Detective Story

by Imre Kertész

  In short, as I say, we were groping around in the dark, metaphorically as well as literally. We sat in a darkroom and had photographs developed and then enlarged. The individuals who were visible in the enlarged shots were then identified, one by one. As I said, we had shot ten dozen rolls of film of them at the Blue Coast and wherever else.

  Well anyway, in one of the Blue Coast photos we spotted a new face. He is standing there in the group of wanted individuals. They are laughing, while he seems rather sullen. Ramón immediately identified him as Enrique Salinas. We could have identified him without Ramón’s help, but what’s an informer for if not to make himself useful?

  From that moment on Enrique Salinas did not take a step without our knowing about it.

  One week later we received a film reel from our people. An interesting movie it was, a worthy reward for our troubles.

  Enrique can be seen in it. He enters a café. He is carrying a briefcase. He takes a seat at a table.

  Cut.

  A chap arrives at the café. A nondescript character, middle-aged, medium height, no distinguishing marks. He is carrying a briefcase. After a brief hesitation, he recognizes Enrique and sits down at his table. They are discussing something, hastily spreading out documents from their briefcases.

  Enrique also produces an envelope from his case.

  As the papers are being tidied up, that envelope is slipped among the stranger’s documents.

  The chap pockets the envelope.

  They finish their discussion and put the files away. They pay and leave, separately.

  So much for the film. We found out that the chap was called Manuel Figueras, a sales clerk who had worked for a few years for the Salinas stores. A married man, he had two children. He had no lover, and his name didn’t turn up in our records. The Salinas company’s personnel department, where we had one of our people (why would we not have one there, of all places?), could tell us nothing about him of any interest.

  Figueras hurried from the café straight back to his office. He went by bus, having left his beat-up Volkswagen in the big parking lot in front of the Salinas office building. He only popped up again once work was over: he got into his Volkswagen and drove straight home.

  Over the ensuing days Figueras traveled only between his office and home. We tailed him on his journeys, but he didn’t have a telephone for us to tap. His partner was a housewife; she had no lover. Her time was entirely taken up with housework; we noticed nothing suspicious about her shopping trips. Their ten-year-old boy attended school; the four-year-old girl we discounted. On Saturday evening Figueras went with his wife to see a movie. On Sunday afternoon he took his son to watch a soccer match. Never even once did he make contact with strangers. What had he done with the envelope? Was it still on him, perhaps? Or had he passed it on? Might it have been addressed directly to him? We had no way of knowing.

  Ten days later Enrique Salinas’s Alfa Romeo headed out of the city and turned onto the southwestern trunk road. He stopped in B., the region’s fashionable seaside resort. He checked into a room in a busy hotel, using his own name. That evening he went down to the bar. It was hot, and he was lightly dressed in slacks and a colorful, high-necked silk shirt. He was presumed not to have a briefcase—our men came across it when they searched his room during his absence. Among other things they found inside was an envelope containing a folded sheet of white paper. It bore the number “3” in the top left-hand corner and in the middle were six typewritten letters in the sequence ENAUSE. The envelope was resealed with an appropriate technique, and all traces of our search were removed.

  The next morning Figueras’s beat-up Volkswagen headed out of the city and turned onto the southwestern trunk road. He stopped in B. and parked his car in front of Enrique Salinas’s hotel. He went into the hotel’s bar and ordered himself a drink.

  At precisely eleven o’clock, Enrique Salinas came down from his room and looked into the bar. Undoubtedly, he noticed Figueras. He left without having taken a seat.

  Figueras soon paid and returned to the parking lot. There he found Enrique Salinas, who was fussing with something under the hood of his Alfa Romeo. They greeted each other like old acquaintances. Figueras got into his own car, then for a minute Enrique Salinas—in the midst of speaking to him—climbed in beside him. On this occasion our man, from his adverse position, saw nothing, but he presumed that at this moment Enrique must have passed the envelope on to Figueras.

