The Paris Enigma (4 page)

F
ive days later Craig brought together in the Green Room the journalists who had defamed him. There was the reporter from
The Nation
, pale and freckled, who was never without a pad and pencil, as if at any moment the perfect sentence was going to jump out and surprise him. The journalist from
The Tribune
was a man about thirty years old, indigenous looking, who affected gentlemanly manners but it was said that when he got some good information, he sold it to the highest bidder. Another journalist, so tall that he spent his life bent like a question mark, worked for a newspaper in Montevideo, where the case had been followed with interest. There were also three people I had never seen before; I imagined they'd been sent by the Alarcón family.

“As I promised, the case has been solved. As we feared, Gabriel Alarcón is dead. His corpse was found in the basement of the Victoria Theater. The police are taking it away as we speak. The body was covered in lime to hasten the decomposition process.”

“How did you find it?”

“I cannot explain methods that would forewarn criminals and teach them how to proceed in the future so as not to leave clues. But I can tell you that Kalidán, as you know him, or Jean Baptiste Cral, his
real name, was an epileptoid criminal who suffered morbid attacks, with a pathological fear of growing old. He believed that drinking human blood would keep him young forever. He was so sure that his crimes would go unpunished that he kept a trophy from each one of his victims.”

Craig opened a large, square box, like those that women use to store their hats.

“Alarcón was prepared to stop his crimes and, against my advice, became his assistant. He took advantage of his proximity to search for evidence about the murders; he found the collection of souvenirs from Kalidán's victims. Unfortunately, he allowed himself to be dazzled by the magician's skills.”

Craig pulled a dull medallion, a scapular, a bit of lace, and a lock of hair tied with a yellow ribbon out of the box. “These macabre treasures gave Alarcón the illusion that he had solved the case; but the magician discovered what he was doing and killed him. He drank his blood just as he had the women's. Then he made the body disappear.”

The journalists took notes as fast as they could; Craig had shrewdly called this meeting at the end of the day so they wouldn't have time to ask too many questions, since they were already due back at their editorial offices. The moment they left, the detective seemed to lose all his strength and he collapsed into a chair with his head in his hands.

It seemed best to leave him in peace, but I had a thousand questions. Didn't I, his assistant, deserve an explanation of the method that had enabled him to reconstruct the story? Since he didn't respond to my questions, I put my hand on his shoulder. Physical contact was something that Craig couldn't stand, but I was experiencing a maddening curiosity, the satiation of which would make even Alarcon's gruesome murder seem like a gift.

“It's true,” he said, sitting up with a piqued expression on his face.
“The method. The perspective. Following clues. Salvatrio my friend, I am going to give you a lesson on the method that none of The Twelve Detectives can match.”

Overcome by that dark energy that now held sway over him, he dragged me out of the house. We walked at top speed: Craig, the insomniac, went first, with a lit lantern. After an hour of walking in silence I wished we had called a carriage. I made some vague remark and he responded by saying, “Rented carriages can't take us to where we're going.”

I was unfamiliar with those dark, disintegrating corners of the city. We passed a fallen tree and then a dead horse. His bones shone in the moonlight. Later that same night I saw something worse, but nightmares are capricious, and it was the horse's empty eye sockets that haunted me for nights afterward. Farther on there was a shed, which was where we were headed. Craig opened the large door, without a key or a lock. Up high there were some broken windows that let in the moon's white light. I thought I heard a whisper, but it was the buzzing of flies.

In the middle of the shed a man's corpse hung upside down. His feet were tied to a beam with rope. Craig raised his lantern so I could see it well. He was naked and covered in clots of blood. His inert, open arms seemed to retain something of the gesture he had used, night after night, in distant theaters, to elicit amazement. Beneath the body, there was a lake of blood that the dirt floor was struggling to swallow up.

“He was slow in telling me where Alarcón's body was. Up until the very last minute he seemed to trust that some trick would save him.”

“What are you going to do with…that?”

“As soon as the sun comes up I'll go to the police station. I've already thought of how I'll explain it, that I came here following the clues I got from the card players. The police are familiar with the harsh ways they punish cheaters. And thus ends Detective Craig's Final Case.”

As I left the shed I had the feeling I was being followed by blue flies. I couldn't go back alone in the middle of the night, so I had to wait for Craig. I didn't want to walk by his side. Thirty paces ahead, Craig, with his lantern raised, showed me the way. Even that light, for the mere fact that it had shone on the macabre sight of the magician, seemed to glow with the incandescence of corruption.

