Ricardo Piglia - Target in the Night

There was a big commotion when the session ended, an explosion of happiness. Cueto’s friends all got up to speak to each other. Ada joined the group, too, and Cueto took her by the arm and whispered something in her ear. The only one who approached Luca was Sofía, she stood in front of him and tried to cheer him up. The factory was saved. They hugged, she held him in her arms and spoke softly to him, as if she were trying to calm him down, and she went with him to the other room, where the judge was waiting for him to sign the papers.

Renzi stayed in his seat while everyone got up. Outside the courtroom, he saw Luca shuffling down the hallway, like a boxer who’s accepted winning the title in a fixed match. Not the boxer who’s forced to take a dive because he needs the money. Not — as usual — the humiliated, offended party who knows that he didn’t really lose even though someone has beaten him. No. Luca was like a boxer who’s retained his title as champion thanks to a racket — which only he and his rival know is a racket — and all he has now is the illusion that his dreams have finally come true, but at an unbearable cost. Luca moved as if he were extremely tired and could barely move. Sofía was the only one with him, walking next to him, without touching him. When they crossed the main hallway she said goodbye and left out a side door. Luca continued by himself to the door of the other room.

He’d been subjected to a trial like a tragic character without a choice. Anything he chose would have been his downfall, not for him but for his idea of justice. In the end, it was justice that had put him to the test, an abstract entity — with its rhetorical apparatuses and its imaginary constructions — which he’d had to confront that afternoon in April, until he capitulated. That is, until he accepted one of the two options he was offered. Luca Belladona, who’d always boasted of making clear decisions, unhindered by any doubts, supported by his self-assuredness and his fixed idea. He chose his work, we might say, over his life, and he paid a very high price, but his illusion remained intact to the end. He remained true to his precept, he’d been sunk, but he hadn’t defected. He was so proud and stubborn that it took him a while to realize that he’d fallen into a trap with no way out. By the time he realized what was happening, it was too late.

The townspeople watched him walk down the hallway in silence. They’d known him forever and were now at peace, they seemed magnanimous, because by doing what he’d done — after years and years of his impossible battle, held up by his demoniacal pride — the town had succeeded in getting him to capitulate. Now it could be said that Luca was like everyone else, or that everyone else was like him: now that Luca had revealed a weakness that he’d never revealed before. Renzi hurried to try to talk to him, but was unable to catch up and could only follow behind as they walked down the stairs leading outside. Then an incredible thing happened. When he came out onto the sidewalk, Croce’s mutt appeared, walking crookedly as always, but this time when he saw Luca walk out into the daylight, the dog rushed and started barking at him, baring his teeth as if to bite, with hatred, his yellow fur on end, his body tense. That barking was the only thing that Luca got that day.

The next day, when Renzi went back to the Madariaga Tavern, the atmosphere was somber. Croce was at his usual table by the window, wearing his dark suit and tie. That morning he’d gone to the prison in Dolores to visit Yoshio and give him the news, before the official word reached him, that his case had been closed with the consent of Luca Belladona. “Jail is a bad place to live,” Croce said. “But it’s the worst place in the world for a man like Yoshio to live.”

Croce seemed dejected. Luca was going to pay off the mortgage and save the factory, but the cost was too high. Croce was sure it would end poorly. He had an extraordinary ability to grasp the sense of events and anticipate their consequences, but he could do nothing to prevent them. When he tried, the only thing waiting for him was madness. Reality was his field of play, he could often see a series of events before they occurred and anticipate their outcome, but the only thing he could do to prove his theories and demonstrate that he was right was to let the events happen of their own accord. He had no influence over them.

“That’s why I’m no good as an inspector,” he said after a while. “I take events that have already occurred and imagine their consequences, but I can’t prevent them. What comes after a crime? More crime. Luca believes he’s condemned both Yoshio and me. If he hadn’t accepted Cueto’s offer, if he’d refused to help him close the case, I might have had a chance with Cueto.” Croce paused and looked at the plains through the bars of the window against which he always sat. The same motionless landscape that was, for him, the image of his life. “I blew it,” Croce added, “my version of the crime was no good for anyone.”

“And in the end, what’s the truth?”

Croce looked at Renzi with a resigned expression on his face and smiled with the same sparkle of tired irony that always burned in his eyes.

“You read too many detective novels, kid. If you only knew what things were really like. Order doesn’t always get restored, the crime doesn’t always get solved. There’s never any logic to it. We struggle to establish the causes and deduce the effects, but we’re never able to understand the entire network of the intrigue. We isolate facts, we stop in front of a few scenes, we question a handful of witnesses, but for the most part we move blindly in the dark. The closer you are to the target, the more you get tangled in a web without end. In detective novels the crimes are always solved, whether with elegance or with violence, so readers will be satisfied. Cueto has a tortured mind, he does strange things, he kills by proxy. He leaves loose strands behind on purpose. Why did he have them leave the bag with the money in the hotel’s storage room? Was Old Man Belladona involved? There are more unknowns than confirmed certainties.”

Croce sat still, staring out the window, lost in his thoughts.

“So you’re leaving,” he said after a while.

“I’m leaving.”

“You’re doing the right thing.”

“Better not say goodbye,” Renzi said.

“Who knows,” Croce said, referring either to his conclusions about Tony’s death, or Renzi’s eventual return to the town which he seemed to be leaving forever.

Croce got up ceremoniously and gave him a hug. Then he thumped down again in his chair and leaned over his notes and diagrams, distracted, as if Renzi were already gone.

While Croce keeps going, Cueto will never have peace, Renzi thought as he walked out into the street. The story goes on, it can go on, there are several possible conjectures, the story remains open and is only interrupted. The investigation has no end, the investigation cannot end. Someone should invent a new detective genre, paranoid fiction it could be called. Everyone is a suspect, everyone feels pursued. Instead of being an isolated individual, the criminal is a group with absolute power. No one understands what’s happening, the clues and testimonies contradict each other as if they changed with each interpretation, and all suspicions are kept open. The victim is the protagonist and center of the intrigue, instead of the detective hired to solve the case or the murderer hired to kill. Renzi thought along these lines as he walked — perhaps for the last time — down the dusty streets of the town.

He went back to the hotel and packed his bag. The days he’d spent in the countryside had taught him to be less naïve. It wasn’t true that the city was the place for experiences. The plains had geological layers of extraordinary events that returned to the surface with the blowing of the southern winds. The evil light of the unburied shimmers in the air like a poisonous fog. Renzi lit a cigarette and smoked, gazing out the window over the main square. Then he looked around the room to make sure he wasn’t forgetting anything, and went downstairs to settle his bill.