Pablo De Santis - The Paris Enigma

Arzaky shrugged his shoulders. Sakawa, who rarely spoke, said, “Arzaky should be in charge of the case. This is his city. What right do we have to investigate a crime in Paris? If someone was thrown from a tower in Tokyo, I wouldn’t let any one of you investigate who incited the victim to jump.”

“In the West no one invites anyone to jump with f licks of their fan or seventeen-syllable poems, Sakawa,” said Lawson. “Here, when someone wants to throw someone off a tower, they push him. We know that we have to investigate those who stand to benefit from his death. Why shouldn’t we suspect Arzaky?”

The Japanese detective responded serenely. “I am sure that if Arzaky is the murderer, he himself will follow every single one of the clues that lead to him and he will accuse himself of the crime.”

What Sakawa said didn’t make any sense, but as often happens, nonsense is harder to refute than logical opinions.

Arthur Neska let his voice be heard.

“Arzaky hated my mentor, Louis Darbon. If you leave the case in his hands, the guilty party will never be punished. Or an innocent man will pay.”

“The assistants must ask for special permission to speak, which is granted by their mentor,” said Hatter. “Those are the rules.”

“My mentor is dead. I speak in his name.”

“It’s okay, Hatter. Let him speak,” said Arzaky. “These are exceptional circumstances. We can’t always go by the rules. I’m going to be in charge of the case: I am not asking for your permission, because that is not incumbent on The Twelve Detectives. If you want to make inquiries on your own behalf, you may do so. But we shouldn’t compete among ourselves. We should share our discoveries.”

There was a suspicious murmur.

“We don’t know each other, Arzaky,” said Caleb Lawson. “If there’s one thing you can’t ask of us, it’s that we share what we know. For many long years we have cultivated secrecy and solitude; it is too late for us to become a commune.”

Neska always had a gloomy air about him, and now that appearance was substantiated. He didn’t speak with the humility appropriate to the acolytes. He even dared to give the detectives advice.

“You would be wise to watch your backs. I don’t think that anyone who finds out anything will live to see the dawn.”

“Be careful. Don’t let your grief make you reckless. We have rules about expulsion as well,” warned Hatter.

“What are you going to expel me from? I no longer have a detective to assist. The murderer has already expelled me.”

Arzaky, who until that point had spoken softly, now raised his voice.

“I am not going to respond to your foolish words. But I need Darbon’s papers in order to begin my work. I want to know who he was investigating.”

Neska smiled defiantly at Arzaky.

“I left everything in the hands of his widow. If you can convince her to give them to you, you’ll have everything.”

Neska left the room without another word. We all, detectives and assistants, remained there in silence. And that moment was the only tribute that Louis Darbon received, the only moment in which his death weighed on the detectives’ lives, not as an enigma, not as a mouthful for their insatiable curiosity, but as a loss. With a solemnity that competed with the others’ silence, Arzaky spoke.

“Perhaps Darbon did fall accidentally, perhaps it was some old enemy with a score to settle. But we have to consider another possibility. We have gathered here, in Paris, to display our trade among the other works of Man. And it is possible that one of our secret partners has taken this opportunity to challenge us. And thus display, not only the art of investigation, but the art of crime.”

The tower f launted its blend of grandiosity and futility at the gray sky. It was made for cloudy days, to be seen through drops of rain, from far away. A few years later, at the 1900 World’s Fair, surrounded by automobiles, it would already seem old, but as it was being built the tower projected an air of extravagance and surprise. It wasn’t just its height that was exceptional, but the promise of its demise. That something so gigantic could disappear without some kind of cataclysm. Its transitory nature cast a shadow of fantasy around it; whispering in our ears that we shouldn’t take life too seriously.

There is something coffinlike about elevators, a tendency toward the worlds below (volcanoes, mines, the dirt on Pluto). But the tower’s elevator rose effortlessly. It amazed me that it didn’t fall. On that day the mechanism that went up to the second platform wasn’t ready yet, so we got off at the first and continued our ascent to the scene of the crime on foot. Arzaky went ahead, and I struggled to keep up with his swift pace. I was very inexperienced back then, but even now, after having seen hundreds of crime scenes, I can say that nothing seemed farther from a murder than the silence and tranquility of that platform. I know that a match, a drop of blood, a stain on the wall, or a newspaper clipping can be signs that lead to the killer, but my first thought upon arriving at a crime scene is the utter meaninglessness of everything that remains in the face of death.

“Well it seems we are dealing with a locked-room case,” said Arzaky. He wasn’t even out of breath. “In this case, the locked room happens to be outdoors. No one saw the killer come in or out.”

I remembered that the now deceased Alarcón maintained that it made no sense to speak of a “locked room.” I barely managed to put together a coherent sentence as I gasped for breath, but Arzaky seemed to understand.

“What authority are you citing?” he asked.

“Alarcón, Craig’s original apprentice.”

“Did he solve many crimes?”

“No, he died on his first case.”

“Oh, yes, I remember, he was killed by the magician. With all due respect for the dead, why are you repeating such foolishness? The locked room is the essence of our work. It doesn’t matter if the room doesn’t actually exist. We must accept its metaphorical power.”

We arrived at the second platform and went up a few more steps. After finding a f law in the smelting, they had removed the protective railings and hadn’t yet installed new ones. It was easy to see where Darbon had slipped and fallen, because the steps were covered with the same thick black liquid that Arzaky had found beneath the detective’s nails.

“Be careful what you touch and where you step,” said Arzaky. “There’s oil everywhere.”

“And broken glass. Do you think the killer broke a bottle of oil over his head?”

“The killer made sure to be far from here when Darbon fell. He was an old man and had a lot of trouble climbing stairs. He used a cane, which hid only a small sword, not the myriad surprises that Craig’s has. The killer proposed a meeting up here, promising information about the attacks on the tower. Darbon was anxious to close that case before our next meeting.”

“But Darbon took on only the most important cases; murders, a few anonymous letters sent by a lunatic… ”

“You’re new to this city and you don’t understand. You’ve barely seen anything of Paris besides this tower. To you, Paris is the tower. But those of us who live here have been watching its slow progress for two years. These struts and vertical irons have filtered into our dreams. We all feel compelled to shout either yes or no about this matter, particularly because no one has asked our opinion. For some it is evil, for others the future, for the most pessimistic, it’s both evil and the future.”

I didn’t know where to lean, where to step. Everything was covered in black oil.