The Paris Enigma

by Pablo De Santis

  “I’m a private detective; I’ve been sent by the Alarcón family.” “I know very well who you are. You are one of the founding members of The Twelve Detectives. I’ll never forget the Case of the Severed Hand, and how, based on a bit of wine left in a glass…”

  Craig didn’t let him continue. “The family’s youngest son, Gabriel Alarcón, whom you hired as an assistant, has disappeared.”

  Kalidán didn’t seem to be alarmed by our presence, although he still hadn’t taken off his makeup, as if he didn’t want to show us his true face. He spoke with the affable common sense that is so universal among killers, at least according to the pages of The Key to Crime.

  “I hired a young man for five performances, but he wasn’t named Alarcón. He said his name was Natalio Girac. I don’t ask a lot of questions. In show business, everybody has a fake name. My real name, as you can imagine, is not Kalidán, and I’m not actually from India. I’m used to doing my act with a woman, but the assistant I had got sick and Girac replaced her very well. I gave him a good tip. I would have liked to bring him with me, but Sayana, the woman you saw, was waiting for me here in Montevideo. We have worked together before. The audience comes to see her, more than me, and I couldn’t disappoint them.”

  For years I had read accounts of Craig’s cases, in which he bombarded suspects with seemingly simple questions until the distracted murderer made a fatal mistake. On the printed pages of The Key to Crime, Craig was always the absolute master of the situation. But here, in front of the magician, he seemed more like an awkward, frightened policeman who fell for the first lie he heard. He didn’t ask any more questions, he just apologized and then we left the dressing room. I wanted to lie in wait for the magician, so we could see his real face, but he refused. We left Montevideo at dawn. Leaning on the steamship’s railing, we were silent for a long time, until finally Craig spoke.

  “Did you notice anything odd about the name that Alarcón used: Natalio Girac.”

  “What about it?”

  “Girac is an anagram of Craig. And Natalio is the name of our only son, who died as an infant.”

  Over the next few days Craig continued to do nothing, in spite of the pressure from Alarcón’s family. If he had a secret plan for finding out the truth, he didn’t mention it. There were many stories in which the detective adopted some sort of indolence, or left town, or acted crazy for a while and then later it would be revealed that what seemed like apathy or delirium had actually been the patient application of a genius plan. But in this case Craig’s revelation was slow in coming.

  Gabriel Alarcón was born into a family of boat manufacturers. The Alarcón shipyards supplied the merchant marines of several countries. It was a powerful family and all sorts of emissaries visited Craig in the days following our return, demanding that he find the boy. Craig received them all, and he asked them all for more time to work. The police beat him to the punch and Kalidán the magician was arrested as soon as he got off the steamship that had brought him from Montevideo.

  The magician’s capture appeared on the front page of the papers. He had traveled disguised as a Hindu, in his turban and yellow tunic, with shoe polish on his face. Craig gave all the reports we had gathered to the police, but there was no indication of the boy’s whereabouts in them, nor any proof of Kalidán’s crimes. The police interrogated him for fifteen days and fifteen nights. Kalidán, in spite of being driven mad with the beatings, the cold, and the lack of sleep, didn’t say a word. When it was clear that they couldn’t make a case against the magician, they released him with certain restrictions: he couldn’t leave the country, and every four days he had to come in person to check in at the police station.

  Gabriel Alarcón’s disappearance marked the end of the Academy. The newspapers, which had so celebrated the detective’s achievements in the past, now attacked him mercilessly: he had sent a novice, an innocent, to an uncertain fate. The other students, pressured by their families, stopped coming. Trivak and I decided to stay in the empty building, as a show of confidence in Craig. We helped classify the pieces from the forensic museum, we cleaned and oiled the microscopes, and we waited in vain for the classes to start up again. Finally Trivak left as well.

  “Your family?” I asked him.

  “No. Boredom.”

  I had a good excuse to stay: the organization of the archive, which Craig had assigned to me months earlier. I would arrive early and go to the kitchen, where Angela served me yerba maté tea and French toast she made with day-old bread. Once in a while I had tea with Señora Craig, and we continued the conversations she had begun with Alarcón. I tried to cheer her up, but each time I saw her she seemed paler, dulled by Alarcón’s disappearance and her husband’s fall from grace.

  8

  Tired of the journalists’ attacks, Craig swore he would find Alarcón. He called it “My Final Case,” which seemed to be an admission that something had gone terribly wrong, that he couldn’t continue. He thought it had a dramatic effect (and he was right). “My Final Case” he would say, sometimes even in the third person, “Detective Craig’s Final Case,” and then he would pause reverently. His detractors were now silenced, not because Craig commanded respect, but because endings commanded respect.

