The tower f launted its blend of grandiosity and futility at the gray sky. It was made for cloudy days, to be seen through drops of rain, from far away. A few years later, at the 1900 World’s Fair, surrounded by automobiles, it would already seem old, but as it was being built the tower projected an air of extravagance and surprise. It wasn’t just its height that was exceptional, but the promise of its demise. That something so gigantic could disappear without some kind of cataclysm. Its transitory nature cast a shadow of fantasy around it; whispering in our ears that we shouldn’t take life too seriously.
There is something coffinlike about elevators, a tendency toward the worlds below (volcanoes, mines, the dirt on Pluto). But the tower’s elevator rose effortlessly. It amazed me that it didn’t fall. On that day the mechanism that went up to the second platform wasn’t ready yet, so we got off at the first and continued our ascent to the scene of the crime on foot. Arzaky went ahead, and I struggled to keep up with his swift pace. I was very inexperienced back then, but even now, after having seen hundreds of crime scenes, I can say that nothing seemed farther from a murder than the silence and tranquility of that platform. I know that a match, a drop of blood, a stain on the wall, or a newspaper clipping can be signs that lead to the killer, but my first thought upon arriving at a crime scene is the utter meaninglessness of everything that remains in the face of death.
“Well it seems we are dealing with a locked-room case,” said Arzaky. He wasn’t even out of breath. “In this case, the locked room happens to be outdoors. No one saw the killer come in or out.”
I remembered that the now deceased Alarcón maintained that it made no sense to speak of a “locked room.” I barely managed to put together a coherent sentence as I gasped for breath, but Arzaky seemed to understand.
“What authority are you citing?” he asked.
“Alarcón, Craig’s original apprentice.”
“Did he solve many crimes?”
“No, he died on his first case.”
“Oh, yes, I remember, he was killed by the magician. With all due respect for the dead, why are you repeating such foolishness? The locked room is the essence of our work. It doesn’t matter if the room doesn’t actually exist. We must accept its metaphorical power.”
We arrived at the second platform and went up a few more steps. After finding a f law in the smelting, they had removed the protective railings and hadn’t yet installed new ones. It was easy to see where Darbon had slipped and fallen, because the steps were covered with the same thick black liquid that Arzaky had found beneath the detective’s nails.
“Be careful what you touch and where you step,” said Arzaky. “There’s oil everywhere.”
“And broken glass. Do you think the killer broke a bottle of oil over his head?”
“The killer made sure to be far from here when Darbon fell. He was an old man and had a lot of trouble climbing stairs. He used a cane, which hid only a small sword, not the myriad surprises that Craig’s has. The killer proposed a meeting up here, promising information about the attacks on the tower. Darbon was anxious to close that case before our next meeting.”
“But Darbon took on only the most important cases; murders, a few anonymous letters sent by a lunatic… ”
“You’re new to this city and you don’t understand. You’ve barely seen anything of Paris besides this tower. To you, Paris is the tower. But those of us who live here have been watching its slow progress for two years. These struts and vertical irons have filtered into our dreams. We all feel compelled to shout either yes or no about this matter, particularly because no one has asked our opinion. For some it is evil, for others the future, for the most pessimistic, it’s both evil and the future.”
I didn’t know where to lean, where to step. Everything was covered in black oil.
Arzaky’s voice sounded remote, almost as if I were dreaming.
“If Darbon managed to solve this case, although it seemed simple on the face of it, his name would be in all the papers again, tied to the heart of Paris itself. He would have achieved the definitive victory over the interloper…”
“The interloper?”
“Me. He also used to call me ‘the damn Polish traitor.’”
Arzaky reached into his pocket and pulled out a pair of tiny tweezers, a tiny scissors, and a tiny metal box. They looked like they belonged in a dollhouse. He carefully took a sample of the glass shards. I prayed he wouldn’t get any oil on him, because then I’d have to put up with his bad temper. He pointed out a cord that was almost completely soaked in the black liquid, and cut off a piece with his miniature scissors. Arzaky put the cord and the glass into the metal box, which he then returned to his pocket.
“Do you understand the nature of this trap? The killer put a bottle of machine oil on the stairs. It’s very thick oil, and made the steps impossibly slippery. Darbon went up without a lantern, perhaps according to the instructions of the killer himself, who must have set up this meeting with him. We should look for evidence of his correspondence. When Darbon’s foot hit the cord, the bottle tipped over, spilling its contents onto the steps, causing him to slip and fall.”
“And how could someone get up here and set the trap without anyone seeing him?” I asked.
“At six o’clock the workers leave for the day and only the night watchman remains. Everyone knew that he liked to drink, and that afternoon he received a gift of two bottles, addressed to him from an anonymous benefactor. He drank them and passed out. He didn’t see or hear anything.”
I pointed to a small puddle of oil a few stairs farther up. Arzaky shone his lantern on it.
“I think the killer first considered placing the bottle higher up,” I said. “He calculated the trajectory of the fall and decided to move it. In the process he accidentally spilled a little.”
Arzaky looked at me distastefully, as if it was annoying to him that I point out some imperfection in the murder. But then he said, “All the better for us. The killer must have stained his clothes, gloves, or shoes. Have you gotten this all down?”
“You mean the bottle, the cord, and the oil? I remember it perfectly.”
“And my words? Don’t you think you should write down what I say?”
I hurried to find a notepad in my pocket. As I hastily took out a pencil, it slipped from my fingers, bounced, and fell into the void. I was suddenly aware of how high up we were. I peeked over the edge, and seeing how far below the ground was made my stomach turn and my hands and forehead began to sweat.
I tried to play off the loss of my pencil as an intentional experiment.
“They say that if you drop a coin from this height, the force of gravity increases the speed of its fall so much that it could go through a man’s skull.”
“Don’t be an idiot, you’re forgetting about the air’s resistance. And now what are you going to use to write with?”
I pointed to my forehead.
“Like a steel trap.”
“Old Tanner responded to each and every one of my sentences with an amazed ‘Oh’ or a ‘That never would have occurred to me.’ You don’t even pay attention. What are you looking at?”
