Target in the Night (8 page)

There was no other sign of violence except for a poorly closed drawer, from which a tie was slightly sticking out. Perhaps it was closed quickly and, when he turned around, the killer didn't see
the tie. The Inspector pushed the drawer shut with his hip, sat on the bed, and let his gaze drift through the skylight on the ceiling.

Saldías took inventory of what they found. Five thousand dollars in a wallet; several thousand Argentine pesos stacked on the dresser, next to a watch and a keychain; a pack of Kent cigarettes; a Ronson lighter; a package of Pink Veil prophylactics; a U.S. passport issued to Anthony Durán, born February 5, 1940, in San Juan. There was a cutout from a New York newspaper with the results from the major leagues; a letter written in Spanish by a woman;
⁹
a photograph of the nationalist leader Albizu Campos speaking at a function, the Puerto Rican flag waiving behind him. A photograph of a soldier with round glasses, in a Marine uniform. A book of poetry by Palés Matos, a salsa long-play by Ismael Rivera, dedicated to
My friend Tony D.
There were a lot of shirts, many pairs of shoes, several jackets, no journal or datebook. Saldías listed off the items to the Inspector.

“What a corpse leaves behind is nothing,” Croce said.

Such is the mystery of these crimes, the surprise of a man who dies unprepared. What did he leave unfinished? Who was the last person he saw? The investigation always starts with the victim, he
is the first trace, the dark light.

There was nothing special in the bathroom: a jar of Actemin, a jar of Valium, a box of Tylenol. In the dirty-clothes wicker hamper they found a novel by Ben Benson,
The Ninth Hour
, a map from the Automobile Club with the roads of the Province of Buenos Aires, a woman's bra, and a small, nylon bag with American coins.

They went back to the room. They had to prepare a written report before the body was photographed and taken to the morgue for the autopsy. A fairly thankless task that the Inspector delegated to his Assistant.

Croce paced back and forth from one end of the room to the other, making observations in starts, constantly moving, muttering, as if he were thinking out loud in a kind of continuous murmur. “The air is strange,” he said.
Tinted, a kind of rainbow against the sunlight, a blue light. What was it?

“See that?” he asked, his eyes fixed on the light in the room.

He pointed at the traces of a nearly invisible dust that seemed to be floating in the air. Saldías was under the impression that Croce saw things at an unusual speed, as if he were half a second (half a thousandth of a second) ahead of others. They followed the trail of the light blue dusting—a fine mist swayed by the sun, which Croce saw as if it were footprints on the ground—to the far end of the room where there was a hanging on the wall, a black cloth square with yellow arabesques, a kind of Batik or tapestry from the pampas. It looked shabby, not like an actual decoration, it was clearly covering something. The corners of the tapestry flapped slightly in the wind that blew through the open window.

Croce removed the hanging with a letter opener that hung off of his keychain, and found that it was hiding a double-hung internal window. Opening it easily, they saw that it led into a kind of pit. There was a rope. A sheave.

“The service pulley.”

Saldías looked at him, not understanding.

“They used to serve food up to the room, if the guest ordered it. You'd call and they'd send it up through here.”

They leaned over the opening. Between the ropes they could hear the murmur of voices and the sound of the wind.

“Where does it lead?”

“To the kitchen, and the basement.”

They moved the rope on the sheave and raised the box from the small pulley up to the edge.

“Too small,” Saldías said. “No one would fit.”

“I don't know,” Croce said. “Let's see.” He leaned over again. Through the cobwebs, he could see a faint light below, and at the bottom a floor with checkered tiles.

“Let's go,” Croce said. “Come on.”

They went down the elevator to the ground level and down a further flight of stairs to a blue hallway that led into the basement. They found the old, out-of-service kitchens and the boiler room. To the side there was a door that opened into a large closet with blue-tiled walls and an old, empty refrigerator. At a turn at the end of the hallway, behind a grille, was the telephone switchboard. On the other side, a half-opened, iron door connected to a storage room filled with items from lost-and-found and old items of furniture. The storeroom was wide and tall, with a black-and-white
tiled floor. A window at the back wall, closed with a double-paned shutter, was the base of the service pulley with the cables connecting up to the higher floors.

The storage room contained the remainders from the hotel's past life, randomly piled up. Trunks, wicker baskets, suitcases, tacks with messages, rolled-up canvases, empty frames, clocks, a 1962 calendar from the Belladona factory, a blackboard, a birdcage, fencing masks, a bicycle without its front wheel, lamps, lanterns, ballot boxes, a headless statue of the Virgin, a crucifix (whose eyes seemed to follow you around), sleeping cots, a wool carding machine.

There was nothing especially noticeable—except, in a corner, for a fifty-dollar bill on the floor.

Strange. A brand-new bill. Croce put it in a clear envelope with the other evidence and looked at the issue date. A fifty-dollar bill. Series 1970.

“Whose is it?”

“Could be anyone's,” Croce said. He looked at one side of the bill and then the other, as if he were trying to identify who had dropped it. Accidentally? They paid for something and it fell out. Maybe. He saw General Grant's face on the bill:
the butcher
, the drunk, a hero, a criminal, the inventor of the strategy of razing the earth, he'd go in with the army from the North and burn down cities and the fields, he'd only go into battle when he outnumbered his opponents five-to-one, he'd have all prisoners executed—Ulysses S. Grant, the butcher. Look where he ended up, on a dropped bill on the floor of a lousy hotel in the middle of nowhere. Croce stood there, thinking, the clear envelope in his hand. He showed it to Saldías as if it were a map. “See? Now
I understand, my son. I mean, I think I know what happened. They came to steal from him, they went down the service pulley, they split up the money. Or they were putting it away? In their rush they dropped a fifty-dollar bill.”

