The Secret in Their Eyes

by Eduardo Sacheri

  In those days, whether because I was young or because I was tenderhearted or both, it was hard for me to categorize people I knew as sons of bitches. But every time Romano was around, he seemed determined to make me less inclined to go easy on him. More than once, I’d seen him making fun of people in custody who were dark-skinned and looked poor. I’d also seen him fawning on the more or less distinguished lawyers he had to deal with. I spoke the first words that came to me: “I see. Well, if you want to charge them with being dark, let me know.”

  I thought about adding, Hold on and I’ll check the Penal Code to see which statute applies, but for fear of ruining the effect, I decided to keep the naive irony to a minimum. In any case, I could see that Romano was making a fierce effort not to insult me, and when he spoke again, not the smallest vestige of the casual camaraderie he’d started with remained in his voice. “I’m going to the police station. Sicora told me they’ve got the prisoners ready for interrogation.”

  “Ready for interrogation?” I’d moved beyond annoyance and was now ready to explode. “That means they’ve already had the shit beat out of them. I’ll go myself. Don’t forget, it’s my case.”

  Generally, I disliked the judiciary zeal that led some of my colleagues to use possessives when referring to cases, but the guy had exhausted my patience. My parents had taught me not to call people names to their faces; therefore, I controlled myself, put on my jacket, and left with a curt “See you later.” The only indulgence I allowed myself was to shut the door with considerably more force than necessary.

  9

  I entered the police station with the tough-guy demeanor I habitually adopted in front of cops, and which usually gave me good results. I identified myself and waited two minutes before Sicora came out to meet me, grinning with satisfaction. Evidently his friend Romano hadn’t thought it necessary to inform him that I was angry.

  “They’re ready to confess,” he said, brandishing two file folders with various legal documents sticking out of them. “Sebastián Zamora. Paraguayan, twenty-eight years old. Worker. Lives in Los Polvorines. The other one’s José Carlos Armandós, twenty-six. Also a worker. He’s an Argentine, at least, but he lives in the shantytown at Ciudad Oculta.”

  Trying to sound natural, I asked, “Did you put them in a lineup?”

  Sicora looked at me with his mouth open.

  “Have you talked about these suspects with the other witnesses? I mean the ones Báez interviewed.”

  Overcoming an incipient stutter, Sicora replied, “Not yet. I called the court, and Deputy Clerk Romano told me to keep things moving forward. He said he’d take care of informing the husband, and—”

  “I’m not talking about the husband,” I said, cutting him short. “I mean the neighbor woman who lives in the apartment at the end of the hall, the one who saw the murderer leave and called the police. Or the owners of the other apartments, including number 3, where the suspects were working.”

  When I saw the disconcerted expression on Sicora’s face, I realized that the fellow’s idiocy was so vast I’d never be able to apprehend it in its full glory. “You’re not telling me you didn’t compare notes with Báez, are you?” I asked. The question produced another period of silence, at the end of which I said, “Bring me Báez’s papers. And I want to see the two suspects, right away.”

  Sicora was too stupid to protest or complain about being ordered around by a civilian. He went off to fetch the statements Báez had collected, but he didn’t take me to see the prisoners. A bad sign, I thought. I made myself as comfortable as I could at a desk covered with overflowing boxes of documents and pushed practically into the corridor that led to the cells. I started to look through Báez’s work and stopped almost at once, when I came to the declarations made by one Estela Bermúdez. I read her statement attentively, took it out of the folder, and put it aside. Then I looked up at Sicora, and I figure my eyes were shooting off sparks.

  “Have you gone over the statement from Estela Bermúdez?”

  Sicora gazed away, as if trying to recall, or taking time to decide how he should answer; then, almost immediately, he focused on me again, furrowed his brow, and said, “Who’s she?”

  I was expecting this question. “The woman who lives in Apartment 3, Sicora.”

  The policeman knew he’d lost his bearings.

