Needle in a Haystack (18 page)

Lascano parks the car next to the Lavalle monument. He sticks a police sign on the windscreen and runs across Tucumán, zigzagging between the buses. He disappears for a second, lost in the swarming sea of lawyers. He reappears on the steps leading up to the Palace of Justice and then disappears again between the
columns. Eva feels her heart shrink. She puts on a pair of Ray Bans she finds in the glove compartment.

Marraco’s busy attending a hearing. Lascano sits down on a bench in the corridor facing the patio and waits. He looks down at the group of cells where they put defendants brought in to appear in court. The accused anxiously wait to be called, to be taken handcuffed to the courtroom to learn their fate, given their freedom or find out they really are in the shit. The prisoners are nervous and impatient in the circumstances and pace back and forth in their cells, taciturn and absorbed in thought. As a result, the place is known as the Lion’s Den:
La Leonera
. Perro sits very still on the bench, but inside he too feels like a caged lion. He has to wait for an hour before the judge’s office boy gives him the signal to come through. Marraco is sitting at his desk, looking refined as ever, but is noticeably disgruntled with the mountain of resolutions, orders, sentences and decrees he has to sign, instead of being out playing golf. Lascano throws a manila envelope on top of the file that Marraco’s reading.

All Perro can think about is getting out of there and back to Eva as soon as possible. He makes his excuses and leaves. When he opens the door, he comes face to face with the office junior, who pretends he was just about to come in. The boy offers him a generous smile and Lascano returns the compliment, patting him on the head.

In the mortuary, Fuseli hastily gathers up his last bits and pieces. From where he’s standing, he can keep an eye on the gateway, and he sees a Ford Falcon pull in and two men get out. He knows it’s them, that they’ve come for him. He tucks his bag out of sight, climbs on top of a dissection table and covers himself with a sheet. The guys come in, traipse around the room and then head out, back to the gate. Fuseli sees them talking to the security guard, who directs them off to the right. The killers walk out onto the street and turn in the direction of Junín. Fuseli pulls out his bag and takes his watch from a pocket. He waits a minute, time enough,
he calculates, for them to reach the administration office, and goes out.

The guard scurries off. Fuseli runs back in, grabs his bag and then hurries out into the street. He hails the first taxi he sees. When he reaches the corner, he sees Chaparro returning with the two men.

A few blocks away, Lascano gets back in his car and puts it in gear. Eva looks serene on the surface, but inside she’s Krakatoa volcano ready to erupt. Perro breathes deeply and joins the river of tin cans that is the traffic heading towards Tucumán. After a few minutes they pull up outside the bank. Lascano takes a key out of his pocket and gives it to Eva.

Eva looks into his eyes and gives him a kiss, lingering an instant, then gets out without saying another word. Lascano watches her go into the bank and head to the counter. He takes out a cigarette and lights it. The fuel gauge shows that Tito and the boys siphoned off all the petrol in the tank: Lascano will have to stop and fill up if they’re going to get anywhere. In the bank, Graciela talks to Eva, who turns around towards Lascano and smiles. All is well. Graciela comes out from behind
the counter and tells Eva to follow her and they both disappear down a side staircase to the basement, where the treasure’s kept.

A traffic warden approaches, confidently fluttering a book of counterfoils in his hand. Lascano takes a deep puff on his cigarette and winds the window down. The warden realizes he’s before a superior, without Lascano having to say a word or show any identification. Perro raises his hand towards his chin and wags a finger to tell the warden to move on and ask no questions. The warden walks on by. Lascano watches him amble away in his rear-view mirror. A Falcon turns the corner at top speed. Perro’s heart leaps and he instinctively reaches for his shoulder holster. The Falcon pulls up in front of Lascano’s car, the doors open, two men jump out, guns in hands, and start shooting at him. Lascano opens the door, dives to the pavement and rolls over, pulling out his gun. People in the street start running or throw themselves to the ground. Lascano jumps up and, pointing his index finger along the barrel, aims at the head of the nearest of the men and shoots. The impact spins the man around. Perro, in quick succession, shoots twice more. The force of the bullets throws the man onto the bonnet of a car, then he bounces off and crashes to the ground like a sack of potatoes. As Lascano takes aim at the second man, he feels like he’s been punched in the chest and the blow sits him down on the pavement, behind the open door of his car. The shooter has lost sight of Lascano. He takes two steps to the side, trying to get a clear view in order to deal the killer blow. When he next sees Lascano, the policeman’s aiming a gun right between his eyes. Without hesitating, Perro pulls the trigger and sends the little missile right
into the middle of the man’s forehead. He drops down dead on the pavement, legs shaking in a final spasm. A ferociously sharp pain grips Lascano’s chest, his shirt starts to soak with blood, his vision becomes misty, he feels very tired and slumps down on his side in slow motion. Head on the ground, he sees his cigarette on the pavement before him, still smouldering. He slowly reaches out, grabs it, puts it to his mouth and inhales deeply. It suddenly becomes night.

