Читать книгу Target in the Night - Ricardo Piglia - Страница 13

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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.

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.

Ada said that she didn’t have any news from her brother, that she hadn’t seen Luca in a while. They weren’t close. No one saw him anymore, she added, he lived shut away in the factory with his inventions and his dreams.

“What’s going to happen?” Sofía asked.

“Nothing,” Croce said. “We’ll have him sent to the morgue.”

It was strange to be speaking in that room, with the dead man lying on the floor, with Saldías taking notes, and the tired Inspector looking kindly at them.

“Can we leave?” Sofía asked.

“Or are we suspects?” Ada asked.

“Everyone’s a suspect,” Croce said. “You better leave out the back. And please don’t tell anyone what you saw here, or what we talked about.”

“Of course,” Ada said.

The Inspector offered to walk them out, but they refused. They were leaving on their own, he could call them anytime if he needed them.

Croce sat down on the bed. He seemed overwhelmed, or distracted. He wanted to see the notes Saldías had taken. He studied them calmly.

“Okay,” he said after a while. “Let’s see what these scoundrels have to say.”

A rancher from Sauce Viejo declared that he had heard the sound of chains from the other side of the door, outside Durán’s room. Then he had heard clearly someone say, in a nervous, hushed voice:

“I’ll buy it for you. You can pay me later, somehow.”

He remembered the words perfectly because he thought it sounded like a threat, or a joke. He couldn’t identify who had spoken, but the voice was shrill, as if they were speaking in falsetto, or like a woman’s voice.

“Falsetto, or like a woman’s voice?”

“Like a woman’s voice.”

One of the travelers, a certain Méndez, said that he had seen Yoshio walk down the hallway and squat to look through the keyhole of Durán’s door.

“Strange,” Croce said. “He squatted?”

“Against the door.”

“To listen, or to look?”

“He seemed to be spying.”

An import-export agent said that he saw Yoshio go into the bathroom in the same hallway to wash his hands. That he was dressed in black, with a yellow scarf around his neck, and that the sleeve of his right arm was folded up to his elbow.

“And what were you doing?”

“Relieving myself,” the import-export agent said. “I was facing away from him, but I could see him through the mirror.”

Another of the guests, an auctioneer from Pergamino who always stayed at the hotel, said that around two o’clock he had seen Yoshio leave the bathroom on the third floor and go downstairs, agitated, without waiting for the elevator. One of the maids from the cleaning staff said that at that same time she had seen Yoshio leave the room and head down the hallway. Prono, the tall, fat, hotel security man who had been a professional boxer and had retired to the town seeking peace and quiet, accused Dazai right away.

“It was the Japo,” he said, with the nasal voice of an actor from an Argentine cowboy movie. “A fight among faggots.”

The others seemed to agree with him. They all hurried to give their testimony. The Inspector thought that so much unanimity was strange. Some witnesses had even created problems for themselves with their testimony. They could be investigated, their statements had to be corroborated. The rancher from Sauce Viejo, a man with a flushed face, for one, had a lover in town, the widow of Old-Man Corona. His wife, the rancher’s, was in the hospital in Tapalqué. The maid who said she saw Yoshio leave Durán’s room in a hurry couldn’t explain what she was doing in the hallway on that floor when she should already have clocked off by that time.

Yoshio had locked himself in his room—terrified, according to what everyone said, distraught by the death of his friend—and would not answer the door.

“Let him be for now, until I need him,” Croce said. “He won’t go anywhere.”