country Inspector like me.”
Croce was born and raised in the area. He became a policeman during Perón’s first government, and had been in charge of the district ever since—except for a brief period after General Valle’s revolution in 1956. The Inspector went gray overnight, that year, when he found out the military had executed the workers who had risen up asking for Perón’s return. The week before the uprising Croce had been rallying the local police stations, but when he learned the rebellion had failed he wandered through the countryside speaking to himself for days, without sleeping. By the time they found him it was already as if he were someone else. His hair white, his head agitated, he locked himself in his house and didn’t come out for months. He lost his post that time, but he was reinstated during Frondizi’s presidency in 1958 and has kept it ever since, despite all the political changes. He was supported by Old Man Belladona who, as they say, always defended him, although they weren’t particularly close.
“They want to catch me slipping up somehow,” Croce said, smiling. “They have me under surveillance. But it won’t work, I won’t let them.”
He was legendary, much loved by all, a kind of general consultant in town. Everyone thought Inspector Croce had a bit of a screw loose, especially when people saw him riding through the countryside in his one-horse cart. Always the lone ranger, he’d detain cattle rustlers and horse thieves, or round up bums and rich kids from the large ranches when they came back drunk from the bars near the port. His style sometimes provoked scandals and grumbling, but he got such great results that everyone ended up thinking that his was the way every country Inspector should behave. He had such extraordinary intuition, he was like a psychic.
“He’s a bit off,” everyone said. A bit off, maybe, but not like Madman Carousel, who circled around town all dressed in white, talking to himself in an incomprehensible tongue. No, a bit off but in another way, like someone who can hear a song in his head but can’t quite play it on the piano. An unpredictable man who ranted at times, had no set rules, but was always right and always remained impartial.
Croce got it right so often because he seemed to see things that others didn’t. He caught a man who had raped a woman, once, because he saw the perpetrator coming out of the same movie theater—twice. It turned out that the man had raped a woman in the theater where God Bless You was playing, but the clue that had led Croce to the arrest hadn’t meant anything to anyone else. Another time he discovered that someone was a rustler because he saw the man taking the early-morning train to Bolívar. If he’s going to Bolívar at that time of day, it’s because he’s going there to sell stolen loot, Croce said. Said and done.
Sometimes they’d call him from one of the surrounding towns to solve an impossible case, as if he were a criminal faith healer. He’d ride over in his one-horse cart, listen to the different stories and testimonies, and come back with the case solved. “The priest did it,” he said once in the case of a set of farm fires in Del Valle. A Franciscan pyromaniac. They went to the parish and found a trunk full of fuses and a can of kerosene in the atrium.
His whole life was dedicated to his job. After a strange love affair with a married woman, Croce remained unattached, although everyone thought he had an intermittent relationship with Rosa, Estévez’s widow, the woman in charge of the town’s archives. He lived by himself on the edge of town, on the other side of the tracks, where the police station operated.
Croce’s cases were famous throughout the province. His assistant, Saldías the Scribe, a student of criminology, had fallen under the Inspector’s spell, too.
“Fact is no one really understands why Tony came to this town,” Croce said, and looked at Saldías.
The assistant took out a little black notebook and reviewed his notes.
“Durán arrived in January, on the fifth of January,” Saldías said. “Exactly three months and four days ago.”
1 The town is toward the south of the province of Buenos Aires, 340 kilometers from the capital. A military stronghold and the location of troop settlements during the time of the Indian Wars, the small town was really founded in 1905 when the railroad station was built, the plots of the downtown area were demarcated, and the lands of the municipality were distributed. In the 1940s the eruption of a volcano covered the plains and the houses with a mantle of ash. The men and women defended themselves from the gray dust by covering their faces with beekeeping and fumigation masks.
2 Investigator was the name used, at the time, for a plainclothes policeman.
On that day, in the still glare of summer, a stranger was seen getting off the northbound express. Very tall, with dark skin, dressed like a dandy, with two large suitcases that he left on the train platform—and a fine leather brown bag that he refused to let go of when the porters approached—he smiled, blinded by the sun, and gave a ceremonial bow, as if that was the way people greeted each other around here. The ranchers and laborers talking in the shade of the casuarina trees responded with a surprised murmur, as Tony—in his sweet voice, in his musical language—looked at the stationmaster and asked where he could find a good hotel.
“Would you be so kind as to tell me, sir, where there might be a good hotel near here?”
“The Plaza is right over there,” the stationmaster said, pointing to the white building on the other side of the street.
He registered at the hotel as Anthony Durán, showing his U.S. passport and using his traveler’s checks to pay a month in advance. He said he had come for business, that he wanted to make some investments, that he was interested in Argentine horses. Everyone in town tried to figure out what type of business he might have with horses. They thought that maybe Durán was going to invest in the stud farms in the area. He said something vague about a polo player in Miami who wanted to buy ponies from the Heguy Ranch, and something about a trainer in Mississippi who was looking to race Argentine stallions. According to Durán, a show jumper named Moore had been here before him, leaving convinced of the quality of the horses bred in the pampas. That was the reason he gave when he first arrived. A few days later he started visiting the local corrals and checking out the colts and fillies grazing in the pastures.
At first it looked as if he had come to buy horses. Everyone became interested in him—the cattle auctioneers, the consignees, the breeders, the ranchers—thinking there was some kind of profit to be made. The gossip buzzed from one end of town to the other like a swarm of locusts.
“It took us a while,” Madariaga said, “to catch on to his connection to the Belladona sisters.”
Durán settled in at the hotel in a room on the third floor facing the plaza and asked to have a radio installed (a radio, not a television). He asked if there was anywhere in the area where he could get rum and frijoles, but he quickly got used to the local food in the hotel restaurant and to the Llave gin that he had sent up to his room every afternoon at five.
He spoke an archaic Spanish, full of unexpected idiomatic expressions (copacetic, what’s the deal, in the thick of it) and bewildering words in English or in ancient Spanish (obstinacy, victor, frippery). It wasn’t always possible to understand the words he used, or how he put sentences together, but his language was warm and soothing. Also, he’d buy drinks for anyone who listened to his stories. That was his moment of greatest esteem, and that’s how he started to circulate, to become known, to visit the most varied of places, and to become friends with the young men in town, regardless of their level on the social scale.
He
