The Secret in Their Eyes (9 page)

Morales raised his eyes to the photographs I’d just shown him. He chose one of the two from the picnic. Lifting up the marked sheet of wax paper, he slipped the photo under it. When the India ink marks perfectly matched the outlines of the figures in the picture, I understood. There was a number written in the space occupied by each figure. Morales laid his finger on the outline at a point under which, barely visible, was the image of Liliana’s eternal observer.

“Nineteen,” he murmured.

We both turned our eyes to the list of names.

Morales read the heading: “‘Picnic at Rosita Calamaro’s country house, September 21, 1962.’” Then he ran his index finger down the list until he came to the line he was looking for. “Number 19: Isidoro Gómez.”

Although he’d already read it twice, once silently when he received it and then again aloud, Delfor Colotto decided to go over it one more time while his wife was out shopping, just to be sure he’d understood it right. He put on his glasses and sat in the rocking chair on the back porch. He read slowly so he wouldn’t have to move his lips, but still, if he’d been in front of the house, where anybody could see him, he would have felt uncomfortable.

When he finished, he removed his spectacles and folded the letter along its original creases. The stationery was smooth and very white, unlike the skin of his hands, which resembled coarse sandpaper. He’d understood the letter, despite his initial fear that some of the words, elegantly handwritten in black ink on both sides of the page, could stump him. “Imperative” was the only one that had given him trouble. He’d had an idea of what it might mean, but he’d wanted to be sure, and so he’d picked up the dictionary the girl had left in the house, and that had done the trick: his son-in-law needed help—urgently, a lot, whatever it might take. He’d understood the rest of the letter with no trouble. At the end, his son-in-law had
written, “I leave it in your hands,” because he was “certain that you’ll devise the best way to go ab out it.” And just here was the thorny problem that had kept Delfor Colotto on tenterhooks ever since the arrival of the letter, two days previously: What could that “best way” be?

He got to his feet. The only thing he could accomplish by staying in the rocking chair would be to make himself more nervous. Maybe his plan wasn’t a good one, but he’d devised nothing else. His son-in-law should have been clearer in his letter. The older man felt the younger one hadn’t told him the whole truth. Did he consider him unworthy of his confidence? Or—worse—did he think he was an idiot because he hadn’t finished school?
Don’t get worked up about it,
Colotto told himself. Maybe his son-in-law hadn’t given him more details because he hadn’t wanted to make him even more nervous. In that case, he’d had a point, because the little Delfor Colotto knew and the great deal he imagined were already driving him crazy, and he hadn’t slept a wink for two consecutive nights. More knowledge, or a confirmation of what he feared, might well be worse. Besides, he’d always been fond of his son-in-law, even though that “always” sounded a bit exaggerated, because how many times had he seen him? Three, four at the most? So he didn’t really know him, but hell, that wasn’t the young guy’s fault, after all.

These thoughts gave him the impetus he needed. He went into the house and walked to the bedroom. On the
back of the chair a shirt was hanging neatly. Colotto put it on over his undershirt, stuffed the shirttails into his trousers, and readjusted his belt buckle. Then he left the house and strolled to the corner, pausing briefly on the way to greet a couple of his neighbors, who were drinking maté on the sidewalk. Dusk was falling, December had let loose one of its infernal heat waves, and some people were trying to find a bit of fresh air outside.

At the corner he turned right. “We’re practically on the same street,” he thought. And he felt uncomfortable, as though something had been put over on him. He stopped in front of a house just like his and just like all the others built according to the government’s plans for residential development. The little yard in front, the porch, the door flanked by two windows, the American-style asphalt roof. He clapped his hands. From behind the house a pair of dogs came running and barking into the front yard, only to be silenced almost completely by a female voice from inside the house. A rather small woman with white skin and light eyes came out onto the porch, drying her hands on the apron she wore over her skirt.

“How are you doing, Mr. Colotto? What a surprise to see you over this way.”

“Still here, Miss Clarisa. Hanging on.”

The woman seemed uncertain as to how to continue the conversation. “And how’s your wife? I haven’t seen her around the neighborhood for a long time.”

“She’s plugging along, you know, getting a little better.” The man scratched his head and frowned.

The woman interpreted this gesture as a desire to change the subject, and therefore she raised her hand to open the little black door before she spoke again: “Come in, please, come in. Would you like some maté?”

“No, thank you, Miss Clarisa, thanks a lot anyway.” He held up both hands, palms outward, as if softening his refusal. “I appreciate it, but this is just a quick visit. The truth is I was trying to locate your nephew Humberto.”

“Ah …”

“It’s for a job. The supervisor over in the municipal lumberyard asked me to do a little carpentry work on his house, see, and I might need an assistant, and so it occurred to me that maybe Humberto …”

“It’s really too bad, Mr. Colotto, but it so happens Humberto’s gone to help my brother in the country, you know, out there around Simoca.”

