14 People in small towns turn off the lights in their houses early in the evening, at which point everything turns gray, because the landscape under the moon is gray. The only way you know then that there is a house in the middle of the plains is by the barking dogs, one barks and then another, and then another, the barking can be heard in the vast shadows in the distance.
7
Inspector Croce Manipulates Evidence, was the leading headline in the local El Pregón newspaper the next morning. The story contained information that shouldn’t have been made public, mentioning aspects of the investigation that should have been protected by the secret nature of police activities. Official sources confirm that Inspector Croce returned to the Plaza Hotel late last night and went down to the storage room full of lost objects, later departing with several items that might be part of the investigation. How had the news gotten out, why were the facts presented like that? These questions no longer worried Croce. Exclusive statements by General Prosecutor Cueto, the newspaper said. An interview, photographs. Ever since he’d been placed in charge of the Prosecutor’s Office, Cueto had been building a campaign in the press against him. As the main reporter at the newspaper — one Daniel Otamendi — had written, Croce was Cueto’s bête noir. “I just learned that I have a rival who cares that much about me,” Croce said.
Cueto didn’t care about him, he just wanted to get Croce out of the way, and he knew that the key was to use the press to discredit him. The Prosecutor maintained that Croce was an anachronism, he wanted to modernize the local police force, and he treated Croce as if he were a rural cop, a sergeant in charge of a card game. The problem was that Croce solved all his cases.
The Inspector wasn’t intimidated by the leading headlines in the newspaper, but he was worried. The news of the murder of an American in the province of Buenos Aires had taken a national character. News was contagious, reporters would start flooding in like a leak through the roof of a country house.
That same morning, in fact, people had seen a reporter arriving from Buenos Aires. It was the special correspondent from the newspaper El Mundo. He’d gotten off the bus from Mar del Plata looking sleepy, smoking, wearing a leather jacket, had walked around a bit, and had finally gone into the Madariaga Store and Tavern and ordered coffee with milk and croissants. He was impressed by the round, white coffee mug and the foamy milk, and by the small, crispy, homemade croissants. Whenever someone from out of town arrived, people left a kind of buffer zone around him, as if everyone were studying him, so the reporter ate breakfast on his own, at the side table near the window with the bars facing out to the patio. The young man looked surprised and alarmed. At least that’s the impression he gave, because he changed seats twice and was seen speaking with one of the regular customers, who leaned forward and pointed outside toward the Plaza Hotel. Then, through the window in the tavern, they saw the town’s police car pull into town.
Croce and Saldías parked the car, got out, and walked along the square to the offices of El Pregón. They were followed at a respectful distance by the same entourage of curious townspeople and children who had taken the stranger to the tavern. The newspaper offices were on the second floor of the old Aduana Seca building, a large area occupied by the telephone operator, the secretary, and two writers.
Everyone expected a scandal at the newspaper, but the Inspector walked calmly into the newspaper’s offices, took off his hat, greeted the staff, and stopped at the editor’s desk. This was Thomas Alva Gregorius, a short, myopic man who wore a woven cap — the famous Tomasito-wool caps — because he was going bald and was depressed about it. Born in Bulgaria, Gregorius’s Spanish was imaginative; he wrote very poorly and only stayed on at the newspaper because he was the right-hand man for the prosecutor Cueto, who manipulated him as if he were a ventriloquist’s dummy.
Croce addressed Gregorius across his desk:
“Who tells you all those stories, eh?”
“That’s confidential information, Inspector. You were seen going down into the hotel basement, and come out carrying several items. It’s a fact, so I publish it,” Gregorius replied.
“I need some photographs from the archives,” Croce said.
He wanted to check something from one of the papers from a few weeks ago. Gregorius went directly to the secretary’s desk and approved the Inspector’s request. The secretary looked at the myopic editor, who looked back at her through his eight-diopter glasses and winked okay.
Croce took the newspapers given to him to a back counter and leafed through them until he found what he was looking for. He began studying the details on one of the pages with a magnifying lens. It was a photograph of the horse races in the town of Bolívar. He may have been searching for certain facts and trusted that a picture would allow him to see what he hadn’t been able to see when he was there in person. We never see what we see, he thought. After a while, he got up and spoke with Saldías.
“See if you can get the negative for this photograph at the lab. Talk to Marquitos, he keeps archives of all the pictures he takes. I want the negative this afternoon. We need to have this right here blown up.” He drew a circle with his finger around one of the faces in the photograph. “Twelve by twenty.”
The reporter from Buenos Aires walked in. He seemed half-asleep, curly hair, round glasses. He was the first reporter from a Buenos Aires newspaper to come to town since the floods of ’62. He approached the front desk and spoke with the secretary, who directed him to the editor’s office. Gregorius was waiting for him at the door, a friendly smile on his face.
“Ah, you’re the correspondent from El Mundo,” Gregorius said, helpfully. “You must be Renzi. Come on in. I always read your articles. It’s an honor …”
Another typical small-town brownnoser, Renzi thought.
“Yes, of course, how do you do? I wanted to ask you for a typewriter and the teleprinter to send my articles, if I have anything.”
“So you came because of the news.”
“I was in Mar del Plata, they sent me because I was nearby. This time of year everything’s flat. What’s happening around here?”
“An American has been murdered. A hotel employee did it. Everything is solved already, but Inspector Croce is not convinced. He’s stubborn, he’s crazy. We have everything: the suspect, the motive, the witnesses, the dead body. The only thing missing is the confession. The Inspector there,” Gregorius said, gesturing toward the table where Croce and Saldías were looking at the photograph in the newspaper. “That’s the Inspector, the other one is his assistant, Deputy Saldías.”
Croce raised his head, the magnifying glass in his hand, and looked at Renzi. A strange flare of sympathy flashed on the Inspector’s narrow face. Their eyes met but neither said anything. Then the Inspector seemed to look through Renzi, as if he were made of glass, and glared scornfully at Gregorius.
“Hey, Gregorio, I need to get a blow-up of this photograph,” he said in a loud voice. “I’ll leave it with Margarita.”