Target in the Night. Ricardo Piglia

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СКАЧАТЬ 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? СКАЧАТЬ