The Paris Enigma (10 page)

I
had solved my first mystery, but I couldn't tell anyone about it, not even Arzaky. In Madame Nécart's hotel, at breakfast, the other assistants looked at me enviously. I had a case while they just sat around smoking, drinking, and chatting. The Japanese assistant, Okano, was always silent, and only once in a while sat at the desk to write a letter in his language, which looked like little pictures. Linker and Baldone argued over the possibility of making a rule about the relationships between detectives and their assistants.

“We live in an era dominated by science,” said Linker. “Everything has a system, and we should have one too. The Twelve Detectives should be organized just like any science academy or association. We can't appear to be of nebulous origin like the Templar knights.”

“I've seen too much to believe that everything can be explained. Reality is immune to explanations. I think we are Templars, and like the Templars we'll eventually die out.” Suddenly Baldone addressed Novarius's assistant in a mocking tone, “What do you think? Should we have a rule?”

The Sioux remained silent. He was cleaning his knife: a large blade with a horn handle. He didn't even look up.

Baldone noticed my presence. “The only lucky one. He just got here and he already has a case. Unlike us…”

I spoke humbly. “The other detectives are going to investigate this case too, not just Arzaky.”

“But it's a foreign city. They don't have informants, and they have trouble speaking the language. Arzaky's chances of solving the case are much better. I think that all the detectives would have preferred to continue their discussion on the art of investigation, rather than actually conduct one. And meanwhile the killer is still at large.”

I didn't want to give myself superior airs, so I stayed with them for a while, as if I were off-duty too. I was hoping that if Arzaky sent me any instructions, they would arrive discreetly, so that no one else would notice. I had almost managed to convince the others that Arzaky had chosen me just to handle the paperwork, when a tall, robust messenger with a soldierly air burst into the room and asked for me in a loud voice. He brought a note from Arzaky: I was to accompany the detective to Madame Darbon's house.

“Orders?” asked Baldone. I nodded, not wanting to reveal anything. “Meanwhile we just sit here. Luckily we have the Sioux Indian here to liven things up.”

I didn't say anything. I just left the room among envious gazes. I went to find Arzaky at the Numancia Hotel. He was already waiting for me at the door.

“Darbon hated me, but his loathing was nothing compared with his wife's. If the old witch gives you something to drink, don't taste it. Don't even accept a mint from her.”

We took a car to a yellow house. The housekeeper made us wait in an anteroom filled with armor and shields and swords. It was clear that the owner had wanted to live amid a legendary past. He had achieved fame as a detective, but perhaps in his dreams Darbon didn't imagine himself solving the case of the century, but rather recovering the Holy Sepulcher. I know, from my own experience, that no one is who they dream of being. We all aspire to something else, an ideal
that we don't want to sully by bringing it to close to our real lives. The orchestra conductor would have preferred to be an Olympic swimmer; the renowned painter, a skilled swordsman; the writer famous for his tragedies, an illiterate adventurer. Fate is nourished by errors; glory feeds on regret.

Darbon's house, where he had raised his three daughters, had many rooms. It had a piano, heavy furniture, and objects that had been handed down through the generations. Everything pointed to the past, to roots, to tradition. Arzaky, on the other hand, had never married; he lived in the Numancia Hotel; he had no possessions. He devoted all his time to investigation. He lived like a foreigner who had just arrived and was about to leave.

“I am Polish and everything that implies,” he used to say in the adventures Tanner recounted. And he also said it in real life. It excited me to hear with my own ears the same phrase I had read so many times, the refrain that served as a prologue to his escapades.

The house seemed deserted, but there wasn't a speck of dust, which was a sign that the walls hid an unflagging domestic staff. I heard the distant noise of a door being opened and then slammed shut, and then other successive doors, closer ones, and finally Madame Darbon arrived. She looked like a woman who had been widowed long ago and had already recovered from the shock and grief. She didn't even glance at me: she walked directly toward Arzaky with the decisiveness of someone about to commit murder. I feared she was hiding a stiletto in the sleeve of her violet dress. Arzaky watched her warily, like someone studying a dangerous beast in a cage.

