The Secret in Their Eyes (11 page)

Báez didn’t answer right away. Then he said, “I understand. I couldn’t have expressed it better. You’re good with words, Chaparro. You could be a writer, you know?”

“Don’t fuck with me, Báez.”

“I’m not fucking with you. I’m serious. Well, look, after we get your updated report, I’ll call you.”

I hung up the telephone with a click that resounded in the silence of the clerk’s office. I looked at the clock. It was very late. I picked up the receiver again, dialed the number of the bank where Morales worked, and asked the night guard to deliver an urgent message: as soon as Morales arrived, the guard was to tell him to come to the court so he could sign a statement. The guard promised to pass on the message.

Once again, the sound of the telephone switch hook. I walked over to the bookcase on whose highest shelf, several months previously, I’d camouflaged the Morales case. Standing on tiptoe, I yanked at the dossier, which came down to me in a cloud of dust. I went back to my desk. I didn’t go through the case from the beginning again but went straight to the last proceeding. It was a court order from the previous June, directing that a supplementary autopsy report—on the visceral examination—be added to the case file. I checked the calendar, inserted a sheet of paper with the letterhead of the National Judiciary into the typewriter, and began to type out a new document, giving it a fictitious August date.

I hadn’t lied to Báez when I answered his last question, but I hadn’t told him the whole truth, either. Gómez’s way of looking at Liliana had indeed called my attention to him, and I’d interpreted his gaze as a silent, futile message to a
woman who couldn’t or wouldn’t understand it; all that was true. But I’d noticed that look because—and this is what I hadn’t told Báez—I myself had gazed at a woman in just that way. It had been fourteen months since I’d first met her, and as I’d often done in those fourteen months, once again on that hot night in December 1968, I bitterly regretted that she wasn’t my wife.

When I arrived in the office that morning, I had but one prayer:
Please, God, don’t let Sandoval come to work loaded today.
I’d been awake practically all night. Not only had I arrived home extremely late (and then guilty, because Marcela was waiting up for me), but it had taken me forever to fall asleep. What would happen if the judge wised up to the fact that I was trying to put one over on him? Was running such a risk worth it? My nerves had rousted me out of bed very early. I must have looked atrocious, because my wife noticed something was wrong and asked me about it at breakfast.

Today, thirty years later, I remember my plan, and it’s hard for me to think of myself as its author. What impulse was driving me to take such a risk? I suppose it was my sense of guilt. And then, over and above the risk, there was the uncertainty: If Gómez wasn’t the culprit, what was the point of the mess I was about to set in motion? But if he
had
committed the murder, how could I look at myself in the mirror ever again until the day I died without feeling like a coward for putting my security and my job above everything else?

My practical problem wasn’t due to the fruitless search for Isidoro Gómez; I’d been in trouble ever since the moment, several months previously, when I’d foolishly broken the rules to avoid sealing the case. At the time, I’d imagined that the judge, once the culprit was under arrest, would be so pleased that he wouldn’t bother me about having kept the file active. On the contrary. A round of sufficiently histrionic and cloying flattery, attributing to him all the merits of the capture, would make him abandon his zeal for correct procedure.

But now I’d come too far to turn back, and it was here that I needed Sandoval. That is, I needed the inspired, shrewd, quick-witted, intrepid Sandoval. If I got the drunken Sandoval, I was fucked. By good fortune, while I was sunk in my meditations, in he came, fresh as a May morning, fragrant with lavender, and shining like the sun. I stopped him on his way to his desk and gave him a brief overview of my plan. He was, without a doubt, a brilliant guy. He understood the setup before I was through explaining it. And he was loyal, because he agreed without the least hesitation to join me in my swindle.

Then Morales himself showed up. Without letting him get past the reception area, I had him sign an addendum to his sworn statement. I gave him no details, told him I’d explain what was going on later, and sent him away. Hours passed. When Judge Fortuna Lacalle finally made
his entrance into the clerk’s office, I remembered my mother’s ploys for overcoming anxiety and commended myself to the Holy Spirit. As always, Lacalle looked impeccable: dark suit, sober tie, breast-pocket handkerchief playing off against the tie, slicked-down hair plastered to his skull, suntanned skin. I believe observing him led me to develop my theory that stupid people are better preserved physically than others because they aren’t worn down by existential angst, to which those with some semblance of mental clarity are necessarily subject. I have no conclusive proofs of this notion, but the case of Fortuna Lacalle always struck me as evidence of the most blindingly obvious sort.

