The Secret in Their Eyes

by Eduardo Sacheri

  After a tense week spent hiding in a rooming house at the cost of Alfredo Báez’s savings, I wasn’t apt to make too many demands. I don’t think I complained, but I couldn’t help finding my surroundings soul-shattering. Still, I knew I had to be in a safe place where people were unlikely to look for me, unless they had the cockroaches on their payroll.

  I hadn’t heard from Báez at all that week, except for a note he’d left at the reception desk to set up our meeting. I got to the appointed place early, so I had time to upset myself by imagining all the things that might have gone wrong in the past seven days. What if Báez had been the victim of a persecution identical to mine? What if someone had attacked him for poking his nose into the wrong places? My nervousness, steadily intensified over the course of a week and augmented by the nauseating smell, the filth, the bellowing at the bar, and the radio shouters, put me on the verge of breakdown and flight. Luckily, the policeman was as punctual as usual; had he not been, I don’t think he would have found me. He shook my hand and sat down, making one of the dirty metal-and-leatherette chairs squeak.

  “Were you able to find out anything?” I lit into him at once, before he was well settled. I wasn’t in the mood for small talk.

  Báez eyed me before answering. “Yes. In fact, I’ve found out several things, Chaparro.”

  He frightened me. It wasn’t what he said, it was the way he was staring at me. His face bore the expression of a man unsure of how to introduce his subject. Could my plight be that grave? I resolved to shorten the way to the raw truth. “Good,” I said. “In that case, I’m listening.”

  “The thing is I don’t know where to begin.”

  “Wherever you want,” I said, and then, trying to joke: “We’ve got lots of time.”

  “Don’t believe it, Benjamín. You don’t have so much.” As I listened to him, I tried not to let my growing panic show. “You have to take the bus to San Salvador de Jujuy tonight. It leaves at ten minutes past twelve, from Liniers. Under the General Paz freeway.”

  When I caught my breath again, I asked, almost shouting, “What are you talking about?”

  “You’re right. I’m sorry. I think I started with the hardest part. Please be patient.”

  “I’m listening,” I agreed, without lowering my guard.

  “After our meeting the other day, the first question I asked myself was who in the hell had attacked you. Clearly, it was no random act. That one sure thing, added to all the rest, allowed me to identify them pretty easily.”

  “What do you mean, ‘all the rest’?”

  “Everything, my friend,” he said. Then, realizing that my anxiety demanded more precision, he added, “To begin with, the way they went in, the time they went in. Do you have any idea how much racket they must have made, breaking all the things they broke? Your common, everyday thieves go about their work more stealthily. Those guys barged in like they owned the place. They didn’t give a shit who might hear them. Think about it, Chaparro: a small band of thugs, acting with impunity in the middle of the night. These days, you don’t need many more clues to figure out what side they’re on, do you?”

  I was beginning to understand, but it was incredible. What could guys like that want with me?

  “You’ve come up against one of those groups of outlaws employed by the government, my friend. That’s it in a nutshell. You were colossally lucky they didn’t catch you at home. If you’d been there, you wouldn’t have lived to tell the tale. You’d have been dragged to a car by your hair and thrown into the trunk, and then pulled out of the trunk and tossed into a ravine with four bullets in you.”

  Báez seemed to withdraw for a moment, silently contemplating the images of what might have been. Then, suddenly, he returned: “Everything points in the same direction. The impunity, the savagery, the operating in teams. Do you know your neighbor in Apartment B? It took me a long time and a bit of work, but I finally got her to the point where she was willing to tell me that she’d looked out of the peephole and seen four men pass her door.”

  “And what could they have wanted with me?”

  “We’re getting there, Chaparro. Bear with me. My next step was to establish—or let’s say to confirm—that the men belonged to a group connected with Romano or Gómez.”

  “What?” Those two names fell on my ears with a terrifying splat, like a body landing on the sidewalk from ten floors up. “What are you telling me?”

  “Calm down, Benjamín. No use getting upset. It was a foregone conclusion. You’re not a militant, you’re not a public person. You don’t work in a field the military’s interested in—in fact, I don’t believe they give a hoot about Justice. So what reason could there be for a group of guys like that to come busting in on you? They had to have something against you, some old grudge, something personal …”

  I did a finger calculation before I spoke. “Forgive me for saying this, but that’s ridiculous. It’s been almost three years since I’ve heard anything about Isidoro Gómez—not since they released him from Devoto—and not a word about that other son of a bitch, either.”

  “I know, I know. I thought about that, too. But it led me to the next question. I decided to operate on the assumption that those guys had something to do with your incident, or vice versa, you follow me?”

  “I follow you.” Was I truly following him?

  “So I had to start thinking about their motives for wanting to do you in. I didn’t believe they had any new motives, and old ones struck me as even less logical. So I gave all this a lot of thought, and I wound up coming back to the present and focusing on what’s going on now. At first I thought it would be really hard to investigate anybody who works with the intelligence services, anybody in that game. Maybe in a serious country, such organizations are hermetically sealed. Or in any case, I suppose they are. But here, they have more holes than a tea strainer. They like to show off—you know?—all that riding around in cars without license plates, wearing sunglasses, exhibiting those Ithaca shotguns like they were their … you know what I mean.”

