The Paris Enigma (22 page)

I
left the hotel, looking this way and that. The moon shone with a yellow light, promising rain the next day. I began to run through an alley and I heard labored breathing ahead of me. It was Desmorins, who was also pursuing Arzaky.

“I want to hear his confession,” he told me.

I ran in one direction, then the other, without any clue as to which way I should go. I was about to abandon the search, when I heard a bang. It was a single shot, but it was enough. Guided by the noise, I turned the corner. Arzaky lay on the ground, lit by the moonlight. The killer had dropped Novarius's pistol.

I knelt down beside the fallen giant.

“I'm going to get help,” I promised without conviction as the lake of blood around me grew.

I would have liked to have gone for a doctor, just to get away from Arzaky's death throes. But the Polish detective held me there.

“It's too late. Neska knows how to get the job done.”

“It's my fault, I should have spoken in private….”

“No, it was my mistake. Craig sent me a detective, not an assistant. I didn't realize in time. You did the right thing by telling the truth.”

“The truth? I didn't tell the truth.”

“You didn't?”

“No. And neither did you. I don't believe you committed those crimes to take revenge on Darbon, or for glory and recognition, or to save The Twelve Detectives. It was for love. The only one you wanted to kill was the Mermaid, because she betrayed you. You knew that she and Grialet were still seeing each other. You did all the rest to hide that crime, the only one that mattered. If they caught you, you could say you had done it for The Twelve Detectives. You didn't care about being branded a killer, but you didn't want the name Arzaky to be remembered for the worst of all crimes: the crime of passion.”

Arzaky tried to smile.

“Well done. But that will be a secret between you and me, Detective.”

“Detective? I'm not even an assistant.”

“From now on you are. I invoke the fourth clause: If a Detective were to use his knowledge to commit a crime and his assistant were to discover it…”

Soon Desmorins showed up, breathless. The detectives' footsteps were heard close behind.

“I'm going to anoint you with the holy oils.”

Desmorins opened his cassock and took a small bottle of holy water from his belt. Magrelli had arrived and was with us too.

“He's not a real priest,” I said.

“What does that matter now,” said Arzaky. “In this light, no one is what he appears. But let's pretend that he's a priest, that I'm a detective, and that you are my loyal assistant.”

The priest took a deep breath and said,
“In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti…”

A
rzaky had told the truth, for the fourth clause—the one the Japanese detective had burned in that garden—allowed an assistant who discovered that a detective was also a murderer to become a member of The Twelve. I assumed that the detectives had made that rule thinking it would never be applied. They were so despondent over what Arzaky had done that they believed that making me a member of the group would atone for the sin of having strayed from the path.

I returned to Buenos Aires two months later. My family found me a changed man.

“Getting you to talk is like pulling teeth,” said my mother.

My father had already figured out that I wouldn't want to keep working in the shoe shop, and he was training my younger brother in the business.

It took me three weeks to do what I had to do: visit Craig, return his cane, and tell him the story of Arzaky's downfall. He listened to me for hours, he asked for details, he insisted I go over parts of the story that I didn't think were important. By that point they had quit bothering him about the Case of the Magician, which had been shelved. But he had stayed firm in his decision to give up detective work. I asked to rent out the lower floor of his house and he agreed. I set up my office
there. I inherited Craig's former clients, and from then on, every time I went to solve a theft or a murder, they relentlessly praised my mentor's skills, comparing mine unfavorably to his.

When Craig died, I have to confess I felt relieved, as if the doors of the world were opening for me, as if the secret that had been a burden on me no longer carried any weight. I still work in the lower floor of that house, and I make sure Señora Craig is never out of sugar or green tins of British tea. In the mornings, Angela, the cook, makes French toast and yerba maté tea for me, while she gives her always inauspicious report on the weather conditions. Then I go out following some lead or en route to a crime scene, to see the man who hanged himself in the basement, the poisoned hotel guest, the girl drowned in the garden fountain.

In my study, in a glass case, I have Craig's cane. Sometimes, when I'm working late into the night, I take out the cane and polish its lion's head handle as I imagine how it would feel to cross the line, to taste evil's trace. The game only lasts a few seconds. Almost immediately I close the glass case and return to my thoughts. I still don't have an assistant. Will I take one on some day? The footsteps of Señora Craig, pacing in her insomnia, echo above my head.