The Paris Enigma (8 page)

“Well, Arzaky, you are the one who organized all this. Now you've got some objects for your glass cases. Which one will you choose to represent our profession? Incomplete jigsaw puzzles, paintings that fuse fruit and faces, a Greek monster and an inquisitive sphinx, Aladdin's blackboard, a blank page. Which one will it be?”

Arzaky held back a yawn.

“He who speaks last always has an advantage: the sound of his voice still echoes. But apart from that, I choose Sakawa. I also fear that all investigation is a blank page.”

I
n spite of my exhaustion, it took me a while to fall asleep. I was surrounded by unfamiliar things, and my mind tried in vain to adapt to the continuous introduction of new ideas, people, and settings. Sleep refused to come, because there were too many things to dream about. I thought about what was said at the meeting: the detectives' statements, the assistants' covert remarks. Time and time again I imagined myself escaping the outer circle of the satellites, and walking with sure steps toward center stage. I was immensely lucky to be an acolyte, to have gotten to meet The Twelve Detectives, and that was enough for me during the day. But at night I wanted more.

I finally slept for several hours, although I had the feeling that I had barely shut my eyes. I was awoken by noises outside the room: people running, and then doors slamming and voices. I washed up, shaved off my shadow of a beard, and dressed. I went out into the hallway still adjusting the knot in my tie. Linker, Tobias Hatter's assistant, bumped into me and kept running without saying a word, as if he had collided with one of those room service carts. Benito came charging up behind him.

“They've killed Louis Darbon,” gasped Benito as he passed me.

I thought I must still be dreaming, nobody could have killed one of the detectives. Weren't they immortal? Weren't they immune to
silent swords, to ice darts shot through locks, and perfect roses with poisoned thorns?

I followed them down the stairs and then through the street. The morning was cool. I had taken the precaution of bringing my vicuña poncho. I secretly regretted having missed breakfast; it's the only thing I like about staying in hotels. The assistants had all left Madame Nécart's hotel at almost the same time and were running toward the entrance to the fair. We would bunch up together, looking like a group of long distance runners, and then we would spread out again, separated by the obstacles posed by the future World's Fair: carts that carried materials to the tower, an iron cage that held a rhinoceros, fifty Chinese soldiers as still as statues awaiting the orders of an absent captain.

It took us a full twenty minutes to reach the foot of the forged iron tower. Journalists and photographers pushed each other, jockeying for position, in some sort of collective dance. The morgue ambulance waited to one side, pulled by stolid, pensive horses.

I wanted to see the corpse, but the crowd was impenetrable. Arzaky made his way over to me, shouting.

“You, the Argentine, come here.”

I elbowed my way over to an area that was accessible only to a chosen few. I wouldn't have been able to break through the crowd if Arzaky's voice hadn't cleared the way, pulling me toward him like a rope. The photographers' flashbulbs exploded over the dead man's face and the air was filled with the bitter smell of magnesium.

“Now I have a case, but I don't have an assistant. I am the only detective without one. That may be a custom in your savage country, but in my city it is an oddity. I want you to work with me. Observe everything carefully. Any comment that occurs to you, make it: there is no greater inspiration for a detective than the frivolous words of the hoi polloi.”

“What happened?”

“Darbon was investigating the tower's opponents, who had re
cently sent hundreds of anonymous letters and caused some minor incidents. He came here last night, alone, following a clue; he fell from the second platform. We don't know anything more. Do you accept?”

“Do I accept what?”

“Working as my assistant.”

“Of course I accept!” I exclaimed, surprised. Without meaning to I had shouted my reply and, in spite of the racket, everyone turned to look at me. I had become an acolyte thanks to Craig, who had sent me to Paris; thanks to Alarcón, who gave his life; and thanks to Arzaky, who accepted me—but also thanks to Darbon, who was now being lifted off the ground by the morgue employees (gray uniforms, flannel hats) with a mixture of ceremony and annoyance, to be transferred to the realm of deciphering and dissection.

T
wo hours later we managed to get permission to enter the morgue, leaving behind the journalists and onlookers, who were crowded together behind the railing, waiting for some extraordinary revelation. Arzaky knew the building well. I would have gotten lost in the labyrinthine series of hallways which always turned to the left and stairs which always went down, but the Pole moved forward with broad steps, exuding that crazy joy of a detective on a case. It was as if, with each step, he was taking the world by force. But when he entered the room he lowered his head, as though he were in a cathedral. His face reflected both humility and defiance, like a saint who finds dissipation in temperance, overindulgence in moderation, ecstasy in renunciation.

