Ten days after the evening with Morales and his photographs, I made an appointment and went down to Homicide to meet Báez. When I opened the door to his office, he invited me in and offered me some coffee, which he sent one of his staff to get. As always happened when I spent time in his company, I let a feeling of respect for him get the better of me, even though I found such admiration uncomfortable.
He was a large man, hard-featured, built like an armoire. He was—how many?—fifteen or twenty years older than me. It was hard to figure his age exactly, because he sported a thick mustache that would have made a teenager look old. I think the thing that aroused my admiration for him was the calm, direct way he exercised his authority. I’d often watched him moving among other policemen with the controlled self-confidence of a pontiff convinced of his right to command. And even though I’d been the deputy clerk of the court for a couple of years by then, I sensed that I would never in my life be able to give an order without my heart jumping into my throat. I don’t know what I was more afraid of: that the people under me would resent my directives, that they wouldn’t obey me, or that they’d do what I wanted and laugh behind my back, which was almost the most distressing possibility of all. Báez was surely untroubled by such cogitations.
That afternoon, however, I felt I had a slight advantage over the man I admired so much. I was riding a wave of euphoria because of my hunch about the photographs. What had begun as not much more than an aesthetic observation had turned into a lead, the only one we had.
In those days, I was incapable of regarding my life with moderation. Either I considered myself an obscure, invisible functionary, a slave to routine, vegetating monotonously in a post appropriate to my mediocre faculties and limited aspirations, or I was a misunderstood genius, my talent wasted in the tedious exercise of secondary activities suitable for natures less favored than my own. I spent most of my time occupying the first of those two positions. Only rarely did I shift to the second, which I’d have to abandon sooner rather than later, when some brutal disillusion would end my sojourn at that particular oasis. I didn’t know it, but in twenty minutes, my self-esteem was going to be wrecked by one such disastrous purge.
I started off by telling him about the episode with the photos. First, I described them, and then I showed them to him. I was pleased by the attention he paid to my account. He asked me for details, and I was able to satisfy his curiosity on most points. Báez had always shown great respect for my knowledge of the law. In our conversations, he’d never minded confessing to gaps in his own familiarity with legal matters (which was another reason for me to admire him, given that I regarded my own areas of ignorance as inexcusable shortcomings). On this occasion, I was venturing onto his turf, and yet he gave me the impression that he thought I was doing so for good reason. When I finished showing him the pictures, I told him about the instructions I’d given Morales: the widower was to write to his father-in-law and ask him to find out Isidoro Gómez’s current location. So that his nerves wouldn’t get the better of him, so that he wouldn’t try to carry out some sort of absurd personal revenge, the father-in-law had to limit himself to obtaining the desired information and passing it along to Morales. Colotto’s mission had been such a success, I explained to Báez, that I’d ordered Morales to request a second round of reports from his father-in-law, the information to be gathered from other neighbors and from friends that his daughter and Gómez might have had in common. We’d based the search for the friends on the list of names accompanying the photographs of the famous picnic. As I was preparing to lay out the findings from the second round of reports, which confirmed Gómez’s progressive withdrawal, his apparently precipitous departure for Buenos Aires, and his arrival in the capital a few weeks before the murder, Báez cut me off with a question: “How long ago did the father-in-law pay this visit to the suspect’s mother?”
Although a little surprised, I started counting the days. Didn’t he want to hear the verified information I was on the brink of revealing to him? Didn’t he want to know that a couple of Gómez’s friends from the barrio had corroborated my theory that the young man had been secretly in love with the victim for years?
“Ten days, eleven at the most.”
Báez looked at the antiquated black telephone on his desk. Without a word to me, he picked up the receiver and dialed three digits. When the call was answered, Báez spoke in a murmur: “I need you to come here at once. Yes. By yourself. Thanks.”
Then he hung up and, as if I’d vanished, immediately began a rapid search of his desk drawers. Soon he extracted a plain notepad with about half its sheets missing and began at once to scribble on it, using big, untidy strokes. He looked like a stern-faced doctor writing me a prescription for who knows what medication. If I hadn’t been so tense, I would have found the image amusing. Before Báez finished, there were two knocks on the door. A senior subofficer entered the room, greeted us, and planted himself next to the desk. Báez soon put down his pencil, tore off the sheet of paper, and handed it to the policeman. “Here you go, Leguizamón. See if you can find this guy. All the information you might be able to use is on that sheet. If you manage to find him, take care—he may be dangerous. Place him under arrest and bring him in. The learned doctor here and I will see what we can get out of him.”
I wasn’t surprised to hear him refer to me as a doctor—he meant a doctor of law, of course—nor was I for a moment tempted to correct him. The police prefer to call all judicial employees of a certain age “doctor”; it’s nothing to get offended about, and the cops are right to do so. I’ve never known any profession whose members are as sensitive about honorific titles as lawyers are. What disturbed me was what Báez said next, as he was dismissing his subordinate: “And be quick about it. If this is the guy we want, I suspect he’s already vanished into thin air.”