Ricardo Piglia - Target in the Night

Luca was raised as a legitimate son and treated in the same manner as his brother, but he never forgave his father, the one who claimed to be his father, for this indulgence.

“My brother Luca always thought that he wasn’t my father’s son. He grew up sheltered by Grandfather Bruno, he’d follow him everywhere, like an abandoned puppy. But that’s not why he finally confronted my father, that’s not why. And that’s also not why they killed Tony.”

10 The first Japanese immigrant arrives in Argentina in 1886, a certain Professor Seizo Itoh from the School of Agriculture in Sapporo. He takes up residence in the Province of Buenos Aires. In 1911, Seicho Arakaki is born, the first Argentine of Japanese origin ( Nikkei ). The last Argentine census (1969) records the presence of 23,185 Japanese and descendents.

11 Bruno Belladona was very influenced by the treatise Field, Factories and Workshops (1899) by Prince Pyotr Kropotkin, the great Russian geographer, anarchist, and free-thinker. Kropotkin proposed that the development of communications and the flexibility of electric energy should establish the basis of a manufacturing production decentralized into small, self-sufficient units, set up in isolated, rural areas, outside the conglomeration of large cities. He defended the production model of small workshops with their large potential for creative innovation, because the more delicate the technology, the greater the need for human initiative and individual skill.

12 “Once,” Sofía told him, “they took apart the engine of one of the first mechanical threshing machines and left the bolts and nuts to dry on the grass while they started looking at the blades. All of a sudden, a rhea came out of nowhere and ate the nuts shining in the sun. Gulp, gulp, went the rhea’s throat as it swallowed several nuts and bolts. Then it started walking backwards, sideways, its eyes bulged out. They tried to lasso it, but it was impossible, it would run like a light, then stop and turn back toward them with such a crazy look, it seemed offended. Finally they had to chase down the ostrich in a car to recover the parts of the machine it had swallowed.”

13 In the old days, they used to separate the different estancias by digging ditches between them to prevent the cattle from one to cross over into the other. This work of digging trenches in the pampas was done by Basques and Irish immigrants. The local gauchos refused to do any kind of task that meant dismounting from their horses; they considered despicable any work that had to be done “on foot” (cf. John Lynch, Massacre in the Pampas ).

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