we are not authorized to reveal, have managed to uncover the individual who is, in all probability, the head of the tapeworm whose coils have kept the civic conscience of the majority of the city's inhabitants of voting age entirely paralyzed and in a state of dangerous atrophy. A certain woman, married to an ophthalmologist, and who, wonder of wonders, was, according to reliable witnesses, the only person to escape the terrible epidemic four years ago that made of our homeland a country of the blind, this woman is now considered by the police to be the person responsible for the current blindness, limited this time, fortunately, to what used to be the capital city, and which has introduced into political life and into our democratic system the dangerous germ of perversion and corruption. Only a diabolical mind, like those of the greatest criminals in the history of humankind, could have conceived what, according to reliable sources, his excellency the president of the republic has so eloquently described as a torpedo fired below the water line of the majestic ship of democracy. For that is what it is. If it is proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, as everything indicates it will be, that this doctor's wife is guilty, then all those citizens who still respect order and the law will demand that the full rigor of justice falls upon her head. How strange life is. Given the singularity of her case four years ago, this woman could have become an invaluable subject of study for our scientific community, and, as such, would have deserved a prominent place in the clinical history of ophthalmology, but she will now be singled out for public execration as an enemy of her country and of her people. One is tempted to say that it would have been better if she had gone blind.
That last sentence, clearly threatening in tone, sounded like a judicial sentence, just as if it had said It would have been better if you had never been born. The superintendent's first impulse was to phone the doctor's wife, to ask if she had read the newspapers, to comfort her as best as he could, but he was prevented by the thought that, overnight, the probability of her phone being tapped had become one hundred percent. As for the phones of providential ltd, the red and the gray ones, they, of course, were linked directly to the state's private network. He leafed through the other two newspapers, which had not printed a single word on the subject. What should I do now, he asked out loud. He went back to the article, re-read it, and found it strange that they had not identified the people in the photograph, in particular, the doctor's wife and the doctor. It was then that he noticed the caption, which read thus, The suspect is indicated by an arrow. It seems, although there is no solid confirmation of this fact, that the doctor's wife took this group under her wing during the epidemic of blindness. According to official sources, identification of these people is at an advanced stage and will be made public tomorrow. The superintendent murmured, They're probably trying to find out where the boy lives, as if that would help them. Then, after some thought, At first sight, the publication of the photograph, unaccompanied by any other measures, appears to make no sense, since all the people in the photo, as I myself advised, could seize the opportunity and vanish, but then the minister loves a spectacle, a successful manhunt would give him greater political weight and more influence in both the government and the party, and as for other measures, the homes of these people are almost certainly already under round-the-clock surveillance, the ministry has had more than enough time to get agents into the city and to set up such a programme. While all of this was true, none of it answered his question What should I do now. He could phone the ministry of the interior on the pretext that, since it was now Thursday, he wanted to know what decision had been taken about his disciplinary situation, but there was no point, he was sure the minister would not speak to him, some secretary would merely come on the line, telling him to get in touch with the police commissioner, the days of conversations between albatross and puffin are over, superintendent. What shall I do now, he asked again, just sit here rotting away until someone finally remembers me and sends orders for the corpse to be removed, try to leave the city when it's more than likely that strict orders have been given at the frontier posts not to let me pass, what shall I do. He looked at the photograph again, the doctor and his wife in the middle, the girl with the dark glasses and the old man with the black eye-patch to the left, the guy who wrote the letter and his wife to the right, the boy with the squint kneeling down in front like a football player, the dog sitting at its mistress's feet. He re-read the caption, Full identification will be made public tomorrow, will be made public, tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. At that moment, he was suddenly gripped by an idea for a plan of action, but the following moment, caution was immediately protesting that it would be utter madness, The sensible thing, it said, would be not to wake the sleeping dragon, the stupid thing would be to approach while it's awake. The superintendent got out of his chair, paced twice around the room, returned to the table on which the newspapers lay, and looked again at the head of the doctor's wife surrounded by a white ring that looked already like a