The tower looked finished, The machinists, organized into groups of four, continued to replace the provisional rivets—cold-fitted—for the definitive ones, which were heated to red-hot and fitted with whacks from a drop hammer. Over the two years of the construction, there had been plenty of problems: some of them were minor, like the flaws in the protective railing, which was being replaced, and others were more serious, like the labor union disputes that threatened to halt the project, or the problems getting the elevators to go up along the diagonal. In his statements to the press, Alexandre Eiffel seemed more confident about dealing with the engineering problems than with his enemies: the tower had been attacked by politicians, intellectuals, artists, and members of esoteric sects. But one thing was sure: the taller it grew, the more the problems faded into the distance. Now that it was almost completed, the voices that opposed it no longer resounded with the fury that leads to action, but with nostalgia for a lost world. The same thing had happened with the union. It was more difficult to work at a thousand feet high than at a hundred and fifty or three hundred, because of the vertigo, and the freezing winds. But the laborers, so unruly close to the ground, became more obedient the higher they climbed, as if they considered the tower a personal challenge and had reached a place of proud solitude that no longer tolerated the complaints of the herd. Like a good engineer, Eiffel knew that sometimes difficulties made things run more smoothly.
In spite of the fact that the tower was almost finished, there was one enemy that had not given up harassing the builders with anonymous letters and minor attacks. Along with Turin and Prague, Paris was one of the points on the Hermetic triangle, and it was swarming with esoteric sects. All their members hated the tower. The organizing committee for the World’s Fair had been forced to hire Louis Darbon to look into the anonymous letters. Eiffel, the engineer, wasn’t in favor of this investigation. When one of his collaborators made fun of the fanatics, Eiffel defended them by saying, “They are the only ones, with their feverish minds, that have understood us. We are in a war of symbolism.”
The tower was the entrance to the fair: once you passed through the tall door made of iron and empty space, you saw frenetic activity devoid of any hierarchy or central focus. That chaos made you understand the dictionary compiler’s desire to impose alphabetical order on the world’s infinite variety. Everything was being built at once: temples, pagodas, cathedrals. In the streets, carts dragged enormous wooden boxes, decorated with shipping and customs stamps, from which emerged the tops of African trees or the arms of disproportionately large statues. Displaced natives from Africa and the Americas were ordered to build their indigenous dwellings in the middle of the splendor of European pavilions and palaces. But it wasn’t easy to maintain these islands of virgin nature in the midst of all the hustle and bustle and amid the machines: when there wasn’t a hut on fire there was an igloo melting.
The fair strove to re-create the world in a finite space in Paris, but this activity provoked a strange reaction, and the fair expanded throughout the city, infecting theaters and hotels, where glass cases were mounted and treasures were unearthed from basements that no one had been in for years. Even the cemeteries were restored and the now shiny tombs had an air of artifice, as if the old gravestones had been transformed into facsimiles of themselves. I was surrounded by a world without secrets; there was nothing left that could remain hidden. Up until now we had tolerated the dim imprecision of gas lamps; it was the heir to candles and the yellow moon, not the sun. From the tower and from the fair itself, electric light exposed a world without subtlety, without yellows, without shadows. It had the transparency of truth.
In that motley city, I walked toward the Numancia Hotel. After convincing the concierge to let me in, I went down the stairs to the underground parlor, a former meeting place of conspirators and reprobates. It looked at once like a museum and a theater because there were glass-covered cabinets on the walls but also chairs arranged in a semicircle. At the round table sat Arzaky, looking older than the photographs I had seen of him. He rested his head on the table, as if he had fallen asleep. His pillow was a pile of yellowing scraps of paper filled with his tiny handwriting. He was surrounded by the glazed shelves that would soon showcase the detectives’ instruments, but now displayed only the odd newspaper page, dead insects, and some wilted flowers.
The floor, assailed by the basement’s dampness, crunched beneath my feet, and Arzaky stood up with a start. His alarm was such that I feared for my life, as if the sleeping detective was prepared for a killer’s visit. He was so tall that he appeared to unfold, like a fireman’s ladder. When he saw me he abandoned all attempts at self-defense, seeing that I was harmless.
