The Paris Enigma

by Pablo De Santis

  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.”

  part iii. The Tower’s Opponents

  1

  The tower f launted its blend of grandiosity and futility at the gray sky. It was made for cloudy days, to be seen through drops of rain, from far away. A few years later, at the 1900 World’s Fair, surrounded by automobiles, it would already seem old, but as it was being built the tower projected an air of extravagance and surprise. It wasn’t just its height that was exceptional, but the promise of its demise. That something so gigantic could disappear without some kind of cataclysm. Its transitory nature cast a shadow of fantasy around it; whispering in our ears that we shouldn’t take life too seriously.

  There is something coffinlike about elevators, a tendency toward the worlds below (volcanoes, mines, the dirt on Pluto). But the tower’s elevator rose effortlessly. It amazed me that it didn’t fall. On that day the mechanism that went up to the second platform wasn’t ready yet, so we got off at the first and continued our ascent to the scene of the crime on foot. Arzaky went ahead, and I struggled to keep up with his swift pace. I was very inexperienced back then, but even now, after having seen hundreds of crime scenes, I can say that nothing seemed farther from a murder than the silence and tranquility of that platform. I know that a match, a drop of blood, a stain on the wall, or a newspaper clipping can be signs that lead to the killer, but my first thought upon arriving at a crime scene is the utter meaninglessness of everything that remains in the face of death.

  “Well it seems we are dealing with a locked-room case,” said Arzaky. He wasn’t even out of breath. “In this case, the locked room happens to be outdoors. No one saw the killer come in or out.”

  I remembered that the now deceased Alarcón maintained that it made no sense to speak of a “locked room.” I barely managed to put together a coherent sentence as I gasped for breath, but Arzaky seemed to understand.

  “What authority are you citing?” he asked.

  “Alarcón, Craig’s original apprentice.”

  “Did he solve many crimes?”

  “No, he died on his first case.”

  “Oh, yes, I remember, he was killed by the magician. With all due respect for the dead, why are you repeating such foolishness? The locked room is the essence of our work. It doesn’t matter if the room doesn’t actually exist. We must accept its metaphorical power.”

>   We arrived at the second platform and went up a few more steps. After finding a f law in the smelting, they had removed the protective railings and hadn’t yet installed new ones. It was easy to see where Darbon had slipped and fallen, because the steps were covered with the same thick black liquid that Arzaky had found beneath the detective’s nails.

  “Be careful what you touch and where you step,” said Arzaky. “There’s oil everywhere.”

  “And broken glass. Do you think the killer broke a bottle of oil over his head?”

  “The killer made sure to be far from here when Darbon fell. He was an old man and had a lot of trouble climbing stairs. He used a cane, which hid only a small sword, not the myriad surprises that Craig’s has. The killer proposed a meeting up here, promising information about the attacks on the tower. Darbon was anxious to close that case before our next meeting.”

  “But Darbon took on only the most important cases; murders, a few anonymous letters sent by a lunatic… ”

  “You’re new to this city and you don’t understand. You’ve barely seen anything of Paris besides this tower. To you, Paris is the tower. But those of us who live here have been watching its slow progress for two years. These struts and vertical irons have filtered into our dreams. We all feel compelled to shout either yes or no about this matter, particularly because no one has asked our opinion. For some it is evil, for others the future, for the most pessimistic, it’s both evil and the future.”

  I didn’t know where to lean, where to step. Everything was covered in black oil.

  Arzaky’s voice sounded remote, almost as if I were dreaming.

  “If Darbon managed to solve this case, although it seemed simple on the face of it, his name would be in all the papers again, tied to the heart of Paris itself. He would have achieved the definitive victory over the interloper…”

  “The interloper?”

  “Me. He also used to call me ‘the damn Polish traitor.’”

  Arzaky reached into his pocket and pulled out a pair of tiny tweezers, a tiny scissors, and a tiny metal box. They looked like they belonged in a dollhouse. He carefully took a sample of the glass shards. I prayed he wouldn’t get any oil on him, because then I’d have to put up with his bad temper. He pointed out a cord that was almost completely soaked in the black liquid, and cut off a piece with his miniature scissors. Arzaky put the cord and the glass into the metal box, which he then returned to his pocket.

  “Do you understand the nature of this trap? The killer put a bottle of machine oil on the stairs. It’s very thick oil, and made the steps impossibly slippery. Darbon went up without a lantern, perhaps according to the instructions of the killer himself, who must have set up this meeting with him. We should look for evidence of his correspondence. When Darbon’s foot hit the cord, the bottle tipped over, spilling its contents onto the steps, causing him to slip and fall.”

  “And how could someone get up here and set the trap without anyone seeing him?” I asked.

  “At six o’clock the workers leave for the day and only the night watchman remains. Everyone knew that he liked to drink, and that afternoon he received a gift of two bottles, addressed to him from an anonymous benefactor. He drank them and passed out. He didn’t see or hear anything.”

  I pointed to a small puddle of oil a few stairs farther up. Arzaky shone his lantern on it.

  “I think the killer first considered placing the bottle higher up,” I said. “He calculated the trajectory of the fall and decided to move it. In the process he accidentally spilled a little.”

