The Paris Enigma by Pablo De Santis

Author:Pablo De Santis
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: HarperCollins

6

Six days had passed since Darbon’s murder, and the halls of Madame Nécart’s hotel were no longer filled with leisurely waiting assistants. The armchairs were empty, and even the Sioux Indian had set off on some mission.

“Where are they? How would I know where they are?!” replied the owner. “Finally those savages are out of the drawing room. If my husband were alive, he never would have stood for having a redskin Indian in our hotel.”

The flight en masse had me worried. While they were there, I felt privileged to have a case. But with them out in the city, I couldn’t help thinking that they were the ones with the real clues, and that I was left walking in the shadows.

Arzaky didn’t seem to trust the information we had either, because he sent me to look for Grialet and Bradelli on my own.

“Grimas, the editor of Traces, knows them well. He published several magazines for them. Ask him where they are.”

“But,” I protested, “you can get the truth out of suspects with just a look. I’m a foreigner, I’m inexperienced, I’m only an assistant…”

He dismissed my arguments with a contemptuous wave of his hand.

“Detective’s apprentice, son of a shoemaker: don’t be so sheepish, just go and distract Grialet.”

“I’m better at distracting myself than anyone else. And even if I manage to, what do I do then?”

“What do you think? Look for oil-stained clothes or gloves or shoes, of course.”

“If Grialet is the killer, he’s had time to get rid of those things.”

“You are an Argentine spendthrift. No good Frenchman would ever throw away a pair of shoes, not even if holding on to them could send him to the gallows.”

Adrien Grimas’s publishing house was located on the first floor of a building in the Jewish quarter. There was a fabric store below. Grimas was eating a bowl of soup when I came in, and as soon as he saw me he hurriedly tried to hide the large blue notebook where he kept his accounts. The editor was supposed to give a percentage of his profits to The Twelve Detectives, but he claimed to have recorded a loss. Later I mentioned to Arzaky that it seemed very strange to me that the wisest men on the planet, capable of finding a killer from one hair or a cigarette butt, could be taken in by that little bespectacled man, who made only a cursory attempt to cover his tracks. He replied, “It’s a well-known tale: Thales of Miletus was walking through the field, looking up at the stars, when he fell into a well. A Thracian slave who saw him laughed and asked, ‘How can a wise man know so much about the distant stars and not notice the well that’s in front of him?’ Well, in our case, we are twelve men who all fell into the well at the same time because we were looking up at the stars.”

Once Grimas had hidden his ledger book, he went back to finishing his soup of onions and meat.

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