Death Going Down Read online

  “And so?” asked Luchter’s eyebrows, arched like circumflex accents.

  Superintendent Lahore leaned forward. His round, dark face bore a good-natured expression that seemed to say, “Come on, you can tell Daddy.”

  “Do you think Soler was telling the truth?”

  He immediately understood that he’d made a mistake. Luchter was a discreet man and pseudo-camaraderie irritated him.

  “He was very drunk. In vino veritas,” said the doctor.

  “Yes, yes, of course, but you found him alone with the body, isn’t that right?”

  “He told me he had just arrived.”

  “That’s what he claims. He won’t be dragged away from that, as it were.”

  Those simple words hid a depth of troubling questions, with one—the essential one—coming and going like the theme of a symphony. Soler did not inspire pity in Luchter. He felt no compassion towards him.

  “I don’t think he’s lying,” he added all the same. He had believed what Soler said since the outset.

  “All the same, there is no doubt that señora Eidinger went to the building to see someone.”

  “Of course.”

  “Who threw the key ring away? Her?”

  Luchter remained silent.

  “May I ask you something, Superintendent?” he said at last.

  Lahore nodded.

  “I suppose you’ll interrogate all the building’s residents again, won’t you? As a doctor I would ask you to please not disturb my patient, señor Iñarra. He suffers from a nervous disorder that affects his mobility and can, to all intents and purposes, be considered disabled. As far as possible, interrogate him in his home.”

  “What does he suffer from?”

  “A disease of the spinal cord. His left arm and leg are affected by a continuous tremor. He never leaves his home.”

  “We’ll bear that in mind,” the Superintendent assured him. He seemed an amiable man who was satisfied by the rare opportunity for kindness.

  “As for me,” Luchter went on, “I’m happy to help. I’ll leave you my number at the hospital so you can call if you need me during the morning.” As he spoke, Luchter took out his pen with the methodical flourish of someone accustomed to adding touches of ceremony to the most insignificant gestures.

  Lahore accompanied him to the office door. The police station was a few blocks from his building and Luchter slowly made his way home. He walked with his fists closed tight inside the pockets of his overcoat and his eyes fixed on the ground.

  A police officer was watching the front door and the main lift was out of service. Luchter went up in the service lift and tiptoed into his apartment so as not to wake the cook. It was almost six a.m.

  The light of the August morning was beginning to make its presence felt in the dark apartment like an invisible hand fraying the silent domestic shadows. Luchter went over to the drinks cabinet and poured himself a glass of whisky, then sat down in one of the armchairs and rested his head back. His closed eyes gave his face the immobile quality of a plaster mask. He sat up to bring the glass to his lips, but a sudden grimace of repulsion stopped the movement short. Little by little his features relaxed and his whole face took on an expression of infinite sadness.

  Gabriela de Iñarra arranged her husband’s pillows and pulled the covers up until they almost covered his chin. Then, leaning over, she kissed him goodnight on the forehead.

  “Try to get some sleep, darling,” Don Agustín said to her. “This business must have made you very nervous.”

  “Only for your sake. You must rest now. It’s silly for us to worry. It’s nothing to do with us, after all.”

  “Don’t fret over me. You make me feel like a burden. You don’t have to sacrifice yourself for me.”

  The softness of his voice didn’t temper the severity of his gaze or his hard-set mouth. Gabriela turned pale, as if he had just threatened to hit her.

  “Agustín, why do you say that? I don’t like it when you say things like that. I look after you because I want to, and sometimes it seems you’re determined to remind me of what I’ve long forgotten.”

  Iñarra reached for his wife’s hand, which she had retracted so it now hung at her side.

  “For God’s sake, Gaby! Why do you always get the wrong idea? I must have put it badly. Your constant goodwill makes me feel as though you’re not entirely sincere.”

  Gabriela pulled away from the hand, which had settled for clutching the folds of her apron.

