The committee assigned to write the complete catalogue of the 1889 World’s Fair continued working in spite of the war. It originally had three members, Deambrés, Arnaud, and Pontoriero; Arnaud died three years after the fair ended, but Pontoriero and Deambrés are still at it. The original idea was to have the catalogue ready before the fair, then during and finally after; but the catalogue, a quarter of a century later, still wasn’t ready; something that not even the most somber pessimists or the most passionate optimists could have imagined. I mention the optimists as well, since that task became interminable not because of the catalogue compilers’ inefficiency but because of the grandeur of the fair.
So many years later, Pontoriero and Deambrés still continue to receive correspondence from distant countries; sometimes it’s idle, solicitous civil servants, but mostly it’s spontaneous collaborators who want to correct slight mistakes. They are mostly older gentlemen, already retired, whose favorite hobby, besides correcting the catalogue, is writing indignant letters to newspapers. The main problem is how to combine different classification methods: should it be done by country, merely alphabetically, making a distinction between everyday objects and extraordinary ones, or by headings (naval, medical, culinary instruments, etc.)? Deambrés and Pontoriero had published partial catalogues every two or three years, advances on the final version, perhaps with the intention of showing that they were still working on it and at the same time discrediting the fakes that were made for purely commercial ends. One of those partial catalogues, the one devoted to toys, was the basis for the Great Toy Encyclopedia, the first of its kind, produced by the Scarletti publishing house in 1903.
“All of our work consists of avoiding the one word that would free us from all these obligations,” stated Pontoriero to a journalist in 1895.
“And what word is that?”
“Etcetera.”
It is true that the innovations of 1889 that so dazzled us and promised to turn our cities into dizzyingly vertical landscapes are now old hat. Most of the inventions gathered in the Galerie des Machines (Vaupatrin’s submarine, Grolid’s excavator, the artificial heart invented by Dr. Sprague, who turned out to be a fraud, Mendes’s robot for organizing archives) must be stored in a warehouse somewhere, if they haven’t already been dismantled. Meanwhile, the war had shown itself to be the true world’s fair of all human technology, and the Somme and Verdun trenches the true venues for technology to demonstrate its material and philosophical reach.
None of these considerations disheartened Pontoriero and Deambrés, who continued their task on the third f loor of a building of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They had promised to carry on even after their official retirement.
In the second of the partial catalogues, devoted to dual-function objects or, better put, objects that have an obvious use and a secret one, I was pleased to find a mention of Renato Craig’s cane, made of cherry wood with a handle shaped like a lion’s head. It could become a spyglass, a magnifying glass, and a sword was hidden inside. In addition, it featured compartments for fingerprint powder and small glass boxes to hold evidence found at crime scenes; it could also be used as a firearm, although only on exceptional occasions and at a very short distance, because the bullet came out any which way. Because of its wide range of weaponry, one had to be very careful when using at as a cane; one slip could have fatal consequences.
I was given the task of bringing the detective’s cane to the parlor of the Numancia Hotel. After meeting with Señora Craig and accepting her request, I was allowed to visit my mentor in the hospital. I remember the smell of bleach and the checkerboard f loors, recently mopped and extremely slippery. His room was quite dark because one of the symptoms of Craig’s illness was an aversion to light. It was summer and very hot; Craig had a damp cloth over his face.
He moved the cloth from over his mouth to speak, but kept his eyes veiled.
“When you see Detective Arzaky, remember that he and I are old friends, like brothers; we’ve managed The Twelve Detectives, between the two of us, all these years. The others believe that they have always exercised their right to vote, but it never was a democracy. It was a monarchy, shared by the Pole and me. We made the decisions we had to make, because none of the others thought as much as we did about this profession; sometimes we did these things with heavy hearts, still other times we had to pluck up each other’s courage, to restore one another’s faith in the method. Arzaky is in charge of the exhibition of our craft, in the parlor of the Numancia Hotel; but the discussions between the detectives are going to be more important than the exhibition; and even more important than that will be the words whispered in the hallways, the secret laughter, the gestures between one detective and another, and between detectives and their assistants. Each will bring with him an object representing his concept of investigative work: some will bring complex machines and others a simple magnifying glass. I will send along my cane. Open the closet, take it out.”
I opened up a white metal wardrobe and carefully removed Craig’s cane. It was incredibly heavy. The detective’s clothes were also hung up inside the wardrobe, and seeing these garments empty, without any body inhabiting them, I felt a deep sadness, as if Craig’s illness were there, in the wardrobe, in the way he failed to wear his clothes.
“That cane was given to me by a furniture and weapons salesman who had a store near Victoria Plaza. Actually he didn’t give it to me: I bought it for one coin. I had done a favor for the man; I had recovered an old Bible that was stolen from him. I didn’t want to accept any payment so he brought me this cane and told me: ‘There is a sword hidden inside. I want you to have it, but I can’t give it to you. If one gives a blade as a gift, the fate of the former owner is passed on to the recipient. And who wants someone else’s fate? Give me the smallest coin you have.’ And I gave him a ten-cent coin. Since then, this cane and I have been constant companions.”
I carefully leaned the heavy stick against a chair.
“You will be responsible for bringing Arzaky something else as well. I want you to tell him about My Final Case. Only him.”
“The Case of the Cobra Bite?”
On that occasion, Craig had proved that the cobra was completely innocent: a woman had killed her husband with a distillation of curare, and then pretended that it had been one of the snakes that her husband raised.
“Don’t be an idiot. My Final Case. The case that has no other name but that one: the final case. Give him all the details. The real version. He’ll be able to understand it.”
I thought about Kalidán’s body, naked, hanging by his feet. It had been motionless, covered in a cloud of f lies, but in my imagination it swayed slightly.
“I can’t tell that story. Ask me for anything but that.”
“Do you want me to go to church and confess? Do you think detectives stoop to talking to priests? Repentance doesn’t exist for us, nor does reconciliation or forgiveness. We are philosophers of action, and we judge ourselves only by our actions. Do what I tell you. Tell the Pole the whole truth. That is my message for Viktor Arzaky.”
It was the first time I had ever left my country, the first time I had been on a boat. And yet the real voyage had begun the moment I entered the Academy and I left behind my world (my house, my father’s shoe shop). From then on everything was foreign to me. Paris was just a continuation of Craig’s house, and more than once I awoke in the hotel room with the feeling that I had fallen asleep in one of the Academy’s freezing cold rooms.
Following my mentor’s instructions, I took a room at the Nécart Hotel. I knew that was where the other assistants would be staying. While Madame Nécart wrote my name into a thick accounting register, I tried to guess which of the gentlemen smoking in the reception room were my colleagues. They must be the ones who are most discreet, most observant, and capable of collaborating on an investigation without getting in the way. Shadows.
I was accustomed to the large rooms and open spaces of Buenos Aires, so the Parisian salon seemed to belong in a dollhouse. It was one of those rooms that we visit in dreams, where several different places from our waking life converge into a single dream-space: the faux Persian rug, the paintings with mythological motifs, the shaky end table, the fake Chinese desk, everything was incongruent, theatrical. On the stage one must create the impression of life with a motley conglomeration of furniture, saturated with details, but in the real world empty spaces are needed to allow a little breathing room.
I had barely started unpacking when there was a knock at my door. When I opened it I saw a Neapolitan with an exaggerated mustache who brought his heels together with a military click.
“I’m Mario Baldone, assistant to Magrelli, the Eye of Rome.” I offered him my hand, which he shook vigorously.
“I know every single case your detective has solved. I particularly remember the one that began with a nun f loating in the river. She had a letter fastened to her cap with a gold pin.”
“The Case of the Tarot Cards. I had the great honor of assisting Magrelli with that. It was one of his loveliest cases. There was so much symmetry, such balance in those crimes… They were clear, elegant, without so much as one extra drop of blood. The killer was Dr. Benardi, the director of San Giorgio Hospital; every so often he still writes to Magrelli from prison.”
“Would you like to come in?”
“No, I just wanted to invite you to the meeting tonight. A few of us have already arrived.”
“Are we meeting here in the hotel?”
“In the drawing room, at seven.”
I continued to unpack with the feeling that I was taking apart my old life, and that those elements-the brand-new clothes my mother had insisted I buy, Craig’s cane, my notebook, with every page blank-were the pieces with which I would construct a new reality.
I lay down for a nap but because of my exhaustion from the trip-I was never able to sleep a whole night through on board the ship-I didn’t wake up until seven thirty. I went downstairs with my head still cloudy from sleep. Seven of the assistants were gathered in the drawing room. Baldone didn’t seem at all disturbed by my lateness and introduced me to everyone. The first was Fritz Linker, assistant to Tobias Hatter, the detective from Berlin, who offered me an enormous soft hand: he was a dull-looking giant and his lederhosen only accentuated the impression of stupidity coming from his watery eyes. However, I knew very well that his obvious questions, his insistence on discussing the weather, and his idiotic jokes (which drove Hatter crazy) were merely a charade.
Benito, the only black assistant, worked for Zagala, the Portuguese detective, famous for solving mysteries on the high seas. His most celebrated case was the disappearance of the entire crew of the Colossus. The case had dominated newspapers for months. Benito’s skill with locks was renowned and it was said that he used his talents not only in search of the truth but also to earn some extra money, since Zagala had a reputation for being cheap.