I didn’t answer right away.
“The whole city. Do you realize that I’m incredibly lucky? I just arrived in Paris and I’m observing it from a height that even those born here have never seen.”
“Get away from the edge, before you get even luckier: you could be the first foreigner to fall from up here.”
Avoiding the oil slick, we began our descent.
case?” I asked him. On the way back Arzaky seemed discouraged.
“Do you think this is a difficult
“Even the easiest case can get complicated. What worries me is not that it can’t be solved, but rather that it will be solved in a trivial way. That in the end the solution will be something absurd. An indignant lover, a jealous husband, a crime of passion…”
“Don’t you like crimes of passion?”
“No. I prefer envy, ambition, revenge-especially revenge, for something silly that everyone thinks has been forgotten. Even suicides that have been covered up. But not murders committed out of lust or insanity. There’s nothing admirable in them. Those cases are purely formulaic. They have no poetry.”
Every once in a while, a passerby turned to look at the great Arzaky, whose photograph often appeared in the newspaper. Arzaky walked briskly, oblivious to the attention.
“Now what are we going to do?”
“I don’t know what you’re going to do, but I’m going to rest. At six I have a meeting with the people from the fair’s organizing committee. And as for your other assignment, have you figured anything out?” I shook my head no and he continued, “I was told that Castelvetia wrote the name Reynal in some hotel’s register, but no one has seen him yet.”
“And what do you suspect?”
“Castelvetia was the last one to join The Twelve Detectives. Craig insisted on it. I was against it. Caleb Lawson detests him; they harbor a mutual grudge. When we issued the invitations, I doublechecked his résumé. Most of his cases are impossible to verify. He could be an infiltrator, a journalist putting together information for an exposé of us, or an envoy from the European police’s annual secret meeting.”
“A spy? ”
“Who knows? We detectives are men with shady pasts. We can invent our histories, because our career has no supporting institutions, like doctors or lawyers. We are self-made men in every sense of the word.”
We had arrived at the point where our paths separated.
“As soon as you can, follow Castelvetia and find out his secret,” Arzaky ordered me. “Right now, when all eyes are on us, I don’t want any surprises.”
Faced with Arzaky’s insistence, I had no choice but to follow Castelvetia. Of course it’s not easy to follow a man who is a specialist in tracking, since he could easily discover what I was up to. Craig had taught us to become invisible; the first thing one had to do was think about something else, move as if sleepwalking, get closer as if by accident. I followed Craig’s teachings so obediently that I forgot I was following the Dutchman and I bumped right into him in the middle of the street. I shouted out an apology, in an intentionally high-pitched voice so he wouldn’t recognize me. He was so wrapped up in his thoughts that he didn’t even look up, and immediately went into the Varinsky Hotel.
I distanced myself a few paces. The Varinsky was a hotel for tired travelers who aren’t choosy: it was part hostel and part brothel. Like all the hotels and all the pensions in Paris those days, it was completely full, since the committees of visiting countries had already begun to arrive. I waited outside until he left. Then, instead of following him, I resolutely entered the hotel. A nearsighted young man came out to assist me, which is to say, to get rid of me. I put some coins into his pockets as I mentioned the name Reynal.
“Room twelve,” he said.
Craig had warned me: sometimes investigations are complicated and tiring, and other times we solve them immediately. A detective must be willing to work, but even more willing to receive a revelation. I was certainly willing: I knocked on the door and it opened, with no delay or questions. Inside the room there was a young woman: she looked as if she had just gotten out of bed. Ever since that moment, I have always adored women who’ve just woken up and are still somewhat in sleep’s clutches. She wore a distracted smile as she stretched languidly. I didn’t quite know what this situation meant for The Twelve Detectives, but I was even more confused as to what it meant for me. Castelvetia’s assistant was a woman: this was unprecedented. I tried to replace the entranced expression on my face with a shocked one.
I had ended up here by following Arzaky’s orders, and I had to speak for Arzaky. “Don’t tell anyone who I am,” said the young woman, as if I could possibly know who she was.
She invited me in, so we wouldn’t be seen together in that hallway traveled by fabulists: the shady men who were the electricians who would light up the fair; the discreet ladies who would welcome foreigners and justify the city’s reputation; the young men who seemed to be quintessentially Parisian but were actually South American journalists drunk on absinthe.
“I didn’t know the rules allowed…”
“Where are the rules written? Have you ever seen them?”
“Nowhere. In the detectives’ hearts.”
“But they only have brains. They don’t have hearts.”
I sat on the edge of a chair, as if I was about to leave at any moment. I wanted to be shocked, but my ability to be shocked was dulled by intrigue. “Wait till I tell Arzaky,” I thought.
She washed her face in a basin.
“My name is Greta Rubanova. I’m Boris Rubanov’s daughter. My father left Russia when he was twenty years old and he met my mother, a Frenchwoman, in Amsterdam. She died giving birth to me. When my father started working for him, Castelvetia was practically still a child. They had an office in Amsterdam, which Castelvetia rented from a shipping company. Together they solved dozens of cases. My father taught me everything he knew. But he had a weakness for women, especially dangerous ones. And when he walked out on a Hungarian woman, she said good-bye with her knife. By the time Castelvetia found him, my father was dying. Castelvetia asked him who had done it. My father’s reply was that some cases shouldn’t be solved. Castelvetia respected his last wish. At his funeral I asked Castelvetia to let me work for him. He accepted, at first out of sympathy, but later took me seriously.”
“And how did Castelvetia manage to keep you hidden all this time?”
“Detectives are fame seekers, and they know that their renown is an essential part of investigative work: before arriving in a city, their name precedes them, and it’s the talk of the town. Sometimes this helps their work, and other times it’s an impediment. When a detective is around, fantasies multiply. Castelvetia, on the other hand, always sought anonymity. Since joining The Twelve Detectives, his obsession with secrecy has become even greater. In Amsterdam there are few crimes: we are too polite, too accustomed to ignoring one another. We are so distanced from each other that we never reach the point of murder. There’s no need. So Castelvetia and I often have to travel. That helps our cases to go unnoticed. Castelvetia has renounced fame for me: many doubt that he is a true detective, but he did it all to keep me hidden.”
