The Secret in Their Eyes (4 page)

I had a strange feeling when we entered the bank. It was a big, square room with wide, cold marble panels on the walls. Spaced at regular intervals across the ceiling, a series of ancient, glass-shaded lamps hanging at the end of narrow black tubes poorly illuminated the vast room. An unbroken line of tall counters, made of gray Formica and topped by glass panels, separated the area reserved for employees from the public space. A bored janitor was cleaning the glass around the circular openings through which the bank’s customers made themselves heard. I hated enormous rooms, and I thought it must be horrific to work every day in a place like that. I even went so far as to comfort myself by recalling the office of the court where I worked, its shelves crammed with files from floor to ceiling, its narrow passages, its faint aroma of old wood.

But the strange feeling had to do with something else. As soon as I went through the door, following Báez, I cast a quick glance at the twenty or so employees; even at this hour, when the bank wasn’t yet open to the public, they were already at their desks, absorbed in their
work. It was as if no one had yet been selected to receive the awful news we were bringing—not, at least, until the guard who’d opened the door for us walked across the room, lifted the hinged section of one of the counters, stepped into the area reserved for bank personnel, and directed his steps toward the desk occupied by the person we’d asked for. I looked from one employee to the next, wondering which of them was Morales. I tried to remember the wedding photograph on the night table in his bedroom, but I couldn’t, maybe because I’d looked at it too hurriedly, or too apprehensively.

I felt that tragedy was hovering above those twenty lives and hadn’t yet decided to descend on one. A ridiculous notion, of course, because only one of those men could be Ricardo Agustín Morales. None of the others. All of them were safe from the horror we were there to communicate to him alone. But as long as the guard didn’t stop beside one of them as they worked, each of them (each young one, at any rate) seemed like a valid target, a potential victim of fearful chance, a possible recipient (against all odds, past all predicting, beyond all the certainties with which humans bear, every day, the terrifying knowledge that everything we love can be extinguished from one moment to the next) of news that would unhinge his life.

The guard passed several desks and leaned down to speak into the ear of a young man who was tallying
checks on a huge adding machine. Across the distance that separated us, I was starting to feel sorry for the guy, but all of a sudden, events seemed to corroborate my theory of a catastrophe hesitating before swooping down on its target: the young fellow with the checks raised his hand and pointed to a door in the back, and it was as though that gesture of stretching out his arm had saved him from the impending misery of having lost his wife in a most brutal way.

Báez and I looked where that arm was pointing, and almost as if in a synchronized theatrical movement, the door in the rear of the enormous room opened to reveal a tall young man with slicked-down hair combed straight back, a serious little mustache, a blue jacket, and a tightly knotted tie. In the last moments of his innocence, he walked toward the desk where the guard and the young colleague with the checks waited, eyeing him curiously.

The guard spoke to the tall young man and indicated that we were looking for him. Now, I thought, at this exact moment, that boy has just entered an endless tunnel, one he’ll probably stay in for the rest of his life. He looked in our direction. At first he seemed surprised, but his surprise immediately turned to suspicion. The guard must have told him that Báez and I were both policemen. It’s always the same—people want the simplest image possible. A policeman is something everybody
knows. A deputy clerk in an examining magistrate’s court, Criminal Division, belongs to a more exotic species. So there we were, ready to plunge our knives into the lad’s jugular, and he was looking at us, not sure yet whether or not he should be worried.

I walked over to the hinged counter as the young man approached it from the other side. I’d decided to introduce myself but then to let Báez do the talking. There would be time later to explain which of us was the policeman and which the judicial employee. Besides, Báez seemed to be used to communicating abominable information. As for me, when it came right down to it, I had no reason to be there at all, no fucking reason to be a witness to how one goes about shattering a young banker’s life. And if I
was
there, I owed the privilege exclusively to that jackass Judge Fortuna Lacalle and his overriding eagerness to be promoted as soon as possible to the Appellate Court.

While the brand-new widower, Báez, and I sat close together in the bank’s tiny kitchen, I was reflecting on how odd life is. I felt sad, but what was it, exactly, that was making me so sad? I didn’t think it could be the boy’s bewilderment, his pallor, or his wide-open, unfocused eyes after Báez told him his wife had been murdered in their home. Nor was it the kid’s grief. Grief can’t be seen, simply because it isn’t visible, not in any circumstances. What you can see, at most, are some of its external signs. But such signs have always struck me as masks rather than manifestations. How can a man express the intolerable agony of his soul? By weeping floods of tears? By sustained howling? Disjointed babbling? Groans? Sobs? I felt that all such possible tokens of grief were capable only of insulting that grief, of belittling it, of profaning it, of placing it on the same level as free samples.