“My husband hated you, Arzaky,” she said in greeting.

“Your husband hated everybody.”

“But you most of all. Did you come to give me your condolences?”

“I am investigating Monsieur Darbon's death. His assistant, Arthur Neska, told me that you have his papers. I want to know what leads he was following on his last investigation.”

Any other person would have adopted a conciliatory tone with that furious woman, but Arzaky spoke to her arrogantly. Here comes the moment when she kicks us out, I thought. But the widow said, “Let's go up to my husband's study.”

Louis Darbon's office was nothing like the piled-high chaos of Craig's. The walls were lined with metal filing cabinets, the kind used in accountant's offices. On a large table were microscopes and magnifying glasses and five bronze lanterns with colored glass that might have been for discovering blood or poison stains. In one corner there was a camera. The wall that faced the window held a complete library of books on forensic medicine, dictionaries, and a copy of Vidocq's
Memoirs
. There was also a portrait of Paris's famous chief of police. Darbon had considered himself his heir. The study was as much a laboratory as it was an office and reading room.

“It still seems as though my husband has just gone out and is about to come home,” said the widow.

Arzaky let out a slightly exaggerated sigh. I was about to start laughing, out of sheer nervousness.

On the desk was a cardboard box, the type used for mailing, with the inscription “Eiffel Affair.”

“May I borrow that?”

“I knew you were going to come. I prepared it for you.”

Arzaky took the widow's hand between his. The woman immediately pulled it away. The detective, somewhat confused by the woman's reaction, said, “I am being sincere. I assumed that you would ask me to quit the case and let one of the other detectives solve it, or Captain Bazeldin, who was such a good friend of your husband's. Now I see that your interest in knowing the truth is more important to you than any old enmity.”

The widow laughed so abruptly that Arzaky shuddered. It was a warning.

“That old enmity didn't disappear with my husband's death. Quite
the contrary: it has deepened. Before, I hated you because my husband did; now that you have caused his death, I despise you myself.”

“I didn't force Monsieur Darbon to climb the tower in the middle of the night.”

“But if he hadn't loathed you so much he'd still be alive now. He climbed that tower thinking of you; it was your image that gave him the strength to go up those stairs in the middle of the night, in spite of his leg and his respiratory problems. He climbed with your name on his lips; he thought that no other enemy mattered, and that's why he lost his concentration.”

“So then why are you giving me his papers?”

“Because I want you to find the killer. I want him to feel hunted. To tremble with fear when he hears your footsteps and to take action. If he could best my husband, he can best you.”

A
rzaky had an apartment on the top floor of the Numancia Hotel, for which he paid a monthly rent. The first room served as his office, where he received clients and kept his archives. It was littered with papers. It was impossible to avoid stepping on the pages that completely covered the floor: forensic reports, outstanding debts, unanswered correspondence, letters from women. That jumble of papers, which seemed to have acquired a life of its own, climbed as high as the desk drawers and the table, hiding firearms, bottles filled with dead insects, handkerchiefs stained with blood from who knows what distant murder, a mummified hand, tickets for the theater, for transatlantic voyages, for trips in hot-air balloons.

“Reading documents bores me. Why don't you look for clues in Darbon's papers? While you're at it, organize them without making any changes.”

“I'll do my best. But you know, my inexperience…”

“Experience can be deceiving. It teaches us that at one point we already did what we are doing now. Nothing could be more false. Approach everything as if it's for the first time.”

Arzaky went out, leaving me alone with the papers. He said he had to go supervise the progress of the exhibition about The Twelve
Detectives. It seemed absurd to me that in the middle of a criminal matter he would bother with canes and other artifacts abandoned in dusty glass cases. But detectives are like artists. In the life of every actor, musician, singer, or writer there is always a moment when they begin to play the role of themselves, and everything that they do in the present is merely a ceremony with which they evoke something from their past. And life becomes, for the artist or the detective, the incessant fine-tuning of their own legend.