  Arzaky looked at me distastefully, as if it was annoying to him that I point out some imperfection in the murder. But then he said, “All the better for us. The killer must have stained his clothes, gloves, or shoes. Have you gotten this all down?”

  “You mean the bottle, the cord, and the oil? I remember it perfectly.”

  “And my words? Don’t you think you should write down what I say?”

  I hurried to find a notepad in my pocket. As I hastily took out a pencil, it slipped from my fingers, bounced, and fell into the void. I was suddenly aware of how high up we were. I peeked over the edge, and seeing how far below the ground was made my stomach turn and my hands and forehead began to sweat.

  I tried to play off the loss of my pencil as an intentional experiment.

  “They say that if you drop a coin from this height, the force of gravity increases the speed of its fall so much that it could go through a man’s skull.”

  “Don’t be an idiot, you’re forgetting about the air’s resistance. And now what are you going to use to write with?”

  I pointed to my forehead.

  “Like a steel trap.”

  “Old Tanner responded to each and every one of my sentences with an amazed ‘Oh’ or a ‘That never would have occurred to me.’ You don’t even pay attention. What are you looking at?”

  I didn’t answer right away.

  “The whole city. Do you realize that I’m incredibly lucky? I just arrived in Paris and I’m observing it from a height that even those born here have never seen.”

  “Get away from the edge, before you get even luckier: you could be the first foreigner to fall from up here.”

  Avoiding the oil slick, we began our descent.

  2

  case?” I asked him. On the way back Arzaky seemed discouraged.

  “Do you think this is a difficult

  “Even the easiest case can get complicated. What worries me is not that it can’t be solved, but rather that it will be solved in a trivial way. That in the end the solution will be something absurd. An indignant lover, a jealous husband, a crime of passion…”

  “Don’t you like crimes of passion?”

  “No. I prefer envy, ambition, revenge-especially revenge, for something silly that everyone thinks has been forgotten. Even suicides that have been covered up. But not murders committed out of lust or insanity. There’s nothing admirable in them. Those cases are purely formulaic. They have no poetry.”

  Every once in a while, a passerby turned to look at the great Arzaky, whose photograph often appeared in the newspaper. Arzaky walked briskly, oblivious to the attention.

  “Now what are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know what you’re going to do, but I’m going to rest. At six I have a meeting with the people from the fair’s organizing committee. And as for your other assignment, have you figured anything out?” I shook my head no and he continued, “I was told that Castelvetia wrote the name Reynal in some hotel’s register, but no one has seen him yet.”

  “And what do you suspect?”

  “Castelvetia was the last one to join The Twelve Detectives. Craig insisted on it. I was against it. Caleb Lawson detests him; they harbor a mutual grudge. When we issued the invitations, I doublechecked his résumé. Most of his cases are impossible to verify. He could be an infiltrator, a journalist putting together information for an exposé of us, or an envoy from the European police’s annual secret meeting.”

  “A spy? ”

  “Who knows? We detectives are men with shady pasts. We can invent our histories, because our career has no supporting institutions, like doctors or lawyers. We are self-made men in every sense of the word.”

  We had arrived at the point where our paths separated.

  “As soon as you can, follow Castelvetia and find out his secret,” Arzaky ordered me. “Right now, when all eyes are on us, I don’t want any surprises.”

  Faced with Arzaky’s insistence, I had no choice but to follow Castelvetia. Of course it’s not easy to follow a man who is a specialist in tracking, since he could easily discover what I was up to. Craig had taught us to become invisible; the first thing one had to do was think about something else, move as if sleepwalking, get closer as if by accident. I followed Craig’s teachings so obediently that I forgot I was following the Dutchman and I bumped right into him in the middle of the street. I shouted out an apology, in an intentionally high-pitched voice so h
e wouldn’t recognize me. He was so wrapped up in his thoughts that he didn’t even look up, and immediately went into the Varinsky Hotel.

  I distanced myself a few paces. The Varinsky was a hotel for tired travelers who aren’t choosy: it was part hostel and part brothel. Like all the hotels and all the pensions in Paris those days, it was completely full, since the committees of visiting countries had already begun to arrive. I waited outside until he left. Then, instead of following him, I resolutely entered the hotel. A nearsighted young man came out to assist me, which is to say, to get rid of me. I put some coins into his pockets as I mentioned the name Reynal.

  “Room twelve,” he said.

  Craig had warned me: sometimes investigations are complicated and tiring, and other times we solve them immediately. A detective must be willing to work, but even more willing to receive a revelation. I was certainly willing: I knocked on the door and it opened, with no delay or questions. Inside the room there was a young woman: she looked as if she had just gotten out of bed. Ever since that moment, I have always adored women who’ve just woken up and are still somewhat in sleep’s clutches. She wore a distracted smile as she stretched languidly. I didn’t quite know what this situation meant for The Twelve Detectives, but I was even more confused as to what it meant for me. Castelvetia’s assistant was a woman: this was unprecedented. I tried to replace the entranced expression on my face with a shocked one.

  I had ended up here by following Arzaky’s orders, and I had to speak for Arzaky. “Don’t tell anyone who I am,” said the young woman, as if I could possibly know who she was.