My name is Sigmundo Salvatrio. My father came to Buenos Aires from a town north of Genoa and made his living as a cobbler. When he married my mother, he already owned a shoe-repair shop specializing in men’s footwear (he never felt comfortable fixing women’s shoes). As a child, I often helped him with this work. Today, people in my profession view my method for classifying fingerprints (the Salvatrio method) with high regard-I owe that crime-solving innovation to the many hours I spent among the lasts and soles that filled our shop. I came to realize that detectives and shoemakers see the world from beneath, both focusing more on the footsteps that have strayed away from their intended path than the path itself.
My father was no spendthrift. Every time my mother asked for a little extra money, Renzo Salvatrio would say that wanton spending would eventually force us to subsist on boiled boot soles as Napoleon’s soldiers had done during their Russian campaign. But despite his frugality, once a year he allowed himself an extravagance: on my birthday he would buy me a jigsaw puzzle.
He began the tradition with a hundred-piece puzzle, and each year the puzzles got more and more complex, until finally they had fifteen hundred pieces. They were made in Trieste and came in wooden boxes. Once they were complete you’d discover a watercolor of the Dome of Milan, or the Parthenon, or an old map with monsters lying in wait at the ends of the Earth. It always took me many days to finish them. My father believed that jigsaw puzzles were rigorous training for mental and visual acuity. He helped me enthusiastically but generally wasn’t very good because he paid more attention to the color of the pieces than to their shape. I let him do it his way, and then I fixed them when he wasn’t looking.
“An investigation and a jigsaw puzzle have nothing in common,” swore Renato Craig, who would later become my mentor. But nevertheless it was this hobby that, in February 1888, led me to answer the ad Craig published in the newspaper. Renato Craig, the famous detective, the only one in Buenos Aires, wanted to share his knowledge, for the first time, with a group of young people. Over the course of a year, the chosen students would learn the art of investigation, preparing them to assist even the best of detectives. I still have the newspaper clipping; the ad was on the same page as a story about the arrival of Kalidán, a Hindu magician touring the country.
The detective’s ad excited me, not only because of what it heralded, but also because it meant that Craig, Craig the loner, was finally willing to allow other human beings to learn his methods. Craig was a founding member of The Twelve, a group of the most elite detectives in the world. It was Craig himself who introduced the term acolyte to The Twelve Detectives as a way to refer to their assistants. During one of the group’s first meetings, in 1872, he explained this designation with a definition from a dictionary of Latinisms: ACOLYTE: said of one that follows another as if he were his shadow.
Every member of the club had his acolyte, except for Craig. In the magazine, The Key to Crime, Craig had often defended his position by saying that acolytes weren’t necessary to a detective, and that the nature of the profession called for solitude. Another member of the group, Viktor Arzaky, who was Craig’s good friend, had always been critical of this assessment. The fact that Craig was now willing to train assistants was a direct contradiction to his previous philosophy.
In order to be considered for the academy, I had to send a letter in my own hand that explained why I was applying. There was one rule: Don’t mention your background; nothing that you’ve done up until this point has any value to me. I asked my father for a few of the pages that he used for his business correspondence, with letterhead that read Salvatrio’s Cobbler’s Shop above a drawing of a patent leather boot. I cut off the top of each page: I didn’t want Craig to know I was the son of a cobbler.
In my first draft of the letter, I wrote that I wanted to learn the art of investigation because I had always been interested in the big crime cases that I read about in the newspaper. But I tore up that page and decided to start over. I really wasn’t interested in gory crimes, but in the other kind: the perfect enigmas, the ones that, at first glance, were inexplicable. I liked to see how-in a disorganized but predictable world-an organized, but totally unpredictable way of reasoning emerged. I had no hope of becoming a detective; just being an assistant was a goal worthy of my concerted efforts. But at night, alone in my room, I imagined myself aloof, ironic, and pure, making my way, like Craig, through a world of facades, discovering the truth buried beneath the false leads, beyond the distractions and the blind gaze of habit.
I don’t know how many nervous, hopeful people sent letters to Detective Craig’s house at number 171 De la Merced Street, but it must have been a lot, because months later, when I was already one of the academy’s top students, I found a heap of dusty envelopes. Many of them had never been opened, as if one glance at the handwriting had been enough for Craig to know if an applicant was unsuitable. Craig maintained that graphology was an exact science. Among those letters I found the one I had sent; it was also still sealed, which left me baff led. When Craig ordered me to burn them, I did so with a sense of relief.
On March 15, 1888, at ten o’clock in the morning, I arrived at the door of his building on De la Merced Street. I had chosen to walk instead of taking the streetcar, but I quickly regretted that decision because a freezing rain, a sign that autumn was on its way, fell the whole way there. When I got to the door I found about twenty other young men, all as nervous as I was. At first I thought they were aristocrats, and that I was the only one who arrived without status, family name, or fortune. To cover their unease they tried to inscribe their faces with the contemptuous expression Craig wore when his picture appeared on the front pages of newspapers or the yellow cover of The Key to Crime, a biweekly serial that sold for twenty-five cents. It was the local version of Traces, the official journal of The Twelve Detectives, published by Adrien Grimas, in Paris. But The Key to Crime was an inexpensive publication of only thirty-six pages, while Traces had the format of an academic journal. Two or three cases filled the pages of The Key to Crime. The cover was yellow, with an ink drawing that showed either an illustration of one of the detectives, or the most horrific image from the account of one of the cases. On the last page there was a column titled “In Hushed Tones” where brief notices of the detectives’ lives appeared. I sometimes complained about the rather frivolous nature of this section (it informed readers that Detective Castelvetia was keen on snuff, that Rojo spent quite a bit of time investigating the brothels of a certain Madrid neighborhood, or that Caleb Lawson had finally broken off his engagement) but I very much enjoyed reading it.
Surprisingly, Craig himself answered the door. We were expecting some sort of butler who served as a buffer between the detective and the world. We were so disconcerted that, instead of going in, we each made way for the others to enter first. The comedy routine would have continued for hours if Craig hadn’t grabbed hold of the first arm he found and pulled it inside. Immediately, we all followed in a line, as if we were tied together by a rope.
