The Secret In Their Eyes Part 4

"Well, look, Miss Clarisa." Now. It was now or never. "How about Isidoro? What's he doing? Could he be interested in a temporary job?"

"Noooo ..." Her "no" was long, high-pitched, convinced, trusting, innocent. "Isidoro went to Buenos Aires almost a year ago, didn't you know that? Well, not a year ago. A little less, to tell the truth. But when you miss somebody, it seems longer, you know how it is."

Colotto opened his eyes very wide, but he figured the woman would interpret that as simple surprise.

"Let me see," she went on. "We're in the beginning of December ..." She raised her hands to count on her fingers. "So he's been gone around ten months. It was the end of March, you know. I mean, I thought you knew. Well, I guess I don't go out very much, what with my rheumatism and all ..."

"Of course, Miss Clarisa, of course." (Almost there, Delfor, he thought. Control yourself, for G.o.d's sake, stay calm.) "But I had no idea. I imagined he was working somewhere around here."

"No. There wasn't much work for him last summer. A few little odd jobs here and there. Nothing to speak of. Oh, I used to tell him he wasn't trying very hard. It made him mad sometimes when I said that, but it was true. He'd stay shut up in his room all day, staring at the ceiling. He looked sick, he never went out. Never, not even to have fun with his friends. I'd ask him, what's wrong, Isidorito, tell Mama what's wrong with you, but who can figure kids out? He wouldn't say a thing. And ... well, he's turned out to be just as reserved as his father, may he rest in peace, and you know, getting two words out of him was a real triumph. And so I let him be. He'd put on a long face and stalk around the house like a caged lion. Finally, one day he hit me with the news that he didn't want to stay here anymore and he was going to Buenos Aires. It made me sad at first, you know-my baby, my only son, and so far away. But he looked so bad, so ... it was like he was angry, you know? So in the end it seemed almost like a good idea for him to go away."

The woman wanted to go on talking, but standing up for so long made her joints ache and obliged her to keep shifting her weight from one leg to the other. She settled for leaning on the porch pillar. "Anyway, I'll tell you something, Mr. Delfor. Every month, he sends me a money order. Every month. With that and my pension, I can get along really well, you know?"

One more to go, Colotto thought. One more. He said, "That's just great, Miss Clarisa. I'm happy for you. Look, the way things are these days, finding a full-time job so fast-"

"Right, right," the woman said, agreeing enthusiastically. "That's exactly what I tell him. I say, you have to run and thank Our Lady of the Miracle, Isidorito. Well, but I call him Isidoro, because if I don't he gets annoyed. A miracle, the way things are these days. He should be grateful. Because when he got there, he had a recommendation from my brother-in-law for a job in a print shop, but that didn't work out. But then, soon afterward, in fact right away, he found a job on a construction site. Not only that, but it seems they're building something really big, so the job's going to last awhile."

"What a break! It sounds too good to be true, doesn't it?" Colotto swallowed saliva.

"I know, Mr. Colotto, I know! It's just fantastic! An apartment building in the Caballito neighborhood, he said. Down there around ... around Primera Junta, I think. Could that be right? Real close to that train, the sebway or whatever it is. The building's going to have something like twenty floors."

The woman kept on talking, but Delfor Colotto missed most of the rest of her conversation, because he was trying to decide whether he should be happy or sad about what he'd just found out. He made an effort to concentrate on her words and save his evaluations for later. She was talking about going to Salta for the Miracle Fiesta if her rheumatism would allow it, because she was very devoted to the Blessed Virgin.

"Well, all right, then, Miss Clarisa, I'll be on my way." Suddenly, he remembered his excuse for being there in the first place. "And if you hear about anybody who needs a temporary job ... I mean someone you could recommend, of course."

"I'll keep my ears open, Mr. Delfor. Now I have to tell you, I don't get much news, stuck inside the way I am, but if I hear anything, I'll let you know, and G.o.d bless you."

Delfor Colotto walked back home, bathed in the dim glow of the recently installed street lights. It was strange. Two years before, when he was president of the Development a.s.sociation, he'd moved heaven and earth to get streetlights put up in this part of town. And now, he felt about street lighting the way he felt about almost everything else; he didn't give a s.h.i.t.