“They came down?”

“Or they went up,” Croce said.

Croce leaned into the opening of the service pulley and looked up again.

“Maybe they just sent the money down and someone was waiting for it here.”

They went out the blue hallway. The telephone switchboard was off to one side, in a kind of cell, behind a glass screen and a grille.

They questioned the hotel's operator, a Miss Coca. Thin and slight, freckly, Coca Castro knew everything about everyone, she was the best-informed person in town, she was always invited to people's houses because everyone wanted to hear about what she knew. She made people beg. But in the end she always went and brought all the news and updates with her—and this is why she never married. She knew so much that no man dared. A woman who knows things scares men off, Croce said. She went out with import-export agents and men traveling through, and was a very good friend to the young women in town.

Croce and Saldías asked her if she had seen anything, if she had seen anyone go in or out. No, she hadn't seen anyone that day. Then they asked her about Durán.

“Thirty-three is one of the three rooms in the hotel with a telephone,” the operator clarified. “Mr. Durán asked especially for this.”

“Who did he speak with.”

“There were a few calls. Several in English. Always from Trenton, New Jersey, in the United States. But I don't listen to the guests' conversations.”

“And today, when he didn't pick up. Who was calling? Around two in the afternoon. Who was it?”

“A local call. From the factory.”

“Was it Luca Belladona?”

“I don't know, they didn't say. It was a man. He asked for Durán, but he didn't know the room number. When no one answered, he asked me to try again. He waited on the line, but no one picked up.”

“Had he ever called before?”

“Durán had called there a couple of times.”

“A couple?”

“I have the records. You can take a look.”

The operator was nervous, in a murder case everyone believes the police are going to make their life complicated. Durán was a darling, he had asked her out twice. Croce immediately thought that Durán wanted information from her, that was why he would have asked her out, she could have told him things. She had refused out of respect for the Belladona family.

“Did he ask you anything specific?”

The woman seemed to roll up and retreat, like a spirit in an Aladdin's lamp, until you could only see a red mouth.

“He wanted to know who Luca spoke with. That's what he asked me. But I didn't know anything.”

“Did he ever call the Belladona sisters at home?”

“A few times,” Coca said. “He spoke with Ada about everything.”

“Let's call them, I want them to come identify the body.”

The operator dialed the number of the Belladona house. She had a satisfied expression on her face, as if she were the protagonist of an exceptional situation.

“Hello, yes, this is the Plaza Hotel,” she said. “I have a message for the Belladona Misses.”

The sisters arrived late in the afternoon and quietly entered the hotel. The occasion was such that they had decided to break the taboo, or superstition, which had kept them for years from being seen together in town. The sisters were like replicas, the symmetry between them was so similar it was almost sinister. Croce had a familiarity with them that came not only from seeing them around town occasionally.

“Who told you?”

“Cueto, the public prosecutor. He rang us up,” Ada said.

They went up to identify the body. Covered with the white sheet, it looked like an item of furniture. Saldías pulled the sheet back. Durán's face had an ironic sneer now and was already very pale and stiff. Neither sister said anything. There was nothing to say, all they were supposed to do was identify the body, and it was him. Everyone knew it was him. Sofía shut his eyes for him and walked to the window. Ada looked as if she had been crying, or maybe it was the dust from the street burning her eyes; she looked at the objects in the room distractedly, the open drawers. She was tapping her foot nervously in a motion that didn't mean anything, like a spring bouncing outdoors. The Inspector looked
at the movement and, without intending to, thought about Regina Belladona, Luca's mother, who used to make that same motion with her foot. As if the body—as if a part of the body—was the site where all desperation gathered.
The crack in a crystal glass.
Croce would suddenly receive strange sentences like these, as if someone were dictating to him. Even the feeling that someone or something was dictating to him was—for him—evidence of their significance. He grew distracted. When he snapped back to, he heard Ada speaking, she seemed to be answering some question from his assistant, the Scribe. Something referring to the telephone call to the factory. She didn't know if Durán had spoken with her brother. Neither one of them knew anything. Croce didn't believe them, but he did not insist because he preferred to have his intuitions revealed when it was no longer necessary to confirm them. All he wanted to know from them was a few details about Tony's visit to their house.

“He came to speak with your father.”

“He came to our house because my father wanted to meet him.”

“Something was said about the will.”

“This shitty town,” Ada said, with a delicate smile. “Everyone knows we can split the inheritance whenever we want because my mother is incapacitated.”

“Legally,” Sofía said.

“Toward the end people saw him with Yoshio frequently, you know the rumors.”

“We don't worry about what people do when they're not with us.”

“And we're not interested in rumors.”

“Or gossip.”

As if it were a flash, Croce recalled a summer siesta: both sisters playing with newborn kittens. They must have been five or six years old, the girls. They had lined up the kittens, crawling along the tiles, warmed by the afternoon sun; each girl would pet a kitten and pass it to the other, holding them by their tails. A fast game, which went even faster, despite the kittens' plaintive meowing. Of course he had ruled out the sisters from the start. They would've killed him themselves, they wouldn't have delegated such a personal issue. Crimes committed by women are always personal, Croce thought, they don't trust anyone else to do it for them. Saldías continued asking questions and taking notes. A telephone call from the factory. To confirm he was there. At the same time. Too great a coincidence.

“You know my brother, Inspector. It's impossible, he wouldn't have called,” Sofía said.