She came closer to me. She smelled of fresh clothes dried in the sun.
“We were confident that during this meeting things could finally be cleared up. Castelvetia was planning to ask that I be recognized as his assistant.”
“A woman? Never,” I said indignantly.
“Who are you, the keeper of the rules?”
“I’m simply the bearer of common sense.”
“Don’t get too alarmed, it’s not going to happen after all. Things have gotten complicated, and Castelvetia has changed his mind. Now that all the detectives are plotting against each other, they even suspect Darbon’s murderer may be among them. If he presented me now, he would have everyone at his throat. Caleb Lawson hates him, he would take full advantage of the situation.”
“Why does he hate him?”
“Lawson considers three of The Twelve Detectives his rivals: Craig, Castelvetia, and Arzaky. Craig and Arzaky are his enemies because he wants to run The Twelve Detectives. Craig has already quit the race so now only Arzaky, the more skilled and more difficult, remains. Lawson hates Castelvetia because, on a trip to London, Castelvetia solved the Case of the Princess in the Tower.”
“I’m not familiar with that one.”
“No? You can ask Lawson about it. He likes to reminisce about old times. And now that you’ve seen me, you can leave. Or did you want something more?”
“What use is an assistant who has to be hidden away?”
“I can go places that men can’t. Doors have opened for me that you couldn’t dream of walking through.”
“I’m sure I’d rather not walk through them.”
“You see? In men, curiosity is laborious, something borrowed, and in the long term, a pretense. Men ask questions that they think they already know the answer to. I ask what I don’t know.” “And you never leave here? Castelvetia has you locked up?” “I go where I like. We meet in secret.”
“Like lovers?”
“Like conspirators. Like revolutionaries. Like father and daughter.”
“Father and daughter,” I repeated incredulously.
“Father and daughter. Can I trust you?”
“No one has ever doubted my honor.”
“I am completely dependent on that dubious honor. Imagine the consequences of the scandal, now that the investigative arts are on display in full view of everyone. Who would maintain their faith in The Twelve Detectives? ”
I had to leave, but it wasn’t easy; I was comfortable in my discomfort. For a second I saw things from a distance. The detectives, the rules, the hierarchies, murder itself: it was all just a game. And I was like a stamp collector who comprehends, in a f lash, that he has been playing with worthless little slips of paper.
“Now I will ask that you keep our secret, and that you leave. I have to finish getting dressed.”
I got up from the chair that I had barely occupied. I was going to say something, but she brought her fingers to my lips. She knew how to ask for silence.
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 unf lagging 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 a m invest igat ing Monsieur Darbon’s deat h. His assista nt, A r t hur 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.”
Arzaky had an apartment on the top f loor 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 f loor: 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.
116 • Pablo De Santis
“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.
Paris’s finest. What did you think of her?”When Arzaky arrived I told him about the ballerina’s visit. “So you’ve met the Mermaid.
“She told me about the ballet.”
“She always has some crazy new thing going on. You should see her, sunk deep into the ice. I don’t know where they get those blocks from. Sometimes they even have frozen fish inside them. She’s the kind of woman who drives men crazy.”
“Does she drive you crazy too?”
“Me? No. I’m like the lake of ice she plunges into. What did you find in Darbon’s papers?”
I told him about Grialet, Isel, and Bradelli.
“Darbon always loved false leads. He searched where it was easiest to search, where there was nothing hidden. Do you know the joke about the drunk who came home late? He drank so much that he couldn’t get the key into the lock, and eventually he dropped it. About ten feet away there’s a streetlight, and the drunk starts looking there. His wife hears him and sticks her head out of the window, saying, ‘Did you drop your key again? ’ ‘Yes,’ says the drunk. ‘Well, why are you looking for it by the streetlight instead of by the door? ’ And the drunk replies, ‘Because there’s more light here.’ That joke is Darbon’s professional biography: he’s always right by the streetlights. Electric light would have made his job even easier.”
I insisted, and Arzaky finally agreed to visit Isel.
“All right, let’s go, if it’ll make you happy. We’re going to wind up switching roles; in the end I’ll be your faithful acolyte. The devotion that Tanner had for every last one of my opinions! He thought I was infallible, and he liked to make mistakes just so I could correct him.”
“Mistakes lead to the truth.”
“Mistakes only lead to mistakes, and skill leads to the truth.”
A carriage took us to Isel’s house. It was a gloomy castle on the outskirts of the city. It had two or three incongruent architectural blocks, which looked as if they had been built in different periods, or in one very f ickle period. They were a series of failed attempts to give the building a medieval air.
“You knock on the door. Convince me that there’s something of interest within these walls.”
A servant let us in. He was tall and bald, with oriental features. He moved with his eyes closed, like a sleepwalker. We entered a vast monastic room, where everything appeared to be missing. There were marks where paintings had hung, where rugs no longer covered the f loor, where furniture had been taken elsewhere. The statues had gone, but the pedestals remained. We sat in hard chairs, like the kind you find in a church.
“They’re dismantling everything,” I said. “Do you think Isel’s dead? No, the servant would have told us.”
“Servants are no longer allowed to give such news. If the master has died and someone comes to visit him, they leave the person waiting in the living room, with some information left where they can find it-a newspaper, or a death notice-that fills them in on what happened. If the visitor doesn’t think to have a look at those papers, the waiting continues indefinitely. I remember a certain count who was so offended at being made to wait that he challenged the deceased to a duel. Of course, the duel couldn’t be fought.”
Someone coughed a few steps away.
“That’s not the case, gentlemen. This mausoleum houses a living man.”
Isel appeared before us in a tattered yellow robe. He wore round eyeglasses and a gray beard covered his face. From his neck hung an exaggeratedly large gold crucifix.
“Have a seat, please. I’ll sit as well.”