He stepped into his house and looked at the clock. It was too late to go out to the phone booth. That would have to wait until tomorrow morning. He heard the sound of pots and pans-his wife was busy in the kitchen. He decided not to tell her anything for the moment. As he walked to the bedroom, he took off his shirt. He hung it up again on the back of the chair, went back outside, and sat on the porch. There was a very slight breeze.

14.

Ten days after the evening with Morales and his photographs, I made an appointment and went down to Homicide to meet Baez. When I opened the door to his office, he invited me in and offered me some coffee, which he sent one of his staff to get. As always happened when I spent time in his company, I let a feeling of respect for him get the better of me, even though I found such admiration uncomfortable.

He was a large man, hard-featured, built like an armoire. He was-how many?-fifteen or twenty years older than me. It was hard to figure his age exactly, because he sported a thick mustache that would have made a teenager look old. I think the thing that aroused my admiration for him was the calm, direct way he exercised his authority. I'd often watched him moving among other policemen with the controlled self-confidence of a pontiff convinced of his right to command. And even though I'd been the deputy clerk of the court for a couple of years by then, I sensed that I would never in my life be able to give an order without my heart jumping into my throat. I don't know what I was more afraid of: that the people under me would resent my directives, that they wouldn't obey me, or that they'd do what I wanted and laugh behind my back, which was almost the most distressing possibility of all. Baez was surely untroubled by such cogitations.

That afternoon, however, I felt I had a slight advantage over the man I admired so much. I was riding a wave of euphoria because of my hunch about the photographs. What had begun as not much more than an aesthetic observation had turned into a lead, the only one we had.

In those days, I was incapable of regarding my life with moderation. Either I considered myself an obscure, invisible functionary, a slave to routine, vegetating monotonously in a post appropriate to my mediocre faculties and limited aspirations, or I was a misunderstood genius, my talent wasted in the tedious exercise of secondary activities suitable for natures less favored than my own. I spent most of my time occupying the first of those two positions. Only rarely did I shift to the second, which I'd have to abandon sooner rather than later, when some brutal disillusion would end my sojourn at that particular oasis. I didn't know it, but in twenty minutes, my self-esteem was going to be wrecked by one such disastrous purge.

I started off by telling him about the episode with the photos. First, I described them, and then I showed them to him. I was pleased by the attention he paid to my account. He asked me for details, and I was able to satisfy his curiosity on most points. Baez had always shown great respect for my knowledge of the law. In our conversations, he'd never minded confessing to gaps in his own familiarity with legal matters (which was another reason for me to admire him, given that I regarded my own areas of ignorance as inexcusable shortcomings). On this occasion, I was venturing onto his turf, and yet he gave me the impression that he thought I was doing so for good reason. When I finished showing him the pictures, I told him about the instructions I'd given Morales: the widower was to write to his father-in-law and ask him to find out Isidoro Gomez's current location. So that his nerves wouldn't get the better of him, so that he wouldn't try to carry out some sort of absurd personal revenge, the father-in-law had to limit himself to obtaining the desired information and pa.s.sing it along to Morales. Colotto's mission had been such a success, I explained to Baez, that I'd ordered Morales to request a second round of reports from his father-in-law, the information to be gathered from other neighbors and from friends that his daughter and Gomez might have had in common. We'd based the search for the friends on the list of names accompanying the photographs of the famous picnic. As I was preparing to lay out the findings from the second round of reports, which confirmed Gomez's progressive withdrawal, his apparently precipitous departure for Buenos Aires, and his arrival in the capital a few weeks before the murder, Baez cut me off with a question: "How long ago did the father-in-law pay this visit to the suspect's mother?"

Although a little surprised, I started counting the days. Didn't he want to hear the verified information I was on the brink of revealing to him? Didn't he want to know that a couple of Gomez's friends from the barrio had corroborated my theory that the young man had been secretly in love with the victim for years?

"Ten days, eleven at the most."

