The Paris Enigma: A Novel

by Pablo De Santis

  I followed Grimas down the stairs and we said good-bye at the door.

  7

  W

  ith Bradelli dead, I needed to find Grialet. The Dorignac bookstore, like everything in Paris, was hidden. If I hadn't written the address down, I would have walked right past it. There was a main room where history books, innocuous new arrivals, big volumes with pictures of military uniforms, and anatomy guides were gathered on large tables. But all those books were the facade behind which Mr. Dorignac carried out his true mission: the chosen few had to go down some stairs and to the back of the shop to find, behind a worn velvet curtain, the real bookstore.

  Two other people were there when I entered, a tall, elegantly dressed lady who wore rings with snakes on them, and a gentleman who had rather greenish skin. Apart from his color, he seemed to be in perfect health. The gray-bearded bookseller completely focused on assessing a shipment of used books that had arrived in a trunk. The lady feigned interest in a dictionary, which she set aside quickly, and made a gesture to the bookseller with her head. He responded with a nod of approval, and the lady vanished behind the red curtain. Minutes later, after leafing through a thick book by Michelet entitled

  Bibles of the World, the green gentleman made the same sign of complicity and received an identical response. I waited for the gentleman to disappear behind the curtain and then I perfectly imitated the seriousness of the gesture. I was about to go past the threadbare curtain that separated me from the Mystery, when the bookseller stopped me.

  "Who are you? Where are you going?"

  I shook the hand that he put in my way, and I introduced myself. "Monsieur Dorignac ? My name won't mean anything to you. I am

  Monsieur Arzaky's assistant."

  "Arzaky is an enemy of everything here."

  I drew close to his ear.

  "Monsieur Arzaky is having a crisis of faith. He has poured himself

  into reading the occult texts, but he has no discipline. He wants it all at once: alchemy, spiritualism, black magic. He mixes stills with crystal balls, sulfur with Haitian dolls. I'm afraid he's headed for disaster. And that he'll end up like . . ." Just then the green gentleman left the bookstore empty-handed. He had spent no more than a minute in the forbidden section.

  "Poor Serdac, so persistent in his experiments. He comes here to look at the cover of the most expensive book I have. It's enough for him to know that it's here and then he leaves. He doesn't look good, but he's in better health than he was when his skin was white. Similar methods have greatly reduced the clientele of our bookstore. The ones that don't end up in a hospice, blow themselves up. The ones who don't die in an explosion, end up with sulfur poisoning. Suicides are the order of the day. I'll confess that lately I've been hiding the most dangerous books, so I won't go bankrupt for lack of readers. As for Arzaky, I can't help him. I'm sure your detective already has the books he needs."

  "One never has the books he needs: he has too many or too few. That's why I was looking for Monsieur Grialet. I trust that he can help me get Arzaky back to his cases."

  "And why would I want Arzaky back on his cases?"

  "Do you want them to accuse the Martinists of having driven Paris's great detective crazy? Or the Rosicrucians? Or you yourself, who nourishes all those impressionable minds with your books?" "He's not the Detective of Paris, Darbon is."

  "He was, but Darbon was murdered while investigating some of your customers."

  "Don't think you're telling me anything I don't know. I run a bookstore, but I read the newspapers too."

  The curtain opened slightly and a woman's hand, filled with rings, waved the bookseller over. Did she want to know the price of a book? Was she looking for some title that wasn't on the shelves? Dorignac's haste in attending to her made me think that it was something more mundane than the search for knowledge. From what I had been able to observe, good booksellers invariably wait on customers in an offhand manner, convinced that everyone will eventually find the book they want without any help. If the bookseller takes care of a customer, it's not about a book.

  Dorignac, rushing to help the woman, found a pencil and jotted down the name of a street that I wasn't familiar with.

  "I recently sent him a package at this address. Grialet devotes his days and nights to searching through thousands of pages to find the perfect quote, the one that will save him. Then he gets rid of the books. He believes in these things."

  "And what do you believe in?" I asked as I put the piece of paper in my pocket.

  "Surrounded by dangerous books as I am, I believe that our only hope is in forgetting the quote that we once read, the one that will lead to our downfall."

  Dorignac vanished behind the red curtain.

  8

  A

  lthough there were no books in Grialet's house, the house itself was a book. The building, I found out later,

  had belonged to an editor named Fussel, who had the door and windows built to look like book covers. The spiral staircases crossed through the building like arabesques, unexpected rooms appeared here and there like footnotes, the hallways extended like careless margin notes. On the white walls there was writing; in some places it was like calligraphy, and in others with the haste of sudden inspiration.

  I knocked on the door and Grialet appeared and immediately invited me in. He was about forty years old, and of average height. The contrast between his very white skin and black beard gave him a theatrical air, as if at any moment he might take off the beard and mustache and reveal his true face. Grialet wore his hair a little long to hide the fact that he was missing half his right ear. With his mouth closed, he looked weak and shy, but when he opened it, he was transformed. There was something animal about his large yellow teeth. He was dressed in a blue wool suit, which was too warm for the season. He had his reasons: the house was cold; not the gentle coolness that some homes have in the summer, but the dank cold of long-abandoned houses.