I had read about that house in The Key to Crime. Having no assistant, Craig wrote about his adventures himself; in these stories his vanity transformed the house into a temple of knowledge. The other detectives maintained a dialogue with their adherents, who served as the voice of the common man. Craig had these conversations with himself, asking the questions and providing the answers, giving the impression that he was quite insane. He depicted himself in the solitude of his study, admiring his collection of Flemish watercolors or cleaning his numerous weapons: daggers hidden in fans, pistols in Bibles, and swords in umbrellas. His favorite secret weapon, of course, was his cane, which appeared in many of his stories: its lion-shaped handle had cracked open more than one head, its retractable stiletto had rested, threateningly, on the carotid artery of numerous suspects, and its resounding shot had cut through many a night. One hardly needed to carry anything else. Inside, we went through the rooms searching the high walls, furniture, and mantelpieces for those weapons and instruments, which to us were like the Holy Grail, Excalibur, or the Mambrino’s helmet of detective work.
For me, going into that house was like visiting a sacred site. When you actually encounter that which you have always dreamed of, the details aren’t as important as the fact that it’s real, that it is dense and limited, without that intangible tendency to shape-shift that dreams have. It is delightful when the fantasy becomes real, but disappointing that it means the fantasy must come to an end.
Craig lived with his wife, Margarita Rivera de Craig, but their residence had that damp coldness of empty houses, a feeling that was enhanced by the unfurnished rooms and bare walls. Fifteen years earlier they had lost a child, only a few months old, and it seemed as though they had abandoned most of the house. The Craigs’ bedrooms were on the third f loor and his study was on the first. It was carpeted, and had a huge desk that held a Hammond typewriter, which at that time was a novelty. Other than that, there were just empty halls and vacant rooms. For a moment I had the impression that Craig decided to set up the academy just to vanquish the lonely dampness of that house; it was too big for the servants they had: Angela, a Spanish woman from Galicia that took care of the kitchen, and a maid. Angela barely spoke to Craig, but twice a week she made rice pudding with cinnamon, his favorite dessert, and she always eagerly awaited Craig’s approval.
“Not even in the Progress Club do they make rice pudding this good. I don’t know what I’d do without you,” said the detective. And that was the only time he ever addressed her.
The cook had abrupt mood swings, as if the power the house held over her was sporadic. Sometimes she would sing old Spanish songs at the top of her lungs as she dusted, so loudly that Señora Craig would scold her. Angela either didn’t hear the reprimands or she just pretended that she couldn’t. Other times, she took on a resigned, defeated attitude. When she opened the door for me in the mornings I remarked on the weather, and no matter what it was she took it as a bad omen.
“It’s awfully hot. That’s not a good sign.”
Or if it was cold, she’d say, “Too cold. That can’t be good.” And if it was neither hot nor cold: “On a day like this a person doesn’t know what to wear. Bad omen.”
Drizzle, rain, lack of rain, storms, long periods without any storms, any climatic condition would get the exact same condemnation from Angela.
“Up until yesterday, we were having a drought. Now comes a flood.”
That first day, one of the happiest of my life, Craig spoke to us about his method. But his talk seemed designed to discourage us; he listed obstacles, described failures, probably to weed out those of us who weren’t truly dedicated to that occupation which required endless patience. But none of us could hear the language of defeat, because no matter what happened during our training period, even the bad things, this was all an adventure we yearned to have. He could really scare us only by threatening us with a normal life-practicing law, responsible parenthood, going to bed early. All twenty-one of us who showed up that first day came back the next, and the next. The big, empty house began to fill up. Craig ordered new things that arrived constantly. He seemed to have the irrational idea that the accumulation of things was meant to contribute to the cult of reason. From the very beginning Craig’s teachings were destined to alert me to that ambiguity: it is in the moment when we are thinking most clearly that we are closest to madness.
Only Angela, the cook, dared to confront Craig, reproaching him for the baskets overf lowing with filth and all the horrible things that were filling the house. The cook challenged him:
“I’m expecting a letter from my cousins in Lugo. When it comes, I’m leaving. And good-bye rice pudding.”
But he paid her no mind.
Craig gave classes in the morning. At that time of day his voice was filled with a self-confidence that was tempered over the course of the day. Sometimes he preferred to take us out on a field trip, always at night, to some place of ill repute where a woman’s throat had been slit, or the hotel room of the latest suicide.
“Suicide is the great mystery, even more than murder,” Craig told us. “Every city has a stable suicide rate. It doesn’t vary according to economic circumstances or historic events; it’s a disease of the city itself, not of individuals. No one commits suicide in the countryside; it’s our buildings that transmit the horrible infection and irresponsible poets who celebrate it.”
The first time we went into the room where a suicide had taken place we hung back, letting Craig and the corpse take over the scene. The dead man was dressed in his Sunday best and had tidied up the room before drinking the liquid from a small blue glass bottle.
From the middle of the room, Craig invited us to take a closer look.
“Look at this man’s expression, notice how he carefully neatened his room, how he packed his suitcase before taking the poison. Hotel rooms, guesthouses, never has loneliness been so complete. Suicides are drawn to one another; if there is a suicide in a hotel it leaves a mark on that building, and there’ll be another at that location the next month. Soon there’ll be hotels devoted solely to these impatient travelers.”
We learned that the key to solving a crime wasn’t in the larger picture but in the symmetry of blood droplets, the hairs stuck to the f loorboards, the crushed cigarette butts, or under the fingernails of the dead. We went over everything with a magnifying glass. Tiny places became enormous, distorting all of life.
Sometimes Craig’s old friends also taught us. Among them was Aquiles Greco, the great phrenologist, a tiny doctor with nervous tics, whose hands trembled as if they had a life of their own. They were like small animals, anxious to leap onto your face in order to feel your cheekbones or your superciliary arches or to estimate, just by touch, the circumference of your skull. He always reminisced about the years he had worked at the University of Paris with Prospère Despines, the illustrious but forgotten mentor of Cesare Lombroso. Greco had us pass skulls from one hand to the other, palpating the protuberances and noting the murderers’ frontal sinuosity, their prognathism, their prominent jawbones and f lattened foreheads. With our eyes closed and our fingers moving we had to answer the question: Thief, murderer, or con man?
I once shouted out “Murderer! ” and Greco responded, “Even worse. That’s the skull of a Jesuit.”
The visits to the morgue weren’t as pleasant. Dr. Reverter, who was tall and had the parsimonious and melancholic character of those born under the sign of Saturn, would cut open the cranial lid and show us the encephalic mass, teaching us to recognize the many calluses and marks on murderers’ brains.
“Their future crimes are written here, from the moment of their birth. If we had some apparatus that allowed us to see people’s brains, we could arrest those who bear these marks before they committed their crimes, and murder would disappear.”