For a few seconds the three of us were silent. Since the chairs were next to one another, and all faced the same direction, the situation was a bit ridiculous. We looked like passengers waiting for a train. Was the silence deliberate? Was it part of Arzaky’s strategy, or was he shy, or distracted? I coughed, and realized that I was the only one made uncomfortable by the silence. For different reasons, they were each used to provoking unease.
Arzaky finally explained what we had come for, and then he asked if Isel had known the man who fell from the tower’s heights.
“Yes, Darbon had been here. He began by asking me about my youthful exploits. It is true that we founded groups and sects, and we ordered books from abroad and each had a library filled with banned volumes. But now I use those books to keep me warm in the winter. Although they’re not even entirely good for that, since the leather covers smell terribly when they’re burned.”
“Who else was a part of your group?”
“Their names aren’t important. Pseudonyms abounded. Names with alchemical or Egyptian echoes were the most common. There were many, they came, they left, they founded new churches… For most of them I was depravity incarnate. They blamed the devil for my sins. If there were a copyright office for vices, I would have registered mine there so that no one could attribute my inventions to the devil.”
Isel stood up and pointed to the mark a large painting had left on the wall.
“You see this painting? These are my parents. I inherited a fortune from them and never worked a day in my life. I spent my time studying and collecting. I had exotic birds brought from abroad, which I often either freed or killed, depending on my mood. I had a large music box built, and I hired a blind girl to dance for me, repeating the same mechanical movements over and over. She danced naked, and never knew how many eyes were upon her. I would invite my friends to the meetings, some of which were held in the dark, and make them smell perfumes, sip drinks, and taste food without knowing what they were. When the lights came on, the real surprises were waiting for them. I was sick, I couldn’t handle real life. I searched for corners where life still held an air of strangeness and artifice. Now I’ve stopped all that, now I devote all my energy to the Church of Tr ut h.”
“What brought about your change?” asked Arzaky.
“Three years ago, a young man who called himself Sinbad joined my domestic staff.” He pointed to another mark on the wall that had been left by a small painting. “I painted his portrait myself. He had Arab features and called himself Sinbad for a circus act he had once performed. I let him keep it; it didn’t bother me. He was dark, reserved, he cheated at every game, and I became interested in him. I had the strange idea of making him into a gentleman, because I sensed that, beneath his wild exterior, there was a hidden god. The statue within the marble block. I hired a tutor to acquaint him with math, Latin, and the French classics, particularly the funereal orations of Bossuet. He learned to fence, and I took him to museums and cathedrals. Meanwhile he helped me to maintain order in this castle where I keep, all muddled together, marvels and misfortunes. I had trouble getting him to enter my natural sciences room, where I kept stuffed birds, some turtles, and several tanks with fish brought from Brazil. Those fish devour anything that’s put before them, and he trembled at the sight of them just cutting through the water with their fins.
“I don’t know what happened to him. Perhaps my efforts weren’t enough, or he missed his old life, because one day he f led. I was undone; I felt that my masterpiece had been completely ruined. My good servant Joseph, whom you saw, was glad that the young man had disappeared. I thought of tracking him down and killing him; I thought of killing myself; I thought about burning the house down. Fortunately I’m not a man of action-except for the act of collecting-so I returned to my studies, my dusky evenings, and my disappointments.
“One day I heard a rumor that a two-headed lamb had arrived in the market; I set out immediately to buy it. But something distracted me on the way: among the crowd I saw Sinbad, juggling for pocket change. He juggled the monkey skulls he had stolen from my collection. I hid my rage, which was also joy, and I embraced him without a second thought. I convinced him to come back with extravagant promises, which I didn’t make to him so much as to myself. Once he was back at the house, it only took me a few minutes to notice how his French had been corrupted, how his manners had changed, how his gaze had become sidelong and given to surreptitiousness and betrayal. I could see it in his eyes: I was just an old eccentric he could get enough money from to run away again. It terrified me to think of him disappearing and I made Joseph lock him in the natural sciences room. With no windows and only one door, there was no way he could possibly escape. Sinbad begged me on bended knee not to lock him up, but he used such common words that I was reminded of how his foolish f light had nearly ruined my work.
“I never knew if he slipped or if he threw himself into the water of his own volition. I heard a terrible scream in the middle of the night, the truest sound I have ever heard in my life. The words we use are nothing more than disguises to cover that scream, which is the essential expression of our soul. In the red water there was incessant motion, boiling. Incapable of moving, I stood staring at the depravity of nature, which was symmetrical to my own illness. When the movement stopped, I was empty, hollow. The great experience that life had in store for me was over. I didn’t leave my room for ten days. I smashed the perfume bottles, I drank all the cocktails I had brought for him, I used up my supply of hashish. I destroyed that abominable tank. Then I pulled out all my collections, every little pleasure meticulously catalogued, and I buried it in the basement of this house. The emperor’s cabinet of wonders would envy what I have stored here! I had nearly reached the most perfect of all experiences; it no longer made sense to continue. Now I devote myself to a different kind of pleasure.”
“Crime? ”
“No. Louis Darbon had nothing against me. He considered me an enemy of the tower. Why would I care about something whose existence I don’t even recognize? Could that tower compare with the bloody visions I see in my dreams? Darbon didn’t understand. We are not men of action. We are a school of contemplators. We are the immobile, the useless, those who read books about men of action. I wish there were a true criminal among us. It’s better if Grialet explains it to you. Grialet, now he has a golden tongue. But, of course, Arzaky, you know that full well.”
I had mentioned Grialet when I told Arzaky what I had read in Darbon’s papers, but he never told me he knew him.
“I haven’t seen him in some time. Where is Grialet these days?”
“I don’t know where he lives, but I doubt he’s stopped going to Dorignac’s bookstore. That is the port through which all banned books arrive. Paris is filled with sects that are out to kill each other, but Dorignac’s bookstore is a sort of common ground, a neutral zone where enemies observe each other from a distance. I miss Grialet. I used to take nighttime walks with him. He took me to see the many perversions the city has to offer and I paid the price. Now I prefer other sights. Once in a while I travel to see far-off oddities; in Naples I saw a church made entirely of human skulls. I go to see local miracles: in one chapel there’s an intact cadaver, as fresh as if he’d died just moments before; in another, farther away, I watch a corpse decompose in seconds, right before my eyes. These are the only wonders that fill my free time these days. I’m consumed with death, because after Sinbad, I don’t deserve any new pleasures. I’ve renounced everything.”
