The Paris Enigma

by Pablo De Santis

  It seemed best to leave him in peace, but I had a thousand questions. Didn’t I, his assistant, deserve an explanation of the method that had enabled him to reconstruct the story? Since he didn’t respond to my questions, I put my hand on his shoulder. Physical contact was something that Craig couldn’t stand, but I was experiencing a maddening curiosity, the satiation of which would make even Alarcon’s gruesome murder seem like a gift.

  “It’s true,” he said, sitting up with a piqued expression on his face.

  36• Pablo De Santis

  “The method. The perspective. Following clues. Salvatrio my friend, I am going to give you a lesson on the method that none of The Twelve Detectives can match.”

  Overcome by that dark energy that now held sway over him, he dragged me out of the house. We walked at top speed: Craig, the insomniac, went first, with a lit lantern. After an hour of walking in silence I wished we had called a carriage. I made some vague remark and he responded by saying, “Rented carriages can’t take us to where we’re going.”

  I was unfamiliar with those dark, disintegrating corners of the city. We passed a fallen tree and then a dead horse. His bones shone in the moonlight. Later that same night I saw something worse, but nightmares are capricious, and it was the horse’s empty eye sockets that haunted me for nights afterward. Farther on there was a shed, which was where we were headed. Craig opened the large door, without a key or a lock. Up high there were some broken windows that let in the moon’s white light. I thought I heard a whisper, but it was the buzzing of f lies.

  In the middle of the shed a man’s corpse hung upside down. His feet were tied to a beam with rope. Craig raised his lantern so I could see it well. He was naked and covered in clots of blood. His inert, open arms seemed to retain something of the gesture he had used, night after night, in distant theaters, to elicit amazement. Beneath the body, there was a lake of blood that the dirt f loor was struggling to swallow up.

  “He was slow in telling me where Alarcón’s body was. Up until the very last minute he seemed to trust that some trick would save him.”

  “What are you going to do with… that?”

  “As soon as the sun comes up I’ll go to the police station. I’ve already thought of how I’ll explain it, that I came here following the clues I got from the card players. The police are familiar with the harsh ways they punish cheaters. And thus ends Detective Craig’s Final Case.”

  As I left the shed I had the feeling I was being followed by blue f lies. I couldn’t go back alone in the middle of the night, so I had to wait for Craig. I didn’t want to walk by his side. Thirty paces ahead, Craig, with his lantern raised, showed me the way. Even that light, for the mere fact that it had shone on the macabre sight of the magician, seemed to glow with the incandescence of corruption.

  10

  I went back to my father’s workshop and applied myself to the cutting of soles, which was my specialty. I don’t know if I mentioned it already, but Salvatrio’s Cobbler’s Shop only made men’s shoes. My father refused to touch women’s feet. He noticed I was gloomy and he tried to get me to talk about it. I implied that it was a romantic problem, just to reassure my father. He smiled with relief, “Once you touch a woman’s feet, all is lost.”

  In the days that followed my mother insisted I eat well. She prepared stews with long noodles, zucchini, and beef. I couldn’t touch the meat.

  One afternoon a short boy about twelve years old, wearing a blue hat that was too large for his head, entered the shoe shop. He asked for Señor Sigmundo Salvatrio and it took me a while to answer because no one had ever called me “mister” before. He handed me a note written in a woman’s round, careful hand.

  my husband is in the hospital, suffering from an unknown illness. i need to send you on one last assignment. i’ll be home all afternoon.

  There was no heading or signature, as if Señora Craig feared the paper could fall into strange, enemy hands. I polished my shoes with the black cream my own father made-and which, it was said, also worked as an ointment for burns and wounds-and left the workshop.

  The maid opened the door and as I went upstairs, I looked into the sitting room, where papers and dust were piling up. On the top f loor Señora Craig, seated in a white chair, was waiting for me. The table on which she had her tea was like some sort of garden in winter; all the plants that surrounded it were dark and filled with thorns; the f lowers were f leshy and enormous. The maid rushed to bring tea and a sugar bowl. When I opened it and saw that it was empty, I feared that Señora Craig was suffering hardships due to her husband’s illness.

  “Please, help yourself,” she told me, and I pretended to serve myself. Two or three white grains fell into the hot tea.

  “How is your husband?”

  “The doctors can’t find anything. He is sick in spirit.”

  “Can I visit him?”

  “Not yet. But you can do something for him. The past few days he has talked of nothing else. Are you listening?”

  “Of course, ma’am.”

  “In Paris, this May, the World’s Fair opens. I imagine you’ve seen pictures in the newspapers of the pavilions, and of the iron tower being constructed. The Twelve Detectives have been asked to participate.”

  “All of them?”

  “All of them, together for the first time.”

  My hand shook and I almost dropped my cup of tea. The Argentine newspapers had followed the preparations for this new World’s Fair in detail, as if it were something that somehow belonged to us. I had read that the Argentine pavilion was larger and more magnificent than any of the other South American ones. Passage reservations had been sold out long ago. But news that the detectives were getting together was more important to me than all the treasures of all the countries, than the paintings hanging in the Palace of Fine Arts,

  and the inventions in the Galerie des Machines. I thought that what excited me should be exciting for everyone, and even the tower itself paled in comparison to the detectives’ meeting.

  “Will they have their own pavilion?” I asked. For a minute I could even imagine The Twelve displayed in glass cases and on platforms, like wax figures.

  “No, they are going to have their meetings in the Numancia Hotel and there, in a parlor, they’ll display the tools of their trade. Up until now, only a few of them have gotten together at one time, at most six, but this time they’ll be twelve. Well, eleven, since my husband can’t go.”

  What was I hearing? Craig would miss the first meeting of The Twelve Detectives in history?

  “He has to go, even if he’s sick. You could go with him. You and a nurse.”

  “My husband was the driving force behind this meeting, along with Viktor Arzaky. They both wanted the art of investigation to be represented among so many other trades. With your youthful enthusiasm, my dear Salvatrio, nothing is impossible, but I know that my husband can’t take the long boat trip. Which is why you must go in his place.”

  “I couldn’t take his place. I’m an inexperienced acolyte.”

  “Arzaky, the Pole, as my husband calls him, has been left without an assistant. Old Tanner is sick; he plays chess, he grows tulips, and he sends letters. And Arzaky has to prepare the exhibition of the detectives’ instruments. My husband thought that you could go and help him in that undertaking.”

  “I have no money.”

  “It will all be paid for. The fair’s organizing committee will take care of the expenses. What’s more, my husband won’t take no for an answer.”

  I had never traveled anywhere. The invitation both excited and intimidated me. I paused and then said, in a faint voice, “I know your husband would have preferred to send Alarcón. Today is his funeral. Are you going to go, Señora Craig?”

  “No, Salvatrio. I am not going to go.”

  I took a sip of bitter tea.

  “I have something to confess to you. We envied him.”

  “Alarcón? Why?”

  Señora Craig sat up in her chair.
Some sort of vague f lush gave life to her face. I didn’t give her the answer she was expecting.

  “Because he was your husband’s favorite. Because he considered him more competent than us.”

  Señora Craig stood up. It was time to leave.

  “You are alive and he is dead. Don’t ever envy anyone, Señor Salvatrio.”

  part ii. The Symposium

  1

  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.”

  2

  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.”