Imre Kertész: Detective Story

So I dug a little further. “You mean the police of hostile states as well?”

At that he raised a finger. “Nowhere and at no time,” he said, “are the police hostile.”

I was unable to drag anything more out of him, though, however nice the afternoon.

When all’s said and done, I don’t know if he genuinely believed this view. Today I’m inclined to suppose that he did. A person has to believe in something to be such a nasty piece of work. In any event, he would often come back to the subject, never entirely seriously, always in that ambivalent way he had, but I wouldn’t be a policeman if I didn’t know what that means.

It’s just that it was of precious little help to me. There is no denying that by then more than once I had caught myself stuttering. Then at other times I would drop into my speech stupid expressions like “thingy” and “I mean” and “how should I put it” and suchlike that previously I had never been in the habit of using. And a good job too! Just imagine, a policeman who stutters, jiggles uneasily with his hands, and trails off in the middle of sentences. I quickly kicked the habit; by then my headaches were plenty for me to put up with.

Anyway, it soon became clear what Rodriguez had picked up from that book. One fine day a statuette appeared on his desk. It was small, some four to six inches high, no bigger than a paperweight, but you could still see everything, clearly and distinctly. Rodriguez kept that statuette on his desk all the time. Before long a copy of it was also ready, and this was no longer a model but life-size, roughly five feet tall. Rodriguez had his assistant install it in the room next door. He had found that chap for himself, among the lower ranks, and I have to say he chose well: anyone who took one look into that ape face could have no doubt, and no mistake. Otherwise he was silent as a shark and as eager as a trained gorilla. His military blouse was forever unbuttoned at the neck, his sleeves were rolled up to the elbow on his hairy arms, and he reeked of sweat and liquor and filth of every kind. That room was their kingdom—“my operating theater” as Rodriguez called it.

I’m reluctant to talk about it, but it can’t be avoided. I’m damned if it’s of any interest to me; it never was. But now they keep asking me about it — the examining magistrates, that is. It’s useless my declaring I gave even the vicinity of that lousy room a wide berth. “So,” one of them will pipe up from the rostrum, “you claim that you were unaware of what was going on in the room known as the operating theater?” The hell I’m claiming! “All I said, sir, was that I didn’t drop by the room.” “I see,” he gloats triumphantly. “And what do you have to say about the statement made by witness Quintieros that he saw you in the so-called operating theater on several occasions?” Well, if your witness saw it, then obviously that’s how it was. What cleverdicks! As if I cared in the slightest whether I dropped by the room or not. But then what do I expect, magnanimity? At least I’m allowed to write in my cell — that’s something we would never have permitted. It went against all the rules.

So as I said, this statue appeared on Rodriguez’s desk. It was made for him by a sculptor from down below: there were prisoners of every kind in our jails, so why not a sculptor? This sculptor, by the way, was not a genuine sculptor but a monument mason. Still, he did a good job, I’ll say that for him. He made it of wood and some kind of plastic, if I’m not mistaken. It consisted of a base on which stood two uprights ending in forks. Resting on the forks was a rod, which in turn supported a tiny human figure in such a way that it passed between the bent knees and the wrists handcuffed together behind the knees. A devastating contraption, no two ways about it. Diaz glowered at it.

“What on earth is that?” he asked.

“That? It’s a Boger swing,” Rodriguez responded with great affection.

“Boger?” Diaz fussed. “What do you mean, Boger?”

“That’s the name of the fellow who invented it,” Rodriguez explained. He flicked the diminutive doll on the head with an index finger. It spun a few times, then the momentum died down, and it just swung on the rod, head down. You could see the thighs and the crudely carved buttocks, not omitting what lies in between. To Rodriguez’s credit, it should be made clear that it was a male doll.

“This bit here”—Rodriguez traced a small circle over it with his finger—“is freed up. You can do with him what you will.” He looked up at Diaz and grinned. I might as well not have been there — which is just as well as I probably only would have stuttered. That reflects badly on a person. “Or else,” Rodriguez continued, “you can squat down here, by his mug, and ask him whatever you want to know.”

Diaz hemmed and hawed. He strode up and down the room a couple of times, hands clasped behind him. That was his habit when he was mulling something over, or if something was not to his liking. The day he made his getaway he did that for the entire morning, until in the end I felt dizzy.

He perched one buttock on Rodriguez’s desk.

“What in the blue blazes do you need it for?” he inquired in a fatherly tone. “We’ve got every sort of plaything. All you have to do is press a button, and it switches on an electric current. That’s what they use the world over these days: clean and convenient. Isn’t that enough for you?”

No, it wasn’t enough. Rodriguez didn’t believe in mechanization.

“A person,” he says, “has no direct contact.”

“What’s that to you?” Diaz asked.

He failed to convince Rodriguez, however, who had his own principles. An educated man was Rodriguez; he would follow up on anything that interested him. “It’s too fiddly with machines,” he says. “Pure mechanics. One might as well don a white gown, like an engineer or surgeon. There’s no more interaction than if one were handling the matter by telephone. The offender can’t see the good humor one is in. And yet,” so Rodriguez, “that’s the key to the effect.”

As I said, I’m reluctant to talk about this. Even then I had nothing to say — I was still a new boy, and then again I was nervous about the stuttering and the clichés. I told Diaz what I thought only after Rodriguez had left the room to attend to business, as the workmen were by then already erecting the frame.

“Swine!” I said.

“That he is,” Diaz nodded with feeling, abstractedly twirling the doll. “A swine. A rat. A bloodsucker.”

He fell silent. Neither of us said a word. Even that poxy doll was by then dangling motionless between us, head downward.

“And you.” All at once he lifted his eyes to look at me. “What are you so windy about, sonny boy?” Diaz could have a very disagreeable way of looking at you, though he had tranquil, dark brown eyes and did nothing to alter that. I mean, he did not narrow them or glower or stare — he just looked, nothing more. But that was disagreeable all the same.

“Me?” I retort. “Not windy, absolutely not. Just thingy … that’s taking it a bit too far.”

“Too far indeed, too far.” He nods. “Well, we have dealings with the far out.”

“Sure, sure,” says I. “It’s just … how should I put it … I mean, I actually thought we were serving the law here.”

“Those in power, sonny boy,” Diaz corrects me. My head started to ache. Oddly, it was actually Diaz who made it ache, not Rodriguez.

To that I say, “Up till now I thought the two were the same.”

“Fair enough,” Diaz concedes. “Only you shouldn’t lose sight of the order.”

“What order is that?”

“Those in power first, then the law,” Diaz says quietly with that inimitable smile of his.