“Four people were close to Durán’s room at the time of the crime. They all say they saw someone suspicious. They should be questioned.”
“We’ll start with them.”
Saldías realized that the Inspector was hesitant to go up and see the body. Croce didn’t like the expression of the dead, that strange look of surprise and horror. He had seen plenty of them, too many, in all sorts of positions and from the oddest causes of death, but always with the same look of shock in their eye. His hope was always to be able to solve a crime without having to examine the corpse. Too many corpses, dead bodies everywhere, he said.
“We have to go upstairs,” Saldías said, and used an argument that Croce himself had used in similar circumstances. “It’s better to look at everything before talking to the witnesses.”
“True,” Croce said.
Tony had been staying in the best room in the hotel. It faced out to the street corner and was isolated at the end of the hallway. Durán, dressed in black trousers and a white shirt, was lying on the floor in a pool of blood. He seemed as if he were about to smile. His eyes were open in a look that was at once frozen and terrifying.
Croce and Saldías stood before the body with that strange sort of complicity that forms between two men who look at a dead man together.
“Don’t touch him,” Croce said. “Poor devil.”
The Inspector turned his back on the body and carefully started to examine the floor and the furniture. Everything in the room was in order, at first sight. Croce walked to the window facing the square to see what you could see from the street, and also to see what you could see from the room if you looked out. The killer had probably stopped at least for a moment to look out the window and see if anyone could see what was happening inside the room. Or maybe there had been an accomplice downstairs who gave him a sign.
“He was killed when he opened the door.
“He was pushed back in,” Croce said, “and was killed right away. First he recognized the person who came in. Then he was surprised.” Croce walked back to the body. “The knife wound is very deep, very precise, it’s the kind of blow used to kill a calf. A perfect strike, the killer used a local knife technique. Brought down from above, with force, the edge of the blade facing in, between the ribs. A clean blow,” he said, as if he were narrating a movie he had seen that afternoon. “There was no noise, just a moan. I’m sure the killer held him up so he wouldn’t fall too hard. There’s not that much blood. You hold the body up, like a sack of bones, and by the time you set your victim down, he’s already dead. Short and chubby, the killer,” Croce concluded. He could tell from the wound that an ordinary blade had been used, it would be like many of the kitchen knives used in the country to slice beef. A carving knife, there were thousands of them in the province.
“I’m sure they threw the weapon into the lake,” the Inspector said, with a lost look in his eye. “A lot of knives at the bottom of the lake. When I was little I used to dive down there, and I’d always find one—”
“Knives?”
“Knives and bodies. It’s a cemetery down there. Suicides, drunks, Indians, women. Corpses and more corpses at the bottom of the lake. I saw an old man once, his hair long and white, it had kept growing. It looked like tulle in the clear water.” He paused. “The body doesn’t rot in the water, the clothes do, that’s why dead bodies float naked among the weeds. I’ve seen pale corpses on their feet with their eyes open, like big, white fish in an aquarium.”
Had he seen it, or dreamt it? He would suddenly have visions like that, Croce would, and Saldías would realize that the Inspector was already somewhere else, just for a moment, speaking with someone who wasn’t there, chewing furiously on his extinguished cigar stub.
“Not that far away, out there, in the nightmare of the future. They come out of the water,” he said enigmatically, and smiled, as if he had just woken up.
They looked at each other. Saldías held him in high esteem and understood that Croce would sometimes get suddenly lost in his thoughts. He’d be gone for a moment and always come right back, as if he had psychic narcolepsy. Durán’s body, becoming whiter and more rigid, was like a plaster statue.
“Cover the deceased,” Croce said.
Saldías covered Tony Durán with a sheet.
“They could have thrown him out in a field, left him for the vultures. But they wanted me to see him. They left him on purpose. Why?” Croce looked around the room again, as if seeing it for the first time.
There was no other sign of violence except for a poorly closed drawer, from which a tie was slightly sticking out. Perhaps it was closed quickly and, when he turned around, the killer didn’t see the tie. The Inspector pushed the drawer shut with his hip, sat on the bed, and let his gaze drift through the skylight on the ceiling.
Saldías took inventory of what they found. Five thousand dollars in a wallet; several thousand Argentine pesos stacked on the dresser, next to a watch and a keychain; a pack of Kent cigarettes; a Ronson lighter; a package of Pink Veil prophylactics; a U.S. passport issued to Anthony Durán, born February 5, 1940, in San Juan. There was a cutout from a New York newspaper with the results from the major leagues; a letter written in Spanish by a woman;9 a photograph of the nationalist leader Albizu Campos speaking at a function, the Puerto Rican flag waiving behind him. A photograph of a soldier with round glasses, in a Marine uniform. A book of poetry by Palés Matos, a salsa long-play by Ismael Rivera, dedicated to My friend Tony D. There were a lot of shirts, many pairs of shoes, several jackets, no journal or datebook. Saldías listed off the items to the Inspector.
“What a corpse leaves behind is nothing,” Croce said.
Such is the mystery of these crimes, the surprise of a man who dies unprepared. What did he leave unfinished? Who was the last person he saw? The investigation always starts with the victim, he is the first trace, the dark light.
There was nothing special in the bathroom: a jar of Actemin, a jar of Valium, a box of Tylenol. In the dirty-clothes wicker hamper they found a novel by Ben Benson, The Ninth Hour, a map from the Automobile Club with the roads of the Province of Buenos Aires, a woman’s bra, and a small, nylon bag with American coins.
They went back to the room. They had to prepare a written report before the body was photographed and taken to the morgue for the autopsy. A fairly thankless task that the Inspector delegated to his Assistant.
Croce paced back and forth from one end of the room to the other, making observations in starts, constantly moving, muttering, as if he were thinking out loud in a kind of continuous murmur. “The air is strange,” he said. Tinted, a kind of rainbow against the sunlight, a blue light. What was it?
“See that?” he asked, his eyes fixed on the light in the room.
He pointed at the traces of a nearly invisible dust that seemed to be floating in the air. Saldías was under the impression that Croce saw things at an unusual speed, as if he were half a second (half a thousandth of a second) ahead of others. They followed the trail of the light blue dusting—a fine mist swayed by the sun, which Croce saw as if it were footprints on the ground—to the far end of the room where there was a hanging on the wall, a black cloth square with yellow arabesques, a kind of Batik or tapestry from the pampas. It looked shabby, not like an actual decoration, it was clearly covering something. The corners of the tapestry flapped slightly in the wind that blew through the open window.
Croce removed the hanging with a letter opener that hung off of his keychain,