Pablo De Santis - The Paris Enigma

There were nine empty gurneys and one that was occupied lined up beneath the greenish light of the lamps swinging from the very high ceilings. A strong smell of bleach and maybe camphor hung in the air. Darbon’s body, already undressed, had a lunar whiteness to it that was marred by the lacerations and bruises caused by his fall. Of his numerous authoritative features (his imposing voice; the seriousness that never deigned to smile, unless it was ironic; the gaze that dissolved any obstacle) the only surviving one was his white beard.

The forensic doctor was a tiny man named Godal. He greeted Arzaky with a familiarity that was not returned. The Detective of Paris (now without any rival to dispute the title) half heartedly introduced his colleagues who were also there: Hatter, Castelvetia, and Magrelli. I was the only assistant in the room.

“It is an honor for me to have members of The Twelve Detectives here,” said Dr. Godal, looking at everyone except me.

“I imagine that this case is something new for you, as it is for us. No one has ever fallen from so high,” said Hatter with the air of an expert.

“What are you saying, Hatter?” said Arzaky in a very rude tone. “Do you think there are no bodies in the crevices of the Alps?”

“There must be… but no one has ever seen them.”

“I have.”

Godal began to point out the marks from the fall.

“Observe the destroyed legs; this proves he was conscious when he fell. His feet plunged into the earth. Halfway down he hit some kind of protrusion, which tore his skin at the height of the thorax, but that didn’t kill him.”

Castelvetia was ashen and looked around as if searching for a window.

“Come closer. When I was young, we practiced autopsies outdoors. We had to rush to make use of the sunlight, before night fell and erased all the details.”

“Do bodies come in every week?” asked Hatter.

“Every week? Every day. A thousand a year: suicides, accident fatalities, murder victims. Lately there has been an increase in poisonings: we’ve done about a hundred and forty autopsies already this year. We have to be very careful with poison: they used to use only arsenic, which we can easily identify, but they come up with new poisons every day.”

Arzaky picked up the dead man’s hand. He pointed to one of the fingernails. There was something black underneath it.

The Paris Enigma •91

“Louis Darbon was fastidious about his appearance. Why are his nails dirty?”

“I’m sorry, his hands were black with oil, and it took us a lot of work to clean them. But there’s always a trace left behind! ”

“A trace left behind? Everything is supposed to be left behind. How can we work if you clean up the evidence?”

“I didn’t think it was important. It was oil. He fell from the tower, and I imagine that that horrible tower is full of machine oil.”

Arzaky was going to say something, but he held himself back. When he left the room, furious, I followed him. He banged his head against the wall several times.

“Incompetent! That damn Dr. Godal was always on Darbon’s side. He’s a forensic doctor who should have been an undertaker. What do you think we should do?”

I was surprised that he asked for my opinion. What value could my thoughts on forensic practices have?

“I think we should go to the tower, to the place where Darbon fell. And see where that oil came from.”

“No, no. You are supposed to be an assistant. You should embody common sense. For example, you should say: the oil isn’t important. At the tower everything is oil-stained.”

“But I don’t think that’s the case.”

Arzaky hit his head against the wall one more time, but lightly.

“Tanner was always spot-on with his comments. Craig failed in his school for assistants. Wasn’t there a professor of common sense?”

“I know I’m not as good as the other assistants, but I’ll try my best to keep up.”

“The others? Don’t worry about emulating your colleagues. The black man is a thief; the Andalusian, a liar; Linker, an imbecile; the Sioux Indian never says anything. I don’t even think he’s real, I think he’s a wax figure from Madame Tussaud’s.”

“And Castelvetia’s acolyte? I still haven’t seen him.”

“You have just mentioned an awkward mystery. No one has seen him. I would leave it at that, but it’s inevitable that someone will bring him up at our meetings. And between you and me, I don’t think that fop Castelvetia has an assistant. If he does… he must not be the same kind of assistant the others are. You know what I mean. That’s a mystery you could solve.”

His anger vented, Arzaky went back into the room. Dr. Godal had turned the corpse over and was pointing to a wound on his back. Castelvetia, passed out on a metal chair, was being tended to by one of Godal’s assistants, who was trying to bring him around with smelling salts.

“I swear, gentlemen, this is the first time this has ever happened to me,” he declared as soon as he came to.

Arzaky looked at me.

“I miss Craig,” he said.

That night the detectives reconvened in the underground parlor of the Numancia Hotel. Between those four walls their grief took strange forms: without removing his white hat, Jack Novarius took long strides from one side of the room to the other, while his Sioux assistant remained immobile; Castelvetia laughed openly; Hatter waited for the meeting to start while taking apart a small mechanism that looked like an artificial heart; Sakawa was arranging f lowers in a vase, pulling out some petals and letting them fall onto the table. They were detectives, crime was their lifeblood, they couldn’t be blamed for not shedding tears.

Only Arzaky seemed to be grieving.

“When Castelvetia goes out, follow him. I want to find out the truth about his assistant today.”

It was a job for a lackey, but I accepted it, even though I didn’t like the whole business. I didn’t want to get involved in the gossip between detectives.

Arzaky took center stage. The shelves of the glazed cabinets had begun to fill with objects: a giant magnifying glass, a microscope, a small metal filing case with photographs of delinquents, a pistol that shot tranquilizer darts, a hypnotizing machine. Off to one side, away from the other objects, was Craig’s cane, its powers concealed. Arzaky spoke.

“As we all know, Louis Darbon died last night, falling from the stairs that led to the second platform of the tower. For the moment nothing points to its having been anything but an accident.”

“And the railings?”

“They had been found to be defective and were being replaced.”

“Come on, Arzaky. Who can believe it was an accident?” said Hatter.

“I am going to be in charge of the case and when I know anything for certain, I will tell you.”

Caleb Lawson, tall and stooped, cloaked in the smoke from his pipe, stepped forward.

“I don’t think you should be in charge of this case. We all know that Darbon despised you. If anyone is a suspect, it’s you. Captain Bazeldin has already been asking questions around here.”

“Shut up, Lawson! ” said Magrelli indignantly. “Arzaky is one of the founders of our order, along with Renato Craig. You can’t go accusing him just because that idiot, Captain Bazeldin, was asking questions. Have you never read Grimas’s magazine?”

In the pages of Tra ce s , Captain Bazeldin was always the butt of jokes. The clues he followed up on, which were the most obvious ones, always ended in failure.

“Darbon was also one of The Twelve Detectives,” said the Englishman. “And someone pushed him from the tower. What’s more, Arzaky, his death left all of Paris to you.”