  “Doubts make nasty enemies,” she said decisively. “Try to get some sleep, Agustín.”

  She walked to the door with her head bent low. From there she turned to add, in a simpler tone:

  “I’d feel better if you could just accept things naturally. Goodnight, Agustín.”

  As she passed the door to Betty’s room, Gabriela stopped. Betty was walking around the room. She was surely getting undressed for bed. She heard the sound of a body reclining, then a metallic click. Yes, there was no doubt. Betty had just picked up the telephone receiver and was dialling a number.

  She held her breath and leant against the door to hear better. The hall stretched out in front of her like a dark stain split by the sliver of light coming from under Betty’s door.

  “Hello,” she said, “are you alone?”

  A silence.

  “Don’t say anything. It’s better that way.”

  Another silence.

  “Yes, yes, see you tomorrow.”

  Gaby heard the click of the receiver being replaced on the stand, then she moved away silently. Once she was in her bedroom and had got into bed, she took a packet of cigarettes from the drawer in her bedside table. Long hours unfurled ahead of her like an image multiplied in a house of mirrors. She smoked with relish, tricking her wakeful anxiety with the calm appearance of her gestures, her gaze lost in the whitish smoke that slowly dissipated in the darkness of the room.

  Boris Czerbó said goodbye to Blasi at the door to his apartment. The innocuous questions had sapped his spirits and left in his mouth the bitter taste of the past being churned up. Behind him Rita waited, ingenuous and terrified, her expression of total submission inciting him to cruelty and spite.

  “Don’t just stand there,” he said in their native language. “Go and check everything’s ready for me. I’ll need two tablets to sleep tonight.”

  Rita had picked up an ashtray to empty but her hands were trembling so much that she dropped it. Cigarette butts rolled onto the carpet and Rita stared in fright at where the ash now blurred a patch of the Persian design.

  “Clumsy cow,” Boris muttered. “You’re a waste of space. Always have been.”

  Rita burst into tears. Boris pursed his lips in annoyance.

  “Clean that up before you go to bed. Goodnight.”

  But Rita’s presence followed him to his bedroom, which was full of her preparations: two glasses, one containing water and one with some black prunes floating inside. The brownish liquid testified to the fact that they had been put there some time ago. Next to the glasses he saw the tube of sleeping tablets and a packet of cigarettes. Everything was in order.

  He heard Rita’s footsteps in the living room. Lulled by the familiar sound, a pleasant drowsiness gradually crept over Boris. Very soon “that thing” started to rear its head. A series of scenes paraded before his bleary eyes. The cage doors opened to make way for dark memories of a certain time. Rita loomed up, with her resigned and soulless presence.

  “She will never know peace, ever,” Boris said to himself.

  The cabalistic phrase soon dissolved the fearsome images. Sleep closed the doors of consciousness. Boris felt the knot in his chest loosening and, giving way to the sensation of wellbeing, he let himself be carried off by a stupor that rocked him like waves on a beach.

  2

  The Moon in the Window

  That afternoon, at siesta time, the plaza of Villa Devoto looked like a peaceful village square. Local women were knitting and chatting under the
huge eucalyptus trees. Every now and then a child ran up to one of them before trotting off, proudly jangling the coveted prize in his or her hand: a few coins for the chocolate seller or the merry-go-round.

  Three people were sitting on one of the benches. A man was reading the crime pages of the morning paper with his hat pulled down over his eyes. The two women next to him eyed him askance, apparently absorbed in counting the stitches of their knitting. The man soon began to nod off over the journalistic suppositions, and when the newspaper fell to his feet he made no move to recover it. The women raised their eyes. His head dropped onto his chest, with the indiscretion common to those who sleep in public places.

  One of the women then pointed the toe of her shoe towards a headline in the crime pages.

  “Poor Frida,” she sighed.