At that time physiology was a main focus of criminology, and doctors and policemen dreamed of a science that could separate the innocent from the reprobate. Today it has lost all of its scientific value, and even mentioning Lombroso’s name in an auditorium-and I have often done so-is enough to set off derisive laughter. Today’s dismissive mockery is just as irresponsible as the blind faith of the past. After more than twenty years of tracking down murderers, my experience has shown me that fate’s signs do show on our faces; the problem is that there isn’t one single system for interpreting them. Lombroso didn’t err when choosing his field of study; his error was in believing that all those clues hidden in faces and hands were subject to only one interpretation.
Did Craig believe in physiognomy or any other variant of criminal physiology? That was hard to say; the murders that interested him most were the ones that left traces only at the crime scene.
“Those easily identifiable criminals-the ones with prominent ears and protruding eye sockets and enormous hands, for them there’s the police. For the invisible murderer, the murderer that could be any one of us, that’s for me.”
Sometimes when Craig mentioned one of The Twelve Detectives in passing, we found the courage to ask him questions about how the association was founded, about its unwritten rules, and about the few occasions in which some of the members had gotten together. Craig answered the questions vaguely, with annoyance and we attempted to fill in the blanks later, among ourselves. We repeated the names as if we were memorizing them, as if we were studying a particularly difficult lesson. The most famous detectives in Buenos Aires-The Key to Crime always published stories of their adventures-were Magrelli, also known as the Eye of Rome, the Englishman Caleb Lawson, and the German Tobias Hatter, a native of Nuremberg. The magazine often reported the frequent conf licts between the two men who both wanted the title of Detective of Paris: the veteran Louis Darbon, who considered himself the heir to Vidocq, and Viktor Arzaky, a Pole and Craig’s good friend, who had settled in France. Even though his cases weren’t published very often, the Athenian detective, Madorakis, was one of my favorites. The way he solved crimes made it seem that he wasn’t just accusing one particular criminal, but the entire human race.
Buenos Aires ’s Spanish community closely followed the exploits of Fermín Rojo, a detective from Toledo, who had such extraordinarily entertaining mishaps that the murders themselves were beside the point. Zagala, a Portuguese detective, was always by the sea: interrogating the fierce crewmembers of boats lost in the fog, searching the beach for remains of inexplicable shipwrecks, solving “locked cabin” cases.
Novarius, Castelvetia and Sakawa rounded out The Twelve Detectives. In our imagination we associated Jack Novarius, the American detective, with legendary cowboys and gunmen. The meticulous Andres Castelvetia, who was Dutch, crawled into dusty corners without ever dirtying his white outfit. We didn’t know a thing about Sakawa, the inscrutable detective from Tokyo.
We repeated those names behind Craig’s back. The nebulous subject of The Twelve Detectives was not on his syllabus. He preferred that we learn law, taught by Dr. Ansaldi, a former classmate of Craig’s at the Colegio San Carlos. Ansaldi explained that law was a narrative practice. Lawyers tried to compose a story-one of innocence or of guilt-and make it seem the only possibility, taking advantage of the conventions of the genre and of human nature, which was so eager to confirm its prejudices. Our fellow students Clausen and Miranda, both sons of lawyers, were the only ones who didn’t sleep through the law classes, and, in fact, they eventually became lawyers. The rest of us didn’t care for that stagnant world, filled with unreadable books, lived behind a desk. To us it was diametrically opposed to the danger and intellectual excitement promised by detective work. Even Craig hated law.
“We detectives are artists, and lawyers and the judges are our critics,” he would say.
Trivak, the only student whom I became friends with, had read Thomas De Quincey in his father’s Edinburgh Gazette collection, and dared to correct him.
“The murderers are the artists, and the detectives their critics.”
Craig was silent, preferring to save his response for later. Trivak was the boldest of the group, and when Craig hid clues around the house, one of his endless exercises, Trivak got closer to solving the mystery than anyone else. It was rumored that in one painstaking pursuit he hadn’t even stopped at Señora Craig’s bedroom, but went in and searched through her clothes. Trivak didn’t confirm the rumor, but he didn’t deny it either, saying, “There should be no limits to one’s investigation.”
I suspected that Trivak had started that rumor himself, along with another, more persistent one, that the academy was just a means for Craig to groom an assistant. The newspapers often criticized him for lacking a second pair of eyes to lend credence to his adventures. Craig, along with Arzaky and Magrelli, was one of the most adept and prudent of The Twelve Detectives, yet without an acolyte, he was considered to be somewhat inferior to his colleagues. The Portuguese, Zagala, had Benito, a remarkably agile Brazilian; Caleb Lawson, a knight of the Queen and Scotland Yard’s most famous collaborator, had Dandavi, the Hindu, who followed him everywhere, sometimes putting false leads and real dangers in his path just to create a more exciting tale to tell. Arzaky, who competed with Louis Darbon for the title of Detective of Paris, had old Tanner as his helper. Tanner’s health had been compromised by so many rigorous adventures that now, stooped over, consumptive, and with his days numbered, he spent most of his time in his tulip garden and assisted Arzaky only by mail.
The idea that Craig had set up an entire academy just to find himself an acolyte wasn’t preposterous, and it filled us with an enthusiasm that we didn’t dare admit to one another. By then, several students had quit, terrified by the unknown world that detective work had revealed. Attending the execution, by firing squad, of the anarchist Carpatti, who, even when riddled with bullets, continued to spit insults at his executioners, and visiting prisons to meet famous murderers had disheartened those who thought that investigation was an intellectual game, a spiritual puzzle. Of course, none of those who abandoned the academy ever admitted to being afraid or disenchanted. They all pretended that their change of course was due to a recent, sobering maturity; a realization that they wanted to be family men, to follow in the footsteps of their fathers, who were businessmen, doctors, and lawyers. As our numbers dwindled, our hopes grew that we would be the chosen one.
Deep down, we knew that if Craig had really set all this up in order to find an assistant, he had already made his choice. As much as Trivak tried to dampen his sarcasm and impress his teacher, it was Alarcón who was the favorite. Gabriel Alarcón, whose skin was so pale that you could see his veins. Gabriel Alarcón, whose beauty was more befitting a girl than a man. Craig was happy when Alarcón proved to be shrewder than we were, when he could accuse us of missing the logic in an exercise of reason and then demonstrate his absolute superiority. Craig was eager to beat us, but he was even more eager to be defeated by Alarcón, and when from his disciple’s feminine mouth came the words that bested him, then he smiled twice as proudly.