Arzaky didn’t seem to take Isel’s confessions very seriously, because he asked him, “And don’t you want to renounce your servant as well, to make your contrition complete?”
“Get rid of Joseph? Oh, please, no. I might be crazy, Mr. Arzaky, but not so crazy as to think one can get by without servants. What’s more, he keeps me alive. On my nights of insomnia he tells me, in infinite detail, of Sinbad’s spasmodic movements as he fell into the water, he describes how his face lit up with terror. He fills my sleepless hours with those few dreadful seconds. How could I go on living without that bedtime story?”
Six days had passed since Darbon’s murder, and the halls of Madame Nécart’s hotel were no longer filled with leisurely waiting assistants. The armchairs were empty, and even the Sioux Indian had set off on some mission.
“Where are they? How would I know where they are?! ” replied the owner. “Finally those savages are out of the drawing room. If my husband were alive, he never would have stood for having a redskin Indian in our hotel.”
The f light en masse had me worried. While they were there, I felt privileged to have a case. But with them out in the city, I couldn’t help thinking that they were the ones with the real clues, and that I was left walking in the shadows.
Arzaky didn’t seem to trust the information we had either, because he sent me to look for Grialet and Bradelli on my own.
“Grimas, the editor of Tra ce s, knows them well. He published several magazines for them. Ask him where they are.”
“But,” I protested, “you can get the truth out of suspects with just a look. I’m a foreigner, I’m inexperienced, I’m only an assistant…”
He dismissed my arguments with a contemptuous wave of his hand.
“Detective’s apprentice, son of a shoemaker: don’t be so sheepish, just go and distract Grialet.”
“I’m better at distracting myself than anyone else. And even if I manage to, what do I do then?”
“What do you think? Look for oil-stained clothes or gloves or shoes, of course.”
“If Grialet is the killer, he’s had time to get rid of those things.”
“You are an Argentine spendthrift. No good Frenchman would ever throw away a pair of shoes, not even if holding on to them could send him to the gallows.”
Adrien Grimas’s publishing house was located on the first f loor of a building in the Jewish quarter. There was a fabric store below. Grimas was eating a bowl of soup when I came in, and as soon as he saw me he hurriedly tried to hide the large blue notebook where he kept his accounts. The editor was supposed to give a percentage of his profits to The Twelve Detectives, but he claimed to have recorded a loss. Later I mentioned to Arzaky that it seemed very strange to me that the wisest men on the planet, capable of finding a killer from one hair or a cigarette butt, could be taken in by that little bespectacled man, who made only a cursory attempt to cover his tracks. He replied, “It’s a well-known tale: Thales of Miletus was walking through the field, looking up at the stars, when he fell into a well. A Thracian slave who saw him laughed and asked, ‘How can a wise man know so much about the distant stars and not notice the well that’s in front of him? ’ Well, in our case, we are twelve men who all fell into the well at the same time because we were looking up at the stars.”
Once Grimas had hidden his ledger book, he went back to finishing his soup of onions and meat.
“Arzaky won’t speak to me,” he said. “I wanted to meet you so I could give you some copies of Tra ce s and remind you to take notes as you go along, so you’ll be prepared when it comes time for you to write the story of Arzaky’s case. I will ask that you maintain Tanner’s style.”
“I don’t have enough experience to be able to tell Arzaky’s adventures, much less in Tanner’s style. Besides, I can’t write in French. I’m just a temporary assistant, until Arzaky can find someone permanent.”
“We’re all temporary, Monsieur Salvatrio. We are all awaiting our replacement.”
I asked the editor about Grialet and Bradelli, and he in turn asked me, “Arzaky’s following up on the Hermetic lead?”
“Are you surprised?”
“No. I knew that Louis Darbon was on the trail of the tower’s enemies. Occultists are like detectives: they investigate the lines that join the macrocosmos to the microcosmos. But while detectives look for signs in corners, at the bottom of drawers, among the f loorboards, the occultists do the opposite: they search in gigantic things, in monuments, in the shapes of cities, or the pyramids. Then they try to find a relationship between those enormous things and their own private miseries. Detectives go from the tiny corner to the world, occultists from the world to the tiny corner. That’s why the tower has made such an impression on them. Where others see beauty or ugliness, the steel or the height, they see the symbolism.”
“I thought they were interested only in the great monuments of the past. I wouldn’t have thought that the Eiffel Tower would attract their attention…”
“The Eiffel Tower is not the Eiffel Tower; it’s the tower of Koechlin, his assistant, who had to work long and hard to convince Eiffel to get on board with the project. Maurice Koechlin, an engineer like Eiffel, was the one who made the first sketch and later designed the structure. Now everyone talks about Eiffel, but you’ll see-in a few years it’ll be called the Koechlin Tower. You want to make a bet? Koechlin is Swiss, maybe that’s why he doesn’t like to draw attention to himself. He first thought of devoting himself to medicine, and studied anatomy in Zurich. When he designed the tower he was thinking of the organization of the fibers in the femur, which is a very strong, lightweight bone, the longest in the human body. Pythagoras was also obsessed with the femur; he found its relationship to music and, as a result, a link between that bone and universe’s hidden arithmetic. So our occultists are convinced that Koechlin is a Pythagorean devotee who divulged his greatest secret. The tower has always been a symbol of the center of the world, which is why these occultists believe ours is a false center that they must expose. Also, lately they’ve been leaning more toward the Catholic Church, and they don’t like the fact that the tower is taller than Saint Peter’s. It doesn’t really matter though; it’s a mistake for Arzaky to investigate them. I know them well, they’re harmless, I’ve published several of their magazines. Everything goes fine through the second issue, and then the infighting starts. It’s hard to work with people who want to publish their exploits and keep them secret at the same time.”
