Detective Story

by Imre Kertész

  There was a time when I would have preferred to spend those few hours with Diaz. I would have been curious about how he wove the web of his logic and about how he won over the Colonel, for example.

  I now see the answer as simple: he just set the facts before him. And the Colonel had no option but to move ahead: for him too the only way back was to go forward. Everyone had their part to play in this game, as I said, Enrique just as much as the Colonel. And Diaz as well, who imagined that it was he who assigned the roles. Diaz was also built into the logic; the Colonel must have known him in just the same way as Diaz knew Rodriguez, for instance. No, there was no longer room for anyone here outside the logic.

  Anyway, to be brief, we reassembled at seven o’clock. By then Diaz had the authorization in his hands. It had to be: this was work for which authorization was needed. Not a broad authorization, that would not have been sufficient, but a special authorization. And don’t go thinking that I had any idea of this at the time. Diaz said not a word to us; he didn’t need to. We followed him blindly down the path of the logic: he was our commander, we couldn’t object.

  We sat and waited, blew smoke rings. It was warm, and my headache had barely eased up. The telephone rang at nine o’clock that evening.

  “Major Diaz,” Diaz announced.

  Shortly afterward, he said:

  “I shall consider it a special honor to be of service to you, General.” He said it in a tone of voice that was like he had oiled his tonsils beforehand.

  Barely an hour later the commander of the guard reported. He had been given his instructions; everyone in Headquarters that day knew what they had to do. “A man identifying himself as Federigo Salinas, proprietor of the Salinas department store, is requesting an urgent hearing from the duty officer.”

  “Bring him up,” Diaz declared elegantly into the handset. He then crossed his legs as if awaiting a round of applause. He would have deserved one, make no mistake. Only now could we see just how much a detective Diaz was.

  Ten minutes later we were welcoming Federigo Salinas into our office. He arrived in a dark suit; he was distinguished, cool, and formal. Diaz bowed like a retired dancing master. There were times when Diaz could be smooth, confoundedly smooth.

  “Permit me,” he says, “to introduce my colleagues, Mr. Rodriguez and Mr. Martens.”

  Salinas barely glanced at us but nodded like a king from his throne. He was a real gentleman, was Salinas—he had an exquisite feel for that.

  “Delighted,” he says, though as far as that goes, he has no reason to be. “In point of fact I need to speak to the Colonel.”

  “The Colonel,” cooed Diaz, “is preparing for a speech in parliament tomorrow.”

  “Everyone is using that excuse. I’ve been unable to reach him by telephone all evening,” Salinas seethed. “Even though I asked intermediaries like Vargas, the banker, and General Mendoza to relay my request.”

  “I was speaking with the General just now,” fawned Diaz. “Do take a seat, Mr. Salinas. We are at your disposal; you may trust in our discretion. Cigar?”

  That’s how it began. As stylish as one could wish, as you can see. Diaz didn’t hurry Salinas along, just stalled him. Something was giving Salinas grief, that was evident, but Diaz waited tactfully, like a father-confessor.

  In the end it was Salinas who ran out of patience first.

  “In point of fact”—he nibbled at the hook—“it’s about my son.”

  There was silence. Maybe he was awaiting a word of encouragement from Diaz. Diaz, however, stayed quiet, his bland expression showing only mild interest and an artless desire to be helpful.

  “My son,” says Salinas. “Well … at some point during the day my son vanished.”

  “Fancy that,” Diaz registered surprise. “Vanished, you say?”

  “Vanished,” Salinas repeated.

  “I’m afraid that’s not the sort of case in which we have any competence,” Diaz agonized. “Maybe you should make inquiries with the police or, if you’re really worried, the ambulance service.”

  “They have no knowledge of him.”

  “I would point out”—Diaz cracked a smile—“that it’s not unknown for young men to vanish unexpectedly for an evening or a night. There’s no reason to think the worst right away when it happens.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” Salinas comes back. “In this case, though, allow me to proceed by my hunches, because at some point yesterday one of my clerks also vanished without a trace.”

