Needle in a Haystack (12 page)

Amancio finds a table by the window from where he can keep an eye on Biterman’s block and the coming and going of the conscripts loading the lorry. Now they’re carrying pictures, rugs, pots and pans. He orders a Bols, which the Spaniard serves up to the brim of a small sturdy glass. Amancio downs it in one and orders another. The nasty spirit warms his gullet and gradually he stops shaking. The pains become more localized, less general, and a splitting headache sets upon him, which he thinks he might dull with a third gin. Other than the marine removal men, the street is empty. With some satisfaction, he thinks about how Biterman’s body will have already begun to decompose, filling up with worms until he disappears. Making him disappear, this is the problem Amancio now faces. He could just leave him there and let Horacio deal with the mess in the morning, after all… But he doesn’t trust him. As soon as the police put any pressure on, Horacio would no doubt tell them
everything, act the innocent and dump the whole load on Amancio. On the other hand, if there is no corpse, there’s no proof of the crime and no conviction, even if a trail does lead to Amancio. Yes, the Jew has to disappear. And now that he’s dead, Amancio has solved the problem of the cheques. Come to think of it, he has to go back and get the cheques, and the blank pieces of paper he was made to sign. He feels about in his pockets in sudden panic and sighs in relief that he still has the keys. Giribaldi knows what to do with dead bodies.

Meanwhile, now on his fourth gin, a warm drowsiness comes over him. Gretschen pops into his head, a girl who already had a prize pair of tits at the age of fourteen. Horse rides on their uncle and auntie’s ranch out at Tapalqué. His cousin galloping along the cattle tracks, her boobs bouncing up and down in front of his twelve-year-old eyes. Lying in the clover, she would let him touch them and kiss her with closed lips and say they were a secret couple, because if cousins have children then they turn out defective, so no one must know. At night around the dining table, the day’s sun still warm on their skin, they would exchange naughty looks and, later on, once the sheets warmed up, Amancio would take hold of his sex with thumb and forefinger and masturbate slowly imagining that Gretschen, in the next room, was doing the same thinking of him. And then, with veritable joy, he would release the millions of children they would never have into the piece of toilet paper he’d brought in from the bathroom.

He gives a sudden start. Giri, in military fatigues, is knocking on the window. Amancio signals for him to come in. The military man sits down in front of him, orders a hot chocolate and looks out at the navy lorry.

Giribaldi notices the injuries on Amancio’s face.

All dapper in his immaculate uniform, Giribaldi jumps in his car and ploughs away. The soldiers finish loading the truck. Amancio asks for the bill, pays and leaves. A gust of wind whips at him as he crosses the road and he shivers as he enters the building where Biterman lies dead.

Amancio’s a little repulsed by the idea that he’ll have to touch a dead body. He tugs the curtain down and
laboriously wraps the corpse in it, then uses the curtain ties to fasten up the package. He sits down. The fabric starts to stain with blood. He gets up. He goes out into the corridor. He presses the button on the Otis elevator. When the lift arrives, Amancio opens the door. He goes back. With great effort, he drags the body to the lift and then, also with much difficulty, manages to get it inside. He closes the door and starts the descent. He thinks he sees Biterman move. He thinks he hears a whine. Terrified, he starts kicking the bundle where he supposes the head is. He reaches the ground floor. He gets out of the lift. He closes the interior grill. With one hand he holds down the latch to make the lift think the door is closed. He puts his other hand through the bars of the grill and presses a button in the lift. He pulls his hand back quickly and watches the lift go up, then lets go of the door latch with the other hand. The lift halts between two floors. With the butt of his gun he shifts the lever that blocks the door when the lift is on another floor, and doesn’t realise he’s damaged the breech. He closes the lift door and goes out into the street.

Amancio realizes he’s started shaking again and he tells himself it’s because of the physical effort of moving the carcass. He walks to the corner. Turns. Gets in his car, puts it into reverse, his foot slips off the clutch, the car jumps back and bashes into the truck parked behind. He gets out. He’s put a dent in his rear door and broken one of the brake lights. He gets back behind the wheel, pulls off, drives around the block and parks. He gets out. Goes in.

He pulls open the lift door. With one hand he holds down the door latch and with the other he presses the button to call the lift. The lift descends. It arrives. He
opens the grill. He hears a noise in the street. He climbs into the lift. He closes the door and holds the handle tight so that it can’t be opened. The sound of footsteps. Somebody, a resident, tries to open the door, bangs on it. Finally the stranger heads for the staircase, grumbling. Amancio pokes his head out, listens until the sound of footsteps fades away. He heads over to the entrance and jams the door open with a clothes peg. He goes out onto the pavement; the neighbourhood is deserted. He opens the boot of his Rural. He carries the corpse out and puts it in the back, the effort of which produces a sharp pain in his chest, a moment of panic as he feels like his heart is going to explode. He takes the tarpaulin he uses to cover the car in the country in winter and drapes it over the bundle. He goes back to the building, removes the peg, the door swings shut with a thump. He gets into the car, starts up and pulls away.

Amancio’s heartbeat thunders in his ears. He’s sweating, he sees himself wild-eyed in the mirror. He winds the window down. The winter air hits him full in the face. He hits a pothole that squeezes the shock absorbers to the limit. The steering wheel conveys the city’s neglect. He pulls out onto Entre Ríos, driving slowly down the middle of the street. He inhales deeply, counts to ten, lets the air out, does it again, and again.
The cheques, the cheques. Bloody hell, I forgot the cheques!