Grimas ate the last drop of soup and moved the plate away, onto a pile of papers. Caleb Lawson’s name was on the top page. It seemed sacrilegious to treat The Twelve Detectives’ material that way.
“Well, I’d still like to know where Grialet and Bradelli are.”
“Of course, the more moves Arzaky makes, the more pages you’ll write for me, isn’t that right?” I shook my head no, but he ignored me. “Arzaky’s adventures are the most chaotic, but our readers love them, who knows why. Tanner brought out the best in Arzaky. There was always a moment in his adventures when Arzaky seemed confused, about to admit defeat, sometimes he even disappeared for two or three days, and Tanner narrated the details of his absence with a master hand. He described his empty study on the top f loor of the Numancia Hotel, his unopened correspondence, and the dust that gathered on his desk. Then Arzaky would make a triumphant return and resolution would come swiftly. Christ also had to spend a good while in the desert before allowing the prophecies to be fulfilled.”
Grimas stretched out his arm and handed me some back issues of Tra ce s. It was obvious that it was a relief for him to be able to get rid of some of those papers.
“So you can familiarize yourself with Tanner’s style.” “Thank you very much. I’d love to have them, although I’m already very familiar with Arzaky’s cases.”
“You already know them? Oh, of course, The Key to Crime.” Grimas said the name of the Argentine magazine disdainfully. He looked at the clock on the wall and leaped from his chair. “You’ll have to excuse me, but I have to go to the printer’s. I’m sorry I haven’t been much help with the two occultists. After involuntarily becoming one of the protagonists in the Case of the Magnetizer, Grialet went to live in Italy.”
“He was involved in a criminal investigation?”
“Yes, the detective was Arzaky. Didn’t he tell you anything about it? Ask him, or look for the case in issue forty-five of Tra ce s, which I just gave you. The one with the green cover. As I said, Grialet went to Rome to live for a while. He became involved with the widow of a general, who gave him large donations for the Hermetic cause. I think the ruse he used was the publication of the complete works of Fabre d’Olivet. Once he had the money he returned to Paris, but he hasn’t been seen much since he got back. And, of course, he hasn’t published even a brief treatise. I don’t know where he lives now, but he’s not hard to recognize: his right ear is missing, lost in a fight at the now defunct Pythagorean Society of Paris. And as for Bradelli, he died three months ago.”
“A natural death?”
“Natural for a man with his somber disposition. He poisoned himself. During the last few years he had tried to apply his knowledge of alchemy to painting. His frequent use of mercury provoked fits of madness and finally poisoned him to death. Three years ago he had promised the Autumn Salon a painting in which he had created new colors never seen before. To heighten anticipation, he published an article in one of Grialet’s magazines, Anima Mundi, where he refuted Goethe’s theory of colors as well as Diderot’s. He announced the names of the new hues, which were a mix of Latin, Catholic liturgy, alchemy, and even necromancy. They were designed to alter the viewer’s perception and provoke sensations in him that transcended the subject matter. Painting, he said, must be a secret message; in the color one finds true meaning. When, after much beating around the bush, and many announcements and retractions, he finally presented his paintings, he pointed out the new colors: diabolical topaz, larva yellow, mandrake green, and silentium blue, and a dozen more. We saw only grays and blacks, and large areas where the white of the canvas hadn’t even been touched. That was Bradelli’s last work.”
I followed Grimas down the stairs and we said good-bye at the door.
With 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.
Although 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. Besides, 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”:
Je suis le Ténébreux,-le Veuf,-l’Inconsolé, Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la Tour abolie:
Ma seule Étoile est morte,-et mon luth constellé Porte le Soleil noir de la Mélancolie.
Dans la nuit du Tombeau,Toi qui m’as consolé, Rends-moi le Pausilippe et la mer d’Italie, La fleurqui plaisait tant à mon cœur désolé, Et la treille où le Pampre à la Rose s’allie. Suis-je Amour ou Phoebus?… Lusignan ou Biron? Mon front est rouge encor du baiser de la reine; J’ai rêvé dans la Grotte où nage la Sirène…
Et j’ai deux fois vainqueur traversé l’Achéron: Modulant tour à tour sur la lyre d’Orphée Les soupirs de la sainte et les cris de la Fée.
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.
I am the Gloomy One-the Widower-the Unconsoled The Prince of Aquitaine, at his stricken Tower My lone Star is dead,-and my star-spangled lute Bears the black Sun of Melancholia.
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.
In the night of the Tomb, you who have comforted me, Give me back Posilipo and the sea of Italy,
The flower that so pleased my desolate heart And the trellis where the branch and the rose meet.
“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:
Am I Eros or Phoebus?… Lusignan or Biron? My forehead is flushed from the Queen’s kiss; I dreamed in the Grotto where the Mermaid swims…
And twice victorious I crossed the Acheron: Modulating alternately on the lyre of Orpheus The saint’s sighs and the fairy’s screams.
“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.”
We left the house upset and confused.
“My performance was perfect. Grialet would still believe my lie, if you hadn’t shown up.”
“He knew who we were before we came in. Grialet pretended to believe you just so he could get a good gawk at your bosom.”
“I used my bosom to distract Grialet, so that you could look around… Why didn’t you check the other rooms? Then we might have something now…”
I shrugged. “I didn’t want to leave you alone with him. I thought he might bite you.”
“I’m used to-”
“Being bitten?”
“To this job. I’ve dealt with men much worse than Grialet, men who wanted to do more than look at me. Now we’re not going to be able to get in again. Instead of looking for clues, you just stared at the walls…”
“There was writing on them.”
“But the clue wasn’t going to be there, on the wall, in plain sight.”
“With everything that was written there, the wall could have easily read ‘I killed Darbon,’ and neither of us would have even noticed.”
“Brilliant observation. And now we’re leaving empty-handed.”
I took the photograph of the Mermaid out from where I had hidden it in my jacket.
“I’m not leaving Grialet’s mansion completely empty-handed.”
She looked at the image, her eyes wide.
