I tried to follow his explanation, but an image from eight years before-that son of a b.i.t.c.h Romano celebrating, jumping up and down around the judge's desk-kept recurring to me. How could I have failed to notice, back then, that this colleague of mine was a s.a.d.i.s.t and a murderer?

"Romano's the leader of the group. And generally, he doesn't go out when they vacuum people." He saw the puzzlement on my face. "Sorry. The thugs say 'vacuum.' It means they carry off anybody they feel like carrying off to one of their hideouts."

I nodded. I remembered what had happened to Sandoval's cousin, who had no doubt been put through the same appalling ordeal. Was it possible he'd been abducted just last week? It seemed to me that had occurred in another life, distant and definitively inaccessible.

"In fact, Romano hardly goes out at all. He works inside, doing ... how do they say it? 'Basic intelligence,' or 'raw intelligence.' Which means he's the creep who directs the torture sessions where they get names out of the detainees. Then he sends out his heavies to pick up the people he wants." Once again, Baez's face darkened. "But the studs I talked to didn't have much to say on that subject. I guess they still have enough sense left not to brag about such stuff."

What Baez was telling me was so macabre, so irrational, so horrific, and it provided such a simple confirmation of what Sandoval and I had guessed, that I knew it had to be true.

"Guess who's one of the thugs who do the street work for Romano ..."

I remembered Morales and his maxim, according to which everything that can go bad is going to go bad, and everything that can get worse will get worse. I managed to stammer a name: "Isidoro Gomez."

"None other."

"What a son of a b.i.t.c.h," was all I could add. "Well ... I think they're just alike as far as that's concerned. Or they were just alike, apparently." "What do you mean?"

"Remember that all this began, supposedly, when those guys trashed your apartment."

"And?"

"And there was a reason why those guys decided to get rid of you when they did. A few years ago, they had no motive."

"I don't understand."

"Of course you don't. Let me explain. A few nights ago, Romano, in a sudden fury, summons his boys and kicks in your apartment door. He can't wait to whack you. Why? That's easy: revenge. Revenge for what? Think about it. What do the two of you have in common? Nothing-or almost nothing. You have Gomez. Remember Campora's amnesty?"

I nodded. As if I could have forgotten that.

"Good. Back then-when that happened, I mean-Romano must have felt that he'd busted your b.a.l.l.s up and down the line. That's why he stopped f.u.c.king with you. Because he figured he'd f.u.c.ked you enough."

"And then what?"

"And then the other night, he rushes out like a madman to do you in. Why would he do that?" "I don't understand anything."

"Just wait, we're almost there. It's as if you two were playing a chess game, a kind of challenge match. You s.h.i.t on him by getting him fired from the court. He gets revenge by letting Gomez go. So why does Romano decide to murder you now, three years later? Simple: because he's convinced you've just moved another piece. Or, more precisely, he believes that you, Chaparro, have just wasted one of his most reliable men, namely Isidoro Gomez."

My face must have revealed that I had no idea what he was talking about.

"Romano wants to kill you, Chaparro, because as far as he's concerned, you just did away with Gomez. That's it."

I was stunned for a moment, but I had to shake it off or run the risk of missing the rest of Baez's explanation. "I'm not saying you did it. I'm saying Romano thinks you did it. They came to your house looking for you on the night of July 28, right? Just imagine: two nights earlier, on the twenty-sixth, somebody killed Gomez. It happened near his apartment in Villa Lugano."

It was too complicated, or the polluted air in the place had finally overcome me.

"Are you all right?" Baez asked, looking worried.

"The truth is I feel pretty queasy."

"Come on. Let's go breathe some fresh air."

36.

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 pa.s.sengers 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 modic.u.m of clarity, and I realized I had something urgent to say to Baez. "There's one thing I haven't told you, Baez," I said hesitantly. "You remember back at the beginning of the case, when Gomez 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."

Baez 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 embarra.s.sed about having looked like a r.e.t.a.r.d in front of him the first time, eight years before. Now I had to play the part of the recidivist r.e.t.a.r.d. After the amnesty, I told him, it had occurred to me to do Ricardo Morales one last favor: to find out where Gomez was, just in case Morales should get up the nerve to blow his brains out. I explained to Baez 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. Baez asked me the cop's name.

"Zambrano, in Theft," I answered, and immediately asked a question of my own. "Is he an a.s.shole, or is he a son of a b.i.t.c.h?"

"No," Baez said slowly. "He's not a son of a b.i.t.c.h."

"Then he's an a.s.shole."

"Ah, forget Zambrano," Baez 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 pa.s.sed, 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 Baez 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 Gomez 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, Baez said, "You pa.s.sed 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," Baez said.

"You believe it was Morales who did the job on Gomez in Villa Lugano?"

"Do you have any doubt?" Baez 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 h.e.l.l 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 Baez 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 Gomez 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 Tuc.u.man 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 Baez the relevant part of my last chat with the widower.

"Well ... it's not so easy," Baez 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 Gomez 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 Gomez 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," Baez 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 Baez 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."

Baez 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."

37.

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 f.u.c.king 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 pa.s.sengers with tickets to Tuc.u.man 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, Benjamin." Sandoval seemed to have antic.i.p.ated 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 pa.s.sed once in a blue moon.

38.

Zarate 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.

ROSARIO 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 pa.s.sed from dead calm to whirlwind.

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

"That's what I started to explain to you at the beginning," Baez said. "And then I decided it would be best to leave it until the end."

Then I remembered. "Jujuy?" I asked.