Seated in one of the four green armchairs, without talking to anyone, was an Indian who seemed to be concentrating intensely on the spiderweb stretching over one corner of the room. It was Tamayak, whose ancestors were Sioux, the assistant to Jack Novarius, an American who, in his youth, had worked for the Pinkerton Agency. Later he founded his own office. Tamayak wore a fringed suede jacket; his long black hair was pulled back tightly. The jacket was eye-catching, but I was surprised he wasn’t wearing a feathered headdress, or carrying a tomahawk or a peace pipe or any of the other accoutrements Indians usually have in magazine illustrations. The other detectives often criticized Novarius because he preferred to use his fists over reason, but among his many triumphs, he had caught the so-called “Baltimore Strangler,” who had killed seven women between 1882 and 1885. Tamayak had been essential to solving that case, although his account of it, filled with metaphors that only Sioux-speakers could understand, had spoiled the story.
“This is Manuel Araujo, from Seville,” said Baldone, as a short man with a toothy smile came toward us.
“Failed matador and assistant to the detective from Toledo, Fermín Rojo, whose exploits far surpass those of the other eleven detectives,” said Araujo, and he began to recall an episode when the Neapolitan interrupted him.
“Surely the Argentine is familiar with them,” said Baldone. And it was true; I also knew that Araujo exaggerated the detective’s adventures to the point that he had damaged his reputation, casting doubt even on proven facts. The accounts of some of his adventures, which I had read in The Key to Crime, were suspicious to say the least. In The Case of the Golden Hen, Rojo had gone down inside a volcano; in The Ash Circle, he had fought a giant octopus in the Saragossa aquarium. But the most seasoned followers of the Spanish detective said that Rojo allowed his assistant to embellish the tales of his investigations beyond the credible in order to keep the true stories secret.
Sunk into an armchair and looking like he was about to fall asleep was Garganus, the assistant to the Greek detective Madorakis, who stuck out a weary hand to me. I knew that Madorakis had come up against Arzaky on some theoretical aspects of their profession. Craig had told me a bit about their rivalry:
“Every detective is either Platonic or Aristotelian. But we’re not always what we believe ourselves to be. Madorakis thinks he’s Platonic, but he’s Aristotelian; Arzaky thinks he’s Aristotelian, but he’s a hopeless Platonic.”
At the time I hadn’t understood my teacher’s words. I knew that Arzaky’s other rival-his true rival, because his competition with the Greek didn’t go beyond intellectual folly-was Louis Darbon, with whom he vied for control of Paris. Darbon had always considered Arzaky a foreigner who had no right to practice the trade in his city. Arthur Neska, his assistant, was dressed entirely in black and stood in a corner, looking as if he was about to leave. As the days passed I came to understand that he was always like that: in doorways, on staircases, never seated or settled or absorbed in conversation. He was slim and had a youthful air about him, and thin feminine lips that seemed to convey displeasure toward everything and everyone. When I approached him in greeting he didn’t move to shake my hand until the very last second.
Since my childhood, I had followed the adventures of some of these men in The Key to Crime, as well as in other magazines like The Red Mark and Suspicion; and now I was actually shaking their hands. Even though they were assistants and not detectives, to me they were legendary characters who lived in another world, another time, and yet here we were, in the same room, surrounded by the same cloud of cigarette smoke.
Mario Baldone raised his voice so he could be heard over the murmuring.
“Dear sirs, I would like to welcome Sigmundo Salvatrio, from the Argentine Republic, who has come on behalf of the founder of The Twelve Detectives: Renato Craig.”
Everyone applauded upon hearing Craig’s name, and it was gratifying for me to see how respected my mentor was. Stammering in French, I explained that I was inexperienced, and that only a series of unfortunate coincidences had brought me there. My modesty made a good impression among those around me: in that moment I saw a tall Japanese man at the back of the room, who wore some sort of blue silk shirt with bright yellow details: it was Okano, the assistant to Sakawa, the detective from Tokyo. Okano looked to be one of the youngest-he must have been about thirty years old-but it has always been hard for me to guess the age of people from the Orient. They always seem younger or older than they actually are, as if even their features speak an exotic foreign tongue.
Problems always bring us around and keep us alert, but when everything’s going well, as on that night, we forget about possible dangers. They served me cognac, and since I’m not used to drinking, I overdid it somewhat. Modesty began to seem insipid and I thought it was time to highlight a few of my virtues. I left out the fact that I was a cobbler’s son, but I did mention my skill with footprints.
“Those are qualities of a detective, not an assistant,” said Linker. I looked at his too-pale eyes, and I recognized, luckily not aloud, that his imitation of a dullard was perfect.
But he wasn’t the only one who was bothered by what I had said.
“Where did you learn these skills?” asked Arthur Neska, Louis Darbon’s assistant, from a doorway, as always.
I should have kept my mouth shut, but alcohol loosens the tongue and firmly ties up the mind.
“In the Academy,” I said, “Detective Craig taught us all types of investigative methods, including the principles of anthropological physiognomy.”
“But is it an academy for assistants, or for detectives?” asked the German.
“I don’t know, Craig never said. Perhaps he was hoping to train such good assistants that they could become detectives themselves someday.”
I had never in my life heard such a deep silence as the one that followed my words; the effect of the alcohol wore off abruptly, as if their reaction was a splash of cold water. How could I explain to them that it was the cognac, not me? How could I tell them that I was from Argentina and geographically doomed to talk more than I should? The Japanese assistant, who up until that moment had been watching everything as if he couldn’t understand a word, left so distressed that I thought he had gone to find his sword, so he could stab me, or stab himself, I wasn’t sure. Linker looked me in the eyes and said, “You’re new and so we’ll forgive your lack of information, but remember this as surely as you remember that fire burns: no acolyte has ever become a detective.”
I wasn’t going to open my mouth, not even to apologize, out of fear that even my apology would be inadequate. But then Benito, the black Brazilian, recalled, “Yet they always said that Magrelli, the Eye of Rome, started out as an assistant…”
It was clear that he had brought up an old matter that everyone was familiar with-familiar but unmentionable-because as soon as Benito opened his mouth Baldone went straight for his neck, as if Benito had insulted his mentor. He took out a sailor’s knife with a curved blade, and brandished it in the air, searching for the black man’s neck. The German and the Spaniard managed to hold him back.
Baldone had given up on French-the detectives’ international language-and was swearing in a Neapolitan dialect. Benito backed up slowly toward the exit, without turning his back on the Italian, afraid that he’d escape the others’ hold and attack him again. When he was out of sight, Baldone calmed down.
“Maledetto Benedetto.”
Linker, the German, said, almost into my ear, “That is an old, unfounded rumor. There are rumors about all the detectives, but we never repeat them.”
Baldone regained his momentum, asserting, “Of course we shouldn’t repeat them! There have always been rumors, but we never believed them! I’ve heard gossip about every one of the detectives: that this one is a morphine addict, that one learned everything he knows in prison, the other one isn’t interested in women at all! But I would cut out my own tongue before spreading them! ”
Some of the arrows had hit their mark because now Neska and Araujo and even Garganus leaped on the Italian as if they were going to rip off his mustache. Baldone was brandishing his knife again, moving it from one side to the other, in such an exaggerated way that for a moment I feared he was going to end up hurting himself. A statue of the goddess Minerva that decorated a corner of the room received an unintentional thrust of his blade. Everyone was worked up, except for Tamayak.
Just then a calming voice was heard. It was deep and wise, but at the same time a bit slow. It could just as easily make you fall asleep as get your attention. It was Dandavi, Caleb Lawson’s Hindu assistant. In the midst of the argument we hadn’t noticed his arrival, in spite of the fact that his clothes were hard to miss. He wore a yellow shirt and turban, with a gold chain around his neck. He looked at all of us as though he could read what was written in our hearts. He spoke for a long time, his words sketching vast generalizations. I only remember the last thing he said:
“There is nothing wrong with a detective having been an assistant. We are all assistants. And who among us has never dreamed of becoming a detective?”
Those words sank the men into a state of confused melancholy. Baldone, seeing that the others had abandoned their bellicose stances, put away his knife. The tips of his mustache, usually smoothly waxed, now drooped toward the f loor. Some men went back to their armchairs, to their drinks, to the conversation they had abandoned; others decided to go off to bed. I was glad to know that they weren’t so different from me: we all dreamed of the same things.
The tower looked finished, but there was still movement up at the top. The machinists, organized into groups of four, continued to replace the provisional rivets-coldfitted-for the definitive ones, which were heated to red-hot and fitted with whacks from a drop hammer. Over the two years of the construction, there had been plenty of problems: some of them were minor, like the f laws in the protective railing, which was being replaced, and others were more serious, like the labor union disputes that threatened to halt the project, or the problems getting the elevators to go up along the diagonal. In his statements to the press, Alexandre Eiffel seemed more confident about dealing with the engineering problems than with his enemies: the tower had been attacked by politicians, intellectuals, artists, and members of esoteric sects. But one thing was sure: the taller it grew, the more the problems faded into the distance. Now that it was almost completed, the voices that opposed it no longer resounded with the fury that leads to action, but with nostalgia for a lost world. The same thing had happened with the union. It was more difficult to work at a thousand feet high than at a hundred and fifty or three hundred, because of the vertigo, and the freezing winds. But the laborers, so unruly close to the ground, became more obedient the higher they climbed, as if they considered the tower a personal challenge and had reached a place of proud solitude that no longer tolerated the complaints of the herd. Like a good engineer, Eiffel knew that sometimes difficulties made things run more smoothly.