We hated Alarcón for that. We also hated him because his family was richer than any of ours, their fortune built on the construction of ships. He could aspire to be an ambassador or devote his life to traveling and women, and yet he had chosen to compete among us. And he was outdoing us. Trivak and I loathed him more than anyone: I was a shoemaker’s son and his father was one of the few Jewish lawyers in the city at that time. But even as we hated him, we recognized his merits (which far from assuaging our hatred, increased it). Alarcón always followed an unexpected and solitary path. He never asked for permission, but moved through the world as if all doors were open to him. His familiarity with the Craigs was unnerving. He had tea with Señora Margarita every afternoon. When the detective was out of town, she spent hours in his company. He became a substitute-of course, only at teatime-for her husband.
When Craig revealed the solution to the case of the locked room- one that had obsessed the detectives-Alarcón responded, “Calling a murder ‘a locked-room crime’ is the wrong approach to the investigation, because it assumes that locks are infallible. There are no truly locked rooms. Calling it that presupposes an impossibility. In order to solve a problem, it has to be correctly posited. We mustn’t let semantics blue our logic.”
We hated him. We competed among ourselves, not with him. We were fighting over second place, in a race where only first place mattered. On the days when Craig was traveling for a case, things were more relaxed and we went home earlier than usual. Trivak would stare, perplexed, from the doorway at Alarcón, who instead of leaving, would go upstairs, with those slow, almost weightless, steps of his, to accept Señora Craig’s excessive hospitality.
In the academy, on the first f loor, there was a meeting room that was never used. An oval table with chairs around it stood in the middle. Both the chairs and the table were heavy, impossible to move, as if the wood had petrified. We called it the Green Room, because there were branches and vines painted on the ceiling by an artist who had begun his work with patience and diligence and had obviously tired of botany by the end. The exacting calligraphy of stems and veins became a confused mass of branches whipped by a storm. The walls were covered in dark wood, hung with swords, harquebusiers, and coats of arms; it all had a somewhat pretentious air, like the houses of antique dealers. The room looked like the remains of some abandoned project: the headquarters of a Masonic enclave, or a dining room that Señora Craig had envisaged for illustrious visitors who had never arrived. Called one day to convene there, we sat around the table, which was completely empty except for the dust, and Craig spoke.
“Gentlemen, in the last few years you have learned everything there is to know about crime. At least everything that can be taught in a classroom. Life is a perennial teacher, especially when the subject is death. Theoretical knowledge has its limits. Beyond those limits lies intuition, which is not something supernatural, as our friend Trivak, future member of the spiritualist brotherhood, insists. Rather it is the sudden relationship that we establish with other hidden, less dominant realms of knowledge. To intuit is to retrieve subconscious memories, which is why experience is the mother of intuition. It is nothing more than a specialized type of memory. Its goal is to find a pattern, connect the dots of this chaotic life.”
Distracted, I let my finger trace my name in the thick layer of dust that covered the table.
“For a while now I’ve been waiting for a suitable practice case to present itself, and now I have it.”
Craig spread out a newspaper page out on the table. We were looking for some big headline about an honest tailor shot to death, or a woman found f loating in the river, but there was only an ad for the performances of the magician Kalidán, the same magician who had been touring in the city when Craig announced the launch of his academy. At that time great magicians often came through our city, though now it’s not so common. Various types of phantasmagoria were popular in Europe and the public filled the theaters to see skeleton battles, luminous ghosts, decapitated bodies that spoke, and other marvels created with smoke and mirrors.
“For some time now I have noticed that this magician’s tours seem to coincide with murders and disappearances. The victims are always women: in New York a chorus girl disappeared, in Budapest a f lower vendor, in Montevideo a cigarette girl was found exsanguinated. The Berlin police questioned him in the death of a nurse, but they couldn’t prove anything. The few corpses that have been found (because our killer always tries to either hide or destroy the bodies) revealed that he drained the victims’ blood and then washed them with bleach. He always performs this purification ritual.”
Craig explained the case detachedly; six of us cracked our knuckles, angered by the crime. Only Alarcón responded to the tale with equal indifference. They both approached the challenge without emotion.
“Kalidán will be in the city for fifteen more days. Then he continues on to Brazil and we won’t have anything to investigate. I’ll continue explaining the case, and I’ll stress the importance of distinguishing coincidence from inevitability, but those of you who are any good will leave me here talking to myself, you’ll leave Detective Craig raving alone in this dusty room.”
All six of us rushed to the door, but by that time Alarcón had already disappeared.
We bought tickets for the performance and settled into the dilapidated seats of the Victoria Theater. We wanted to find some connection between the illusions with swords and guillotines in the magician’s show and real murders. But he joked as he did his tricks, far from the gravity that we, in our inexperience, expected from a murderer. Instead of exaggerating the mysterious air lent by his name and his sleight of hand, Kalidán joked about his fake exoticism.
After that first encounter, we each came up with our own strategy. Trivak pretended to be a journalist from The Nation and went to interview him in his dressing room. Miranda seduced an usherette and was able to go through his Chinese screens, boxes with holes for housing swords, and even the trunk with Edgar Allan Poe’s cut-off hand, which on stage tirelessly wrote the refrain of “The Raven.” Federico Lemos Paz had his uncle, who owned the Ancona Hotel where the magician was staying, employ him as a bellhop so he could search for clues in his room. At dusk we met in a corner café near the theater to exchange news of our progress, which wasn’t much. The only one who didn’t come to our meetings was Alarcón. Jealous and tormented, we imagined that Craig had sent him on a more important mission, while he distracted us with the magician’s games. Since we didn’t trust each other, we kept the information we thought most essential to ourselves and we reported irrelevant details with an air of secrecy and revelation. It was my job to search Craig’s archive.
The more progress we made, the more convinced we were that the fake Hindu, who was actually Belgian, was guilty, and that he hadn’t been caught because he always chose inconsequential victims, the daughters of immigrants, lonely girls whose bodies no one claimed.
After a week had passed, we met in the Green Room to present our findings. Our fingerprints were still there on the dusty table, a reminder of the last meeting. We listed the facts we had been able to prove, and we bragged about our various ruses to get into the magician’s life and spy on his past. Craig, bored, pretended to listen. Occasionally he would congratulate someone on his inventiveness (he liked that Lemos Paz had passed himself off as a bellhop, he recognized that my archive search had been methodical and responsible) but his congratulations were so insipid, so apathetic, that we would have preferred he shout out a reprimand or some sign of contempt.
Only when he started to speak did he seem to emerge from his melancholy state. He heard the sound he liked best: his own voice.
