Pablo De Santis - The Paris Enigma

His investigation had begun seven months earlier. From the beginning, the tower’s construction had numerous enemies who claimed it was destroying the city’s beauty. At first these were relatively harmless, those who didn’t want the forged iron monument cohabiting with the old palaces. Eiffel had been attacked by associations of war widows, scholars of the city’s history, and museum and monument conservators. But then a radical group had joined the battle: the anonymous letters became threatening, the threats, actions. A rose with poisoned thorns was sent to the engineer Eiffel, and a miniature Statue of Liberty with a bomb inside that hadn’t been triggered. The most unique attack involved poisoning the pigeons that perched on the tower, so that hundreds of birds dropped dead at once onto the construction site, paralyzing the elevator motor and frightening the unsuspecting workers.

Louis Darbon was convinced that a group of intellectuals whom he called “crypto-Catholics” was responsible. Most of his observations referred to someone named Grialet, to whom he attributed the formation of a Rosicrucian cell.

116 •Pablo De Santis

“Grialet is a tireless seeker of the esoteric, from astrology to magic, from alchemy to Rosicrucianism. Like so many others, he’s more fascinated by the hierarchies and the initiation rites than by the mysteries themselves. These types are always like that. They spend their lives suspicious of one another; they barely establish any rules; they emerge out of schisms and heresies. The schism becomes the rule and a new heresy springs up. Grialet is the soul of that process of continuous disintegration, that constant movement that seeks to create, in everything, the sensation that something is hidden within.” Darbon considered Grialet the main suspect. The papers included the names of two possible accomplices: the writer Isel and the painter Bradelli.

I was immersed in those documents, trying to understand the principles of that circle of esoteric writers, when someone knocked on the door. I opened it. It was a tall woman with black hair. She smelled of a mixture of perfumes, and the scent changed with each step, as if it were a complex mechanism of sleeping substances that suddenly awoke according to the stimulus of light or the passage of time. She was surprised to see me.

“And Mr. Arzaky?”

“He’s gone out.”

“You…?”

“I’m his assistant.”

“I didn’t know he had gotten an assistant. I thought he’d never resign himself to replacing Tanner. Didn’t he leave a message for me? ”

“No. If you tell me your name, I’ll let him know you came by.”

“I am Paloma Leska, but you can call me the Mermaid, the way everyone else does. That’s my stage name.”

“Your stage name? Are you an actress?”

“An actress and a ballerina. Haven’t you heard of the Night Ballet?”

“I’ve only just arrived in Paris.”

“There are certain things that one should do as soon as they arrive in a city, while they still have money. Later their pockets are empty and they have to become respectable. We are going to do a piece called ‘In the Ice Mountains.’ Arzaky has already seen the rehearsals. If you’re new to the city, I can assure you you’ll never see anything like it. Does the cold bother you?”

“Yes, but it’s springtime.”

“In the piece, I plunge naked into a lake of ice. It might give you shivers. Do you think you can take it?”

I looked at the woman’s bare arms. Her corset was a bit too tight; she was the one wearing it but I was having trouble breathing.

“Arzaky never told me he liked the ballet.”

“He doesn’t just come for the ballet.”

I jotted “the Mermaid” down on a piece of paper. I had to struggle to place one letter after the other instead of all on top of one another. She had been born in Spain, which was why her name was Paloma, Spanish for dove. But she was the daughter of two Polish actors. She considered herself Polish.

“As Polish as Arzaky?”

“More so. I long for Poland, and I travel to Warsaw twice a year. He doesn’t. He wants to be a good Frenchman. He won’t even touch Polish food. It doesn’t matter though. To his enemies he’ll always be that damn Polish traitor or, to his more intimate enemies, simply that damn Pole. You’re working, I don’t mean to interrupt…”

“Don’t worry about that. It’s dead letter…”

I don’t know if she heard me. The woman had disappeared, as if I had only dreamed she was there. Her perfumes, which had come in gradually, left in order, one by one. Finally I was alone again, with the scent that came off of the newspaper clippings and the yellowing dossiers.

Paris ’s finest. What did you think of her?”When Arzaky arrived I told him about the ballerina’s visit. “So you’ve met the Mermaid.

“She told me about the ballet.”

“She always has some crazy new thing going on. You should see her, sunk deep into the ice. I don’t know where they get those blocks from. Sometimes they even have frozen fish inside them. She’s the kind of woman who drives men crazy.”

“Does she drive you crazy too?”

“Me? No. I’m like the lake of ice she plunges into. What did you find in Darbon’s papers?”

I told him about Grialet, Isel, and Bradelli.

“Darbon always loved false leads. He searched where it was easiest to search, where there was nothing hidden. Do you know the joke about the drunk who came home late? He drank so much that he couldn’t get the key into the lock, and eventually he dropped it. About ten feet away there’s a streetlight, and the drunk starts looking there. His wife hears him and sticks her head out of the window, saying, ‘Did you drop your key again? ’ ‘Yes,’ says the drunk. ‘Well, why are you looking for it by the streetlight instead of by the door? ’ And the drunk replies, ‘Because there’s more light here.’ That joke is Darbon’s professional biography: he’s always right by the streetlights. Electric light would have made his job even easier.”

I insisted, and Arzaky finally agreed to visit Isel.

“All right, let’s go, if it’ll make you happy. We’re going to wind up switching roles; in the end I’ll be your faithful acolyte. The devotion that Tanner had for every last one of my opinions! He thought I was infallible, and he liked to make mistakes just so I could correct him.”

“Mistakes lead to the truth.”

“Mistakes only lead to mistakes, and skill leads to the truth.”

A carriage took us to Isel’s house. It was a gloomy castle on the outskirts of the city. It had two or three incongruent architectural blocks, which looked as if they had been built in different periods, or in one very f ickle period. They were a series of failed attempts to give the building a medieval air.

“You knock on the door. Convince me that there’s something of interest within these walls.”

A servant let us in. He was tall and bald, with oriental features. He moved with his eyes closed, like a sleepwalker. We entered a vast monastic room, where everything appeared to be missing. There were marks where paintings had hung, where rugs no longer covered the f loor, where furniture had been taken elsewhere. The statues had gone, but the pedestals remained. We sat in hard chairs, like the kind you find in a church.

“They’re dismantling everything,” I said. “Do you think Isel’s dead? No, the servant would have told us.”

“Servants are no longer allowed to give such news. If the master has died and someone comes to visit him, they leave the person waiting in the living room, with some information left where they can find it-a newspaper, or a death notice-that fills them in on what happened. If the visitor doesn’t think to have a look at those papers, the waiting continues indefinitely. I remember a certain count who was so offended at being made to wait that he challenged the deceased to a duel. Of course, the duel couldn’t be fought.”