In spite of the fact that the tower was almost finished, there was one enemy that had not given up harassing the builders with anonymous letters and minor attacks. Along with Turin and Prague, Paris was one of the points on the Hermetic triangle, and it was swarming with esoteric sects. All their members hated the tower. The organizing committee for the World’s Fair had been forced to hire Louis Darbon to look into the anonymous letters. Eiffel, the engineer, wasn’t in favor of this investigation. When one of his collaborators made fun of the fanatics, Eiffel defended them by saying, “They are the only ones, with their feverish minds, that have understood us. We are in a war of symbolism.”
The tower was the entrance to the fair: once you passed through the tall door made of iron and empty space, you saw frenetic activity devoid of any hierarchy or central focus. That chaos made you understand the dictionary compiler’s desire to impose alphabetical order on the world’s infinite variety. Everything was being built at once: temples, pagodas, cathedrals. In the streets, carts dragged enormous wooden boxes, decorated with shipping and customs stamps, from which emerged the tops of African trees or the arms of disproportionately large statues. Displaced natives from Africa and the Americas were ordered to build their indigenous dwellings in the middle of the splendor of European pavilions and palaces. But it wasn’t easy to maintain these islands of virgin nature in the midst of all the hustle and bustle and amid the machines: when there wasn’t a hut on fire there was an igloo melting.
The fair strove to re-create the world in a finite space in Paris, but this activity provoked a strange reaction, and the fair expanded throughout the city, infecting theaters and hotels, where glass cases were mounted and treasures were unearthed from basements that no one had been in for years. Even the cemeteries were restored and the now shiny tombs had an air of artifice, as if the old gravestones had been transformed into facsimiles of themselves. I was surrounded by a world without secrets; there was nothing left that could remain hidden. Up until now we had tolerated the dim imprecision of gas lamps; it was the heir to candles and the yellow moon, not the sun. From the tower and from the fair itself, electric light exposed a world without subtlety, without yellows, without shadows. It had the transparency of truth.
In that motley city, I walked toward the Numancia Hotel. After convincing the concierge to let me in, I went down the stairs to the underground parlor, a former meeting place of conspirators and reprobates. It looked at once like a museum and a theater because there were glass-covered cabinets on the walls but also chairs arranged in a semicircle. At the round table sat Arzaky, looking older than the photographs I had seen of him. He rested his head on the table, as if he had fallen asleep. His pillow was a pile of yellowing scraps of paper filled with his tiny handwriting. He was surrounded by the glazed shelves that would soon showcase the detectives’ instruments, but now displayed only the odd newspaper page, dead insects, and some wilted flowers.
The f loor, assailed by the basement’s dampness, crunched beneath my feet, and Arzaky stood up with a start. His alarm was such that I feared for my life, as if the sleeping detective was prepared for a killer’s visit. He was so tall that he appeared to unfold, like a f ireman’s ladder. When he saw me he abandoned all attempts at self-defense, seeing that I was harmless.
“Who are you? A messenger?”
“It would be an honor for you to regard me as such. I was sent by
Renato Craig.”
“And you come empty handed?”
“I’ve brought you this cane.”
“A piece of wood with a lion’s head.”
“It’s full of surprises.”
“It’s been a long time since anything has surprised me. Once you reach thirty, everything’s a repetition. And I’m over fifty.”
He held the cane in his hands, without trying to discover any of its hidden mechanisms.
“He also asked me to tell you about his final case. He didn’t want to write it out, so he asked me to tell it to you in person. And not to let anyone else hear.”
That seemed to wake Arzaky completely.
“A story! Do they all think I can fill up these cases with stories? I need objects, but they won’t give them up. They cling to their investigative methods, their artifacts, their secret weapons. They all want to see what everyone else brings; they want the others to show their cards first. The editors of the catalogue have already asked me several times to give them something, but I’m forced to send them off with excuses. It’s easier to put together a meeting of sopranos than of The Twelve Detectives. Don’t look so distraught, it’s not your fault. Let’s hear what old Craig has to say.”
I was about to start speaking, but Arzaky silenced me with a gesture.
“Not here. Let’s go to the dining hall. This dampness is ruining my lungs.”
I hurried to keep pace with Arzaky’s giant strides. The dining hall was still empty. Hesitant afternoon light came in from the street; they had already begun to light the gas lamps. There were some private rooms in the hall, with wooden tables. Arzaky chose one by the window. The waiter approached and I ordered a glass of wine, but all Arzaky had to do was make a sign that meant “the usual.”
“Don’t start yet: wait until I finish my drink. I have a feeling that I’m not going to like what you’re about to tell me. Good news arrives in the mail; these days, if there’s a messenger, that means it’s bad news.”
The waiter brought my wine and a conical glass filled halfway with green liquid for Arzaky. The detective put a slotted spoon with a lump of sugar on it over the glass, and then poured a bit of ice-cold water on it. The liquid turned a milky color.
He needed to screw up courage to listen to that tale, as I did to tell it. I drank half the wine, trying to show a familiarity with alcohol that I didn’t really have. I started to tell the story. My bad French motivated me to get it all over with quickly, but at the same time I wanted to put off the ending, which I felt I couldn’t possibly tell, so I padded the story with details and tangents. Arzaky showed neither interest nor impatience, and I began to feel as if I were talking to myself.
I was interrupted by the detective’s yawn.
“Am I boring you? Should I make it shorter?”
“Don’t worry. Both fables of just a few lines and newspaper serials that continue for months reach their end at some point.”
The end was near. I described the scene in the shed; I described the magician’s lacerated body, and Craig’s indifference to his own crime. I lacked the words to express the horror I had felt that night. Every once in a while, Arzaky corrected my French in a voice devoid of emotion.
“Craig sent me to tell you this. I can’t explain why. I don’t understand it myself.”
Arzaky finished his third absinthe. His eyes shone with the liquor’s green radiance.
“Now can I tell you a story? It’s a story told by a Danish philosopher-philosophy, as you know, is the secret vice of detectives. A great vizier sent his son to quell a rebellion in a distant province. When the son arrived there he didn’t know what to do, since he was very young and it was a confusing situation. So he asked his father for advice through a messenger. The vizier hesitated, not wanting to answer directly because the messenger could fall into rebel hands and be tortured into revealing the information. So this is what he did: he took the messenger to the garden, he showed him a group of tall tulips, and he cut them with his cane, in one fell swoop. He asked the messenger to relate exactly what he had seen. The messenger managed to reach that distant region without being captured by the enemy. When he told the vizier’s son what he had seen in the garden, the son understood right away and had all the lords of the city executed. The rebellion was put down.”
Arzaky got up suddenly, as if he had remembered something urgent.
“We’ll talk tonight in the parlor. Today’s topic will be the enigma. The detectives and assistants will all be there, although of course the assistants are not allowed to speak. I know how you Argentines are, so I feel obliged to offer you some advice: practice keeping silent.”
I spent the morning writing letters to my parents and to Señora Craig. I preferred not to write to the detective himself out of fear that my letter would be left, unopened and unread, on some desk of the now abandoned Academy. I took several long walks during the day, fighting off the feeling that I was in the wrong place. Craig had sent me to help Arzaky, but the Pole didn’t seem to want any help. I waited, anxiously, for the hours to pass so it would be time to go to the hotel and meet The Twelve Detectives, who were actually eleven, and who would soon be ten.
I went out dressed in a brand-new suit, a wide-brimmed hat, and a vicuña poncho that my mother had insisted I bring. Wearing the hat made me very happy: I had owned it for a while already, but in Buenos Aires I couldn’t use it, because just wearing a hat like that on your head was enough to be taken for a knave and challenged to a knife duel. Since I had taken some fencing classes, it didn’t seem right for me to accept such challenges, and I avoided wearing it so as not to be led into temptation. In Paris the hat had no meaning whatsoever.
As I entered the Numancia Hotel, where the detectives were staying, a tall black man in a blue uniform blocked my way. But all I had to do was say Arzaky’s name and he stepped to one side, almost reverently. I thought that there was no greater glory in life than making your own name a secret password capable of changing minds and opening doors. I went down to the parlor with the pleasure that conspirators must feel with the thought of every secret and symbol that proves they are involved in something beyond the trivial.
The detectives were seated in the center of the underground parlor. Around them were the assistants, some in chairs, others standing. They nodded their heads in greeting, and I responded with the typical nervousness of someone who bursts into a meeting and worries that they’re too early, or late, or inappropriately dressed.
Arzaky stood up and said, “Before we begin, gentlemen, I would like to remind you that my cases are still empty and awaiting your artifacts. This fair is a celebration of your intelligence, not your indifference.”
“We’ll send our brains in formaldehyde,” said a detective whose hands were covered in bright rings with colored stones. From his accent, I guessed that it was Magrelli, the Eye of Rome.
“In my case, I’ll send the brain of my assistant Dandavi, who increasingly does my thinking for me,” said Caleb Lawson. Tall, with a big nose, he looked at the world through the smoke of his meerschaum pipe, which was shaped like a question mark. He was identical to the illustrations that accompanied his adventures.
“What could we display?” asked Zagala, the Portuguese detective. “A magnifying glass? Our work is abstraction, logic. We are the only profession with nothing to show, because our most precious instruments are invisible.”
There was a murmur of agreement, until Arzaky’s voice rose above it.
