In the days following the Mermaid’s murder, no one saw or heard from Arzaky. I am sure that it had been the shock of seeing her body that made him disappear. He had gone to the theater, alerted by one of his informants on the police force; he had looked in to see the Mermaid’s drowned body and then, without saying a word, he had completely vanished. After a few hours, the detectives began to worry. Gathered in that room at the Numancia Hotel, they were now ensconced in an uninterrupted conclave. Caleb Lawson recommended that I wait in Arzaky’s study, in case he happened to show up.
Arzaky’s absence had caused more worry than the crime itself. The next day representatives of the fair’s authorities began to arrive, with urgent messages that I piled into a cardboard box. What I had seen of Arzaky was a negligible portion of his real life, of the people he dealt with, of the numerous tasks that kept him busy: his absence made that hitherto buried world come to light. A parade of people came through the office: desperate women, men who owed him their lives, wives of the falsely accused and imprisoned, people selling secrets. I tried to get rid of them all calmly and quickly.
“Monsieur Arzaky will be back any minute.”
I grew tired of waiting and I went out to look for him. I visited all the taverns the detective frequented, I found informants who told me about other, more secret, spots; I left absinthe territory for opium dens. The more I asked around, the farther away Arzaky seemed. I wasn’t worried about the lack of clues, but rather the abundance of them. Arzaky had argued with a Hungarian, Arzaky had hit a woman, Arzaky had grabbed a dagger from a Chinese cook, that shadow on the wall is Arzaky’s shadow. A blind man, high on opium, opened his white eyes and said, “Arzaky is dead, and you are the one who killed him.”
I couldn’t go through those lairs without tasting what they offered me, so the more debased the places were, the more debased I became. First the wine, then the liquors improvised in secret stills, adulterated absinthe, which made me forget life’s troubles, and finally opium, which made me forget everything. In a few days all my money was gone. Everything Arzaky had paid me I had spent searching for him.
In my travels I noticed that what was said about Arzaky could have been said about anyone. A woman had whispered in my ear that Arzaky was sleeping in a whorehouse on the outskirts of town. When I went in, a drunken old man from Marseille attacked me with a butcher’s knife. I escaped, but I came back again the next night to ask for Arzaky. “He was here last night, a man from Marseille attacked him with a butcher’s knife,” they replied.
Aware that my stupor was clouding my good judgment, I spent an entire day in my hotel room, cleansing my system. There was no reason to think that Arzaky had given in to his grief. He could be working in secret, going back over old clues. At dusk, finally lucid, I decided to pay Grialet a visit. He opened the door himself, dressed in some sort of long black outfit. I wondered if I had interrupted a ceremony.
“Ah, my friend, the one who steals photographs. You’ll have to forgive me, I’m fresh out.”
“I’m ashamed. I already returned that photograph to its owner.”
“I was its owner. What are you looking for now?”
“I wanted to ask you about Arzaky.”
“Arzaky? They say he’s gone, disappeared, that he’s dead.”
“Did he pay you a visit?”
“I didn’t have the pleasure.”
“The Mermaid was Arzaky’s lover,” I told him somewhat defiantly. He didn’t bat an eyelash.
“I know. She was my lover too. He sent her to investigate me. And now he’s sending you.”
“I’m here on my own steam.”
Grialet laughed.
“The more we think we are acting on our own, the more we are being manipulated by unknown forces. Come in. We’re all friends here.”
There were three other men gathered in the living room. I recognized Isel’s birdlike profile. He greeted me with a nod of the head, leading me to believe that he remembered me too. Near the piano there was a man who wore a priest’s habit. His face was round and childlike, without any trace of a beard. The other, a younger man, wore a white shirt, open at the neck, and he looked around with the anxious eyes of a consumptive.
“Here we are: Darbon’s bêtes noires. You’ve already met Isel; the others are Father Desmorins and the poet Vilando. Desmorins was expelled from the Jesuits for dabbling in necromancy, but he hasn’t accepted that decision and still wears the habit.”
Desmorins spoke in a high-pitched voice. “The pope should go back to Avignon. Now, more than ever, the Catholic Church is not a stone, nor a cathedral, nor the nave at the heart of every cathedral. It is a broken bridge leading nowhere.”
“Desmorins insists on writing those kinds of things. He started out as the superior of all the order’s libraries, and his job was to burn all the inappropriate books, but some time ago he gave up the fire and gave in to the temptation of that literature. Young Vilando, on the other hand, has followed the opposite path: he once belonged to the circle of Count Villiers and Huysmans, but now he spends every night writing poems and then burning them. He wants them to exist only in the mind of the unknowable God.”
Grialet paused. The four men looked at me. They enjoyed being observed by others. They had spent their lives cultivating secrets, and now they wanted their faces, their slightly outlandish outfits, and their conspiratorial gestures to illustrate the power of all they were keeping quiet.
“These are the enemies of progress, the enemies of the tower and the World’s Fair,” continued Grialet. “The disciples of the secret teachings of Christ. We’re not so dangerous as Darbon suspected. Don’t you think?”
