The Paris Enigma

by Pablo De Santis

  “Among them, of course.”

  There was an awkward silence. Everyone wanted to discuss it, but nobody dared start the conversation.

  “I’d like to know who hates whom,” I said to get things rolling.

  “There’s plenty of hate to go around,” said Baldone. “But the real animosity, the most serious… well, it’s best not to talk about it.”

  “Don’t I at least deserve a clue?”

  Benito came closer to my ear and whispered, “Castelvetia and Caleb Lawson.”

  Linker turned red, this time with indignation.

  “You’re taking advantage of the fact that their assistants aren’t here to speak ill of them.”

  Benito shrugged his shoulders.

  “You brought it up, Linker. Besides, it’s not our fault that the Hindu is never around and that Castelvetia has an invisible assistant.”

  “That is an old subject and it makes no sense to dig it up again. The Argentine is young and the impressions formed now will stay with him for the rest of his life.”

  “He has plenty of time to forget everything he runs the risk of learning here,” said Baldone.

  “I want to find out everything I can about the detectives,” I insisted. “Besides, it isn’t fair for me not to know what you all do. I might say something inappropriate in front of them.”

  They looked at each other in silence. There were two possibilities: they could either include me in the group so that mutual loyalty developed, or they could completely exclude me. If I were somewhere in the middle, I could hear some careless comments, and repeat them to the detectives. They had no way of knowing for sure that I wasn’t a snitch. They had to decide if I was truly going to be part of their group or not. After exchanging glances with those who hadn’t yet spoken, Linker said, “Okay, then I’ll tell him myself. I’m impartial, and I hate Baldone and Benito’s gossiping. When this happened, Caleb Lawson was already a famous detective and prominent member of The Twelve. Castelvetia on the other hand, was a complete unknown. The case that made them enemies for life was the Death of Lady Greynes, whose father had been president of the North Steamboats Company, a shipping business. Lady Greynes suffered from a nervous condition. Francis Greynes built a tower to support her voluntary isolation from the world. The townspeople called her the Princess in the Tower. Lady Greynes very rarely left her refuge. She said that she couldn’t stand contact with other people, that they might infect her with fatal contagious diseases. Her husband managed the family fortune, but he couldn’t do anything without his wife’s signature. One stormy night, the woman fell from the window of her tower. Her head hit a stone lion, and she died immediately.”

  “And her husband?” I asked.

  “He was several miles away, at a party in Rutherford Castle. As a social event it was terrible, not enough wine, champagne, or food, but there were plenty of witnesses. They were very reliable (no one got drunk with such a shortage of liquor) so Lord Greynes wasn’t considered a suspect. But rumors of his involvement in his wife’s death spread by word of mouth and were printed in the newspapers. Francis Greynes wanted to clear his good name and honor so he called his old Oxford buddy, Dr. Caleb Lawson, and asked him to investigate the case and absolve him of any guilt.”

  “Agreeing to help an old friend and then accusing him of murder is behavior unbecoming to an English gentleman,” I said. “I hope Lawson didn’t do something like that.”

  “Of course not,” continued Linker. “Lawson interviewed the servants, the doctor who had treated Lady Greynes, and Lord Rutherford’s dissatisfied guests, and he confirmed Greynes’s alibi. He declared it a suicide. Everyone knew that Lawson was the most famous detective in London and the judge wouldn’t question his opinion. And yet this judge, a provincial civil servant, decided to keep the case open. He felt he had to.”

  “Had Caleb Lawson changed his mind?”

  “No, that wasn’t it. Caleb Lawson has never, not in his entire career, ever admitted to making a mistake. But Lady Greynes had a sister, Henriette, who didn’t believe the suicide theory. Henriette was married to a Flemish painter who knew Castelvetia, and he enlisted his help. At that time, Castelvetia worked with a Russian assistant, a remarkably strong man named Boris Rubanov. Boris had acquired the habit, on every new case, of engaging the domestic help in conversation, without interrogating them. He let them talk about their families, about their little everyday complaints, he bought them drink after drink, and after a few days of increasing trust and alcohol, there were no secrets between them. Thanks to Boris, Castelvetia solved a case which, outwardly, was not a mystery.”

  “Castelvetia contradicted Caleb Lawson?” I asked.

  “Contradict him? Castelvetia almost ruined Lawson’s reputation! After that, Lawson’s assistant, Dandavi, had to force him to practice those breathing exercises that Hindus do so they won’t succumb to a dizzy spell. Boris had gathered the following information: before the crime, a cook and a coachman had heard the sound of furniture being moved around in a room of the tower. Those nighttime noises were what enabled the Dutchman to solve the case. Castelvetia maintained, before the judge, that Francis Greynes had planned his wife’s murder long before it happened. He had the tower built in such a way that there were two identical windows, one facing east and the other west. One opened onto a small stone balcony, the other onto nothing. Architecturally the room was completely symmetrical. Every night the cat would meow and Lady Greynes would go out to the balcony and tend to her. That night, Greynes doubled his wife’s medication so that she would fall asleep in the dining room. When he carried her to the tower in his arms, he had already switched the furniture around, so that the window that faced east, instead of being on the left side of the bed, was on the right. Then he went to Lord Rutherford’s castle, so he would have an alibi. That night the cat meowed, as always, and Lady Greynes, disoriented by the medication and the reconfigured furniture, went out the wrong window.”

  “The poor woman,” I said, because I didn’t know what else to say.

  “Poor Lawson,” continued Linker. “The press had a field day with him, they even talked of bribery, and he swore undying hatred for Castelvetia. Before Castelvetia had time to report the results of his investigation, Francis Greynes was tipped off and escaped. They say he f led to South America. That f light saved Lawson, because the press paid much less attention to the trial than they would have if the accused were there in the courtroom. Trials in absentia are even more boring than executions in effigy.”

  The animosity between the two detectives was a delicate and unpleasant topic, and the assistants were silent, pondering the consequences of that distant episode. I felt a bit ashamed for having taken the conversation in that direction.

  Luckily Benito broke the silence. “But they are also divided by theoretical concerns. I’ve heard that Castelvetia maintains that an assistant, under certain circumstances, could be promoted.”

  “That’s enough, Benito, we’ve already discussed that,” said Linker. “Don’t dream the impossible dream. They are The Twelve, not The Twenty-four. Who’s ever heard of an assistant who was promoted? Nobody.”

  “But maybe the laws state that-”

  “And who’s ever seen the laws? They’re unwritten; the detectives only make veiled references to them when they’re alone. They won’t tell them to you, or to me. It doesn’t make any sense to argue about something we’ve never seen, and never will.”

  “But I have seen them,” said Okano, the Japanese assistant. His voice, in spite of being barely the whisper of silk paper, made us all jump. “I’ve seen the rules.”

  Linker attributed his claim to a language problem. “Do you know what we’re talking about?”

  Okano responded in perfect French. He was more f luent than Linker.

  “My mentor is very methodical; and any time he received a correspondence about the laws, he wrote it in a separate place. I had a chance to read the papers before he burned them.”

  “He burn
ed the laws?”

  “So no one else could see them. He burned them in the garden of an inn where we were staying during an investigation in a southern town. It was summertime and the cicadas were singing. My mentor burned the papers in a stone lantern.”

  “Do you mean to say that you read something about an assistant becoming a detective?”

  “That’s right. My mentor didn’t ask me to keep it a secret, so I’ll dare to speak. I even think Sakawa allowed me to read those papers on purpose, so I would know that the remote possibility exists, and so someday you all would know it as well. Knowing that means we have to be better assistants. Not because we have ambitions of becoming detectives, but because the mere fact it could happen exalts us.”

  This was much more than the Japanese assistant had said in any of the other sessions, and now he was visibly short of breath. He was drinking a glass of pure absinthe, which was probably the reason for his sudden loquacity. But now the green fairy seemed to have abandoned him. Linker grew impatient.

  “Come on, tell us. How is it done?”

  Okano squinted his eyes, as if he were recalling something that had happened long ago.

  “Four rules have been established for the promotion from assistant to detective. The first is that the detective, on his voluntary retirement, has to nominate his assistant as his replacement. He must be willing to give him his good name and his archives as well. The assistant would carry on his mentor’s work, as if he were the same detective. Nine of the eleven other members must approve the appointment. That’s the rule of inheritance.”

  “And the second one?”

  “The second tenet is called the rule of unanimity. That is when all the detectives agree to fill an empty chair by naming an assistant whom they deem exceptional on the basis of his performance.”

  “And the third?”

  “That’s the rule of prepotency. When a mystery has stumped three detectives and there is an assistant who is able to solve the case, he can present his application for membership. Their incorporation into the club is subject to a vote, in which two thirds of all the members, not just those present, must agree.”

  Benito smiled, pleased with his victory.

  “What now, Linker? Was I right or not?”

  Linker looked at him with irritation.

  “But those are hypothetical situations. Pure theory. In practice none of those three rules have ever been applied. But… didn’t you say there were four?”

  Okano now regretted that he had said so much. Baldone held up the little green bottle and Okano looked at his empty glass. He had to talk to get his reward.

  “There was a fourth rule, which my mentor called the rule of inevitable betrayal. But Sakawa didn’t write anything more on that sheet of paper, as if he found it so shocking that not even the burning f lames could remove the stink of sacrilege. All the clauses are secret, but that one is twice as secret.”

  Everyone had fallen silent. Baldone poured two fingers of absinthe into Okano’s glass. He drank it straight. Soon he fell asleep.

  “Dream,” said Linker. “Dream of secret clauses and rules whispered into ears. Dream of papers burning in the stone lantern of a Japanese garden.”

  I said good night to the acolytes and I went up to my room.

  6

  The next morning I was awakened by banging on the door.

  “Get up, assistant! You have the right to sleep late only when you’ve been out investigating all night.”

  It was Arzaky’s voice. I jumped out of bed and started getting dressed. I told him to come in because I didn’t want to make him wait outside.

  “I envy those gleaming boots.”

  “I shined them last night.”

  “I have mine shined, but they never look that good.”

  “I polish my boots with a special cream that my father makes. It’s his secret formula.” I opened my shoeshine box and showed him the jar, whose blue label showed a picture of a shoe and the name Salvatrio. “Do you want some? It’s perfect for when it rains. My father says that it can cure injuries too.”

  The detective took the jar, opened it, and breathed in the cream’s smoky odor.

  “You put the shoe polish on a wound? I don’t trust your father that much.”

  Arzaky moved some papers off of the only chair in the room and sat down.

  “I can make your boots shine like mine.”

  “You can? Please do.”

  I looked in the shoeshine box for a blackened rag and a sable-hair brush. I sat on the f loor and covered the boots with polish and then brushed them vigorously. They soon shone with the blue gleam characteristic of Salvatrio polish.

  “I think deep down you’re ashamed that your father is a shoemaker.”

  “He works hard. I have nothing to be ashamed of.”

  “But you don’t mention it either. Do you think all the other assistants come from aristocratic families?”

  “I guess not. If they did, they wouldn’t be assistants. They’d be detectives.”

  “Is that what you think? The detectives don’t come from important families either.”

  “Doesn’t Magrelli come from Roman aristocracy? I read that somewhere. Castelvetia has a noble title, count or duke, and the Hatters own the largest newspapers in Germany…”

  “Counts, dukes, millionaires, relatives of the pope… I’m afraid we fall very short of your fantasies. Magrelli’s father was a Roman policeman. Zagala grew up in a fishing village and his mother died in a famous storm that destroyed half the ships in port. Castelvetia gave himself a title, but it’s fake. The Hatter family used to own a small press in Nuremberg; they printed commercial stationery and wedding invitations. The others I can’t recall, I don’t know them as well, but I can assure you that Madorakis isn’t the heir to the Greek throne, and that good old Novarius used to hawk newspapers on the street. And as for me, I’m a bastard.”