“It’s trick photography. No person is capable of such things. It must be some play of light and cameras…”
“I’ve seen her.”
“Like this?”
“Dressed.”
“I still maintain it’s impossible.”
She turned the photograph over, as if she expected to find some confirmation that it was fake on the back. In green ink, a woman’s hand had written “I dreamed in the Grotto where the Mermaid swims.”
“There are so many photographic tricks these days; they can make women look as perfect as statues.”
“That photograph isn’t painted.”
“Only fools fall for optical illusions.”
She gave me back the photo and left, offended. But Arzaky was even more upset when I showed it to him.
“How dare you enter a house using my name and steal a photograph? The idea is to send criminals to prison, not for them to send you and me there.”
“I thought it could be a clue. Perhaps the woman’s handwriting indicates-”
“It’s the Mermaid’s handwriting… No secret there for me. She’s known Grialet for some time. I asked her to help in an investigation a while back, that’s all.”
“The Case of the Fulfilled Prophecy?” I showed him the magazine that Grimas had given me.
Arzaky looked at me, annoyed.
“Old cases are no concern of yours. Your job is to ask questions and, if it’s decided that we continue following up on this Hermetic lead, search for some oil-stained shoes. You don’t need to steal anything. I don’t know what strange things Craig taught you, but the assistant is a spectator, not an actor. The assistant watches life pass in front of his eyes, without getting involved. Now close your eyes. Imagine that life is a theater. Did you imagine the curtain, the orchestra, the actors? Good, now imagine yourself seated in the last row.”
I told him about the conversation I had with Grialet, but it was difficult explaining exactly what went on without mentioning Greta. Arzaky listened to me without interrupting. I told him of the writings on the walls, and the phrases written on them, I recited part of Nerval’s poem and I told him Grialet’s interpretation of it. But when I got carried away and acted like an expert as I explained the second of the three verses, Arzaky had a fit of anger and began banging the f loor with Craig’s cane.
“Okay! ” I said to him. “I won’t recite any more! And be careful with that cane, it could go off.”
Arzaky wiped his forehead with a handkerchief. “I can’t stand poetry.”
“Maybe it’s my foreign accent…”
“Your foreign accent isn’t the problem. It’s your mind; it’s foreign to all reason. Put all this in order. Gather these things into the glass cases and start writing out placards that explain the function of each object. And go to the parlor to see if you can find my colleagues and demand the objects that are still missing. The Japanese detective, Castelvetia, Novarius, Baldone… And did you find out anything more about Castelvetia’s assistant?”
I shook my head no, without looking at him, as if I barely realized what he was asking me. Arzaky gave an indignant snort and I thought he was going to have another fit, but he sat down, dispirited.
“I’m sorry to be so irritable. Grialet brings back bad memories.”
“Because of the unsolved case?”
“It was solved. But perhaps that case is the prologue to this mess we’re in now.”
Arzaky took the magazine out of my hands and quickly reviewed the story, as though he had trouble remembering the names. Every once in a while he smiled bitterly, as if mocking those pages Tanner had written. For the first time I suspected that there might be quite an abyss between the published versions of the cases and the real investigation.
“The Case of the Fulfilled Prophecy was the first time I had contact with Paris ’s Hermetic sects. The victim was a professor at the Sorbonne, who had one paralyzed leg. His named was Isidore Blondet. He lived alone in a large house, shut in with his books. He had spent his youth in Lyon, where he had contact with a Martinist order, a spiritualist group that he soon abandoned. Once he was living in Paris, he became obsessed with the myth of Atlantis, and began combing through histories of remote cultures for references to islands swallowed up by the sea.
“One of Blondet’s most loyal friends was Father Prodac, a former seminarian who experimented with poisons and liturgical elements. He fed communion Hosts to rats and kept track of how long it took them to die of starvation. From his bodily f luids he extracted poisons that were said to be extremely powerful and could kill on contact. Blondet eventually got tired of Prodac’s experiments, and he kicked him out of his house.
“This was the first enemy that the cripple Blondet made, but he soon discovered that constantly creating enemies was entertaining- an amusing way to fill his empty Sundays. He founded a satirical newspaper in which he was the sole writer and editor in chief, making fun of the leaders of the Paris Hermetic scene. His favorite target was Grialet and, of course, his former friend Prodac. In those days Prodac claimed to be a prophet. His prophecies were fairly banal (a storm on St. Peter’s Day, a vague shipwreck), but one day he made a prediction with a name and date: on the eighteenth of September, Isidoro Blondet was going to die.
“Blondet, a bit frightened by the prophecy (not because he believed that Prodac could see the future, but because he feared that he was plotting to kill him) didn’t leave his house the whole day, didn’t open the door to anyone, and only picked up the newspapers and the mail. Nevertheless, when the maid came in the next day, she found him dead, seated at his desk, with his head resting on a large book.
“For a few days Prodac enjoyed his fame as a prophet. Businessmen and ladies of leisure visited him at his house so he could predict their luck in investments, gambling, and love. It didn’t last long. Blondet’s autopsy, which I attended, revealed that he had been poisoned with phosphorus. I helped the police with their investigation, and found that the last book Blondet touched was impregnated with phosphorus. Blondet had climbed a staircase to get the book, gone back down, and looked through it. Then, when he slammed it shut, a cloud of dust rained out from its pages and poisoned him.
“Prodac was arrested immediately. It was obvious that the murder had been well planned. He eventually confessed to the judge that before leaving Blondet’s house, five or six months earlier, he had poisoned the book. Then he waited for him to consult that particular volume.
“The police were satisfied with the chain of events, but for me there was a missing element. How could Prodac know that Blondet was going to take out that book on that precise day? It was this investigation that led me to Grialet.
“The book that killed Blondet was a thick volume about the Hermetic movements during the Renaissance. I combed through the newspapers from that day looking for some information about what could have awakened Blondet’s interest in consulting that particular book. One of the papers at Blondet’s house was The Magnetizer, which was run by Grialet. After reading it over and over, I found, on a footnote signed by someone named Celsus, a common pseudonym in the Hermetic circle, a mention of Marsilio Ficino, the philosopher to whom we owe the revival of Plato’s thinking in the Western canon.