“Detective work is an act of thinking, the last corner in which the philosopher seeks refuge. We are logic’s last hope. Which is why I ask that you accord the clues their true place, without exaggerating their importance. The correct interpretation of a f lower petal can be more valuable that the discovery of a blood-covered knife.”
As he spoke, baff ling us, Craig looked toward the door. He was expecting Alarcón, waiting for his prize student to make an entrance that would relieve him of having to hear more, and relieve us of our awkward attempts to impress him. He was waiting for Alarcón to come in and deliver definitive proof. It was late and we began to leave; finally Trivak, Craig, and I were left there alone. To lighten the atmosphere, Trivak said that surely Craig had sent Alarcón on one of the good cases, a “locked-room” crime (which at the time was considered the non plus ultra of criminal investigation), while keeping us distracted with the fake Hindu magician. Without taking his gaze off the door, Craig responded, “Every murder is a ‘locked-room’ case. The locked room is the criminal’s mind.”
After a tour through the cities of Tucumán and Córdoba, Kalidán the magician returned to the Victoria Theater for four farewell performances. We were there, and we saw that the magician’s assistant-a tall and extraordinarily thin girl, who herself seemed to be another artful trick of catoptrical magic- had been replaced by a young man who wore the blue uniform of an imaginary army. The new assistant was none other than Alarcón, who operated the machinery, moved the screens, offered himself as a human target for the dagger trick, and allowed his skull to be hooked up to some cables that led to a strange machine. That machine supposedly projected the assistant’s thoughts onto a white screen: we saw some fish, some coins that dropped and were lost, the naked silhouette of a woman who seemed to me to be the exact replica-though I didn’t dare mention it to anyone-of Señora Craig. Alarcón had gotten further than anyone; he was working with the magician. It made our clumsy attempts to get information seem like child’s play.
We continued meeting in the academy’s rooms, but we were disheartened. We expected Craig to finally release us from the course, from the obligation, from our hopes. Craig had his acolyte and there was no reason to go on. But the detective still taught us, and he never mentioned any need for an assistant.
In the following days, Alarcón still hadn’t returned to the academy and Craig asked us if we knew anything about his whereabouts. His questions surprised us, because we thought that it was Craig, not us, who was in contact with Alarcón. The performances at the Victoria Theater had ended and the newspapers announced that the magician was traveling to Montevideo.
One afternoon, after class, Craig handed me a wad of bills and told me to go to Montevideo that same night.
“No one has heard from Alarcón, and his family is beginning to worry,” he said to me in a hushed voice.
“I’m sure he’s found something and wants to surprise you.”
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s to hate surprises.”
That night I crossed the river on a steamship; the boat’s movement kept me awake. In the morning, I bought an orchestra seat for that day’s show at the Marconi Theater. First a pianist played a piano that sounded like brass, and then there was some sort of duel between two actors, dressed as gauchos, that each represented one side of the River Plate. That was when I fell asleep. When I woke up, Kalidán’s show was about to end. I only saw a little of it, but enough to know that Gabriel Alarcón had been replaced by a black girl, whose skin was slathered with some kind of oil that sometimes made her look like a statue.
I telegraphed Craig to tell him the news. He came to the city the next day and got a room at the Regency Hotel, which had a few pool tables at the back: in those days the game was new and was played according to the Italian rules. Craig listened in silence to the account of my inquiries, while he drank one brandy after another.
After the performance we went to the magician’s dressing room. Kalidán received us wrapped in a golden robe and smoking an Egyptian cigarette. Craig entered timidly and indecisively; I couldn’t tell if it was a brilliant act or if the detective actually felt intimidated by the magician.
“I’m a private detective; I’ve been sent by the Alarcón family.” “I know very well who you are. You are one of the founding members of The Twelve Detectives. I’ll never forget the Case of the Severed Hand, and how, based on a bit of wine left in a glass…”
Craig didn’t let him continue. “The family’s youngest son, Gabriel Alarcón, whom you hired as an assistant, has disappeared.”
Kalidán didn’t seem to be alarmed by our presence, although he still hadn’t taken off his makeup, as if he didn’t want to show us his true face. He spoke with the affable common sense that is so universal among killers, at least according to the pages of The Key to Crime.
“I hired a young man for five performances, but he wasn’t named Alarcón. He said his name was Natalio Girac. I don’t ask a lot of questions. In show business, everybody has a fake name. My real name, as you can imagine, is not Kalidán, and I’m not actually from India. I’m used to doing my act with a woman, but the assistant I had got sick and Girac replaced her very well. I gave him a good tip. I would have liked to bring him with me, but Sayana, the woman you saw, was waiting for me here in Montevideo. We have worked together before. The audience comes to see her, more than me, and I couldn’t disappoint them.”
For years I had read accounts of Craig’s cases, in which he bombarded suspects with seemingly simple questions until the distracted murderer made a fatal mistake. On the printed pages of The Key to Crime, Craig was always the absolute master of the situation. But here, in front of the magician, he seemed more like an awkward, frightened policeman who fell for the first lie he heard. He didn’t ask any more questions, he just apologized and then we left the dressing room. I wanted to lie in wait for the magician, so we could see his real face, but he refused. We left Montevideo at dawn. Leaning on the steamship’s railing, we were silent for a long time, until finally Craig spoke.
“Did you notice anything odd about the name that Alarcón used: Natalio Girac.”
“What about it?”
“Girac is an anagram of Craig. And Natalio is the name of our only son, who died as an infant.”
Over the next few days Craig continued to do nothing, in spite of the pressure from Alarcón’s family. If he had a secret plan for finding out the truth, he didn’t mention it. There were many stories in which the detective adopted some sort of indolence, or left town, or acted crazy for a while and then later it would be revealed that what seemed like apathy or delirium had actually been the patient application of a genius plan. But in this case Craig’s revelation was slow in coming.
Gabriel Alarcón was born into a family of boat manufacturers. The Alarcón shipyards supplied the merchant marines of several countries. It was a powerful family and all sorts of emissaries visited Craig in the days following our return, demanding that he find the boy. Craig received them all, and he asked them all for more time to work. The police beat him to the punch and Kalidán the magician was arrested as soon as he got off the steamship that had brought him from Montevideo.
