understand.
“What authority are you citing?” he asked.
“Alarcon, Craig’s original apprentice.”
“Did he solve many crimes?”
“No, he died on his first case.”
“Oh, yes, I remember, he was killed by the magician. With all due respect for the dead, why are you repeating such foolishness? The locked room is the essence of our work. It doesn’t matter if the room doesn’t actually exist. We must accept its metaphorical power.”
We arrived at the second platform and went up a few more steps. After finding a f law in the smelting, they had removed the protective railings and hadn’t yet installed new ones. It was easy to see where Darbon had slipped and fallen, because the steps were covered with the same thick black liquid that Arzaky had found beneath the detective’s nails.
“Be careful what you touch and where you step,” said Arzaky. “There’s oil everywhere.”
“And broken glass. Do you think the killer broke a bottle of oil over his head?”
“The killer made sure to be far from here when Darbon fell. He was an old man and had a lot of trouble climbing stairs. He used a cane, which hid only a small sword, not the myriad surprises that Craig’s has. The killer proposed a meeting up here, promising information about the attacks on the tower. Darbon was anxious to close that case before our next meeting.”
“But Darbon took on only the most important cases; murders, a few anonymous letters sent by a lunatic… ”
“You’re new to this city and you don’t understand. You’ve barely seen anything of Paris besides this tower. To you, Paris is the tower. But those of us who live here have been watching its slow progress for two years. These struts and vertical irons have filtered into our dreams. We all feel compelled to shout either yes or no about this matter, particularly because no one has asked our opinion. For some it is evil, for others the future, for the most pessimistic, it’s both evil and the future.”
I didn’t know where to lean, where to step. Everything was covered in black oil.
Arzaky’s voice sounded remote, almost as if I were dreaming.
“If Darbon managed to solve this case, although it seemed simple on the face of it, his name would be in all the papers again, tied to the heart of Paris itself. He would have achieved the definitive victory over the interloper…”
“The interloper?”
“Me. He also used to call me ‘the damn Polish traitor.’”
Arzaky reached into his pocket and pulled out a pair of tiny tweezers, a tiny scissors, and a tiny metal box. They looked like they belonged in a dollhouse. He carefully took a sample of the glass shards. I prayed he wouldn’t get any oil on him, because then I’d have to put up with his bad temper. He pointed out a cord that was almost completely soaked in the black liquid, and cut off a piece with his miniature scissors. Arzaky put the cord and the glass into the metal box, which he then returned to his pocket.
“Do you understand the nature of this trap? The killer put a bottle of machine oil on the stairs. It’s very thick oil, and made the steps impossibly slippery. Darbon went up without a lantern, perhaps according to the instructions of the killer himself, who must have set up this meeting with him. We should look for evidence of his correspondence. When Darbon’s foot hit the cord, the bottle tipped over, spilling its contents onto the steps, causing him to slip and fall.”
“And how could someone get up here and set the trap without anyone seeing him?” I asked.
“At six o’clock the workers leave for the day and only the night watchman remains. Everyone knew that he liked to drink, and that afternoon he received a gift of two bottles, addressed to him from an anonymous benefactor. He drank them and passed out. He didn’t see or hear anything.”
I pointed to a small puddle of oil a few stairs farther up. Arzaky shone his lantern on it.
“I think the killer first considered placing the bottle higher up,” I said. “He calculated the trajectory of the fall and decided to move it. In the process he accidentally spilled a little.”
Arzaky looked at me distastefully, as if it was annoying to him that I point out some imperfection in the murder. But then he said, “All the better for us. The killer must have stained his clothes, gloves, or shoes. Have you gotten this all down?”
“You mean the bottle, the cord, and the oil? I remember it perfectly.”
“And my words? Don’t you think you should write down what I say?”
I hurried to find a notepad in my pocket. As I hastily took out a pencil, it slipped from my fingers, bounced, and fell into the void. I was suddenly aware of how high up we were. I peeked over the edge, and seeing how far below the ground was made my stomach turn and my hands and forehead began to sweat.
I tried to play off the loss of my pencil as an intentional experiment.
“They say that if you drop a coin from this height, the force of gravity increases the speed of its fall so much that it could go through a man’s skull.”
“Don’t be an idiot, you’re forgetting about the air’s resistance. And now what are you going to use to write with?”
I pointed to my forehead.
“Like a steel trap.”
“Old Tanner responded to each and every one of my sentences with an amazed ‘Oh’ or a ‘That never would have occurred to me.’ You don’t even pay attention. What are you looking at?”
I didn’t answer right away.
“The whole city. Do you realize that I’m incredibly lucky? I just arrived in Paris and I’m observing it from a height that even those born here have never seen.”
“Get away from the edge, before you get even luckier: you could be the first foreigner to fall from up here.”
Avoiding the oil slick, we began our descent.
2
case?” I asked him. On the way back Arzaky seemed discouraged.
“Do you think this is a difficult
“Even the easiest case can get complicated. What worries me is not that it can’t be solved, but rather that it will be solved in a trivial way. That in the end the solution will be something absurd. An indignant lover, a jealous husband, a crime of passion…”
“Don’t you like crimes of passion?”
“No. I prefer envy, ambition, revenge-especially revenge, for something silly that everyone thinks has been forgotten. Even suicides that have been covered up. But not murders committed out of lust or insanity. There’s nothing admirable in them. Those cases are purely formulaic. They have no poetry.”
Every once in a while, a passerby turned to look at the great Arzaky, whose photograph often appeared in the newspaper. Arzaky walked briskly, oblivious to the attention.
“Now what are we going to do?”
“I don’t know what you’re going to do, but I’m going to rest. At six I have a meeting with the people from the fair’s organizing committee. And as for your other assignment, have you figured anything out?” I shook my head no and he continued, “I was told that Castelvetia wrote the name Reynal in some hotel’s register, but no one has seen him yet.”
“And what do you suspect?”
“Castelvetia was the last one to join The Twelve Detectives. Craig insisted on it. I was against it. Caleb Lawson detests him; they harbor a mutual grudge. When we issued the invitations, I doublechecked his resume. Most of his cases are impossible to verify. He could be an infiltrator, a journalist putting together information for an expose of us, or an envoy from the European police’s annual secret meeting.”
“A spy? ”
