Pablo De Santis - The Paris Enigma

Nazar approached the third gurney and delicately touched the woman’s skin. She wore a white dress and still held the ribbon that had tied some f lowers, long since disintegrated. Her hair, streaked with gray, looked exactly like that of a living woman. Nazar gestured to me, inviting me to touch her leathery skin, but I recoiled.

“This isn’t my work; it was executed by time, weather conditions, and chance. The third method, which often keeps the bodies that are stored in churches intact, is the reduction of humidity inside the coffin. We bought this woman from a dealer in relics. She died half a century ago, but looks as if it were only yesterday.”

Last, Dr. Nazar pointed to the empty gurney.

“But Mr. X, preserved in the traditional, Western method, was our most exquisite model. He had been executed by guillotine and we were able to reattach his head and almost perfectly restore him.”

I pulled a black notebook I had recently bought out of my pocket. Its pages had a grid, like graph paper, just like the one that Arzaky used. And without realizing it, I was imitating the way he wrote, with the notebook half shut as if I were afraid someone would peek at my notes.

“How could they have gotten the body out of here?”

“They forced the lock and took the body in a wheelbarrow. At the fair people work all night long, especially now that opening day is so close. No one would have looked twice at someone transporting a bulky load, in the midst of hundreds of carts and wheelbarrows filled with construction materials, machines, statues, animals…”

“Where do you get the bodies you work on?”

“From the city morgue. This pavilion depends on the Ministry of Public Health.”

“And that’s where Mr. X’s corpse came from?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Why do you call him that? Mr. X? It would be helpful to know his real name.”

“Is that important to the investigation?”

“Of course. The person who incinerated him may have had a personal grudge…”

“We don’t know his name. We never know any of their names. It’s easier to work on anonymous bodies, you understand? That way one can forget they once walked the earth, that someone gave birth to them, that someone misses them at the dinner table, or in bed. Anyway, it’s a waste of time to search in that direction. This was an attack directed at me by rival taxidermists! It was my job to accept the pieces you see here and reject the ones you don’t. We are a vindictive lot: one of them sends a poorly sewn rabbit, with buttons instead of eyes, and when it’s rejected, a hatred that lasts a lifetime is born. In our business, what’s best preserved is resentment.”

I didn’t want to continue the investigation without further orders from Arzaky. I looked for him in his apartment first and then in the underground parlor of the Numancia Hotel. Arzaky was sitting on a chair with a stack of papers. He grabbed his head in a theatrical gesture while a tiny man with a pointy beard shouted.

“So, Arzaky, you think your problems are bad? It’s never the dead people who are the problem, it’s the live ones! Messengers knock on my door day and night, my wife is threatening to leave me, and, what’s worse, my cook is too! The government’s decision to have the fair this year, as an homage to the Revolution, forces us to constantly exchange information with other countries. A few months earlier or a few later, and the whole thing would be solved. But now, the crowned heads of Europe don’t want to participate officially because they don’t think it’s right to celebrate a king’s decapitation. They don’t like to see the words guillotine and majesty in the same sentence. But their diplomatic advisers, their industrialists, and their technicians have come and are filling our hotels. Men whom we call ‘informal civil servants’ pay us visits, hordes of characters with conspiratorial airs who ask to meet with everyone and hand out business cards, so hot off the presses that they stain your fingers. And we never manage to discern informality from impersonation. The day before yesterday I threw a lout out of my office, and he turned out to be an envoy from the British embassy. My secretary had to spend all morning writing letters of apology. Last Saturday the minister himself was talking for two hours to a German, supposedly the representative of the Swabian industrialists, who turned out to be the conman Dunbersteg, wanted for the Swiss bond scandal. Your murdered detective and incinerated corpse don’t seem like such great problems to me.”

Giant Arzaky looked at him with what seemed to be fear. I must say I’ve often noted that very tall people are completely disconcerted by very short ones, as if they belonged to a quicker, more intimate, more complex world.

“We are doing everything possible, Dr. Ravendel. If you had hired me instead of Darbon, this never would have happened.”

“I didn’t hire Darbon. It was the organizing committee, who were frightened.” Ravendel threw down an envelope filled with banknotes onto the table. “I brought what we agreed on, Arzaky, to serve as inspiration. The other half when the case is solved. We have managed to get the press to portray Darbon’s death as an accident. That’s cost more money than anything else so far. Bribing politicians is much cheaper, because they’re naturally dishonest, but journalists are always expensive because they try to pretend that they’re willing to take their scruples to the limit. Our coffers are not bottomless, we’re not like those ostentatious Argentines who felt they had to build the Taj Mahal.”

Ravendel stormed out without saying good-bye. Arzaky’s gaze followed him as if making sure he was really gone. Then he stuck his hand into the envelope and took out a bill.

“Is your information worth one of these?” he asked me.

“I’m not sure.”

“Did the body come from where I thought it did?”

“Yes, the Taxidermists’ Pavilion. The taxidermist who prepared it is named Nazar. It was a body donated by the morgue. A guillotined man. Nazar was very proud of having reconnected the head.”

166 •Pablo De Santis

“Let’s go to the morgue then. We have to beat Bazeldin’s foot soldiers.”

Arzaky, not convinced that I deserved it, gave me the money.

An hour later we were walking across a square stone courtyard. Arzaky had sent me to buy a bottle of wine, some cheese, and cold meats, and I was carrying the box with the provisions. There were two green ambulances in the courtyard, with yoked horses, ready to go out to the farthest reaches of the city in search of a body. We went down a staircase to the autopsy room. We passed an open door; Arzaky signaled for me to keep quiet but I couldn’t help peeking in. The forensic doctor was talking to Bazeldin and a couple of policemen.

“Right now they are finding out what we already know. We’ve got the upper hand,” said Arzaky in a whisper. And when I smiled complicitly he warned, “But one should never, never rely on that.”

We opened a door that revealed a deserted room: the morgue’s archives. The shelves held cardboard boxes and file folders with papers coming out of them, tied with green ribbon. On the wall was an engraving of an anatomy amphitheater, with medical students and curious onlookers surrounding a professor as he dissected a cadaver. On the desk were photographs of faces and bodies, and judicial orders with the hospital seal and doctors’ pompous signatures. Arzaky, who knew the archive well, searched through a cabinet that, because of its proximity to the desk, was most likely for more recent papers. After much looking he triumphantly pulled out a page.

We heard heavy footsteps approaching. I was scared, but Arzaky didn’t even look up.