“I didn’t know I was in a meeting of purists. Magrelli, you have the largest archive of criminal anthropology in Italy, supervised by Cesare Lombroso himself. And that’s not to mention the delicate instruments that you use to measure ears, skulls, and noses. Are they invisible, as Zagala says? And you, Dr. Lawson, you never leave London without your portable microscope. If you only had one I wouldn’t ask you to lend it, but I know that you collect them. You even have microscopes that can be seen only with a microscope! And you’ve been acquiring those optical instruments that let you work in the fog for years.” Arzaky pointed to a tall man, who was winding his watch. “Tobias Hatter, a native of Nuremberg, has given our trade at least forty-seven toys, rumors of which provoke dread in even the worst German criminals. When the killer Maccarius threatened you with a butcher’s knife, didn’t you let an innocent toy soldier open fire? Wasn’t it you who designed a music box whose melody tormented murderers’ sleepless nights and forced them to confess? And Sakawa, where is my invisible friend Sakawa…?”
The Japanese detective appeared out of nowhere. He was whitehaired, much shorter than his assistant, Okano, and so thin he couldn’t have weighed more than a boy.
“Don’t you usually contemplate the stones in your Sand Garden, and the Screen of Twelve Figures, to help you think? Aren’t your thoughts led by the demons painted on the screen?”
The Japanese detective bowed his head as an apology and said, “I like the empty cases: they say more about us than all the instruments we could fill them with. But I know that won’t sit well with all the curious souls who come to visit our little exhibition. I devoted many hours of thought to what I should put in the space allotted to me, but I still haven’t decided. I don’t want to come across as eccentric. I’d prefer to show something more…”
“I know. You, from the East, want to show something Western; Lawson, who works with science, would be satisfied with something stripped of all scientific rigor; Tobias Hatter doesn’t want to be taken for a toy maker and instead gives me nothing. You’re all hiding your secrets and I’m stuck with empty cases.”
I edged close to Baldone and, whispering, asked him to identify the detectives. Many I knew from the magazines I read in Buenos Aires, which compiled their exploits with hagiographic devotion. But seeing them in person wasn’t the same as looking at the ink drawings that illustrated The Key to Crime and Suspicion. The artists usually emphasized one feature or expression yet, in the parlor, each face said many things at once.
Up until now they had all been speaking in a playful, slightly exaggerated tone, but now a serious, impatient voice was heard.
“Sirs, you may be on vacation, but this is my city and I still have to work just like any other day.”
The man who had spoken was about sixty years old, with white hair and beard. While all the others had some exotic touch to their attire, as if they wanted to be recognized as exceptional beings, this veteran detective was indistinguishable from any other Parisian gentleman.
“That’s Louis Darbon,” said Baldone into my ear. “Arzaky and Darbon have both claimed the title of Detective of Paris. But since Arzaky is Polish, he faces a lot of resistance. Some time ago, Arzaky proposed they each take one side of the Seine, but Darbon refused.”
“We understand your situation, and your shock at our appetite for leisure, and we’ll forgive your early departure, Mr. Darbon,” said Arzaky with a smile.
Darbon approached Arzaky defiantly. They were almost the same height.
“Before leaving I want to express my displeasure at the way things are being handled. What are all these meetings that you insist on having? Should we bow down before methodology? Are we priests of a new cult? A sect? No, we are detectives and we have to show results.”
“Results aren’t everything, Mr. Darbon. There is a beauty in the enigma that sometimes makes us forget the result… Also we need a bit of leisure, after-dinner chats. We are professionals, but there is no detective that isn’t also a bit of a dilettante. We are travelers, driven by the winds of coincidence and distraction to the locked room that hides the crime.”
“Travelers? I’m no traveler, no foreigner, God help me. But I am in a hurry, and I am not going to argue with you of all people, Arzaky, over principles or countries of origin.”
Louis Darbon made a general gesture of farewell. Arthur Neska, his assistant, moved to follow him, but Darbon made a spirited gesture that told him to stay.
“Darbon is leaving, but he wants to find out every word Arzaky says,” said Baldone into my ear.
A gentleman dressed in a white suit with bright blue details, more appropriate to a theatrical costume than to a detective’s work clothing, came forward. He clapped with reprehensible affectation; behind me I heard the acolytes’ stif led laughter. I gestured to Baldone, silently asking him who it was.
“That’s Andres Castelvetia.”
“The Dutchman?”
“Yes, Magrelli tried to block his acceptance as a full member, but it didn’t work.”
Arzaky gave Castelvetia the f loor.
“If you’ll allow me, gentlemen, I’ll be the first to talk about enigmas. And I will do so, if you’ll forgive me, with a metaphor.”
“Go ahead,” said Arzaky. “Free us from our obsession with invisible clues, cigarette butts, and train schedules. And don’t be embarrassed: during the day we worship syllogisms, but the night belongs to the metaphor.”
Thus spoke Castelvetia:
“There is an oft-used image that best defines our work: the jigsaw puzzle. It’s a cliché, but what is more like our investigations than the patient search for a hidden picture? We put the pieces together one by one, searching for the images or shapes that remind us of other images and shapes. Just when it seems that we are lost, we find the right piece, giving us a f leeting glimpse of the complete image. Who didn’t do jigsaw puzzles as a child? Who doesn’t feel now, while searching in alleys, beneath the moonlight or the green halo of the streetlights, that we are continuing our childhood games? With a board that has grown more complicated and has expanded to fill entire cities.
“I remember the murder of Lucía Railor, a dancer with the national theater of Amsterdam: she was hanged in her dressing room with a prop rope. Prop revolvers don’t fire, but prop ropes hang someone just as well as the real thing. It was one of the few locked-room cases that we’ve had in Amsterdam. The dressing room was locked from inside, the key was in the door. The dancer was found with the rope around her neck and her body was blocking the door. Since no one else could have entered the room, the police supposed that Lucía had hanged herself using the hook where she usually hung her coat; the weight of the body had eventually undone the rope. It was an unusual suicide, but in that period just forming a hypothesis, as mistaken as it might be, was a big step forward for the Amsterdam police. I asked myself the same question as always: if she was killed, how could the murderer have escaped? For days I scoured the room, as if it were an island and I the only inhabitant. I crawled along the f loor…”
“In that white suit?” asked a snide voice I wasn’t able to identify. Castelvetia ignored the comment and continued.
“First I attended to the small things, then to the imperceptible ones, and finally to those that couldn’t even be found with a magnifying glass. I put the pieces together like a jigsaw puzzle: remnants of tulips on the soles of the shoes Lucía wore in the performance, bits of thin glass, loose threads from a cotton rope, a book of poems, in French, by Victor Hugo that Lucía kept in a drawer. And the position of her body, by the door.”
Castelvetia paused, allowing the room to fall silent. I’m sure that each one of the detectives already had a hypothesis about the case, but they chose to keep quiet, out of courtesy. The only sound was the scratching pencil of a man who looked as if he had slept in his clothes. He was overdressed not only for the room’s temperature but for the entire city’s as well.
“Who’s that guy taking notes?” I asked Baldone. “Castelvetia’s acolyte?”
“No, that’s Grimas, the editor-in-chief of Tra ce s. He is going to publish a synopsis of our talks in his magazine. At least, until the fighting starts.”
At Craig’s house I had seen an old copy of Tra ce s. It was a lushly produced publication, printed on heavy paper, but I still preferred The Key to Crime, with its yellowing pages, crowded typography, and the ink drawings that had made such an impression on me as a child. I still remember the staring eyes of a hanged man, a trunk with a hand coming out of it, a woman’s head in a hatbox…
“And how did the final picture emerge?” asked Caleb Lawson.
“I’ll be brief, and go piece by piece. The bouquet of tulips: the killer, who was her ex-lover, the actor Roddelbach, used to bring her f lowers. The trampled tulips showed that Lucía had decided to break up with him. The little pieces of glass: Roddelbach knocked the dancer out with ether, but the bottle broke and he wasn’t able to pick up all the pieces. The threads of cord: after rendering her unconscious, Roddelbach put a rope around her neck and passed the other end of the rope over the door. The thin cord allowed the door to close easily. Once he was out of the room, he pulled on the cord, hanging the actress. The friction against the door and the frame made some threads come off. Roddelbach had used a very small dose of ether so that the woman would wake up when she felt the pain of the noose tightening around her neck. And that’s how he did it.”
“I don’t see what the French book had to do with it.”
“The book led me to investigate the dancer’s true nationality. Lucía had passed herself off as Dutch to get the job, but she was French, and Roddelbach knew it. He figured that in her state of confusion she would try to open the door, as she would have in her home country: counterclockwise. But the old locks still used in Holland have a reverse mechanism. In trying to open the door, Lucía closed it. It was her final act. Roddelbach was so convinced of his plot’s success that he didn’t even bother to make up an alibi. It was almost as if he wanted to be caught. He thought, as so many murderers do, that the effectiveness of his plan guaranteed that his crime would go unpunished. Yet I have observed that it is often the impulsive crimes, committed in the heat of the moment, that are the most difficult to solve. Roddelbach’s arrogance was the final piece of the puzzle.”
Castelvetia bowed his head like an actor after a performance and returned to his seat.
“A statement can be true or false, but a metaphor isn’t subject to such verdicts. Which is why I will say that your metaphor is, if not false, at least inadequate,” said Arzaky. “In a jigsaw puzzle the image appears slowly: when the last piece is in place, we’ve already known for a while what the picture is. You give the impression of a gradual method, when actually the truth often comes to detectives like a revelation.”
