Her grandfather was born in Italy and studied engineering and was a railroad technician, and when he arrived in Argentina they brought him out to the deserted plains and put him at the head of a branch line, a stop — a railroad crossing, really — in the middle of the pampas.
“And now sometimes I think,” she said later, “that if my grandfather hadn’t left Turin, Tony wouldn’t have died. Or even if we hadn’t met him in Atlantic City, or if he had stayed with his grandparents in Río Piedras, then they wouldn’t have killed him. What do you call that?”
“It’s called life,” Renzi said.
“Pshaw8!” she said. “Don’t be so corny. What’s wrong with you? They picked him out on purpose and killed him, on the exact day, at the exact hour. They didn’t have that many opportunities. Don’t you understand? You don’t get that many chances to kill a man like that.”
8 Sofía liked to use the onomatopoeias she always saw reading comics throughout her childhood.
4
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.