  During the day he stayed at the Academy, afraid the journalists, the snoops, and those sent by Alarcón’s parents would follow him. There was no way to talk to him, he stayed shut up inside his study, writing in notebooks with black covers. His handwriting was a trail of ants that didn’t know where they were marching.

  I thought, at that point, that Craig was beaten; but never stopped proclaiming to the journalists, who were increasingly less interested, to his wife, who had stopped leaving the house, and to me, the only one who listened to him, that he was very close to solving the case. One night he took me away from my work-as I classified his old papers, my admiration for his past and my compassion for his present continued to grow-and he asked me to accompany him to the Green Room.

  Without any special emphasis, as if he were telling me of a decision made by someone else, or by simple inertia, he told me that I would be his acolyte.

  “But you said that you would never have an assistant.” “The word never shouldn’t exist; that way we would be less inclined to make promises we can’t keep. This title, in spite of our situation, will be handled with due formality and announced to The Twelve Detectives.”

  In that moment, mentioning The Twelve Detectives seemed incongruent and at the same time it gave me hope. It was as if Craig once again invoked his power to invent and amaze, reviving all that I believed in. For a few seconds I saw the image of my name in the “In Hushed Tones” section of The Key to Crime.

  The detective rubbed his eyes like he was waking up from a sleep that had lasted days and he continued, “You do know this position won’t last long. This is my final case.”

  My body tensed involuntarily, and my firm voice complemented my martial stance.

  “I hope it won’t be your final case; I hope it’ll be a new start. But if it is, if the day when all the city’s murderers can sleep easy has arrived, then there can be no greater honor than having a small role in your farewell.”

  Craig nodded distractedly at my words.

  That day I started to work. The magician had already violated his obligation to appear at the police station and had f led the city. I visited all the hotels where he might have stayed. Once in a while Craig came with me. I was expecting the classic dialogue between acolyte and detective to develop between us. The Hindu, Dandavi, who worked for Caleb Lawson, pretended not to understand anything because he was foreign, which forced Lawson to explain everything to him in great detail; the Alsatian Tanner spoke in almost a whisper, and only raised his voice when Arzaky surprised him with a brilliant revelation; Fritz Linker, assistant to Tobias Hatter, the detective from Nuremberg, asked such obvious questions that he could easily be taken for an idiot. All the other detectives talked to their assistants, but we proceeded in sile
nce. I rehearsed silly phrases, I was taken in by obvious ideas, by the luster of appearances, and I always had a cliché on the tip of my tongue, leaving room for Craig to dazzle me with the secret logic of his thinking. But the detective never spoke, and we walked through the night as if there was nothing more to be said.

  The owner of the Victoria Theater, a tremendously fat man who had been a tenor in his youth, let us poke around, afraid that the criminal notoriety of the artist would bring him problems with the law. The theater was a labyrinth that not even he knew very well; the basement levels and the wings stored sets from old shows. In the half-light we banged up against Venetian bridges, plaster storks, and Chinese palaces. Whispers could be heard at the back of the endless basement, as if not only sets were stored there, but the entire casts of forgotten plays as well.

  Renato Craig went about looking for clues, but it was clear that his despondency was preventing him from carrying out an in-depth investigation. It was no secret that Craig hated theaters, a dislike that was well known to all the students at the Academy, and even to any reader of The Key to Crime. Although he is remembered as the first detective in Buenos Aires, Renato Craig was actually the second. The first one was named Jacinto Vieytes, and he was a tracker who came here to live after some resounding triumphs in his detective work. Vieytes managed to apply trail guide methods to urban crime. And while his skills, when employed in hotel rooms, society halls, and railroad stations, didn’t yield such spectacular results as when he was studying hoofprints, trails in the grass, or bonfire remains, the police often called him to study crime scenes. He liked to have people around, for him to dazzle with his deductive reasoning, which was half logic and half old country proverbs. An Italian theater impresario realized that he could use the fact that the tracker was such a character to his advantage and he organized a performance for him at the Argentine Theater. Vieytes shared a billing with Frank Brown, the clown. The theatrical representation of his skills cost him all credibility; the audience thought he had always been just an actor. Although he knew that Vieytes had real talent as a detective, Craig felt that his performance diminished the art of investigation. The detective hated theaters because they reminded him of his predecessor’s show, as well as the danger of turning the lonely act of reasoning into an empty spectacle. When he worked as a detective, Vieytes never had an acolyte but when he entered show business, he decided to have an actor play the part of the common man who expressed his foolish opinions as a lead-in to the detective’s brilliant conclusions.

