Target in the Night (12 page)

6

The Inspector got in his car and headed out of town on the road parallel to the train tracks, and turned onto the highway. The night was cool, peaceful. Croce liked to drive, he could let himself go, see the countryside all around him, the cows chewing quietly, hear the even rumbling of his car's engine. Through the rearview mirror he saw night falling behind him, a few lights in the distant houses. He didn't see anyone along the highway, except for a cattle truck coming back from Venado Tuerto, which honked its horn as it passed him. Croce flicked his high beams and thought that the trucker probably recognized him, so he got off the highway and took a dirt road that also led to the lake. When he arrived, he maneuvered carefully between the willows and parked close to the shore, turned off the engine, and let the shadows and the murmur of the water wash over him.

On the horizon, like a shadow rising on the plains, was the tall building of the factory with its rotating fog light sweeping across the night. A beacon mounted on the roof made its way around and around, illuminating the pampas with gusts of light. Rustlers used this white brightness as a guide when they had to lead their herd before dawn. The ranchers in the area had filed complaints. “We won't be responsible for the peasants stealing animals from
those bums,” Luca always answered, and the demands would go no further.

Maybe they had killed Tony to settle a gambling bet. But no one killed over something like that around there, otherwise the entire population would have gone extinct years ago. The most anyone had done was to burn a wheat field, like the Dollans did with Schutz, the German, when he bet an entire harvest on a dice game, lost, and refused to pay. They all finally ended up in jail. It's not well thought of to kill someone because they owe you money. This isn't Sicily, after all. Not Sicily? It was like Sicily because everything was settled in silence, quiet towns, dirt roads, armed foremen, dangerous people. Everything very primitive. Workers on one side, owners on the other. Did he not hear the president of the Rural Society say at the hotel bar, just last night, that there was nothing to worry about even if elections were brought back?
We load the workers from the estancias into the trucks and tell them who to vote for
. That's how it's always been. What could a small town inspector do? Croce was being left on his own. His old friend, Inspector Laurenzi, was retired and living in the south. Croce remembered the last time they were together, in a bar in La Plata.
It's a big country
, Laurenzi told him.
You see cultivated fields, empty plains, cities, factories, but no one ever understands people's secret hearts. And that's a surprise, because we're cops. No one's in a better position to see the extremes of misery and madness.
Croce remembered Laurenzi clearly, his thin face, a cigarette always hanging from the corner of his mouth, his neat moustache. And crazy Inspector Treviranus? Treviranus had been transferred from the Capital to Las Flores and soon afterwards dismissed, as if he'd been responsible for the death
of that imbecile amateur sleuth who'd spent all his time looking for Yarmolinski's murderer. Then there was Inspector Leoni, as bitter as the others, at the police station in Talpaqué. Croce had called him on the telephone because he thought his case might have originated there. Just a hunch. People from the old guard, Peronists who'd been involved in all sorts of trouble, poor Leoni, they'd killed one of his kids. There are very few of us left, Croce thought, smoking by the lake. Cueto the Prosecutor wants to throw Yoshio in jail and shut down the investigation. An open-and-closed case, that's what everyone wants. I'm a dinosaur, a survivor, the Inspector thought. Treviranus, Leoni, Laurenzi, Croce, sometimes they'd get together in La Plata to reminisce over old times. But did old times exist? Croce hadn't lost his senses yet, anyway, he was sure he was on the right track. He'd solve this case, too, and he'd do it the old-fashioned way.

He sat in his car with the engine off and smoked in the dark, looking at the light that periodically shone over the water. The light from the beacon on top of the factory seemed to flicker, but it actually rotated in large circles. Croce suddenly saw an owl shake out of its lethargy and fly with a smooth flapping of its wings, chasing the white light in a circle as if it were the herald for dawn.
Minerva's bird is confused, too, lost
. They weren't voices that he heard, the phrases just reached him as if they were memories.
The white eye of night. A superior criminal mind
. He knew exactly what they meant, but not how they got into his head. General Grant's marked face was a map.
A very scientific job. Grant, the butcher, with his kidskin glove
. Croce watched the small waves from the lake dissolve among the rushes at the shore. In the quiet, he heard the
croaking of the frogs, the metallic sound of the crickets; nearby, a dog barked, and then another, and then another; a few minutes later the barking drifted and faded into the night.
¹⁴

He was tired, but his fatigue had become a kind of sleepless lucidity. He had to reconstruct a sequence, move from the chronological order of facts to the logical order of events. His memory was an archive, his recollections burned like stars in the closed night. He never forgot anything having to do with a case until he solved it. Later everything was erased. But during the investigation, he lived obsessed with the details that went in and out of his conscience.
He arrived with two suitcases. He carried a brown leather bag in his hand. He didn't want anyone to help him with that. They pointed out the hotel across the way. Why was that fifty-dollar bill on the floor? Why did they go down to the basement?
That's what he had. And the fact that a man the size of a cat had climbed into the old service lift. His thinking was implacable, he grew exasperated, he postponed the final conclusion forever.
I don't have to try to explain what happened, I just need to make it comprehensible. I have to understand it myself, first.

Instinct—or, better yet, a certain intimate perception that didn't quite bloom into consciousness—told him that he was about to find a way out. Whatever it was, he decided to move. He started his car and turned on the lights. Several frogs jumped into the water and a creature—an armadillo? a guinea pig?—stood frozen
in a clearing, near the willow trees. Croce backed the car up a few meters, turned around, and headed into the open countryside. He drove along the edge of the Reynal Estancia until he reached the asphalt. As he drove for several leagues by the bordering fence, he saw chimango buzzards perched silently on the posts and animals grazing on the other side.