Baez looked at the antiquated black telephone on his desk. Without a word to me, he picked up the receiver and dialed three digits. When the call was answered, Baez spoke in a murmur: "I need you to come here at once. Yes. By yourself. Thanks."

Then he hung up and, as if I'd vanished, immediately began a rapid search of his desk drawers. Soon he extracted a plain notepad with about half its sheets missing and began at once to scribble on it, using big, untidy strokes. He looked like a stern-faced doctor writing me a prescription for who knows what medication. If I hadn't been so tense, I would have found the image amusing. Before Baez finished, there were two knocks on the door. A senior subofficer entered the room, greeted us, and planted himself next to the desk. Baez soon put down his pencil, tore off the sheet of paper, and handed it to the policeman. "Here you go, Leguizamon. See if you can find this guy. All the information you might be able to use is on that sheet. If you manage to find him, take care-he may be dangerous. Place him under arrest and bring him in. The learned doctor here and I will see what we can get out of him."

I wasn't surprised to hear him refer to me as a doctor-he meant a doctor of law, of course-nor was I for a moment tempted to correct him. The police prefer to call all judicial employees of a certain age "doctor"; it's nothing to get offended about, and the cops are right to do so. I've never known any profession whose members are as sensitive about honorific t.i.tles as lawyers are. What disturbed me was what Baez said next, as he was dismissing his subordinate: "And be quick about it. If this is the guy we want, I suspect he's already vanished into thin air."

15.

Baez's words turned me into a pillar of salt. Why was he making such a dire prediction? I remained as calm as I could until the subofficer withdrew, and then, practically yelling, I asked Baez, "What do you mean, 'vanished into thin air'? Why should he?" The policeman's pessimism had caught me so off guard that I'd simply taken hold of his last words and repeated them as a question, without so much as a clue to the nature of his objection. Nothing, not even remnants, remained of my desire that Baez should consider me a perceptive man.

Because he had some respect for me, I suppose, he tried to be judicious in his reply. "Look, Chaparro," he said, lighting a 43/70 and moving his coffee cup to one side, as if it were an obstacle that might impede the pa.s.sage of his words to my ears, "if this guy is the one we're looking for-and based on what you've told me, it's perfectly possible that he is-don't think he's going to be so easy to catch. He may be a total son of a b.i.t.c.h, but he doesn't seem like a hothead who does things on impulse. Not that there's any lack of those, believe me. We nab lots of hoodlums because they f.u.c.k up so bad they might as well pin a sign on their shirts that says, 'It was me, put my a.s.s in jail.' But this guy ..."

The policeman stopped talking for a moment, as if evaluating the suspect's intellectual capacities and coming to the conclusion that they were worthy of respect. He exhaled cigarette smoke from his nose. That dark tobacco was stinking up the place. I felt my mucous membranes getting irritated, but brainless pride kept me from coughing or blinking, as I would have loved to do.

"The babe he's crazy about goes off to Buenos Aires. He doesn't think about following her-he's not up to that. Or he is, but he needs time before he can leave home." Baez was formulating his hypothesis as he spoke to me. Along the way, he left gaps to be filled in later, but sometimes he stopped his forward progress and resolved a question with precise arguments. "Anyway, there's a good chance he'd already declared himself back in Tuc.u.man. And the girl didn't want to hear it. So he feels enormously humiliated, he wants the earth to swallow him up. I figure that's why he stays there; he doesn't hold her back-how could he?-and he doesn't follow her. Why should he try?"

Baez seemed to a.s.sess his theories for a few moments, and then he went on. "Yes, that's it. I'm sure he confronted her, and she rejected him so fast he felt like he was on a bungee cord. And so he went into hibernation. But then comes the news that she's getting married. He's not ready for that, and he can't react to it, either. What does that mean, 'react,' for this kid? What can he do? He lets time pa.s.s. But he's got nothing going on, and he doesn't forget her. Just the opposite. He's in a foul mood all the time. He's angry. He starts feeling he's been swindled somehow. How can it be that Liliana's about to marry some guy from Buenos Aires she just met? What about him? Is he not worth considering? He spends his days thinking about that, just as you told me-or as the kid's mother told the guy you sent to talk to her. The kid lies in his bed all day, staring at the ceiling. And then, finally, he makes a decision. Or maybe it was made long before. Did he spend months thinking about whether or not he was going to kill her, or did he know he'd kill her from the start, and the delay was just because he was getting up his courage? I have no idea, and I doubt we'll ever know. In any case, as soon as he's got everything clear in his mind, he leaves home and takes the Northern Star to Buenos Aires."

