The Riddle of Monte Verita

by Jean-Paul Torok

  He couldn’t take any more. He would have liked to be able to forget all the unknown quantities of this affair, even the ridiculous story of the coded letter. A puzzle in the style of Poe, what nonsense! Even from the hereafter, Hoenig continued to mock him. But he couldn’t get the riddles out of his mind. Every time a new fact was uncovered, the mystery deepened. Instead of bringing enlightenment, everything kept getting more and more complex in this frightening brain-teaser.

  Sitting up in bed, as the clarity of the electric light met the greyness of the early day, he read the morning newspaper and tried to convince himself that the events were real. It all appeared so incredible now, sitting this mundane environment where one could see the teapot, the toast, the butter and the little pots of jam placed carefully on the tray, or hear the water running in the bathtub, sounds of doors and footsteps, happy conversations and all the peaceful and confused background noises of a hotel waking up.

  Under the headline: GREAT HOPE FOR PEACE, the news of the start of the Munich conference covered the front page, together with photographs of the four attendees. The photos seemed to have been selected from the archives of some morgue. Pierre recognised one of the four faces as Hitler, whose deceitful and murderous appearance belied the optimism of the title. Chamberlain looked inane and Daladier’s smile was more like a grimace. Mussolini appeared in full regalia, his chin imprudently in the air as he descended a monumental staircase.

  Arthur Carter Gilbert’s discourse was, more modestly, announced in the local news pages. Would the great writer be able to shed light on the mystery of Monte Verita? asked the journalist. His coverage of the affair was reasonably accurate, even though it put rather too much emphasis on the supernatural aspects and failed to mention any suspicions attaching to the attendees at the symposium that had just ended.

  Pierre had finished his breakfast, and was anxiously imagining what Carter Gilbert was going to say, when his wife came out of the bathroom. She was wrapped in a flannel bathrobe and her hair was swept up under a knotted towel. Her face was smooth and her skin was fresh but her eyes appeared swollen. The scent of eau-de-toilette permeated the room.

  ‘You’re not up yet?’ she said sitting down in front of the dressing-table. ‘Hurry up, or you’re going to be late.’

  ‘So you’re not coming with me?’ he asked, knowing the response. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to the clinic. Freyja Hoenig gets out today. She’s going to be all alone. I imagine Strahler will be at the lecture.’

  ‘And afterwards?’

  He looked at her reflection in the mirror. Her eyes seemed unusually wide as she applied mascara to the lashes, an operation that seemed to require all her attention.

  ‘Afterwards, I’m coming back to pack our bags. You can take the car. Come straight back here after the lecture and we’ll leave at once. We’ll stop for lunch on the way.’ She turned round. ‘You can’t imagine how happy I am that this nightmare is over. What about you?’

  ‘I’ll tell you at the end.’

  ‘Come here,’ she said. She put her cheek against his hip as she looked up at him in the mirror.

  ‘Don’t worry, darling. Uncle Arthur will fix everything. He’ll explain the role I had to play. I don’t know why I couldn’t bring myself to tell you,’ she murmured, pressing herself more firmly against her husband. ‘Sometimes it seems too ridiculous; at other times it’s too frightening. Anyway, I don’t know what’s behind it all. Someone killed this odious man and I know it wasn’t me.’

  He leant down and kissed her on the forehead.

  ‘Don’t think about it any more, darling, there’s no point in even talking about it.’

  ‘But I do want to talk about it, because I’m the cause of all this evil. You see….’

  She stopped herself and changed the subject, while mechanically applying her lipstick.

  ‘You know, Pierre, the happiness I feel right now will be nothing compared to how I shall feel once there’s an explanation of this whole dreadful business.’

  ***

  A light drizzle fell upon the Albergo in the wan light of a grey sky. It was a chilly morning, so much so that many were wearing coats and scarves and those waiting outside the room were walking up and down as they talked, to warm themselves up. The rain from the previous night had washed the terrace clean. Water dripped from cherry-laurels and spindle trees and slid with each gust of wind off the hanging leaves of the palm trees. The damp smell of autumn rose from the clumps of trees in the park. Down below, mist hung over the lake. People were leaving the building already. Suitcases were stacked up in the hallways. There was a general atmosphere of melancholy and departure.

