renzi gave him a summary of his investigations at the Archives. He'd followed a series of clues in the newspapers and found that the transactions led to a ghost finance company from Olavarría that had purchased the factory's mortgage to appropriate the assets. Apparently, the banking code or the legal name was Alas 1212
.

“Alas? So Cueto is behind it.”

“The name that appears is that of a certain Alzaga.”

“Of course, that's his partner.”

“This is what's at stake,” Renzi said, showing him the cutout he'd found in the Archives. “They're also speculating with the land. The Old Man is opposed.”

“Good,” Croce said.

Cueto, who was once the family lawyer, commandeered the operation to appropriate the shares for the new corporation.
Everything was done under the table, which is why Luca blamed his father—with good reason, for the Old Man trusted Cueto and didn't realize until some time later that Cueto was the black monk of the story. But now it seemed that the Old Man had distanced himself from Cueto.

“And the trial? Luca doesn't know what's in store for him.”

“But he knows what he wants,” Croce said, and started elaborating a new hypothesis based on the information that Renzi had just brought him. Of course they wanted to keep the money from reaching Luca, but the crime was still an enigma.
The Intrigue
, Croce wrote on a piece of paper.
The factory, a Center, the surrounding land, the speculation with the real estate.
He sat still for a moment. “You have to be able to think like the enemy,” he said all of a sudden. “Someone who acts both like a mathematician and a poet, someone who follows a logical line but at the same time associates freely. A mind that builds syllogisms
and
metaphors. The same element enters into two different ways of thinking. We're facing an intelligence without limits. What in one case might be a simile, in the other is an equivalence. Understanding a fact hinges on the possibility of seeing the connection. Nothing is worth anything in and of itself, everything is worth something in relationship to other factors, but we don't know what the other factors are. Durán,” Croce said, and drew an ex on the paper, “a Puerto Rican from New Jersey, a U.S. citizen, meets the Belladona sisters in Atlantic City”—Croce drew two exes on the paper—“and comes here after them. Did the girls know or did they not know what was happening? That's the first unknown. They have dodged the question, as if they were protecting someone. The jockey was
the executor: he served as a substitute for another. They may have murdered Tony for no reason at all, just to keep anyone from investigating the real reason.
A diversionary tactic.
³⁹
They killed him to divert our attention elsewhere,” he said. They had the dead body, they had the suspects, but the motive was of a different order. This seemed to be the case. A diversionary tactic, he wrote, and handed the paper to Renzi.

Emilio looked at the piece of paper with the underlined phrases and the checks and exes, and understood that Croce wanted him to reach the same conclusions as he had. This way he could be certain that he'd hit right on target.

Croce found a repeating mechanism: the criminal tended to resemble the victim so as to erase his tracks.

“They leave a corpse to send a message. It's the structure of the mafia: they use bodies as if they were words. And that's how it was with Tony. They were trying to say something. We know the cause of Tony's death, but what was the reason?” Croce remained quiet, looking at the bare trees through the window. “They didn't have to kill him, poor Christ,” he said after a while.

He seemed nervous and tired. It was late afternoon and the block he was in was entirely in shadows now. They went outside to walk in the park of the asylum. Croce wanted to know if Luca was relaxed. He was betting everything on that lawsuit, he wished he could help him, but there was no way to help him.

“That's why I'm here,” he said. “You can't live without making
enemies, you'd have to lock yourself in a room and never leave. Not move, not do anything. Everything is always more stupid and more incomprehensible than what one can deduce.”

He got lost in his thoughts. When Croce came back, he said he'd go return to his burrow and keep working. The walk was over. Renzi watched Croce head off toward his block. He walked in a nervous zigzag, swaying slightly, as if he were about to lose his balance. He stopped before he went in, turned around, raised his hand, and waved weakly in the distance.

Was that goodbye? Renzi didn't like the idea, but he didn't have much left. They were pressuring him at the newspaper to get back to Buenos Aires, they barely published his articles anymore, they thought the case was closed. Junior told him to stop fooling around and to come back to work on the literary pages. Kidding, Junior had proposed that Renzi put together a special on gauchesque literature—since he was already out in the country.

When he got back to the hotel, Renzi found the Belladona sisters sitting at a table in the lounge. He went to the bar, ordered a beer, and watched the twins reflected in the mirror behind the bottles. Ada was speaking excitedly, Sofía was agreeing, there was much intensity between them, too much …
If it was a man
. Every time he got himself in deep, Renzi remembered something he'd read. The line came from a story by Hemingway, “The Sea Change,” which Renzi had translated for his newspaper's Culture section.
If it was a man
. Literature doesn't change, you can always find what you are looking for there. Life, instead … But what was life? Two sisters in the bar of a provincial hotel. As if she were reading
his thoughts, Sofía waved at him, smiling. Emilio raised his mug to toast in the air. Then Sofía sat up and called him over, a flare. Renzi left his glass on the bar and walked to their table.