Baez picked up the telephone and bounced the switch hook up and down a few times. When the same office employee as before put his head inside the door, Baez asked him for more coffee.

"And you know what? If this kid really is the guy we're looking for, I'd bet more than I've got that he takes his time getting settled. He looks for a rooming house. He finds a job. And it's only then that he turns his attention to the girl. For a few days, he hangs around on a street corner close to her place, figuring out what the newlyweds' routines are. Their outdoor routines, that is, because he can imagine the indoor ones, and they wrench his guts. Sometimes it gets so bad he thinks maybe he should waste them both, the wife and the husband. Can you imagine how a guy must feel when he sees another guy looking happy and contented every morning, and he knows the other guy just got out of bed with the woman he's crazy for? So he goes back there the morning of the crime. He sees Morales leave, waits five minutes, and walks into the house. The main door's open all day long, because the workers in Apartment 3 have to keep hauling rubble out of it in a wheelbarrow ... Ah, no, that's bulls.h.i.t. The workers weren't there that day. So the guy rings the doorbell, and the girl answers him through the intercom. She's surprised, sure, but why wouldn't she let him in? Isn't he her childhood friend, her pal from the old neighborhood? Haven't they done lots of things together over the years? She leaves her apartment and goes to open the main door for him. Probably, as she's turning the key, she remembers the way she had to disappoint him when he declared himself a few years ago, and she feels vaguely guilty. It's strange of him to drop in on her without calling first, especially considering he wasn't even at the wedding, but that's no reason to leave him standing outside the door. She's wearing her nightdress, we know, but she's got a dressing gown on over it, so she's decent. And she's young. An older woman might have considered it improper to open the door while wearing such an outfit. But the girl's not that formal. She has no reason to be. As for the guy, the visitor, he doesn't care what she's wearing. The important thing is she opens the door. She says, "Isidoro, what a surprise," and he comes in and gives her a kiss on the cheek. That's why the neighbor woman doesn't hear him knock on the apartment door. Liliana goes to open the street door for him, leads him back to her place, and they go inside. Poor girl."

Baez puts out his cigarette and seems to hesitate over lighting another one right away. He holds off.

"Does he arrive with the intention of raping her, or does he just improvise? Once again, I have no idea, but I'm inclined to suppose he's been chewing over his plan for some time. This boy doesn't do things without thinking. He's collecting a debt, nothing more or less. So s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g her against her will right there, on the bedroom floor, is his way of making her pay off an old debt. And strangling her with his own hands is his revenge on her for having spited him and ignored him, for having left him back in the barrio, alone and sad, a laughingstock for friends and enemies alike. I'm only guessing here, but I have a feeling this Isidoro can't bear to have people laugh at him. That drives him right up the wall.

"So then? So then it's over. How long can he have stayed there? Five, ten minutes. He leaves no trace anywhere. There are a few small scratches on the parquet floor around the body-the girl tried to get away from him before her strength gave out-but he even takes the trouble of going over those marks with a cloth he's found on a shelf, because he wants to be sure to cover all his tracks. (He has no way of knowing that the yahoos of the Federal Police a.s.signed to handle the preliminaries will trample all over the crime scene and destroy any clue that may have escaped him.) He doesn't wipe the door handle, because he remembers he never touched it. You know why I'm telling you that? So you'll know what kind of person this kid is. We found fingerprints from both Morales and his wife on the inside and outside doork.n.o.bs, but that's it. Which means that the punk was cool enough, or cynical enough-call it what you like-to go around the apartment with a cloth in his hand, calmly deciding what to wipe down: the floor around the place where he mounted the poor girl, yes; the door handle he remembered not having touched, no. And you know what he did afterward?"