  Pierre tried to calm himself by thinking about the weather. It would be better in Italy, he told himself, once they’d crossed the border. He moved towards a group dominated by Lippi’s tall silhouette. The only ones with him were Prokosch, Mestre and a handful of disinterested onlookers. Mestre told him Harvey had left on the first train out that morning without taking the time to say goodbye.

  Pierre felt like running away. He didn’t care about the dénouement of this senseless business and he wasn’t even surprised at his own lack of curiosity. He prepared some brief words of departure: “I shan’t stay for the lecture. I just came to say farewell. We have to leave right away in order to be in Venice by nightfall.” But his scrupulous nature rebelled subconsciously against the feeling of cowardice he would experience afterwards. What would he say to Solange? What would she think of him?

  Talking about anything at all; fretting about the delayed start of the lecture: it was still putting off the moment of truth. And so he stayed.

  ‘Terrible weather.’

  ‘Terrible weather.’

  ‘Musn’t complain. It’s been a pretty good week.’

  ‘When are you leaving?’

  ‘Today.’

  ‘I leave tomorrow,’ said Mestre. ‘We’ll keep in touch, OK?’

  The siren of a police car coming up the ramp became louder. Brenner appeared at the door of the bar. He looked upset. Despite the cold, he wore his rumpled summer suit and a rather loud tie. It was obvious from his face that he hadn’t slept for twenty-four hours. He squinted in the direction of the parking space where a fat policeman was emerging from behind a clump of laurels kepi in hand.

  ‘Where is Sir Arthur?’ barked Brenner. ‘What’s happening, for goodness’ sake?’

  His manner changed dramatically when he addressed subordinates.

  ‘He’s coming, Superintendent. He was sleeping like a log and we had the devil of a job waking him up. He’s furious, sir,’ he added, wiping his brow.

  The old man emerged, accompanied by two more policemen. Their very size made him look even smaller. An overcoat several sizes too large from him, and obviously borrowed, flapped about his fragile frame. His pince-nez were askew and the tufts of hair stood up on either side of his great bald head. He was fuming. He walked straight up to Brenner with a menacing look on his face, spluttering about attacks on individual liberty and Gestapo-like methods.

  The Superintendent ignored the remarks and saluted him courteously. The he turned to the first policeman.

  ‘What about Strahler? Have you found him? We can’t start without him.’

  Strahler had not been in the hotel the previous night and Brenner, convinced he would be found at the clinic, had dispatched the man there.

  The policeman stood to attention.

  ‘Impossible, sir.’

  There was something in his voice which caused everyone to look up.

  ‘What’s impossible?’ Brenner asked acidly.

  The officer leant forward and his voice took on a despondent tone.

  ‘To find Stahler, sir. He’s left, Superintendent. He’s gone away with the Hoenig woman. They’ve packed their bags. They’ve gone.’

  ***

  Sir Arthur Carter Gilbert’s discourse and the debates that followed it were reported in the official minutes
of the symposium. But the academic style employed could not capture the truly remarkable spectacle the great man offered his audience, nor the indelible impression of a formidable intellect at work behind the vast bald forehead and the expressive little eyes twinkling behind the pince-nez perched on the end of the long nose. The man who had invented and solved nearly fifty criminal puzzles, who had shaken up the world of mystery fiction with his theory of impossible crimes, was there seated on the stage, as calm and immutable as the lord of heaven and earth on judgment day; or, rather, like an antique soothsayer about to pronounce upon the flight patterns of birds or the entrails of a slaughtered sheep.

