"Shouldn't you get that seen to?" the policeman asked. "I mean, it's looking pretty nasty."

"Yeah, he really got me good, the b.a.s.t.a.r.d." They were speaking in front of the young man, who stared fixedly at the floor.

The policeman accompanied the conductor to the door. Outside, the train was still waiting.

"And all because he wanted to play the big guy, the stupid little jerk." Petrucci felt the need to explain himself. "If he tells me he's broke, or if he asks me please to let him go, I might not say anything, you know?"

"What are you going to do? Kids these days, they think they're ent.i.tled."

"Unbelievable," the conductor concluded.

He waved good-bye, closed the doors, and sounded the departure signal. The train didn't start for a few moments, because the engineer was distracted after such a long wait. When Petrucci arrived at Once station, his nose was swollen and b.l.o.o.d.y. He was sent to the Hospital Ferroviario, the Railroad Hospital, where he was x-rayed and then examined by the physician on duty. "Fracture of the nasal septum," the doctor said. "You didn't pa.s.s out?" Petrucci shook his head, as if getting his septum cracked was the most normal thing in the world. "Go home," said the doctor. "I'm marking you down for four days' rest. Come back in on Friday, and we'll see how you're doing."

If fights with fare dodgers came with so much time off, Petrucci thought, he'd try to get in at least one a month from then on. Overjoyed, he went back to Once station and took a train from there without reporting to security. He had to deliver the medical doc.u.ments directly to the office in Castelar, and he was feeling extremely weary. When he arrived there with his hospital certificates, some of his colleagues came out to welcome him.

"Step aside, boys, here comes the sheriff," one of them said jokingly.

"Don't break my b.a.l.l.s, avalos," Petrucci said curtly. "Seriously, macho man, they didn't tell you in Once?" "Tell me what?"

"The kid you busted. The one who fought with you." "Yeah, what about him?"

"You know the cops in Flores brought him in to check for priors, right?"

"What? Don't tell me that little a.s.shole has a record."

"Better than that. The f.u.c.ker's got an arrest warrant out for him. From a court in Buenos Aires, for homicide and I don't know what else ..."

"I'll be d.a.m.ned." Petrucci's real surprise was mingled with a touch of retroactive fear: What if the kid had been carrying a weapon?

"So now you're some sort of guardian of the law, see?" someone else said.

"Stop with that bulls.h.i.t, Zimmerman. You should see this boy, he's got a face like a little lamb. And he's wanted for murder? He must be one of those Montoneros or something like that, right?* In any case, I'm going home. I'm wasted."

* TRANSLATOR'S NOTE: The Montoneros were a Peronist urban guerrilla group active in Argentina during the 1960s and 1970s.

They exchanged lethargic farewells. While walking to the stop for bus 644, Petrucci figured the day hadn't turned out so bad, after all. That stupid young punk had lifted him right out of his bad mood. And the timing of his four days off was fantastic, just what he needed to finish installing the subfloor in the back room. He'd been given some horse painkillers, according to the doctor, so his nose hardly hurt. And surely, sooner or later, Racing would win a championship again, after all. He wondered how long it would be before that happened.

He took a seat on the bus. He felt something in his pocket that turned out to be the piece of paper avalos had handed him. "The kid's name," his colleague had said. At the time, Petrucci hadn't given it a second thought, but now he was curious. He unfolded the paper and read, "Isidoro Antonio Gomez." The conductor crushed the paper into a ball and dropped it on the dirty floor of the bus. Then he settled in for a brief nap, careful to keep his nose well away from the window. Should the two come into contact, he was sure he'd see stars, and his nose might even start to bleed again.

20.

When I had him in front of me, the suspicion that I'd built a skysc.r.a.per out of thin air returned. Could this kid with the placid expression and the relaxed stance, as if the fact that his hands were manacled behind his back affected him little or not at all-could this kid be guilty of murder?

After spending two or three days almost motionless and practically incommunicado, sick from eating jail rations and disgusted with being dirty and nervous and cooped up in a cell, many people in custody are pictures of distress, their faces marked by forced submission to the capricious will of others.

