After a tour through the cities of Tucumán and Córdoba, Kalidán the magician returned to the Victoria Theater for four farewell performances. We were there, and we saw that the magician’s assistant—a tall and extraordinarily thin girl, who herself seemed to be another artful trick of catoptrical magic—had been replaced by a young man who wore the blue uniform of an imaginary army. The new assistant was none other than Alarcón, who operated the machinery, moved the screens, offered himself as a human target for the dagger trick, and allowed his skull to be hooked up to some cables that led to a strange machine. That machine supposedly projected the assistant’s thoughts onto a white screen: we saw some fish, some coins that dropped and were lost, the naked silhouette of a woman who seemed to me to be the exact replica—though I didn’t dare mention it to anyone—of Señora Craig. Alarcón had gotten further than anyone; he was working with the magician. It made our clumsy attempts to get information seem like child’s play.
We continued meeting in the academy’s rooms, but we were disheartened. We expected Craig to finally release us from the course, from the obligation, from our hopes. Craig had his acolyte and there was no reason to go on. But the detective still taught us, and he never mentioned any need for an assistant.
In the following days, Alarcón still hadn’t returned to the academy and Craig asked us if we knew anything about his whereabouts. His questions surprised us, because we thought that it was Craig, not us, who was in contact with Alarcón. The performances at the Victoria Theater had ended and the newspapers announced that the magician was traveling to Montevideo.
One afternoon, after class, Craig handed me a wad of bills and told me to go to Montevideo that same night.
“No one has heard from Alarcón, and his family is beginning to worry,” he said to me in a hushed voice.
“I’m sure he’s found something and wants to surprise you.”
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s to hate surprises.”
That night I crossed the river on a steamship; the boat’s movement kept me awake. In the morning, I bought an orchestra seat for that day’s show at the Marconi Theater. First a pianist played a piano that sounded like brass, and then there was some sort of duel between two actors, dressed as gauchos, that each represented one side of the River Plate. That was when I fell asleep. When I woke up, Kalidán’s show was about to end. I only saw a little of it, but enough to know that Gabriel Alarcón had been replaced by a black girl, whose skin was slathered with some kind of oil that sometimes made her look like a statue.
I telegraphed Craig to tell him the news. He came to the city the next day and got a room at the Regency Hotel, which had a few pool tables at the back: in those days the game was new and was played according to the Italian rules. Craig listened in silence to the account of my inquiries, while he drank one brandy after another.
After the performance we went to the magician’s dressing room. Kalidán received us wrapped in a golden robe and smoking an Egyptian cigarette. Craig entered timidly and indecisively; I couldn’t tell if it was a brilliant act or if the detective actually felt intimidated by the magician.
“I’m a private detective; I’ve been sent by the Alarcón family.”
“I know very well who you are. You are one of the founding members of The Twelve Detectives. I’ll never forget the Case of the Severed Hand, and how, based on a bit of wine left in a glass…”
Craig didn’t let him continue. “The family’s youngest son, Gabriel Alarcón, whom you hired as an assistant, has disappeared.”
Kalidán didn’t seem to be alarmed by our presence, although he still hadn’t taken off his makeup, as if he didn’t want to show us his true face. He spoke with the affable common sense that is so universal among killers, at least according to the pages of The Key to Crime.
“I hired a young man for five performances, but he wasn’t named Alarcón. He said his name was Natalio Girac. I don’t ask a lot of questions. In show business, everybody has a fake name. My real name, as you can imagine, is not Kalidán, and I’m not actually from India. I’m used to doing my act with a woman, but the assistant I had got sick and Girac replaced her very well. I gave him a good tip. I would have liked to bring him with me, but Sayana, the woman you saw, was waiting for me here in Montevideo. We have worked together before. The audience comes to see her, more than me, and I couldn’t disappoint them.”
For years I had read accounts of Craig’s cases, in which he bombarded suspects with seemingly simple questions until the distracted murderer made a fatal mistake. On the printed pages of The Key to Crime, Craig was always the absolute master of the situation. But here, in front of the magician, he seemed more like an awkward, frightened policeman who fell for the first lie he heard. He didn’t ask any more questions, he just apologized and then we left the dressing room. I wanted to lie in wait for the magician, so we could see his real face, but he refused. We left Montevideo at dawn. Leaning on the steamship’s railing, we were silent for a long time, until finally Craig spoke.
“Did you notice anything odd about the name that Alarcón used: Natalio Girac.”
“What about it?”
“Girac is an anagram of Craig. And Natalio is the name of our only son, who died as an infant.”
Over the next few days Craig continued to do nothing, in spite of the pressure from Alarcón’s family. If he had a secret plan for finding out the truth, he didn’t mention it. There were many stories in which the detective adopted some sort of indolence, or left town, or acted crazy for a while and then later it would be revealed that what seemed like apathy or delirium had actually been the patient application of a genius plan. But in this case Craig’s revelation was slow in coming.
Gabriel Alarcón was born into a family of boat manufacturers. The Alarcón shipyards supplied the merchant marines of several countries. It was a powerful family and all sorts of emissaries visited Craig in the days following our return, demanding that he find the boy. Craig received them all, and he asked them all for more time to work. The police beat him to the punch and Kalidán the magician was arrested as soon as he got off the steamship that had brought him from Montevideo.
The magician’s capture appeared on the front page of the papers. He had traveled disguised as a Hindu, in his turban and yellow tunic, with shoe polish on his face. Craig gave all the reports we had gathered to the police, but there was no indication of the boy’s whereabouts in them, nor any proof of Kalidán’s crimes. The police interrogated him for fifteen days and fifteen nights. Kalidán, in spite of being driven mad with the beatings, the cold, and the lack of sleep, didn’t say a word. When it was clear that they couldn’t make a case against the magician, they released him with certain restrictions: he couldn’t leave the country, and every four days he had to come in person to check in at the police station.
Gabriel Alarcón’s disappearance marked the end of the Academy. The newspapers, which had so celebrated the detective’s achievements in the past, now attacked him mercilessly: he had sent a novice, an innocent, to an uncertain fate. The other students, pressured by their families, stopped coming. Trivak and I decided to stay in the empty building, as a show of confidence in Craig. We helped classify the pieces from the forensic museum, we cleaned and oiled the microscopes, and we waited in vain for the classes to start up again. Finally Trivak left as well.
“Your family?” I asked him.
“No. Boredom.”
I had a good excuse to stay: the organization of the archive, which Craig had assigned to me months earlier. I would arrive early and go to the kitchen, where Angela served me yerba maté tea and French toast she made with day-old bread. Once in a while I had tea with Señora Craig, and we continued the conversations she had begun with Alarcón. I tried to cheer her up, but each time I saw her she seemed paler, dulled by Alarcón’s disappearance and her husband’s fall from grace.