The Paris Enigma

neighborhood, or that Caleb Lawson had finally broken off his engagement) but I very much enjoyed reading it.

Surprisingly, Craig himself answered the door. We were expecting some sort of butler who served as a buffer between the detective and the world. We were so disconcerted that, instead of going in, we each made way for the others to enter first. The comedy routine would have continued for hours if Craig hadn’t grabbed hold of the first arm he found and pulled it inside. Immediately, we all followed in a line, as if we were tied together by a rope.

I had read about that house in The Key to Crime. Having no assistant, Craig wrote about his adventures himself; in these stories his vanity transformed the house into a temple of knowledge. The other detectives maintained a dialogue with their adherents, who served as the voice of the common man. Craig had these conversations with himself, asking the questions and providing the answers, giving the impression that he was quite insane. He depicted himself in the solitude of his study, admiring his collection of Flemish watercolors or cleaning his numerous weapons: daggers hidden in fans, pistols in Bibles, and swords in umbrellas. His favorite secret weapon, of course, was his cane, which appeared in many of his stories: its lion-shaped handle had cracked open more than one head, its retractable stiletto had rested, threateningly, on the carotid artery of numerous suspects, and its resounding shot had cut through many a night. One hardly needed to carry anything else. Inside, we went through the rooms searching the high walls, furniture, and mantelpieces for those weapons and instruments, which to us were like the Holy Grail, Excalibur, or the Mambrino’s helmet of detective work.

For me, going into that house was like visiting a sacred site. When you actually encounter that which you have always dreamed of, the details aren’t as important as the fact that it’s real, that it is dense and limited, without that intangible tendency to shape-shift that dreams have. It is delightful when the fantasy becomes real, but disappointing that it means the fantasy must come to an end.

Craig lived with his wife, Margarita Rivera de Craig, but their residence had that damp coldness of empty houses, a feeling that was enhanced by the unfurnished rooms and bare walls. Fifteen years earlier they had lost a child, only a few months old, and it seemed as though they had abandoned most of the house. The Craigs’ bedrooms were on the third f loor and his study was on the first. It was carpeted, and had a huge desk that held a Hammond typewriter, which at that time was a novelty. Other than that, there were just empty halls and vacant rooms. For a moment I had the impression that Craig decided to set up the academy just to vanquish the lonely dampness of that house; it was too big for the servants they had: Angela, a Spanish woman from Galicia that took care of the kitchen, and a maid. Angela barely spoke to Craig, but twice a week she made rice pudding with cinnamon, his favorite dessert, and she always eagerly awaited Craig’s approval.

“Not even in the Progress Club do they make rice pudding this good. I don’t know what I’d do without you,” said the detective. And that was the only time he ever addressed her.

The cook had abrupt mood swings, as if the power the house held over her was sporadic. Sometimes she would sing old Spanish songs at the top of her lungs as she dusted, so loudly that Senora Craig would scold her. Angela either didn’t hear the reprimands or she just pretended that she couldn’t. Other times, she took on a resigned, defeated attitude. When she opened the door for me in the mornings I remarked on the weather, and no matter what it was she took it as a bad omen.

“It’s awfully hot. That’s not a good sign.”

Or if it was cold, she’d say, “Too cold. That can’t be good.” And if it was neither hot nor cold: “On a day like this a person doesn’t know what to wear. Bad omen.”

Drizzle, rain, lack of rain, storms, long periods without any storms, any climatic condition would get the exact same condemnation from Angela.

“Up until yesterday, we were having a drought. Now comes a flood.”

That first day, one of the happiest of my life, Craig spoke to us about his method. But his talk seemed designed to discourage us; he listed obstacles, described failures, probably to weed out those of us who weren’t truly dedicated to that occupation which required endless patience. But none of us could hear the language of defeat, because no matter what happened during our training period, even the bad things, this was all an adventure we yearned to have. He could really scare us only by threatening us with a normal life-practicing law, responsible parenthood, going to bed early. All twenty-one of us who showed up that first day came back the next, and the next. The big, empty house began to fill up. Craig ordered new things that arrived constantly. He seemed to have the irrational idea that the accumulation of things was meant to contribute to the cult of reason. From the very beginning Craig’s teachings were destined to alert me to that ambiguity: it is in the moment when we are thinking most clearly that we are closest to madness.

3

Only Angela, the cook, dared to confront Craig, reproaching him for the baskets overf lowing with filth and all the horrible things that were filling the house. The cook challenged him:

“I’m expecting a letter from my cousins in Lugo. When it comes, I’m leaving. And good-bye rice pudding.”

But he paid her no mind.

Craig gave classes in the morning. At that time of day his voice was filled with a self-confidence that was tempered over the course of the day. Sometimes he preferred to take us out on a field trip, always at night, to some place of ill repute where a woman’s throat had been slit, or the hotel room of the latest suicide.

“Suicide is the great mystery, even more than murder,” Craig told us. “Every city has a stable suicide rate. It doesn’t vary according to economic circumstances or historic events; it’s a disease of the city itself, not of individuals. No one commits suicide in the countryside; it’s our buildings that transmit the horrible infection and irresponsible poets who celebrate it.”

The first time we went into the room where a suicide had taken place we hung back, letting Craig and the corpse take over the scene. The dead man was dressed in his Sunday best and had tidied up the room before drinking the liquid from a small blue glass bottle.

From the middle of the room, Craig invited us to take a closer look.

“Look at this man’s expression, notice how he carefully neatened his room, how he packed his suitcase before taking the poison. Hotel rooms, guesthouses, never has loneliness been so complete. Suicides are drawn to one another; if there is a suicide in a hotel it leaves a mark on that building, and there’ll be another at that location the next month. Soon there’ll be hotels devoted solely to these impatient travelers.”

We learned that the key to solving a crime wasn’t in the larger picture but in the symmetry of blood droplets, the hairs stuck to the f loorboards, the crushed cigarette butts, or under the fingernails of the dead. We went over everything with a magnifying glass. Tiny places became enormous, distorting all of life.

Sometimes Craig’s old friends also taught us. Among them was Aquiles Greco, the great phrenologist, a tiny doctor with nervous tics, whose hands trembled as if they had a life of their own. They were like small animals, anxious to leap onto your face in order to feel your cheekbones or your superciliary arches or to estimate, just by touch, the circumference of your skull. He always reminisced about the years he had worked at the University of Paris with Prospere Despines, the illustrious but forgotten mentor of Cesare Lombroso. Greco had us pass skulls from one hand to the other, palpating the protuberances and noting the murderers’ frontal sinuosity, their prognathism, their prominent jawbones and f lattened foreheads. With our eyes closed and our fingers moving we had to answer the question: Thief, murderer, or con man?

I once shouted out “Murderer! ” and Greco responded, “Even worse. That’s the skull of a Jesuit.”

The visits to the morgue weren’t as pleasant. Dr. Reverter, who was tall and had the parsimonious and melancholic character of those born under the sign of Saturn, would cut open the cranial lid and show us the encephalic mass, teaching us to recognize the many calluses and marks on murderers’ brains.

“Their future crimes are written here, from the moment of their birth. If we had some apparatus that allowed us to see people’s brains, we could arrest those who bear these marks before they committed their crimes, and murder would disappear.”

At that time physiology was a main focus of criminology, and doctors and policemen dreamed of a science that could separate the innocent from the reprobate. Today it has lost all of its scientific value, and even mentioning Lombroso’s name in an auditorium-and I have often done so-is enough to set off derisive laughter. Today’s dismissive mockery is just as irresponsible as the blind faith of the past. After more than twenty years of tracking down murderers, my experience has shown me that fate’s signs do show on our faces; the problem is that there