It’s starting to get light. The time has come. He gets to Vélez Sarsfield, drives around the bridge and he’s beside the stagnant river. He takes a perfumed tissue out of his pocket and drives with one hand on the wheel, the other holding the tissue over his nose to cover up the putrid smell. He remembers that his father used to make the same joke whenever they passed the Riachuelo:
Breathe
in boys, it’s good for a cough.
It’s a grey morning and he can’t see more than twenty feet in front of the car, the fog acting like a wall refracting the car’s headlights. He turns them off, reduces his speed.
How the hell am I going to find the hut in this kind of visibility.
And then he sees it. It’s like a brown brushstroke on a canvas of grey. He brakes. He reverses back up the road until he passes the hut again, then noses forward down the dirt track towards it. Before he’s gone far, he spots the bulk of something. Two corpses lie on the ground. Competing winds start to sweep away the fog. The girl’s head has been destroyed with gunshots and part of her brain has spilled out onto what remains of her face. He feels himself retch and turns away. He doesn’t want to see any more. He opens the boot and faces up to the gruelling task of getting Biterman out. He takes the tarpaulin off. The movement of the car has made the curtain slide off the dead body, leaving the Jew’s blood-soaked belly on full display. As he pulls at the corpse, he finds one of its arms has got jammed under the spare tyre. To Amancio, it seems like the dead man is refusing to let go. He wrestles with it, but only succeeds in getting the arm stuck even more. He looks for the key that unfastens the screw that holds the tyre in place. He finally manages to free the arm and pull the body halfway out of the car. He grabs hold of the dead man’s belt and pulls. The buckle snaps. Amancio throws the strip of leather away in anger. He grabs hold of Biterman by the legs and drags him out of the car. He unties and unwraps the body, not wanting to leave the curtain behind, and he notices that the corpse is already starting to go stiff. He gets his breath back. He rolls the fabric into a ball and hurls it into the river. The water begins to stain it, then
swallows it up. Slowly the bundle sinks, becomes a ghost and disappears.

Amancio gets into the car and reverses up the track. As he reaches the street, he notices a car approaching with its lights on. He takes the same lane and pulls away at top speed. In the rear-view mirror, the lights of the other car quickly get smaller and smaller until they can no longer be seen. He slows down and carries on towards General Paz. All he can think of is a whisky, a bath and bed.

Lascano arrives at police headquarters when everyone else is getting ready to go home. He wants to go through certain dossiers when the archives department is at its quietest, so that he can work unobserved and avoid having to check files in and out at the desk, preferring to leave no record of his research. Office work, what he likes least.

Five hours of reading have blurred his vision and five hours of chain smoking have filled his lungs with soot. He sets off walking from headquarters to his car, parked on the end block of Diagonal Norte. He’s nearly there when he gets mixed up with the audience coming out of the late showing at Cine Arte. He notices
Pasqualino Setebelleze
on the billing and starts to weave his way through the crowd when a scream draws everyone’s attention.

Across the road, a man holding a shotgun is standing beside a double-parked Ford Falcon. Two other men come out of an apartment block with their pistols drawn, dragging along a young man who cries out again and manages to pull himself free. One of the armed men swings a punch but misses. The youth runs out into the middle of the street, but when he’s halfway
between the cinema-goers and his pursuers he trips, falls and is recaptured. He shouts out his name. One of the men lunges at the boy and hits him on the head with his gun. The men with pistols carry him over to the Falcon and throw him in the back. The man with the shotgun points it at the crowd and growls something that can’t be understood but that everyone understands and the group starts to disperse. Lascano, alone on the pavement, watches the Falcon turn onto Libertad and quickly disappear.

Where Diagonal ends, behind the leafy eucalyptuses on Plaza Lavalle, the solemn Palace of Justice stands tall, blind, dirty and deaf.

Lascano likes the suburbs. They’re the essence of his youth. Nobody knows these places and these people better than he does. Out here people still have a provincial air, but it’s spiked with the cynicism that emanates from the big city, just twenty minutes up the Panamerican highway. Ponds, stray dogs, a bar where men sit playing hands of
Tutte Cabrero,
Guigue the pools coupon man on the street corner, the bottle collector pulling his cart.

But it’s not nostalgia that has brought Lascano here. A cast-iron arch adorns the entrance and above it a sheet-metal sign announces the Fortuna Sawmill, in rather pretentious shaded lettering. This is the only clue offered by the corpse planted at the scene of the execution. As if in a scene from a film noir, Perro takes out the business card and looks up at the sign. Here is where he hopes to find the end of the thread that will unravel the crime. This is the place all right.

Dodging the potholes full of water and rotting wood shavings spilled by the freight lorries, he moves forward purposefully. He is guided by the screech of an electric saw as it cuts through a board, held by a huge blond man in overalls. The man’s missing the top of his index finger on his right hand and a cataract in one of his eyes has
turned the pupil white. The guy is so concentrated on the saw edge he seems not to notice Lascano’s presence. But without stopping his work he suddenly speaks.

Lascano takes out the photo of Biterman and throws it onto the bench.

The woodcutter closes his cloudy eye and half-heartedly glances at the photo with the other.