The magician’s capture appeared on the front page of the papers. He had traveled disguised as a Hindu, in his turban and yellow tunic, with shoe polish on his face. Craig gave all the reports we had gathered to the police, but there was no indication of the boy’s whereabouts in them, nor any proof of Kalidán’s crimes. The police interrogated him for fifteen days and fifteen nights. Kalidán, in spite of being driven mad with the beatings, the cold, and the lack of sleep, didn’t say a word. When it was clear that they couldn’t make a case against the magician, they released him with certain restrictions: he couldn’t leave the country, and every four days he had to come in person to check in at the police station.
Gabriel Alarcón’s disappearance marked the end of the Academy. The newspapers, which had so celebrated the detective’s achievements in the past, now attacked him mercilessly: he had sent a novice, an innocent, to an uncertain fate. The other students, pressured by their families, stopped coming. Trivak and I decided to stay in the empty building, as a show of confidence in Craig. We helped classify the pieces from the forensic museum, we cleaned and oiled the microscopes, and we waited in vain for the classes to start up again. Finally Trivak left as well.
“Your family?” I asked him.
“No. Boredom.”
I had a good excuse to stay: the organization of the archive, which Craig had assigned to me months earlier. I would arrive early and go to the kitchen, where Angela served me yerba maté tea and French toast she made with day-old bread. Once in a while I had tea with Señora Craig, and we continued the conversations she had begun with Alarcón. I tried to cheer her up, but each time I saw her she seemed paler, dulled by Alarcón’s disappearance and her husband’s fall from grace.
Tired of the journalists’ attacks, Craig swore he would find Alarcón. He called it “My Final Case,” which seemed to be an admission that something had gone terribly wrong, that he couldn’t continue. He thought it had a dramatic effect (and he was right). “My Final Case” he would say, sometimes even in the third person, “Detective Craig’s Final Case,” and then he would pause reverently. His detractors were now silenced, not because Craig commanded respect, but because endings commanded respect.
During the day he stayed at the Academy, afraid the journalists, the snoops, and those sent by Alarcón’s parents would follow him. There was no way to talk to him, he stayed shut up inside his study, writing in notebooks with black covers. His handwriting was a trail of ants that didn’t know where they were marching.
I thought, at that point, that Craig was beaten; but never stopped proclaiming to the journalists, who were increasingly less interested, to his wife, who had stopped leaving the house, and to me, the only one who listened to him, that he was very close to solving the case. One night he took me away from my work-as I classified his old papers, my admiration for his past and my compassion for his present continued to grow-and he asked me to accompany him to the Green Room.
Without any special emphasis, as if he were telling me of a decision made by someone else, or by simple inertia, he told me that I would be his acolyte.
“But you said that you would never have an assistant.” “The word never shouldn’t exist; that way we would be less inclined to make promises we can’t keep. This title, in spite of our situation, will be handled with due formality and announced to The Twelve Detectives.”
In that moment, mentioning The Twelve Detectives seemed incongruent and at the same time it gave me hope. It was as if Craig once again invoked his power to invent and amaze, reviving all that I believed in. For a few seconds I saw the image of my name in the “In Hushed Tones” section of The Key to Crime.
The detective rubbed his eyes like he was waking up from a sleep that had lasted days and he continued, “You do know this position won’t last long. This is my final case.”
My body tensed involuntarily, and my firm voice complemented my martial stance.
“I hope it won’t be your final case; I hope it’ll be a new start. But if it is, if the day when all the city’s murderers can sleep easy has arrived, then there can be no greater honor than having a small role in your farewell.”
Craig nodded distractedly at my words.
That day I started to work. The magician had already violated his obligation to appear at the police station and had f led the city. I visited all the hotels where he might have stayed. Once in a while Craig came with me. I was expecting the classic dialogue between acolyte and detective to develop between us. The Hindu, Dandavi, who worked for Caleb Lawson, pretended not to understand anything because he was foreign, which forced Lawson to explain everything to him in great detail; the Alsatian Tanner spoke in almost a whisper, and only raised his voice when Arzaky surprised him with a brilliant revelation; Fritz Linker, assistant to Tobias Hatter, the detective from Nuremberg, asked such obvious questions that he could easily be taken for an idiot. All the other detectives talked to their assistants, but we proceeded in silence. I rehearsed silly phrases, I was taken in by obvious ideas, by the luster of appearances, and I always had a cliché on the tip of my tongue, leaving room for Craig to dazzle me with the secret logic of his thinking. But the detective never spoke, and we walked through the night as if there was nothing more to be said.
The owner of the Victoria Theater, a tremendously fat man who had been a tenor in his youth, let us poke around, afraid that the criminal notoriety of the artist would bring him problems with the law. The theater was a labyrinth that not even he knew very well; the basement levels and the wings stored sets from old shows. In the half-light we banged up against Venetian bridges, plaster storks, and Chinese palaces. Whispers could be heard at the back of the endless basement, as if not only sets were stored there, but the entire casts of forgotten plays as well.
Renato Craig went about looking for clues, but it was clear that his despondency was preventing him from carrying out an in-depth investigation. It was no secret that Craig hated theaters, a dislike that was well known to all the students at the Academy, and even to any reader of The Key to Crime. Although he is remembered as the first detective in Buenos Aires, Renato Craig was actually the second. The first one was named Jacinto Vieytes, and he was a tracker who came here to live after some resounding triumphs in his detective work. Vieytes managed to apply trail guide methods to urban crime. And while his skills, when employed in hotel rooms, society halls, and railroad stations, didn’t yield such spectacular results as when he was studying hoofprints, trails in the grass, or bonfire remains, the police often called him to study crime scenes. He liked to have people around, for him to dazzle with his deductive reasoning, which was half logic and half old country proverbs. An Italian theater impresario realized that he could use the fact that the tracker was such a character to his advantage and he organized a performance for him at the Argentine Theater. Vieytes shared a billing with Frank Brown, the clown. The theatrical representation of his skills cost him all credibility; the audience thought he had always been just an actor. Although he knew that Vieytes had real talent as a detective, Craig felt that his performance diminished the art of investigation. The detective hated theaters because they reminded him of his predecessor’s show, as well as the danger of turning the lonely act of reasoning into an empty spectacle. When he worked as a detective, Vieytes never had an acolyte but when he entered show business, he decided to have an actor play the part of the common man who expressed his foolish opinions as a lead-in to the detective’s brilliant conclusions.
So the heavy work was left to me. With my magnifying glass I traced the f loorboards of the dressing room in search of a letter, some scrap of paper, or even a hair. Beneath a trunk of such enormous dimensions that it couldn’t have fit through the door I found a receipt for the purchase of a boat crossing. I showed it to Craig.
“He’s left the country, sir. Here’s the receipt for a ticket on the Goliardo, which left port a week ago.”