Princely in mien, as always, he sat in my chair and took his Parker fountain pen out of the inside pocket of his jacket. Theatrically exaggerating my own gestures, I began to pile case files on the desk, as if giving him to understand that he was going to spend the next two or three hours of his life signing documents. Thank God it was Thursday—he played tennis every Thursday at six—which meant that from about three o’clock on, he would be seized by growing impatience with anything that might deter him from his high purpose. Realizing at once the implications of so many files, he opened his eyes wide and made a remark, intending to be funny, about how fast his staff in this clerk’s office did their work. I smiled and started passing him cases
with documents that needed signing, presenting each of them with a florid commentary on their contents. It was useless—or let’s say redundant and superfluous—information, but the magistrate was too stupid to notice the wool I was pulling over his eyes.

It was then that Sandoval appeared for the first time, showing his face from behind the bookcase that gave my desk a certain minimal privacy. “Your Honor,” he began, addressing Fortuna Lacalle in a tone midway between unctuous and ironic, but at the same time sufficiently confidential for the judge to feel like an accomplice rather than a victim. “When are we going to see you driving a Dodge Coronado like your colleague Judge Molinari?”

The judge considered him cautiously. Though a blockhead, Fortuna Lacalle had the preservation instinct that people like him develop to deal with complicated and hostile realities, and Sandoval, however one looked at him, belonged to the elusive world of the complex.
He’s going to ask him to repeat the question. He’s going to ask him to repeat it,
I told myself. With a rapid movement I grabbed the Morales case and opened it directly to page 208, which I had bookmarked.

“What are you saying, Sandoval?” Fortuna Lacalle was blinking and paying much more attention to my assistant than to the case I’d placed in front of him.

“A writ ordering that the case be reopened, Your Honor,” I murmured, as if I didn’t want such a trivial
matter to interrupt the conversation the judge was concentrating on.

“Yes, yes,” he said, not looking at me.

“Nothing important, Your Honor,” Sandoval said, giving him a roguish smile. “I thought you’d already seen Judge Molinari’s new car. You haven’t?”

Lacalle was striving to respond both quickly and cleverly, but to succeed at even one of those goals would require great effort from him; achieving both at the same time was simply impossible, yet he seemed eager to give it a try. Since an undertaking of such proportions consumed all his intellectual energy, paying attention to what he was signing proved to be quite beyond his capabilities. He therefore affixed his ornate signature to a writ dated July 2, which did indeed order the reopening of the sealed case at page 201, but which also, in passing, directed the court investigator to secure an addendum to the sworn testimony given by Ricardo Morales. I pulled the document away from him as soon as he finished signing it—I didn’t want him, by some miracle, to latch onto the fact that he was signing a court order dated almost four months ago.

“No, I didn’t know about it … a Coronado?”

“A Coronado, Your Honor. Electric blue …” Sandoval smiled absently, as though enthralled by the memory. “A treat for the eye. Black leather upholstery.
Chrome details … Seriously, you haven’t seen it, Your Honor?”

“No. To tell you the truth, it’s been a long time since I had lunch with Abel.”

Perfect, I thought, he’s got him on the ropes. Sandoval could be cruel with people he didn’t like, and the way he used that cruelty to undermine his opponents with their own weaknesses was brilliant. As I’ve repeatedly pointed out, Fortuna Lacalle was an imbecile who gave himself the airs of an eminent jurist, but over and above his self-regard, he was dyspeptically envious of judges who actually deserved their high office. Molinari was such a judge, and Fortuna Lacalle’s desperate wave—calling Judge Molinari by his first name, as if the two of them were good friends, as if pretending to a familiarity that didn’t exist—corroborated my belief that our examining magistrate was mad with envy.

I decided to move on to Act Two. I placed before Judge Lacalle a deposition in which Morales mentioned his suspicions about Gómez, suspicions based on some fictitious threatening letters that his wife, also fictitiously, had received before the murder; they’d supposedly been sent by the rejected lover and later conveniently destroyed by the couple. I’d drafted the document the previous night, Morales had signed it earlier that day, and now it was attached to the end of some other case. “This
is a witness statement in the Muñoz case, the one concerning the series of frauds,” I lied.

“Ah … how’s that investigation going?”

We’re in for it, I thought. Now, for some reason, he was interested in the case. What could I tell him? What could I invent, after removing acts from one case and attaching them to another? And how was I going to justify that witness statement, which I’d made up out of nothing?

“You still have the Falcon, don’t you, Your Honor?” Sandoval came to my aid.

“Yes, of course,” Lacalle answered, intending to sound gruff.

“Right, right … because … what model is it? ‘63? ‘64?”

“It’s a ‘61.” Lacalle was almost curt, but he immediately tried to soften his response: “It’s given me so much satisfaction I can’t bring myself to part with it.”

Sandoval was an artist. We’d laughed behind the judge’s back a thousand times, not because of his ‘61 Falcon (after all, Sandoval and I belonged to the perpetual pedestrian category), but because the vehicle was, for Fortuna Lacalle, a source of suffering, of private anguish. He’d have given an ear for a new car (assuming he could find someone crazy enough to accept the exchange). On his salary, he should have been able to afford such a purchase, but his wife and their two daughters had spending habits befitting princesses, so much so that the poor
judge had to fend off the specters of insolvency month after month. Fortuna Lacalle’s transparent face showed me that he was caught up in the mental enumeration of all that he could buy if his women hadn’t abandoned themselves so totally to consumerism. And the Dodge Coronado, I figured, stood at the top of his list.

