The Secret in Their Eyes Read Online Free PDF Page A

employ can do their jobs in peace. They can even couple their knowledge and experience with his inertia and make him appear to be smart or, at least, a little less of an asshole.
    But the asshole who wants to advance his career poses two difficulties. To begin with, he’s bursting with energy,filled with enthusiasm, abounding in initiatives, which flow from him as from a fountain and which he wishes to present to his superiors openly and frankly, so that they will realize what an undervalued diamond they hold in their hands, a man relegated to a position inferior to his moral and intellectual deserts. And this is where the second difficulty arises: this particular category of asshole compounds temerity with obliviousness. For if he cherishes the dream of advancement, it’s because he feels worthy of it, and he may even go so far as to consider himself unjustly treated by life and by his fellow men if they deny him the fulfillment of his intrinsically legitimate aspirations. That’s when the asshole’s obliviousness and drive make him dangerous. They raise him to the level of a threat, not so much to himself as to others—and, more specifically, to those others who are under his orders, one of whom, to take a random example, must abandon the warm hospitality of his office and betake himself to the scene of a crime. And it’s precisely for that reason that he leaves by the Talcahuano door and goes down the steps spewing a stream of expletives.
    That was me, the victim, harboring deep in my heart the suspicion that the judge who wanted to play the diligent schoolboy before his superiors on the Appellate Court wasn’t the only asshole in this story, no, but that there was another asshole, who—because he was pusillanimous, or because it was convenient, or because hewas distracted—had failed to complete his legal studies and as a consequence was never going to advance past deputy clerk, and who was therefore like a train up against one of those big wood-and-metal buffer stops, an unequivocal sign that tells you you’ve come this far but you’ll go no farther, my man. Shunted off, end of the line, that’s it. And from then on, he knew, he’d see a long parade of clerks, who would give him orders he’d have to obey, because the clerks, lawyers as they were, would be his superiors, and there would be a long parade of judges, too, who would give the clerks orders they would then pass on to him. I was complying with just such an order, according to which, whenever a homicide case came in while we were on duty, the deputy and chief administrator of the clerk’s office whose turn it was had to betake himself to the scene of the crime in order to oversee the work of the police.
    Once and only once, trying not to seem arrogant, had I dared to consult my illustrious magistrate about the usefulness of such diligence, since the Federal Police were responsible for carrying out the first phase of the investigation. No matter, His Honor declared; that was the way he wanted it done. This was his entire response, and in the ensuing silence, I felt the special wretchedness of one who must not so much as allude to what everyone in the room knows, which in this case was that our new judge was an imbecile, and that the clerks weren’t goingto say a word. The clerk of Section No. 18 hasn’t got the slightest intention of opposing the judge, I thought, because having discovered, and how, that his new boss is a first-class, black-belt asshole, the said clerk is preparing to bring to bear all the influence he can muster so that he can set sail for some other island, where calmer breezes blow. And as for Julio Carlos Pérez, I said to myself, your immediate superior, the clerk of Section No. 19—your section—he’s highly unlikely to notice that the judge is an asshole because he’s one as well, and to a superlative degree, and consequently, you are screwed. So what can you do? Nothing. You can’t do anything. Or you could, at most,