Buenos Aires ’s Spanish community closely followed the exploits of Fermín Rojo, a detective from Toledo, who had such extraordinarily entertaining mishaps that the murders themselves were beside the point. Zagala, a Portuguese detective, was always by the sea: interrogating the fierce crewmembers of boats lost in the fog, searching the beach for remains of inexplicable shipwrecks, solving “locked cabin” cases.
Novarius, Castelvetia and Sakawa rounded out The Twelve Detectives. In our imagination we associated Jack Novarius, the American detective, with legendary cowboys and gunmen. The meticulous Andres Castelvetia, who was Dutch, crawled into dusty corners without ever dirtying his white outfit. We didn’t know a thing about Sakawa, the inscrutable detective from Tokyo.
We repeated those names behind Craig’s back. The nebulous subject of The Twelve Detectives was not on his syllabus. He preferred that we learn law, taught by Dr. Ansaldi, a former classmate of Craig’s at the Colegio San Carlos. Ansaldi explained that law was a narrative practice. Lawyers tried to compose a story-one of innocence or of guilt-and make it seem the only possibility, taking advantage of the conventions of the genre and of human nature, which was so eager to confirm its prejudices. Our fellow students Clausen and Miranda, both sons of lawyers, were the only ones who didn’t sleep through the law classes, and, in fact, they eventually became lawyers. The rest of us didn’t care for that stagnant world, filled with unreadable books, lived behind a desk. To us it was diametrically opposed to the danger and intellectual excitement promised by detective work. Even Craig hated law.
“We detectives are artists, and lawyers and the judges are our critics,” he would say.
Trivak, the only student whom I became friends with, had read Thomas De Quincey in his father’s Edinburgh Gazette collection, and dared to correct him.
“The murderers are the artists, and the detectives their critics.”
Craig was silent, preferring to save his response for later. Trivak was the boldest of the group, and when Craig hid clues around the house, one of his endless exercises, Trivak got closer to solving the mystery than anyone else. It was rumored that in one painstaking pursuit he hadn’t even stopped at Señora Craig’s bedroom, but went in and searched through her clothes. Trivak didn’t confirm the rumor, but he didn’t deny it either, saying, “There should be no limits to one’s investigation.”
I suspected that Trivak had started that rumor himself, along with another, more persistent one, that the academy was just a means for Craig to groom an assistant. The newspapers often criticized him for lacking a second pair of eyes to lend credence to his adventures. Craig, along with Arzaky and Magrelli, was one of the most adept and prudent of The Twelve Detectives, yet without an acolyte, he was considered to be somewhat inferior to his colleagues. The Portuguese, Zagala, had Benito, a remarkably agile Brazilian; Caleb Lawson, a knight of the Queen and Scotland Yard’s most famous collaborator, had Dandavi, the Hindu, who followed him everywhere, sometimes putting false leads and real dangers in his path just to create a more exciting tale to tell. Arzaky, who competed with Louis Darbon for the title of Detective of Paris, had old Tanner as his helper. Tanner’s health had been compromised by so many rigorous adventures that now, stooped over, consumptive, and with his days numbered, he spent most of his time in his tulip garden and assisted Arzaky only by mail.
The idea that Craig had set up an entire academy just to find himself an acolyte wasn’t preposterous, and it filled us with an enthusiasm that we didn’t dare admit to one another. By then, several students had quit, terrified by the unknown world that detective work had revealed. Attending the execution, by firing squad, of the anarchist Carpatti, who, even when riddled with bullets, continued to spit insults at his executioners, and visiting prisons to meet famous murderers had disheartened those who thought that investigation was an intellectual game, a spiritual puzzle. Of course, none of those who abandoned the academy ever admitted to being afraid or disenchanted. They all pretended that their change of course was due to a recent, sobering maturity; a realization that they wanted to be family men, to follow in the footsteps of their fathers, who were businessmen, doctors, and lawyers. As our numbers dwindled, our hopes grew that we would be the chosen one.
Deep down, we knew that if Craig had really set all this up in order to find an assistant, he had already made his choice. As much as Trivak tried to dampen his sarcasm and impress his teacher, it was Alarcón who was the favorite. Gabriel Alarcón, whose skin was so pale that you could see his veins. Gabriel Alarcón, whose beauty was more befitting a girl than a man. Craig was happy when Alarcón proved to be shrewder than we were, when he could accuse us of missing the logic in an exercise of reason and then demonstrate his absolute superiority. Craig was eager to beat us, but he was even more eager to be defeated by Alarcón, and when from his disciple’s feminine mouth came the words that bested him, then he smiled twice as proudly.
We hated Alarcón for that. We also hated him because his family was richer than any of ours, their fortune built on the construction of ships. He could aspire to be an ambassador or devote his life to traveling and women, and yet he had chosen to compete among us. And he was outdoing us. Trivak and I loathed him more than anyone: I was a shoemaker’s son and his father was one of the few Jewish lawyers in the city at that time. But even as we hated him, we recognized his merits (which far from assuaging our hatred, increased it). Alarcón always followed an unexpected and solitary path. He never asked for permission, but moved through the world as if all doors were open to him. His familiarity with the Craigs was unnerving. He had tea with Señora Margarita every afternoon. When the detective was out of town, she spent hours in his company. He became a substitute-of course, only at teatime-for her husband.