“Speaking of revelations, I had forgotten you’re a Catholic,” answered Castelvetia.
“I’m Polish, and everything that goes along with it.” Arzaky pointed at Magrelli, who raised his hand to speak, like a schoolboy.
“I agree with Arzaky: the revelation of an enigma is not a slow progression, although the path to it requires patience. I hate Milan and the Milanese, but there is a painter from that city named Giuseppe Arcimboldo, an underappreciated genius, whose paintings haunt me. Arcimboldo would paint a disorganized mound of different fruits, or monstrous f lowers, or sea creatures. And within those decaying fruits, poisonous, carnivorous f lowers, or fish, octopi, and crabs, we discover a human face. For a moment we see the objects, and then suddenly the face emerging: the nose, the eyes, the gaze; and then, in the next moment we see only f lowers or fruit. His paintings hang in Prague in the emperor’s cabinet of wonders. I had to look into it because of a murder I’d rather not remember. They look like the work of a magician interested in optical illusions and in the fine line between magnetism and repulsion. That is how the enigma is for us; not a progressive journey, but a leap, a complete change of perspective; we gather details until we see that they trace a hidden figure.”
Magrelli stood up. Baldone, proud of his detective, nudged me with his elbow, as if to say “here comes the good part.”
“Eight years ago, a series of painting thefts shocked Venice. The important families kept very valuable paintings in their homes, but the thief had consistently chosen minor works that hung in peripheral rooms, rarely used hallways, or servants’ bedrooms, works that were easy to steal. When the thefts continued unabated, I was called in. The owners of the paintings were not as upset about the value of the stolen works as they were about the thief ’s persistence. I consider myself an expert in fine art, but nevertheless, no matter how many times I read the list of stolen works, I couldn’t understand the thief ’s motives. A seascape by an unknown British painter; St. Mark’s Basilica painted by some duke’s uncle, whose intentions were better than his results; the portrait of a bishop whom no one remembered anymore; some goats grazing at dusk… (it’s always dusk in bad paintings). I tried to imagine those works and discover something in them, but I wasn’t making any progress. I couldn’t solve the case until the paintings became invisible to me.”
“They already were invisible-they’d been stolen,” interjected Caleb Lawson.
Magrelli looked at him with annoyance.
“But I had filled my head with descriptions of them and they were hanging in the gallery of my mind. So just as I was able to make myself see them, I stopped seeing them. Renato Craig called this the detective’s blindness, the ability to stop seeing the obvious in order to discover what lies behind it. I stopping paying attention to the descriptions of the paintings and I focused on the frames. Again and again they were ornate moldings, the gold worked with bitumen to make it look aged. All the paintings had been framed by Egidio Vicci, whose work hardly varied. I’ll spare you the details: I soon discovered that Vicci was none other than Cornelio Valgrave, famous forger and art thief. Valgrave had stolen the Tabbia collection ten years earlier: a fatal f law led the police to suspect him. Since he knew that sooner or later they would find him, Valgrave decided to place the stolen pieces behind the bad paintings that arrived in his workshop. Behind the bishop’s face, or the goats, or the Venetian basilica, there was a Giorgione, or a Veronese, or a Titian. When the police had him cornered, the thief turned himself in without revealing where the paintings were hidden. The police searched his house and his friends’ and family’s houses, but they never found anything. When Valgrave got out of prison he hired a band of thieves to recover the booty. I would never have discovered it if I hadn’t reversed my perspective. We always have to do this in order to solve an enigma, remembering Arcimboldo’s repulsive paintings.”
There was a low murmuring, I don’t know if it was approval or confusion. By this point, the assistants who surrounded me were bored, and anxiously awaiting the moment they could go back to their hotel. In my mind I tried to match the assistants with their detectives: Anders Castelvetia’s wasn’t there, and never had been; Benito had taken advantage of a moment’s distraction to disappear; the German, Linker, stood his ground; Baldone, in spite of the devotion that he had shown for his mentor, had chosen an isolated armchair in which to fall asleep.
Madorakis, the Athenian detective, stood up to speak.
“I’d like to thank our good Arzaky for the idea of this symposium,” he said, “but according to the rules, we must have wine. The ancient Greeks would never have dared converse with their throats dry.”
Arzaky gestured and a waiter, who was standing in the doorway, went to get drinks. Madorakis continued, “I have heard people talk about jigsaw puzzles many times, but I have never understood what they had to do with our trade, except in terms of patience, something we strive to have but often don’t. With regard to the paintings of that Milanese artist, I’m not familiar with them. My knowledge of art is limited. But perhaps you will allow me to add an element to our conversation, a venerable image that still has something to tell us: the sphinx.
“Oedipus was our predecessor: he investigated a crime that, unbeknownst to him, he himself was guilty of. That is something we shouldn’t forget: we have an eye for that which is foreign to us, but are blind to the familiar. Let’s leave the crime and the crossroads for a moment and focus on the following scene: Oedipus wants to enter the plague-besieged city to find the sphinx, who offers each of her visitors a riddle, an enigma. What is the creature that walks on four legs in the morning, on two at noon, and on three legs in the evening? Oedipus shrewdly answered, ‘man,’ and in doing so finished off that sphinx. That one, and all the others, because we haven’t heard anything from a sphinx since. We can say that as a man, he was the answer, and would also be the answer to the second enigma, the crime at the crossroads. But let me say something more: the sphinx poses questions, but at the same time she herself is a riddle. We ask questions of enigmas and vice versa. Gentlemen, though we want to live in glass bubbles, to use pure reason, to interrogate witnesses without ever being interrogated, we are always surrounded by questions, and we answer them-subconsciously, through our actions. Through our investigative methods, we show who we are. It is us and not the poets, who aspire to live in ivory towers, but time and time again we come down to earth, and we reveal, without realizing it, our worst secrets.
“Sometime around 1868 a rich merchant was killed in an Athens hotel. He was found in his bed, with a knife from the hotel kitchen in his heart. He had been murdered in the middle of the night, and since no one had entered the hotel at that time, it was assumed that the guilty party was one of the guests. Nothing had been stolen, in spite of the fact that the dead man was quite rich and there were plenty of valuables in his suite. The merchant’s widow immediately contacted me for help. I went around to the hotel, where the Athens police were detaining all the guests. Anyone could easily have gotten into the dead man’s room; the spare key was kept in a drawer in the office. There was no danger that the night watchman would wake up; he slept very soundly and opened his eyes only when a bronze bell was rung. Although any of the hotel guests could have been the killer, none of them had a motive.
“I gave the widow a list of everyone staying in the hotel, to see if she recognized any of the names. A glance was enough for her to tell me that only one of the names was familiar to her: Basilio Hilarion, but she couldn’t remember how she knew him. This Basilio Hilarion had stayed alone in a room on the third f loor. I went to see him. He received me kindly and gave brief, but complete, answers to all my questions. He had been born in Athens, but lived in Thessaloniki; he was an importer of South American tobacco, and his commercial interests didn’t compete with the victim’s. They didn’t live near each other either, so rivalry over a woman was unlikely. He said he’d never met the merchant.
“I went to see the widow and tell her about my interview with Hilarion. She still hadn’t been able to figure out who he was. She showed me a trunk that had been locked for years and held the dead man’s entire past: medals he had won in his youth, family keepsakes, school notebooks, wrinkled letters. It was in an old letter that I found Hilarion’s name.
“They had been classmates. Only a few days after meeting they became inseparable friends. But, when he was thirteen years old, the dead man had seriously offended Hilarion, who had sent him a letter in which he seemed, at once, angry about the friendship ending and truly hurt by it. Shortly after, Hilarion had switched schools and they never saw each other again. I mentioned the incident to the widow and she agreed with me that Hilarion was almost certainly innocent. Who would kill someone over a comment that was made when they were thirteen years old? I left her house empty handed.
“You all know the sibyl’s message: Know thyself. I walked back to my house, it was a melancholy walk: those old letters, locked up in a trunk, had filled me with sadness. One day we will all be just a bundle of letters stowed away. I suddenly remembered an episode from my life that I hadn’t thought of in years and which surely, had it not been for this unique case, would never have crossed my mind again. When I was thirty years old, I took the steamship that goes from Pireo to Brindisi. I was obsessed with a romantic problem and, in spite of the cold rain, wanted to be alone at the deck rail, far from the crowd inside. Soon I saw, only about ten feet away from me, another young man who was as alone as I was. He had been a schoolmate of mine, and had christened me with a nickname that I won’t reveal. It tormented me for years. In time, however, I managed to forget everything: the teasing I suspected my classmates of, the boy who invented the nickname, even the nickname itself. The ancient Greeks spoke of the art of memory; but I believe that there is only one true art: forgetting. I had erased it from my mind, but when I saw my former schoolmate just those few feet away, the hatred rushed back to me, intact. He still hadn’t seen me, and at that moment I resolved to kill him. Those crimes that are decided in a split second, ‘crimes of passion,’ are, in many ways, the most premeditated of them all: they take a lifetime to foment.
“My former chum was a scrawny man, and I, as you can see, while short am quite strong. I could easily throw him over the rail and no one would notice. No one would hear his screams amidst the sea’s crashing waves. I was almost upon him when a young girl came running over, calling out to him. My old enemy, who was obviously the girl’s father, answered her call and started toward her. Only then did I realize what I had been considering. My enemy disappeared from my sight and my life forever.