  “When Báez took her statement,” I said, trying to make my voice sound peaceable, because that seemed the best way to humiliate him, “the woman declared that she had two guys working on her apartment, but they hadn’t come either Monday or Tuesday. Not on Monday, because it rained all day long, and the work they were doing was outside, on the terrace. And not on Tuesday, because they needed it to be good and dry before they could apply the tar. She said they’d called her up and arranged to wait until Thursday.”

  I held out the sheet of paper so that he could read it for himself, but Sicora, taking hold of the last shreds of his dignity, counterattacked: “So what? Couldn’t they have made that call just to cover themselves, gone to the apartment house anyway, killed the girl, and fled the scene?”

  “Look, Sicora, everyone who lives in the building—the woman in Apartment 3 and all the rest—they all stated that the main door, the door to the street, is always locked with a key. When they have visitors, they have to leave their apartment, go down the hall, and unlock the door for them. Didn’t you read that? It’s in all the statements. And the woman in the next-door apartment, the one who reported the crime—did you read her statement? She says again and again that she saw only one guy leave the scene.”

  I gathered up the stack of documents I’d made and pushed them across the desk, but Sicora made no move to take them. He kept staring at me, looking more wretched every minute. When I understood the reason why, a shiver ran down my spine, and the order I gave him was peremptory: “Take me to the suspects.”

  Sicora bounded to his feet as though he’d been sitting on a spring. “It’s … uh, it’s lunchtime. The meals are being served.”

  I insisted: “I can’t wait, and I can’t come back later. I want to see them. And I want you to put me in touch with Báez, right away.”

  Sicora kept dallying for another few seconds. Then he shouted a name, and a police officer emerged from the corridor. Sicora said, “Accompany this gentleman to the cell where those … where the two suspects are.”

  The policeman led me to the end of the hallway, which was flanked by the bars of four pairs of cells. We stopped in front of the last one on the left. There was no smell of food. The officer manipulated the door, which opened with a screech. Inside the cell, the light was on. Two men were on the hard bunks that ran along each of the side walls. One of the two was asleep, and when we entered, he didn’t move. The other, who was lying on his back with his arms covering his face, turned on his side to look at us. I greeted him, and he mumbled a reply. We gazed at each other for a moment.

  “Call Sicora,” I ordered my escort. He hesitated.

  “I can’t leave you alone in the cell.”

  I was sick of them. When I spoke again, I raised my voice. “Call him or I’ll report you, too.”

  The policeman went away. Trying to keep the rage and horror out of my voice, I said, “How do you feel?”

  The man on the bunk seemed to smile beneath the layer of dried blood that covered his face below his nose. He was missing two front teeth, and I was sure their loss was recent. Speaking as well as he could, he told me that now he was hurting a little less, but that his companion had been kicked in the ribs repeatedly and had wept until he’d fallen asleep a little while ago.

  The police officer returned and announced that Lieutenant Sicora had gone out. “Then get me the captain,” I said.

  “He’s having lunch.”

  “I don’t give a fuck!” I shouted. It wasn’t often that I descended to such a barrack-room level, but I was incensed.

  When I returned to the Palace of Justice three hours later, instead of going to my own office,
I went to Section No. 18. I walked down the narrow aisles separating the desks and advanced between the rows of tall, bulky file cabinets without a word of greeting to anyone. When I reached Romano’s desk—he was sitting at it, absently reading the newspaper—it was my turn to stick a piece of paper under his nose. “Listen up,” I said. “I’ve just come from the Appellate Court, where I filed a complaint against you and your fuckwit friend Sicora for physical coercion and abuse. The medical examiners are conducting an examination of your two suspects right now, on my orders.”

  I was trying not to lose control of myself. Romano had lowered the newspaper and was trying to think. I kept talking: “I’ll bet my balls that the idea of beating the shit out of those two was yours and not that idiot Sicora’s. He went along with it so he could play the hero and score points with the court. Fucking jackass. So I’ve got two recommendations for you. First, if you want somebody worked over, do it yourself. And second, if you’re going to beat the shit out of someone, make sure he has some connection to something, because the two guys you brought in are nothing but poor working stiffs.”