When Craig revealed the solution to the case of the locked room- one that had obsessed the detectives-Alarcón responded, “Calling a murder ‘a locked-room crime’ is the wrong approach to the investigation, because it assumes that locks are infallible. There are no truly locked rooms. Calling it that presupposes an impossibility. In order to solve a problem, it has to be correctly posited. We mustn’t let semantics blue our logic.”
We hated him. We competed among ourselves, not with him. We were fighting over second place, in a race where only first place mattered. On the days when Craig was traveling for a case, things were more relaxed and we went home earlier than usual. Trivak would stare, perplexed, from the doorway at Alarcón, who instead of leaving, would go upstairs, with those slow, almost weightless, steps of his, to accept Señora Craig’s excessive hospitality.
5
In the academy, on the first f loor, there was a meeting room that was never used. An oval table with chairs around it stood in the middle. Both the chairs and the table were heavy, impossible to move, as if the wood had petrified. We called it the Green Room, because there were branches and vines painted on the ceiling by an artist who had begun his work with patience and diligence and had obviously tired of botany by the end. The exacting calligraphy of stems and veins became a confused mass of branches whipped by a storm. The walls were covered in dark wood, hung with swords, harquebusiers, and coats of arms; it all had a somewhat pretentious air, like the houses of antique dealers. The room looked like the remains of some abandoned project: the headquarters of a Masonic enclave, or a dining room that Señora Craig had envisaged for illustrious visitors who had never arrived. Called one day to convene there, we sat around the table, which was completely empty except for the dust, and Craig spoke.
“Gentlemen, in the last few years you have learned everything there is to know about crime. At least everything that can be taught in a classroom. Life is a perennial teacher, especially when the subject is death. Theoretical knowledge has its limits. Beyond those limits lies intuition, which is not something supernatural, as our friend Trivak, future member of the spiritualist brotherhood, insists. Rather it is the sudden relationship that we establish with other hidden, less dominant realms of knowledge. To intui
t is to retrieve subconscious memories, which is why experience is the mother of intuition. It is nothing more than a specialized type of memory. Its goal is to find a pattern, connect the dots of this chaotic life.”
Distracted, I let my finger trace my name in the thick layer of dust that covered the table.
“For a while now I’ve been waiting for a suitable practice case to present itself, and now I have it.”
Craig spread out a newspaper page out on the table. We were looking for some big headline about an honest tailor shot to death, or a woman found f loating in the river, but there was only an ad for the performances of the magician Kalidán, the same magician who had been touring in the city when Craig announced the launch of his academy. At that time great magicians often came through our city, though now it’s not so common. Various types of phantasmagoria were popular in Europe and the public filled the theaters to see skeleton battles, luminous ghosts, decapitated bodies that spoke, and other marvels created with smoke and mirrors.
“For some time now I have noticed that this magician’s tours seem to coincide with murders and disappearances. The victims are always women: in New York a chorus girl disappeared, in Budapest a f lower vendor, in Montevideo a cigarette girl was found exsanguinated. The Berlin police questioned him in the death of a nurse, but they couldn’t prove anything. The few corpses that have been found (because our killer always tries to either hide or destroy the bodies) revealed that he drained the victims’ blood and then washed them with bleach. He always performs this purification ritual.”
Craig explained the case detachedly; six of us cracked our knuckles, angered by the crime. Only Alarcón responded to the tale with equal indifference. They both approached the challenge without emotion.
“Kalidán will be in the city for fifteen more days. Then he continues on to Brazil and we won’t have anything to investigate. I’ll continue explaining the case, and I’ll stress the importance of distinguishing coincidence from inevitability, but those of you who are any good will leave me here talking to myself, you’ll leave Detective Craig raving alone in this dusty room.”
All six of us rushed to the door, but by that time Alarcón had already disappeared.
6
We bought tickets for the performance and settled into the dilapidated seats of the Victoria Theater. We wanted to find some connection between the illusions with swords and guillotines in the magician’s show and real murders. But he joked as he did his tricks, far from the gravity that we, in our inexperience, expected from a murderer. Instead of exaggerating the mysterious air lent by his name and his sleight of hand, Kalidán joked about his fake exoticism.
