The Secret in Their Eyes (21 page)

We walked to the station. Inside we sat on the only bench whose wooden slats were still intact, on the platform where trains stopped on their way into the capital. At that hour they were almost empty. By contrast, on the other side of the tracks, crowds that grew larger as the evening advanced were getting off every train that pulled into the station. The passengers scattered in all directions or ran to catch one of the red buses with the black roofs.

The open air did me good. I could at least think with a modicum of clarity, and I realized I had something urgent to say to Báez. “There’s one thing I haven’t told you, Báez,” I said hesitantly. “You remember back at the beginning of the case, when Gómez figured out we were looking for him because I tried to play the detective?”

“Well, it wasn’t that bad. Besides—”

“Yes it was. Let me finish. After the amnesty, I screwed up again, much the same way. I mean, I see now that it was a screwup. At the time, I didn’t think so. I didn’t think it was anything.”

Báez stretched out his legs and crossed his ankles, like a man getting ready to listen. I tried to be as concise as
I could. I was already embarrassed about having looked like a retard in front of him the first time, eight years before. Now I had to play the part of the recidivist retard. After the amnesty, I told him, it had occurred to me to do Ricardo Morales one last favor: to find out where Gómez was, just in case Morales should get up the nerve to blow his brains out. I explained to Báez that I’d conducted the investigation with the help of a cop, an acquaintance of mine, and that it had all been done, naturally, only by word of mouth, without putting anything in writing. Báez asked me the cop’s name.

“Zambrano, in Theft,” I answered, and immediately asked a question of my own. “Is he an asshole, or is he a son of a bitch?”

“No,” Báez said slowly. “He’s not a son of a bitch.”

“Then he’s an asshole.”

“Ah, forget Zambrano,” Báez said, trying to protect what was left of my self-esteem. “He’s not important. Tell me how the investigation turned out.”

“Something like two months passed, but in the end Zambrano came up with an address in Villa Lugano. To tell you the truth, I no longer remember what it was. You know how Villa Lugano addresses are. Block so-and-so, Building I don’t know what, Corridor something or other, and all that.”

“Well, did he do a good job? Did he give you the right address?”

“I don’t know. I never checked it out.”

We were silent while Báez tried to fit the piece of information I’d just provided him into the puzzle he was working out in his head. “I think I understand now,” he said at last. “Romano must have found out. Especially if Zambrano disregarded the necessary subtleties. But since nothing happened, Romano stayed calm. He probably interpreted your search for Gómez as a futile gesture, a sign of your anger and humiliation at losing him.”

We fell silent again. Each of us, I imagine, was mentally taking the next logical step in the chain of events. Eventually, Báez said, “You passed that information on to Morales, I suppose.”

“As a matter of fact, I didn’t. Pretty ironic, huh? I was afraid he’d take it badly or … I don’t know. In the end, I didn’t tell him anything.”

An outbound train arrived and discharged another human flood, which surged out of the carriages and dispersed.

“In that case, the widower must have found out the address on his own account. That kid was never stupid,” Báez said.

“You believe it was Morales who did the job on Gómez in Villa Lugano?”

“Do you have any doubt?” Báez turned toward me. Up until then, both of us had been looking at the opposite platform as we talked.

“I … at this point, I don’t know what to think … or say, either,” I confessed.

“Yes. It was Morales. I’d even say that’s been confirmed. I mean, I’ve got as much confirmation as you can get in such cases. I went to Villa Lugano the day before yesterday and asked a few questions. A couple of neighbors had a few things to tell me. They even remarked that ‘some young guys’ had already been there, asking pretty much the same questions as me.”

“Romano’s people?”

“You bet. In a couple of the local taverns, I heard about an elderly couple who had seen everything. So I went to have a word with them. You can imagine how that went. The desire to talk in the supermarket is inversely proportional to the desire to talk to a policeman. I had to threaten them. I had to act very sorry, but I was going to have to take them down to the station to make a statement. If they’d called my bluff, I don’t know where the hell I would have taken them. But they eventually gave in, and by the time I left, we were all great pals. They had seen the whole thing. You know how old folks are. Or should I say, how we all are? They get up at dawn, even though they don’t have a frigging thing to do. Since there’s no television at that hour, they listen to the radio and peep out the window. And that’s how they come to see a young man they recognize because they see him around dawn every morning, walking down the street to the building across from theirs,
where he apparently lives. What makes this night different is that another guy suddenly comes out from behind some bushes and gives their neighbor a mighty thump on the head with what looks like a pipe. The kid goes down like a sack, and his attacker—a tall guy, fair-haired, they think, but they didn’t get a very good look at him—anyway, the attacker takes a key from his pocket and opens the trunk of a white car parked right there at the curb. The old folks don’t know much about automobile makes. They said it was too big for a Fiat 500 and too small for a Ford Falcon.”

