“It was brilliant. I didn’t understand a thing, but I could tell he was a cut above. I understand that, in recent years, he has given up detective work.”
“Because of his health problems.”
“And because of the Case of the Magician. Well, you should know better than me.”
I was speechless. I often forgot that I wasn’t the only person who knew about the Kalidan case and Alarcon’s death. When that old business came to light I felt horribly ashamed, as if I had squandered that opportunity. Guilt, in many cases, has no relation to actual events. We feel responsible for things that have nothing to do with us, and don’t give a thought to our real sins. I abruptly returned to the matter at hand.
“I came because a body was found, and we believe it is the same one that was stolen from you.”
Nazar’s face lit up.
“I knew it couldn’t have gone far. Is it in good condition?”
I shook my head.
“Did they take the head off?” he asked. “It’s going to take a lot of work to get that head back where it belongs.”
“I’m afraid, doctor, that won’t be necessary.”
Nazar breathed a sigh of relief.
“They burned it.”
Crestfallen, Nazar sank back into a chair.
“What day is it?”
“Thursday.”
“The Grand Opening is in a week. A week. And I’ve had to do everything myself, this whole pavilion, getting the permits… The authorities from the Argentine Pavilion didn’t want to give me any space. The only thing they care about is showing their horses, their sheep, their wheat, and especially their cows… They have an unhealthy obsession with cows… but they don’t want my art displayed there. Life, life, they told me. Life, they kept repeating, rolling their eyes. But do they even know what life is?”
He shook his head slowly and stared at his fingertips.
“I’m the one who knows what life is. I’m the one who knows the decomposition process. I am the one who can stop it. Oh well. I’ll have to go see the disaster. Show me the way.”
“It won’t do any good. Besides, if you go now, they’ll keep you there with questions. Captain Bazeldin will call you into the police headquarters and you’ll have to spend a whole afternoon waiting for them to question you. You’re lucky that Arzaky still hasn’t told the police that the body is one of yours. Don’t you have other things you can show at the opening?”
“I suppose I do. Come with me.”
Nazar led me into a back room filled with the animals that hadn’t yet been classified. There was a lion with its jaws open, a stork, a large crocodile, and an ostrich. In the corners, there were many minor pieces: foxes, otters, pheasants, snakes. Some had no eyes, others had come unstitched. They each had a yellow card attached with a thread, showing their origin, a date, and the taxidermist’s name.
In the middle of the room were four gurneys, holding three bodies. The first was a mummy; the second, a stone statue; the third, a woman who seemed to be made of dust and about to vanish into thin air. The last gurney was empty.
“We were thinking about showing four bodies in different states of embalming. Now we’ll have to make do with three. This one, as you can see, is an Egyptian mummy, which we reproduced strictly following the traditional procedures. We even recited the ancient incantations. If you are interested, the jars with the entrails are around here somewhere…”
He got up to look for the jars in a closet, but I assured him it was unnecessary.
“This other body was embalmed using an ancient Chinese method that uses volcano lava to convert the body into stone. The method is interesting but the results are highly debatable. It looks just like stone, you see? There are taxidermists who don’t believe me when I tell them that it’s a human body, they think it’s a sculpture.” “How’d you get the lava?”
“We made it artificially, heating mud, limestone, and sand to high temperatures. It was an absurd amount of work. There wasn’t a single day that I didn’t burn my hands. Guimard, my closest collaborator, is still in the hospital. I hope they discharge him soon so he can come to the opening.”
Nazar approached the third gurney and delicately touched the woman’s skin. She wore a white dress and still held the ribbon that had tied some f lowers, long since disintegrated. Her hair, streaked with gray, looked exactly like that of a living woman. Nazar gestured to me, inviting me to touch her leathery skin, but I recoiled.
“This isn’t my work; it was executed by time, weather conditions, and chance. The third method, which often keeps the bodies that are stored in churches intact, is the reduction of humidity inside the coffin. We bought this woman from a dealer in relics. She died half a century ago, but looks as if it were only yesterday.”
Last, Dr. Nazar pointed to the empty gurney.
“But Mr. X, preserved in the traditional, Western method, was our most exquisite model. He had been executed by guillotine and we were able to reattach his head and almost perfectly restore him.”
I pulled a black notebook I had recently bought out of my pocket. Its pages had a grid, like graph paper, just like the one that Arzaky used. And without realizing it, I was imitating the way he wrote, with the notebook half shut as if I were afraid someone would peek at my notes.
“How could they have gotten the body out of here?”
“They forced the lock and took the body in a wheelbarrow. At the fair people work all night long, especially now that opening day is so close. No one would have looked twice at someone transporting a bulky load, in the midst of hundreds of carts and wheelbarrows filled with construction materials, machines, statues, animals…”
“Where do you get the bodies you work on?”
“From the city morgue. This pavilion depends on the Ministry of Public Health.”
“And that’s where Mr. X’s corpse came from?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Why do you call him that? Mr. X? It would be helpful to know his real name.”
“Is that important to the investigation?”
“Of course. The person who incinerated him may have had a personal grudge…”
“We don’t know his name. We never know any of their names. It’s easier to work on anonymous bodies, you understand? That way one can forget they once walked the earth, that someone gave birth to them, that someone misses them at the dinner table, or in bed. Anyway, it’s a waste of time to search in that direction. This was an attack directed at me by rival taxidermists! It was my job to accept the pieces you see here and reject the ones you don’t. We are a vindictive lot: one of them sends a poorly sewn rabbit, with buttons instead of eyes, and when it’s rejected, a hatred that lasts a lifetime is born. In our business, what’s best preserved is resentment.”
3
I didn’t want to continue the investigation without further orders from Arzaky. I looked for him in his apartment first and then in the underground parlor of the Numancia Hotel. Arzaky was sitting on a chair with a stack of papers. He grabbed his head in a theatrical gesture while a tiny man with a pointy beard shouted.
“So, Arzaky, you think your problems are bad? It’s never the dead people who are the problem, it’s the live ones! Messengers knock on my door day and night, my wife is threatening to leave me, and, what’s worse, my cook is too! The government’s decision to have the fair this year, as an homage to the Revolution, forces us to constantly exchange information with other countries. A few months earlier or a few later, and the whole thing would be solved. But now, the crowned heads of Europe don’t want to participate officially because they don’t think it’s right to celebrate a king’s decapitation. They don’t like to see the words
