Ricardo Piglia - Target in the Night

37 “Sometimes Luca hears the mocking laughter of a group of children. Are they laughing at him? He hates children, their voices, their metallic laugh, the little childish monsters. The neighbors are watching, they send their children to observe . His fate has been to be celibate, a true non-father, the anti-father, nothing natural, everything made , and thus rejected and persecuted” (Report by Mr. Schultz).

38 When she lay down on a white sheet on the grass to sunbathe, the chickens would always try to peck the freckles on her torso…

When Renzi went back to visit Croce at the asylum, he found him alone in his block. As he crossed the lawn, the fat man and the thin man, who’d been transferred to another section of the hospital, approached Renzi and asked him for cigarettes and money. Off to the side, sitting on a bench between the trees, he saw another of the admitted patients — a very gaunt man, with the face of a corpse, wearing a long, black overcoat — masturbating, looking up toward the women’s rooms on the other side of the gated fence. On the upper level of that building, Renzi thought he saw one of the women leaning out the window with her chest bare, making obscene gestures while the man watched her with a lost look in his eye, touching himself between the folds of his open coat. Did they pay for that? Renzi wondered.

“Yeah, they pay,” Croce said. “They send money or cigarettes to the girls so they’ll stick their tits out the windows upstairs.”

In the vast, empty room with the beds undone, Croce had set up a kind of desk using two old fruit crates. He sat, facing the window, taking notes.

“They left me alone. It’s better this way, so I can think and sleep in peace.”

He seemed calm. He’d put on his dark suit and was smoking his small cigar. His bag was all packed up. When Renzi told him that Luca had accepted the summons from the court, Croce smiled with the same mysterious look as always.

“That’s the news I was waiting for,” he said. “Now the matter will be settled.”

He jotted a few things in his notebook, behaving as if he were in his own office. Croce confused the noises he heard through the window — voices, murmurings, distant radios — with the sounds of the past. He thought the footsteps and the creaking noise in the corridor, on the other side of the door, were the footsteps and rubber wheels of the girl who came around the offices in town with the coffee cart. But when he got up he saw it was the nurse with the medicine, a white liquid in a small plastic cup that Croce drank in a single swig.

Renzi gave him a summary of his investigations at the Archives. He’d followed a series of clues in the newspapers and found that the transactions led to a ghost finance company from Olavarría that had purchased the factory’s mortgage to appropriate the assets. Apparently, the banking code or the legal name was Alas 1212.

“Alas? So Cueto is behind it.”

“The name that appears is that of a certain Alzaga.”

“Of course, that’s his partner.”

“This is what’s at stake,” Renzi said, showing him the cutout he’d found in the Archives. “They’re also speculating with the land. The Old Man is opposed.”

“Good,” Croce said.

Cueto, who was once the family lawyer, commandeered the operation to appropriate the shares for the new corporation. Everything was done under the table, which is why Luca blamed his father — with good reason, for the Old Man trusted Cueto and didn’t realize until some time later that Cueto was the black monk of the story. But now it seemed that the Old Man had distanced himself from Cueto.

“And the trial? Luca doesn’t know what’s in store for him.”

“But he knows what he wants,” Croce said, and started elaborating a new hypothesis based on the information that Renzi had just brought him. Of course they wanted to keep the money from reaching Luca, but the crime was still an enigma. The Intrigue , Croce wrote on a piece of paper. The factory, a Center, the surrounding land, the speculation with the real estate. He sat still for a moment. “You have to be able to think like the enemy,” he said all of a sudden. “Someone who acts both like a mathematician and a poet, someone who follows a logical line but at the same time associates freely. A mind that builds syllogisms and metaphors. The same element enters into two different ways of thinking. We’re facing an intelligence without limits. What in one case might be a simile, in the other is an equivalence. Understanding a fact hinges on the possibility of seeing the connection. Nothing is worth anything in and of itself, everything is worth something in relationship to other factors, but we don’t know what the other factors are. Durán,” Croce said, and drew an ex on the paper, “a Puerto Rican from New Jersey, a U.S. citizen, meets the Belladona sisters in Atlantic City”—Croce drew two exes on the paper—“and comes here after them. Did the girls know or did they not know what was happening? That’s the first unknown. They have dodged the question, as if they were protecting someone. The jockey was the executor: he served as a substitute for another. They may have murdered Tony for no reason at all, just to keep anyone from investigating the real reason. A diversionary tactic. 39 They killed him to divert our attention elsewhere,” he said. They had the dead body, they had the suspects, but the motive was of a different order. This seemed to be the case. A diversionary tactic, he wrote, and handed the paper to Renzi.

Emilio looked at the piece of paper with the underlined phrases and the checks and exes, and understood that Croce wanted him to reach the same conclusions as he had. This way he could be certain that he’d hit right on target.

Croce found a repeating mechanism: the criminal tended to resemble the victim so as to erase his tracks.

“They leave a corpse to send a message. It’s the structure of the mafia: they use bodies as if they were words. And that’s how it was with Tony. They were trying to say something. We know the cause of Tony’s death, but what was the reason?” Croce remained quiet, looking at the bare trees through the window. “They didn’t have to kill him, poor Christ,” he said after a while.

He seemed nervous and tired. It was late afternoon and the block he was in was entirely in shadows now. They went outside to walk in the park of the asylum. Croce wanted to know if Luca was relaxed. He was betting everything on that lawsuit, he wished he could help him, but there was no way to help him.

“That’s why I’m here,” he said. “You can’t live without making enemies, you’d have to lock yourself in a room and never leave. Not move, not do anything. Everything is always more stupid and more incomprehensible than what one can deduce.”

He got lost in his thoughts. When Croce came back, he said he’d go return to his burrow and keep working. The walk was over. Renzi watched Croce head off toward his block. He walked in a nervous zigzag, swaying slightly, as if he were about to lose his balance. He stopped before he went in, turned around, raised his hand, and waved weakly in the distance.

Was that goodbye? Renzi didn’t like the idea, but he didn’t have much left. They were pressuring him at the newspaper to get back to Buenos Aires, they barely published his articles anymore, they thought the case was closed. Junior told him to stop fooling around and to come back to work on the literary pages. Kidding, Junior had proposed that Renzi put together a special on gauchesque literature — since he was already out in the country.

When he got back to the hotel, Renzi found the Belladona sisters sitting at a table in the lounge. He went to the bar, ordered a beer, and watched the twins reflected in the mirror behind the bottles. Ada was speaking excitedly, Sofía was agreeing, there was much intensity between them, too much … If it was a man . Every time he got himself in deep, Renzi remembered something he’d read. The line came from a story by Hemingway, “The Sea Change,” which Renzi had translated for his newspaper’s Culture section. If it was a man . Literature doesn’t change, you can always find what you are looking for there. Life, instead … But what was life? Two sisters in the bar of a provincial hotel. As if she were reading his thoughts, Sofía waved at him, smiling. Emilio raised his mug to toast in the air. Then Sofía sat up and called him over, a flare. Renzi left his glass on the bar and walked to their table.