  The conversation was starting to get interesting, distinctly interesting. And as though a chill had grown between the two of them, Salinas no longer had the old expression on his face.

  “I still don’t understand,” says Diaz, “how we can be of assistance to you.”

  “You didn’t bring him in?” Salinas asks, not even raising his voice. But I supposed that Salinas could give dirty looks, just as dirty as Diaz did on occasion.

  “The only people we bring in,” responds Diaz, “are individuals about whom we have reasonable grounds to be suspicious.”

  “I have to tell you in all frankness,” Salinas says at this juncture, “that certain circumstances … quite innocent circumstances, I can assure you … might possibly have cast my son in a suspicious-looking light.”

  “So, according to your assumption, did he actually do anything?” Diaz asks.

  “He’s here?” says Salinas in response.

  “According to your assumption, did he actually do anything on account of which he might be here?” Diaz reiterates.

  “You’ve arrested him?” Salinas asks again.

  Diaz was now looking at him far from pleasantly. “Mr. Salinas, you’re posing very odd questions. And you’re posing your odd questions in an odd way.”

  “Is he here, or isn’t he?” Salinas leaped up. For a moment I thought he was going to grab Diaz by the lapels.

  “Sit back down. We can’t discuss anything like this. It seems you are forgetting where you are, Mr. Salinas.” Diaz’s voice by now was unpleasant, distinctly unpleasant.

  “I’m well aware of where I am. I came on my own steam. Are you trying to threaten me?” Salinas asks.

  “No, just to remind you of the house rules,” says Diaz.

  “And what’s that supposed to mean?!”

  “Just that it’s we who ask the questions here. We ask the questions, and you give the answers, Mr. Salinas.”

  At that point Diaz stands up and switches on the lamp. He makes his way ponderously around the desk and parks one buttock on it. Right in front of Salinas.

  Rodriguez gets up and steps over to Salinas’s side.

  I move behind his back.

  “What do you people want?” Salinas is startled.

  “Nothing in particular, Mr. Salinas,” Diaz replies. “We just have a few questions for you.”

  And so it begins—much as I have already described earlier.

  Salinas proved a tough customer; he really tested our patience to the limit. He cracked only after we brought his son up—literally brought him, as he was unable to walk.

  “Well?” asked Diaz.

  “Not in front of my son,” Salinas said dully after a while, his face buried in his hands.

  “No way,” said Diaz. “Otherwise we’ll smash your bones. We’ll leave the choice up to you.”

  Salinas soon thought better of his position.

  Don’t ask me to recall precisely who said what, or in which sequence. I don’t recall even what I myself said. There was confusion, and my head ached. From time to time, when a burst of energy seized me, I would lean forward and ask something:

  “From whom did Enrique get the envelopes?”

  “From me.”

  “To whom did Figueras give the envelopes?”

  “To me.”

  “Are you trying to tell me that you sent letters to yourself by way of Enrique and Figueras?!”

  “Yes, that’s how it was.”

  “Do you take us for fools?” />
  “I can’t tell you anything else. That’s what I did.”

  “And why did you do it?”

  “To head off trouble, so my son would not take a fateful step of some kind.”

  “What kind of fateful step?”

  “I was afraid that he was going to be recruited into some kind of student movement.”

  “So you recruited him instead, into your own secret network, huh?!”

  “I have no secret network. No secret organization of any kind. I dreamed the whole thing up.”

  “What possible reason could you have had to do that?”

  “I’ve already told you: to protect my son.”

  “And why did you need the letters to do that?”

  “To indulge his flights of fancy and satisfy his craving for action. He wouldn’t listen to sober arguments. I had to create the appearance that he was engaged in secret work.”

  “And he wasn’t?”

  “No. He’s innocent. He is, and so is Figueras, and so am I. I can prove it.”

  “As yet, that’s still a bit far away. What’s the meaning of ENAUSE?”