At first I feared that Darbon's widow had tricked us, that she had manufactured the documents herself to send us off on false leads and toward real dangers. But that wasn't the case: the pages were a compilation of Darbon's methodical work. There was a diary where the old detective recorded the progress of his investigation. He pursued more than one case at a time, but he had devoted more energy to the Eiffel affair than to any other.

His investigation had begun seven months earlier. From the beginning, the tower's construction had numerous enemies who claimed it was destroying the city's beauty. At first these were relatively harmless, those who didn't want the forged iron monument cohabiting with the old palaces. Eiffel had been attacked by associations of war widows, scholars of the city's history, and museum and monument conservators. But then a radical group had joined the battle: the anonymous letters became threatening, the threats, actions. A rose with poisoned thorns was sent to the engineer Eiffel, and a miniature Statue of Liberty with a bomb inside that hadn't been triggered. The most unique attack involved poisoning the pigeons that perched on the tower, so that hundreds of birds dropped dead at once onto the construction site, paralyzing the elevator motor and frightening the unsuspecting workers.

Louis Darbon was convinced that a group of intellectuals whom he called “crypto-Catholics” was responsible. Most of his observations referred to someone named Grialet, to whom he attributed the formation of a Rosicrucian cell.

“Grialet is a tireless seeker of the esoteric, from astrology to magic, from alchemy to Rosicrucianism. Like so many others, he's more fascinated by the hierarchies and the initiation rites than by the mysteries themselves. These types are always like that. They spend their lives suspicious of one another; they barely establish any rules; they emerge out of schisms and heresies. The schism becomes the rule and a new heresy springs up. Grialet is the soul of that process of continuous disintegration, that constant movement that seeks to create, in everything, the sensation that something is hidden within.” Darbon considered Grialet the main suspect. The papers included the names of two possible accomplices: the writer Isel and the painter Bradelli.

I was immersed in those documents, trying to understand the principles of that circle of esoteric writers, when someone knocked on the door. I opened it. It was a tall woman with black hair. She smelled of a mixture of perfumes, and the scent changed with each step, as if it were a complex mechanism of sleeping substances that suddenly awoke according to the stimulus of light or the passage of time. She was surprised to see me.

“And Mr. Arzaky?”

“He's gone out.”

“You…?”

“I'm his assistant.”

“I didn't know he had gotten an assistant. I thought he'd never resign himself to replacing Tanner. Didn't he leave a message for me?”

“No. If you tell me your name, I'll let him know you came by.”

“I am Paloma Leska, but you can call me the Mermaid, the way everyone else does. That's my stage name.”

“Your stage name? Are you an actress?”

“An actress and a ballerina. Haven't you heard of the Night Ballet?”

“I've only just arrived in Paris.”

“There are certain things that one should do as soon as they arrive in a city, while they still have money. Later their pockets are empty and they have to become respectable. We are going to do a piece called ‘In the Ice Mountains.' Arzaky has already seen the rehearsals. If you're new to the city, I can assure you you'll never see anything like it. Does the cold bother you?”

“Yes, but it's springtime.”

“In the piece, I plunge naked into a lake of ice. It might give you shivers. Do you think you can take it?”

I looked at the woman's bare arms. Her corset was a bit too tight; she was the one wearing it but I was having trouble breathing.

“Arzaky never told me he liked the ballet.”

“He doesn't just come for the ballet.”

I jotted “the Mermaid” down on a piece of paper. I had to struggle to place one letter after the other instead of all on top of one another. She had been born in Spain, which was why her name was Paloma, Spanish for dove. But she was the daughter of two Polish actors. She considered herself Polish.

“As Polish as Arzaky?”

“More so. I long for Poland, and I travel to Warsaw twice a year. He doesn't. He wants to be a good Frenchman. He won't even touch Polish food. It doesn't matter though. To his enemies he'll always be that damn Polish traitor or, to his more intimate enemies, simply that damn Pole. You're working, I don't mean to interrupt…”

“Don't worry about that. It's dead letter…”

I don't know if she heard me. The woman had disappeared, as if I had only dreamed she was there. Her perfumes, which had come in gradually, left in order, one by one. Finally I was alone again, with the scent that came off of the newspaper clippings and the yellowing dossiers.