  I turned on my heels and dropped a copy of the complaint on the nearest desk. “When you finish reading that, send it to my office,” I said. All of Romano’s colleagues, naturally, were looking at me with the utmost surprise.

  Maybe I should have shut up at that point, but just as it was hard for me to become really angry, once I boiled over, I found it equally hard to cool down. So I said, “You know, Romano, I’ve always thought you were pretty much a jackass. But that’s not it. Well, yes, you’re a jackass, all right, but what you really are, beyond any shadow of a doubt, is a lowdown, worthless, no-account son of a bitch.”

  Back then, I was unaware of the problems that day had planted like seeds in my destiny, and of the harvest I’d sooner or later have to reap. I suppose no one can read, in the fluff of the present, the signs of his future tragedies.

  10

  That very evening, during my first private conversation with Ricardo Morales, I made my decision to help him any way I could. We were in a bar at 1400 Tucumán Street, sitting next to the guillotine window that separated us from the sidewalk. Outside, a torrential rain was very gradually letting up.

  After chewing out Romano, I’d gone to my office, sat at my desk, and taken deep breaths, trying to calm down. It had occurred to me that the poor widower was probably hurrying over to the court at that very moment, convinced that he was about to learn the truth. And in fact, twenty minutes later, he arrived; I heard two timid knocks on the door of the court and an impersonal “Come in” from one of the young office workers.

  Soon the kid who’d waited on Morales came to me and said, “Excuse me, sir, there’s someone to see you.” I raised my head and spent a few moments thinking that if the new intern was speaking to me so formally, it surely meant I’d crossed the threshold into maturity.

  When he saw me approaching the reception area, Morales said, “I got a telephone call at the bank.” Maybe he recognized me as one of the two who’d brought him the news of Liliana’s death.

  “Yes, I know,” I replied, incapable of saying anything more precise. I supposed he was going to ask me if there had really been “a major breakthrough” in the case, or if it was true that “the murderers had been remanded into custody,” depending on which journalistic style (Crónica? La Nación?) that fool Romano had chosen to imitate while communicating his supposed scoop. But to my surprise, Morales contented himself with remaining very stiff, with his hands lightly resting on the counter and his eyes fixed on mine.

  That was worse than if he’d asked questions, because his silence struck me as the silence of a defenseless man convinced that nothing is going to turn out the way he’d dared to dream it would. Maybe that’s why I invited him to have coffee with me. I was aware that I was violating the most elemental rules of judicial asepsis. I soothed my conscience by telling myself I was doing it out of sympathy for his loss, or I wanted to make some kind of amends for Romano’s stupid haste.

  We went out the Tucumán Street door and into a fierce downpour that gusts of wind blew sideways. Water was rising in the street when we bounded across it. Morales followed me docilely as I went on, clinging to storefronts and dashing under awnings, trying to avoid getting too drenched. With the same meekness, or apathy, he let me lead him across Uruguay Street, into a bar, and to a table next to the front window. Making a brusque sign to the waiter, I ordered two coffees; Morales accepted his wordlessly. After that, we had nothing to do.

  “What lousy weather, huh?” I said, making an effort to climb out of the uncomfortable silence we’d sunk into.

  For a long time, Morales stared absently at the flooded sidewalk.

  “We sent for you,” I said—even though the word “we” tied me to that son of a bitch Romano—“but there’s something I have to tell you.”

  At this point, I got stuck again. How to begin? Maybe I should say, We got your hopes up for nothing, please excuse us.

  “Don’t worry,” Morales said, finally turning to look at me with the slightest of smiles on his face. “You just told me.”

  I stared at him in confusion.

  “It was the ‘but,’ ” he continued by way of explanation. I opened my mouth to reply, even though I didn’t understand what the widower was trying to convey. Seeing me flail about like a drowning man, he went on: “The ‘but.’ You just said, ‘We sent for you, but.’ That’s enough. I get it. If you had said, ‘We sent for you, and,’ or ‘We sent for you, because,’ that would have been different. You didn’t say that. You said ‘but.’ ”

  Morales turned his gaze back to the rain outside, and I supposed, incorrectly, that he’d finished.