  Afterward, Figueras promptly started up the engine and, on getting back to the city, did not stop until he reached the Salinas office building. He entered the building right away and did not leave it again that day until work was over. Then he again hurried directly to his parking space. He was extremely surprised to find, in the spot where he had presumed his Volkswagen would be, a black limousine. Twenty minutes later he found himself at Corps headquarters. We set about interrogating him without further ado.

  I am unhappy talking about this, especially going into details. All the newspapers have printed enough bullshit about this sort of thing nowadays; everybody now knows how that sort of thing goes: roughly the way they can see in their idiotic movies, just a bit more to the point. And well, with the difference that everything is for real.

  It’s nasty work, I can tell you, but it’s part of the job. We take away the offender’s mind, shred his nerves, paralyze his brain, rifle through every pocket and even his innards. We slam him into a chair, draw the curtains, light a lamp—in short, we go by the book. We didn’t make any effort to surprise the offender with some original twist. Everything happened in the way those ham-handed films would have prepared him for; everything happened the way he would expect; and precisely that was always the surprise—check it out if you don’t believe me. We gather around, with Diaz facing him, Rodriguez to the side, me behind.

  Then out comes the line. And a flood of questions, simply deluging him.

  “Right, pig,” one of us will kick off. “Playtime’s over. You’ve been rumbled.”

  “We know everything,” another interjects. “You’ll only be hurting yourself if you try to deny anything.”

  “Young Enrique’s already spilled the beans. You’d be well advised to do the same.”

  “It’s in your interest. It’s all the same to us.”

  “It’s difficult, we know, but if you’re a good boy, you can be let off. Bear that in mind.”

  “What’s the point of getting your nuts crushed if your accomplice has already spilled the beans?”

  “So be a good boy, open your mouth. Or are we going to have to open it for you?!”

  “Who’s your go-between?”

  “Where’s the envelope?” (A body search had not revealed it on him.)

  “Where’s your weapons dump?”

  “When are you planning for the atrocity to happen?”

  “Which group do you belong to? Spit it out!”

  “You’ve no choice anyway. Let yourself go, be sensible!”

  “Be sensible, then you’ll soon be rid of us.”

  “Your accomplices have hung you out to dry. Do you want to carry the can alone? In their place?”

  “Not talking, then?”

  This was all bluff, as you can see, to prepare the ground. We stun him with a deluge of questions. He has to feel that he is utterly alone, whereas there are a lot of us; that we are able to do with him what we want; and that we know everything, much more than he could suspect. But that we’ve got it all wrong, and he’s the only one who can set us straight, if he wishes to improve his circumstances. It’s a stale old number, but it usually works. If you know of a better one, say so.

  We then slowly get around to what is actually of interest to us. What we wanted to know from Figueras, for instance, was the story behind the envelope. We found out as well, though don’t push me on how. Figueras couldn’t cut it; Rodriguez wasted his time working on him, because what he had to say he spat out right away, and after that we were unable to drag anything further out of
him.

  In such cases Diaz would fill out a request form and call for the duty guard. Everybody had their place with us, and if the Homeland’s security was under threat, we weren’t accountable to anyone.

  The three of us were left to ourselves. It was a wretched moment, that goes without saying. Just look at what we had extracted from Figueras. Federigo Salinas had sent him out to collect the envelopes. Beforehand he had been called into the boss’s office, and was offered extra pay for his work. “It’s a matter of confidential stock market tip-offs,” Figueras claims Salinas told him. It was a delicate matter of the sort that comes up not infrequently in business life; that was why he was asking him, Figueras, and not one of his managers, who might be recognized by the network’s agents. And that was why he asked Figueras to stick to certain precautionary measures. Figueras did not get nosy: he was a small fry who was glad for the confidence that was being shown in him and for the unexpected income. According to his statement, he didn’t know that Enrique Salinas was the boss’s son. We could believe him: never once during the whole time that we had him under observation did Enrique Salinas turn up at the Salinas office building. The first time Figueras met him was on the basis of a verbal description; on subsequent occasions he recognized the face. Figueras would then hand on the envelopes to Federigo Salinas.