“The hotel guests, held against their will, were finally allowed to leave. Hilarion was packing his suitcase when I went to see him. I told him the story of my trip to Brindisi. He listened patiently, without interrupting. When I finished, he made a gesture of acceptance, not defeat, and revealed the truth to me.
“Basilio Hilarion was having dinner, alone, in the hotel’s dining hall when he noticed that a man near the window was his old childhood friend. Throughout the dinner he watched the man eat and drink voraciously. He, on the other hand, couldn’t choke down anything. Hilarion couldn’t take his eyes off him. He was not as fascinated by this man that devoured everything in sight as he was by the discovery, in his own heart, of a fury that was as alive on that day as it had been forty years ago. And now Hilarion knew that his entire life (the constant traveling that allowed him to escape his marriage, his interest in astronomy, a lover that had begun to bore him) had been nothing more than an accumulation of unreal things, once he compared it to the clarity of that hatred. In that fury there was something pure and true that was more real than his everyday life. That hate was him.
“For many years, the fabric merchant’s offense (Hilarion never said what it was) had given him chronic insomnia. In time he learned to sleep well, but that night his insomnia returned. He realized that, almost as if it were a game, he had to plan the crime: he stole a sharp knife from the dining room and followed the victim to his room, but did nothing. This is all a joke, he told himself when he returned to his own room, I’m no killer. He tried in vain to sleep, but he just tossed and turned. His usual cures were useless: eating an apple, drinking a glass of milk, taking a hot bath, taking a few drops of an amber-colored opiate he always carried with him. All useless. At four in the morning, he slipped past the sleeping night watchman, stole the key, went up to room thirty-six, and murdered his old friend with one thrust of the blade. He felt guilty about only one thing: he should have told him why he was killing him. It seemed fair that the victim know that his execution was a consequence of his prior actions. When he returned to his room, Hilarion took off his bloody clothes, which he got rid of the next morning, and slept soundly.”
“We appreciate the gift of Madorakis’s story,” said Arzaky. “The next time I travel to Warsaw and come across my old classmates from the gymnasium, I’ll make sure not to turn my back on them. Who will we hear from next?”
Tobias Hatter, the detective from Nuremberg, came forward and placed a child’s small cardboard drawing slate on the table. Then he scribbled on it with a wooden stick. Next, as if it were a magic trick, he removed the sheet of cardboard from its frame, and returned it to the table. The scribble had disappeared.
“Last year a manufacturer of notebooks and paper from Nuremberg brought these boards onto the market. They called them Aladdin’s blackboard: as you can see, one can write on them without ink and everything erases immediately. The trick isn’t in the little stick, but in the board itself: it is a sheet that is put in contact with another black sheet behind it: at the points where the two sheets touch, a drawing appears on the surface. Now, if we take this device apart (don’t be alarmed; it costs only a few cents) we see the black acetate sheet. All the marks disappear, but the deepest ones leave a trace on this black page. Some of the erased drawings leave a mark, and those marks together form a secret drawing. Thus, gentlemen, is the relationship between enigmas and their revelation. On the surface, we incessantly gather facts, clues, and words. Who among us can say they’ve never felt apprehension over the vast amount of trivia that crowds our sight? In the theater, detectives always say, ‘Good heavens, the killer has left no clues,’ but in real life that’s not what happens: we are nearly driven crazy by the quantity of clues and the task of sifting through them. And we, slaves to method and intuition, sometimes scratch the surface filled with inconsequential marks-those marks the police earn their salary on-in order to discover the hidden truth.
“I learned the rudiments of my trade in Nuremberg. There is a street in the old quarter where the bulk of the secondhand book trade is concentrated. One of those stores is called Rasmussen’s; I was twenty-two when the owner, Ernst Rasmussen, was shot and killed. His son had been a buddy of mine in the army; we were in the same detail. I had never solved a case, I foresaw a military future for myself, but I was very fond of riddles-which I made up and solved easily-and perhaps that was why my friend called me to help him figure out who had murdered his father.
“Old Rasmussen had died of a bullet to the chest. The killer had surprised him after midnight during a raging thunderstorm. The bookseller usually didn’t work so late, but he had said that he would stay to examine a batch of religious books he had bought from the widow of a Lutheran pastor. Fatally wounded, Rasmussen had grabbed a book with both hands, as if he wanted to take some reading material along on his trip. I asked his son Hans about this gesture, and he responded, ‘My father dealt in all kinds of old books, but his favorites were the children’s stories. He was very fond of the Brothers Grimm, the second volume of the 1815 edition. In spite of his violent death, I like to think that my father was showing a final gesture of his love for books.’
“His son didn’t share that love; he had always preferred less cerebral activities. It was clear that he was destined to follow in the footsteps of so many adventurous types who end up ruining their lives over a woman, or at the gambling table in Baden-Baden. The kind that happily receive the news that war has been declared, because in those distant skirmishes they believe they have found some sort of order, a destiny that they are incapable of creating with their own actions. So Hans knew little about his father’s business, and he couldn’t tell me if anything important was missing. I searched for clues: there was nothing out of the ordinary, except for the muddy footprints left by the killer, the bookseller himself, and the police. I sat in a chair facing the table where the bookseller had been killed and I began to f lip through the book by the Brothers Grimm.
“I know the Grimms’ work well. Nowadays we think of the brothers as inseparable, like a bust of Janus, but during their lifetime they were quite different. Jacob was a philologist who faithfully recorded popular folk stories and sought to publish them just as he had heard them, without worrying that some made no sense. Wilhelm, on the other hand, wanted the stories to be edited, expanded upon, and improved. He didn’t care so much about being faithful to the anonymous voices as he did to the integrity of storytelling itself. And he kept making changes, in the successive editions, each time taking the stories farther and farther from their whispered origins.
“I held the book in my hand, and felt tempted on one hand to be like Wilhelm, and let the story end tidily with the bookseller, fatally wounded and unable to call anyone or write a note, making his last gesture a declaration of his love for books. But on the other hand I felt inclined to follow Jacob’s example and remain faithful to what I had found, the footprints. In that spirit I began to leaf through the volume.
“Books always contain secrets. We leave things between their pages and forget about them: lottery tickets, newspaper clippings, a postcard we’ve just received. But there are also f lowers, leaves that attracted us with their shape, or insects trapped in a paragraph’s snare. This edition had all those things, each marking a different page. Remember the example of Aladdin’s blackboard: the surface is filled with marks, but one has to discover the deeper marks, those underneath.
“And I soon found such a mark. It was a page’s folded corner. In another book or another situation, that wouldn’t have surprised me, but I guessed that a bookseller like Rasmussen would never have folded over the page of a first edition of the Brothers Grimm without a very good reason. So I studied it with particular interest.
“The Brothers Grimm had included some riddles that were taken out of later editions, perhaps because they weren’t exactly stories. One told of three women who had all been turned into f lowers by a witch. One of them, however, was able to recover her human form at night in order to sleep at home with her husband. Once, as dawn approached, she told him, ‘If you go to the field to see the three f lowers and you can tell which one is me, pull me up and I will be freed from the spell.’ And the next day her husband went to the field, recognized his wife, and saved her. How did he do it, when the three f lowers were identical? There was a blank space, to allow the reader time to come up with his own answer. The story ended with this explanation: since the woman spent the night at home instead of in the field, no dew fell on her, and that was how her husband knew her.
“Because of that story I was able to find the killer. The police had identified a suspect named Numau, a man who went from town to town buying up rare books cheaply and then reselling them to the bibliophiles of Berlin. But no one had seen Numau leave the hotel that night. And the police had searched through his clothes without finding anything damp. If any of his clothes had gotten wet in the storm, Numau had gotten rid of them, along with the murder weapon.
“The captain in charge of the case let me accompany him on a visit to Numau. Nothing there was damp: boots or any articles of clothing. But when I searched through his books, Numau went pale: I came across a Bible, printed in a monastery in Subiaco by Gutenberg’s disciples. Numau’s pockets weren’t big enough to protect the book, and it was swollen and wrinkled with moisture. He confessed: Rasmussen had refused to sell that edition; he already had a good buyer for it. So he decided to steal the book during the night. Rasmussen, who was working late, surprised him. Numau got frightened and shot him.
“‘How did you find me? ’ the killer asked before he was taken away by the police. I showed him the volume of the Brothers Grimm. ‘This book showed me that one has to learn to tell the wet from the dry.’ ‘As a child, this was my favorite,’ said Numau. ‘If any book had to bring me down, I’m glad it was this one.’”
Arzaky took Tobias Hatter’s toy and amused himself for a few seconds, making drawings and then erasing them.
“This is like my memory. I erase everything in seconds.”
“But something remains behind on the black sheet, Detective Arzaky,” said Hatter.
“I hope so.”
Sakawa came forward and handed Arzaky what appeared to be an urgent message. It was a blank page.
“What’s this? Invisible ink?”
“An enigma. This is what the enigma always is for us: a blank page.”