  “It’s the shittiest word I know,” he said, and then he was off again, but I never for a minute thought we were having a conversation; it was an interior monologue he was speaking aloud out of pure distraction. “ ‘I love you, but …’; ‘That could be, but …’; ‘It’s not serious, but …’; ‘I tried, but …’ See what I mean? It’s a shitty word people use to annihilate what was, or could have been, but isn’t.”

  I looked at his profile as he watched the rain come down. I’d figured he was a simple young guy with narrow horizons whose world had just collapsed. But his words and the tone he spoke them in were those of a man acquainted with grief. He seemed like someone who’d always been prepared to suffer the hardest blows and endure the worst defeats.

  “That makes things a little simpler for me,” I said. Although I felt somewhat ashamed, I found in his knowing melancholy a way to escape from the odd sensation of guilt I was starting to feel.

  “Go on, I’m listening.” Morales shifted his chair in my direction, as if to facilitate focusing his entire attention on me, or as if he wanted to avoid being hypnotized by the rain again.

  I told him everything. I no longer felt obliged to disguise Romano’s and Sicora’s responsibilities in the matter—as far as I was concerned, they could go straight to hell. I ended my account by explaining that I’d just filed a complaint against the two of them in the Appellate Court, and that I was waiting for the medical examiners’ report on the injuries suffered by the two workers.

  “Poor guys,” Morales said. “What a mess they got dragged into.”

  He spoke in a tone so neutral, so lacking in emotion, that he seemed to be talking about something totally unconnected with himself. I’d been afraid that Morales would disapprove of my actions and insist on clinging fanatically to the case Romano and that other moron had built up out of the smoke of their own stupidity. But now I was starting to realize that the young man was too intelligent to find solace in any story that wasn’t the truth.

  “If you catch him, what will he get?” Morales spoke without turning his eyes from the rain, which had finally turned into a thin drizzle.

  I couldn’t help remembering the relevant articles of the Penal Code, one of which decreed that the punishment in such a case was life imprisonment, whil
e the other provided for a concurrent sentence of imprisonment for an indefinite period of time, as stipulated for anyone who “kills in order to prepare, facilitate, commit, or conceal another crime.” I didn’t think Morales could be hurt by any hard truth at that point, simply because his soul was so thoroughly wounded that another wound wouldn’t matter. I said, “It’s first-degree murder. Article 80, paragraph 7 of the Penal Code. The sentence is life imprisonment.”

  “Life imprisonment,” Morales repeated, as if making an effort to grasp the idea entirely.

  I took a chance: “Does that disappoint you?” I was afraid I’d sounded insolent, asking him such a personal question. After all, we were two strangers.

  Morales looked at me again, and his sudden perplexity appeared sincere. “No,” he replied at last. “It seems fair.” The young man continued to surprise me.

  I kept quiet. Maybe it was my duty to explain to him that unless the culprit had a prior murder conviction, he’d be able to leave prison on parole in twenty or twenty-five years, even if he’d been sentenced concurrently to confinement “for an indefinite period of time,” in accordance with article 52. But I had the feeling that such an explanation would increase his grief.

  So I said nothing and kept my eyes fixed on Morales, who for his part was staring at the sidewalk. I saw his brow suddenly darken, and he made a sign of vexation. I too looked outside. It had stopped raining, and the bright sun was lighting up the wet streets and reflecting in the puddles as if shining for the first time.

  “I hate when this happens,” Morales said, all of a sudden. I was apparently supposed to know what “this” was. “I’ve never liked to see the sun come out after a storm. My idea of a rainy day is that it ought to rain all day and into the night. If the sun comes out the next morning, fine, but this? This is unforgivable. The sun’s butting in where it’s not wanted. It’s an intruder.” Morales stopped for a second and gave me a quick, absent smile. “Don’t worry. You’re probably thinking the tragedy has scrambled my brains. It’s not that bad.”