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, Deambrés, Arnaud, and Pontoriero; Arnaud died three years after the fair ended, but Pontoriero and Deambrés 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 Deambrés 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.)? Deambrés 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 Great Toy Encyclopedia, the first of its kind, produced by the Scarletti publishing house in 1903.
“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 Deambrés, who continued their task on the third floor 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 Señora Craig and accepting her request, I was allowed to visit my mentor in the hospital. I remember the smell of bleach and the checkerboard floors, 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 another, and between detectives and their assistants. Each will bring with him an object representing his concept of investigative work: some will bring complex machines and others a simple magnifying glass. I will send along my cane. Open the closet, take it out.”
I opened up a white metal wardrobe and carefully removed Craig’s cane. It was incredibly heavy. The detective’s clothes were also hung up inside the wardrobe, and seeing these garments empty, without any body inhabiting them, I felt a deep sadness, as if Craig’s illness were there, in the wardrobe, in the way he failed to wear his clothes.
“That cane was given to me by a furniture and weapons salesman who had a store near Victoria Plaza. Actually he didn’t give it to me: I bought it for one coin. I had done a favor for the man; I had recovered an old Bible that was stolen from him. I didn’t want to accept any payment so he brought me this cane and told me: ‘There is a sword hidden inside. I want you to have it, but I can’t give it to you. If one gives a blade as a gift, the fate of the former owner is passed on to the recipient. And who wants someone else’s fate? Give me the smallest coin you have.’ And I gave him a ten-cent coin. Since then, this cane and I have been constant companions.”
I carefully leaned the heavy stick against a chair.
“You will be responsible for bringing Arzaky something else as well. I want you to tell him about My Final Case. Only him.”
“The Case of the Cobra Bite?”
On that occasion, Craig had proved that the cobra was completely innocent: a woman had killed her husband with a distillation of curare, and then pretended that it had been one of the snakes that her husband raised.
“Don’t be an idiot. My Final Case. The case that has no other name but that one: the final case. Give him all the details. The real version. He’ll be able to understand it.”
I thought about Kalidán’s body, naked, hanging by his feet. It had been motionless, covered in a cloud of flies, but in my imagination it swayed slightly.
“I can’t tell that story. Ask me for anything but that.”
“Do you want me to go to church and confess? Do you think detectives stoop to talking to priests? Repentance doesn’t exist for us, nor does reconciliation or forgiveness. We are philosophers of action, and we judge ourselves only by our actions. Do what I tell you. Tell the Pole the whole truth. That is my message for Viktor Arzaky.”