Not Isidoro Antonio Gomez. Naturally, he bore signs of the confinement he'd been in since the previous Monday: the rancid odor of unwashed human flesh, the incipient beard, the sneakers with no shoelaces. There was, moreover, the cast on his right hand, plus the greenish bruise above his right eyebrow, souvenirs of his scrimmage with the bellicose conductor on the Sarmiento Line.

I was consumed with doubt. Could someone who knew himself to be guilty of murder remain so calm? Maybe he hadn't even been told why he'd been arrested and brought to the Palace of Justice for questioning, which meant there was still a possibility that he thought all this was a mere procedure, however overdone, a consequence of his having ridden a train without a ticket and fought with the person in charge of curtailing such behavior. No, I thought; he was clearly an intelligent guy, so he must have known he was there for some other reason. But if he was guilty, how to explain why he'd let himself get involved in such an outrageous scene? I concluded that he was either innocent or a thoroughly callous son of a b.i.t.c.h.

My head was spinning at a thousand revolutions per minute. If he was innocent, why had he gone into hiding in late 1968? And if he was guilty, why had he acted with such egregious stupidity that he got himself arrested?

When I'd arrived at the clerk's office that Tuesday, the day after Gomez's detention, the news was already waiting for me, and Baez himself had confirmed it over the telephone. We'd agreed to let the guy marinate for two more days, until Thursday, mostly to give me time to figure out how I was going to go about getting a statement out of him, and also so I could discuss the case at length with Sandoval. No one else who worked with me had half his powers of discernment.

During the previous three years in the court, few things had changed. We'd been able to get the wretched Clerk Perez off our backs-he'd been promoted to public defender-but losing our boss that way had left a bitter taste, because it appeared to confirm our belief that a certain level of congenital stupidity, such as the kind he displayed like a flag, could augur a meteoric ascent in the juristic hierarchy. As for His Honor, Judge Fortuna Lacalle, we hadn't been so lucky. He was still our judge, and he was still an a.s.shole. But, even worse, it was 1972, and being the friend of a friend of Ongania's no longer provided a very effective push up the road to the Appellate Court. If Fortuna hadn't been able to reach his goal when the mustachioed general's star shone brightest, his current chances were practically nil. And so he continued to vegetate in his old position. The good news was that he'd recovered from his insufferable mania for showing off to impress his superiors. He let us work, signed where we told him to sign, and abandoned his pointless insistence that deputy clerks go to the crime scenes in homicide cases. This was all to the good, because in Argentina back then, the number of dead bodies lying about was on the rise.

For all these reasons, seeing that we were (as Sandoval jocularly put it) "bereft of competent leaders," he and I had sat down together to reread the Morales case, which had stopped cold in December of 1968. Now it was three and a half years later, and the court order requiring the subject's appearance had just been served the previous Monday, in the Flores train station.

Sandoval, who was going through one of the longest periods of sobriety I'd ever known him to persist in, based his conclusion on iron logic: "Even a.s.suming he's guilty, Benjamin, the outcome's still doubtful. Unless he puts the noose around his neck all by himself, our goose is cooked."

This was painfully true. What did we have, really, that gave us sufficient cause to try him for first-degree murder? A widower who accused him (fict.i.tiously, as it happened, because we'd invented Morales's statement to use in case Fortuna Lacalle balked at the police reports) of having sent some threatening letters that were nowhere to be found. Some preliminary formalities, turned over to me by Baez, according to which Gomez had left his place of residence as well as his job hours before the police arrived to carry out the investigations outlined in those very formalities. The time card from the suspect's job, which showed that he'd arrived at work very late on the day when Liliana Emma Colotto de Morales was murdered. Pure s.h.i.t, in other words. We had nothing at all, and even the stupidest defense attorney would go before the Appellate Court and pulverize our preventive detention order, a.s.suming, incidentally, that we could get Judge Fortuna to sign it.

Because of all those considerations, I suppose, I hadn't bothered to call Morales and inform him. To what end? To make clear to him why we'd have to release the only suspect we'd managed to identify in the course of more than three years? The very suspect that he himself was still looking for-I had no doubt of it-in the train stations, on a rotating schedule, every evening from Monday to Friday?

I had Gomez brought to the clerk's private office, which was empty. A replacement for Perez hadn't been named yet, and for the moment, our doc.u.ments were being signed for us by the clerk of Section No. 18. I preferred there to be as few witnesses as possible. I myself didn't know why, but I didn't want witnesses, and so I gave orders that I wasn't to be interrupted. I stepped into the office behind Gomez and the prison guard who was pulling him along by one arm. I asked the guard to take off his handcuffs. Gomez sat down in front of the desk and crossed his right leg over his left. He's sure of himself, this little p.r.i.c.k, I thought. It wasn't a good sign to see him so calm.

At that moment, I heard the exterior door of the adjacent office open and a chirpy voice sing out a "Good morning" that made my hair stand on end. It couldn't be. It couldn't. Sandoval stuck his head not very far into the office where Gomez and I were sitting and repeated his merry greeting, accompanied by a broad smile. Although he disappeared immediately, I sat staring for a long time at the spot where he'd stood in the doorway. "The worthless, worthless motherf.u.c.ker!" I said under my breath. He was loaded. Uncombed, unshaven, wearing yesterday's clothes, with one shirttail partially hanging out of his pants. That was the reason for the cheery salutation. Although I'd seen him for barely an instant, it had been enough for me to recognize a sight all too familiar from the many years we'd worked together. I tried to remember the previous afternoon. Hadn't I looked out the window and made certain he was on his way home and not bound for the Bajo bars? Or had my head been so focused on today's interrogation that I'd forgotten to check? Either way, it made no difference. We were f.u.c.ked.

I rolled a sheet of letterhead paper into the typewriter, which I'd carried there from my own desk. I was leery of deviating from even the smallest of my routines. "In Buenos Aires, on the twenty-seventh day of the month of April, 1972 ..."

I stopped. Sandoval was back in the doorway, as though waiting for me. I glared at him. He couldn't think he was going to partic.i.p.ate in the deposition, not in his current state. Since he'd been so foolish as to ruin seven months of abstinence, since he hadn't minded s.h.i.tting on something he knew was very important to me, and since his condition would no doubt prevent him from articulating three words with more than two syllables, I believed he should at the very least put a sock in it and let me do what I could with Gomez. Either Sandoval read my expression or a sudden wave of nausea persuaded him to take refuge at his own desk. In any case, he went away. I glanced at Gomez and the guard. They both looked thoroughly uninvolved with what was going on and heedless of my growing desperation. In spite of everything, I had to admit that Sandoval brought a very dignified and elevated style to his drunkenness. No hiccups, no zigzagging, no staggering into furniture. The most you could say about his exterior aspect was that he looked like a worthy gentleman who, for reasons contrary to his will, had found himself compelled to sleep outdoors.

I decided to ignore all further distractions and concentrate on taking Gomez's statement. I was resolved to give him a bad time, to treat him as if I knew he was guilty. Whatever I did, the game was up. In the coldest and most calmly menacing voice I was capable of producing, I asked him for some basic personal information and communicated to him the reasons why he'd been brought in. First I explained his rights, and then I described in broad outline the elements of the case. As I spoke, I banged away on my typewriter, the same one I'm using to record these memories. When I finished typing out the standard opening, I paused. It was now or never.

"The first question I have to ask you is whether you acknowledge having a connection with the matter under investigation in this case."

"Having a connection" was sufficiently vague. If only he would let something slip out and give me an opening of some kind. I needed something I could hold on to, but I had no expectations. His face might have expressed many things, or nothing, but he certainly didn't show any surprise. He took a while to answer, and when he did, he spoke serenely: "I don't know what you're talking about."

That was it; I was done. Game over. Heads or tails, I lost. There was nothing I could do. I'd tried. I'd even leaned on the police to bring in the suspect before the public defender arrived and started giving him advice. But evidently, either Gomez knew absolutely nothing about the crime or he realized that he had me by the b.a.l.l.s and didn't have the slightest intention of letting me go. He was going to confine himself to playing dumb and denying everything until I had my fill of tormenting him in vain.

At that point, Sandoval came in, squinting a little as if trying to focus his gaze. He walked over to me and bent down almost level with my ear. "The Solano dossier, Benjamin ... have you seen it?" He spoke in a loud voice, almost shouting the words, as if we were separated by sixty yards instead of four inches.

"It's with the cases awaiting signatures," I snapped.

"Thank you," he said, and went away.

I turned back to Gomez. I hadn't yet recorded his categorical denial in the deposition. I didn't want to do so just yet, but I couldn't think how to proceed. I'd tried a direct attack, and it hadn't worked. Would it be worth it to try some more oblique approach? Or was I really just hara.s.sing a poor innocent guy?

"Look, Mr. Gomez." I pointed at the dossier, which was lying on the desk. "Why do you think we've kept you in jail for four days on the basis of an order to appear dating from 1968? Just because?"

"You must know," he said, and then, after a pause: "I don't know anything."

For the first time, I thought he was lying. Or was that simply my desire to keep the case from expiring altogether?

Sandoval again. What a pain in the a.s.s. He'd found the d.a.m.n Solano dossier and was brandishing it in triumph. "Here it is, I found it," he said, putting it in front of me. "Don't you think we ought to issue a summons to the expert who a.s.sessed the building before the auction? I mean, because that way we kill two birds with one stone."

Was he acc.u.mulating points to win a whack on the head? That was what it seemed like. Didn't he realize I was trying to trap the suspect, which was like trying to trap a fly in a large room? No. No, he didn't realize any such thing, not with the load he was carrying.

All I said was "Do whatever you want."

He left the office, happy as could be. When I turned to Gomez again, his small smile seemed to indicate that my colleague's intoxicated state hadn't escaped his notice. I urged myself not to let him take over the initiative, but my ship was going down, and I didn't know how to jump off of it. I just sat there, typing nothing, not my stupid questions and not his predictable answers. Then I decided to go for broke, all in, come what might ...

As he could imagine, I said, we didn't arrest people for no good reason. We were perfectly aware that he'd been a friend and neighbor of the victim. We knew he'd come to the capital from Tuc.u.man, filled with resentment, shortly after the girl's marriage. We knew the only day he'd ever been terribly late for work was the day of the murder, and moreover, toward the end of 1968, when the police investigation had begun to close in on him, he'd disappeared without a trace.

Now that was really it. I'd taken my last shot, and all the odds were against me. There was a tiny possibility that he'd be scared or surprised or both at once and decide to cooperate by way of alleviating the problem. I was used to dealing with idiots who, because they couldn't take the pressure of lying, or because they'd seen too many movies where the guilty got their penalties reduced by confessing their crimes, would wind up singing their entire repertoire, "La c.u.mparsita" included, thereby allowing us to revive moribund cases. But when Gomez looked at me, I knew he was either innocent or very clever. Or maybe both. He remained self-possessed, confident, patient. Nothing seemed to surprise him-or perhaps he'd come prepared in advance to parry my pitiful thrusts.

All of a sudden, I remembered Morales. Poor guy, I thought. Maybe it would have been better for the widower if the case had been a.s.signed to someone like Romano instead of me. Romano sure wouldn't have a problem. He and his pal Sicora could preside over one night of torture down in the police station, and by this time Gomez would be confessing to the a.s.sa.s.sination of John F. Kennedy. After all, his face was already busted up anyway. I stopped and concentrated. Was I so desperate that the methods employed by a contemptible son of a b.i.t.c.h like Romano were starting to seem acceptable?

Something interrupted my digressions. Or rather, someone. For the third time, Sandoval burst into the office where I was trying to take a deposition. On this occasion, he arrived without a case file in his hand. Making himself right at home, he began to rummage in the clerk's desk drawers. He even went so far as to move my right elbow out of the way, very delicately, so as not to hit me with the tall drawer on that side.

"I already told you, I don't know anything," Gomez said. Was there mockery in his voice? "I knew the girl, yes. We were friends, and I was very sorry to hear she was dead."

I looked at the sheet of paper in the typewriter and hit the s.p.a.ce bar several times to situate my text correctly. Then I started typing pretty furiously: "Questioned by the court as to whether or not he acknowledged any connection with the events which are the subject of the present case, declarer stated-"

"Excuse me for b.u.t.ting in, Benjamin." Had I heard right? Was that s.h.i.t-faced jacka.s.s Sandoval really interrupting me at a time like this? "But it couldn't have been this kid."