hangman's noose, at this hour, half the city is reading the newspapers and the other half is sitting in front of the television to hear what the newsreader on the first news bulletin is going to say or listening to the voice of the radio announcing that the woman's name will be made public tomorrow, and not only her name, but her address too, so that the whole population will know where evil has made its nest. The superintendent went to fetch the typewriter and brought it over to the table. He folded up the newspapers, pushed them to one side and sat down to work. The paper he was using bore the heading providential ltd, insurance and reinsurance, and could, if not tomorrow, certainly the day after tomorrow, be used by the state prosecution as proof of a second crime, that of using civil service stationery for his own purposes, an aggravating factor being the confidential nature of that correspondence and the conspiratorial use to which it was put. What the superintendent was typing was neither more nor less than a detailed account of the events of the last five days, from early Saturday morning when he and his two assistants had clandestinely breached the city blockade, until today, and this very moment of writing. Providential ltd does, of course, have a photocopier, but it seems to the superintendent impolite to give the original letter to one person and a mere copy to the other, however convincingly the very latest reprographic techniques may assure us that not even the eyes of a hawk could tell them apart. The superintendent belongs to the second oldest generation of those who still eat bread in this world, which is why he retains a respect for form, which means that, having finished the first letter, he started carefully copying it out onto a clean sheet of paper. It is, to be sure, still a copy, but not in the same way. When he had completed this task, he folded up the letters and placed each one in an envelope bearing the company name, sealed the envelopes and wrote the respective addresses. While it is true that the letters will be delivered by hand, the addressees will understand, if only by the discreet elegance of the gesture, that these letters from providential ltd, insurance and reinsurance, deal with important matters deserving of the news media's attention.
The superintendent is about to go out again. He placed the two letters in one of his inside jacket pockets and put on his raincoat, even though the weather is as mild as one could hope for at this time of year, as, indeed, he could ascertain for himself by opening the window and looking up at the slow, sparse, white clouds passing by overhead. It is possible that there may have been another strong reason, for the raincoat, especially of the belted trench-coat variety, is a kind of identifying feature of detectives from the classic era, at least ever since raymond chandler first created the character of marlowe, so much so that seeing a man walk by, a slouch hat on his head and his raincoat collar turned up, and immediately proclaiming there goes humphrey bogart with his piercing eyes gazing out between the edge of his collar and the brim of his hat, is the kind of knowledge that is within easy grasp of any reader of detective fiction, p.o. box death. This superintendent is not wearing a hat, his head is bare, as determined by the fashion of a modern world that loathes the picturesque and, as they say, shoots to kill without even asking if you're still alive. He has got out of the lift, walked past the porter's lodge, from where the porter waved to him, and now he is in the street ready to carry out his three objectives for that morning, namely, to eat a belated breakfast, to take a walk down the street where the doctor's wife lives, and to deliver the letters to their addressees. He achieves the first in this cafe, a cup of milky coffee, a couple of slices of buttered toast, not as tender and succulent as those he ate the other day, but there's no surprise there, life is like that, you win some, you lose some, and there are very few cultivators of buttered toast left, both amongst those who prepare it and those who eat it. Forgive these extremely banal gastronomic thoughts in a man who is carrying a bomb in his pocket. He has eaten and paid, now he is striding toward his second objective. It took him almost twenty minutes to get there. He slowed his pace when he reached the street and adopted the air of one just out for a stroll, he knows that if there are any surveillance police about they will probably recognize him, but he doesn't care. If one of them sees him and informs his immediate boss of what he saw, and if the boss passes on the information to his immediate superior, who then tells the police commissioner, who then tells the interior minister, you can guarantee that the albatross will croak out in his harshest tones, Don't come bothering me with things I already know, tell me what I don't know, namely, what that wretched superintendent is up to. The street is more crowded than usual. There are small knots of people standing around outside the building where the doctor's wife lives, they are locals moved by a curiosity which is in some cases innocent and in other cases morbid, and who have come, newspaper in hand, to the place where the accused woman lives, a woman they know more or less by sight or from an occasional exchange of words, and there is the inevitable coincidence that the eyes of some have benefited from the expertise of her ophthalmologist husband. The superintendent has already spotted the
