Pablo De Santis - The Paris Enigma

“Of course it has something to do with us,” said Hatter. “This woman was Arzaky’s lover.”

Captain Bazeldin started to say something, but when he opened his mouth no sound came out. He dropped the handkerchief he had used to clean the Mermaid’s face. Perhaps he was thinking about all those agents he had sent to follow Arzaky, all those reports that piled up on his desk, all the informers he had bought useless information from who weren’t even able to tell him the name of Arzaky’s lover.

Zagala made a murmur of displeasure. He didn’t want Arzaky’s secrets aired in front of the police. Hatter realized he had said too much and tried to defend himself.

“What? We all knew it. That’s why we came as soon as we heard the news.”

Baldone made the sign of the cross, very quickly, so that no one would notice. I imitated him, unashamed: the detectives could fight with positivism, but we acolytes were allowed to be religious. I knelt down for a few seconds beside the body, to pick up the handkerchief Bazeldin had just dropped. I said two Our Fathers in a soft voice: one for the Mermaid’s soul and the other for the chief of police not to discover my sleight of hand.

Madorakis stepped forward and bent down beside the body. He touched the Mermaid’s oiled hair with one finger.

“First Darbon, Arzaky’s adversary. Then Sorel, whom Arzaky had sent to the guillotine. And now this young lady dressed up as a mermaid, Arzaky’s lover. The Polish detective finally has his series.”

In the days following the Mermaid’s murder, no one saw or heard from Arzaky. I am sure that it had been the shock of seeing her body that made him disappear. He had gone to the theater, alerted by one of his informants on the police force; he had looked in to see the Mermaid’s drowned body and then, without saying a word, he had completely vanished. After a few hours, the detectives began to worry. Gathered in that room at the Numancia Hotel, they were now ensconced in an uninterrupted conclave. Caleb Lawson recommended that I wait in Arzaky’s study, in case he happened to show up.

Arzaky’s absence had caused more worry than the crime itself. The next day representatives of the fair’s authorities began to arrive, with urgent messages that I piled into a cardboard box. What I had seen of Arzaky was a negligible portion of his real life, of the people he dealt with, of the numerous tasks that kept him busy: his absence made that hitherto buried world come to light. A parade of people came through the office: desperate women, men who owed him their lives, wives of the falsely accused and imprisoned, people selling secrets. I tried to get rid of them all calmly and quickly.

“Monsieur Arzaky will be back any minute.”

I grew tired of waiting and I went out to look for him. I visited all the taverns the detective frequented, I found informants who told me about other, more secret, spots; I left absinthe territory for opium dens. The more I asked around, the farther away Arzaky seemed. I wasn’t worried about the lack of clues, but rather the abundance of them. Arzaky had argued with a Hungarian, Arzaky had hit a woman, Arzaky had grabbed a dagger from a Chinese cook, that shadow on the wall is Arzaky’s shadow. A blind man, high on opium, opened his white eyes and said, “Arzaky is dead, and you are the one who killed him.”

I couldn’t go through those lairs without tasting what they offered me, so the more debased the places were, the more debased I became. First the wine, then the liquors improvised in secret stills, adulterated absinthe, which made me forget life’s troubles, and finally opium, which made me forget everything. In a few days all my money was gone. Everything Arzaky had paid me I had spent searching for him.

In my travels I noticed that what was said about Arzaky could have been said about anyone. A woman had whispered in my ear that Arzaky was sleeping in a whorehouse on the outskirts of town. When I went in, a drunken old man from Marseille attacked me with a butcher’s knife. I escaped, but I came back again the next night to ask for Arzaky. “He was here last night, a man from Marseille attacked him with a butcher’s knife,” they replied.

Aware that my stupor was clouding my good judgment, I spent an entire day in my hotel room, cleansing my system. There was no reason to think that Arzaky had given in to his grief. He could be working in secret, going back over old clues. At dusk, finally lucid, I decided to pay Grialet a visit. He opened the door himself, dressed in some sort of long black outfit. I wondered if I had interrupted a ceremony.

“Ah, my friend, the one who steals photographs. You’ll have to forgive me, I’m fresh out.”

“I’m ashamed. I already returned that photograph to its owner.” “I was its owner. What are you looking for now?”

“I wanted to ask you about Arzaky.”

“Arzaky? They say he’s gone, disappeared, that he’s dead.” “Did he pay you a visit?”

“I didn’t have the pleasure.”

“The Mermaid was Arzaky’s lover,” I told him somewhat defiantly. He didn’t bat an eyelash.

“I know. She was my lover too. He sent her to investigate me. And now he’s sending you.”

“I’m here on my own steam.”

Grialet laughed.

“The more we think we are acting on our own, the more we are being manipulated by unknown forces. Come in. We’re all friends here.”

There were three other men gathered in the living room. I recognized Isel’s birdlike profile. He greeted me with a nod of the head, leading me to believe that he remembered me too. Near the piano there was a man who wore a priest’s habit. His face was round and childlike, without any trace of a beard. The other, a younger man, wore a white shirt, open at the neck, and he looked around with the anxious eyes of a consumptive.

“Here we are: Darbon’s bêtes noires. You’ve already met Isel; the others are Father Desmorins and the poet Vilando. Desmorins was expelled from the Jesuits for dabbling in necromancy, but he hasn’t accepted that decision and still wears the habit.”

Desmorins spoke in a high-pitched voice. “The pope should go back to Avignon. Now, more than ever, the Catholic Church is not a stone, nor a cathedral, nor the nave at the heart of every cathedral. It is a broken bridge leading nowhere.”

“Desmorins insists on writing those kinds of things. He started out as the superior of all the order’s libraries, and his job was to burn all the inappropriate books, but some time ago he gave up the fire and gave in to the temptation of that literature. Young Vilando, on the other hand, has followed the opposite path: he once belonged to the circle of Count Villiers and Huysmans, but now he spends every night writing poems and then burning them. He wants them to exist only in the mind of the unknowable God.”

Grialet paused. The four men looked at me. They enjoyed being observed by others. They had spent their lives cultivating secrets, and now they wanted their faces, their slightly outlandish outfits, and their conspiratorial gestures to illustrate the power of all they were keeping quiet.

“These are the enemies of progress, the enemies of the tower and the World’s Fair,” continued Grialet. “The disciples of the secret teachings of Christ. We’re not so dangerous as Darbon suspected. Don’t you think?”

He pointed me to an empty chair. I sat with them. Soon there was a glass of spiced wine before me.

“We are against the World’s Fair. At least Darbon wasn’t wrong about that,” said Grialet.

“Why? ”

“Because we believe that secrets make the world exist. The city of Paris has been a refuge for esoteric knowledge for many years. Now they’ve decided to illuminate it. Electric light, positivism, the World’s Fair, the tower: they are all part of the same thing. Science no longer strives to collect answers, but rather to obliterate the questions.”