He stopped talking, as if he'd really asked a question he expected me to answer, but that wasn't the case. Nor was he showing off. Nothing like that. Baez didn't waste his intelligence on such foolishness.

"When I first started working in Homicide, back when I was young and just learning the dance, do you know what I had trouble imagining? Not the crimes in themselves, not even the brutal act of killing someone. I got used to that right away. What I couldn't figure out was what a murderer does after committing his crime. I don't mean for the rest of his days, no, but let's say for the next two or three hours. I imagined all murderers shaking in their boots, horrified by what they'd done, with their memories fixed on the moment when they snuffed out another human being's life." Baez snorted and half-smiled, like a man thinking about something funny. "More or less like Dostoyevsky's young character-you know who I mean?-the one in Crime and Punishment. He feels remorse. He says, 'I killed the old woman, how can I go on living?'" Baez looked at me as if he'd just remembered something. "Sorry, Chaparro, I'm being stupid. You don't need a lecture from me-I'm sure you've read the book. But most of the time, I'm surrounded by brutes, know what I mean? Just to take one example, try to imagine that r.e.t.a.r.d Sicora chatting about literature. Can't do it, right? Don't hurt yourself-it's not possible. Well, anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that guilt and remorse aren't that common among murderers. Not at all, really. Granted, you find guys so tormented by guilt they could shoot themselves, but lots of others go out to a movie or get a pizza. And I believe this kid, this Gomez, belongs to the second type. Since it's a Tuesday morning, I'm sure he goes on to work, just like any other weekday. He walks over to the bus stop and waits for the bus. And when he gets off, he buys the latest edition of the Cronica. Why not?"

This time, Baez pulled out a cigarette and lit it decisively. When I was writing about the fluctuations of my state of mind earlier, I mentioned that I'd arrived for my police interview afloat on a cloud of euphoria. Well, in about twenty minutes, that euphoria had been blown away. Not only did I feel defeated by events, which was a fairly common condition for me, but I also felt guilty. Instead of calling Baez the moment I had the intuition and letting him figure out the best way to close in on the suspect, I'd done everything my own way: I'd let myself be swept along by my spirit of initiative, I'd compelled the poor widower and his poor father-in-law to serve as my flunkies, and I'd made them kick over an ants' nest for no G.o.dd.a.m.ned good reason.

In spite of all that, I tried to rea.s.sure myself. Couldn't Baez be exaggerating? And what if Gomez was much stupider than Baez thought? Wasn't there a good chance the guy had let his guard down over the course of all those months? After all, what proof did Baez have for his hypothesis? Nothing more or less than the account I'd just given him.

And another thing: Suppose Gomez had nothing to do with the crime? With childish spite, I hoped that the trail leading to him would turn out to be nothing but a mirage. I got to my feet. Baez did likewise, and we shook hands. "I figure we'll have some news tomorrow," he said.

"All right," I replied, in a tone that might have sounded unnecessarily curt. "I'll call you."

I left his office pretty agitated, or at least uneasy, and walked back to the Palace of Justice. Although it was contemptible of me, I was more concerned at that moment about not looking like a bungler than about grabbing the son of a b.i.t.c.h who'd done the crime, whether it was Gomez or some other creep.

A little before seven o'clock that evening, the telephone in the clerk's office rang. It was Baez. "Leguizamon's here with his report."

"I'm listening." My wounded-child att.i.tude was absurd, but I couldn't shake it. Besides, I wasn't ready for the call. I'd thought it wouldn't come until at least the following day.

"All right. Let's begin with the bad news. Three days ago, Isidoro Gomez disappeared from the rooming house in Flores where he'd been staying since the end of March. 'Disappeared' is a figure of speech; he paid what he owed in full and left without giving a forwarding address. Same thing with his job. We located the worksite: a fifteen-story building on Rivadavia Avenue, in the middle of the Caballito barrio. The foreman told Leguizamon that Gomez was a phenomenal kid. Not much for conversation and sometimes unpleasant, but reliable, neat in his work, and sober in his habits. Just a little jewel. But according to the foreman, Gomez came to him a few mornings ago and told him he was going back to Tuc.u.man, because his mother was very sick. The foreman paid him off and told him to come back and see him if he ever returned to Buenos Aires, because he was very satisfied with him."

