The Secret in Their Eyes Read Online Free PDF

make a novena to San Calixto and pray that the chief asshole may succeed in his ambitions and get a quick promotion to the Appellate Court, and perhaps, once he’s there, he’ll calm down, he’ll feel fulfilled, and he’ll pass into another category of asshole, accomplished, satisfied, peaceful, and contemplative, the kind that can be found occupying some of the most illustrious offices in the Palace of Justice.
    But that hadn’t happened, and there I was. As I asked the vendor at a news kiosk which bus would take me to the corner of Niceto Vega Avenue and Bonpland Street, I started feeling sick in anticipation of the scene I was going to have to witness. I tried to buck up my courage, if only out of shame, telling myself that I couldn’t get weak in the knees in front of the crowd of cops who were sureto be milling around in that apartment, even though it would give me the creeping willies to see a corpse, a new corpse, a fresh corpse, a corpse produced not by the natural law of life and death but by the categorical and savage decision of a murderer who was on the loose somewhere nearby, and then I had my bus ticket out, making sure to keep it so I could get reimbursed for the expense when I got back, and since it would be a while before we reached the barrio of Palermo, I walked all the way to the rear of the bus and took a seat, still cursing myself between my teeth for not having had the drop of discipline, the ounce of fortitude, the dollop of willpower I would have needed to become a lawyer.

5
    When I turned the corner and saw the first signs of the vain commotion the police display in such cases, my stomach began to churn. There were three patrol cars, an ambulance, and a dozen cops, coming and going with nothing to do but determined to keep on doing it. As I wasn’t inclined to give them the satisfaction of detecting my queasiness, I walked up to the group quickly, reaching for my rear trouser pocket. I held my credentials under the nose of the first officer who barred my path, declared without condescending to look at him that I was Deputy Clerk Chaparro of Examining Magistrate’s Court No. 41, and told him to take me to the officer in charge of the operation. The uniformed policeman acted according to a rule whose iron logic allowed him to follow his chosen path without undue difficulty: everyone who had one more stripe on his sleeve than he did must be obeyed; everyone who had one less stripe must be treated like dirt. Although I was totally unadorned by epaulets, my peremptory tone placed me in the first category, and so he saluted me awkwardly and asked me to follow him “into the interior.”
    It was an old house divided up into several apartments, all of which opened onto a side corridor, ugly but tidy. Geraniums in flowerpots had been placed here and there in the hall in a failed effort to beautify it. Two or three times, we had to move to one side to avoid running into more policemen, all of whom had come out of the second-to-last apartment. I calculated that there must be more than twenty cops on the scene, and once again I was appalled by the morbid pleasure some people find in the contemplation of tragedy. Like train accidents, I thought. I was more or less accustomed to those, because I traveled on the Sarmiento Line every day, but I could never begin to understand the curious onlookers who would crowd around the stopped trains and peer between the wheels and the rails, hoping to glimpse the victim’s mutilated body and watch the firemen’s bloody work. Once, suspecting that what was actually bothering me was my own weakness, I forced myself to move closer to an accident site, but soon I was horrified beyond recovery, not so much by the atrocious spectacle of death as by the jubilant, festive expressions on the faces of many in the crowd. It was as if the accident were a free show put on for their enjoyment, or as if they had to take in every single detail of the scene so that they could