A curious crowd gathers around Lascano and the two other fallen men. Eva comes out of the bank clutching her purse. She freezes. The traffic warden comes running back, bends down over Lascano’s body, puts two fingers to the policeman’s neck, searches for a pulse and grimaces in resignation. At that moment a patrolman’s gumboots screech to a halt beside him. An officer and a sergeant approach the bodies and look at them as if they were mere things. Two policemen busy themselves dispersing the crowd. Graciela comes out of the bank with other employees to find out what’s going on. Graciela sees Lascano on the ground, she seems to recognize him and then looks at Eva, frozen at his side. Eva starts to react and realizes that she needs to leave immediately. She walks to the corner, the opposite direction to where the police are coming from. She stops a taxi, gets in and asks to be taken to the first place that pops into her head, to Rosedal, the rose garden.

Eva sits in front of the monument to Sarmiento and recalls the first lines of the school hymn:
Fue la lucha tu vida y tu elemento, la fatiga tu descanso y calma
-
the
s
truggle was your life and essence, weariness your rest and calm
- and she murmurs them like a lament. She repeats them
again and again, mechanically like a mantra, hypnotized, sitting motionless on the bench in the square, her legs frozen. Thus she remains for hours, not noticing the couples who walk by arm in arm, the ducks swimming in the stagnant waters of the lake, the bare wisteria in the pergola, the children bunking off school with their books and their blazers hidden under their coats, the grumpy one-armed municipal caretaker, the adventurers paying twenty pesos for an hour on the strange metal pedalos. Eva spends the rest of the day in this dazed state. When the sun comes down on the racetrack side of the park, she gets up and starts walking. Slowly at first, but then her muscles start to warm up and she picks up her pace. She runs past the Urquiza statue of the war horse, the Planetarium, the bridges over the train tracks. She goes all the way around the Aeropark, heads on to Costanera Avenue, indifferent to the darkened river, and carries on jogging until she reaches the airport, where she buys a ticket on the first flight to Resistencia.

The judge’s office boy is arranging the case files that Marraco has just signed, readying them for the filing cabinets where they’ll be available to lawyers for reference. The judge is rounding off a conversation on the phone.

Giribaldi takes his time lighting the fire, enjoying every moment of it. At army camp in his youth, he developed a special technique that meant he could get a fire going in the most adverse conditions. Whenever a fire needed preparing, the other cadets at Military College would say,
let Giri light it, let the champion light it
. Because Giri is champion of the flames. Now, even in the comfort of his own home, even in a fireplace, Giribaldi prepares the fire as if he’s at camp in Zapala, in the depths of winter, with forty-mile-an-hour winds. He takes pleasure in rolling the newspaper into giant straws and tying them by their ends into hoops. He then lays them one on top of the other to form a pyramid.
He covers them with wood chip and then, concentrically, adds ever bigger chunks. The result of his toils burns away in in the hearth. On top of the lively fire he places a hefty branch of a
quebracho
tree, which the flames lick with appetite. The crackle of the wood is like a lullaby to the Major, hypnotized by the dancing tongues of fire. On the flowery armchair, Maisabé nestles the child, with the beatified smile she’s had stamped on her face since Father Roberto blessed them. In the kitchen, Sunday’s leftover ravioli is slowly reheating in a bain-marie. The doorbell rings. Giribaldi gets up and goes to the door. Maisabé hears him talk briefly with someone, then sees him come straight back in.

The Major rips open the envelope. There’s the photo of Elías Biterman lying dead, the forensics, ballistics and laboratory reports, a long statement signed by Lascano describing the various stages and findings of the investigation. Giribaldi thinks what a shame it is that this cop, such a great investigator, is not on the side of the just.
But well, brilliant minds are often the ones most easily misled. When people get to thinking too much, they usually end up in the shit
.One by one, he throws the documents onto the burning logs and watches, fascinated by the spectacle: the white paper first changes colour, browned by the fire, then, when it hits 451 degrees, it ignites with a little explosion. The flames devour it, blacken it, change its substance, its essence, but it’s still possible to make out the writing amidst the dark mass. The heat contorts the paper until the material bearing the words is vaporized, broken up into thousands of particles, some floating up and disappearing, others incorporating themselves into the charred mass, where everything is uniform, where nothing lives, where finally the words die,
where all that remains are ashes, inert, sterile, silent, the final remains of the facts, a hymn to purification. Blank and clear once more, as blank now as nothing.

 

Eva’s ears sense the moment the aeroplane doors close. Out of the window, the bus that brought the passengers to the stairway pulls away and heads back to the terminal. The mechanics move away from the plane talking distractedly among themselves and the signalman directs the aircraft as it manoeuvres itself towards the runway. Eva feels strange. She’s always been scared of flying, but now, as the chassis bumps over the gaps in the paving, she doesn’t feel anything, no fear at all. As the plane files past the tall trees and traffic on the adjacent Avenida Costanera, watching the office workers on their way home, she feels empty in the absence of fear. She thinks about how it wouldn’t matter to her in the least if the plane crashed and she died along with all these strangers surrounding her.