Free Target in the Night by Ricardo Piglia Page B

voice?”
    â€œLike a woman’s voice.”
    One of the travelers, a certain Méndez, said that he had seen Yoshio walk down the hallway and squat to look through the keyhole of Durán’s door.
    â€œStrange,” Croce said. “He squatted?”
    â€œAgainst the door.”
    â€œTo listen, or to look?”
    â€œHe seemed to be spying.”
    An import-export agent said that he saw Yoshio go into the bathroom in the same hallway to wash his hands. That he was dressed in black, with a yellow scarf around his neck, and that the sleeve of his right arm was folded up to his elbow.
    â€œAnd what were you doing?”
    â€œRelieving myself,” the import-export agent said. “I was facing away from him, but I could see him through the mirror.”
    Another of the guests, an auctioneer from Pergamino who always stayed at the hotel, said that around two o’clock he had seen Yoshio leave the bathroom on the third floor and go downstairs, agitated, without waiting for the elevator. One of the maids from the cleaning staff said that at that same time she had seen Yoshio leave the room and head down the hallway. Prono, the tall, fat, hotel security man who had been a professional boxer and had retired to the town seeking peace and quiet, accused Dazai right away.
    â€œIt was the Japo,” he said, with the nasal voice of an actor from an Argentine cowboy movie. “A fight among faggots.”
    The others seemed to agree with him. They all hurried to give their testimony. The Inspector thought that so much unanimity was strange. Some witnesses had even created problems for themselves with their testimony. They could be investigated, their statements had to be corroborated. The rancher from Sauce Viejo, a man with a flushed face, for one, had a lover in town, the widow of Old-Man Corona. His wife, the rancher’s, was in the hospital in Tapalqué. The maid who said she saw Yoshio leave Durán’s room in a hurry couldn’t explain what she was doing in the hallway on that floor when she should already have clocked off by that time.
    Yoshio had locked himself in his room—terrified, according to what everyone said, distraught by the death of his friend—and would not answer the door.
    â€œLet him be for now, until I need him,” Croce said. “He won’t go anywhere.”
    Sofía seemed furious, she looked at Renzi with a strange smile. She said that Tony was crazy for Ada, maybe not in love, probably just horny for her, but that there were other reasons why he’d come to town. The stories that people told about the trio, about the games they had played or imagined, they had nothing to do with the crime, they were phantoms, fantasies that she could tell Emilio about some other time, if the opportunity arose, because she had nothing to hide, she wasn’t going to let a gaggle of old, resentful women tell her how she should live—“or with whom,” she added—she and her sister should go to bed with. Nor would they allow the prudish bastards of a small town, the fat, pious slobs who go straight from church to the Cross-Eyed Woman’s brothel—or vice versa—lecture them about proper behavior.
    Country people lived in two separate realities, with two sets of morals, in two parallel worlds. On the one hand they dressed in English clothes and drove around the pampas in their pickup trucks waving at the laborers as if they were feudal lords, and on the other they got mixed up in all the dirty dealings and shady arrangements with the cattle auctioneers and exporters from the Capital. That’s why when Tony arrived people knew that there had to be another play involved, in addition to the sentimental story. Why would an American come all the way here if not to bring money for some kind of business?
    â€œAnd they were right,” Sofía said, lighting a cigarette and smokingin silence for a while, the cigarette’s ember