Tall, of indefinite age, with a red face and gray moustache and hair, Croce chewed pensively on an Avanti cigar as he paced back and forth, hitting the legs of the chairs with his riding whip. As if he were shooing away his own thoughts, crawling along the floor.
“How could no one have seen Durán that day?” Croce asked, and everyone in the country store looked at him silently, guiltily.
Then he said that he knew that everyone knew but that no one was talking, and that they were thinking up a bunch of lies and going round and round the obvious to try to find a fifth leg to the cat.
“I wonder where that expression comes from?” Croce said, stopping to think, intrigued. He got lost in the zigzag of his thoughts, flashing like lightning bugs at night. He smiled, and began pacing again. “Just like Tony,” he said, remembering. “An American who didn’t look like an American, but he was an American.”
Tony Durán was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. His parents moved to Trenton when he was five years old, and he was raised in New Jersey as a typical American. The only thing he remembered from the island was that his grandfather was a gamecock breeder who used to take him to the fights on Sundays. He also remembered that the men would cover their pants with newspapers to protect their clothes from the spraying blood of the fighting cocks.
When he arrived and found a secret cockfighting ring in the town of Pila, and saw the country laborers wearing sandals and the little pygmy roosters strutting around in the sand, he laughed, saying that that’s not how it was done. But in the end he got excited about the suicidal fierceness of a Bataraz rooster that used its spurs like a lightweight boxer uses his hands to come out swinging. Quickly, deadly, ruthless, going straight for his rival’s death, his destruction, his end. When he saw the rooster, Durán started betting and got worked up about the cockfight, as if he were already one of us (one of us, as Tony himself would have said, in English).
“He wasn’t one of us, though, he was different, but that’s not why they killed him. They killed him because he looked like what we imagined that he had to be,” the Inspector said, as enigmatic as always, and as always a bit crazy. “He was nice,” he added, looking outside at the countryside. “I liked him,” the Inspector said, stopping in his tracks, near the window, leaning back against the wall, lost in his thoughts.
At the bar of the Plaza Hotel, in the afternoons, Durán would recount fragments from his childhood in Trenton, about his family’s gas station off of Route One. How his father got up before daybreak because someone had turned off the highway and was honking his horn, how you could hear laughter and jazz from the radio, how Tony looked out the window, half asleep, to see the expensive cars speeding by with happy blond women in ermine jackets in the back seats. A bright vision in the middle of the night confused—in his memory—with fragments from a black and white film. The images were secret and personal and didn’t belong to anyone. He didn’t even remember if the memories were his. Sometimes Croce felt the same about his own life.
“I’m from here,” the Inspector said all of a sudden, as if he had just woken up. “And I know all the cats around here, and I’ve never seen one with five legs, but I can imagine this young man’s life perfectly. He seemed to come from somewhere else,” Croce said calmly, “but there is nowhere else.” He looked at his young assistant, Saldías, who followed him everywhere and always agreed with him. “There is nowhere else, we’re all in the same boat.”
Durán was elegant and ambitious and so good at dancing the plena in the Dominican clubs of Spanish Harlem that he became the emcee of the Pelusa, a dancehall on East 122nd Street in Manhattan. This was in the mid 1960s, and he had just turned twenty. He climbed quickly because he was quick, because he was fun, because he was always willing and because he was loyal. Before long he was working the hotels in Long Island and the casinos in Atlantic City.
Everyone in town remembered how amazed they were when they heard the stories that he told at the bar in the Plaza Hotel, drinking gin-and-tonics and eating peanuts, chatting in a low voice as if he were sharing secrets. No one was sure if those stories were true, but no one cared about a detail like that. They listened, grateful that he was confiding in provincial folk like them, people who still lived where they were born, where their parents and their grandparents were born, and who only knew about the lifestyle of guys like Durán because they saw them on the Telly Savalas detective show on Saturday nights. He didn’t understand why they wanted to hear the story of his life. His story was the same as anyone else’s, he said. “There aren’t that many differences, when you get down to it,” Durán used to say. “The only thing that changes is who your enemy is.”
After a time in the casinos, Durán broadened his horizon, particularly with women. He developed a sixth sense that allowed him to determine a woman’s wealth, to differentiate rich women from female adventurers who were looking for a catch of their own. Small details would grab his attention, a certain caution when betting, a deliberately distracted look, a carelessness in their dress and a use of language that he immediately associated with abundance. The more money, the more laconic the woman, that was his conclusion. He had the class and skill to seduce them. He’d tease and string them along, but at the same time he treated them with a colonial chivalry he had learned from his Spanish grandparents. Until one night in early December 1971, in Atlantic City, when he met the Argentine twins.
The Belladona sisters were the daughters and granddaughters of the town founders, immigrants who had made their fortune from the lands they owned in the area of Carhué, at the end of the Indian Wars. Their grandfather, Colonel Bruno Belladona, came with the railroad and bought lands now administered by a North American firm. Their father, the engineer Cayetano Belladona, lived in the large family house, retired, suffering from a strange illness that kept him from going out but not from controlling the town and county politics. He was a wretched man who cared only for his two daughters (Ada and Sofía). He had a serious conflict with his two sons (Lucio and Luca), and had erased them from his life as if they’d never existed. The difference of the sexes is the key to every tragedy, Old Man Belladona thought when he was drunk. Men and women are different species, like cats and vultures. Whose idea was it to make them cohabitate? The males want to kill you and kill each other, while the women want to go to bed with you, climb into the nearest cot with you at siesta time, or go to bed together, Old Man Belladona would ramble on, somewhat deliriously.
He’d been married twice. He had the twin girls with his second wife, Matilde Ibarguren, a posh lady from Venado Tuerto who was a certifiable nut. The two boys he’d had with an Irishwoman with red hair and green eyes who couldn’t stand life in the countryside and had run away, first to Rosario, and then back to Dublin. The strange thing was that the boys had inherited their stepmother’s unhinged character, while the girls were just like the Irishwoman: red-haired and joyful, lighting up the air wherever they went. Crossed destinies, Croce called it, the children inherit their parents’ crossed tragedies. Saldías the Scribe carefully jotted down all the observations that the Inspector made, trying to learn the ins and outs of his new position. Recently transferred to the town by order of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, which was trying to control the overly rebellious Inspector, Saldías admired Croce as if he were the greatest investigator2 in Argentine history. Assistant Inspector Saldías took everything that Croce said entirely seriously; and the Inspector would, in jest, sometimes call him Watson.
In any case, their stories—Ada and Sofía’s on the one hand, Lucio and Luca’s on the other—remained separate for years, as if they belonged to different tribes. They only came together when Tony Durán was found dead. There had been a monetary transaction; apparently Old Man Belladona had been involved with some transfer of funds. The old man went to Quequén every month to oversee the shipments of grain that he exported, for which he received a compensation in dollars paid to him by the State under pretext of keeping internal prices stable. He taught his daughters his own moral code and let them do whatever they wanted, raising them as if they were boys.
Ever since they were little the Belladona sisters were rebellious. They were audacious, they competed with each other all the time, with tenacity and delight, not to differentiate themselves, but to sharpen their symmetry and to learn to what extent they were