around it stood in the middle. Both the chairs and the table were heavy, impossible to move, as if the wood had petrified. We called it the Green Room, because there were branches and vines painted on the ceiling by an artist who had begun his work with patience and diligence and had obviously tired of botany by the end. The exacting calligraphy of stems and veins became a confused mass of branches whipped by a storm. The walls were covered in dark wood, hung with swords, harquebusiers, and coats of arms; it all had a somewhat pretentious air, like the houses of antique dealers. The room looked like the remains of some abandoned project: the headquarters of a Masonic enclave, or a dining room that Senora Craig had envisaged for illustrious visitors who had never arrived. Called one day to convene there, we sat around the table, which was completely empty except for the dust, and Craig spoke.
“Gentlemen, in the last few years you have learned everything there is to know about crime. At least everything that can be taught in a classroom. Life is a perennial teacher, especially when the subject is death. Theoretical knowledge has its limits. Beyond those limits lies intuition, which is not something supernatural, as our friend Trivak, future member of the spiritualist brotherhood, insists. Rather it is the sudden relationship that we establish with other hidden, less dominant realms of knowledge. To intuit is to retrieve subconscious memories, which is why experience is the mother of intuition. It is nothing more than a specialized type of memory. Its goal is to find a pattern, connect the dots of this chaotic life.”
Distracted, I let my finger trace my name in the thick layer of dust that covered the table.
“For a while now I’ve been waiting for a suitable practice case to present itself, and now I have it.”
Craig spread out a newspaper page out on the table. We were looking for some big headline about an honest tailor shot to death, or a woman found f loating in the river, but there was only an ad for the performances of the magician Kalidan, the same magician who had been touring in the city when Craig announced the launch of his academy. At that time great magicians often came through our city, though now it’s not so common. Various types of phantasmagoria were popular in Europe and the public filled the theaters to see skeleton battles, luminous ghosts, decapitated bodies that spoke, and other marvels created with smoke and mirrors.
“For some time now I have noticed that this magician’s tours seem to coincide with murders and disappearances. The victims are always women: in New York a chorus girl disappeared, in Budapest a f lower vendor, in Montevideo a cigarette girl was found exsanguinated. The Berlin police questioned him in the death of a nurse, but they couldn’t prove anything. The few corpses that have been found (because our killer always tries to either hide or destroy the bodies) revealed that he drained the victims’ blood and then washed them with bleach. He always performs this purification ritual.”
Craig explained the case detachedly; six of us cracked our knuckles, angered by the crime. Only Alarcon responded to the tale with equal indifference. They both approached the challenge without emotion.
“Kalidan will be in the city for fifteen more days. Then he continues on to Brazil and we won’t have anything to investigate. I’ll continue explaining the case, and I’ll stress the importance of distinguishing coincidence from inevitability, but those of you who are any good will leave me here talking to myself, you’ll leave Detective Craig raving alone in this dusty room.”
All six of us rushed to the door, but by that time Alarcon had already disappeared.
6
We bought tickets for the performance and settled into the dilapidated seats of the Victoria Theater. We wanted to find some connection between the illusions with swords and guillotines in the magician’s show and real murders. But he joked as he did his tricks, far from the gravity that we, in our inexperience, expected from a murderer. Instead of exaggerating the mysterious air lent by his name and his sleight of hand, Kalidan joked about his fake exoticism.
After that first encounter, we each came up with our own strategy. Trivak pretended to be a journalist from
The more progress we made, the more convinced we were that the fake Hindu, who was actually Belgian, was guilty, and that he hadn’t been caught because he always chose inconsequential victims, the daughters of immigrants, lonely girls whose bodies no one claimed.
After a week had passed, we met in the Green Room to present our findings. Our fingerprints were still there on the dusty table, a reminder of the last meeting. We listed the facts we had been able to prove, and we bragged about our various ruses to get into the magician’s life and spy on his past. Craig, bored, pretended to listen. Occasionally he would congratulate someone on his inventiveness (he liked that Lemos Paz had passed himself off as a bellhop, he recognized that my archive search had been methodical and responsible) but his congratulations were so insipid, so apathetic, that we would have preferred he shout out a reprimand or some sign of contempt.
Only when he started to speak did he seem to emerge from his melancholy state. He heard the sound he liked best: his own voice.
“Detective work is an act of thinking, the last corner in which the philosopher seeks refuge. We are logic’s last hope. Which is why I ask that you accord the clues their true place, without exaggerating their importance. The correct interpretation of a f lower petal can be more valuable that the discovery of a blood-covered knife.”
As he spoke, baff ling us, Craig looked toward the door. He was expecting Alarcon, waiting for his prize student to make an entrance that would relieve him of having to hear more, and relieve us of our awkward attempts to impress him. He was waiting for Alarcon to come in and deliver definitive proof. It was late and we began to leave; finally Trivak, Craig, and I were left there alone. To lighten the atmosphere, Trivak said that surely Craig had sent Alarcon on one of the good cases, a “locked-room” crime (which at the time was considered the non plus ultra of criminal investigation), while keeping us distracted with the fake Hindu magician. Without taking his gaze off the door, Craig responded, “Every murder is a ‘locked-room’ case. The locked room is the criminal’s mind.”
7
After a tour through the cities of Tucuman and Cordoba, Kalidan the magician returned to the Victoria Theater for four farewell performances. We were there, and we saw that the magician’s assistant-a tall and extraordinarily thin girl, who herself seemed to be another artful trick of catoptrical magic- had been replaced by a young man who wore the blue uniform of an imaginary army. The new assistant was none other than Alarcon, who operated the machinery, moved the screens, offered himself as a human target for the dagger trick, and allowed his skull to be hooked up to some cables that led to a strange machine. That machine supposedly projected the assistant’s thoughts onto a white screen: we saw some fish, some coins that dropped and were lost, the naked silhouette of a woman who seemed to me to be the exact replica-though I didn’t dare mention it to anyone-of Senora Craig. Alarcon had gotten further than anyone; he was working with the magician. It made our clumsy attempts to get information seem like child’s play.
We continued meeting in the academy’s rooms, but we were disheartened. We expected Craig to finally release us from the course, from the obligation, from our hopes. Craig had his acolyte and there was no reason to go on. But the detective still taught us, and he never mentioned any need for an assistant.
In the following days, Alarcon still hadn’t returned to the academy and Craig asked us if we knew anything about his whereabouts. His questions surprised us, because we thought that it was Craig, not us, who was in
