I had a strange feeling when we entered the bank. It was a big, square room with wide, cold marble panels on the walls. Spaced at regular intervals across the ceiling, a series of ancient, glass-shaded lamps hanging at the end of narrow black tubes poorly illuminated the vast room. An unbroken line of tall counters, made of gray Formica and topped by glass panels, separated the area reserved for employees from the public space. A bored janitor was cleaning the glass around the circular openings through which the bank’s customers made themselves heard. I hated enormous rooms, and I thought it must be horrific to work every day in a place like that. I even went so far as to comfort myself by recalling the office of the court where I worked, its shelves crammed with files from floor to ceiling, its narrow passages, its faint aroma of old wood.
But the strange feeling had to do with something else. As soon as I went through the door, following Báez, I cast a quick glance at the twenty or so employees; even at this hour, when the bank wasn’t yet open to the public, they were already at their desks, absorbed in their work. It was as if no one had yet been selected to receive the awful news we were bringing—not, at least, until the guard who’d opened the door for us walked across the room, lifted the hinged section of one of the counters, stepped into the area reserved for bank personnel, and directed his steps toward the desk occupied by the person we’d asked for. I looked from one employee to the next, wondering which of them was Morales. I tried to remember the wedding photograph on the night table in his bedroom, but I couldn’t, maybe because I’d looked at it too hurriedly, or too apprehensively.
I felt that tragedy was hovering above those twenty lives and hadn’t yet decided to descend on one. A ridiculous notion, of course, because only one of those men could be Ricardo Agustín Morales. None of the others. All of them were safe from the horror we were there to communicate to him alone. But as long as the guard didn’t stop beside one of them as they worked, each of them (each young one, at any rate) seemed like a valid target, a potential victim of fearful chance, a possible recipient (against all odds, past all predicting, beyond all the certainties with which humans bear, every day, the terrifying knowledge that everything we love can be extinguished from one moment to the next) of news that would unhinge his life.
The guard passed several desks and leaned down to speak into the ear of a young man who was tallying checks on a huge adding machine. Across the distance that separated us, I was starting to feel sorry for the guy, but all of a sudden, events seemed to corroborate my theory of a catastrophe hesitating before swooping down on its target: the young fellow with the checks raised his hand and pointed to a door in the back, and it was as though that gesture of stretching out his arm had saved him from the impending misery of having lost his wife in a most brutal way.
Báez and I looked where that arm was pointing, and almost as if in a synchronized theatrical movement, the door in the rear of the enormous room opened to reveal a tall young man with slicked-down hair combed straight back, a serious little mustache, a blue jacket, and a tightly knotted tie. In the last moments of his innocence, he walked toward the desk where the guard and the young colleague with the checks waited, eyeing him curiously.
The guard spoke to the tall young man and indicated that we were looking for him. Now, I thought, at this exact moment, that boy has just entered an endless tunnel, one he’ll probably stay in for the rest of his life. He looked in our direction. At first he seemed surprised, but his surprise immediately turned to suspicion. The guard must have told him that Báez and I were both policemen. It’s always the same—people want the simplest image possible. A policeman is something everybody knows. A deputy clerk in an examining magistrate’s court, Criminal Division, belongs to a more exotic species. So there we were, ready to plunge our knives into the lad’s jugular, and he was looking at us, not sure yet whether or not he should be worried.
I walked over to the hinged counter as the young man approached it from the other side. I’d decided to introduce myself but then to let Báez do the talking. There would be time later to explain which of us was the policeman and which the judicial employee. Besides, Báez seemed to be used to communicating abominable information. As for me, when it came right down to it, I had no reason to be there at all, no fucking reason to be a witness to how one goes about shattering a young banker’s life. And if I was there, I owed the privilege exclusively to that jackass Judge Fortuna Lacalle and his overriding eagerness to be promoted as soon as possible to the Appellate Court.