  "Arzaky sent me."

  "I know."

  "You do?"

  "Don't be alarmed, I was warned. Predicting the future isn't one

  of my talents."

  informants and servants."

  "Who warned you? I haven't talked to anyone."

  "We all keep track of Arzaky's movements, along with those of his

  Grialet had said that to see if I would be offended and back off. I acted as if I hadn't heard a thing. He led me into a room with yellow walls, on which the black words continued. There was malignancy in that writing, as if it were an incurable disease, a corrupting decay that would soon bring down the walls and bury the occupants. It would have been impossible to sleep in that house without fearing contagion, without the fear of waking up between the closed pages of a book.

  "If I can stand one unexpected visit, I can stand two," said Grialet.

  It was then that I noticed that there was someone else in the room. I think it took me a few seconds to recognize, toward the back of the room, by the piano, Greta Rubanova, as still as a statue. We looked at each other with the mix of kindness and lack of interest strangers adopt when forced to greet each other. Grialet didn't introduce us, as if he had guessed that we already knew each other.

  "It is an honor to be suspected by all of The Twelve Detectives.

  But I promise the tower is not among my concerns."

  "If you were a suspect, Arzaky wouldn't have sent me, he would

  have come in person. He only wants to end this matter that Darbon

  started, prove that the old detective was on the wrong trail . . ." "And one of the trails led to me?"

  "The trails lead many directions; one of them is here." Grialet waved his hand, brushing aside my investigation as something to be dealt with later, and looked over at the young woman. "You didn't finish telling me why you're here. Don't tell me that

  you work for The Twelve Detectives too."

  He said it sarcastically, of course.

  Greta approached him as if she were going to whisper som
ething

  in his ear but she spoke out loud, "I come as a representative of a

  certain countess whose name I cannot mention. She asked me to tell

  her what quotes you've written on the walls that surround you. She

  admires you and is very impressed by your aversion to books. A man

  who rejects books must be a saint."

  "Often names don't mean anything to me," replied Grialet, "but

  when one is withheld, I know immediately who it is. Tell your

  countess that I take only what I need from each book; I don't want

  those extra pages tormenting my nights. I stroll through the house

  as if it were my memory, one day I sleep here, another there. Every

  book has unpleasant sentences, ideas that attack the main structure,

  words that cancel out other ones, and I want to eliminate all that.

  The path to the perfect quote is winding and takes years to travel,

  but when one arrives, it justifies all the unhappiness that reading

  gives us."

  "Can I go through the house, copying down the quotes that strike

  me as appropriate?" Greta asked Grialet. "My mistress would be very

  happy to have just a tiny part of your vast treasure."

  It was clear that Greta was too quick for me. She was poised to find

  the oil-stained boots or clothes before me, guaranteeing Castelvetia's

  victory. But Grialet leaned toward her and for a moment I thought he

  was going to bite her with his big yellow teeth.

  "No, those quotes are mine alone. The countess has to find her

  own. These have meaning only for me; outside this house, they're

  worthless."

  Greta had already gotten Grialet's attention with some new lie.

  She didn't even have to talk much, since Grialet couldn't take his

  eyes off her. Greta was wearing a blue dress that showcased the

  whiteness of her bosom, which was the only space in the room that

  wasn't covered in letters. Grialet was distracted, just like Arzaky

  had asked, but I couldn't just go looking for oil-stained shoes. Besides, I felt absurdly jealous about leaving him alone with the girl.

  The sentences surrounded me and held me back, as if they were

  obeying a secret signal from their master. On the wall, two feet

  above a dusty piano, I read, "Nothing survives except secrets."

  SEFER HA-ZOHAR.

  Next to that phrase, in a careless hand, Grialet had written, "The

  day will come when God will be a meeting between an old man, a

  decapitated man, and a dove." ELIPHAS LEVI.

  There were quotes in Greek, Latin, and German. Some were attributed to well-known names, like Friedrich Holderlin or Novalis, but other names were completely foreign to me: Stanislaus de

  Guaita, Laterzin, Guillaume de Leclerc. On the closed piano there

  was a messy pile of papers. I also saw a postcard, with an image of a

  woman swimming in a lake of ice. She was naked, covered by only

  a few well-placed ice blocks. When I realized that the woman was

  the Mermaid, I hid the photograph in my clothing. I didn't know

  then why I took it, and I still don't know. I instantly regretted it,

  but there was no turning back. I consoled myself by thinking that

  it was probably just publicity for the performance and that Grialet

  wouldn't miss it.

  One entire wall was devoted to a poem by Gerard de Nerval, "The

  Disinherited":

  Je suis le Tenebreux,--le Veuf,--l'Inconsole, Le Prince d'Aquitaine a la Tour abolie:

  Ma seule Etoile est morte,--et mon luth constelle Porte le Soleil noir de la Melancolie.