While I stared at Morales’s frozen face and listened to Báez talk to him about going to the morgue to identify the body, I believed I understood that the reason we’re sometimes moved by another’s grief has to do with our atavistic fear that this grief may get transferred to us,
too. In 1968, I’d been married for three years, and I believed, or preferred to believe, or fervently desired to believe, or was trying desperately to believe, that I was in love with my wife. And while I contemplated that boy—his body collapsed on a rickety little bench, his small eyes fixed on the blue flame burning on the stove, his hands pressed against his temples, his tightly knotted tie hanging down between his open legs like a plumb line—I imagined myself in his place, in the plight of a broken man whose life was over, and the image horrified me.

Morales’s drifting eyes had come to a stop on the flame he’d lit five minutes previously, intending to fix himself some maté, right before our brutal irruption into his life. And I thought I understood what was going through his mind as he gave monosyllabic answers to Báez’s methodical questions. The young man couldn’t focus on exactly what time it had been when he’d left for work that morning, nor could he remember precisely how many people might have the keys to his apartment or whether he’d seen anyone who looked suspicious hanging around his building. It seemed to me most likely that he was taking a mental inventory of everything he’d just lost.

His wife wouldn’t accompany him to do the shopping that afternoon, or any other, nor would she ever again offer him her alabaster body, nor bear his children, nor grow old at his side, nor walk with him on Punta Mogotes
beach, nor laugh until she cried at some especially funny episode of
The Three Stooges
on Channel 13. Back then, I didn’t know these details (which Morales consented to reveal to me only after some time had passed), but it was evident from the young man’s anguished face that his future had just been blown into rubble.

When Báez asked him if he had any enemies, I couldn’t help feeling, deep down inside, an urge to burst into sarcastic laughter. Unless there was someone Morales had given the wrong change to or whose electric bill he’d forgotten to stamp
PAID,
who could hold anything against this guy? He shook his head without emphasis and impassively turned his eyes back to the burner’s blue flame.

As the minutes passed and Báez’s questions went into details that neither Morales nor I cared about, I watched his expression grow more and more vacant. His features gradually relaxed, and the tears and sweat that had dampened his skin at the start dried up definitively. It was as if Morales—once he’d cooled off, once he was empty of emotions and feelings, once the dust cloud had settled on the ruins of his life—could perceive what his future would be like, what he had to look forward to, and as if he’d realized that yes, beyond the shadow of a doubt, his future was nothing.

“It’s solved, Benjamín. Case closed.”

Pedro Romano said this to me with an air of triumph, leaning his elbows on my desk and waving a piece of paper with some typewritten names on it under my nose. He’d just hung up the telephone. I’d watched his side of a long conversation in which vociferous exclamations (so that no one could doubt the importance of what he was working on) had alternated with long speeches delivered in a conspiratorial whisper. In my initial distraction, I’d wondered why the hell he’d come to my section to use the telephone instead of staying in his own. Then I saw Judge Fortuna talking to Clerk Pérez in his office, and things became clear: Romano was trying to show off. Since I considered myself a compassionate fellow, and since I was, naturally, in the most absolute ignorance as to all the consequences the events of that day were going to have in the years to come, I found Romano’s efforts to dazzle our superiors more amusing than annoying. I wasn’t tickled so much by the way he was striving to call attention to himself as by the moral and intellectual qualities of the superior for
whom he wanted to stand out. That someone would play the model employee before a judge might have seemed to me like fairly pathetic behavior, but that he’d do it without realizing that the judge in question was an idiot of the first magnitude who wouldn’t even notice the performance left me speechless. Nevertheless, I was even more deeply surprised when Pedro Romano finished his telephone conversation and told me that the case was solved, showing me a piece of paper with two names written on it and looking at me as if to say,
Here, I’m doing you a favor, though we both know I don’t have to, because it’s your section’s case.

“Workers,” he said. “In Apartment 3. Doing renovation.”