  The old man was there, gracefully holding his pince-nez in one hand while gesticulating with the other to lend force to his demonstration. Due to his elevated position, it was possible to see, under the table, that his trousers were too short and his red socks were twisted, a fact which would not have drawn so much attention if they had been worn by other ankles but which – illustrated by magazines and the jeers of the street urchins – filled the spectators with an almost religious respect. Before him sat every detective in the canton, the entire local press, a considerable number of dignitaries and noted academics, and those few foreigners that had decided to stay following the interruption of the symposium – the rest, having opted to go home instead, cursed themselves for it for the rest of their existence.

  ‘In the course of my numerous – too numerous – conferences,’ Sir Arthur began nonchalantly, ‘I have noticed that the public prefers the particular to the general and the concrete to the abstract. I was proposing, therefore – initially at least – to keep to the material aspects of the affair all you reasonable people have come here about, and to limit myself to the discussion and resolution of a crime which, for once, did not spring from the busy typewriters of Dorothy Sayers or Agatha Christie.’

  He looked around the audience with his little twinkling eyes, eliciting the occasional smile or growl of approval and then, to the surprise of all, banged his fist on the table.

  ‘I WAS WRONG!’ he exclaimed, in a voice which set off echoes all round the hall. ‘I was wrong because you see, good people, the big problem with this story of locked doors and walking corpses is that there is no material evidence to base it on. As I believe has been said between these very walls, nobody planning a criminal enterprise would, under normal circumstances, dream of employing such ridiculously complicated methods. Unfortunately, in the present case, it turns out that’s exactly what he did. We’re dealing with someone who, by all the evidence, created an irrational situation in the pursuit of rational ends. Once seen from that point of view, everything becomes logical. BUT BEWARE! The logic in question does not follow the rules of real life. That’s why it seemed to me from the moment I became involved in this affair – and I already made this clear to several among you – that someone must have prepared a plan that caused events to occur according to the rules of detective fiction. That is to say the routine steps of police investigations – material clues, fingerprints, infinitesimal particles of ash collected by the likes of the maniacal Sherlock Holmes which could only have come from a particular cigar shop in Valparaiso that only has a single client – seem to be solecisms, completely out of place here. We must thus limit ourselves to the discussion and abstract resolution of an intellectual problem, a million miles from the sordid reality of everyday life.

  ‘This matter, you see, doesn’t fall in the category of realist but of intellectual, implying intelligence and not just imagination: what we call the detective story. I’m not talking about those slices of life, seasoned with violence and other obscene spices, that American readers habitually consume these days. Nor the French version, which suffers from anarchy and vulgarity, as practised by Gaboriau, Leblanc and Leroux and the Belgians Steeman and Simenon, men of letters who can be readily forgotten.’ There were several disapproving coughs from the audience and even one voice crying “No!” Carter Gilbert raised a conciliatory hand. ‘I exclude, however, the delectable Mystery of the Yellow Room, whose excellent argument has survived even its frightful editing,’ he added, to considerable applause.

  ‘No, I’m talking about those gentle novels where the action takes place between civilized people and which have perfected the suppression of human life in a peaceful English village, on a Cunard ocean liner, or in the most respectable boarding houses in Brighton. Crime there is civilized and avoids bloodshed. There, all is logic and reason, good manners and cups of tea. Let us be thankful for that kind of detective story: like a modern-day version of the epics of chivalry, it has managed, in these troubled times, to uphold the classic virtues. It is maintaining order in a time of universal disorder.’

  There were several bursts of applause and even some shouts of agreement. Carter Gilbert silenced them by modestly raising both hands. Then he continued:

  ‘I shall now speak on the subject of –.’

  ‘Could the speaker please get to the point,’ asked a voice, with exaggerated politeness.

  ‘I shall now speak,’ continued Carter Gilbert smoothly, ‘on the subject of a fundamental problem in this kind of fiction, that of a body in a locked room which nobody has left – .’

  One of the symposium organisers, seated on the front row, raised his hand.

  ‘Forgive the interruption, Sir Arthur, ‘but that point was the subject of an earlier paper by Professor Lippi.’