Craig held up the receipt and studied it under the magnifying glass.
“It seems to be genuine, but I’m afraid Kalidán bought the passage just to throw us off track. I’m sure that if we pay a visit to the shipping company they’ll tell us that cabin berth remained empty.”
Craig turned the paper over. He studied the footprint on the edge.
“Kalidán pushed the paper under the trunk with his foot. Here is the mark. You’re a shoemaker-”
I was surprised Craig knew that about me. I had never told him.
“The son of a shoemaker.”
“But you can tell me what type of shoe it is.”
I didn’t take me more than a few seconds to come up with a response.
“It’s the print from a sailor’s shoe.”
“Are you positive?”
I pointed to the pale lines on the paper. I was happy to be able to show Craig something, although I wasn’t convinced that it was something he didn’t already know.
“It is a shoe with wide lasts, and grooves to grip the deck’s slippery surface. I think he disguised himself as a sailor so he could blend in with the crew and not be discovered.” I didn’t really believe that was true, but it seemed like an appropriate comment for an assistant to make.
Craig accepted my effort and then said victoriously, “That’s not it at all. He dressed up as a sailor so he could find lodging at the port and wait until things calmed down before leaving the city. He could easily support himself with his skill at cards.”
Craig’s face was well known in the city, and he didn’t like disguises, so it was up to me to scour the disreputable bars in the port area. In these places with stagnant air and weak light, sailors tried to escape the tedium of their travels with the tedium of terra firma; they pretended to listen to accordion players who played too slowly, or pianists who played too fast; they pretended to talk to women whose faces, in the light of day or a moment of clarity, would have terrified them. In tiny rooms they trafficked in trinkets, foreign money, ambiguous words, opium, and infectious diseases.
I went into the bars trying to see without being seen. I was searching for Kalidán’s face using an exercise of the imagination: I had to strip him of his Hindu complexion and the bright aura he used to attract attention onstage, and add instead a beard and hats and cloaks and the furtive expression of someone who wishes he could make himself invisible. I tried to strike up conversations with the men who seemed most harmless, but it was hard to trust anyone. A Portuguese man who kept talking about his poor mother stabbed some unlucky guy who had dared to correct him when he mispronounced the name of a ship; a shy, calm dwarf, with a scar across his forehead, ripped into the stomach of a drunk who made fun of his condition. No one punished these crimes. I continued to see the Portuguese guy, and the dwarf too, which made me think that they all must have a few murders under their belts, but since they were in some sort of international territory, no one cared.
I had trouble getting away from the sailors’ unintelligible conversations, the greedy women who went through my pockets, and the police spies who looked at me suspiciously. But two weeks later, when I had gotten used to getting drunk every night, I heard a rumor about a French captain who was winning a fortune at cards.
He played in a gambling den that was above a grocery warehouse. Through the dirty windows movement could be seen, but there was no way I could get in, as two formidable ruffians guarded the entrance. I waited in the drizzle for the fake French captain to finish gathering his winnings and head home. He finally came out, sunken into his cloak and beardless. What distinguished him from Kalidán the magician wasn’t his disguise but some sort of inner confidence that he couldn’t be seen, as if all he had to do was concentrate and he would become invisible. I followed from a distance, carefully, imitating drunken zigzags. He didn’t turn to look at me; he walked with sure steps, immune to the effects of alcohol or fear. He was stopped only by a black cat, which he didn’t want to cross his path. Then he went into a dilapidated house that looked like it was about to collapse.
In the morning, so early that my father wouldn’t even have been in his workshop, I went to visit Craig. It didn’t matter what time I stopped by; he was always awake. I told him of my discovery and described the building’s slow collapse; I warned him that in the world of the port nothing lasted long.
“You’ve done a good job. But now it’s my turn. I sent one boy to his death and I don’t want to send another.”
Before the door closed completely, I thought I saw Craig smile, for the first time in weeks.
reporter from The Nation
Five days later Craig brought together in the Green Room the journalists who had defamed him. There was the, pale and freckled, who was never without a pad and pencil, as if at any moment the perfect sentence was going to jump out and surprise him. The journalist from The Tribune was a man about thirty years old, indigenous looking, who affected gentlemanly manners but it was said that when he got some good information, he sold it to the highest bidder. Another journalist, so tall that he spent his life bent like a question mark, worked for a newspaper in Montevideo, where the case had been followed with interest. There were also three people I had never seen before; I imagined they’d been sent by the Alarcón family.
“As I promised, the case has been solved. As we feared, Gabriel Alarcón is dead. His corpse was found in the basement of the Victoria Theater. The police are taking it away as we speak. The body was covered in lime to hasten the decomposition process.”
“How did you find it?”
“I cannot explain methods that would forewarn criminals and teach them how to proceed in the future so as not to leave clues. But I can tell you that Kalidán, as you know him, or Jean Baptiste Cral, his real name, was an epileptoid criminal who suffered morbid attacks, with a pathological fear of growing old. He believed that drinking human blood would keep him young forever. He was so sure that his crimes would go unpunished that he kept a trophy from each one of his victims.”
Craig opened a large, square box, like those that women use to store their hats.
“Alarcón was prepared to stop his crimes and, against my advice, became his assistant. He took advantage of his proximity to search for evidence about the murders; he found the collection of souvenirs from Kalidán’s victims. Unfortunately, he allowed himself to be dazzled by the magician’s skills.”
Craig pulled a dull medallion, a scapular, a bit of lace, and a lock of hair tied with a yellow ribbon out of the box. “These macabre treasures gave Alarcón the illusion that he had solved the case; but the magician discovered what he was doing and killed him. He drank his blood just as he had the women’s. Then he made the body disappear.”
The journalists took notes as fast as they could; Craig had shrewdly called this meeting at the end of the day so they wouldn’t have time to ask too many questions, since they were already due back at their editorial offices. The moment they left, the detective seemed to lose all his strength and he collapsed into a chair with his head in his hands.
It seemed best to leave him in peace, but I had a thousand questions. Didn’t I, his assistant, deserve an explanation of the method that had enabled him to reconstruct the story? Since he didn’t respond to my questions, I put my hand on his shoulder. Physical contact was something that Craig couldn’t stand, but I was experiencing a maddening curiosity, the satiation of which would make even Alarcon’s gruesome murder seem like a gift.
“It’s true,” he said, sitting up with a piqued expression on his face.
36• Pablo De Santis
“The method. The perspective. Following clues. Salvatrio my friend, I am going to give you a lesson on the method that none of The Twelve Detectives can match.”