“What do you mean?” asked Rojo, the Spanish detective. “That we don’t actually do any investigating? That we make it all up? Why they’ve even gone so far as to accuse me of inventing my fight with the giant octopus! ”
“No, of course not. But the mystery isn’t hidden at some unattainable depth; it’s right on the surface. We are the ones who make it what it is. We slowly construct the facts; they become a riddle. We are the people who say that one mysterious death is more important than a thousand men lying dead on a battlefield. This shows us the Zen of the enigma: there is no mystery, there is only a void and we make the mystery. Our desire for this, not the movements of killers in the night, guides our footsteps. Perhaps we should set aside crimes for a moment, forget about guilty suspects. Haven’t we realized that we all see different things in the same mystery? Perhaps, in the end, there is nothing to see. And even more in my case than in each of yours. As you all know, my specialty is finding something more ephemeral than the enactor of poisonings, gunshot wounds, or stabbings; I search for what we call grasshopper hunters.”
“Grasshopper hunters?” asked Rojo. “Are you sure that’s what you meant to say?”
“I didn’t misspeak. Grasshopper hunters are what we call those who incite others to take their own lives. They are the subtlest type of killers. I’ll explain the origin of the name a little later.”
As he spoke, Sakawa slowly, and almost casually, moved toward the center of the room.
“Grasshopper hunters kill without weapons. Sometimes they do it with a few lines published in a newspaper; other times it’s an insidious comment or a gesture made with a fan. There are those who have murdered with a poem. And I have devoted my life to the subtle hunt for those who leave grasshoppers. But sometimes I ask myself: what if I’ve been mistaken about all this from the very beginning? Perhaps I should let men commit suicide, and not try to alter the course of things. Was I finding a puzzle to solve in behavior that wasn’t mysterious in the least, in people who were fated from birth to their unique deaths? I don’t have nightmares about crime; I dream about the blank page, I dream that I am the one who draws the ideograms where there was nothing, where there should always be nothing. And that is what I want to ask you all: Should we be not only the solvers of mysteries, but also the custodians of the enigma? Our Greek colleague gave Oedipus and the sphinx as an example. I say we are both Oedipus and the sphinx. The world is becoming an open book. We must be the defenders of evidence, the exterminators of doubt, but also the last guardians of mystery.”
Sakawa’s words left the detectives perplexed. If he had been a Westerner, they would have argued with him.
“Tell us about a case,” said Arzaky. “Maybe that way we can understand what you mean.”
“A boastful display of my skill is unworthy of this forum. I will tell of a case that is not mine, and that way you will know why we call them grasshopper hunters.”
While Sakawa spoke, his assistant, Okano, bowed his head as a sign of respect.
“Mr. Huraki was the manager of a bank in the city of S. I won’t say the name of the city. In the spring it’s overrun with grasshoppers, but the inhabitants of the region refuse to kill them, believing they are good luck. A large sum of money disappeared from the bank; Mr. Huraki was not accused of stealing it. When the police showed up at his office they found no evidence that incriminated him, and the only thing that drew their attention to him was that Huraki was extremely nervous and accidentally stepped on a grasshopper that had come in through the window. Huraki’s accountant, Mr. Ramasuka, whose reputation was spotless up until that point, was put in prison. He confessed to nothing, nor did he accuse anyone else; he spent the years he was locked up reading the old masters.
“Time passed. Ramasuka finished his sentence. By then Huraki was the director of a bank in Tokyo. Ramasuka was determined to take his revenge, but he couldn’t imagine himself brandishing a sword or taking up a firearm. All that reading, all that thinking he had done wasn’t to fill his head with ideas, but rather to clear his mind of trivial ideas and meaningless prejudices. He had learned to see what others overlook. Taking advantage of an open window, he entered Huraki’s house one night: he didn’t touch a thing; he just left a grasshopper in the middle of the room, on top of the tatami. Before dawn, the grasshopper’s singing awoke Huraki. The banker instantly remembered a verse by a poet from his city (this memory was part of Ramasuka’s plan):
The grasshopper you killed in your dream Sings again in the morning.
“Huraki knew that he had been discovered. He killed himself that very night by drinking poison.”
The waiter, who had served wine to the detectives and water to the assistants, as dictated by The Twelve Detectives’ protocol, offered a glass of wine to the old detective, who refused it.
“Thus Ramasuka established the tradition of the grasshopper hunters: men and women capable of killing with insinuations, signs, invisible traces. But these warriors need a symmetrical oppositional force. I am part of that force. We don’t send them to prison, of course, because no judge legislates on grasshoppers and butterf lies and poems with secret meanings. But we write and publish our verdicts, and we often drive those responsible to disgrace, exile, silence, sometimes death. But I wonder: what if the enemy is completely imaginary? What if I perceive this enemy-these men and women that conspire in a tradition of subtle murderers-only in my mind? What if I become the murderer by exposing them?”
With small steps Sakawa moved out of the center of the room. Magrelli pointed mockingly at Arzaky, who was seated in an armchair and seemed to be either concentrating very intensely or sleeping.
“Well, Arzaky, you are the one who organized all this. Now you’ve got some objects for your glass cases. Which one will you choose to represent our profession? Incomplete jigsaw puzzles, paintings that fuse fruit and faces, a Greek monster and an inquisitive sphinx, Aladdin’s blackboard, a blank page. Which one will it be?”
Arzaky held back a yawn.
“He who speaks last always has an advantage: the sound of his voice still echoes. But apart from that, I choose Sakawa. I also fear that all investigation is a blank page.”
In spite of my exhaustion, it took me a while to fall asleep. I was surrounded by unfamiliar things, and my mind tried in vain to adapt to the continuous introduction of new ideas, people, and settings. Sleep refused to come, because there were too many things to dream about. I thought about what was said at the meeting: the detectives’ statements, the assistants’ covert remarks. Time and time again I imagined myself escaping the outer circle of the satellites, and walking with sure steps toward center stage. I was immensely lucky to be an acolyte, to have gotten to meet The Twelve Detectives, and that was enough for me during the day. But at night I wanted more.
I finally slept for several hours, although I had the feeling that I had barely shut my eyes. I was awoken by noises outside the room: people running, and then doors slamming and voices. I washed up, shaved off my shadow of a beard, and dressed. I went out into the hallway still adjusting the knot in my tie. Linker, Tobias Hatter’s assistant, bumped into me and kept running without saying a word, as if he had collided with one of those room service carts. Benito came charging up behind him.
“They’ve killed Louis Darbon,” gasped Benito as he passed me.
I thought I must still be dreaming, nobody could have killed one of the detectives. Weren’t they immortal? Weren’t they immune to silent swords, to ice darts shot through locks, and perfect roses with poisoned thorns?
I followed them down the stairs and then through the street. The morning was cool. I had taken the precaution of bringing my vicuña poncho. I secretly regretted having missed breakfast; it’s the only thing I like about staying in hotels. The assistants had all left Madame Nécart’s hotel at almost the same time and were running toward the entrance to the fair. We would bunch up together, looking like a group of long distance runners, and then we would spread out again, separated by the obstacles posed by the future World’s Fair: carts that carried materials to the tower, an iron cage that held a rhinoceros, fifty Chinese soldiers as still as statues awaiting the orders of an absent captain.
It took us a full twenty minutes to reach the foot of the forged iron tower. Journalists and photographers pushed each other, jockeying for position, in some sort of collective dance. The morgue ambulance waited to one side, pulled by stolid, pensive horses.
I wanted to see the corpse, but the crowd was impenetrable. Arzaky made his way over to me, shouting.
“You, the Argentine, come here.”
I elbowed my way over to an area that was accessible only to a chosen few. I wouldn’t have been able to break through the crowd if Arzaky’s voice hadn’t cleared the way, pulling me toward him like a rope. The photographers’ f lashbulbs exploded over the dead man’s face and the air was filled with the bitter smell of magnesium.
“Now I have a case, but I don’t have an assistant. I am the only detective without one. That may be a custom in your savage country, but in my city it is an oddity. I want you to work with me. Observe everything carefully. Any comment that occurs to you, make it: there is no greater inspiration for a detective than the frivolous words of the hoi polloi.”
“What happened?”
“Darbon was investigating the tower’s opponents, who had recently sent hundreds of anonymous letters and caused some minor incidents. He came here last night, alone, following a clue; he fell from the second platform. We don’t know anything more. Do you accept?”
“Do I accept what?”
“Working as my assistant.”
“Of course I accept! ” I exclaimed, surprised. Without meaning to I had shouted my reply and, in spite of the racket, everyone turned to look at me. I had become an acolyte thanks to Craig, who had sent me to Paris; thanks to Alarcón, who gave his life; and thanks to Arzaky, who accepted me-but also thanks to Darbon, who was now being lifted off the ground by the morgue employees (gray uniforms, f lannel hats) with a mixture of ceremony and annoyance, to be transferred to the realm of deciphering and dissection.
Two hours later we managed to get permission to enter the morgue, leaving behind the journalists and onlookers, who were crowded together behind the railing, waiting for some extraordinary revelation. Arzaky knew the building well. I would have gotten lost in the labyrinthine series of hallways which always turned to the left and stairs which always went down, but the Pole moved forward with broad steps, exuding that crazy joy of a detective on a case. It was as if, with each step, he was taking the world by force. But when he entered the room he lowered his head, as though he were in a cathedral. His face reflected both humility and defiance, like a saint who finds dissipation in temperance, overindulgence in moderation, ecstasy in renunciation.