“Ah, right.” Colotto thought things were going too smoothly. The fact that the small talk perfectly suited his plans made him, if possible, even more nervous. “What a shame. The thing is, I don’t want to hire someone I don’t know, if you see what I mean.”

“Oh, sure I do, Mr. Delfor, and I thank you for remembering him …”

“Well, look, Miss Clarisa.” Now. It was now or never. “How about Isidoro? What’s he doing? Could he be interested in a temporary job?”

“Noooo …” Her “no” was long, high-pitched, convinced, trusting, innocent. “Isidoro went to Buenos Aires almost a year ago, didn’t you know that? Well, not a year ago. A little less, to tell the truth. But when you miss somebody, it seems longer, you know how it is.”

Colotto opened his eyes very wide, but he figured the woman would interpret that as simple surprise.

“Let me see,” she went on. “We’re in the beginning of December …” She raised her hands to count on her fingers. “So he’s been gone around ten months. It was the end of March, you know. I mean, I thought you knew. Well, I guess I don’t go out very much, what with my rheumatism and all …”

“Of course, Miss Clarisa, of course.”
(Almost there, Delfor,
he thought.
Control yourself, for God’s sake, stay calm.)
“But I had no idea. I imagined he was working somewhere around here.”

“No. There wasn’t much work for him last summer. A few little odd jobs here and there. Nothing to speak of. Oh, I used to tell him he wasn’t trying very hard. It made him mad sometimes when I said that, but it was true. He’d stay shut up in his room all day, staring at the
ceiling. He looked sick, he never went out. Never, not even to have fun with his friends. I’d ask him, what’s wrong, Isidorito, tell Mama what’s wrong with you, but who can figure kids out? He wouldn’t say a thing. And … well, he’s turned out to be just as reserved as his father, may he rest in peace, and you know, getting two words out of
him
was a real triumph. And so I let him be. He’d put on a long face and stalk around the house like a caged lion. Finally, one day he hit me with the news that he didn’t want to stay here anymore and he was going to Buenos Aires. It made me sad at first, you know—my baby, my only son, and so far away. But he looked so bad, so … it was like he was angry, you know? So in the end it seemed almost like a good idea for him to go away.”

The woman wanted to go on talking, but standing up for so long made her joints ache and obliged her to keep shifting her weight from one leg to the other. She settled for leaning on the porch pillar. “Anyway, I’ll tell you something, Mr. Delfor. Every month, he sends me a money order. Every month. With that and my pension, I can get along really well, you know?”

One more to go,
Colotto thought.
One more.
He said, “That’s just great, Miss Clarisa. I’m happy for you. Look, the way things are these days, finding a full-time job so fast—”

“Right, right,” the woman said, agreeing enthusiastically. “That’s exactly what I tell him. I say, you have to
run and thank Our Lady of the Miracle, Isidorito. Well, but I call him Isidoro, because if I don’t he gets annoyed. A miracle, the way things are these days. He should be grateful. Because when he got there, he had a recommendation from my brother-in-law for a job in a print shop, but that didn’t work out. But then, soon afterward, in fact right away, he found a job on a construction site. Not only that, but it seems they’re building something really big, so the job’s going to last awhile.”

“What a break! It sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it?” Colotto swallowed saliva.

“I know, Mr. Colotto, I know! It’s just fantastic! An apartment building in the Caballito neighborhood, he said. Down there around … around Primera Junta, I think. Could that be right? Real close to that train, the sebway or whatever it is. The building’s going to have something like twenty floors.”

The woman kept on talking, but Delfor Colotto missed most of the rest of her conversation, because he was trying to decide whether he should be happy or sad about what he’d just found out. He made an effort to concentrate on her words and save his evaluations for later. She was talking about going to Salta for the Miracle Fiesta if her rheumatism would allow it, because she was very devoted to the Blessed Virgin.

“Well, all right, then, Miss Clarisa, I’ll be on my way.” Suddenly, he remembered his excuse for being there
in the first place. “And if you hear about anybody who needs a temporary job … I mean someone you could recommend, of course.”

“I’ll keep my ears open, Mr. Delfor. Now I have to tell you, I don’t get much news, stuck inside the way I am, but if I hear anything, I’ll let you know, and God bless you.”

Delfor Colotto walked back home, bathed in the dim glow of the recently installed street lights. It was strange. Two years before, when he was president of the Development Association, he’d moved heaven and earth to get streetlights put up in this part of town. And now, he felt about street lighting the way he felt about almost everything else; he didn’t give a shit.

He stepped into his house and looked at the clock. It was too late to go out to the phone booth. That would have to wait until tomorrow morning. He heard the sound of pots and pans—his wife was busy in the kitchen. He decided not to tell her anything for the moment. As he walked to the bedroom, he took off his shirt. He hung it up again on the back of the chair, went back outside, and sat on the porch. There was a very slight breeze.

