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wondered, how a mulatto who said he came from New York could show up in a place where the last black people had disappeared—or had dispersed until they blended completely into the landscape—fifty years earlier, without ever clearly explaining why he had come here, insinuating rather that he had come on some kind of secret mission. They said something to each other that afternoon, it came out later, the Old Man and Tony. It seems he had come with a message, or with an order, everything under wraps.
    The Old Man lived in a spacious parlor that looked like a racquetball court. They had knocked down several walls to make room for him, so Old Man Belladona could move from one end to the other, between his tables and desks, speaking to himself and spying out the window at the dead movement on the road beyond the gardens.
    â€œThey’re going to call you Sambo around here,” Old Man Belladona told him, smiling caustically. “There were a lot of blacks in the Río de la Plata area during colonial times, they even formed a battalion of mulattos and Negros, very determined, but they were all killed in the War of Independence. There were a few black gauchos, too, out on the frontier, but in the end they all went to live with the Indians. A few years back there were stilla few blacks in the hills, but they’ve died off. They’re all gone now. I’ve heard there are a lot of ways of differentiating skin color in the Caribbean, but here the mulattos are all sambos. 5 Do you understand, young man?”
    Old Man Belladona was seventy years old, but he seemed so ancient that it made sense for him to refer to everyone in town as young. He had survived every catastrophe, he ruled over the dead, everything he touched disintegrated, he drove the men in the family away and stayed with his daughters—while his sons were exiled ten kilometers to the south, in the factory they built on the road to Rauch. Right away the Old Man told Tony Durán about the inheritance. He had divided up his possessions and ceded his property before dying, but that had been a mistake. Ever since it had been nothing but wars.
    â€œI don’t have anything left,” Old Man Belladona said. “They started fighting, and they’ve nearly killed me.”
    His daughters, he said, weren’t involved in the conflict, but his sons had gone about it as if they were fighting over a kingdom. (“ I’m never coming back,” Luca had sworn. “I’ll never set foot in this house again. ”)
    â€œSomething changed at that point, after that visit, and that conversation,” Madariaga said from behind the bar, to no one in particular, and without clarifying what the change had been.
    It was around that time that people started to say that Durán was a carrier. 6 That he had brought money, which wasn’t his, tobuy crops under the table. People started saying that this was his business with Old Man Belladona. That the sisters were only a pretext.
    Quite possibly, it wasn’t that rare, except that people who carried money under the table tended to be invisible. Men who looked like bankers and traveled with a fortune in dollars to avoid the Tax Office. There were a lot of stories about tax evasion and the trafficking of foreign currency. Where it was hidden, how it was carried, who had to be greased. But that’s not the point, it doesn’t matter where they hide the money, because they can’t be discovered if no one says anything. And who’s going to say anything if everyone’s in on it: the farmers, the ranchers, the auctioneers, the brokers who trade in grains, everyone at the silos who keeps prices down.
    Madariaga looked at the Inspector in the mirror again. Croce paced nervously from one end of the tavern to the other, his riding crop in his hand, until he finally sat at one of the tables. Saldías, his assistant, ordered a bottle of wine and something to eat. Croce continued