I searched my memory. “Morales has—or used to have, at least—a white Fiat 1500.”

“There we are. That’s the detail I was missing. So then the tall guy carefully closes the trunk, gets in the front seat, and drives away.”

We kept quiet for a while, until Báez interrupted the silence: “This Morales kid was always very well organized, it seems to me. You once described how patient he was, mounting stakeouts in train stations. No chance he was going to blow Gómez away right there, jump in the car, and blast off, laying rubber like a fugitive in a movie. I’m sure he drove him to a spot he’d already selected, hauled him out of the trunk, shot him several times, and buried him there.”

I remembered my last conversation with Morales, in the bar on Tucumán Street, and I ventured to disagree slightly
with the policeman. I figured it was my turn to offer a hypothesis. “No,” I said. “I think he probably tied him up and waited for him to regain consciousness. The shooting would come later. If not, he wouldn’t have been able to savor his revenge.” All at once, a question occurred to me: “How about the hospitals in the area? Was any wounded patient admitted that day? Seriously wounded, I mean.” “No. I did a thorough check.”

“Then Morales didn’t trust himself to leave the guy a cripple.” I recounted to Báez the relevant part of my last chat with the widower.

“Well … it’s not so easy,” Báez concluded. “It’s one thing to make plans while you’re lying in bed, staring at the ceiling because you can’t sleep. Carrying out the plan you’ve fantasized about is a completely different thing. Morales being a sensible, stable kid, he must have thought—I mean, once Gómez was in the trunk—Morales must have thought, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Maybe you’re right, maybe he waited for Gómez to wake up.”

“Go figure where he dumped the body,” I made bold to say.

A train stopped at our platform, but very few people got on or off. As evening advanced, inbound trains grew emptier and emptier.

“I don’t believe he dumped him,” Báez said, delicately correcting me in his turn. “He must have buried him
very neatly, in a place where he won’t be found for two hundred years, not even by accident.”

An image flashed in my memory: Morales sitting at a table in the little bar, putting the photographs in strict numerical order and arranging them into chronologically organized piles. “That’s got to be it,” I concluded. “He must have planned the operation and chosen the site months ago.” I paused for a while and then spoke into the new silence. “Do you think he did right to kill him?”

A stray dog, skinny and dirty, came up to Báez and started sniffing his shoes. The policeman didn’t shoo the dog away, but when he moved his legs, it got frightened and ran off. “What do you think?” he answered.

“I think you’re dodging the question.”

Báez smiled. “I don’t know. You’d have to be in the kid’s place.”

Those seemed to be his last words on the subject. But then, after a long pause, he added, “I believe I would have done the same thing.”

I didn’t reply immediately. Then I concurred: “I believe I would have, too.”

A few hours later, Sandoval and I were sitting in a taxi, barely exchanging a word. It was as if what was about to happen made the two of us too sad to talk, and neither of us felt like pretending; he wasn’t going to act happy, and I wasn’t going to act convinced.

“Cross under the General Paz freeway,” Sandoval told the driver, “and drop us off at the long-distance bus stop.”

We got the bags out of the trunk, and I prepared to say my farewells. It was ten minutes before midnight. Sandoval stopped me. “No,” he said. “I’m waiting until you’re on the bus.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, go on. You’ve got to work tomorrow. How do you expect to get home if you don’t take this taxi? It’s the only one around.”

“Yeah, right, I’m going to abandon you in the middle of Ciudadela. No fucking chance.” He turned his back to me, spoke to the cab driver, and paid the fare.

We moved the bags and joined a small group of people, who it turned out were waiting for the same bus. “It comes from the south, from Avellaneda, and stops
here,” Sandoval explained. “You’ll get to Jujuy tomorrow night.”

“Sounds like a lovely trip,” I said sourly.

In spite of everything, when the enormous, gleaming bus arrived and pulled up at the curb in front of us, I couldn’t help feeling a wave of childish excitement at the prospect of going on a long trip, the way I used to feel when I left on vacations with my parents. And so I was glad when Sandoval gave me my ticket and I saw that it bore the number 3: first seat on the right. We looked on as a driver wearing a light blue shirt and a dark blue tie shoved my bags all the way to the back of the luggage compartment after checking my ticket and discovering that I was bound for San Salvador de Jujuy. He put the bags belonging to passengers with tickets to Tucumán and Salta nearer the front. It was certainly true that I was fleeing to the farthest corner of Argentina. Sandoval and I had just stepped away when a loud click signaled that the driver had closed and latched the compartment.

