Pablo De Santis - The Paris Enigma

Desmorins opened his cassock and took a small bottle of holy water from his belt. Magrelli had arrived and was with us too.

“He’s not a real priest,” I said.

“What does that matter now,” said Arzaky. “In this light, no one is what he appears. But let’s pretend that he’s a priest, that I’m a detective, and that you are my loyal assistant.”

The priest took a deep breath and said, “In nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti…”

Arzaky had told the truth, for the fourth clause-the one the Japanese detective had burned in that garden-allowed an assistant who discovered that a detective was also a murderer to become a member of The Twelve. I assumed that the detectives had made that rule thinking it would never be applied. They were so despondent over what Arzaky had done that they believed that making me a member of the group would atone for the sin of having strayed from the path.

I returned to Buenos Aires two months later. My family found me a changed man.

“Getting you to talk is like pulling teeth,” said my mother.

My father had already figured out that I wouldn’t want to keep working in the shoe shop, and he was training my younger brother in the business.

It took me three weeks to do what I had to do: visit Craig, return his cane, and tell him the story of Arzaky’s downfall. He listened to me for hours, he asked for details, he insisted I go over parts of the story that I didn’t think were important. By that point they had quit bothering him about the Case of the Magician, which had been shelved. But he had stayed firm in his decision to give up detective work. I asked to rent out the lower f loor of his house and he agreed. I set up my office there. I inherited Craig’s former clients, and from then on, every time I went to solve a theft or a murder, they relentlessly praised my mentor’s skills, comparing mine unfavorably to his.

When Craig died, I have to confess I felt relieved, as if the doors of the world were opening for me, as if the secret that had been a burden on me no longer carried any weight. I still work in the lower f loor of that house, and I make sure Señora Craig is never out of sugar or green tins of British tea. In the mornings, Angela, the cook, makes French toast and yerba maté tea for me, while she gives her always inauspicious report on the weather conditions. Then I go out following some lead or en route to a crime scene, to see the man who hanged himself in the basement, the poisoned hotel guest, the girl drowned in the garden fountain.

In my study, in a glass case, I have Craig’s cane. Sometimes, when I’m working late into the night, I take out the cane and polish its lion’s head handle as I imagine how it would feel to cross the line, to taste evil’s trace. The game only lasts a few seconds. Almost immediately I close the glass case and return to my thoughts. I still don’t have an assistant. Will I take one on some day? The footsteps of Señora Craig, pacing in her insomnia, echo above my head.

PABLO DE SANTIS was born in Buenos Aires, studied literature at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and subsequently worked as a journalist and comic-strip creator, becoming editor-in-chief of one of Argentina ’s leading comic magazines. Most recently, De Santis won the inaugural Premio Planeta-Casa de América de Narrativa prize for best Latin American novel for The Paris Enigma .