“She was very clever, wasn’t she?”
“Pf… just like the rest of them, except she spent money without a second thought. It’s easy to be clever like that. Well, at the end of the day it was her money. A quarter of an hour went by and Frida still hadn’t appeared. Gustavo went up to go and find her. We waited a good while. We could hear them talking upstairs.”
“They were shouting that loudly? Weren’t you in the living room?”
The storyteller blushed slightly.
“Gustavo had left the door open and their voices carried down to us. Of course there was no indiscretion on our part because they were speaking German so we didn’t understand anything they were saying. Suddenly Gustavo rushed down all flustered and went out, slamming the door without saying goodbye. Shortly afterwards Frida came in looking very calm, saying that Gustavo had had to go out but would be back soon. She insisted we take our tea without waiting for him. You can imagine how uncomfortable we felt.”
“And Frida?”
“Unruffled. She was adamant that we should play cards. I made it clear to my husband that if Gustavo came back the situation would get very tense, so we left. We didn’t return the invitation, of course.”
A little girl ran up and buried her tearful face in the storyteller’s skirts.
“Chiche, I don’t like you telling tales,” the mother reprimanded loudly. The sleeping man had opened his eyes and was watching the scene with a glazed look. A second later, his eyelids drooped involuntarily.
The other woman looked at her watch and put her knitting away in a cloth bag.
“Four o’clock! Where can those kids be?” she exclaimed as she stood up. “Are you staying here?”
“No, no, I’ll come with you.”
They left, with the mother dragging the weeping girl along. The man settled himself more comfortably on the bench, with no apparent intention of interrupting his siesta. He was not alone for long. A bright, friendly looking young man approached along the eucalyptus-lined street. He was not wearing a hat and the wind lifted his brown hair. He joined the other man on the bench.
“Did they take the bait?” the sleeping man muttered between his teeth.
The young man shook his head.
“How about here?” he asked, pointing at the bench.
“Somewhat. The human benevolence of boredom,” said Superintendent Inspector Santiago Ericourt to his assistant Ferruccio Blasi.
Ericourt was a corpulent man from whose wide face protruded an aquiline nose and a square chin. When not speaking, the outline of his features gave him an air of unwillingness and distraction that others easily took for rejection, as if he were ill disposed towards friendliness. However, the watchful look in his brown eyes denoted something more than an inquisitive drive to close cases. He could spend days following the lead of a name, hiding his agitation behind an innocuous screen of abstraction. He had nothing of the prowling predator, but all the fearsome patience of an elephant scanning the ground with its trunk for the piece of food it has dropped.
When discussing his fellow men he seemed animated by the goodwill of those to whom the Kingdom of Heaven has been promised, but he pursued them all the same. For him, in a way, justice and truth took on the nature of a sporting tournament whose interest is renewed every day. Blasi admired how he remained permanently alert under his outward appearance of lethargy.
“Eidinger is expecting us now,” said Ericourt. “I told him we were coming. He seemed very happy to see us.”
“I met him in the morgue the night before last. He gives the impression of a good fellow overly concerned by what others think.”
“We’ve got nothing on him, Blasi. When they went to find him he’d just got back from a Photography Club meeting. At least ten people testified that he didn’t leave the place all night. They were holding an AGM.”
The afternoon winter sun projected a few warm rays that caressed them like long fingers, creating an atmosphere that inspired trust.
“Frida Eidinger,” Ericourt went on in his measured tone, “must have planned her suicide as a revenge. That’s why she chose the lift, because it was the best way to put the man she wanted to hurt in an awkward position: a partial incrimination that would open the doors to the most dangerous hypotheses.”
“But why does it necessarily have to be suicide?” Blasi objected, angry with himself for thinking how nice it would be to sit in that square with no other motive than to soak up the sun, disconsolately bored by the lack of anything to do.
Ericourt took off his hat and twirled it between his spatulate fingers.
“I don’t believe it was suicide either. But we have to admit it as a possibility. Frida Eidinger might have gone to the house to see one of three men: Luchter, Czerbó or Soler. For reasons of good taste we’ll discount Iñarra. Czerbó was the only one in his apartment. How do we prove she went to see him? All their statements are logical and do not contradict one another. There is a grey area, but not surrounding Czerbó.”
“Who then?” asked Blasi.
“It’s strange that if señorita Iñarra returned home between one thirty and two, as she claims, she didn’t come across the victim in the lift.”
“She says she took the stairs.”
“After having walked her cousin home and then back to her own building. In that case the girl is obsessed with physical exercise.”
“I don’t like clues,” Blasi contended. “Their interpretation often leads us the wrong way.”
Ericourt stood up. The two men walked in silence along the wide path flanked by trees whose bark split open to reveal the pale, fleshy insides of their trunks, strong as columns. The wind shook the branches, covering the ground with the small red filaments of their flowers. The soft afternoon air was filled with the scent of eucalyptus. Blasi became engrossed in the childish task of treading on the arabesques of sun and shade.
“Last night,” Ericourt said in the emphatically recitative tone he used when putting his ideas in order, “I was working at home until late. I needed to look over some files. My desk is in front of the window. The night was starry and if I had to classify it, I would say it was a moonless winter night. A good while went by; when I looked up again, a waning moon hung in the centre of the window frame. For hours I had considered it inexistent because it was invisible to me. So you see how the evidence of a fact is purely a question of perspective.”
Blasi was still absorbed in his infantile game with the patches of sun.
“There is always a truth, even if it’s hidden,” Ericourt went on, “but the facts inexorably describe their orbit and at a certain point a piece of evidence appears before us with the same clarity as the waning moon that appeared to me last night. Sometimes we have to wait, sometimes the truth reveals itself unexpectedly.”
“I’d like to think it was suicide,” said Blasi. “That’s the most logical. Lahore is sure of it.”
“It is the most logical. But logic has the inherent defect of being personal.”
“According to Lahore, señora Eidinger was a friend of Soler’s and had been to visit him that night. Soler had given her a key to the main door but not his flat so as to avoid problems because he leads a, shall we say, carefree life. Not finding him at home, she left. When she got to the lobby she met him arriving home at that very moment. There had been jealousy between them and threats to end the relationship. They surely had a vicious argument and she ingested the cyanide.”
“How? Where was she carrying it? Let’s suppose she had it in a capsule. Did Soler get her a glass of water so she could take it?”