Romano evidently thought the telegraphic style he was using, punctuated by theatrical silences, increased the drama of his scoop. I asked myself how such a limited guy had risen to the position of deputy clerk. My answer was that a good marriage works wonders. Romano’s wife wasn’t particularly pretty, or particularly nice, or particularly intelligent. But she was particularly the daughter of an infantry colonel, and in Onganía’s Argentina that was a significant merit. I recalled the sea of green army hats at the wedding, and my annoyance grew.

“They saw the girl passing. They liked what they saw. They started thinking about it,” Romano continued, moving on from identifying the perpetrators to
reconstructing the crime itself. “It was a Tuesday morning. They watched the husband leave early. They got up their courage. Then they acted.”

Seeing that he insisted on talking like an official telegram, I was on the point of telling him to get the hell away from me. My hopes rose, in vain, when he stopped leaning over my desk, removed his hands from it, and stood up straight. Instead of going away, however, he dropped into the nearest chair. He shifted it closer with a few sudden hip movements, and then, once again, his eyes were level with mine.

“They went too far and wound up killing her.”

He stopped talking. Maybe he was waiting for a standing ovation or the flashes of news cameras.

“Who told you about this?” I asked, immediately guessed the answer, and risked saying it: “Sicora?”

“Precisely.” Romano’s tone included, for the first time, a very slight trace of doubt. “Why?”

Should I light into him or should I let it go? I opted for the peaceful choice. Homicide Lieutenant Sicora was a specialist in avoiding work. He hated contacting people, he detested walking the streets, he loathed the essential duties of an investigator. As far as I could tell, all he had in common with Báez were the whites of their eyes. Sicora worked up his hypotheses from his living room and tended to pin homicide raps on the first poor bastards that came along. What really burned my ass, however,
wasn’t Sicora; it was that Romano, dimwit extraordinaire, was taking the lieutenant at his word. Sicora was a lout and an idler, and this was a fact known to the very nuns in their goddamned cloisters. How could Romano be unaware of it? And even if he hadn’t heard, he still had the obligation of knowing the proper protocol for conducting a preliminary investigation.

In spite of all that, I didn’t want to get too overheated. After all, Romano was a colleague, and I’d had enough experience in the Palace of Justice to know that verbal wounds are hard to heal.

So I changed the direction of my questions a bit: “But look … wasn’t Báez handling the case?”

My delicacy went unrewarded; Romano answered me with frigid irony. “I don’t think Báez is Spencer Tracy, you know. He can’t take on everything. Don’t you agree?”

I’d about had my fill of him, and the remains of my patience were sifting away like handfuls of sand. “No, I don’t agree. Especially if the alternative is to let the investigation be led by a brainless lout like Sicora.”

Although I’d just impugned his source, Romano didn’t rise to the bait. Instead, with the air of one who generously consents to educate another, he grabbed the fingers of his left hand and started enumerating. “There are two of them. Workers. They were doing renovations in the front apartment or the one next to it. They’re not from the neighborhood and nobody knows them. Get the picture?”

Romano paused, as though certain I was enthralled by his arguments. Then, after a show of deciding whether or not to reveal the clincher, he shook his head, thrust his chin forward, and added, “Besides, they’re two little dark-complected guys. They look like thieves, if you see what I’m saying.”

In those days, whether because I was young or because I was tenderhearted or both, it was hard for me to categorize people I knew as sons of bitches. But every time Romano was around, he seemed determined to make me less inclined to go easy on him. More than once, I’d seen him making fun of people in custody who were dark-skinned and looked poor. I’d also seen him fawning on the more or less distinguished lawyers he had to deal with. I spoke the first words that came to me: “I see. Well, if you want to charge them with being dark, let me know. “

I thought about adding,
Hold on and I’ll check the Penal Code to see which statute applies,
but for fear of ruining the effect, I decided to keep the naive irony to a minimum. In any case, I could see that Romano was making a fierce effort not to insult me, and when he spoke again, not the smallest vestige of the casual camaraderie he’d started with remained in his voice. “I’m going to the police station. Sicora told me they’ve got the prisoners ready for interrogation.”

“Ready for interrogation?” I’d moved beyond annoyance and was now ready to explode. “That means they’ve
already had the shit beat out of them. I’ll go myself. Don’t forget, it’s my case.”

Generally, I disliked the judiciary zeal that led some of my colleagues to use possessives when referring to cases, but the guy had exhausted my patience. My parents had taught me not to call people names to their faces; therefore, I controlled myself, put on my jacket, and left with a curt “See you later.” The only indulgence I allowed myself was to shut the door with considerably more force than necessary.