  He grew distracted again, and a grimace, a mixture of mockery and contempt, appeared on his face.

  “So they turned out to be relatively easy to locate. And then, after two or three conversations in which I played the role of the admiring asshole eager to listen to elite macho bullshit, I practically came away with an organization chart outlining their operations.”

  “I find it hard to believe they can be so obtuse,” I ventured to say.

  “Believe it. If they weren’t such bloodthirsty sons of bitches, you’d shit yourself laughing at them. Let me go on. Romano apparently has his own little group of seven or eight psychos. It seems he was kept on after they closed down Devoto, bad joke that it was. On the other hand, holding on to the guy was only logical. You couldn’t expect a worthless lout like him to do any kind of productive work.”

  I tried to follow his explanation, but an image from eight years before—that son of a bitch Romano celebrating, jumping up and down around the judge’s desk—kept recurring to me. How could I have failed to notice, back then, that this colleague of mine was a sadist and a murderer?

  “Romano’s the leader of the group. And generally, he doesn’t go out when they vacuum people.” He saw the puzzlement on my face. “Sorry. The thugs say ‘vacuum.’ It means they carry off anybody they feel like carrying off to one of their hideouts.”

  I nodded. I remembered what had happened to Sandoval’s cousin, who had no doubt been put through the same appalling ordeal. Was it possible he’d been abducted just last week? It seemed to me that had occurred in another life, distant and definitively inaccessible.

  “In fact, Romano hardly goes out at all. He works inside, doing … how do they say it? ‘Basic intelligence,’ or ‘raw intelligence.’ Which means he’s the creep who directs the torture sessions where they get names out of the detainees. Then he sends out his heavies to pick up the people he wants.” Once again, Báez’s face darkened. “But the studs I tal
ked to didn’t have much to say on that subject. I guess they still have enough sense left not to brag about such stuff.”

  What Báez was telling me was so macabre, so irrational, so horrific, and it provided such a simple confirmation of what Sandoval and I had guessed, that I knew it had to be true.

  “Guess who’s one of the thugs who do the street work for Romano …”

  I remembered Morales and his maxim, according to which everything that can go bad is going to go bad, and everything that can get worse will get worse. I managed to stammer a name: “Isidoro Gómez.”

  “None other.”

  “What a son of a bitch,” was all I could add.

  “Well … I think they’re just alike as far as that’s concerned. Or they were just alike, apparently.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Remember that all this began, supposedly, when those guys trashed your apartment.”

  “And?”

  “And there was a reason why those guys decided to get rid of you when they did. A few years ago, they had no motive.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Of course you don’t. Let me explain. A few nights ago, Romano, in a sudden fury, summons his boys and kicks in your apartment door. He can’t wait to whack you. Why? That’s easy: revenge. Revenge for what? Think about it. What do the two of you have in common? Nothing—or almost nothing. You have Gómez. Remember Cámpora’s amnesty?”

  I nodded. As if I could have forgotten that.

  “Good. Back then—when that happened, I mean—Romano must have felt that he’d busted your balls up and down the line. That’s why he stopped fucking with you. Because he figured he’d fucked you enough.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then the other night, he rushes out like a madman to do you in. Why would he do that?”

  “I don’t understand anything.”

  “Just wait, we’re almost there. It’s as if you two were playing a chess game, a kind of challenge match. You shit on him by getting him fired from the court. He gets revenge by letting Gómez go. So why does Romano decide to murder you now, three years later? Simple: because he’s convinced you’ve just moved another piece. Or, more precisely, he believes that you, Chaparro, have just wasted one of his most reliable men, namely Isidoro Gómez.”

  My face must have revealed that I had no idea what he was talking about.

  “Romano wants to kill you, Chaparro, because as far as he’s concerned, you just did away with Gómez. That’s it.”

  I was stunned for a moment, but I had to shake it off or run the risk of missing the rest of Báez’s explanation. “I’m not saying you did it. I’m saying Romano thinks you did it. They came to your house looking for you on the night of July 28, right? Just imagine: two nights earlier, on the twenty-sixth, somebody killed Gómez. It happened near his apartment in Villa Lugano.”

  It was too complicated, or the polluted air in the place had finally overcome me.

  “Are you all right?” Báez asked, looking worried.

  “The truth is I feel pretty queasy.”

  “Come on. Let’s go breathe some fresh air.”

  36

  We walked to the station. Inside we sat on the only bench whose wooden slats were still intact, on the platform where trains stopped on their way into the capital. At that hour they were almost empty. By contrast, on the other side of the tracks, crowds that grew larger as the evening advanced were getting off every train that pulled into the station. The passengers scattered in all directions or ran to catch one of the red buses with the black roofs.