“How're the girls doing?”

“Sit down, have a drink with us,” Sofía said.

“No, I'm moving on.”

“You're going back already?” Ada asked.

“I'm staying for the trial.”

“We'll miss you,” Sofía said.

“What's going to happen?” Emilio asked.

“Everything will work out. Everything always works out around here,” Ada said.

There was a silence.

“I wish I was a fortune-teller,” Emilio said. “So I could read your thoughts.”

“We take turns with our thoughts,” Ada said.

“Yes,” Sofía said. “When one of us thinks, the other rests.”

They kidded around for a while longer, told him some local jokes, fairly loopy,
⁴⁰
until Renzi finally said goodnight and went up to his room.

He needed to work, organize his notes. Renzi was restless, scattered, he felt as if he'd never been with Sofía.
I was inside her
, he thought, a stupid thought. The thought of an idiot. “You screw a chick, she never forgives you,” Junior would say, with his little
cynical and winning tone of voice. “
Unconsciously
, of course,” he'd clarify, opening his eyes wide, knowingly. “Look, Eve had the first orgasm in female history, after that everything went to hell. And Adam had to go off to work.” He'd had loads of women, Junior had, and to every one of them he'd explain his theory about the unconscious battle of the sexes.

After a while Emilio picked up the telephone and asked for his answering service in Buenos Aires. Nothing important. Amalia, the woman who cleaned his apartment, asked if she should keep going on Tuesdays and Thursdays even though he wasn't there. A woman who didn't leave her name had called and left a telephone number. Renzi did not bother to write it down. Who could it be? Maybe Nuty, the cashier from the Minimax supermarket around the corner from his house, with whom he'd gone out a couple of times. There were two messages from his brother Marcos, calling from Canada. He wanted to know, the woman from the answering service told Renzi, if he'd already emptied out the house in Mar del Plata and put it up for sale. He also wanted to know if it was true that Perón was coming back to Argentina.

“What did you say?” Renzi asked.

“Nothing.” The woman seemed to smile in the silence. “I only take messages, Mister Emilio.”

“Perfect,” Renzi said. “If my brother calls again, tell him that I haven't checked my messages and that I'm not back in Buenos Aires yet.”

The family house on España Street had been left vacant for a few months after his father's death. Renzi had traveled to Mar del Plata and gotten rid of the furniture and the clothes and the pictures on the walls. He'd boxed the books and put them in storage,
he'd see what to do with them when the house was finally sold. There were also a lot of papers and photographs, and even a few letters Renzi had written his father when he was a student in La Plata. The only thing he took with him from the bookshelves was an old edition of
Bleak House
that his father had purchased in a used bookstore somewhere. Renzi had discovered—or he thought he'd discovered—a connection between one of the characters in the Dickens novel and Melville's “Bartleby.” He thought he might be able to write an article about this and send it to Junior, along with the translation of the chapter from the Dickens novel, so his newspaper would leave him alone.
⁴¹

Apparently his brother was going to cancel his trip. If he finally sold the house and they split the money, he'd get about thirty thousand dollars. With this money Renzi could quit the paper and live a while without working. Dedicate himself to finishing his novel. Isolated, without any distractions. Out in the country. The expiatory goat runs away to the deserted countryside.
Straight to where the sun hides / inland I must ride
. But living in the country was like living on the moon. The monotonous landscape, the chimango birds of prey circling above, the girls who amuse themselves.

39
   
Croce had intuitively understood the basic thought process. The evidence was known a priori, no empirical discovery could invalidate it. Croce called this method of deduction
playing it by ear
. And he wondered: Where's the music when one plays it by ear?

40
   
A man in the country, riding a spirited colt in the plains at dawn, a splotch on the bright line of the horizon. In the distance, a gaucho drinking
mate
under the eaves of his country house. When the rider passes in front of the house, the country man at the house says hello. “Nice little morning,” the rider says. “I made it myself,” the other answers, adjusting the shawl on his shoulders.

41
   
“
Chapter 10
of the novel “The Law-Writer,” is centered around the copyist Nemo (No One). Melville (who wrote “Bartleby” in November of 1853) probably read that chapter of the Dickens novel in April of that year, when it was first published in
Harper's
magazine in New York. Dickens's
Bleak House
which narrates the story of an endless trial and describes the world of the courts and its judges, was much admired by Kafka” (Note by Renzi).

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