There was a moment of silence. Although I dearly wanted to hurl the typewriter, the pencil holder, the case file I was working on, and the telephone, I bit my lip and waited.

"And finally, the good news. We can start operating on the a.s.sumption that this is our guy, and that he ran because he knew we were tracking him. Leguizamon brought me an outstanding piece of information. The foreman keeps all the workers' punch cards from the on-site time clock. Gomez worked at that building site for eight months. Want to guess how many times he was late? Two. Once by ten minutes, and once by two and a half hours. You know when that second time was? The day of the crime."

"I understand," I said, the gruffness finally gone from my tone of voice. I've never been a bad loser. "I appreciate the information, Baez. I'll use it to bring the case up to date right away, and I'll let you know what doc.u.ments to send me."

"All right, Chaparro. Good-bye."

"Good-bye. And thanks," I added, as though making amends.

I was about to hang up when I heard the voice on the other end of the line speaking again. "Ah ... one question," Baez said. He sounded doubtful. "How did you figure this Gomez boy could be our guy? I know the idea came to you when you were looking at the photographs, but what was it in particular that drew your attention to him? Because I've got to tell you, Chaparro, that was a fine catch, it really was. You might just have put your finger on the murderer."

Obviously, Baez was a good fellow. Was his praise sincere, or was he just trying to make me feel less guilty and ridiculous? I weighed my response carefully before I spoke. "I don't know, Baez. I suppose it was the way he looked at the girl, with that sort of long-distance adoration. I don't know," I said, repeating myself. "I guess when there are things you can't say, the words have to come out through your eyes."

Baez didn't answer right away. Then he said, "I understand. I couldn't have expressed it better. You're good with words, Chaparro. You could be a writer, you know?"

"Don't f.u.c.k with me, Baez."

"I'm not f.u.c.king with you. I'm serious. Well, look, after we get your updated report, I'll call you."

I hung up the telephone with a click that resounded in the silence of the clerk's office. I looked at the clock. It was very late. I picked up the receiver again, dialed the number of the bank where Morales worked, and asked the night guard to deliver an urgent message: as soon as Morales arrived, the guard was to tell him to come to the court so he could sign a statement. The guard promised to pa.s.s on the message.

Once again, the sound of the telephone switch hook. I walked over to the bookcase on whose highest shelf, several months previously, I'd camouflaged the Morales case. Standing on tiptoe, I yanked at the dossier, which came down to me in a cloud of dust. I went back to my desk. I didn't go through the case from the beginning again but went straight to the last proceeding. It was a court order from the previous June, directing that a supplementary autopsy report-on the visceral examination-be added to the case file. I checked the calendar, inserted a sheet of paper with the letterhead of the National Judiciary into the typewriter, and began to type out a new doc.u.ment, giving it a fict.i.tious August date.

I hadn't lied to Baez when I answered his last question, but I hadn't told him the whole truth, either. Gomez's way of looking at Liliana had indeed called my attention to him, and I'd interpreted his gaze as a silent, futile message to a woman who couldn't or wouldn't understand it; all that was true. But I'd noticed that look because-and this is what I hadn't told Baez-I myself had gazed at a woman in just that way. It had been fourteen months since I'd first met her, and as I'd often done in those fourteen months, once again on that hot night in December 1968, I bitterly regretted that she wasn't my wife.

16.

When I arrived in the office that morning, I had but one prayer: Please, G.o.d, don't let Sandoval come to work loaded today. I'd been awake practically all night. Not only had I arrived home extremely late (and then guilty, because Marcela was waiting up for me), but it had taken me forever to fall asleep. What would happen if the judge wised up to the fact that I was trying to put one over on him? Was running such a risk worth it? My nerves had rousted me out of bed very early. I must have looked atrocious, because my wife noticed something was wrong and asked me about it at breakfast.