  Dans la nuit du Tombeau,Toi qui m'as console, Rends-moi le Pausilippe et la mer d'Italie, La fleurqui plaisait tant a mon coeur desole, Et la treille ou le Pampre a la Rose s'allie. Suis-je Amour ou Phoebus? . . . Lusignan ou Biron? Mon front est rouge encor du baiser de la reine; J'ai reve dans la Grotte ou nage la Sirene . . .

  Et j'ai deux fois vainqueur traverse l'Acheron: Modulant tour a tour sur la lyre d'Orphee Les soupirs de la sainte et les cris de la Fee.

  I knew the poem, because a Central American poet had published a translation of it on

  The Nation's literary page. I remembered the first verse of the sonnet by heart.

  I am the Gloomy One--the Widower--the Unconsoled The Prince of Aquitaine, at his stricken Tower My lone Star is dead,--and my star-spangled lute Bears the black Sun of Melancholia.

  Perhaps Grialet had lost all hope of my leaving, because he turned away from the girl and came over to me.

  "Gerard de Nerval hanged himself from a streetlight not far from here, on Vielle Lanterne street. Everything he wrote had a coded message. I spent many years discovering new meanings to the words of this poem."

  "I don't know if it's because I'm foreign, but I have trouble understanding it."

  "The keys are in tarot and alchemy. The speaker is not the poet, but an alchemical Pluto who represents the philosophical earth, matter prior to its transformation. The tarot is also mentioned. The fifteenth card belongs to the Devil, who is the prince of darkness and, in this case, the Prince of Aquitaine. The sixteenth card is the tower in ruins. And the seventeenth, the star."

  I read the second verse out loud.

  In the night of the Tomb, you who have comforted me, Give me back Posilipo and the sea of Italy,

  The flower that so pleased my desolate heart And the trellis where the branch and the rose meet.

  "I understand even less of this one," I said.

  "I'm not surprised: detectives get lost in the written word. They can read what isn't written, but when letters come into it, they go astray. The night of the tomb means the same as the black sun and melancholy: darkness, the rotting of the matter which will then be transformed. Posilipo is a red stone, which is to say, sulfur, the alchemists' material of choice. And the sea of Italy is mercury. All in all, the entire poem speaks of the transformation of matter, the second alchemical operation."

  The sonnet continued:

  Am I Eros or Phoebus? . . . Lusignan or Biron? My forehead is flushed from the Queen's kiss; I dreamed in the Grotto where the Mermaid swims . . .

  And twice victorious I crossed the Acheron: Modulating alternately on the lyre of Orpheus The saint's sighs and the fairy's screams.

  "I'm not going to overwhelm you with the secrets contained in each and every word; every night I find new possible interpretations. But I want you to observe how the dark, star-spangled lute of the first verse turns into Orpheus's luminous lyre at the end. Nerval set out to tell the story of an alchemical transformation, but here, in the penultimate verse, we see what really matters to him: when matter and work become art. Orpheus is the poet capable of giving and creating an allegorical version of alchemy and its mysteries; he is the artist capable of putting into words those other secret arts. And the result of that verbal operation is as important as if not more so than its contents. Nerval didn't need to tell us the secret; he was interested in pointing out a puzzle that couldn't possibly be solved."

  I read the poem again and then said to Grialet, "But what's interesting about enigmas is that they hint at the possibility of an answer. I like your interpretation, even though I don't completely understand it. I like knowing that just as mysteries exist, so do solutions, even if I can't figure them out. When I was a boy I used to read about the detectives' great exploits and I loved the cases that seemed impossible, a locked-room case, for example, did have an explanation. The enigma exists only for the moment in which the detective unravels it with the strength of his reasoning."

  "You said it: Arzaky and his friends want to unravel mysteries, not complete them with the revelation of the enigma. If they embraced the mystery instead of confronting it, don't you think they would com
e to a better understanding of their cases? Arzaky always finds the killer, but he loses sight of the truth."

  "Arzaky is a detective; like a scientist, he believes only the evidence."

  "Do you believe that the evidence leads to the truth? Evidence is the truth's enemy! How many innocent killers has Arzaky sent to the guillotine? It's not just crime that makes us guilty, nor the lack of it that makes us innocent."

  Grialet had raised his voice, surprising Greta, who moved closer to me. Then the occultist started to circle us, pressing us against one another.

  "I was partially deaf until they hacked off half my ear with a butcher's knife. Since then I hear perfectly." Grialet moved his greasy hair aside to show us his wound, whose irregular edges looked more like they had been bitten than sliced by steel. "With this pretty little ear I can hear your thoughts. I know what the detectives don't. They don't dare come here, sending you instead. Who do you work for, miss? For Lawson, or Castelvetia?"

  Greta, pale, bit her lips.

  "But your detectives don't know what they're doing," he continued. "You are more than servants, more than assistants. Both of you will be the downfall of your mentor."