Target in the Night (7 page)

“I'll say it's okay, then,” the rancher from Luján said. “But I didn't lose. Pay the bets, go on.” He looked at Ledesma. “We'll go again whenever you want, just find me a neutral field. There are races in Cañuelas next month, if you want.”

“I thank you,” Ledesma said.

But Ledesma didn't accept the rematch and they never raced again. They say the sisters tried to convince Old Man Belladona
to buy the horse from Luján, including the jockey, because they wanted the race to be restaged, and that the Old Man refused—but those are only stories and conjectures.

March arrived and the sisters stopped going swimming at the pool in the Náutico. After this, Durán would wait for them at the bar of the hotel, or he'd say goodbye to them at the edge of town and walk to the lake, making a stop at Madariaga's Tavern to have a gin. He was seen at the bar of the hotel almost every night, he kept up a tone of immediate confidence, of natural sympathy, but slowly he started growing more isolated. That's when the versions of his motives for coming to town started changing, people would say that they'd seen him, or that he'd been seen, that he'd said something to them, or that someone had said something—and they'd lower their voices. He looked erratic, distracted, and he seemed comfortable only in the company of Yoshio, while the latter appeared to become his personal assistant, his cicerone and his guide. The Japanese night porter was leading him in an unexpected direction that no one entirely liked. They swam naked together in the lake during siesta time. Several times Yoshio was seen waiting for Durán on the edge of the water with a towel, and then drying Tony vigorously before serving him his afternoon snack on a tablecloth stretched out under the willows.

Sometimes they'd go out at dawn and fish at the lake, rent a boat and watch the sunrise as they cast their lines. Tony was born on an island in the Caribbean, and the interconnected lakes in the south of the province, with their peaceful banks and their islets with grazing cows, made him laugh. Still, he liked the empty
landscape of the plains, beyond the gentle current of the water lapping on the reeds, as they saw it from the boat. Expanding fields, sunburnt grass, and occasionally a water spring between the groves and the roads.

By then the story had changed. No longer a Don Juan, no longer a fortune seeker who had come after two South American heiresses, he was now a new kind of traveler, an adventurer who trafficked in dirty money, a neutral smuggler who snuck dollars through customs using his North American passport and his elegant looks. He had a split personality, two faces, two backgrounds. It was impossible to reconcile the versions because the other, secret life attributed to him was always new and surprising. A seductive foreigner, an extrovert who revealed everything, but also a mysterious man with a dark side who fell for the Belladona sisters and got lost in the whirlwind that followed.

The whole town participated in fine-tuning and improving the stories. The motives and the point of view changed, but not the character. The events themselves hadn't actually changed, only how they were being perceived. There were no new facts, only different interpretations.

“But that's not why they killed him,” Madariaga said, and looked at the Inspector again in the mirror. Nervous, his riding crop in his hand, Croce was still pacing from one end of the tavern to the other.

The last light from the late March afternoon seeped in, sliced by the window grilles. Outside, the stretched-out fields dissolved like water in the dusk.

They spoke from late afternoon until midnight, sitting on the wicker chairs on the porch facing the back gardens. Every so often Sofía would get up and go into the house to refresh the ice or get another bottle of white wine, still talking from the kitchen, or as she went in or out the glass door, or when she leaned on the railing of the porch, before sitting down again, showing off her suntanned thighs, her bare feet in sandals with her red-painted toes—her long legs, fine ankles, perfect knees—which Emilio Renzi looked at in a daze as he followed the girl's serious and ironic voice, coming and going in the evening—like a tune—only occasionally interrupting her with a comment, or to write a few words or a line in his black notebook, like someone who wakes up in the middle of the night and turns on a light to record on any available piece of paper a detail from a dream they have just had with the hope of remembering it in its entirety the next day.

Sofía had realized long ago that her family's story seemed to belong to everyone, as if it were a mystery that the whole town knew and told over and over again, without ever managing to completely decipher. She had never worried about the different versions and alterations, because the various stories formed part of the myth that she and her sister, the Antigones (or was it the Iphigenias?) of the legend didn't need to clarify—“to lower themselves to clarify,” as she said. But now, after the crime, amid all the confusion, it might be necessary to attempt to reconstruct—“or understand”—what had happened. Family stories are all alike, she said, the characters always repeat—there is always a reckless uncle; a woman in love who ends up a spinster; there is always someone who is mad, a recovering alcoholic, a cousin who likes to wear women's clothing at parties; someone who fails, someone who succeeds; a suicide—but in this case what complicated everything was that their
family story was superimposed with the story of the town.

“My grandfather founded the town,” she said disdainfully. “There was nothing here when he arrived, just the empty land. The English built the train station and put him in charge.”

Her grandfather was born in Italy and studied engineering and was a railroad technician, and when he arrived in Argentina they brought him out to the deserted plains and put him at the head of a branch line, a stop—a railroad crossing, really—in the middle of the pampas.

“And now sometimes I think,” she said later, “that if my grandfather hadn't left Turin, Tony wouldn't have died. Or even if we hadn't met him in Atlantic City, or if he had stayed with his grandparents in Río Piedras, then they wouldn't have killed him. What do you call that?”

“It's called life,” Renzi said.

“Pshaw
⁸
!” she said. “Don't be so corny. What's wrong with you? They picked him out on purpose and killed him, on the exact day, at the exact hour. They didn't have that many opportunities. Don't you understand? You don't get that many chances to kill a man like that.”

8
   
Sofía liked to use the onomatopoeias she always saw reading comics throughout her childhood.

4

The cleaning lady found Durán dead on the floor of his hotel room, stabbed in the chest. She heard the phone ringing inside and went in when no one picked up, thinking the room was empty. It was two in the afternoon.

Croce was drinking vermouth in the bar of the hotel with Saldías then, so he didn't have to go anywhere to start the investigation.

“No one leaves the premises,” Croce said. “We'll take their statements before they can go.”

The occasional guests, the travelers, and the long-term lodgers stood around in groups of three or four, or sat on the leather chairs in the reception hall, whispering to each other. Saldías set up at a desk in the office of the hotel manager and called them in one at a time. He made a list, wrote everyone's personal and contact information, asked them exactly where in the hotel they had been at two o'clock, and told them that they remained at the disposal of the police and could be called back as witnesses anytime. Finally, he separated the ones who had been close to the scene of the event, or who had direct information about the murder, and asked them to wait in the dining room. The rest could go on about their normal activities, pending further notice.

“Four people were close to Durán's room at the time of the crime. They all say they saw someone suspicious. They should be questioned.”

“We'll start with them.”

Saldías realized that the Inspector was hesitant to go up and see the body. Croce didn't like the expression of the dead, that strange look of surprise and horror. He had seen plenty of them, too many, in all sorts of positions and from the oddest causes of death, but always with the same look of shock in their eye. His hope was always to be able to solve a crime without having to examine the corpse. Too many corpses, dead bodies everywhere, he said.

“We have to go upstairs,” Saldías said, and used an argument that Croce himself had used in similar circumstances. “It's better to look at everything before talking to the witnesses.”

“True,” Croce said.

Tony had been staying in the best room in the hotel. It faced out to the street corner and was isolated at the end of the hallway. Durán, dressed in black trousers and a white shirt, was lying on the floor in a pool of blood. He seemed as if he were about to smile. His eyes were open in a look that was at once frozen and terrifying.

Croce and Saldías stood before the body with that strange sort of complicity that forms between two men who look at a dead man together.

“Don't touch him,” Croce said. “Poor devil.”

The Inspector turned his back on the body and carefully started to examine the floor and the furniture. Everything in the room was in order,
at first sight.
Croce walked to the window facing
the square to see what you could see from the street, and also to see what you could see from the room if you looked out. The killer had probably stopped at least for a moment to look out the window and see if anyone could see what was happening inside the room. Or maybe there had been an accomplice downstairs who gave him a sign.

“He was killed when he opened the door.

“He was pushed back in,” Croce said, “and was killed right away. First he recognized the person who came in. Then he was surprised.” Croce walked back to the body. “The knife wound is very deep, very precise, it's the kind of blow used to kill a calf. A perfect strike, the killer used a local knife technique. Brought down from above, with force, the edge of the blade facing in, between the ribs. A clean blow,” he said, as if he were narrating a movie he had seen that afternoon. “There was no noise, just a moan. I'm sure the killer held him up so he wouldn't fall too hard. There's not that much blood. You hold the body up, like a sack of bones, and by the time you set your victim down, he's already dead. Short and chubby, the killer,” Croce concluded. He could tell from the wound that an ordinary blade had been used, it would be like many of the kitchen knives used in the country to slice beef. A carving knife, there were thousands of them in the province.

“I'm sure they threw the weapon into the lake,” the Inspector said, with a lost look in his eye. “A lot of knives at the bottom of the lake. When I was little I used to dive down there, and I'd always find one—”

“Knives?”

“Knives and bodies. It's a cemetery down there. Suicides, drunks,
Indians, women. Corpses and more corpses at the bottom of the lake. I saw an old man once, his hair long and white, it had kept growing. It looked like tulle in the clear water.” He paused. “The body doesn't rot in the water, the clothes do, that's why dead bodies float naked among the weeds. I've seen pale corpses on their feet with their eyes open, like big, white fish in an aquarium.”

Had he seen it, or dreamt it? He would suddenly have visions like that, Croce would, and Saldías would realize that the Inspector was already somewhere else, just for a moment, speaking with someone who wasn't there, chewing furiously on his extinguished cigar stub.

“Not that far away, out there, in the nightmare of the future. They come out of the water,” he said enigmatically, and smiled, as if he had just woken up.

They looked at each other. Saldías held him in high esteem and understood that Croce would sometimes get suddenly lost in his thoughts. He'd be gone for a moment and always come right back, as if he had psychic narcolepsy. Durán's body, becoming whiter and more rigid, was like a plaster statue.

“Cover the deceased,” Croce said.

Saldías covered Tony Durán with a sheet.

“They could have thrown him out in a field, left him for the vultures. But they wanted me to see him. They left him on purpose. Why?” Croce looked around the room again, as if seeing it for the first time.