  Well, you make head or tail of that. We tried. We put it together, took it apart, then pieced it together again and worked our way through it afresh.

  Question: From whom did Enrique get the envelopes? Figueras didn’t know, and frankly neither did we, even though we were watching every step Enrique made.

  Furthermore: Why didn’t Enrique simply hand the envelopes over to his father himself? We had only one possible explanation: Enrique was not supposed to see his father’s role—or maybe even his involvement—in the network, and he was not supposed to know that the envelopes were going to him. If that were so, then perhaps Federigo Salinas was pulling all the strings in the background and we had stumbled on one of the Uprising’s top men, if not its clandestine leader. Rodriguez, for one, was quite sure of this possibility. The work excited him; his leopard eyes smoldered and kept coming to rest on the statuette that adorned his desk.

  You can’t do a good job without method, however. We had to crack the first question above all.

  The answer to that, though, could only come from Enrique.

  “Enrique Salinas,” said Diaz. “You, Martens, will make the arrest. But not at his home. Grab him anywhere else. And don’t make a fuss about it.”

  Well, I didn’t. I snatched him on the street with my men the next day, around eleven o’clock, when he was on his way back from B. We waited for him to park his car in the garage, then take the elevator to his apartment. Obviously, he would have let his mother know he was back; a bit later he popped down to the street for something. We simply bundled him into the limousine in the traffic. We have specialists for that. By the time he realized what was happening, he was sitting between us, one wrist handcuffed to me, the other to my man.

  “What do you want? Who are you?” he asked.

  We kept quiet, as is our practice.

  “The police? The Corps?” he had another go, then he shut up. He held his peace when we got out and led him across the Headquarters’ forbidding inner courtyards, and he held his peace as we took him down the long series of corridors where detainees were pressing hands and foreheads to the walls, with alert guards at their backs. That was our practice. That too was part of preparing the ground.

  He held his peace above all when Diaz set about questioning him. Diaz was gentle with him, and I don’t mean with that diabolical meekness of his—he was unusually gentle. On this occasion he personally took over the interrogation, and he did not want there to be any fanfare.

  “We have a few questions for you. We are proceeding on the assumption that you personally are innocent. If you give us satisfactory answers, you can go home afterward,” said Diaz.

  Enrique, however, did not answer a single question. I knew that he must be quaking inwardly, he had to be, but his expression remained set, like a clenched fist. And he held his peace, resolutely held his peace.

  “Listen,” Diaz asked him, “you do appreciate where you are, don’t you? We don’t make a habit of pussyfooting around. We can conduct this conversation in a very different way.”

  Enrique, however, held his peace. He stubbornly held his peace, with stupid determination. Rodriguez and I just sat there, condemned to inactivity. At that time I didn’t understand what Diaz was up to, didn’t understand him at all. Could he have miscalculated, just this once? Had he perhaps applied the wrong technique?

  Now I am less inclined to think so. Now I can see more clearly what sort of stakes Diaz was playing for. But well, I was still a new boy, as I have said, and I didn’t yet have a view of what went on behind the scenes; I was taken in by what happened before my eyes. Now I am not so sure that Diaz really wanted Enrique to talk. If he had really wanted it so much, then he would not have proceeded on the assumption that Enrique was innocent. Or at least he would not have said that to his face. He was too good a detective to do that, was Diaz, far too good.

  “Well?” he inquired mildly, facing Enrique, one buttock perched on the desk, as per habit.

  Enrique, however, held his peace. After waiting a bit, Diaz leaned forward. In fact he was mild-mannered even now, mild-mannered and patient. Only I could truly see how much he was. Enrique most likely could have had no conception at all; most likely all he sensed was that his nose had started to bleed.

