“All of them, together for the first time.”
My hand shook and I almost dropped my cup of tea. The Argentine newspapers had followed the preparations for this new World’s Fair in detail, as if it were something that somehow belonged to us. I had read that the Argentine pavilion was larger and more magnificent than any of the other South American ones. Passage reservations had been sold out long ago. But news that the detectives were getting together was more important to me than all the treasures of all the countries, than the paintings hanging in the Palace of Fine Arts,
and the inventions in the Galerie des Machines. I thought that what excited me should be exciting for everyone, and even the tower itself paled in comparison to the detectives’ meeting.
“Will they have their own pavilion?” I asked. For a minute I could even imagine The Twelve displayed in glass cases and on platforms, like wax figures.
“No, they are going to have their meetings in the Numancia Hotel and there, in a parlor, they’ll display the tools of their trade. Up until now, only a few of them have gotten together at one time, at most six, but this time they’ll be twelve. Well, eleven, since my husband can’t go.”
What was I hearing? Craig would miss the first meeting of The Twelve Detectives in history?
“He has to go, even if he’s sick. You could go with him. You and a nurse.”
“My husband was the driving force behind this meeting, along with Viktor Arzaky. They both wanted the art of investigation to be represented among so many other trades. With your youthful enthusiasm, my dear Salvatrio, nothing is impossible, but I know that my husband can’t take the long boat trip. Which is why you must go in his place.”
“I couldn’t take his place. I’m an inexperienced acolyte.”
“Arzaky, the Pole, as my husband calls him, has been left without an assistant. Old Tanner is sick; he plays chess, he grows tulips, and he sends letters. And Arzaky has to prepare the exhibition of the detectives’ instruments. My husband thought that you could go and help him in that undertaking.”
“I have no money.”
“It will all be paid for. The fair’s organizing committee will take care of the expenses. What’s more, my husband won’t take no for an answer.”
I had never traveled anywhere. The invitation both excited and intimidated me. I paused and then said, in a faint voice, “I know your husband would have preferred to send Alarcon. Today is his funeral. Are you going to go, Senora Craig?”
“No, Salvatrio. I am not going to go.”
I took a sip of bitter tea.
“I have something to confess to you. We envied him.”
“Alarcon? Why?”
Senora Craig sat up in her chair. Some sort of vague f lush gave life to her face. I didn’t give her the answer she was expecting.
“Because he was your husband’s favorite. Because he considered him more competent than us.”
Senora Craig stood up. It was time to leave.
“You are alive and he is dead. Don’t ever envy anyone, Senor Salvatrio.”
part ii. The Symposium
1
The committee assigned to write the complete catalogue of the 1889 World’s Fair continued working in spite of the war. It originally had three members, Deambres, Arnaud, and Pontoriero; Arnaud died three years after the fair ended, but Pontoriero and Deambres are still at it. The original idea was to have the catalogue ready before the fair, then during and finally after; but the catalogue, a quarter of a century later, still wasn’t ready; something that not even the most somber pessimists or the most passionate optimists could have imagined. I mention the optimists as well, since that task became interminable not because of the catalogue compilers’ inefficiency but because of the grandeur of the fair.
So many years later, Pontoriero and Deambres still continue to receive correspondence from distant countries; sometimes it’s idle, solicitous civil servants, but mostly it’s spontaneous collaborators who want to correct slight mistakes. They are mostly older gentlemen, already retired, whose favorite hobby, besides correcting the catalogue, is writing indignant letters to newspapers. The main problem is how to combine different classification methods: should it be done by country, merely alphabetically, making a distinction between everyday objects and extraordinary ones, or by headings (naval, medical, culinary instruments, etc.)? Deambres and Pontoriero had published partial catalogues every two or three years, advances on the final version, perhaps with the intention of showing that they were still working on it and at the same time discrediting the fakes that were made for purely commercial ends. One of those partial catalogues, the one devoted to toys, was the basis for the
“All of our work consists of avoiding the one word that would free us from all these obligations,” stated Pontoriero to a journalist in 1895.
“And what word is that?”
“Etcetera.”
It is true that the innovations of 1889 that so dazzled us and promised to turn our cities into dizzyingly vertical landscapes are now old hat. Most of the inventions gathered in the Galerie des Machines (Vaupatrin’s submarine, Grolid’s excavator, the artificial heart invented by Dr. Sprague, who turned out to be a fraud, Mendes’s robot for organizing archives) must be stored in a warehouse somewhere, if they haven’t already been dismantled. Meanwhile, the war had shown itself to be the true world’s fair of all human technology, and the Somme and Verdun trenches the true venues for technology to demonstrate its material and philosophical reach.
None of these considerations disheartened Pontoriero and Deambres, who continued their task on the third f loor of a building of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. They had promised to carry on even after their official retirement.
In the second of the partial catalogues, devoted to dual-function objects or, better put, objects that have an obvious use and a secret one, I was pleased to find a mention of Renato Craig’s cane, made of cherry wood with a handle shaped like a lion’s head. It could become a spyglass, a magnifying glass, and a sword was hidden inside. In addition, it featured compartments for fingerprint powder and small glass boxes to hold evidence found at crime scenes; it could also be used as a firearm, although only on exceptional occasions and at a very short distance, because the bullet came out any which way. Because of its wide range of weaponry, one had to be very careful when using at as a cane; one slip could have fatal consequences.
I was given the task of bringing the detective’s cane to the parlor of the Numancia Hotel. After meeting with Senora Craig and accepting her request, I was allowed to visit my mentor in the hospital. I remember the smell of bleach and the checkerboard f loors, recently mopped and extremely slippery. His room was quite dark because one of the symptoms of Craig’s illness was an aversion to light. It was summer and very hot; Craig had a damp cloth over his face.
He moved the cloth from over his mouth to speak, but kept his eyes veiled.
“When you see Detective Arzaky, remember that he and I are old friends, like brothers; we’ve managed The Twelve Detectives, between the two of us, all these years. The others believe that they have always exercised their right to vote, but it never was a democracy. It was a monarchy, shared by the Pole and me. We made the decisions we had to make, because none of the others thought as much as we did about this profession; sometimes we did these things with heavy hearts, still other times we had to pluck up each other’s courage, to restore one another’s faith in the method. Arzaky is in charge of the exhibition of our craft, in the parlor of the Numancia Hotel; but the discussions between the detectives are going to be more important than the exhibition; and even more important than that will be the words whispered in the hallways, the secret laughter, the gestures between one detective and