“At that time Blondet was preparing the definitive edition of his work on Atlantis. The author of the footnote, this Celsus, pointed out that Ficino (the son of the Medici’s doctor, who had founded his own academy and was vegetarian and chaste) had written a book about Atlantis, the fable created by Plato, when he was twenty-three years old, but later destroyed it. According to the note, Ficino had found earlier sources than Plato that proved Atlantis hadn’t been a chance invention by the philosopher. And it cited as bibliography the thick volume steeped in phosphorus. I realized that this footnote was the fatal weapon. As soon as Blondet read the false information, he sought out the work on Renaissance Hermeticism, to see if the citation was true. He didn’t find it and, slamming the volume shut, was enveloped in the phosphorus cloud.
“I asked the district attorney to arrest Grialet, the editor of the magazine, but he defended himself, saying that the article had arrived in the mail and he knew nothing about the author. To prove his innocence he showed an envelope postmarked from Toulouse. The plan was too complex for Father Prodac’s limited imagination. I sent the Mermaid after Grialet. Although she managed to become his friend, she never found a single piece of evidence that linked him to the phosphorus, to the murderous citation, or to Prodac himself. As a last resort I went to see the killer at the Salpetrière Hospital (the judge deemed him insane due to his fits of rage), and on the day I arrived Prodac had been found hanging from the ceiling. He didn’t leave a note, nothing that implicated Grialet in the crime.
“That’s why Grialet’s name brings back bad memories. With time, solved cases fade, diminish, disappear. But unsolved cases come back again and again, convincing us on sleepless nights that this collection of question marks, uncertainties, and errors is our true legacy.”
I returned to the hotel disheartened, with the feeling that Arzaky didn’t trust me and was only using me for minor tasks.
He had kept the fact that he knew Grialet from me and he hadn’t told me anything about his plans for the investigation. I locked myself in my room to catch up on my correspondence. Even though I addressed it “Dear Mother and Father,” I couldn’t help thinking that I was really addressing only my mother, as she was the one who took a real interest in my letters. I told her about everything around me but I altered it, trying to restore the original patina, the glow of things seen for the first time, to this world that had begun to tarnish.
After dining in a seedy bar, whose weak light was in cahoots with the chef ’s dark arts, I went to the hotel drawing room to see if I could find Benito or Baldone. Only the Sioux warrior was there, seated in an armchair and rigidly gazing out into space. I greeted him with a nod of the head.
Tamayak took out a pack of cigarettes and offered me one. I had heard that some tribes smoked hallucinogenic herbs, and a scandal in Madame Nécart’s drawing room was the last thing I needed. It would have been the final straw that made Arzaky send me back to my father’s shoe shop. Maybe Tamayak noticed that I was looking at his cigarettes suspiciously, because he said, “Don’t be afraid, they’re from Martinique. I bought them right here in the hotel.”
I was surprised that the Sioux spoke French, and I boldly told him so.
“Four years ago Jack Novarius began studying French so he could join The Twelve Detectives. Knowing French is a prerequisite to anyone aspiring to be a full member. It’s not required for assistants but he made me learn as well so he would have someone to practice with. And how’s it going with Arzaky? Becoming the acolyte to the Detective of Paris should make you proud, but you just seem unhappy.”
“I’m not a real assistant. I’m sure he has a plan, but he’s keeping quiet about it. He doesn’t trust me.”
“But his silence is good. When I started working with Novarius, for the Pinkerton agency, he almost never spoke to me. Once in a while I would make some comment, but he always held his words for the final surprise.”
“He never disclosed anything about the investigation?”
“Not a thing. Our first case took place in a circus, in the Midwest. They had killed the Human Cannonball right in the middle of a performance. The acrobat had commenced his usual routine, greeting the audience, showing his helmet, and asking, ‘Is it shiny? Is it shiny? ’ And then he stuck himself into the cannon. But instead of shooting out and landing a few paces farther on, he blew straight through the circus tent and disappeared into the night.
“The cause of death was clear. The cannon had two mechanisms: an explosive charge to make noise, and a spring, which was the real force that propelled the Human Cannonball. The killer had filled it with gunpowder, turning it into a real cannon.
“Jack showed me a lamp he always carried with him, which gave off blue light that allowed him to detect fake bills. With this lamp, he told me, he would catch the killer. Gunpowder, explained Jack, remained under the fingernails of anyone who touched it for ten days.
150• Pablo De Santis
Washing your hands was no use, said Jack. The only way to get rid of the powder was to burn it. He asked me to repeat the explanation to anyone who wanted to listen.
“Jack announced that the following night he would perform his great experiment, making all those who worked with the circus show their hands under the light. At nine o’clock, after the show, we gathered everyone in the arena and we stayed there in the dark, lit only by the blue lamp. No one’s hands shone and the detective apologized with a heavy heart. The circus artists, one by one, left the tent. The last one, a trapeze artist named Rodgers, I’ll never forget his crazy smile, had burns all over his hands, and the police officer stationed outside the tent arrested him immediately.
“Later we found out the details of the case: Rodgers’s wife, who worked as a horseback rider, had been planning to run off with the Human Cannonball. Rodgers found out and increased the cannon’s charge to get the Cannonball out of his marriage and his life. Mrs. Rodgers confessed to Novarius that when they were in bed, in the dark, he had asked her to look at his hands under the moonlight. And he asked her, ‘Are they shiny? Are they shiny? ’”
“Then Novarius tricked you too.”
“Yes, but my own faith in the trick had been essential to its coming off successfully. If I had been suspicious, if I had employed my cunning, I might have given away his plan. That’s why I’m telling you, my dear Salvatrio, that while you’re here, feeling ignored and neglected, you may actually be the key piece of Arzaky’s secret plan. It could ensure your own success as an acolyte as well.”
As if Tamayak’s words were a premonition, the next morning I was awakened by Madame Nécart banging on my door.