After that first encounter, we each came up with our own strategy. Trivak pretended to be a journalist from The Nation and went to interview him in his dressing room. Miranda seduced an usherette and was able to go through his Chinese screens, boxes with holes for housing swords, and even the trunk with Edgar Allan Poe’s cut-off hand, which on stage tirelessly wrote the refrain of “The Raven.” Federico Lemos Paz had his uncle, who owned the Ancona Hotel where the magician was staying, employ him as a bellhop so he could search for clues in his room. At dusk we met in a corner café near the theater to exchange news of our progress, which wasn’t much. The only one who didn’t come to our meetings was Alarcón. Jealous and tormented, we imagined that Craig had sent him on a more important mission, while he distracted us with the magician’s games. Since we didn’t trust each other, we kept the information we thought most essential to ourselves and we reported irrelevant details with an air of secrecy and revelation. It was my job to search Craig’s archive.
The more progress we made, the more convinced we were that the fake Hindu, who was actually Belgian, was guilty, and that he hadn’t been caught because he always chose inconsequential victims, the daughters of immigrants, lonely girls whose bodies no one claimed.
After a week had passed, we met in the Green Room to present our findings. Our fingerprints were still there on the dusty table, a reminder of the last meeting. We listed the facts we had been able to prove, and we bragged about our various ruses to get into the magician’s life and spy on his past. Craig, bored, pretended to listen. Occasionally he would congratulate someone on his inventiveness (he liked that Lemos Paz had passed himself off as a bellhop, he recognized that my archive search had been methodical and responsible) but his congratulations were so insipid, so apathetic, that we would have preferred he shout out a reprimand or some sign of contempt.
Only when he started to speak did he seem to emerge from his melancholy state. He heard the sound he liked best: his own voice.
“Detective work is an act of thinking, the last corner in which the philosopher seeks refuge. We are logic’s last hope. Which is why I ask that you accord the clues their true place, without exaggerating their importance. The correct interpretation of a f lower petal can be more valuable that the discovery of a blood-covered knife.”
As he spoke, baff ling us, Craig looked toward the door. He was expecting Alarcón, waiting for his prize student to make an entrance that would relieve him of having to hear more, and relieve us of our awkward attempts to impress him. He was waiting for Alarcón to come in and deliver definitive proof. It was late and we began to leave; finally Trivak, Craig, and I were left there alone. To lighten the atmosphere, Trivak said that surely Craig had sent Alarcón on one of the good cases, a “locked-room” crime (which at the time was considered the non plus ultra of criminal investigation), while keeping us distracted with the fake Hindu magician. Without taking his gaze off the door, Craig responded, “Every murder is a ‘locked-room’ case. The locked room is the criminal’s mind.”
7
After a tour through the cities of Tucumán and Córdoba, Kalidán the magician returned to the Victoria Theater for four farewell performances. We were there, and we saw that the magician’s assistant-a tall and extraordinarily thin girl, who herself seemed to be another artful trick of catoptrical magic- had been replaced by a young man who wore the blue uniform of an imaginary army. The new assistant was none other than Alarcón, who operated the machinery, moved the screens, offered himself as a human target for the dagger trick, and allowed his skull to be hooked up to some cables that led to a strange machine. That machine supposedly projected the assistant’s thoughts onto a white screen: we saw some fish, some coins that dropped and were lost, the naked silhouette of a woman who seemed to me to be the exact replica-though I didn’t dare mention it to anyone-of Señora Craig. Alarcón had gotten further than anyone; he was working with the magician. It made our clumsy attempts to get information seem like child’s play.
We continued meeting in the academy’s rooms, but we were disheartened. We expected Craig to finally release us from the course, from the obligation, from our hopes. Craig had his acolyte and there was no reason to go on. But the detective still taught us, and he never mentioned any need for an assistant.
In the following days, Alarcón still hadn’t returned to the academy and Craig asked us if we knew anything about his whereabouts. His questions surprised us, because we thought that it was Craig, not us, who was in contact with Alarcón. The performances at the Victoria Theater had ended and the newspapers announced that the magician was traveling to Montevideo.
One afternoon, after class, Craig handed me a wad of bills and told me to go to Montevideo that same night.
“No one has heard from Alarcón, and his family is beginning to worry,” he said to me in a hushed voice.
“I’m sure he’s found something and wants to surprise you.”
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s to hate surprises.”
That night I crossed the river on a steamship; the boat’s movement kept me awake. In the morning, I bought an orchestra seat for that day’s show at the Marconi Theater. First a pianist played a piano that sounded like brass, and then there was some sort of duel between two actors, dressed as gauchos, that each represented one side of the River Plate.
That was when I fell asleep. When I woke up, Kalidán’s show was about to end. I only saw a little of it, but enough to know that Gabriel Alarcón had been replaced by a black girl, whose skin was slathered with some kind of oil that sometimes made her look like a statue.
I telegraphed Craig to tell him the news. He came to the city the next day and got a room at the Regency Hotel, which had a few pool tables at the back: in those days the game was new and was played according to the Italian rules. Craig listened in silence to the account of my inquiries, while he drank one brandy after another.
After the performance we went to the magician’s dressing room. Kalidán received us wrapped in a golden robe and smoking an Egyptian cigarette. Craig entered timidly and indecisively; I couldn’t tell if it was a brilliant act or if the detective actually felt intimidated by the magician.
The Paris Enigma Page 2