Croce followed the light from the factory, the white gusts in the sky, toward the dark mass of the building on top of the hill. The road led to the warehouse entrance for the delivery trucks. The Belladona brothers had gotten the road paved to speed up the transports that came and went from the company to the highway to Córdoba, site of IKA-Renault headquarters. But the plant had collapsed overnight. The brothers had settled the severance pay for the factory workers after the turbulent negotiations with the SMATA Union. Hounded by their debts, the demands to liquidate, and the accumulating mortgage payments, they were forced to bring production nearly to a halt. It had been a year now since the dissolution of the firm and his brother's death, and Luca had shut himself in the factory, having decided to carry on and keep working on his inventions and his machines on his own.

Croce approached the industrial complex, a row of sheds and galleries facing the parking lot. The meshed-wire fence was drooping in several places, and Croce drove in through one of the broken gates. The cement lot appeared to be abandoned. Two or three isolated lights poorly illuminated the place. Croce parked his car in front of some tracks, between two cranes. A very tall plume could be seen to the side, in the darkness, like some prehistoric animal. He preferred to enter through the back, he knew it was
unlikely that anyone would open the front door for him. There was light in the windows of the upper levels of the factory. Croce made his way in through one of the partially open metal shutters and down a corridor that led to the central garage. The large machines were all quiet; several partially assembled cars were still elevated above the service pits in the assembly line; a tall pyramid of striated steel, painted brick red, rose up in the middle of the work floor; off to a side there were gears and a large, grooved wheel, with chains and pulleys to take small wagons filled with materials into the metal construction.

“Holy Mother of God,” Croce yelled toward the ceiling.

“How do you do, Inspector? Do you have a search warrant?”

The happy, relaxed voice came from up above, where a heavy man leaned out from a balcony on the upper level. Nearly two meters tall, his face reddened, his eyes light-blue, Luca was wearing a leather apron and an iron mask with a glass visor hanging around his chest, and he was holding an acetylene soldering iron in his hand. He seemed jovial and pleased to see the Inspector.

“How are you, Gringo? I was just passing by,” Croce said. “You haven't been to see me in a while.”

Luca came down an elevator, illuminated by the light from the upper level, and walked toward the Inspector, wiping his hands and wrists on a rag that smelled of kerosene. Croce was always moved to see Luca because he remembered him before the tragedy that had turned him into a hermit.

“We can sit here,” Luca said, indicating a couple of benches and a table toward the back of the garage, near a one-cylinder gas stove. Luca put a pot of water on and started preparing the
mate
.

“As La Peugeot's French friend René Queneau used to say,
Ici, en la pampá, lorsqu'on boit de maté l'on devient…argentin
.”

“I can't drink
mate
,” Croce said. “It's bad for my stomach.”

“No gaucho would ever say that.” Luca was having fun. “Come on, have a little bitter one, Inspector.”

Croce held the
mate
gourd and drank carefully through the tin straw. The hot, bitter drink was a blessing.

“Gauchos didn't eat barbequed beef,” Croce said, all of a sudden. “They didn't have teeth. Can you imagine them, always on horseback, smoking black tobacco, eating crackers, they'd lose their teeth right away and couldn't chew meat anymore. They only ate cow tongue, and sometimes not even that.”

“They lived on pudding with maize and ostrich eggs, poor country folk.”

“A lot of vegetarian gauchos.”

They went back and forth, cracking jokes, like every time they met, until little by little the conversation became more focused and Luca grew serious. He was absolutely convinced that he would succeed. He started talking about his projects, about the negotiations with the investors, about how he was resisting his rivals and how they wanted to force him into selling the factory. He didn't explain exactly who his enemies were. Croce could just imagine them, Luca told him, the Inspector knew who they were even better than Luca did, it was the same culprits as always.
I know him as if he were my son
. Luca knew that he was completely cornered, he was fighting on his own, he didn't have any strength left, he needed funds, he had contacts in Brazil, in Chile, businessmen interested in his ideas who might advance him the money he
desperately needed. He was yoked with debt, especially by his upcoming mortgage payments. “When it rains, the banks take away your umbrella,” Luca said. Nobody would toss him a rope, they wouldn't give him a hand, no one in town, or in the district, or in the entire province. They wanted to foreclose the mortgage and auction off the plant, take over the building, speculate with the land. That's what they wanted. Lousy dogs! He had to pay his debts with dollars purchased on the black market and sell what he produced with dollars at the official exchange rate. He was on his own in the whole country, everyone around him, his neighbors, the dirty pigs, and the military too, had turned against him. Speculators. They'd broken his dead brother's will, that was the saddest part of it, the thorn in his heart. Lucio was naïve, that's why he had died. In dreams, at night, he sometimes saw the destruction reach the roofs of the houses in town, like in the big floods of '62. He'd be riding on a horse, bareback, under a bright moon, lassoing what he could save: furniture, animals, coffins, church saints. That's what he had seen. But he also saw a car driving through the countryside and he was sure that it was his brother, coming back to his side to help him. He saw him clearly, driving like mad, like always, pedal to the metal, rumbling through the plowed fields. Luca was quiet for a moment, a peaceful smile on his frank face, and then he added, in a low voice, that he was sure that the same people who were after him had done in Durán.

“I'd like to clear up one point,” Croce said. “You called him at the hotel.” It didn't sound like a question, and Luca the Gringo became serious.

“We asked Rocha to call him.”

“Aha.”

“He was looking for us, they said.”

“But you didn't speak with him.”

Rocha appeared at that point, at the door, like a shadow, under an arcade. Slight and very thin, timid, with black welding goggles pushed up on his forehead, he was smoking, looking down. He was the great technician, Luca's main assistant, his right-hand man, the only one who seemed to understand Luca's projects.

“No one picked up the phone,” Rocha said. “I spoke with the telephone operator at the hotel first, she transferred me to the room, but no one answered.”