Target in the Night Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 keptit 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.
    â€œThey 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.
    â€œHe’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 thathad 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.
    â€œFact 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.
    â€œDurán 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