know my brother, Inspector. It’s impossible, he wouldn’t have called,” Sofía said.
Ada said that she didn’t have any news from her brother, that she hadn’t seen Luca in a while. They weren’t close. No one saw him anymore, she added, he lived shut away in the factory with his inventions and his dreams.
“What’s going to happen?” Sofía asked.
“Nothing,” Croce said. “We’ll have him sent to the morgue.”
It was strange to be speaking in that room, with the dead man lying on the floor, with Saldías taking notes, and the tired Inspector looking kindly at them.
“Can we leave?” Sofía asked.
“Or are we suspects?” Ada asked.
“Everyone’s a suspect,” Croce said. “You better leave out the back. And please don’t tell anyone what you saw here, or what we talked about.”
“Of course,” Ada said.
The Inspector offered to walk them out, but they refused. They were leaving on their own, he could call them anytime if he needed them.
Croce sat down on the bed. He seemed overwhelmed, or distracted. He wanted to see the notes Saldías had taken. He studied them calmly.
“Okay,” he said after a while. “Let’s see what these scoundrels have to say.”
A rancher from Sauce Viejo declared that he had heard the sound of chains from the other side of the door, outside Durán’s room. Then he had heard clearly someone say, in a nervous, hushed voice:
“I’ll buy it for you. You can pay me later, somehow.”
He remembered the words perfectly because he thought it sounded like a threat, or a joke. He couldn’t identify who had spoken, but the voice was shrill, as if they were speaking in falsetto, or like a woman’s voice.
“Falsetto, or like a woman’s voice?”
“Like 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.
“Strange,” Croce said. “He squatted?”
“Against the door.”
“To listen, or to look?”
“He 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.
“And what were you doing?”
“Relieving 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.
“It 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.
“Let him be for now, until I need him,” Croce said. “He won’t go anywhere.”
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