  “It’s an anagram of the word unease. I put the word in each envelope. I’ve used three envelopes—”

  “Two!”

  “In that case you don’t know about the first one. You were late in putting my son under surveillance. There are still two envelopes—”

  “Where?”

  “With Quintieros, the public notary. I deposited them with him.”

  “Why?”

  “To cover my tracks and, should it be necessary, to be in a position to prove my son’s innocence.”

  “You were a little late with that.”

  “I acted in his interest. He was rushing headlong into disaster. I was guided by my unease; I did it all for him. You have taken unfair advantage of his gullibility. Murderers! Bastards!”

  A pause ensued, after which we returned to the envelopes.

  “I placed an identical piece of paper in each envelope. I numbered them serially, and on each of them I printed ENAUSE. I printed all of them on my own typewriter so the lettering would be identifiable. You’ve overstepped your authority, and you’ll all be answerable for that! The envelopes that are with Quintieros …”

  And so it went on. Should I say I was surprised by what we learned from Salinas? That evening nothing surprised me any longer. Diaz, though, sprang to his feet as if he had been stung by a wasp. Now Diaz was generally a placid man. I had never seen him as nervous as he was then.

  He leaned forward into Salinas’s face:

  “Do you take us for idiots?! Just who do you think we are? Ass-scratching lawyers who are going to tip their hats to your public notary? Do you suppose we haven’t heard about double-bluffing? Do you suppose we are incapable of imagining that you are using one set of correspondence to conceal the other? Do you suppose we don’t know how many ways there are to decipher a code? … Don’t imagine you’re going to break free from our clutches! Not until we have laid bare the whole truth!”

  At which point it all started afresh, from the beginning.

  Don’t expect to learn what else happened that evening. It was no longer an interrogation but a poker game. I was still a new boy, as I have said; only then had I begun to see where I was and what I had taken on. I knew, of course, that a different yardstick applied in the Corps—but I believed there was at least a yardstick. Well, there wasn’t: don’t expect me to tell you what happened that evening.

  We hauled in the public notary. We hauled him in because he had failed in his duty as a citizen to report a suspicious act; we hauled him in because that was what Diaz wanted. We surprised him at the dinner table, just as he was celebrating something or other. He was a self-assured fellow, the public notary; he protested and demanded a lawyer.

  Later on, though, he just sat between us in his ripped shirt, his pomaded cheeks sunken, his fleshy lower lip drooping limply.

  “I don’t understand you, gentlemen,” he mumbled. “I don’t understand. What do you want from me? After all, the state places its trust in me!”

  “That’s as may be.” Diaz nodded, almost like an elementary schoolteacher. “Only we don’t place our trust in the state.”

  The notary just goggled at him with his tiny watery eyes. “I don’t understand. I don’t understand. In what do you place your trust then?”

  “In destiny. Right now, though, we have taken on the role of destiny: so in ourselves.” Diaz, one buttock on the desk, smiled his inimitable smile.

  For me this was just like a message that Diaz had sent via the notary. I finally grasped his logic, or at least I believe I grasped it. I grasped that we had now cast away everything that bound us to the laws of man; I grasped that we could no longer place our trust in anyone except ourselves. Oh, and in destiny, in that insatiable, greedy, and eternally hungry mechanism. Were we still spinning it, or was it spinning us? Now it all amounts to the same thing. You think you are being very clever in riding events out, as I say, and then you find that all you want to know is where the hell they are galloping off to with you.

  …

  The interrogations went on for a while longer. We summoned witnesses, took statements, followed procedure. In the course of that procedure we drew the net of logic ever tighter. The Salinas file grew thicker. Then we set it aside. At the time, with unfavorable portents multiplying, we had a lot to do.

  The tape-recorder spools spun on, though, automatically, inexorably, constantly in their slots. Recording their words, the sounds of their prison life that were no longer of any interest to anyone.