Overcome by that dark energy that now held sway over him, he dragged me out of the house. We walked at top speed: Craig, the insomniac, went first, with a lit lantern. After an hour of walking in silence I wished we had called a carriage. I made some vague remark and he responded by saying, “Rented carriages can’t take us to where we’re going.”
I was unfamiliar with those dark, disintegrating corners of the city. We passed a fallen tree and then a dead horse. His bones shone in the moonlight. Later that same night I saw something worse, but nightmares are capricious, and it was the horse’s empty eye sockets that haunted me for nights afterward. Farther on there was a shed, which was where we were headed. Craig opened the large door, without a key or a lock. Up high there were some broken windows that let in the moon’s white light. I thought I heard a whisper, but it was the buzzing of f lies.
In the middle of the shed a man’s corpse hung upside down. His feet were tied to a beam with rope. Craig raised his lantern so I could see it well. He was naked and covered in clots of blood. His inert, open arms seemed to retain something of the gesture he had used, night after night, in distant theaters, to elicit amazement. Beneath the body, there was a lake of blood that the dirt f loor was struggling to swallow up.
“He was slow in telling me where Alarcón’s body was. Up until the very last minute he seemed to trust that some trick would save him.”
“What are you going to do with… that?”
“As soon as the sun comes up I’ll go to the police station. I’ve already thought of how I’ll explain it, that I came here following the clues I got from the card players. The police are familiar with the harsh ways they punish cheaters. And thus ends Detective Craig’s Final Case.”
As I left the shed I had the feeling I was being followed by blue f lies. I couldn’t go back alone in the middle of the night, so I had to wait for Craig. I didn’t want to walk by his side. Thirty paces ahead, Craig, with his lantern raised, showed me the way. Even that light, for the mere fact that it had shone on the macabre sight of the magician, seemed to glow with the incandescence of corruption.
I went back to my father’s workshop and applied myself to the cutting of soles, which was my specialty. I don’t know if I mentioned it already, but Salvatrio’s Cobbler’s Shop only made men’s shoes. My father refused to touch women’s feet. He noticed I was gloomy and he tried to get me to talk about it. I implied that it was a romantic problem, just to reassure my father. He smiled with relief, “Once you touch a woman’s feet, all is lost.”
In the days that followed my mother insisted I eat well. She prepared stews with long noodles, zucchini, and beef. I couldn’t touch the meat.
One afternoon a short boy about twelve years old, wearing a blue hat that was too large for his head, entered the shoe shop. He asked for Señor Sigmundo Salvatrio and it took me a while to answer because no one had ever called me “mister” before. He handed me a note written in a woman’s round, careful hand.
my husband is in the hospital, suffering from an unknown illness. i need to send you on one last assignment. i’ll be home all afternoon.
There was no heading or signature, as if Señora Craig feared the paper could fall into strange, enemy hands. I polished my shoes with the black cream my own father made-and which, it was said, also worked as an ointment for burns and wounds-and left the workshop.
The maid opened the door and as I went upstairs, I looked into the sitting room, where papers and dust were piling up. On the top f loor Señora Craig, seated in a white chair, was waiting for me. The table on which she had her tea was like some sort of garden in winter; all the plants that surrounded it were dark and filled with thorns; the f lowers were f leshy and enormous. The maid rushed to bring tea and a sugar bowl. When I opened it and saw that it was empty, I feared that Señora Craig was suffering hardships due to her husband’s illness.
“Please, help yourself,” she told me, and I pretended to serve myself. Two or three white grains fell into the hot tea.
“How is your husband?”
“The doctors can’t find anything. He is sick in spirit.”
“Can I visit him?”
“Not yet. But you can do something for him. The past few days he has talked of nothing else. Are you listening?”
“Of course, ma’am.”
“In Paris, this May, the World’s Fair opens. I imagine you’ve seen pictures in the newspapers of the pavilions, and of the iron tower being constructed. The Twelve Detectives have been asked to participate.”
“All of them?”
“All of them, together for the first time.”
My hand shook and I almost dropped my cup of tea. The Argentine newspapers had followed the preparations for this new World’s Fair in detail, as if it were something that somehow belonged to us. I had read that the Argentine pavilion was larger and more magnificent than any of the other South American ones. Passage reservations had been sold out long ago. But news that the detectives were getting together was more important to me than all the treasures of all the countries, than the paintings hanging in the Palace of Fine Arts,
and the inventions in the Galerie des Machines. I thought that what excited me should be exciting for everyone, and even the tower itself paled in comparison to the detectives’ meeting.
“Will they have their own pavilion?” I asked. For a minute I could even imagine The Twelve displayed in glass cases and on platforms, like wax figures.
“No, they are going to have their meetings in the Numancia Hotel and there, in a parlor, they’ll display the tools of their trade. Up until now, only a few of them have gotten together at one time, at most six, but this time they’ll be twelve. Well, eleven, since my husband can’t go.”
What was I hearing? Craig would miss the first meeting of The Twelve Detectives in history?
“He has to go, even if he’s sick. You could go with him. You and a nurse.”
“My husband was the driving force behind this meeting, along with Viktor Arzaky. They both wanted the art of investigation to be represented among so many other trades. With your youthful enthusiasm, my dear Salvatrio, nothing is impossible, but I know that my husband can’t take the long boat trip. Which is why you must go in his place.”
“I couldn’t take his place. I’m an inexperienced acolyte.”
“Arzaky, the Pole, as my husband calls him, has been left without an assistant. Old Tanner is sick; he plays chess, he grows tulips, and he sends letters. And Arzaky has to prepare the exhibition of the detectives’ instruments. My husband thought that you could go and help him in that undertaking.”
“I have no money.”
“It will all be paid for. The fair’s organizing committee will take care of the expenses. What’s more, my husband won’t take no for an answer.”
I had never traveled anywhere. The invitation both excited and intimidated me. I paused and then said, in a faint voice, “I know your husband would have preferred to send Alarcón. Today is his funeral. Are you going to go, Señora Craig?”
“No, Salvatrio. I am not going to go.”
I took a sip of bitter tea.
“I have something to confess to you. We envied him.”
“Alarcón? Why?”
Señora Craig sat up in her chair. Some sort of vague f lush gave life to her face. I didn’t give her the answer she was expecting.
“Because he was your husband’s favorite. Because he considered him more competent than us.”
Señora Craig stood up. It was time to leave.
“You are alive and he is dead. Don’t ever envy anyone, Señor Salvatrio.”