Today, thirty years later, I remember my plan, and it's hard for me to think of myself as its author. What impulse was driving me to take such a risk? I suppose it was my sense of guilt. And then, over and above the risk, there was the uncertainty: If Gomez wasn't the culprit, what was the point of the mess I was about to set in motion? But if he had committed the murder, how could I look at myself in the mirror ever again until the day I died without feeling like a coward for putting my security and my job above everything else?

My practical problem wasn't due to the fruitless search for Isidoro Gomez; I'd been in trouble ever since the moment, several months previously, when I'd foolishly broken the rules to avoid sealing the case. At the time, I'd imagined that the judge, once the culprit was under arrest, would be so pleased that he wouldn't bother me about having kept the file active. On the contrary. A round of sufficiently histrionic and cloying flattery, attributing to him all the merits of the capture, would make him abandon his zeal for correct procedure.

But now I'd come too far to turn back, and it was here that I needed Sandoval. That is, I needed the inspired, shrewd, quick-witted, intrepid Sandoval. If I got the drunken Sandoval, I was f.u.c.ked. By good fortune, while I was sunk in my meditations, in he came, fresh as a May morning, fragrant with lavender, and shining like the sun. I stopped him on his way to his desk and gave him a brief overview of my plan. He was, without a doubt, a brilliant guy. He understood the setup before I was through explaining it. And he was loyal, because he agreed without the least hesitation to join me in my swindle.

Then Morales himself showed up. Without letting him get past the reception area, I had him sign an addendum to his sworn statement. I gave him no details, told him I'd explain what was going on later, and sent him away. Hours pa.s.sed. When Judge Fortuna Lacalle finally made his entrance into the clerk's office, I remembered my mother's ploys for overcoming anxiety and commended myself to the Holy Spirit. As always, Lacalle looked impeccable: dark suit, sober tie, breast-pocket handkerchief playing off against the tie, slicked-down hair plastered to his skull, suntanned skin. I believe observing him led me to develop my theory that stupid people are better preserved physically than others because they aren't worn down by existential angst, to which those with some semblance of mental clarity are necessarily subject. I have no conclusive proofs of this notion, but the case of Fortuna Lacalle always struck me as evidence of the most blindingly obvious sort.

Princely in mien, as always, he sat in my chair and took his Parker fountain pen out of the inside pocket of his jacket. Theatrically exaggerating my own gestures, I began to pile case files on the desk, as if giving him to understand that he was going to spend the next two or three hours of his life signing doc.u.ments. Thank G.o.d it was Thursday-he played tennis every Thursday at six-which meant that from about three o'clock on, he would be seized by growing impatience with anything that might deter him from his high purpose. Realizing at once the implications of so many files, he opened his eyes wide and made a remark, intending to be funny, about how fast his staff in this clerk's office did their work. I smiled and started pa.s.sing him cases with doc.u.ments that needed signing, presenting each of them with a florid commentary on their contents. It was useless-or let's say redundant and superfluous-information, but the magistrate was too stupid to notice the wool I was pulling over his eyes.

It was then that Sandoval appeared for the first time, showing his face from behind the bookcase that gave my desk a certain minimal privacy. "Your Honor," he began, addressing Fortuna Lacalle in a tone midway between unctuous and ironic, but at the same time sufficiently confidential for the judge to feel like an accomplice rather than a victim. "When are we going to see you driving a Dodge Coronado like your colleague Judge Molinari?"

The judge considered him cautiously. Though a blockhead, Fortuna Lacalle had the preservation instinct that people like him develop to deal with complicated and hostile realities, and Sandoval, however one looked at him, belonged to the elusive world of the complex. He's going to ask him to repeat the question. He's going to ask him to repeat it, I told myself. With a rapid movement I grabbed the Morales case and opened it directly to page 208, which I had bookmarked.

"What are you saying, Sandoval?" Fortuna Lacalle was blinking and paying much more attention to my a.s.sistant than to the case I'd placed in front of him.