I quickly turned the page. Next came official letters, with copies, to the Federal Police and the police of Tucumán Province, directing them to mount a search for Gómez. The letters were dated in October and had been sent again in November. I’d already made those arrangements with Báez. Lacalle signed the documents as if they were receipts from the cleaners.

“You know what?” Sandoval said. He was inspired. “I’m actually not sure Judge Molinari made a good choice with that Dodge.” Sandoval moved his hands as if uncertain how to present his dilemma. “You’re a connoisseur, Your Honor, you know a lot about this …” Sandoval stopped and then apparently decided to trust the judge’s intellectual honesty and wisdom. “Which would you choose? A Dodge Coronado or a Ford Fairlane?”

You’re a connoisseur, you know a lot about this,
I repeated to myself. Sandoval was a genius. Fortuna Lacalle, in reality, didn’t know a lot about anything: not automobiles, not the law, not anything else. But since one of the things he didn’t know was that he didn’t know anything, he enthusiastically launched into a disquisition, for the
benefit of all present, on the innumerable virtues of the Ford Fairlane and the unpardonable drawbacks of the Dodge Coronado, thus demonstrating tangentially and as it were in passing that Judge Molinari wasn’t so perfect after all. He spoke for ten minutes and even made a drawing of—if I understood correctly—the linkage between the gear shift lever and the gearbox in both cars.

It was marvelous. By the time he stopped talking nonsense, Judge Fortuna had signed off on a document acknowledging receipt of the police report (drawn up by Báez, working against the clock, and sent to me that very morning), according to which the present whereabouts of Isidoro Antonio Gómez were unknown. Furthermore, the judge had put his name to a writ ordering that the request for an investigation into the subject’s present place of residence remain in force, with a view to obtaining a statement from the said subject, and he’d also signed the new official letter to the Federal Police that followed the extension of the investigation. Sandoval, who was leaning against a bookshelf and pretending to be absorbed in His Honor’s passionate discourse, spotted my relieved expression and knew the mission had been accomplished. However, since he was a sensitive guy, he didn’t want to cut Fortuna Lacalle’s lecture short, and so he let the magistrate expound for another two or three minutes. Eventually, Sandoval thanked him for his time: “Well, Your Honor, I have work to finish, so I’ll
take my leave,” and then, shaking his head from side to side in admiration, he added, “You sure know all there is to know about automobiles, Your Honor.”

The judge shut his eyes and smiled with a look on his face that was supposed to express modest acknowledgment of the compliment. To make his muddle complete, I then laid another twenty or twenty-five insignificant documents on the desk before him for his signature.

When Fortuna returned to his office, I collected all the proceedings I’d scattered around in different dossiers, ordered them correctly, and placed them in the Morales case file. Now they’d all been signed by the examining magistrate, but they needed to be countersigned by the clerk, and with him it wasn’t possible to apply the same strategy. He and the judge were fools in equal measure, true, but I didn’t want to press my luck that far. I decided to put my trust in Pérez’s basic nature: he was a pusillanimous fellow, and I was sure he’d go along uncomplainingly with any official piece of paper that bore his boss’s signature. So that very afternoon I brought him the Morales case as well as the other twenty or so files whose latest decrees I’d just had Fortuna sign off on. I knew, of course, that there was a chance the clerk might catch on to my maneuver. What would so many proceedings, dated in a sequence going back several months, be doing in a dossier like that unless they were part of a maneuver conducted behind his back?

But for that eventuality, I had an ace up my sleeve. Should Clerk Pérez go so far as to question my good faith, or should he suspect that there was something fishy about the bundle of fake documents that Fortuna Lacalle had just signed, I was going to move directly to blackmail: I would declare my readiness to tell half the Judiciary how enviably assiduous he was in his devotion to the public defender attached to Section No. 3 in the Federal Criminal and Correctional Court, a lady neither his legitimate spouse nor the affectionate mother of the two healthy lads enshrined in the photograph on his desk. Fortunately, that wasn’t necessary. Without a complaint, he wrote his name after every “Before me” that appeared under the signature of Judge Fortuna Lacalle, the automotive expert. When it was over, I collapsed in my chair, exhausted from nervousness. Sandoval came up to me with a smile on his face and offered the philosophical reflection he employed only in exceptional and solemn circumstances: “As I have frequently maintained, my estimable friend Benjamín, on the day when the assholes of the world throw a party, those two will welcome the others at the door, serve them refreshments, offer them cake, lead them in toasts, and wipe the crumbs from their lips.”