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it was almost as if I were looking at her as she lay cold and naked on the floor of the bedroom. At last, puffing a little, Falcone stood up straight again.
    “Well?” Báez asked.
    “Raped and strangled. I’ll confirm that later in the lab, but there’s no doubt.” As Falcone spoke, he pulled open the door of what looked like a secondhand wardrobe, chose a neatly folded blanket—a light coverlet, obviously for summer use—and spread it over the girl’s body with swift, precise movements. I assumed that the doctor lived alone, or that his wife made him make the bed. In any case, I appreciated his respectful gesture.
    “The fingerprint crew’s on the way. You think there are any prints left? Or have this pack of loiterers touched everything in sight?”
    “Stop it, Falcone, I’m not that fucking stupid.” Báez defended himself, but he seemed more bored thanoffended. “I’m going to see the husband at his work,” he announced, and then he turned to me. “You coming?”
    “Yes,” I said, accepting the invitation and trying not to let my voice reveal how desperate I was to leave the scene. Any excuse would do.
    The door was blocked by three or four policemen, talking loudly. “That’s enough, goddamn it!” Báez thundered. If an opportunity to chew out his subordinates presented itself, Báez, like all senior police officers, seized it, as if shouting at underlings were an extraordinarily effective and economical way of making them meek and submissive. “Get out of here! Go do something useful! Whoever I catch screwing off gets weekend duty!”
    The cops moved away obediently.

6
    I had a strange feeling when we entered the bank. It was a big, square room with wide, cold marble panels on the walls. Spaced at regular intervals across the ceiling, a series of ancient, glass-shaded lamps hanging at the end of narrow black tubes poorly illuminated the vast room. An unbroken line of tall counters, made of gray Formica and topped by glass panels, separated the area reserved for employees from the public space. A bored janitor was cleaning the glass around the circular openings through which the bank’s customers made themselves heard. I hated enormous rooms, and I thought it must be horrific to work every day in a place like that. I even went so far as to comfort myself by recalling the office of the court where I worked, its shelves crammed with files from floor to ceiling, its narrow passages, its faint aroma of old wood.
    But the strange feeling had to do with something else. As soon as I went through the door, following Báez, I cast a quick glance at the twenty or so employees; even at this hour, when the bank wasn’t yet open to the public, they were already at their desks, absorbed in theirwork. It was as if no one had yet been selected to receive the awful news we were bringing—not, at least, until the guard who’d opened the door for us walked across the room, lifted the hinged section of one of the counters, stepped into the area reserved for bank personnel, and directed his steps toward the desk occupied by the person we’d asked for. I looked from one employee to the next, wondering which of them was Morales. I tried to remember the wedding photograph on the night table in his bedroom, but I couldn’t, maybe because I’d looked at it too hurriedly, or too apprehensively.
    I felt that tragedy was hovering above those twenty lives and hadn’t yet decided to descend on one. A ridiculous notion, of course, because only one of those men could be Ricardo Agustín Morales. None of the others. All of them were safe from the horror we were there to communicate to him alone. But as long as the guard didn’t stop beside one of them as they worked, each of them (each young one, at any rate) seemed like a valid target, a potential victim of fearful chance, a possible recipient (against all odds, past all predicting, beyond all the certainties with which humans bear, every day, the terrifying knowledge