Collected Stories Read online

  Erik Lönnrot smiled and read to him with perfect gravity an underlined passage from the thirty-third chapter of the Philologus: “ ‘Dies Judaeorum incipit a solis occasu usque ad solis occasum diei sequentis.’ Meaning,” he added, “ ‘the Jewish day begins at sundown and ends the following sundown.’ “

  The other man attempted a bit of irony. “Is that the most valuable clue you’ve picked up tonight?” he said.

  “No. Far more valuable is one of the words Ginzberg used to you on the phone.”

  The evening papers made a great deal of these recurrent disappearances. La Croix de l’Épée contrasted the present acts of violence with the admirable discipline and order observed by the last Congress of Hermits. Ernst Palast, in The Martyr, condemned “the unbearable pace of this unauthorized and stinting pogrom, which has required three months for the liquidation of three Jews.” The Jüdische Zeitung rejected the ominous suggestion of an anti-Semitic plot, “despite the fact that many penetrating minds admit of no other solution to the threefold mystery.” The leading gunman of the city’s Southside, Dandy Red Scharlach, swore that in his part of town crimes of that sort would never happen, and he accused Inspector Franz Treviranus of criminal negligence.

  On the night of March first, Inspector Treviranus received a great sealed envelope. Opening it, he found it contained a letter signed by one “Baruch Spinoza” and, evidently torn out of a Baedeker, a detailed plan of the city. The letter predicted that on the third of March there would not be a fourth crime because the paint and hardware store on the Westside, the Rue de Toulon tavern, and the Hôtel du Nord formed “the perfect sides of an equilateral and mystical triangle.” In red ink the map demonstrated that the three sides of the figure were exactly the same length. Treviranus read this Euclidean reasoning with a certain weariness and sent the letter and map to Erik Lönnrot—the man, beyond dispute, most deserving of such cranky notions.

  Lönnrot studied them. The three points were, in fact, equidistant. There was symmetry in time (December third, January third, February third); now there was symmetry in space as well. All at once he felt he was on the verge of solving the riddle. A pair of dividers and a compass completed his sudden intuition. He smiled, pronounced the word Tetragrammaton (of recent acquisition) and called the Inspector on the phone.

  “Thanks for the equilateral triangle you sent me last night,” he told him. “It has helped me unravel our mystery. Tomorrow, