“They already were invisible-they’d been stolen,” interjected Caleb Lawson.
Magrelli looked at him with annoyance.
“But I had filled my head with descriptions of them and they were hanging in the gallery of my mind. So just as I was able to make myself see them, I stopped seeing them. Renato Craig called this the detective’s blindness, the ability to stop seeing the obvious in order to discover what lies behind it. I stopping paying attention to the descriptions of the paintings and I focused on the frames. Again and again they were ornate moldings, the gold worked with bitumen to make it look aged. All the paintings had been framed by Egidio Vicci, whose work hardly varied. I’ll spare you the details: I soon discovered that Vicci was none other than Cornelio Valgrave, famous forger and art thief. Valgrave had stolen the Tabbia collection ten years earlier: a fatal f law led the police to suspect him. Since he knew that sooner or later they would find him, Valgrave decided to place the stolen pieces behind the bad paintings that arrived in his workshop. Behind the bishop’s face, or the goats, or the Venetian basilica, there was a Giorgione, or a Veronese, or a Titian. When the police had him cornered, the thief turned himself in without revealing where the paintings were hidden. The police searched his house and his friends’ and family’s houses, but they never found anything. When Valgrave got out of prison he hired a band of thieves to recover the booty. I would never have discovered it if I hadn’t reversed my perspective. We always have to do this in order to solve an enigma, remembering Arcimboldo’s repulsive paintings.”
There was a low murmuring, I don’t know if it was approval or confusion. By this point, the assistants who surrounded me were bored, and anxiously awaiting the moment they could go back to their hotel. In my mind I tried to match the assistants with their detectives: Anders Castelvetia’s wasn’t there, and never had been; Benito had taken advantage of a moment’s distraction to disappear; the German, Linker, stood his ground; Baldone, in spite of the devotion that he had shown for his mentor, had chosen an isolated armchair in which to fall asleep.
6
Madorakis, the Athenian detective, stood up to speak.
“I’d like to thank our good Arzaky for the idea of this symposium,” he said, “but according to the rules, we must have wine. The ancient Greeks would never have dared converse with their throats dry.”
Arzaky gestured and a waiter, who was standing in the doorway, went to get drinks. Madorakis continued, “I have heard people talk about jigsaw puzzles many times, but I have never understood what they had to do with our trade, except in terms of patience, something we strive to have but often don’t. With regard to the paintings of that Milanese artist, I’m not familiar with them. My knowledge of art is limited. But perhaps you will allow me to add an element to our conversation, a venerable image that still has something to tell us: the sphinx.
“Oedipus was our predecessor: he investigated a crime that, unbeknownst to him, he himself was guilty of. That is something we shouldn’t forget: we have an eye for that which is foreign to us, but are blind to the familiar. Let’s leave the crime and the crossroads for a moment and focus on the following scene: Oedipus wants to enter the plague-besieged city to find the sphinx, who offers each of her visitors a riddle, an enigma. What is the creature that walks on four legs in the morning, on two at noon, and on three legs in the evening? Oedipus shrewdly answered, ‘man,’ and in doing so finished off that sphinx. That one, and all the others, because we haven’t heard anything from a sphinx since. We can say that as a man, he was the answer, and would also be the answer to the second enigma, the crime at the crossroads. But let me say something more: the sphinx poses questions, but at the same time she herself is a riddle. We ask questions of enigmas and vice versa. Gentlemen, though we want to live in glass bubbles, to use pure reason, to interrogate witnesses without ever being interrogated, we are always surrounded by questions, and we answer them-subconsciously, through our actions. Through our investigative methods, we show who we are. It is us and not the poets, who aspire to live in ivory towers, but time and time again we come down to earth, and we reveal, without realizing it, our worst secrets.
“Sometime around 1868 a rich merchant was killed in an Athens hotel. He was found in his bed, with a knife from the hotel kitchen in his heart. He had been murdered in the middle of the night, and since no one had entered the hotel at that time, it was assumed that the guilty party was one of the guests. Nothing had been stolen, in spite of the fact that the dead man was quite rich and there were plenty of valuables in his suite. The merchant’s widow immediately contacted me for help. I went around to the hotel, where the Athens police were detaining all the guests. Anyone could easily have gotten into the dead man’s room; the spare key was kept in a drawer in the office. There was no danger that the night watchman would wake up; he slept very soundly and opened his eyes only when a bronze bell was rung. Although any of the hotel guests could have been the killer, none of them had a motive.
“I gave the widow a list of everyone staying in the hotel, to see if she recognized any of the names. A glance was enough for her to tell me that only one of the names was familiar to her: Basilio Hilarion, but she couldn’t remember how she knew him. This Basilio Hilarion had stayed alone in a room on the third f loor. I went to see him. He received me kindly and gave brief, but complete, answers to all my questions. He had been born in Athens, but lived in Thessaloniki; he was an importer of South American tobacco, and his commercial interests didn’t compete with the victim’s. They didn’t live near each other either, so rivalry over a woman was unlikely. He said he’d never met the merchant.
“I went to see the widow and tell her about my interview with Hilarion. She still hadn’t been able to figure out who he was. She showed me a trunk that had been locked for years and held the dead man’s entire past: medals he had won in his youth, family keepsakes, school notebooks, wrinkled letters. It was in an old letter that I found Hilarion’s name.
“They had been classmates. Only a few days after meeting they became inseparable friends. But, when he was thirteen years old, the dead man had seriously offended Hilarion, who had sent him a letter in which he seemed, at once, angry about the friendship ending and truly hurt by it. Shortly after, Hilarion had switched schools and they never saw each other again. I mentioned the incident to the widow and she agreed with me that Hilarion was almost certainly innocent. Who would kill someone over a comment that was made when they were thirteen years old? I left her house empty handed.
“You all know the sibyl’s message: Know thyself. I walked back to my house, it was a melancholy walk: those old letters, locked up in a trunk, had filled me with sadness. One day we will all be just a bundle of letters stowed away. I suddenly remembered an episode from my life that I hadn’t thought of in years and which surely, had it not been for this unique case, would never have crossed my mind again. When I was thirty years old, I took the steamship that goes from Pireo to Brindisi. I was obsessed with a romantic problem and, in spite of the cold rain, wanted to be alone at the deck rail, far from the crowd inside. Soon I saw, only about ten feet away from me, another young man who was as alone as I was. He had been a schoolmate of mine, and had christened me with a nickname that I won’t reveal. It tormented me for years. In time, however, I managed to forget everything: the teasing I suspected my classmates of, the boy who invented the nickname, even the nickname itself. The ancient Greeks spoke of the art of memory; but I believe that there is only one true art: forgetting. I had erased it from my mind, but when I saw my former schoolmate just those few feet away, the hatred rushed back to me, intact. He still hadn’t seen me, and at that moment I resolved to kill him. Those crimes that are decided in a split second, ‘crimes of passion,’ are, in many ways, the most premeditated of them all: they take a lifetime to foment.
“My former chum was a scrawny man, and I, as you can see, while short am quite strong. I could easily throw him over the rail and no one would notice. No one would hear h
is screams amidst the sea’s crashing waves. I was almost upon him when a young girl came running over, calling out to him. My old enemy, who was obviously the girl’s father, answered her call and started toward her. Only then did I realize what I had been considering. My enemy disappeared from my sight and my life forever.
“The hotel guests, held against their will, were finally allowed to leave. Hilarion was packing his suitcase when I went to see him. I told him the story of my trip to Brindisi. He listened patiently, without interrupting. When I finished, he made a gesture of acceptance, not defeat, and revealed the truth to me.
“Basilio Hilarion was having dinner, alone, in the hotel’s dining hall when he noticed that a man near the window was his old childhood friend. Throughout the dinner he watched the man eat and drink voraciously. He, on the other hand, couldn’t choke down anything. Hilarion couldn’t take his eyes off him. He was not as fascinated by this man that devoured everything in sight as he was by the discovery, in his own heart, of a fury that was as alive on that day as it had been forty years ago. And now Hilarion knew that his entire life (the constant traveling that allowed him to escape his marriage, his interest in astronomy, a lover that had begun to bore him) had been nothing more than an accumulation of unreal things, once he compared it to the clarity of that hatred. In that fury there was something pure and true that was more real than his everyday life. That hate was him.
“For many years, the fabric merchant’s offense (Hilarion never said what it was) had given him chronic insomnia. In time he learned to sleep well, but that night his insomnia returned. He realized that, almost as if it were a game, he had to plan the crime: he stole a sharp knife from the dining room and followed the victim to his room, but did nothing. This is all a joke, he told himself when he returned to his own room, I’m no killer. He tried in vain to sleep, but he just tossed and turned. His usual cures were useless: eating an apple, drinking a glass of milk, taking a hot bath, taking a few drops of an amber-colored opiate he always carried with him. All useless. At four in the morning, he slipped past the sleeping night watchman, stole the key, went up to room thirty-six, and murdered his old friend with one thrust of the blade. He felt guilty about only one thing: he should have told him why he was killing him. It seemed fair that the victim know that his execution was a consequence of his prior actions. When he returned to his room, Hilarion took off his bloody clothes, which he got rid of the next morning, and slept soundly.”
“We appreciate the gift of Madorakis’s story,” said Arzaky. “The next time I travel to Warsaw and come across my old classmates from the gymnasium, I’ll make sure not to turn my back on them. Who will we hear from next?”
7
Tobias Hatter, the detective from Nuremberg, came forward and placed a child’s small cardboard drawing slate on the table. Then he scribbled on it with a wooden stick. Next, as if it were a magic trick, he removed the sheet of cardboard from its frame, and returned it to the table. The scribble had disappeared.
