Only Angela, the cook, dared to confront Craig, reproaching him for the baskets overflowing with filth and all the horrible things that were filling the house. The cook challenged him:
“I’m expecting a letter from my cousins in Lugo. When it comes, I’m leaving. And good-bye rice pudding.”
But he paid her no mind.
Craig gave classes in the morning. At that time of day his voice was filled with a self-confidence that was tempered over the course of the day. Sometimes he preferred to take us out on a field trip, always at night, to some place of ill repute where a woman’s throat had been slit, or the hotel room of the latest suicide.
“Suicide is the great mystery, even more than murder,” Craig told us. “Every city has a stable suicide rate. It doesn’t vary according to economic circumstances or historic events; it’s a disease of the city itself, not of individuals. No one commits suicide in the countryside; it’s our buildings that transmit the horrible infection and irresponsible poets who celebrate it.”
The first time we went into the room where a suicide had taken place we hung back, letting Craig and the corpse take over the scene. The dead man was dressed in his Sunday best and had tidied up the room before drinking the liquid from a small blue glass bottle.
From the middle of the room, Craig invited us to take a closer look.
“Look at this man’s expression, notice how he carefully neatened his room, how he packed his suitcase before taking the poison. Hotel rooms, guesthouses, never has loneliness been so complete. Suicides are drawn to one another; if there is a suicide in a hotel it leaves a mark on that building, and there’ll be another at that location the next month. Soon there’ll be hotels devoted solely to these impatient travelers.”
We learned that the key to solving a crime wasn’t in the larger picture but in the symmetry of blood droplets, the hairs stuck to the floorboards, the crushed cigarette butts, or under the fingernails of the dead. We went over everything with a magnifying glass. Tiny places became enormous, distorting all of life.
Sometimes Craig’s old friends also taught us. Among them was Aquiles Greco, the great phrenologist, a tiny doctor with nervous tics, whose hands trembled as if they had a life of their own. They were like small animals, anxious to leap onto your face in order to feel your cheekbones or your superciliary arches or to estimate, just by touch, the circumference of your skull. He always reminisced about the years he had worked at the University of Paris with Prospère Despines, the illustrious but forgotten mentor of Cesare Lombroso. Greco had us pass skulls from one hand to the other, palpating the protuberances and noting the murderers’ frontal sinuosity, their prognathism, their prominent jawbones and flattened foreheads. With our eyes closed and our fingers moving we had to answer the question: Thief, murderer, or con man?
I once shouted out “Murderer!” and Greco responded, “Even worse. That’s the skull of a Jesuit.”
The visits to the morgue weren’t as pleasant. Dr. Reverter, who was tall and had the parsimonious and melancholic character of those born under the sign of Saturn, would cut open the cranial lid and show us the encephalic mass, teaching us to recognize the many calluses and marks on murderers’ brains.
“Their future crimes are written here, from the moment of their birth. If we had some apparatus that allowed us to see people’s brains, we could arrest those who bear these marks before they committed their crimes, and murder would disappear.”
At that time physiology was a main focus of criminology, and doctors and policemen dreamed of a science that could separate the innocent from the reprobate. Today it has lost all of its scientific value, and even mentioning Lombroso’s name in an auditorium—and I have often done so—is enough to set off derisive laughter. Today’s dismissive mockery is just as irresponsible as the blind faith of the past. After more than twenty years of tracking down murderers, my experience has shown me that fate’s signs do show on our faces; the problem is that there isn’t one single system for interpreting them. Lombroso didn’t err when choosing his field of study; his error was in believing that all those clues hidden in faces and hands were subject to only one interpretation.
Did Craig believe in physiognomy or any other variant of criminal physiology? That was hard to say; the murders that interested him most were the ones that left traces only at the crime scene.
“Those easily identifiable criminals—the ones with prominent ears and protruding eye sockets and enormous hands, for them there’s the police. For the invisible murderer, the murderer that could be any one of us, that’s for me.”