The Paris Enigma (2 page)

O
nly Angela, the cook, dared to confront Craig, reproaching him for the baskets overflowing with filth and all the horrible things that were filling the house. The cook challenged him:

“I'm expecting a letter from my cousins in Lugo. When it comes, I'm leaving. And good-bye rice pudding.”

But he paid her no mind.

Craig gave classes in the morning. At that time of day his voice was filled with a self-confidence that was tempered over the course of the day. Sometimes he preferred to take us out on a field trip, always at night, to some place of ill repute where a woman's throat had been slit, or the hotel room of the latest suicide.

“Suicide is the great mystery, even more than murder,” Craig told us. “Every city has a stable suicide rate. It doesn't vary according to economic circumstances or historic events; it's a disease of the city itself, not of individuals. No one commits suicide in the countryside; it's our buildings that transmit the horrible infection and irresponsible poets who celebrate it.”

The first time we went into the room where a suicide had taken place we hung back, letting Craig and the corpse take over the scene.
The dead man was dressed in his Sunday best and had tidied up the room before drinking the liquid from a small blue glass bottle.

From the middle of the room, Craig invited us to take a closer look.

“Look at this man's expression, notice how he carefully neatened his room, how he packed his suitcase before taking the poison. Hotel rooms, guesthouses, never has loneliness been so complete. Suicides are drawn to one another; if there is a suicide in a hotel it leaves a mark on that building, and there'll be another at that location the next month. Soon there'll be hotels devoted solely to these impatient travelers.”

We learned that the key to solving a crime wasn't in the larger picture but in the symmetry of blood droplets, the hairs stuck to the floorboards, the crushed cigarette butts, or under the fingernails of the dead. We went over everything with a magnifying glass. Tiny places became enormous, distorting all of life.

Sometimes Craig's old friends also taught us. Among them was Aquiles Greco, the great phrenologist, a tiny doctor with nervous tics, whose hands trembled as if they had a life of their own. They were like small animals, anxious to leap onto your face in order to feel your cheekbones or your superciliary arches or to estimate, just by touch, the circumference of your skull. He always reminisced about the years he had worked at the University of Paris with Prospère Despines, the illustrious but forgotten mentor of Cesare Lombroso. Greco had us pass skulls from one hand to the other, palpating the protuberances and noting the murderers' frontal sinuosity, their prognathism, their prominent jawbones and flattened foreheads. With our eyes closed and our fingers moving we had to answer the question: Thief, murderer, or con man?

I once shouted out “Murderer!” and Greco responded, “Even worse. That's the skull of a Jesuit.”

The visits to the morgue weren't as pleasant. Dr. Reverter, who was tall and had the parsimonious and melancholic character of those born under the sign of Saturn, would cut open the cranial lid and
show us the encephalic mass, teaching us to recognize the many calluses and marks on murderers' brains.

“Their future crimes are written here, from the moment of their birth. If we had some apparatus that allowed us to see people's brains, we could arrest those who bear these marks before they committed their crimes, and murder would disappear.”

At that time physiology was a main focus of criminology, and doctors and policemen dreamed of a science that could separate the innocent from the reprobate. Today it has lost all of its scientific value, and even mentioning Lombroso's name in an auditorium—and I have often done so—is enough to set off derisive laughter. Today's dismissive mockery is just as irresponsible as the blind faith of the past. After more than twenty years of tracking down murderers, my experience has shown me that fate's signs do show on our faces; the problem is that there isn't one single system for interpreting them. Lombroso didn't err when choosing his field of study; his error was in believing that all those clues hidden in faces and hands were subject to only one interpretation.

Did Craig believe in physiognomy or any other variant of criminal physiology? That was hard to say; the murders that interested him most were the ones that left traces only at the crime scene.

“Those easily identifiable criminals—the ones with prominent ears and protruding eye sockets and enormous hands, for them there's the police. For the invisible murderer, the murderer that could be any one of us, that's for me.”

S
ometimes when Craig mentioned one of The Twelve Detectives in passing, we found the courage to ask him questions about how the association was founded, about its unwritten rules, and about the few occasions in which some of the members had gotten together. Craig answered the questions vaguely, with annoyance and we attempted to fill in the blanks later, among ourselves. We repeated the names as if we were memorizing them, as if we were studying a particularly difficult lesson. The most famous detectives in Buenos Aires—
The Key to Crime
always published stories of their adventures—were Magrelli, also known as the Eye of Rome, the Englishman Caleb Lawson, and the German Tobias Hatter, a native of Nuremberg. The magazine often reported the frequent conflicts between the two men who both wanted the title of Detective of Paris: the veteran Louis Darbon, who considered himself the heir to Vidocq, and Viktor Arzaky, a Pole and Craig's good friend, who had settled in France. Even though his cases weren't published very often, the Athenian detective, Madorakis, was one of my favorites. The way he solved crimes made it seem that he wasn't just accusing one particular criminal, but the entire human race.

