“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.