We stood to one side of the bus door and embraced. I started to walk up the steps, but I turned around suddenly to talk to him. “I want you to do something,” I said, not knowing how to begin. “Or rather, not to do something.”

“Don’t worry, Benjamín.” Sandoval seemed to have anticipated this dialogue. “How am I supposed to get
loaded if I don’t have anyone to pay for my drinks and bring me home in a taxi?” “Is that a promise?”

Sandoval smiled without taking his eyes off the pavement. “Come on, let’s not exaggerate,” he said. “You wouldn’t ask so much.”

“So long, Sandoval.”

“So long, Chaparro.”

Sometimes we men feel more secure if we treat those we love a little coldly. I took my seat and waved to him through the window. He raised a hand, smiled, and headed off to catch the 117 bus, which at that hour passed once in a blue moon.

Z
árate
18. As we headed north, it gave me an uncomfortable feeling, a sense of inferiority or helplessness, to think that all my possessions fit into the three suitcases in the luggage compartment. I hadn’t managed to salvage more than a couple of my favorite books, and I had almost nothing in the way of clothes. One of the bits of bad news that Sandoval had brought me at the rooming house was that most of my wardrobe had been slashed to ribbons, especially the shirts and the sports jackets.

I hadn’t told my mother good-bye. Or anybody at the court.

R
OSARIO
45. The headlights tore through the darkness, occasionally lighting up signs like that, white letters and numbers on a green background. Were we already in Santa Fe province? How many kilometers was Rosario from the border with Buenos Aires province? If we’d already crossed the province line, I hadn’t noticed it.

I tried to sleep from time to time, but I couldn’t keep my eyes closed. The days in the rooming house had been a permanent, monotonous void in which time had stretched out like chewing gum. But so many
things had happened in the course of the last day, and I had learned about so many others, that I felt as if time had passed from dead calm to whirlwind.

At the end of our meeting in the Rafael Castillo train station, Báez had given me the address of Judge Aguirregaray in Olivos, about twenty kilometers north of Buenos Aires. I asked Báez what the judge had to do with my case.

“That’s what I started to explain to you at the beginning,” Báez said. “And then I decided it would be best to leave it until the end.”

Then I remembered. “Jujuy?” I asked.

“Exactly. He’s an upright guy, and he’s got the necessary contacts to arrange your transfer. It was his idea, by the way,” Báez added.

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Or rather, I think it would be better if you got the explanation from him. He’s expecting you.”

“But the only solution is for me to run like a fugitive?” I couldn’t resign myself to the idea that my life as I knew it was going to end overnight.

Báez gazed at me awhile, maybe hoping I’d get the picture myself. Then, seeing I wasn’t going to, he explained: “Don’t you know what the deal is, Benjamín? The only way to be sure Romano will stop fucking with you is to inform him of the truth. I can set up a meeting, if you want. But if we do that, I’ll have to tell him that the
guy who bumped off his little friend wasn’t you, it was Ricardo Morales.” He paused for a bit before concluding. “If you want, that’s what we’ll do.”

Shit,
I thought.
I can’t do that. I just fucking can’t.
“You’re right,” I said. “Let’s leave things as they are.”

We said our good-byes without too much effusiveness. He wrote down the numbers of the buses I would have to take to get to Olivos. At that point, I was beyond worrying about the possibility of looking stupid, so I even went so far as to ask him what color each of the buses was.

It to ok me more than two hours to get there. By the time I did, another cold day in that awful winter was drawing to a close. Judge Aguirregaray’s house was a pretty cottage with a front garden. I told myself that if I ever came back to Buenos Aires, I’d spring for another place in Castelar. No apartments in the city center for me.

The judge in person opened the door and immediately invited me into his study. I thought I heard, in the background, the sounds of children and kitchen activity. The idea that I might have come at an inconvenient time made me uncomfortable, and I told him so.

“Don’t concern yourself about that, Chaparro. There’s nothing to worry about on that score. But it seems to me the fewer people who see you, the better off you are.”

I agreed. After showing me a large armchair, he offered me some coffee, which I declined. Then he began: “Báez has filled me in on all the details,” he said, and I
rejoiced, because the mere thought of having to repeat the entire story exhausted me. “What I don’t know is how much you’re going to like the solution we’ve come up with.”

I tried to sound nonchalant when I ventured to say, “Jujuy.”