There were nine empty gurneys and one that was occupied lined up beneath the greenish light of the lamps swinging from the very high ceilings. A strong smell of bleach and maybe camphor hung in the air. Darbon's body, already undressed, had a lunar whiteness to it that was marred by the lacerations and bruises caused by his fall. Of his numerous authoritative features (his imposing voice; the seriousness that never deigned to smile, unless it was ironic; the gaze that dissolved any obstacle) the only surviving one was his white beard.

The forensic doctor was a tiny man named Godal. He greeted Arzaky with a familiarity that was not returned. The Detective of Paris (now without any rival to dispute the title) halfheartedly introduced his colleagues who were also there: Hatter, Castelvetia, and Magrelli. I was the only assistant in the room.

“It is an honor for me to have members of The Twelve Detectives here,” said Dr. Godal, looking at everyone except me.

“I imagine that this case is something new for you, as it is for us. No one has ever fallen from so high,” said Hatter with the air of an expert.

“What are you saying, Hatter?” said Arzaky in a very rude tone. “Do you think there are no bodies in the crevices of the Alps?”

“There must be…but no one has ever seen them.”

“I have.”

Godal began to point out the marks from the fall.

“Observe the destroyed legs; this proves he was conscious when he fell. His feet plunged into the earth. Halfway down he hit some kind of protrusion, which tore his skin at the height of the thorax, but that didn't kill him.”

Castelvetia was ashen and looked around as if searching for a window.

“Come closer. When I was young, we practiced autopsies outdoors. We had to rush to make use of the sunlight, before night fell and erased all the details.”

“Do bodies come in every week?” asked Hatter.

“Every week? Every day. A thousand a year: suicides, accident fatalities, murder victims. Lately there has been an increase in poisonings: we've done about a hundred and forty autopsies already this year. We have to be very careful with poison: they used to use only arsenic, which we can easily identify, but they come up with new poisons every day.”

Arzaky picked up the dead man's hand. He pointed to one of the fingernails. There was something black underneath it.

“Louis Darbon was fastidious about his appearance. Why are his nails dirty?”

“I'm sorry, his hands were black with oil, and it took us a lot of work to clean them. But there's always a trace left behind!”

“A trace left behind? Everything is supposed to be left behind. How can we work if you clean up the evidence?”

“I didn't think it was important. It was oil. He fell from the tower, and I imagine that that horrible tower is full of machine oil.”

Arzaky was going to say something, but he held himself back. When he left the room, furious, I followed him. He banged his head against the wall several times.

“Incompetent! That damn Dr. Godal was always on Darbon's side. He's a forensic doctor who should have been an undertaker. What do you think we should do?”

I was surprised that he asked for my opinion. What value could my thoughts on forensic practices have?

“I think we should go to the tower, to the place where Darbon fell. And see where that oil came from.”

“No, no. You are supposed to be an assistant. You should embody common sense. For example, you should say: the oil isn't important. At the tower everything is oil-stained.”

“But I don't think that's the case.”

Arzaky hit his head against the wall one more time, but lightly.

“Tanner was always spot-on with his comments. Craig failed in his school for assistants. Wasn't there a professor of common sense?”

“I know I'm not as good as the other assistants, but I'll try my best to keep up.”

“The others? Don't worry about emulating your colleagues. The black man is a thief; the Andalusian, a liar; Linker, an imbecile; the Sioux Indian never says anything. I don't even think he's real, I think he's a wax figure from Madame Tussaud's.”

“And Castelvetia's acolyte? I still haven't seen him.”

“You have just mentioned an awkward mystery. No one has seen
him. I would leave it at that, but it's inevitable that someone will bring him up at our meetings. And between you and me, I don't think that fop Castelvetia has an assistant. If he does…he must not be the same kind of assistant the others are. You know what I mean. That's a mystery you could solve.”

His anger vented, Arzaky went back into the room. Dr. Godal had turned the corpse over and was pointing to a wound on his back. Castelvetia, passed out on a metal chair, was being tended to by one of Godal's assistants, who was trying to bring him around with smelling salts.

“I swear, gentlemen, this is the first time this has ever happened to me,” he declared as soon as he came to.

Arzaky looked at me.

“I miss Craig,” he said.

T
hat night the detectives reconvened in the underground parlor of the Numancia Hotel. Between those four walls their grief took strange forms: without removing his white hat, Jack Novarius took long strides from one side of the room to the other, while his Sioux assistant remained immobile; Castelvetia laughed openly; Hatter waited for the meeting to start while taking apart a small mechanism that looked like an artificial heart; Sakawa was arranging flowers in a vase, pulling out some petals and letting them fall onto the table. They were detectives, crime was their lifeblood, they couldn't be blamed for not shedding tears.

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
Traces
, 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 flicks 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.”