The Secret in Their Eyes Read Online Free PDF Page B

describe it properly to their colleagues at work; they stared with unblinking eyes, engrossed, spellbound, their lips slightly parted in a half-smile. Well, as I crossed thethreshold into that apartment, I was sure some of the men inside would be looking out from under the visors of their blue peaked caps with just such expressions on their faces.
    The tidy living room I entered contained many decorative objects on the walls and bookshelves. The dining set in the small adjoining room, six chairs and a table crowded together into too narrow a space, had little to do with the small armchairs in the living room and no relationship whatsoever to the style of the decor. “Newlyweds,” I guessed. I walked a few steps toward the door that opened to the rest of the apartment, but my way was blocked almost at once by a wall of blue uniforms arranged in a semicircle. Not much brainwork was required to deduce that the corpse was lying in there. Some of the men were silent, others commented loudly to demonstrate their manliness in the face of death, but they all had their eyes fixed on the floor.
    “I want to talk to the officer in charge, please,” I said; it didn’t sound like a request. I searched for the right tone, a little hard-edged, a little weary, to show this bunch of lazy gawkers that I represented a higher authority and they owed me a modicum of respect. My idea was to take the experience gained from the command/obedience tactic I’d used on the cop who blocked my way outside and apply the method at the group level. They turned around to look at me, and the voice of Police InspectorBáez responded from the other side of the room. A couple of the policemen stepped aside, and I could see Báez, sitting on the double bed.
    It was still going to be hard to get to him, because the bed took up almost the whole room, and the body was lying on the floor next to the bed. I couldn’t see much more through the narrow passage the cops had made for me, but I figured that if I didn’t want to look soft, I would have to stop and contemplate the dead woman.
    I knew it was a woman, because the policeman who’d made the call to the court at five after eight had told me—using the strange jargon the police seem to delight in—that the victim was “an unidentified young female.” Their supposedly neutral language, their conviction that they were speaking in forensic terms, occasionally struck me as funny, but in general I found it annoying. Why not just come out and say it? The victim was a young woman whose name we didn’t yet know and who seemed to be a little over twenty years old.
    I guessed that she’d been beautiful, because despite the ugly bluish color her skin had taken on when she was strangled and the predictable distortion of her face, frozen into a grimace by horror and lack of oxygen, there was a majesty about that girl that not even a horrible death had been able to obliterate. I was disturbingly certain the place was crawling with so many policemen precisely because of that, because of her beauty, andbecause she was lying naked at the foot of the bed where she’d been flung, face up on the bright parquet floor; and I knew some of the men standing around her were thrilled to be able to gaze at her body with impunity.
    Báez stood up and walked over to me, skirting the big bed. He shook my hand without smiling. I was sufficiently acquainted with him to know that he liked his work, but he didn’t enjoy the suffering from which his work usually arose. If he hadn’t thrown the blue crowd of curious cops out of the room, it was simply because he hadn’t registered their presence very clearly, or because he knew they were part of police folklore, or maybe a little of each. I asked him if the forensic team had arrived yet. Time would show me that I was never in my life going to meet a cop half so honest and clear-thinking as Alfredo Báez, but that morning, among the many things I didn’t know, I didn’t know that