  “Well?” Diaz asked.

  And then a strange thing happened. As Diaz was leaning toward him, Enrique spat a huge gob of phlegm in his face. A strange thing, that was. And not just strange: dilettante, I would have to say. Yes, that’s what I would have to say. No one spits in Diaz’s face. Not that Diaz doesn’t give people a thousand reasons to do so; it’s just that it’s both futile and risky, and one doesn’t run risks for something futile. It takes a profound bitterness, at the very least, or a profound ignorance. Whichever the case, no one who has any interest in living, real living, spits in Diaz’s face. During my career nothing like that ever happened again.

  To be brief, an uneasy foreboding for Enrique sprang up that was subsequently never to leave me. He alarmed me because all of a sudden I sensed that he was innocent. He was innocent, and his innocence was intransigent, like a virginity that has been violated. It was a lousy feeling, made all the lousier by the fact that I had no one to speak to about it.

  I noticed that it was also bothering Diaz. Not that Diaz said anything; he slipped off the desk and absentmindedly mopped his face. He then strode up and down the room a few times, hands clasped behind his back. As I have said, that was his habit when he was thinking. He harrumphed a few times. He finally came to a standstill behind Enrique and placed a hand on his head.

  “What a big meathead you are, dear boy,” he said. “A very big meathead.” At this point, Rodriguez, whose impatient fingers had been fiddling with his model the whole time, finally got up from his place.

  Minutes passed, long minutes, and then he brought him back from next door. I was looking at Diaz. It’s interesting that this time Diaz did not perch on the desk. Diaz was looking sideways at something, I don’t know what.

  “Well?” he asked.

  But Enrique gave no answer. He couldn’t. He was asleep, or whatever.

  Then Diaz looked at him.

  “Meathead!” he said to Rodriguez. “What in God’s name did you do to the kid!”

  So that was how it stood. We could not expect a statement from Enrique anytime soon—certainly not without hospital treatment. Diaz had made no allowance for this possibility. Or so it seemed. Now I would not care to take an oath on that. At the time, though, being a new boy, I was still taken in by what happened before my eyes, as I said. Diaz knew his men, and he knew very well what he wanted. It would have been hard for anyone to surprise him, although that didn�
��t occur to me at the time.

  He did not reproach Rodriguez for what he had done. Diaz wasn’t one for idle words. He was a man of hard facts, and what had happened was now a fact. He had to keep moving ahead, always ahead. There was truth in Diaz’s logic, yes: our line of work is like that. Once you’ve started, the only way back is to go forward.

  “Salinas ought to be brought in,” said Rodriguez.

  “Right.” Diaz nodded.

  “Should I bring him in?” Rodriguez offered.

  “No,” Diaz gestured.

  As the two of them were speaking, they took no notice of me. I just sat and listened. My head was aching, aching horribly. Maybe it showed.

  “He’ll skip town,” Rodriguez worried.

  “Where to?” Diaz riposted.

  “How should I know! That sort always has somewhere!” Rodriguez fretted. “Give me the slip at the very last moment, the rotten bourgeois.”

  “We’re not fighting capitalism as such,” Diaz reminded him.

  “It’s all the same to me.” Rodriguez’s eyes were smoldering. “Bourgeois, Jew, savior of the world—there’s nothing to choose between them. Upheaval is all they want.”

  “And you?” Diaz inquired. “What do you want, Rodriguez, my son?”

  “Order. But my order,” said Rodriguez. “Should I go?”

  “No. We’ll wait.” Diaz strode up and down the room a few times, hands clasped behind his back. “It’s noon now. You boys go home and get some shut-eye. Be back here by seven this evening. Prepare for what may be an all-night session. We may well have plenty of work.”

  He said no more. I’ll be a Dutchman if I could even guess what he had in mind. But that was Diaz for you. For my own part, I was always glad for the unexpected gift of a few hours off duty. The job takes its toll, so we richly deserve the occasional bit of R&R.