  ‘I know, my friend: I’ve studied the transcript. I merely wanted to add a modest codicil to that scintillating lecture, that I borrow in all humility from the impeccable De Quincey: understand that to have discovered a problem is not less admirable – and, I might add, is more ingenious – than to have found a solution. As everyone here knows, Edgar Allan Poe invented the detective story. In The Murders in the Rue Morgue he posed a formidable problem, but the solution he proposed – and here I beg young Garnier’s pardon ….’

  Adjusting his pince-nez, he found Pierre sitting between Mestre and Lippi, and made a gruesome grimace in his direction which was obviously intended as a welcoming smile.

  ‘As I was saying, the solution he proposed is far from the best possible. It requires obtuse investigators, a window with a broken nail and an anthropomorphic ape. I myself have written innumerable locked room stories. I’ve used asphyxiating gas introduced through a keyhole, a dagger shot from a rifle, an Indonesian arrow dipped in molasses and cyanide, a pistol attached to a piece of elastic that fires bullets made from rock salt, an electrified chessboard and so on. I even read one the other day that should make you laugh. The murderer, finding himself in a house surrounded by six inches of snow, escaped by clinging on to the string of a kite. I ask you, the string of a kite?’

  ‘Where’s he headed with all this?’ whispered Lippi in Pierre’s ear.

  ‘All that is by way of explaining,’ continued Carter Gilbert, as if he’d heard Lippi’s question, ‘that the most satisfying solutions are also the most simple. So simple, in fact, that they appear evident. And so evident that nobody dares think of them! So Professor Lippi, pre-occupied in his lecture with listing the most weird and complicated methods, overlooked the clearest and simplest. I assume it was negligence, for I cannot imagine anyone deliberately ignoring a model of the genre, an elemental solution of exquisite simplicity, invented in 1892 by my compatriot Israel Zangwill in his novella The Big Bow Mystery. It is simple, it is convenient, it is easy to put into practice and it should have pointed you in the right direction….’

  ‘I confess my ignorance,’ said Mestre in a low voice. ‘What solution is he talking about?’

  ‘Shhh!’ said Pierre. ‘I’m trying to remember.’

  Lippi, who had been drumming his fingers on his trouser leg for several moments, stood up.

  ‘Good grief, Maestro, you’ve just said the contrary. Let me see, how did you put it exactly? Yes: you said that in this business the murderer had used ridiculously complicated methods.’

  ‘You haven’t been paying attention,�
�� replied Carter Gilbert irritably. He detested being interrupted. ‘It’s true I did speak about insanely complicated arrangements. But I never said it was the murderer who had done the arranging. I stressed the fact, as I recall, that someone had prepared a plan according to the rules of detective fiction. Someone very clever, I must admit. The staging of a murder in a lighted room, with two witnesses who were expected to be there, already reeked of trickery. But when the woman with the knife vanishes, and the corpse disappears from a double-locked room, and on top of all that there’s a cock-and-bull story about the living dead and a bewitched grotto that’s only been put in for show… all that is too studied, too staged, too mysterious. The spectacle had been slowly and carefully prepared in order to make you all lose your wits, up until the precise moment, chosen by the author, when the skein would have been untangled and all the threads laid out bare in the blink of an eye for all to see.’

  His bulging, myopic eyes scanned the auditorium. With the thick lenses, he looked like an owl.

  ‘And as for you, devotees of unsolvable riddles and inextricable mazes, and you, professionals trained in scientific investigation and tough interrogation….’

  His gaze lingered on the police officers grouped together at the rear of the hall as he continued:

  ‘You allowed yourselves to be mystified and you fell for it hook, line and sinker. Yes, gentlemen of the police, trained as you are to answer an unglamorous calling in the parishes of sordid crime and mundane news items, it pains me to say that, under the disastrous influence of the lovers of puzzles, riddles and brain-teasers, you allowed yourselves to be hoodwinked as well. You accepted without question the myth of the impossible crime, the only miracle that a prosaic mind gifted with sound common sense will accept as a challenge.’

  He raised his hooded eyelids as if expecting a protest. But, seeing Brenner imposing silence on his men with the wave of a hand, he continued: