Ricardo Piglia - Target in the Night

“We’re heading out,” Croce said. “You think I’m afraid of those idiots?”

The three of them walked out and stood outside the hotel entrance.

“Murderer! Degenerate Japo! Justice! We want justice!” the people around the door shouted.

“Get out of the way. I don’t want any trouble,” Croce said, moving forward. “Anyone comes close, you get a night in jail.”

The crowd moved back as they moved forward. Yoshio refused to cover his face. Proud and diminutive, very pale, he walked through a sort of corridor that was formed from the front of the hotel to the car as the people shouted and yelled insults at him.

“Folks, we’re close to solving the case, I’d ask for your patience,” the Prosecutor said, having immediately taken over the scene.

“We’ll take care of it, boss,” one man said.

“Murderer! Faggot!” they shouted again, and started pushing in.

“That’s enough,” Croce said, taking out his weapon. “I’m taking him to the station and he’ll stay there until he has his trial.”

“You’re all corrupt!” a drunk yelled.

A myopic, nervous man approached. He was the editor of El Pregón , the local newspaper.

“You have the guilty party, Inspector.”

“Don’t write what you don’t know,” Croce said.

“Are you going to tell me what I know?”

“I’m going to throw you in jail for violating the confidentiality of the investigation.”

“Violating what? I don’t follow, Inspector,” the myopic said. “It’s the usual tension between power and the press.” He shrugged, turning toward the crowd to make sure everyone heard him.

“The usual tension of stupid-ass journalists,” the Inspector said.

The editor of El Pregón smiled, as if the insult were a personal triumph. The press would not allow itself to be intimidated.

Inspector Flies Off the Handle —would be the headline, for sure. What did “off the handle” mean? Croce wondered for a moment, while Saldías took advantage of the confusion to get Yoshio into the back of the car.

“Let’s go, Inspector,” he said.

What they called the police station was a rural outpost with one guard posted inside. It was basically a hovel with a room set aside to lock up the bums who endangered the crops by lighting fires near the fields to heat up their mate , or who slaughtered animals from the ranches in the area to make themselves a little barbeque.

Croce lived in another room in the same small building. That night — after leaving Yoshio locked up in the cell with the guard at the door — he went out to the vine-covered patio to drink mate with Saldías. The light from the oil lamp illuminated the dirt patio and the near side of the station.

In the Inspector’s mind, the hypothesis that a Japanese night porter, quiet and friendly as an old lady, would kill a fortune-hunting Puerto Rican did not add up.

“Unless it was a crime of passion.”

“But in that case he would’ve stayed in the room, hugging the body.”

Croce and Saldías agreed that if Yoshio had let himself be driven by anger or jealousy, he wouldn’t have behaved as he did. He would have stumbled out of the room with the knife in his hand, or they would have found him sitting on the floor, staring at the dead man’s face in shock. Croce had seen a lot of cases like that. This didn’t seem to be a case of violent emotion.

“Too much stealth,” the Inspector said. “And too visible.”

“The only thing missing was someone taking a picture of him while he was doing the killing,” Saldías agreed.

“As if he were sleeping, or acting .”

An idea seemed to push against the external tissue of Croce’s brain. Like a bird trying to get into a cage from outside. His thoughts would escape sometimes, flutter away, so he would say them out loud.

“As if he were sleepwalking, or a zombie,” he said.

As if by instinct Croce understood that Yoshio had been caught in a trap that he didn’t quite comprehend. A mass of facts had fallen upon him from which he would never be able to free himself. The weapon hadn’t been located, but several eyewitnesses had seen him enter and leave Durán’s room. It was an open-and-shut case.

The Inspector’s mind had become a flock of mad thoughts flying too fast for him to catch. Like the wings of a pigeon, the uncertainties about the guilt of the Japanese night porter flapped fleetingly inside the cage, but not the conviction about his innocence.

“For example, the fifty-dollar bill. Why was it down there?”

“He dropped it,” Saldías said, following his train.

“I don’t think so. They left it on purpose.”

Saldías looked at him, he didn’t understand. But he trusted Croce’s power of deduction, so he sat still, waiting.

There was over five thousand dollars in the room which hadn’t been taken. It wasn’t a robbery. So we’d think that it wasn’t a robbery . Croce started pacing in his mind , out in the field, to clear up his ideas. The Japanese had been the barbarians in World War II, but after that they’d been model servants, servile and laconic. There was a prejudice in their favor: Japanese never commit crimes. This was an exception, a detour. That’s what it was about.

“Barely 0.1 % of crimes in Argentina are committed by Japanese,” Croce said, target shooting in the dark, and fell asleep. He dreamt that he was riding a horse bareback again, like when he was little. He saw a hare in the lake. Or was it a duck? Up in the air, he saw a figure, like a frieze. And against the horizon he saw a duck that turned into a rabbit. The image appeared very clearly in the dream. He woke up and kept talking, as if resuming the paused conversation. “How many Japanese do you think live in our province?”

“In the province I don’t know, but in Argentina 10,” Saldías improvised. “Out of a population of 23 million inhabitants, there must be some 32,000 Japanese.”

“Let’s say there are 8,500 Japanese in the province, 850 in the district. They might be dry cleaners, florists, bantamweight boxers, acrobats. Maybe a purse maker or two with slender hands, but no murderers.”

“They’re tiny.”

“The strange thing is he didn’t escape down the shaft of the service pulley. The witnesses saw him enter and leave the room through the door.”

“True,” Saldías said, and specified, in a bureaucratic tone, “he didn’t use his physical particularities to assist him in the crime.”

Yoshio was delicate, fragile, he looked as if he were made of porcelain. Next to Durán, who was tall and mulatto, they made a very strange couple. Is beauty a moral trait? Maybe beautiful people have better character, they are more sincere, everyone trusts them, people want to touch them, see them, feel the tremor of their perfection. Besides, they were too different. Durán, with his Caribbean accent, seemed like he was always at a party. Yoshio, on the other hand, was laconic, furtive, very servile. The perfect servant.

“You saw that man’s hands, right? Small and weak. What kind of pulse, what kind of heart, would he have to stab somebody like that? As if he’d been killed by a robot.”

“A doll,” Saldías says.

“A gaucho, good with a knife.”

Croce immediately deduced that the crime must have had an instigator. Once he discarded the theory that would have solved the case at once — in other words, a crime of passion — he realized that someone else had to be implicated. All crimes are crimes of passion, Croce said, except crimes for hire. There was a call from the factory, that was strange. Luca never speaks with anyone, and even less by telephone. He doesn’t go out. He hates the countryside, the quiet of the plains, the sleeping gauchos, the owners who never work and just sit under the eaves of their houses staring at the horizon, or let time pass in the shade of their balconies, go out to fuck the local girls in the shed between the bags of maize, play dice through the night. He hates them. Croce can see the tall, abandoned factory building with its rotating beacon light, as if it were an empty fortress. The empty fortress . It’s not that he heard voices, the sentences simply reached him as if they were memories. I know him as if he were my son . Like lines written in the night. He knew very well what they meant, but not how they entered his head. Certainty is not the same as knowledge, he thought. It’s the precondition for knowledge. General Grant’s face was like a map, a footprint on the ground. A very scientific job. Grant, the butcher, with his kidskin glove.