The Paris Enigma Read Free Page B

proved to be shrewder than we were, when he could accuse us of missing the logic in an exercise of reason and then demonstrate his absolute superiority. Craig was eager to beat us, but he was even more eager to be defeated by Alarcón, and when from his disciple’s feminine mouth came the words that bested him, then he smiled twice as proudly.
    We hated Alarcón for that. We also hated him because his family was richer than any of ours, their fortune built on the construction of ships. He could aspire to be an ambassador or devote his life to traveling and women, and yet he had chosen to compete among us. And he was outdoing us. Trivak and I loathed him more than anyone: I was a shoemaker’s son and his father was one of the few Jewish lawyers in the city at that time. But even as we hated him, we recognized his merits (which far from assuaging our hatred, increased it). Alarcón always followed an unexpected and solitary path. He never asked for permission, but moved through the world as if all doors were open to him. His familiarity with the Craigs was unnerving. He had tea with Señora Margarita every afternoon. When the detective was out of town, she spent hours in his company. He became a substitute—of course, only at teatime—for her husband.
    When Craig revealed the solution to the case of the locked room—one that had obsessed the detectives—Alarcón responded, “Calling a murder ‘a locked-room crime’ is the wrong approach to the investigation, because it assumes that locks are infallible. There are no truly locked rooms. Calling it that presupposes an impossibility. In order to solve a problem, it has to be correctly posited. We mustn’t let semantics blue our logic.”
    We hated him. We competed among ourselves, not with him. We were fighting over second place, in a race where only first place mattered. On the days when Craig was traveling for a case, things were more relaxed and we went home earlier than usual. Trivak would stare, perplexed, from the doorway at Alarcón, who instead of leaving, would go upstairs, with those slow, almost weightless, steps of his, to accept Señora Craig’s excessive hospitality.

5
    I n the academy, on the first floor, there was a meeting room that was never used. An oval table with chairs around it stood in the middle. Both the chairs and the table were heavy, impossible to move, as if the wood had petrified. We called it the Green Room, because there were branches and vines painted on the ceiling by an artist who had begun his work with patience and diligence and had obviously tired of botany by the end. The exacting calligraphy of stems and veins became a confused mass of branches whipped by a storm. The walls were covered in dark wood, hung with swords, harquebusiers, and coats of arms; it all had a somewhat pretentious air, like the houses of antique dealers. The room looked like the remains of some abandoned project: the headquarters of a Masonic enclave, or a dining room that Señora Craig had envisaged for illustrious visitors who had never arrived. Called one day to convene there, we sat around the table, which was completely empty except for the dust, and Craig spoke.
    â€œGentlemen, in the last few years you have learned everything there is to know about crime. At least everything that can be taught in a classroom. Life is a perennial teacher, especially when the subject is death. Theoretical knowledge has its limits. Beyond those limits lies intuition, which is not something supernatural, as our friendTrivak, future member of the spiritualist brotherhood, insists. Rather it is the sudden relationship that we establish with other hidden, less dominant realms of knowledge. To intuit is to retrieve subconscious memories, which is why experience is the mother of intuition. It is nothing more than a specialized type of memory. Its goal is to find a pattern, connect the dots of this chaotic