Buenos Aires's Spanish community closely followed the exploits of Fermín Rojo, a detective from Toledo, who had such extraordinarily
entertaining mishaps that the murders themselves were beside the point. Zagala, a Portuguese detective, was always by the sea: interrogating the fierce crewmembers of boats lost in the fog, searching the beach for remains of inexplicable shipwrecks, solving “locked cabin” cases.

Novarius, Castelvetia and Sakawa rounded out The Twelve Detectives. In our imagination we associated Jack Novarius, the American detective, with legendary cowboys and gunmen. The meticulous Andres Castelvetia, who was Dutch, crawled into dusty corners without ever dirtying his white outfit. We didn't know a thing about Sakawa, the inscrutable detective from Tokyo.

We repeated those names behind Craig's back. The nebulous subject of The Twelve Detectives was not on his syllabus. He preferred that we learn law, taught by Dr. Ansaldi, a former classmate of Craig's at the Colegio San Carlos. Ansaldi explained that law was a narrative practice. Lawyers tried to compose a story—one of innocence or of guilt—and make it seem the only possibility, taking advantage of the conventions of the genre and of human nature, which was so eager to confirm its prejudices. Our fellow students Clausen and Miranda, both sons of lawyers, were the only ones who didn't sleep through the law classes, and, in fact, they eventually became lawyers. The rest of us didn't care for that stagnant world, filled with unreadable books, lived behind a desk. To us it was diametrically opposed to the danger and intellectual excitement promised by detective work. Even Craig hated law.

“We detectives are artists, and lawyers and the judges are our critics,” he would say.

Trivak, the only student whom I became friends with, had read Thomas De Quincey in his father's
Edinburgh Gazette
collection, and dared to correct him.

“The murderers are the artists, and the detectives their critics.”

Craig was silent, preferring to save his response for later. Trivak was the boldest of the group, and when Craig hid clues around the
house, one of his endless exercises, Trivak got closer to solving the mystery than anyone else. It was rumored that in one painstaking pursuit he hadn't even stopped at Señora Craig's bedroom, but went in and searched through her clothes. Trivak didn't confirm the rumor, but he didn't deny it either, saying, “There should be no limits to one's investigation.”

I suspected that Trivak had started that rumor himself, along with another, more persistent one, that the academy was just a means for Craig to groom an assistant. The newspapers often criticized him for lacking a second pair of eyes to lend credence to his adventures. Craig, along with Arzaky and Magrelli, was one of the most adept and prudent of The Twelve Detectives, yet without an acolyte, he was considered to be somewhat inferior to his colleagues. The Portuguese, Zagala, had Benito, a remarkably agile Brazilian; Caleb Lawson, a knight of the Queen and Scotland Yard's most famous collaborator, had Dandavi, the Hindu, who followed him everywhere, sometimes putting false leads and real dangers in his path just to create a more exciting tale to tell. Arzaky, who competed with Louis Darbon for the title of Detective of Paris, had old Tanner as his helper. Tanner's health had been compromised by so many rigorous adventures that now, stooped over, consumptive, and with his days numbered, he spent most of his time in his tulip garden and assisted Arzaky only by mail.

The idea that Craig had set up an entire academy just to find himself an acolyte wasn't preposterous, and it filled us with an enthusiasm that we didn't dare admit to one another. By then, several students had quit, terrified by the unknown world that detective work had revealed. Attending the execution, by firing squad, of the anarchist Carpatti, who, even when riddled with bullets, continued to spit insults at his executioners, and visiting prisons to meet famous murderers had disheartened those who thought that investigation was an intellectual game, a spiritual puzzle. Of course, none of those who abandoned the academy ever admitted to being afraid or disenchanted. They all
pretended that their change of course was due to a recent, sobering maturity; a realization that they wanted to be family men, to follow in the footsteps of their fathers, who were businessmen, doctors, and lawyers. As our numbers dwindled, our hopes grew that we would be the chosen one.

Deep down, we knew that if Craig had really set all this up in order to find an assistant, he had already made his choice. As much as Trivak tried to dampen his sarcasm and impress his teacher, it was Alarcón who was the favorite. Gabriel Alarcón, whose skin was so pale that you could see his veins. Gabriel Alarcón, whose beauty was more befitting a girl than a man. Craig was happy when Alarcón proved to be shrewder than we were, when he could accuse us of missing the logic in an exercise of reason and then demonstrate his absolute superiority. Craig was eager to beat us, but he was even more eager to be defeated by Alarcón, and when from his disciple's feminine mouth came the words that bested him, then he smiled twice as proudly.