Now I'd had it. Up to here. I considered the possibility of borrowing the prison guard's pistol and filling my a.s.sociate full of holes. Could it be possible that alcohol had rendered him so totally oblivious? There I was, almost going crazy but trying to cow our suspect with an image of calm authority, and there was my a.s.sistant, marinated in booze at eleven in the morning, taking up his defense. "Go back to your desk," I said. Somehow, I managed to speak without insulting him. "We'll talk it over later."

"No, stop, stop. I'm being serious. This is serious." To top it all, must he keep repeating the few stupidities he was able to articulate? "Have you looked at him?" He gestured toward Gomez with an open hand. The latter, perhaps interested, was reciprocating the attention. "This kid couldn't have done it."

Sandoval picked up the dossier, sat on the edge of the desk, and started leafing through the proceedings. "Impossible," he insisted. "Just take a look. Take a look at this. And think about it."

He held out the case file, opened to the beginning of the autopsy. Was he f.u.c.king with me on purpose? Didn't Sandoval, of all people, know exactly how much I hated looking at medical examiners' reports?

"This Colotto girl, let's see, right here: 'Height, 5 feet 8 inches. Weight, 135 pounds,'" he read, striking the lines with one finger. "You see?" He smiled an impish little smile and added, "The girl was a head taller than this kid."

The expression on Gomez's face suddenly turned somber. Or at least so it seemed to me after a brief glance, because I'd actually begun to pay more attention to my drunken coworker than to the suspect.

"Besides ..." Sandoval paused while he paged back and forth through the file. He stopped at the photographs of the crime scene. "I don't know if you took a good look at the woman," he said, turning the dossier around so I could get a proper view of it and trying to focus his baleful eyes on me. "She was beautiful ..."

He spun the file back around to his side. "A beauty like that," he said, "is like a miracle, out of an ordinary guy's reach." Then he went on as if to himself, in a voice that was suddenly sorrowful, "You'd have to be a real man to get to her ..."

"Yes, you would! You sure would!" I turned my head. It was Gomez who had spoken. His features had gone rigid; a sudden grimace of contempt had appeared on his lips. And he wasn't taking his eyes off Sandoval. "No doubt, the poor sap she wound up marrying must be a very macho guy! No doubt!"

Sandoval looked at him. Then he looked at me, and shaking his head slightly in Gomez's direction, he said, "Don't pay attention. The kid doesn't understand. You remember telling me yesterday that the victim must have known the killer, because the main door of the apartment house showed no signs of a break-in?"

Fantastic, I thought to myself. It was my last sc.r.a.p of a clue and I'd been h.o.a.rding it like a wild card, waiting for a chance to play it, and this cretin had given it up for nothing. I said, "So?"

Was it possible he was so crocked he didn't notice the homicidal tone of my voice?

"So think about it." The worst of it was that Sandoval looked so lively, so alert; it seemed incredible that he didn't realize how badly he was s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g up. "Do you suppose a woman like this has time, has room in her head, to remember her Tuc.u.man neighbors and open her door to them one Tuesday morning just like that, after who knows how many years of not seeing them and not thinking about them? Not a chance, Benjamin. Seriously."

Sandoval dropped the case file on the desk and spread his arms, as if his theory were successfully proven and his demonstration over.

"Who is this guy?" Gomez's question was directed to me, and it sounded aggressive. I didn't answer him, because in a burst of lucidity, I'd begun to grasp what Sandoval was doing and to realize that the one who was groping around and stumbling into things was me, not him.

"But in that case, we'll have to refocus the investigation completely," I pointed out, addressing Sandoval. The doubt in my voice wasn't fake.

"Precisely," Sandoval said, giving me a satisfied look. "We have to look for a tall man. A good-looking guy, I should think, maybe a blond. Someone ... let's say ... someone capable of making an impression on a woman like that." Quickly switching to a reserved tone, he added, "Don't you think we should maybe have another look at her ... at her friends?"

"Stop talking bulls.h.i.t." Gomez had turned red, and he couldn't stop staring at Sandoval. The bruise over his eyebrow suddenly looked inflamed. "For your information, Liliana remembered me perfectly well."

