isn’t one single system for interpreting them. Lombroso didn’t err when choosing his field of study; his error was in believing that all those clues hidden in faces and hands were subject to only one interpretation.
Did Craig believe in physiognomy or any other variant of criminal physiology? That was hard to say; the murders that interested him most were the ones that left traces only at the crime scene.
“Those easily identifiable criminals-the ones with prominent ears and protruding eye sockets and enormous hands, for them there’s the police. For the invisible murderer, the murderer that could be any one of us, that’s for me.”
4
Sometimes when Craig mentioned one of The Twelve Detectives in passing, we found the courage to ask him questions about how the association was founded, about its unwritten rules, and about the few occasions in which some of the members had gotten together. Craig answered the questions vaguely, with annoyance and we attempted to fill in the blanks later, among ourselves. We repeated the names as if we were memorizing them, as if we were studying a particularly difficult lesson. The most famous detectives in Buenos Aires-
Buenos Aires ’s Spanish community closely followed the exploits of Fermin Rojo, a detective from Toledo, who had such extraordinarily entertaining mishaps that the murders themselves were beside the point. Zagala, a Portuguese detective, was always by the sea: interrogating the fierce crewmembers of boats lost in the fog, searching the beach for remains of inexplicable shipwrecks, solving “locked cabin” cases.
Novarius, Castelvetia and Sakawa rounded out The Twelve Detectives. In our imagination we associated Jack Novarius, the American detective, with legendary cowboys and gunmen. The meticulous Andres Castelvetia, who was Dutch, crawled into dusty corners without ever dirtying his white outfit. We didn’t know a thing about Sakawa, the inscrutable detective from Tokyo.
We repeated those names behind Craig’s back. The nebulous subject of The Twelve Detectives was not on his syllabus. He preferred that we learn law, taught by Dr. Ansaldi, a former classmate of Craig’s at the Colegio San Carlos. Ansaldi explained that law was a narrative practice. Lawyers tried to compose a story-one of innocence or of guilt-and make it seem the only possibility, taking advantage of the conventions of the genre and of human nature, which was so eager to confirm its prejudices. Our fellow students Clausen and Miranda, both sons of lawyers, were the only ones who didn’t sleep through the law classes, and, in fact, they eventually became lawyers. The rest of us didn’t care for that stagnant world, filled with unreadable books, lived behind a desk. To us it was diametrically opposed to the danger and intellectual excitement promised by detective work. Even Craig hated law.
“We detectives are artists, and lawyers and the judges are our critics,” he would say.
Trivak, the only student whom I became friends with, had read Thomas De Quincey in his father’s
“The murderers are the artists, and the detectives their critics.”
Craig was silent, preferring to save his response for later. Trivak was the boldest of the group, and when Craig hid clues around the house, one of his endless exercises, Trivak got closer to solving the mystery than anyone else. It was rumored that in one painstaking pursuit he hadn’t even stopped at Senora Craig’s bedroom, but went in and searched through her clothes. Trivak didn’t confirm the rumor, but he didn’t deny it either, saying, “There should be no limits to one’s investigation.”
I suspected that Trivak had started that rumor himself, along with another, more persistent one, that the academy was just a means for Craig to groom an assistant. The newspapers often criticized him for lacking a second pair of eyes to lend credence to his adventures. Craig, along with Arzaky and Magrelli, was one of the most adept and prudent of The Twelve Detectives, yet without an acolyte, he was considered to be somewhat inferior to his colleagues. The Portuguese, Zagala, had Benito, a remarkably agile Brazilian; Caleb Lawson, a knight of the Queen and Scotland Yard’s most famous collaborator, had Dandavi, the Hindu, who followed him everywhere, sometimes putting false leads and real dangers in his path just to create a more exciting tale to tell. Arzaky, who competed with Louis Darbon for the title of Detective of Paris, had old Tanner as his helper. Tanner’s health had been compromised by so many rigorous adventures that now, stooped over, consumptive, and with his days numbered, he spent most of his time in his tulip garden and assisted Arzaky only by mail.
The idea that Craig had set up an entire academy just to find himself an acolyte wasn’t preposterous, and it filled us with an enthusiasm that we didn’t dare admit to one another. By then, several students had quit, terrified by the unknown world that detective work had revealed. Attending the execution, by firing squad, of the anarchist Carpatti, who, even when riddled with bullets, continued to spit insults at his executioners, and visiting prisons to meet famous murderers had disheartened those who thought that investigation was an intellectual game, a spiritual puzzle. Of course, none of those who abandoned the academy ever admitted to being afraid or disenchanted. They all pretended that their change of course was due to a recent, sobering maturity; a realization that they wanted to be family men, to follow in the footsteps of their fathers, who were businessmen, doctors, and lawyers. As our numbers dwindled, our hopes grew that we would be the chosen one.
Deep down, we knew that if Craig had really set all this up in order to find an assistant, he had already made his choice. As much as Trivak tried to dampen his sarcasm and impress his teacher, it was Alarcon who was the favorite. Gabriel Alarcon, whose skin was so pale that you could see his veins. Gabriel Alarcon, whose beauty was more befitting a girl than a man. Craig was happy when Alarcon proved to be shrewder than we were, when he could accuse us of missing the logic in an exercise of reason and then demonstrate his absolute superiority. Craig was eager to beat us, but he was even more eager to be defeated by Alarcon, and when from his disciple’s feminine mouth came the words that bested him, then he smiled twice as proudly.
We hated Alarcon for that. We also hated him because his family was richer than any of ours, their fortune built on the construction of ships. He could aspire to be an ambassador or devote his life to traveling and women, and yet he had chosen to compete among us. And he was outdoing us. Trivak and I loathed him more than anyone: I was a shoemaker’s son and his father was one of the few Jewish lawyers in the city at that time. But even as we hated him, we recognized his merits (which far from assuaging our hatred, increased it). Alarcon always followed an unexpected and solitary path. He never asked for permission, but moved through the world as if all doors were open to him. His familiarity with the Craigs was unnerving. He had tea with Senora Margarita every afternoon. When the detective was out of town, she spent hours in his company. He became a substitute-of course, only at teatime- for her husband.
When Craig revealed the solution to the case of the locked room- one that had obsessed the detectives-Alarcon responded, “Calling a murder ‘a locked-room crime’ is the wrong approach to the investigation, because it assumes that locks are infallible. There are no truly locked rooms. Calling it that presupposes an impossibility. In order to solve a problem, it has to be correctly posited. We mustn’t let semantics blue our logic.”
We hated him. We competed among ourselves, not with him. We were fighting over second place, in a race where only first place mattered. On the days when Craig was traveling for a case, things were more relaxed and we went home earlier than usual. Trivak would stare, perplexed, from the doorway at Alarcon, who instead of leaving, would go upstairs, with those slow, almost weightless, steps of his, to accept Senora Craig’s excessive hospitality.
5
In the academy, on the first f loor, there was a meeting room that was never used. An oval table with chairs