"A writ ordering that the case be reopened, Your Honor," I murmured, as if I didn't want such a trivial matter to interrupt the conversation the judge was concentrating on.

"Yes, yes," he said, not looking at me.

"Nothing important, Your Honor," Sandoval said, giving him a roguish smile. "I thought you'd already seen Judge Molinari's new car. You haven't?"

Lacalle was striving to respond both quickly and cleverly, but to succeed at even one of those goals would require great effort from him; achieving both at the same time was simply impossible, yet he seemed eager to give it a try. Since an undertaking of such proportions consumed all his intellectual energy, paying attention to what he was signing proved to be quite beyond his capabilities. He therefore affixed his ornate signature to a writ dated July 2, which did indeed order the reopening of the sealed case at page 201, but which also, in pa.s.sing, directed the court investigator to secure an addendum to the sworn testimony given by Ricardo Morales. I pulled the doc.u.ment away from him as soon as he finished signing it-I didn't want him, by some miracle, to latch onto the fact that he was signing a court order dated almost four months ago.

"No, I didn't know about it ... a Coronado?"

"A Coronado, Your Honor. Electric blue ..." Sandoval smiled absently, as though enthralled by the memory. "A treat for the eye. Black leather upholstery. Chrome details ... Seriously, you haven't seen it, Your Honor?"

"No. To tell you the truth, it's been a long time since I had lunch with Abel."

Perfect, I thought, he's got him on the ropes. Sandoval could be cruel with people he didn't like, and the way he used that cruelty to undermine his opponents with their own weaknesses was brilliant. As I've repeatedly pointed out, Fortuna Lacalle was an imbecile who gave himself the airs of an eminent jurist, but over and above his self-regard, he was dyspeptically envious of judges who actually deserved their high office. Molinari was such a judge, and Fortuna Lacalle's desperate wave-calling Judge Molinari by his first name, as if the two of them were good friends, as if pretending to a familiarity that didn't exist-corroborated my belief that our examining magistrate was mad with envy.

I decided to move on to Act Two. I placed before Judge Lacalle a deposition in which Morales mentioned his suspicions about Gomez, suspicions based on some fict.i.tious threatening letters that his wife, also fict.i.tiously, had received before the murder; they'd supposedly been sent by the rejected lover and later conveniently destroyed by the couple. I'd drafted the doc.u.ment the previous night, Morales had signed it earlier that day, and now it was attached to the end of some other case. "This is a witness statement in the Munoz case, the one concerning the series of frauds," I lied.

"Ah ... how's that investigation going?"

We're in for it, I thought. Now, for some reason, he was interested in the case. What could I tell him? What could I invent, after removing acts from one case and attaching them to another? And how was I going to justify that witness statement, which I'd made up out of nothing?

"You still have the Falcon, don't you, Your Honor?" Sandoval came to my aid.

"Yes, of course," Lacalle answered, intending to sound gruff.

"Right, right ... because ... what model is it? '63? '64?"

"It's a '61." Lacalle was almost curt, but he immediately tried to soften his response: "It's given me so much satisfaction I can't bring myself to part with it."

Sandoval was an artist. We'd laughed behind the judge's back a thousand times, not because of his '61 Falcon (after all, Sandoval and I belonged to the perpetual pedestrian category), but because the vehicle was, for Fortuna Lacalle, a source of suffering, of private anguish. He'd have given an ear for a new car (a.s.suming he could find someone crazy enough to accept the exchange). On his salary, he should have been able to afford such a purchase, but his wife and their two daughters had spending habits befitting princesses, so much so that the poor judge had to fend off the specters of insolvency month after month. Fortuna Lacalle's transparent face showed me that he was caught up in the mental enumeration of all that he could buy if his women hadn't abandoned themselves so totally to consumerism. And the Dodge Coronado, I figured, stood at the top of his list.

I quickly turned the page. Next came official letters, with copies, to the Federal Police and the police of Tuc.u.man Province, directing them to mount a search for Gomez. The letters were dated in October and had been sent again in November. I'd already made those arrangements with Baez. Lacalle signed the doc.u.ments as if they were receipts from the cleaners.