  The open air did me good. I could at least think with a modicum of clarity, and I realized I had something urgent to say to Báez. “There’s one thing I haven’t told you, Báez,” I said hesitantly. “You remember back at the beginning of the case, when Gómez figured out we were looking for him because I tried to play the detective?”

  “Well, it wasn’t that bad. Besides—”

  “Yes it was. Let me finish. After the amnesty, I screwed up again, much the same way. I mean, I see now that it was a screwup. At the time, I didn’t think so. I didn’t think it was anything.”

  Báez stretched out his legs and crossed his ankles, like a man getting ready to listen. I tried to be as concise as I could. I was already embarrassed about having looked like a retard in front of him the first time, eight years before. Now I had to play the part of the recidivist retard. After the amnesty, I told him, it had occurred to me to do Ricardo Morales one last favor: to find out where Gómez was, just in case Morales should get up the nerve to blow his brains out. I explained to Báez that I’d conducted the investigation with the help of a cop, an acquaintance of mine, and that it had all been done, naturally, only by word of mouth, without putting anything in writing. Báez asked me the cop’s name.

  “Zambrano, in Theft,” I answered, and immediately asked a question of my own. “Is he an asshole, or is he a son of a bitch?”

  “No,” Báez said slowly. “He’s not a son of a bitch.”

  “Then he’s an asshole.”

  “Ah, forget Zambrano,” Báez said, trying to protect what was left of my self-esteem. “He’s not important. Tell me how the investigation turned out.”

  “Something like two months passed, but in the end Zambrano came up with an address in Villa Lugano. To tell you the truth, I no longer remember what it was. You know how Villa Lugano addresses are. Block so-and-so, Building I don’t know what, Corridor something or other, and all that.”

  “Well, did he do a good job? Did he give you the right address?”

  “I don’t know. I never checked it out.”

  We were silent while Báez tried to fit the piece of information I’d just provided him into the puzzle he was working out in his head. “I think I understand now,” he said at last. “Romano must have found out. Especially if Zambrano disregarded the necessary subtleties. But since nothing happened, Romano stayed calm. He probably interpreted your search for Gómez as a futile gesture, a sign of your anger and humiliation at losing him.”

  We fell silent again. Each of us, I imagine, was mentally taking the next logical step in the chain of events. Eventually, Báez said, “You passed that information on to Morales, I suppose.”

  “As a matter of fact, I didn’t. Pretty ironic, huh? I was afraid he’d take it badly or … I don’t know. In the end, I didn’t tell him anything.”

  An outbound train arrived and discharged another human flood, which surged out of the carriages and dispersed.

  “In that case, the widower must have found out the address on his own account. That kid was never stupid,” Báez said.

  “You believe it was Morales who did the job on Gómez in Villa Lugano?”

  “Do you have any doubt?” Báez turned toward me. Up until then, both of us had been looking at the opposite platform as we talked.

  “I … at this point, I don’t know what to think … or say, either,” I confessed.

  “Yes. It was Morales. I’d even say that’s been confirmed. I mean, I’ve got as much confirmation as you can get in such cases. I went to Villa Lugano the day before yesterday and asked a few questions. A couple of neighbors had a few things to tell me. They even remarked that ‘some young guys’ had already been there, asking pretty much the same questions as me.”

  “Romano’s people?”

  “You bet. In a couple of the local taverns, I heard about an elderly couple who had seen everything. So I went to have a word with them. You can imagine how that went. The desire to talk in the supermarket is inversely proportional to the desire to talk to a policeman. I had to threaten them. I had to act very sorry, but I was going to have to take them down to the station to make a statement. If they’d called my bluff, I don’t know where the hell I would have taken them. But they eventually gave in, and by the time I left, we were all great pals. They had seen the whole thing. You know how old folks are. Or should I say, how we all are? They get up at dawn, even though they do
n’t have a frigging thing to do. Since there’s no television at that hour, they listen to the radio and peep out the window. And that’s how they come to see a young man they recognize because they see him around dawn every morning, walking down the street to the building across from theirs, where he apparently lives. What makes this night different is that another guy suddenly comes out from behind some bushes and gives their neighbor a mighty thump on the head with what looks like a pipe. The kid goes down like a sack, and his attacker—a tall guy, fair-haired, they think, but they didn’t get a very good look at him—anyway, the attacker takes a key from his pocket and opens the trunk of a white car parked right there at the curb. The old folks don’t know much about automobile makes. They said it was too big for a Fiat 500 and too small for a Ford Falcon.”

  I searched my memory. “Morales has—or used to have, at least—a white Fiat 1500.”

  “There we are. That’s the detail I was missing. So then the tall guy carefully closes the trunk, gets in the front seat, and drives away.”

  We kept quiet for a while, until Báez interrupted the silence: “This Morales kid was always very well organized, it seems to me. You once described how patient he was, mounting stakeouts in train stations. No chance he was going to blow Gómez away right there, jump in the car, and blast off, laying rubber like a fugitive in a movie. I’m sure he drove him to a spot he’d already selected, hauled him out of the trunk, shot him several times, and buried him there.”