Target in the Night by Ricardo Piglia

glowing in the afternoon dusk. “Tony had an errand to carry out, that’s why he came looking for us. Once he found us, he went with us to the casinos in Atlantic City, stayed in the luxury hotels, or in flea-ridden motels by the side of the road, we had fun living the life, while they finished arranging the affair with which they had entrusted him.”
    â€œAn errand?” Renzi asked. “What affair? Did he already know about that when he found you and your sister in the U.S.?”
    â€œYes, yes,” she said. “In December.”
    â€œIn December, that’s not possible. What do you mean in December? But your brother—”
    â€œMaybe it was January, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, who cares? He was a gentleman, he never spoke out of turn, and he never lied to us. He only refused to go into certain details,” Sofía said, and resumed her litany, as if she were a child singing in a church choir. Renzi had a flash with that image, the little redheaded girl in church, singing in the choir, dressed in white … “And on top of everything, Tony was a mulatto. The fact that my sister and I were turned on by him scared the farmers around here to no end. You know they actually started calling him Zambo, like my father had anticipated.”
    Tony’s death could not be understood without talking about the dark side of the family, especially Luca’s story, the other mother’s son, my half-brother, Sofía was saying. Renzi tried to get her to slow down. “Hold on, hold on,” Renzi said, but Sofía became irritated and continued, or went back to restart the story somewhere else.
    â€œWhen the factory collapsed, my brother didn’t want to sell. I shouldn’t say that he ‘didn’t want to,’ it was more like he wasn’t able to. He couldn’t imagine the possibility of giving up, of giving in. Understand?Imagine a mathematician who discovers that two plus two is five, and to keep everyone from thinking that he’s crazy, he has to adapt the entire mathematical system to his formula. A system wherein two plus two, needless to say, is not five, or three—and he’s able to do it.” She served herself another glass of wine and added ice, and stayed still for a moment; then she turned to face Renzi, who looked like a cat, sitting on the couch. “You look like a cat,” she said, “plopped down on that couch like that. And I’ll tell you something else,” she continued. “That’s not what it was like, he’s not that abstract, imagine a swimming champion who drowns. Or better yet, picture a great marathon runner who’s in first place, only five hundred meters from the finish line, when something goes wrong, he gets a cramp that paralyzes him, but he keeps going, because he never thinks about giving up, no way whatsoever, until finally, when he crosses the line, it’s already nighttime and there’s no one else left in the stadium.”
    â€œWhat? What stadium?” Renzi asks. “What cat? No more comparisons, please. Tell it straight, will you?”
    â€œDon’t rush me, hold on. We have time, don’t we?” she said, and stood motionless for a moment, looking at the light coming in through the back window, from the other side of the patio, between the trees. “He realized,” she said after a pause, as if hearing a tune in the air again, “that everyone in town had plotted to get him out of the way. Two plus two is five, he thought, but no one knows it. And he was right.”
    â€œHe was right about what?”
    â€œYeah,” she said. “The inheritance from his mother. Understand?” she said, and looked at him. “Everything we have is inherited, that’s the curse.”
    She’s delirious, Renzi thought, she’s the one who’s drunk. What was she talking about?
    â€œWe’ve spent our lives fighting over