“Last year a manufacturer of notebooks and paper from Nuremberg brought these boards onto the market. They called them Aladdin’s blackboard: as you can see, one can write on them without ink and everything erases immediately. The trick isn’t in the little stick, but in the board itself: it is a sheet that is put in contact with another black sheet behind it: at the points where the two sheets touch, a drawing appears on the surface. Now, if we take this device apart (don’t be alarmed; it costs only a few cents) we see the black acetate sheet. All the marks disappear, but the deepest ones leave a trace on this black page. Some of the erased drawings leave a mark, and those marks together form a secret drawing. Thus, gentlemen, is the relationship between enigmas and their revelation. On the surface, we incessantly gather facts, clues, and words. Who among us can say they’ve never felt apprehension over the vast amount of trivia that crowds our sight? In the theater, detectives always say, ‘Good heavens, the killer has left no clues,’ but in real life that’s not what happens: we are nearly driven crazy by the quantity of clues and the task of sifting through them. And we, slaves to method and intuition, sometimes scratch the surface filled with inconsequential marks-those marks the police earn their salary on-in order to discover the hidden truth.
“I learned the rudiments of my trade in Nuremberg. There is a street in the old quarter where the bulk of the secondhand book trade is concentrated. One of those stores is called Rasmussen’s; I was twenty-two when the owner, Ernst Rasmussen, was shot and killed. His son had been a buddy of mine in the army; we were in the same detail. I had never solved a case, I foresaw a military future for myself, but I was very fond of riddles-which I made up and solved easily-and perhaps that was why my friend called me to help him figure out who had murdered his father.
“Old Rasmussen had died of a bullet to the chest. The killer had surprised him after midnight during a raging thunderstorm. The bookseller usually didn’t work so late, but he had said that he would stay to examine a batch of religious books he had bought from the widow of a Lutheran pastor. Fatally wounded, Rasmussen had grabbed a book with both hands, as if he wanted to take some reading material along on his trip. I asked his son Hans about this gesture, and he responded, ‘My father dealt in all kinds of old books, but his favorites were the children’s stories. He was very fond of the Brothers Grimm, the second volume of the 1815 edition. In spite of his violent death, I like to think that my father was showing a final gesture of his love for books.’
“His son didn’t share that love; he had always preferred less cerebral activities. It was clear that he was destined to follow in the footsteps of so many adventurous types who end up ruining their lives over a woman, or at the gambling table in Baden-Baden. The kind that happily receive the news that war has been declared, because in those distant skirmishes they believe they have found some sort of order, a destiny that they are incapable of creating with their own actions. So Hans knew little about his father’s business, and he couldn’t tell me if anything important was missing. I searched for clues: there was nothing out of the ordinary, except for the muddy footprints left by the killer, the bookseller himself, and the police. I sat in a chair facing the table where the bookseller had been killed and I began to f lip through the book by the Brothers Grimm.
“I know the Grimms’ work well. Nowadays we think of the brothers as inseparable, like a bust of Janus, but during their lifetime they were quite different. Jacob was a philologist who faithfully recorded popular folk stories and sought to publish them just as he had heard them, without worrying that some made no sense. Wilhelm, on the other hand, wanted the stories to be edited, expanded upon, and improved. He didn’t care so much about being faithful to the anonymous voices as he did to the integrity of storytelling itself. And he kept making changes, in the successive editions, each time taking the stories farther and farther from their whispered origins.
“I held the book in my hand, and felt tempted on one hand to be like Wilhelm, and let the story end tidily with the bookseller, fatally wounded and unable to call anyone or write a note, making his last gesture a declaration of his love for books. But on the other hand I felt inclined to follow Jacob’s example and remain faithful to what I had found, the footprints. In that spirit I began to leaf through the volume.
“Books always contain secrets. We leave things between their pages and forget about them: lottery tickets, newspaper clippings, a postcard we’ve just received. But there are also f lowers, leaves that attracted us with their shape, or insects trapped in a paragraph’s snare. This edition had all those things, each marking a different page. Remember the example of Aladdin’s blackboard: the surface is filled with marks, but one has to discover the deeper marks, those underneath.
“And I soon found such a mark. It was a page’s folded corner. In another book or another situation, that wouldn’t have surprised me, but I guessed that a bookseller like Rasmussen would never have folded over the page of a first edition of the Brothers Grimm without a very good rea
son. So I studied it with particular interest.
“The Brothers Grimm had included some riddles that were taken out of later editions, perhaps because they weren’t exactly stories. One told of three women who had all been turned into f lowers by a witch. One of them, however, was able to recover her human form at night in order to sleep at home with her husband. Once, as dawn approached, she told him, ‘If you go to the field to see the three f lowers and you can tell which one is me, pull me up and I will be freed from the spell.’ And the next day her husband went to the field, recognized his wife, and saved her. How did he do it, when the three f lowers were identical? There was a blank space, to allow the reader time to come up with his own answer. The story ended with this explanation: since the woman spent the night at home instead of in the field, no dew fell on her, and that was how her husband knew her.
“Because of that story I was able to find the killer. The police had identified a suspect named Numau, a man who went from town to town buying up rare books cheaply and then reselling them to the bibliophiles of Berlin. But no one had seen Numau leave the hotel that night. And the police had searched through his clothes without finding anything damp. If any of his clothes had gotten wet in the storm, Numau had gotten rid of them, along with the murder weapon.
The Paris Enigma Page 7