“Who are you? A messenger?”
“It would be an honor for you to regard me as such. I was sent by Renato Craig.”
“And you come empty handed?”
“I’ve brought you this cane.”
“A piece of wood with a lion’s head.”
“It’s full of surprises.”
“It’s been a long time since anything has surprised me. Once you reach thirty, everything’s a repetition. And I’m over fifty.”
He held the cane in his hands, without trying to discover any of its hidden mechanisms.
“He also asked me to tell you about his final case. He didn’t want to write it out, so he asked me to tell it to you in person. And not to let anyone else hear.”
That seemed to wake Arzaky completely.
“A story! Do they all think I can fill up these cases with stories? I need objects, but they won’t give them up. They cling to their investigative methods, their artifacts, their secret weapons. They all want to see what everyone else brings; they want the others to show their cards first. The editors of the catalogue have already asked me several times to give them something, but I’m forced to send them off with excuses. It’s easier to put together a meeting of sopranos than of The Twelve Detectives. Don’t look so distraught, it’s not your fault. Let’s hear what old Craig has to say.”
I was about to start speaking, but Arzaky silenced me with a gesture.
“Not here. Let’s go to the dining hall. This dampness is ruining my lungs.”
I hurried to keep pace with Arzaky’s giant strides. The dining hall was still empty. Hesitant afternoon light came in from the street; they had already begun to light the gas lamps. There were some private rooms in the hall, with wooden tables. Arzaky chose one by the window. The waiter approached and I ordered a glass of wine, but all Arzaky had to do was make a sign that meant “the usual.”
“Don’t start yet: wait until I finish my drink. I have a feeling that I’m not going to like what you’re about to tell me. Good news arrives in the mail; these days, if there’s a messenger, that means it’s bad news.”
The waiter brought my wine and a conical glass filled halfway with green liquid for Arzaky. The detective put a slotted spoon with a lump of sugar on it over the glass, and then poured a bit of ice-cold water on it. The liquid turned a milky color.
He needed to screw up courage to listen to that tale, as I did to tell it. I drank half the wine, trying to show a familiarity with alcohol that I didn’t really have. I started to tell the story. My bad French motivated me to get it all over with quickly, but at the same time I wanted to put off the ending, which I felt I couldn’t possibly tell, so I padded the story with details and tangents. Arzaky showed neither interest nor impatience, and I began to feel as if I were talking to myself.
I was interrupted by the detective’s yawn.
“Am I boring you? Should I make it shorter?”
“Don’t worry. Both fables of just a few lines and newspaper serials that continue for months reach their end at some point.”
The end was near. I described the scene in the shed; I described the magician’s lacerated body, and Craig’s indifference to his own crime. I lacked the words to express the horror I had felt that night. Every once in a while, Arzaky corrected my French in a voice devoid of emotion.
“Craig sent me to tell you this. I can’t explain why. I don’t understand it myself.”
Arzaky finished his third absinthe. His eyes shone with the liquor’s green radiance.
“Now can I tell you a story? It’s a story told by a Danish philosopher—philosophy, as you know, is the secret vice of detectives. A great vizier sent his son to quell a rebellion in a distant province. When the son arrived there he didn’t know what to do, since he was very young and it was a confusing situation. So he asked his father for advice through a messenger. The vizier hesitated, not wanting to answer directly because the messenger could fall into rebel hands and be tortured into revealing the information. So this is what he did: he took the messenger to the garden, he showed him a group of tall tulips, and he cut them with his cane, in one fell swoop. He asked the messenger to relate exactly what he had seen. The messenger managed to reach that distant region without being captured by the enemy. When he told the vizier’s son what he had seen in the garden, the son understood right away and had all the lords of the city executed. The rebellion was put down.”
Arzaky got up suddenly, as if he had remembered something urgent.
“We’ll talk tonight in the parlor. Today’s topic will be the enigma. The detectives and assistants will all be there, although of course the assistants are not allowed to speak. I know how you Argentines are, so I feel obliged to offer you some advice: practice keeping silent.”