  Her companion glanced about before bending to pick up the newspaper. The children were playing at least twenty paces from the bench. She folded the paper and placed it next to the sleeping man, allowing herself time to skim through the report she already knew by heart.

  “I don’t feel sorry for her,” she said. “She was a stranger. I never liked her.”

  “No, don’t say that.” The other woman seemed less susceptible to prejudice and thus more open to compassion. “Eidinger wasn’t a stranger. His family has lived around here since he was the age our kids are now.”

  “What does that have to do with it?

  They spoke in hushed tones, with the lukewarm conviction of aspirational gossips.

  “He married so mysteriously. No one knows who she was.”

  “A girl from a nice family.”

  “A girl from a rich family. I suppose that must’ve been a factor in their love at first sight. Heiresses always believe they’re making conquests. My husband reminded me of that this morning. He never trusted Frida Eidinger.”

  Male opinion muscled into the conversation.

  “But do you know anything?”

  “No, no, nothing. No one has really been able to say anything about Frida Eidinger. Tell me the truth, would you have made friends with her all the same?”

  “Frida wasn’t looking for our friendship.” The sincere remark sounded like a posthumous homage.

  “She might not have been. Eidinger, on the other hand, often came to the pharmacy to talk to my husband. I think he was trying to get an invitation for himself and his wife to our house. My husband pretended not to cotton on, of course, but he had no choice but to accept an invitation to theirs one Saturday afternoon.”

  “Oh, really? You never told me that.”

  The fierce irony in that comment was the verbal equivalent of a dressmaker’s pincushion.

  “Of course I regretted having accepted the invitation,” said the woman, continuing her story. “They’d asked us to go early so we’d have time to play a game of canasta after tea. Gustavo came out to meet us.”

  “People say their house was very nicely done out.”

  “Oh, yes. He spent his last pesos on it before she came over from Europe. Well, as I was saying, Frida didn’t appear and Gustavo hurriedly said she’d be a little late because she’d been busy in the kitchen until the last minute getting the tea ready.”

  “She was very clever, wasn’t she?”

  “Pf… just like the rest of them, except she spent money without a second thought. It’s easy to be clever like that. Well, at the end of the day it was her money. A quarter of an hour went by and Frida still hadn’t appeared. Gustavo went up to go and find her. We waited a good while. We could hear them talking upstairs.”

  “They were shouting that loudly? Weren’t you in the living room?”

  The storyteller blushed slightly.

  “Gustavo had left the door open and their voices carried down to us. Of course there was no indiscretion on our part because they were speaking German so we didn’t understand anything they were saying. Suddenly Gustavo rushed down all flustered and went out, slamming the door without saying goodbye. Shortly afterwards Frida came in looking very calm, saying that Gustavo had had to go out but would be back soon. She insisted we take our tea without waiting for him. You can imagine how uncomfortable we felt.”

  “And Frida?”

  “Unruffled. She was adamant that we should play cards. I made it clear to my husband that if Gustavo came back the situation would get very tense, so we left. We didn’t return the invitation, of course.”

  A little girl ran up and buried her tearful face in the storyteller’s skirts.

  “Chiche, I don’t like you telling tales,” the mother reprimanded loudly. The sleeping man had opened his eyes and was watching the scene with a glazed look. A second later, his eyelids drooped involuntarily.

  The other woman looked at her watch and put her knitting away in a cloth bag.

  “Four o’clock! Where can those kids be?” she exclaimed as she stood up. “Are you staying here?”

  “No, no, I’ll come with you.”

  They left, with the mother dragging the weeping girl along. The man settled himself more comfortably on the bench, with no apparent intention of interrupting his siesta. He was not alone for long. A bright, friendly looking young man approached along the eucalyptus-lined street. He was not wearing a hat and the wind lifted his brown hair. He joined the other man on the bench.

  “Did they take the bait?” the sleeping man muttered between his teeth.

  The young man shook his head.

  “How about here?” he asked, pointing at the bench.