  I started, almost imperceptibly, but Arzaky noticed it.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not going to tell you any big secret that might threaten your sense of decency. My mother, when she was very young, had an affair with the town priest. The priest stayed in his parish, but she was forced to leave, taking her sin along with her. The boy was never baptized. After she moved, my mother had to make up a last name for me. She thought about killing herself, cutting her wrists with the sharp knife she always carried. She read the brand engraved into the steel and that was the name she gave me: Arzaky. Arzaky knives were very common in those days. I understand that in Argentina you are very Catholic…”

  “The women are; we men are freethinkers…”

  “Then I hope your mother doesn’t mind that her son works for an unbaptized detective.”

  We went out onto the street and I quickened my step to keep up with Arzaky.

  “Aren’t you going to ask me where we’re headed? Or have you already guessed?”

  “I’m in no condition to guess.”

  “You don’t seem to care either.”

  “In ten minutes, after a cup of coffee, I’ll start caring about things again.”

  Arzaky walked lively in his newly shined boots. He was wide awake at night and in the morning too. I don’t know when he slept, I’m not even sure he did. We walked fifteen or twenty blocks and we stopped in front of a building whose bronze plaque announced the society for platonic studies.

  Arzaky rapped with the doorknocker, a bronze fist. A butler opened the door; he was an old man with eyes so pale he looked blind.

  “The secretary of the society, Monsieur Bessard, told me to expect you. It’s about the painting, right?”

  He led us up a staircase. He was so old that I wouldn’t have bet money on his being able to climb the stairs. But he had gone up and down them so many times that he and that staircase had become friends, and the oak steps pushed him upward; his steps were light, while ours sounded like heavy marching. The staircase led us to a meeting room: a large table, dirty curtains, library shelves. On one of the walls
was a painting of four men walking among ruins and olive trees. I guessed that the most broad-shouldered one was Plato, although they were fairly indistinguishable in their tunics and beards. One carried a torch, another a pitcher, the third a handful of dirt, and the fourth was blowing a dried leaf.

  “Here it is, The Four Elements. Stolen by Sorel.”

  “A painting that sent a man to his death,” I said.

  “No, if you remember correctly it was the woman, not the painting, that sent him to his death. If he had killed someone for the painting, Sorel would now be in crime’s gilded archives. But instead he ended up on the endless gray list of all those who kill for love, for jealousy, out of blindness. Love inspires more crimes than hate and ambition do.”

  I stared at the solemn, static painting.

  “I wanted to find a relationship between Sorel and Darbon,” said Arzaky, as if he were talking to the figures in the painting.

  “Did Darbon have anything to do with the recovery of the painting?”

  “No, nothing at all.”

  “So?”

  “So, nothing. The first fact: Darbon’s death. The second: Sorel ’s cremation. What do those two men have in common?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There is one thing. They were both my rivals. I’m searching for the missing piece of the puzzle that connects Darbon and Sorel.”

  “You said that an investigation was nothing like a jigsaw puzzle.”

  “Did I say that?”

  “You agreed with the Japanese detective. He said that investigation was like a blank page. That we think we see mysteries where there may be nothing at all.”

  “I’m pleased that you remember. If I manage to solve this case, you must write up the account of it. I don’t remember any of my own words, but I remember what everyone else says. So then we won’t search for a puzzle piece, we’ll search for a line on a blank page.”

  I approached the painting.

  “The victims may not be connected through their rivalries with you. Darbon could have been killed by the crypto-Catholics and Sorel could have been burned by someone from his past, someone related to his crime.”