“Jujuy,” the judge confirmed. “Báez tells me this thug who’s after you, this …” “Romano.”

“Romano, that’s it. Báez says this Romano is after you because of a personal matter, a kind of private vendetta. Is that right?”

“Absolutely,” I conceded. Obviously, Báez
hadn’t
given Judge Aguirregaray “all the details.” I noted that the policeman exercised prudence even with his friends, and I thanked him in my secret heart, for about the thousandth time.

“So he’s siccing his own hoodlums on you, so to speak. I think it’s safe to assume they don’t have much in the way of logistics beyond their little group.”

“A sort of suburban mafia,” I said, trying to be funny.

“Something like that. Don’t laugh—it’s not a bad definition.”

“Well, what’s to be done, Your Honor?”

“Báez and I think what’s to be done is we have to send you far enough away that Romano and his boys can’t bother you, even if they discover where you are. So that’s
where Jujuy comes in. Because sooner or later, Romano’s going to find out about your transfer, Chaparro. You know how long court secrets last downtown. The solution is to discourage him, to make going after you too complicated. “

He paused a moment, listening to the sound of a woman’s footsteps in the hall until they turned into another room. Aguirregaray went to the door, delicately locked it, and returned to his chair. “My cousin’s a federal judge in San Salvador de Jujuy,” he went on. “I know that must sound like the ends of the earth to you. But Báez and I couldn’t come up with a better alternative.”

I remained silent, eager to hear about the countless advantages of moving to the fucking sticks to live and work.

“As you know, the federal courts are part of the National Judiciary, that is, they operate within our own structure. So what we’re talking about is a simple relocation, a transfer. Your position, of course, will be the same.”

“And it has to be in Jujuy,” I said, trying not to sound finicky.

“You know, even though you may not think so, Jujuy offers some advantages. One is that you’ll be 1,900 kilometers away from here, and it will be almost impossible for the bad guys to bother you. And if they still try to get to you, another advantage you’ll have is my cousin.”

I awaited further explanations on this point. Who was his cousin? Superman?

“He’s a guy with pretty traditional ideas. You can imagine. You know how people can be in the provinces.” I didn’t know, but I was beginning to suspect. “And don’t think he’s a nice, agreeable sort. Nothing like it. He’s almost repulsive, my cousin. And mean as a scorpion. But the main thing is that up there, he’s an important, respected man, and all he has to do is to tell four or five key persons that you’re in Jujuy under his protection, and then you won’t have to worry, because not even the flies will bother you. And if anything unusual happens—say four strangers entering the province in a Ford Falcon without license plates—he’ll find out about it at once. If a vicuña on the Cerro de los Siete Colores farts, my cousin’s informed within a quarter of an hour. Do you understand what I’m getting at?”

“I think so,” I said.
Wonderful,
I thought.
I’m going to live on the frontier and work for a feudal lord, more or less.
But at that moment the image of my wrecked apartment crossed my mind and tempered my presumptions. If I was going to be safe under this guy’s protection, it might be a better idea for me to lose the haughty airs and go directly to wherever he was. I remembered the vicarious shame I’d felt years before, when Judge Batista couldn’t find the courage to come down on Romano and backed
away from that prisoner abuse case. I too was a coward. I too had reached the line I wouldn’t cross.

While Judge Aguirregaray was seeing me to the door, I thanked him again. “Think nothing of it, Chaparro,” he said. “One thing, though: come back to Buenos Aires as soon as you can. We don’t have many deputy clerks like you.”

It was as if his words had suddenly given me back the identity I’d lost. I realized the worst thing about my eight days as a fugitive was that I’d stopped feeling like myself. “I’m very grateful to you,” I said, energetically shaking his hand. “Good-bye.”

I walked to the Olivos station. The trains on the Mitre Railroad were electric, like those on the Sarmiento Line, except that the Mitre trains were clean and almost empty, and they ran on time. But this moment of local envy showed me how much I missed Castelar. Do all those who are in flight from their past feel weighed down by nostalgia for it? In Retiro, I took the subway, got off near my rooming house, and walked the rest of the way.

“There’s a guy waiting for you in your room,” the desk clerk said to me as I passed. My knees got weak. “He said you knew he was coming. He introduced himself as your bar associate. Is that right?”

“Ah, yes, yes,” I said, relaxing with a laugh that must
have sounded excessive to the man behind the counter. Good old Sandoval—he never changed.

He was indeed waiting for me, comfortably stretched out on my bed. We embraced, and I went into the bathroom for a shower. Then we took that taxi, the one in which we barely spoke, to the bus stop in Ciudadela.