The Paris Enigma by Pablo De Santis Read Free Book Online

time, at most six, but this time they’ll be twelve. Well, eleven, since my husband can’t go.”
    What was I hearing? Craig would miss the first meeting of The Twelve Detectives in history?
    â€œHe has to go, even if he’s sick. You could go with him. You and a nurse.”
    â€œMy husband was the driving force behind this meeting, along with Viktor Arzaky. They both wanted the art of investigation to be represented among so many other trades. With your youthful enthusiasm, my dear Salvatrio, nothing is impossible, but I know that my husband can’t take the long boat trip. Which is why you must go in his place.”
    â€œI couldn’t take his place. I’m an inexperienced acolyte.”
    â€œArzaky, the Pole, as my husband calls him, has been left without an assistant. Old Tanner is sick; he plays chess, he grows tulips, and he sends letters. And Arzaky has to prepare the exhibition of the detectives’ instruments. My husband thought that you could go and help him in that undertaking.”
    â€œI have no money.”
    â€œIt will all be paid for. The fair’s organizing committee will take care of the expenses. What’s more, my husband won’t take no for an answer.”
    I had never traveled anywhere. The invitation both excited and intimidated me. I paused and then said, in a faint voice, “I know yourhusband would have preferred to send Alarcón. Today is his funeral. Are you going to go, Señora Craig?”
    â€œNo, Salvatrio. I am not going to go.”
    I took a sip of bitter tea.
    â€œI have something to confess to you. We envied him.”
    â€œAlarcón? Why?”
    Señora Craig sat up in her chair. Some sort of vague flush gave life to her face. I didn’t give her the answer she was expecting.
    â€œBecause he was your husband’s favorite. Because he considered him more competent than us.”
    Señora Craig stood up. It was time to leave.
    â€œYou are alive and he is dead. Don’t ever envy anyone, Señor Salvatrio.”

1
    T he 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 publishedpartial 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.
    â€œAll of our work consists of avoiding the one word that would free us from all these