He pointed me to an empty chair. I sat with them. Soon there was a glass of spiced wine before me.
“We are against the World’s Fair. At least Darbon wasn’t wrong about that,” said Grialet.
“Why?”
“Because we believe that secrets make the world exist. The city of Paris has been a refuge for esoteric knowledge for many years. Now they’ve decided to illuminate it. Electric light, positivism, the World’s Fair, the tower: they are all part of the same thing. Science no longer strives to collect answers, but rather to obliterate the questions.”
I drank to the bottom of the glass. Since I wasn’t a born drinker, I liked the sickly sweet taste, the scent of cinnamon, and the other overlapping flavors that I couldn’t name. When the rock crystal cup was empty, Grialet refilled it.
“For years we initiates fought among ourselves. Gnostics, Rosicrucians, alchemical nostalgists, Valentinians, faithful of the Martinist church, Christians, anti-Christians. But now we are united. Now we all have a common enemy. Positivism, the desire to understand everything, to explain everything, is the modern disease. The tower, from which one can see the whole city, and the World’s Fair, which wants to display everything that exists, are nothing less than the symbols of a world without secrets. And your detectives encourage the builders, they encourage the scientists; they don’t know they too are alive because secrecy exists, and when it disappears, they will too.”
Isel brought his birdlike profile close to mine. “Grialet speaks the truth. The detectives have become, unwittingly, the most flagrant sign of the philosophy that everything can be explained. They cannot be saved. None of them, except Arzaky.”
“Why Arzaky?”
“Because he’s Polish,” said Isel. “Because he hasn’t renounced his faith in Christ, even though he hides it. Because he believes in the dark forces and in the limits of Reason. But that battle takes place in his heart and it will eventually destroy him. He thinks he’s a rationalist, a materialist, but he is a soldier of Christ.”
The wine had begun to make me woozy. For a few seconds I feared it was a bewitched potion. I tried to put some order to the words that floated around in my mouth; I slowly translated them into French.
“Darbon was investigating all of you. Darbon knew that you wanted to use the tower to disseminate your beliefs.”
“Disseminate?” Grialet laughed. “Do you think we’re journalists?” He said the word with unbounded disdain. “We’ve done everything possible to hide our beliefs. Christ preached to us, but his true message was a secret one: we are the target of that message, and we transmit it according to our rules. It doesn’t matter if they illuminate the world with electric light: the more light there is the more shadows it creates. We hide ourselves in the darkest corners, like the Christians in the catacombs.”
I wanted to jolt Grialet out of his superior posturing. I wanted to bring him back to the world of accusations, evidence, and alibis.
I asked him, “When was the last time you saw the Mermaid?”
Grialet stood up. I assumed that I had offended him and that he would kick me out right then and there. But he answered with the saddest voice I’ve ever heard.
“If only that were the case. If only I had stopped seeing her. I can’t stop seeing her. I go to the window and I think she’s about to show up.”
“Did you kill her?”
“Me? Why would I kill her?”
“Out of jealousy over Arzaky. Because she worked for him.”
“The Mermaid died of what all mermaids die of: the call of a world that doesn’t understand them.”
Grialet’s voice had begun to crack. He moved away from us and toward the window. Father Desmorins listened to everything with his gaze lowered, and didn’t interfere. The consumptive poet fixed his large damp eyes on me. It seemed that he was about to say something and he raised his hand, as if we were in school and he was awaiting the teacher’s approval, but then he lowered it quickly and regretfully. It must have been true that he burned his manuscripts because the tips of his fingers were blistered and scarred.
Isel dug his clawlike fingers into my arms.
“It is true that we are dark men, and that our rituals eventually leave us with a certain distaste for life, that sometimes leads us to lose our way. Among our predecessors, the suicide rate is higher than for other men. Lucky are those who die a quick death, a death that the Church condemns, wrote the Baron Dupotet. But don’t think that your detectives are men of the light. With the risks they run they also, unsuspectingly, seek out a death worthy of their legend. Or hadn’t you noticed how frequently they put their lives in peril for no good reason? And then there is the other temptation, crossing the line.”
“What line?”
“The one that separates them from the murderers,” said Isel.
Grialet called to me from the window. I freed myself from Isel’s grasp.
“You think you are looking for Arzaky? I think Arzaky’s following you. Come here.”
I looked through the glass at a man who was trying to hide in the darkness. He looked without daring to enter. His hair was a mess; he hadn’t changed his clothes or shaved in days. The man who used to be Reason incarnate was now seeking refuge in the shadows. Behind me, the wall whispered in black ink:
I am the Gloomy One—the Widower—the Unconsoled
The Prince of Aquitaine, at his stricken Tower.
I felt a mixture of happiness and disappointment; while I was relieved to have found him; I had hoped that Arzaky was on his way to a revelation, a solution to all the enigmas. And the man who was there below, clumsy and disheveled, didn’t even look as if he knew where he was.
By the time I made it out onto the street, he had disappeared.