I
went back to my father's workshop and applied myself to the cutting of soles, which was my specialty. I don't know if I mentioned it already, but Salvatrio's Cobbler's Shop only made men's shoes. My father refused to touch women's feet. He noticed I was gloomy and he tried to get me to talk about it. I implied that it was a romantic problem, just to reassure my father. He smiled with relief, “Once you touch a woman's feet, all is lost.”

In the days that followed my mother insisted I eat well. She prepared stews with long noodles, zucchini, and beef. I couldn't touch the meat.

One afternoon a short boy about twelve years old, wearing a blue hat that was too large for his head, entered the shoe shop. He asked for Señor Sigmundo Salvatrio and it took me a while to answer because no one had ever called me “mister” before. He handed me a note written in a woman's round, careful hand.

There was no heading or signature, as if Señora Craig feared the paper could fall into strange, enemy hands. I polished my shoes with the black cream my own father made—and which, it was said, also
worked as an ointment for burns and wounds—and left the workshop.

The maid opened the door and as I went upstairs, I looked into the sitting room, where papers and dust were piling up. On the top floor Señora Craig, seated in a white chair, was waiting for me. The table on which she had her tea was like some sort of garden in winter; all the plants that surrounded it were dark and filled with thorns; the flowers were fleshy and enormous. The maid rushed to bring tea and a sugar bowl. When I opened it and saw that it was empty, I feared that Señora Craig was suffering hardships due to her husband's illness.

“Please, help yourself,” she told me, and I pretended to serve myself. Two or three white grains fell into the hot tea.

“How is your husband?”

“The doctors can't find anything. He is sick in spirit.”

“Can I visit him?”

“Not yet. But you can do something for him. The past few days he has talked of nothing else. Are you listening?”

“Of course, ma'am.”

“In Paris, this May, the World's Fair opens. I imagine you've seen pictures in the newspapers of the pavilions, and of the iron tower being constructed. The Twelve Detectives have been asked to participate.”

“All of them?”

“All of them, together for the first time.”

My hand shook and I almost dropped my cup of tea. The Argentine newspapers had followed the preparations for this new World's Fair in detail, as if it were something that somehow belonged to us. I had read that the Argentine pavilion was larger and more magnificent than any of the other South American ones. Passage reservations had been sold out long ago. But news that the detectives were getting together was more important to me than all the treasures of all the countries, than the paintings hanging in the Palace of Fine Arts,
and the inventions in the Galerie des Machines. I thought that what excited me should be exciting for everyone, and even the tower itself paled in comparison to the detectives' meeting.

“Will they have their own pavilion?” I asked. For a minute I could even imagine The Twelve displayed in glass cases and on platforms, like wax figures.

“No, they are going to have their meetings in the Numancia Hotel and there, in a parlor, they'll display the tools of their trade. Up until now, only a few of them have gotten together at one time, at most six, but this time they'll be twelve. Well, eleven, since my husband can't go.”

What was I hearing? Craig would miss the first meeting of The Twelve Detectives in history?

“He has to go, even if he's sick. You could go with him. You and a nurse.”

“My husband was the driving force behind this meeting, along with Viktor Arzaky. They both wanted the art of investigation to be represented among so many other trades. With your youthful enthusiasm, my dear Salvatrio, nothing is impossible, but I know that my husband can't take the long boat trip. Which is why you must go in his place.”

“I couldn't take his place. I'm an inexperienced acolyte.”

“Arzaky, the Pole, as my husband calls him, has been left without an assistant. Old Tanner is sick; he plays chess, he grows tulips, and he sends letters. And Arzaky has to prepare the exhibition of the detectives' instruments. My husband thought that you could go and help him in that undertaking.”

“I have no money.”

“It will all be paid for. The fair's organizing committee will take care of the expenses. What's more, my husband won't take no for an answer.”

I had never traveled anywhere. The invitation both excited and intimidated me. I paused and then said, in a faint voice, “I know your
husband would have preferred to send Alarcón. Today is his funeral. Are you going to go, Señora Craig?”

“No, Salvatrio. I am not going to go.”

I took a sip of bitter tea.

“I have something to confess to you. We envied him.”

“Alarcón? Why?”

Señora Craig sat up in her chair. Some sort of vague flush gave life to her face. I didn't give her the answer she was expecting.

“Because he was your husband's favorite. Because he considered him more competent than us.”

Señora Craig stood up. It was time to leave.

“You are alive and he is dead. Don't ever envy anyone, Señor Salvatrio.”