The Secret in Their Eyes by Eduardo Sacheri Page A

engineer, and she was expecting their firstborn.
    When Irene returned from maternity leave, it was Chaparro who was gone. It surprised her to learn that her deputy clerk had accepted an open position in the Federal Court of San Salvador de Jujuy, up in the extreme northwest, fifteen hundred kilometers away, but she was given to understand, sotto voce, that Judge Aguirregaray in person had suggested the move to Benjamín. This information was conveyed in a baleful, conspiratorial tone that Irene, even though she wasn’t very knowledgeable about political matters, had no trouble interpreting: at some point during the cold winter of 1976, it had evidently become dangerous for Benjamín Chaparro to remain in Buenos Aires.
    Over the course of the following years, each of them received news of the other in fragments. Chaparro knew about Irene’s continuing climb up the professional ladder: public prosecutor in 1981, clerk of the Appellate Court a couple of years later. In her turn, she heard of his return to Buenos Aires in 1983, when the military dictatorship was in its death throes. He arrived accompanied by his wife, a woman from Jujuy whom he would later divorce. Throughout the decade of the 1980s, contact between Chaparro and Irene was scant, nothing more than a couple of fleeting conversationsafter chance meetings in the street. Irene found out that Chaparro’s wife, the woman from Jujuy, was named Silvia, and that they had no children. He learned that Irene was still married to her engineer and that they had three happy, growing little girls.
    They met again a few years later, in 1992. Chaparro had gone through his second divorce some time previously, and he’d persuaded himself that it would be best for him to live out his days in prudent solitude. Apparently he wasn’t made for marriage. He was over fifty years old. Perhaps the time was right for him to give up women. He was prepared to do without them. What he was unprepared for was Judge Alberti’s retirement at the beginning of the year and the appointment of the new judge, who was none other than Irene.
    When they met face to face, in the same office in which they were now sitting, the two had grinned at each other like battle-tested veterans surrounded by raw recruits. “We already know each other,” Irene said, smiling, and the twenty-five years standing like a protective barrier between Chaparro and the series of dreams that had shaken the foundations of his soul crumbled into dust, with nary a trace left behind. The woman had no right to activate that smile. But she still used “de Arcuri,” the engineer’s name, she was still married, and that was the kind of obstacle Chaparro was disinclined to try to overcome. Not at that point in his life, at least. So he greetedher with a firm handshake and an atrocious “How are you doing, Your Honor?” thus establishing a sensible distance between them. She accepted the boundary, and for the next two years, even though they saw each other eight or nine hours a day, five days a week, they treated each other with reserved courtesy.
    Then, on an ordinary morning, without any preliminaries, Irene started addressing him with the informal vos. It was a Monday, and with the naturalness that marked all she did, she merely said to him, “Say, Benjamín, I need you to help me with the release request for the Zapatas. Could you?” Chaparro could. And they went on like that throughout the following years, until he announced his upcoming retirement. Had she been surprised to hear it? The inveterate optimist that lived inside Chaparro tried to suggest to him that a look of muted sorrow and poorly concealed astonishment had transformed Irene’s face. But there was no reason for surprise; he figured everybody in the court knew about his plans. So was she simply sad that he was leaving?
    Whatever the answer might have been, Chaparro cut his meditations short. He asked himself—he couldn’t help it—whether it would be worth