  So the heavy work was left to me. With my magnifying glass I traced the f loorboards of the dressing room in search of a letter, some scrap of paper, or even a hair. Beneath a trunk of such enormous dimensions that it couldn’t have fit through the door I found a receipt for the purchase of a boat crossing. I showed it to Craig.

  “He’s left the country, sir. Here’s the receipt for a ticket on the Goliardo, which left port a week ago.”

  Craig held up the receipt and studied it under the magnifying glass.

  “It seems to be genuine, but I’m afraid Kalidán bought the passage just to throw us off track. I’m sure that if we pay a visit to the shipping company they’ll tell us that cabin berth remained empty.”

  Craig turned the paper over. He studied the footprint on the edge.

  “Kalidán pushed the paper under the trunk with his foot. Here is the mark. You’re a shoemaker-”

  I was surprised Craig knew that about me. I had never told him.

  “The son of a shoemaker.”

  “But you can tell me what type of shoe it is.”

  I didn’t take me more than a few seconds to come up with a response.

  “It’s the print from a sailor’s shoe.”

  “Are you positive?”

  I pointed to the pale lines on the paper. I was happy to be able to show Craig something, although I wasn’t convinced that it was something he didn’t already know.

  “It is a shoe with wide lasts, and grooves to grip the deck’s slippery surface. I think he disguised himself as a sailor so he could blend in with the crew and not be discovered.” I didn’t really believe that was true, but it seemed like an appropriate comment for an assistant to make.

  Craig accepted my effort and then said victoriously, “That’s not it at all. He dressed up as a sailor so he could find lodging at the port and wait until things calmed down before leaving the city. He could easily support himself with his skill at cards.”

  Craig’s face was well known in the city, and he didn’t like disguises, so it was up to me to scour the disreputable bars in the port area. In these places with stagnant air and weak light, sailors tried to escape the tedium of their travels with the tedium of terra firma; they pretended to listen to accordion players who played too slowly, or pianists who played too fast; they pretended to talk to women whose faces, in the light of day or a moment of clarity, would have terrified them. In tiny rooms they trafficked in trinkets, foreign money, ambiguous words, opium, and infectious diseases.

  I went into the bars trying to see without being seen. I was searching for Kalidán’s face using an exercise of the imagination: I had to strip him of his Hindu complexion and the bright aura he used to attract attention onstage, and add instead a beard and hats and cloaks and the furtive expression of someone who wishes he could make himself invisible. I tried to strike up conversations with the men who seemed most harmless, but it was hard to trust anyone. A Portuguese man who kept talking about his poor mother stabbed some unlucky guy who had dared to correct him when he mispronounced the name of a ship; a shy, calm dwarf, with a scar across his forehead, ripped into the stomach of a drunk who made fun of his condition. No one punished these crimes. I continued to see the Portuguese guy, and the dwarf too, which made me think that they all must have a few murders under their belts, but since they were in some sort of international territory, no one cared.

  I had trouble getting away from the sailors’ unintelligible conversations, the greedy women who went through my pockets, and the police spies who looked at me suspiciously. But two weeks later, when I had gotten used to getting drunk every night, I heard a rumor about a French captain who was winning a fortune at cards.

  He played in a gambling den that was above a grocery warehouse. Through the dirty windows movement could be seen, but there was no way I could get in, as two formidable ruffians guarded the entrance. I waited in the drizzle for the fake French captain to finish gathering his winnings and head home. He finally came out, sunken into his cloak and beardless. What distinguished him from Kalidán the magician wasn’t his disguise but some sort of inner confidence that he couldn’t be seen, as if all he had to do was concentrate and he would become invisible. I followed from a distance, carefully, imitating drunken zigzags. He didn’t turn to look at me; he walked with sure steps, immune to the effects of alcohol or fear. He was stopped only by a black cat, which he didn’t want to cross his path. Then he went into a dilapidated house that looked like it was about to collapse.

  In the morning, so early that my father wouldn’t even have been in his workshop, I went to visit Craig. It didn’t matter what time I stopped by; he was always awake. I told him of my discovery and described the building’s slow collapse; I warned him that in the world of the port nothing lasted long.

  “You’ve done a good job. But now it’s my turn. I sent one boy to his death and I don’t want to send another.”

  Before the door closed completely, I thought I saw Craig smile, for the first time in weeks.

  9

  reporter from The Nation

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

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

  “How did you find it?”

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

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

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

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

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