There were nine empty gurneys and one that was occupied lined up beneath the greenish light of the lamps swinging from the very high ceilings. A strong smell of bleach and maybe camphor hung in the air. Darbon’s body, already undressed, had a lunar whiteness to it that was marred by the lacerations and bruises caused by his fall. Of his numerous authoritative features (his imposing voice; the seriousness that never deigned to smile, unless it was ironic; the gaze that dissolved any obstacle) the only surviving one was his white beard.
The forensic doctor was a tiny man named Godal. He greeted Arzaky with a familiarity that was not returned. The Detective of Paris (now without any rival to dispute the title) half heartedly introduced his colleagues who were also there: Hatter, Castelvetia, and Magrelli. I was the only assistant in the room.
“It is an honor for me to have members of The Twelve Detectives here,” said Dr. Godal, looking at everyone except me.
“I imagine that this case is something new for you, as it is for us. No one has ever fallen from so high,” said Hatter with the air of an expert.
“What are you saying, Hatter?” said Arzaky in a very rude tone. “Do you think there are no bodies in the crevices of the Alps?”
“There must be… but no one has ever seen them.”
“I have.”
Godal began to point out the marks from the fall.
“Observe the destroyed legs; this proves he was conscious when he fell. His feet plunged into the earth. Halfway down he hit some kind of protrusion, which tore his skin at the height of the thorax, but that didn’t kill him.”
Castelvetia was ashen and looked around as if searching for a window.
“Come closer. When I was young, we practiced autopsies outdoors. We had to rush to make use of the sunlight, before night fell and erased all the details.”
“Do bodies come in every week?” asked Hatter.
“Every week? Every day. A thousand a year: suicides, accident fatalities, murder victims. Lately there has been an increase in poisonings: we’ve done about a hundred and forty autopsies already this year. We have to be very careful with poison: they used to use only arsenic, which we can easily identify, but they come up with new poisons every day.”
Arzaky picked up the dead man’s hand. He pointed to one of the fingernails. There was something black underneath it.
The Paris Enigma• 91
“Louis Darbon was fastidious about his appearance. Why are his nails dirty?”
“I’m sorry, his hands were black with oil, and it took us a lot of work to clean them. But there’s always a trace left behind! ”
“A trace left behind? Everything is supposed to be left behind. How can we work if you clean up the evidence?”
“I didn’t think it was important. It was oil. He fell from the tower, and I imagine that that horrible tower is full of machine oil.”
Arzaky was going to say something, but he held himself back. When he left the room, furious, I followed him. He banged his head against the wall several times.
“Incompetent! That damn Dr. Godal was always on Darbon’s side. He’s a forensic doctor who should have been an undertaker. What do you think we should do?”
I was surprised that he asked for my opinion. What value could my thoughts on forensic practices have?
“I think we should go to the tower, to the place where Darbon fell. And see where that oil came from.”
“No, no. You are supposed to be an assistant. You should embody common sense. For example, you should say: the oil isn’t important. At the tower everything is oil-stained.”
“But I don’t think that’s the case.”
Arzaky hit his head against the wall one more time, but lightly.
“Tanner was always spot-on with his comments. Craig failed in his school for assistants. Wasn’t there a professor of common sense?”
“I know I’m not as good as the other assistants, but I’ll try my best to keep up.”
“The others? Don’t worry about emulating your colleagues. The black man is a thief; the Andalusian, a liar; Linker, an imbecile; the Sioux Indian never says anything. I don’t even think he’s real, I think he’s a wax figure from Madame Tussaud’s.”
“And Castelvetia’s acolyte? I still haven’t seen him.”
“You have just mentioned an awkward mystery. No one has seen him. I would leave it at that, but it’s inevitable that someone will bring him up at our meetings. And between you and me, I don’t think that fop Castelvetia has an assistant. If he does… he must not be the same kind of assistant the others are. You know what I mean. That’s a mystery you could solve.”
His anger vented, Arzaky went back into the room. Dr. Godal had turned the corpse over and was pointing to a wound on his back. Castelvetia, passed out on a metal chair, was being tended to by one of Godal’s assistants, who was trying to bring him around with smelling salts.
“I swear, gentlemen, this is the first time this has ever happened to me,” he declared as soon as he came to.
Arzaky looked at me.
“I miss Craig,” he said.
That night the detectives reconvened in the underground parlor of the Numancia Hotel. Between those four walls their grief took strange forms: without removing his white hat, Jack Novarius took long strides from one side of the room to the other, while his Sioux assistant remained immobile; Castelvetia laughed openly; Hatter waited for the meeting to start while taking apart a small mechanism that looked like an artificial heart; Sakawa was arranging f lowers in a vase, pulling out some petals and letting them fall onto the table. They were detectives, crime was their lifeblood, they couldn’t be blamed for not shedding tears.
Only Arzaky seemed to be grieving.
“When Castelvetia goes out, follow him. I want to find out the truth about his assistant today.”
It was a job for a lackey, but I accepted it, even though I didn’t like the whole business. I didn’t want to get involved in the gossip between detectives.
Arzaky took center stage. The shelves of the glazed cabinets had begun to fill with objects: a giant magnifying glass, a microscope, a small metal filing case with photographs of delinquents, a pistol that shot tranquilizer darts, a hypnotizing machine. Off to one side, away from the other objects, was Craig’s cane, its powers concealed. Arzaky spoke.
“As we all know, Louis Darbon died last night, falling from the stairs that led to the second platform of the tower. For the moment nothing points to its having been anything but an accident.”
“And the railings?”
“They had been found to be defective and were being replaced.”
“Come on, Arzaky. Who can believe it was an accident?” said Hatter.
“I am going to be in charge of the case and when I know anything for certain, I will tell you.”
Caleb Lawson, tall and stooped, cloaked in the smoke from his pipe, stepped forward.
“I don’t think you should be in charge of this case. We all know that Darbon despised you. If anyone is a suspect, it’s you. Captain Bazeldin has already been asking questions around here.”
“Shut up, Lawson! ” said Magrelli indignantly. “Arzaky is one of the founders of our order, along with Renato Craig. You can’t go accusing him just because that idiot, Captain Bazeldin, was asking questions. Have you never read Grimas’s magazine?”
In the pages of Tra ce s, Captain Bazeldin was always the butt of jokes. The clues he followed up on, which were the most obvious ones, always ended in failure.
“Darbon was also one of The Twelve Detectives,” said the Englishman. “And someone pushed him from the tower. What’s more, Arzaky, his death left all of Paris to you.”
Arzaky shrugged his shoulders. Sakawa, who rarely spoke, said, “Arzaky should be in charge of the case. This is his city. What right do we have to investigate a crime in Paris? If someone was thrown from a tower in Tokyo, I wouldn’t let any one of you investigate who incited the victim to jump.”
“In the West no one invites anyone to jump with f licks of their fan or seventeen-syllable poems, Sakawa,” said Lawson. “Here, when someone wants to throw someone off a tower, they push him. We know that we have to investigate those who stand to benefit from his death. Why shouldn’t we suspect Arzaky?”
The Japanese detective responded serenely. “I am sure that if Arzaky is the murderer, he himself will follow every single one of the clues that lead to him and he will accuse himself of the crime.”
What Sakawa said didn’t make any sense, but as often happens, nonsense is harder to refute than logical opinions.
Arthur Neska let his voice be heard.
“Arzaky hated my mentor, Louis Darbon. If you leave the case in his hands, the guilty party will never be punished. Or an innocent man will pay.”
“The assistants must ask for special permission to speak, which is granted by their mentor,” said Hatter. “Those are the rules.”
“My mentor is dead. I speak in his name.”
“It’s okay, Hatter. Let him speak,” said Arzaky. “These are exceptional circumstances. We can’t always go by the rules. I’m going to be in charge of the case: I am not asking for your permission, because that is not incumbent on The Twelve Detectives. If you want to make inquiries on your own behalf, you may do so. But we shouldn’t compete among ourselves. We should share our discoveries.”
There was a suspicious murmur.
“We don’t know each other, Arzaky,” said Caleb Lawson. “If there’s one thing you can’t ask of us, it’s that we share what we know. For many long years we have cultivated secrecy and solitude; it is too late for us to become a commune.”
Neska always had a gloomy air about him, and now that appearance was substantiated. He didn’t speak with the humility appropriate to the acolytes. He even dared to give the detectives advice.
“You would be wise to watch your backs. I don’t think that anyone who finds out anything will live to see the dawn.”
“Be careful. Don’t let your grief make you reckless. We have rules about expulsion as well,” warned Hatter.
“What are you going to expel me from? I no longer have a detective to assist. The murderer has already expelled me.”
Arzaky, who until that point had spoken softly, now raised his voice.
“I am not going to respond to your foolish words. But I need Darbon’s papers in order to begin my work. I want to know who he was investigating.”
Neska smiled defiantly at Arzaky.
“I left everything in the hands of his widow. If you can convince her to give them to you, you’ll have everything.”
Neska left the room without another word. We all, detectives and assistants, remained there in silence. And that moment was the only tribute that Louis Darbon received, the only moment in which his death weighed on the detectives’ lives, not as an enigma, not as a mouthful for their insatiable curiosity, but as a loss. With a solemnity that competed with the others’ silence, Arzaky spoke.
“Perhaps Darbon did fall accidentally, perhaps it was some old enemy with a score to settle. But we have to consider another possibility. We have gathered here, in Paris, to display our trade among the other works of Man. And it is possible that one of our secret partners has taken this opportunity to challenge us. And thus display, not only the art of investigation, but the art of crime.”