We hated Alarcón for that. We also hated him because his family was richer than any of ours, their fortune built on the construction of ships. He could aspire to be an ambassador or devote his life to traveling and women, and yet he had chosen to compete among us. And he was outdoing us. Trivak and I loathed him more than anyone: I was a shoemaker's son and his father was one of the few Jewish lawyers in the city at that time. But even as we hated him, we recognized his merits (which far from assuaging our hatred, increased it). Alarcón always followed an unexpected and solitary path. He never asked for permission, but moved through the world as if all doors were open to him. His familiarity with the Craigs was unnerving. He had tea with Señora Margarita every afternoon. When the detective was out of town, she spent hours in his company. He became a substitute—of course, only at teatime—for her husband.

When Craig revealed the solution to the case of the locked room—one that had obsessed the detectives—Alarcón responded, “Calling a murder ‘a locked-room crime' is the wrong approach to the investi
gation, because it assumes that locks are infallible. There are no truly locked rooms. Calling it that presupposes an impossibility. In order to solve a problem, it has to be correctly posited. We mustn't let semantics blue our logic.”

We hated him. We competed among ourselves, not with him. We were fighting over second place, in a race where only first place mattered. On the days when Craig was traveling for a case, things were more relaxed and we went home earlier than usual. Trivak would stare, perplexed, from the doorway at Alarcón, who instead of leaving, would go upstairs, with those slow, almost weightless, steps of his, to accept Señora Craig's excessive hospitality.

I
n the academy, on the first floor, there was a meeting room that was never used. An oval table with chairs around it stood in the middle. Both the chairs and the table were heavy, impossible to move, as if the wood had petrified. We called it the Green Room, because there were branches and vines painted on the ceiling by an artist who had begun his work with patience and diligence and had obviously tired of botany by the end. The exacting calligraphy of stems and veins became a confused mass of branches whipped by a storm. The walls were covered in dark wood, hung with swords, harquebusiers, and coats of arms; it all had a somewhat pretentious air, like the houses of antique dealers. The room looked like the remains of some abandoned project: the headquarters of a Masonic enclave, or a dining room that Señora Craig had envisaged for illustrious visitors who had never arrived. Called one day to convene there, we sat around the table, which was completely empty except for the dust, and Craig spoke.

“Gentlemen, in the last few years you have learned everything there is to know about crime. At least everything that can be taught in a classroom. Life is a perennial teacher, especially when the subject is death. Theoretical knowledge has its limits. Beyond those limits lies intuition, which is not something supernatural, as our friend
Trivak, future member of the spiritualist brotherhood, insists. Rather it is the sudden relationship that we establish with other hidden, less dominant realms of knowledge. To intuit is to retrieve subconscious memories, which is why experience is the mother of intuition. It is nothing more than a specialized type of memory. Its goal is to find a pattern, connect the dots of this chaotic life.”

Distracted, I let my finger trace my name in the thick layer of dust that covered the table.

“For a while now I've been waiting for a suitable practice case to present itself, and now I have it.”

Craig spread out a newspaper page out on the table. We were looking for some big headline about an honest tailor shot to death, or a woman found floating in the river, but there was only an ad for the performances of the magician Kalidán, the same magician who had been touring in the city when Craig announced the launch of his academy. At that time great magicians often came through our city, though now it's not so common. Various types of phantasmagoria were popular in Europe and the public filled the theaters to see skeleton battles, luminous ghosts, decapitated bodies that spoke, and other marvels created with smoke and mirrors.

“For some time now I have noticed that this magician's tours seem to coincide with murders and disappearances. The victims are always women: in New York a chorus girl disappeared, in Budapest a flower vendor, in Montevideo a cigarette girl was found exsanguinated. The Berlin police questioned him in the death of a nurse, but they couldn't prove anything. The few corpses that have been found (because our killer always tries to either hide or destroy the bodies) revealed that he drained the victims' blood and then washed them with bleach. He always performs this purification ritual.”

Craig explained the case detachedly; six of us cracked our knuckles, angered by the crime. Only Alarcón responded to the tale with equal indifference. They both approached the challenge without emotion.

“Kalidán will be in the city for fifteen more days. Then he continues on to Brazil and we won't have anything to investigate. I'll continue explaining the case, and I'll stress the importance of distinguishing coincidence from inevitability, but those of you who are any good will leave me here talking to myself, you'll leave Detective Craig raving alone in this dusty room.”

All six of us rushed to the door, but by that time Alarcón had already disappeared.