  “Somewhat. The human benevolence of boredom,” said Superintendent Inspector Santiago Ericourt to his assistant Ferruccio Blasi.

  Ericourt was a corpulent man from whose wide face protruded an aquiline nose and a square chin. When not speaking, the outline of his features gave him an air of unwillingness and distraction that others easily took for rejection, as if he were ill disposed towards friendliness. However, the watchful look in his brown eyes denoted something more than an inquisitive drive to close cases. He could spend days following the lead of a name, hiding his agitation behind an innocuous screen of abstraction. He had nothing of the prowling predator, but all the fearsome patience of an elephant scanning the ground with its trunk for the piece of food it has dropped.

  When discussing his fellow men he seemed animated by the goodwill of those to whom the Kingdom of Heaven has been promised, but he pursued them all the same. For him, in a way, justice and truth took on the nature of a sporting tournament whose interest is renewed every day. Blasi admired how he remained permanently alert under his outward appearance of lethargy.

  “Eidinger is expecting us now,” said Ericourt. “I told him we were coming. He seemed very happy to see us.”

  “I met him in the morgue the night before last. He gives the impression of a good fellow overly concerned by what others think.”

  “We’ve got nothing on him, Blasi. When they went to find him he’d just got back from a Photography Club meeting. At least ten people testified that he didn’t leave the place all night. They were holding an AGM.”

  The afternoon winter sun projected a few warm rays that caressed them like long fingers, creating an atmosphere that inspired trust.

  “Frida Eidinger,” Ericourt went on in his measured tone, “must have planned her suicide as a revenge. That’s why she chose the lift, because it was the best way to put the man she wanted to hurt in an awkward position: a partial incrimination that would open the doors to the most dangerous hypotheses.”

  “But why does it necessarily have to be suicide?” Blasi objected, angry with himself for thinking how nice it would be to sit in that square with no other motive than to soak up the sun, disconsolately bored by the lack of anything to do.

  Ericourt took off his hat and twirled it between his spatulate fingers.

  “I don’t believe it was suicide either. But we have to admit it as a possibility. Frida Eidinger might have gone to the house to see one of three men: Luchter, Czerbó or Soler. For reasons of good taste w
e’ll discount Iñarra. Czerbó was the only one in his apartment. How do we prove she went to see him? All their statements are logical and do not contradict one another. There is a grey area, but not surrounding Czerbó.”

  “Who then?” asked Blasi.

  “It’s strange that if señorita Iñarra returned home between one thirty and two, as she claims, she didn’t come across the victim in the lift.”

  “She says she took the stairs.”

  “After having walked her cousin home and then back to her own building. In that case the girl is obsessed with physical exercise.”

  “I don’t like clues,” Blasi contended. “Their interpretation often leads us the wrong way.”

  Ericourt stood up. The two men walked in silence along the wide path flanked by trees whose bark split open to reveal the pale, fleshy insides of their trunks, strong as columns. The wind shook the branches, covering the ground with the small red filaments of their flowers. The soft afternoon air was filled with the scent of eucalyptus. Blasi became engrossed in the childish task of treading on the arabesques of sun and shade.

  “Last night,” Ericourt said in the emphatically recitative tone he used when putting his ideas in order, “I was working at home until late. I needed to look over some files. My desk is in front of the window. The night was starry and if I had to classify it, I would say it was a moonless winter night. A good while went by; when I looked up again, a waning moon hung in the centre of the window frame. For hours I had considered it inexistent because it was invisible to me. So you see how the evidence of a fact is purely a question of perspective.”

  Blasi was still absorbed in his infantile game with the patches of sun.

  “There is always a truth, even if it’s hidden,” Ericourt went on, “but the facts inexorably describe their orbit and at a certain point a piece of evidence appears before us with the same clarity as the waning moon that appeared to me last night. Sometimes we have to wait, sometimes the truth reveals itself unexpectedly.”