Ten days after the evening with Morales and his photographs, I made an appointment and went down to Homicide to meet Báez. When I opened the door to his office, he invited me in and offered me some coffee, which he sent one of his staff to get. As always happened when I spent time in his company, I let a feeling of respect for him get the better of me, even though I found such admiration uncomfortable.

He was a large man, hard-featured, built like an armoire. He was—how many?—fifteen or twenty years older than me. It was hard to figure his age exactly, because he sported a thick mustache that would have made a teenager look old. I think the thing that aroused my admiration for him was the calm, direct way he exercised his authority. I’d often watched him moving among other policemen with the controlled self-confidence of a pontiff convinced of his right to command. And even though I’d been the deputy clerk of the court for a couple of years by then, I sensed that I would never in my life be able to give an order without my heart jumping into my throat. I don’t know what I was more afraid of: that the
people under me would resent my directives, that they wouldn’t obey me, or that they’d do what I wanted and laugh behind my back, which was almost the most distressing possibility of all. Báez was surely untroubled by such cogitations.

That afternoon, however, I felt I had a slight advantage over the man I admired so much. I was riding a wave of euphoria because of my hunch about the photographs. What had begun as not much more than an aesthetic observation had turned into a lead, the only one we had.

In those days, I was incapable of regarding my life with moderation. Either I considered myself an obscure, invisible functionary, a slave to routine, vegetating monotonously in a post appropriate to my mediocre faculties and limited aspirations, or I was a misunderstood genius, my talent wasted in the tedious exercise of secondary activities suitable for natures less favored than my own. I spent most of my time occupying the first of those two positions. Only rarely did I shift to the second, which I’d have to abandon sooner rather than later, when some brutal disillusion would end my sojourn at that particular oasis. I didn’t know it, but in twenty minutes, my self-esteem was going to be wrecked by one such disastrous purge.

I started off by telling him about the episode with the photos. First, I described them, and then I showed them to him. I was pleased by the attention he paid to my
account. He asked me for details, and I was able to satisfy his curiosity on most points. Báez had always shown great respect for my knowledge of the law. In our conversations, he’d never minded confessing to gaps in his own familiarity with legal matters (which was another reason for me to admire him, given that I regarded my own areas of ignorance as inexcusable shortcomings). On this occasion, I was venturing onto his turf, and yet he gave me the impression that he thought I was doing so for good reason. When I finished showing him the pictures, I told him about the instructions I’d given Morales: the widower was to write to his father-in-law and ask him to find out Isidoro Gómez’s current location. So that his nerves wouldn’t get the better of him, so that he wouldn’t try to carry out some sort of absurd personal revenge, the father-in-law had to limit himself to obtaining the desired information and passing it along to Morales. Colotto’s mission had been such a success, I explained to Báez, that I’d ordered Morales to request a second round of reports from his father-in-law, the information to be gathered from other neighbors and from friends that his daughter and Gómez might have had in common. We’d based the search for the friends on the list of names accompanying the photographs of the famous picnic. As I was preparing to lay out the findings from the second round of reports, which confirmed Gómez’s progressive withdrawal, his apparently
precipitous departure for Buenos Aires, and his arrival in the capital a few weeks before the murder, Báez cut me off with a question: “How long ago did the father-in-law pay this visit to the suspect’s mother?”

Although a little surprised, I started counting the days. Didn’t he want to hear the verified information I was on the brink of revealing to him? Didn’t he want to know that a couple of Gómez’s friends from the barrio had corroborated my theory that the young man had been secretly in love with the victim for years?

“Ten days, eleven at the most.”

Báez looked at the antiquated black telephone on his desk. Without a word to me, he picked up the receiver and dialed three digits. When the call was answered, Báez spoke in a murmur: “I need you to come here at once. Yes. By yourself. Thanks.”

Then he hung up and, as if I’d vanished, immediately began a rapid search of his desk drawers. Soon he extracted a plain notepad with about half its sheets missing and began at once to scribble on it, using big, untidy strokes. He looked like a stern-faced doctor writing me a prescription for who knows what medication. If I hadn’t been so tense, I would have found the image amusing. Before Báez finished, there were two knocks on the door. A senior subofficer entered the room, greeted us, and planted himself next to the desk. Báez soon put down his pencil, tore off the sheet of paper, and handed
it to the policeman. “Here you go, Leguizamón. See if you can find this guy. All the information you might be able to use is on that sheet. If you manage to find him, take care—he may be dangerous. Place him under arrest and bring him in. The learned doctor here and I will see what we can get out of him.”

I wasn’t surprised to hear him refer to me as a doctor—he meant a doctor of law, of course—nor was I for a moment tempted to correct him. The police prefer to call all judicial employees of a certain age “doctor”; it’s nothing to get offended about, and the cops are right to do so. I’ve never known any profession whose members are as sensitive about honorific titles as lawyers are. What disturbed me was what Báez said next, as he was dismissing his subordinate: “And be quick about it. If this is the guy we want, I suspect he’s already vanished into thin air.”