  I listened to them many times, however. I’m sorry not to have them with me; I could make good use of them here, as all I have is Enrique’s diary.

  Still, they live on in my memory, they live on and keep on spinning there. The tape is short now, just a tiny fraction of what it was originally, but memory is like that. It overlays voices, cuts out what is inessential, replenishes their fading sense, and implacably replays, over and over again, the bits that one might be happiest to delete.

  Then there are the silences between the words. I care for those silences least of all. Because the silences are never complete. They are full of murmurs, characteristic flutters, sighs, groans. The real sounds of an imprisoned man. How many shades of sigh exist, for example? Only these spools know. Consider me mad, but as I say: I find these silences the most difficult to bear.

  “Do you hate me, Enrique?”

  “Of course I hate you, Dad. Do you want some water? I’ve still got a bit … Don’t drink it all, though.”

  Gulping, long, heavy gulping. Silence. A creaking, the creaking of a wire mattress. Even in imprisonment a man will seek to make himself comfortable. I have become sensitive to that nowadays, highly sensitive. Groans.

  “Do you need a hand, Dad?”

  “No, it’s okay now.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “It’s okay now. I wanted what was best for you, Enrique. You didn’t know what you wanted … You couldn’t have known. You had to live, that was my only purpose … to win time, to survive.”

  “I hope they kill us.”

  “Don’t talk such nonsense, Enrique! They have no real evidence. We did nothing. They’ll have to release us!”

  “I no longer want to get out of here. They have to do me that one favor. They may even do it, what’s more, as they don’t know that they’d be doing me a favor.”

  “You’re raving, Enrique! Think about life! Think about the world!”

  “I can’t. You turned the world upside down for me, Dad. If they don’t kill me, I’ll become a murderer. And it could be that you will be first, Dad … You want some water? More water?”

  The spool spins, my memory is chock-full of sounds.

  “Is it evening yet, Enrique?”

  “Probably, Dad. Beyond these walls, right now, people are saying ‘Good evening, ma’am. Good evening, sir. Nice evening we’re having. And how’s the family?’”<
br />
  “Have you any idea, Enrique, what an evening on the outside is really like? A simple everyday evening … when the city lights suddenly come on … Simple, familiar lights that offer aperitifs, refreshments, trendy and durable goods. The smells, Enrique—petrol, sweat, cologne. The sounds …”

  “Don’t fantasize, Dad. We’re going to die before too long!”

  “No. Enrique! No! My friends can’t leave me in the lurch. My death would cast a shadow on them too, a massive shadow. No, there’s no way they’d be able to tolerate that … I wouldn’t tolerate it either, if I were a big businessman on the outside, a leading businessman … No, it’s not possible! Even now your mother will be leaving no stone unturned out there … throwing every contact onto the scales. Commerce is the state’s raison d’être, is that clear? Even the Colonel has to bow down before commerce!”

  “You amaze me, Dad! You’re still living in hope, even now? But what do you want? What can you still want, after everything that has happened?”

  Now there was a sound. A word that I didn’t understand. I had to double the volume to make out the whisper. And even though I am unable to share in it, now that my own future has become decidedly dubious, I’m coming round to an understanding of the rapture that Salinas distilled into this one word:

  “Life.”

  Then one day the atrocity took place. You will undoubtedly recall it. How could you not! There was a huge commotion: a combing of the scene, a state of alert, and whatnot. Cabinet sessions, a parliamentary commission, a diplomatic scandal, international protests. For a few days the whole world yammered about nothing else.

  And the Colonel graced our office with a visit.

  “Bloody fools! What are you wasting your time on here?” For five minutes he unleashed a torrent of anger on us, and we could only cringe with bowed heads, like plants in a downpour. Then he slowly calmed down, rather like a passing thunderstorm.

  “What’s happened in the Salinas case?” he suddenly asked—not directing the question at Diaz, at Rodriguez, or at even me, but tossing it up in the air like a ball, for whoever fielded it.