The Paris Enigma (12 page)

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.

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.”

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

“We all keep track of Arzaky's movements, along with those of his informants and servants.”

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 something 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. Be
sides, 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 Hölderlin 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 Gérard de Nerval, “The Disinherited”:

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.

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

“Gérard 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.

“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:

“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 come 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.”

I felt that the accusation was directed at Greta, not at me, so she was the one who should respond.

“You're wrong,” said Greta. “And don't speak to us as if we were some sort of a team. We just met, it's only a coincidence that we're here at the same time.”

Grialet had lost all meekness. He left his slashed ear in view, and far from being a weak point, it seemed like a triumph, a point of pride, a mark that signified that he belonged to a chosen circle. I couldn't take my eyes off his big yellow teeth.

“I'm wrong? I recognize the voices of those who are due for a transformation. I see the pride that can't be concealed by false modesty. You suspect me. It is you who are the suspects. You, who pretend to be the acolytes, the messengers, the assistants, the shadows…. Now leave. You'll find nothing more here than obscure phrases and obsolete verses.”