Pablo De Santis - The Paris Enigma

The trains purred in the north station. I ran toward track four, from where, according to the schedule, Castelvetia’s train should be leaving. I hurried through the cars, bumping into passengers who were stowing their luggage and into guards who were giving instructions and brief ly enjoying the power bestowed upon them by their gray uniforms. I found Greta and Castelvetia in the third car. All the passengers seemed nervous about the departure, except for them, as if they were railroad staff whose job was to provide an image of tranquility for the other passengers. They sat together, without touching, both serious, as if they were strangers. She was by the window, looking out at a group of gray pigeons pecking at some breadcrumbs.

I went toward them and almost bumped into Castelvetia, who had, just at that moment, gotten up to get a book out of the case he had stored on the luggage rack. When he saw me, the Dutchman sighed, obviously annoyed.

“What? Were you planning on coming with us?”

I had run quite far, and now that it was time to speak, I needed to catch my breath. Castelvetia looked with puzzlement at the catalogue of gestures I used to replace the words I couldn’t get out. Greta looked at me seriously with her large gray eyes.

“Only one thing could excuse your betrayal,” said Castelvetia. “Only one thing. That what Lawson said was true.”

“Lawson said a lot of things.”

“You know what I’m referring to. Craig’s crime.”

I didn’t respond. I let my fatigue overcome me, as an excuse to remain quiet.

Castelvetia’s index finger jammed into my chest.

“It’s your fault I’m no longer part of The Twelve Detectives…”

“I know. And that’s why I’ve come to apologize.”

“No, you came to say good-bye. Besides, I don’t want an apology. I want the truth.”

I lowered my gaze, unable to look him in the eye. Then I realized that Castelvetia thought that my reply would be in the negative, and he was anxiously waiting for me to defend Craig’s good name.

“Say it: Craig didn’t torture the killer. Say it: Craig didn’t kill him.”

I couldn’t say anything, and my silence spoke for me. The Dutchman took a watch out of his pocket and measured the length of my silence.

“More than thirty seconds. Now I know what you aren’t saying.”

The Dutchman was pale. He came close to whisper in my ear, as if he had suspicions about the passengers around us.

“My expulsion doesn’t matter, The Twelve Detectives are finished.”

Castelvetia touched Greta’s shoulder. She had been looking out the window.

“Greta, dear, you can talk to the young man.”

“He betrayed us,” she said, without taking her eyes off the windowpane, refusing to look at me.

“We no longer have any grudge against him, because they have kicked us out of something that no longer exists. That erases the offense.”

That upset Greta, and she stood up, annoyed. Without saying a word, she made her way through the last travelers who were arriving. I went down first and tried to offer my hand to help her with the iron steps, but she refused to take it. I managed to brush her fingers, which were ice cold.

“I knew I shouldn’t say your name, but for a moment I was happy to hear it come out of my mouth. Then I realized what I had done.”

Greta now addressed me with formal distance, instead of the familiar way she used to.

“Now you can say the name as many times as you wish. As a secret, it was powerful. Once the magic word has been spoken, it loses all value.”

“The magic hasn’t lost its power.”

She looked at me for a few seconds. She was a woman, at the end of it all, and she was f lattered by my insistence, by my dishevelment, by my foolishly running all the way here.

“Shouldn’t you be working? They are expecting the fourth murder to happen today.”

“All the detectives are at their posts, keeping watch over any possible versions of air and earth.”

She pointed toward one of the train’s windows. Castelvetia was reading a book with yellow covers, decorated with interwoven roses: a romance novel.

“Castelvetia mocks their preparations. He says that they are all wrong, that it’s not about air or earth.”

“Castelvetia knows as much as the others do. At least they are at their posts. He’s leaving.”

“He’s leaving because they threw him out. He’s leaving because he has no other choice. Can you imagine what the press in Amsterdam is going to say about his expulsion?”

“Castelvetia could stay anyway. Investigate on his own. If he knows so much, he should stay, solve the mystery, and then negotiate his readmittance.”

“You should trust that Arzaky will be the one to solve the enigma. An assistant must maintain his faith even in the lowest moments.”

“I’m no more than a ghost to him. He doesn’t tell me what to do. I don’t know what he’s thinking. Since Paloma’s death…”

I said her real name to create some distance from the green costume, from the body in the water, from Nerval’s damp verses; I said her name as a way not to say anything. Greta stared as if I had uttered an unexpected blasphemy.

“Who?”

“Paloma Leska. The Mermaid.”

“I didn’t know her name was Paloma.”

I was young; my pride thought for me. I wondered if she was jealous that I had used her real name instead of her stage name. Was I going to receive, in that station amid the steam and smell of engine oil, the gift of her jealousy? The train roared. The last passengers rushed to get on board with their luggage, and they pushed their suitcases as best they could. A guard shouted, another insistently rang a bronze bell. I looked at her again, and I knew it wasn’t jealousy. She was trembling. Both of us, almost at the same time, understood. We looked at each other for the last time.

“Weren’t you talking about magic words? My name isn’t the magic word. Doesn’t paloma mean dove? This is the moment you were waiting for when you met with Craig, this is the moment that justifies your delays and betrayals. This is the moment that justifies you now saying good-bye to me, Sigmundo Salvatrio. Quickly. Quickly.”

Greta pushed me, and that was her farewell. She took the stairs a few at a time, when the train had already begun to move. I waited for it to completely disappear, as if I didn’t have the strength to leave. Some pigeons had gathered to eat the stale bread an old woman dressed in rags threw to them. When I walked past them they f lew off toward the tall glass heights.

There are people who need to be still in order to think, but I work better walking or even running. I knew where I was going, but I didn’t know why. Against the opinion of Craig and the other detectives, I didn’t think an enigma was a painting by Arcimboldo, or an Aladdin’s blackboard, or a sphinx, or a blank page. It was what it had been since my childhood: a jigsaw puzzle. My father would come home with a large box wrapped in blue silk paper. By the window, I tore off the paper, threw the pieces to the ground, and enjoyed that wonderful chaos that was waiting for me to put it in order and to find, in the many shapes, the image. Now I had the big pieces in front of me: Darbon’s body, fallen from the tower; Sorel ’s corpse, first executed by guillotine and then burned; and, the only one that pained me, the Mermaid’s lifeless silhouette. There were other, smaller pieces: the black oil that had initiated Darbon’s plunge from the tower, the witnesses’ statements, the fire, the obscure quotes on the walls of Grialet’s book of a house. I had read Nerval’s verses, which I couldn’t get out of my head, but it was those other words that were important, the ones that said: “The day will come when God will be a meeting between an old man, a decapitated man, and a dove…”