I jumped. Sandoval looked at him with the indifferent impatience of someone tolerating the mailman who's rung the doorbell and asked for his Christmas tip. He became very serious and said, "Don't be ridiculous, son." Then he turned back to me: "And another thing. According to the autopsy report, the guy who attacked her was a big brute ... a stud, actually. Listen." He opened the case file and read-or rather, pretended to read, making it up as he went along: "'From the depth of the v.a.g.i.n.al lesions, it can be deduced that the a.s.sailant is a very well endowed man. Similarly, the neck bruises demonstrate that he is possessed of extraordinary strength in his upper extremities.'"

"There you go, a.s.shole! I f.u.c.ked her and f.u.c.ked her good, the s.l.u.t!"

In a flash, Gomez had leaped to his feet and started shouting, inches from Sandoval's face. The guard, reacting quickly, yanked the suspect back onto the chair and reattached his handcuffs. Sandoval made a movement of disgust, I didn't know whether because of the insult or because of the prisoner's fetid breath. Then he drew close to the young man once again. "Son," he said. With an expression that mingled compa.s.sion and weariness, Sandoval looked like a man whose forbearance was being pushed to the limit by an insistent child whom he had no wish to punish. "Don't go swinging at the pinata, today's not your birthday." Then he turned around to me, as though he wanted to continue expounding his theories.

"You pathetic b.a.s.t.a.r.d. You can't even imagine what I did to that filthy wh.o.r.e."

Sandoval turned and gazed at him again, with the look of a man gathering together the last shreds of his patience. "Oh, yeah? And what have you got to say? Come on. Let's hear it, stud."

21.

During the course of the following seventy minutes, Isidoro Antonio Gomez spoke practically without stopping. When he finished, my fingers hurt, but except for a few words with transposed letters, the deposition I typed was almost error-free. I asked the questions, but Gomez spoke only to Sandoval, staring at him intensely as if expecting him to break into pieces or turn into a pile of dust on the wooden floor. As for Sandoval himself, he ran an expressive gamut of grandiose proportions: very slowly, he transformed his initial look of annoyance and incredulity into one that showed greater and greater interest. By the end of the statement, he'd constructed a mask in which there appeared a harmonious combination of respect, surprise, and even a touch of admiration. Gomez ended by discoursing, in breezily pedantic style, upon the measures he'd had to take after talking to his mother on the telephone and learning that Liliana's father had been inquiring about him.

"The foreman on the worksite almost croaked when I told him I was quitting," he said, speaking to Sandoval like an experienced and patient pedagogue. He'd regained his serenity, but he didn't give the slightest indication of wanting to take back any of his earlier declarations. "He offered to recommend me to people he knew. I turned him down, of course-I didn't want to give the police a way of locating me."

Sandoval nodded. He stood up, sighing. He'd spent the whole time barely perched on the edge of the desk, listening with folded arms. "To tell you the truth, kid, I don't know what to say. I would never have thought ..." He pressed his lips together, making the face we make when we're about to give in to the evidence. "Maybe it happened the way you say ..."

"It did!" Gomez's conclusion was comprehensive, triumphant, categorical.

I struck the keys a few last blows, closing the deposition with the usual formulas. Then I stacked the pages and pushed the pile toward him with a pen. "Read it before you sign it. Please," I said. Without having any idea why, I too had adopted the calm, cordial tone Sandoval had used at the end of his partic.i.p.ation in the scene.

It was an extremely long deposition, which started out like an informative statement but immediately turned into a confession, with all the applicable legal guarantees. I'd included an express mention of the fact that the suspect was waiving his right to make no declaration as well as his right to have legal counsel present to advise him during any declaration. By a strange trick of fate, the public defender on duty that day was none other than Perez, the eternal moron. Gomez signed the pages of his confession one after the other, barely glancing at them as he did so. I looked at him, and he met my gaze as he handed the pages back to me. Now you can go f.u.c.k yourself, I thought. Now it's over for you, sweetheart.

At that moment, the door opened, and in came the one and only Julio Carlos Perez, our former clerk and current public defender. Fortunately, I was more skilled at dealing with a.s.sholes than with psychopaths.

"What do you say, Julio?" I called out in welcome, pretending relief. "Good thing you've come. We've got a statement of information here that we had to change into a statement of confession. For first-degree murder, no less. An old case, from when you were clerk."

"Ah, what a problem. I was late because there was a hearing in Number 3. So you've already started?"

"Well, actually, we've already finished," I said, as if excusing us, or excusing him.