Target in the Night by Ricardo Piglia

Author:Ricardo Piglia [Piglia, Ricardo; Waisman, Sergio]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781941920176
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing

21Ten years after the events narrated in this story, on the eve of the Malvinas War, Renzi saw in The Guardian that English soldiers were equipped with infrared glasses that allowed them to see in the dark and fire at targets in the night. As he read this, Renzi remembered that night in the country with the paralyzed rabbit in the beam of the searchlight from Croce’s car, and realized that the war was lost before it had begun.

11

The news that Croce had found Durán’s murderer, dead in a small house near Tapalqué, surprised everyone. It seemed like another of his acts of conjuration that lay at the foundation of his fame.

“The witnesses saw a small, short man go in and out of the room, slightly yellowish, and they thought it was Dazai,” Croce explained. He reconstructed the crime on a blackboard with maps and diagrams. This is the hallway, here’s the bathroom, this is where the witnesses saw him come out. He drew an X on the board. “The murderer’s name was Anselmo Arce, he was born in the District of Maldonado, he trained in the racetrack in Maroñas and made it as a jockey in La Plata, he was an excellent rider, very much valued. He raced in Palermo and in San Isidro, but he got in trouble and ended up racing country races in the Province. I have the letter, here, where he confesses what he did. He killed himself. He wasn’t murdered, we presume he committed suicide,” Croce concluded. “We’ve discovered that they used the hotel’s old service lift to lower the money. We found a fifty-dollar bill on the floor there. It was a crime for hire; the investigation remains open. What’s important, as always, is what happens after the crime is committed. The consequences are more important than the causes.” He seemed to know more than he was saying.

According to Croce, a hired killing was the greatest innovation in the history of crime. The murderer doesn’t know the victim, there’s no contact, no connections, no relationship, all traces are erased. This was such a case. The motive was being studied. The key, he had concluded, was to locate the instigator. Finally, he handed out a copy of the jockey’s letter, written in a neat and very clear hand. It was a piece of paper from a notebook, actually an old sheet from one of those large ledgers used in the estancias. On top, in round, English cursive, it said Debits and Credits. Good place to write a suicide note, Renzi thought. When he turned the sheet over, he saw a few notes written in a different hand: tether 1.2, crackers 210, herb for mate 3 kg, ox halter—there was no number after that last item. At the bottom of the list was a sum for the total. He thought it was strange that they had photocopied the back of the page, too. When one tries to solve a crime, everything eventually makes sense, the investigation slows over irrelevant details which, at first, don’t seem to play a role.

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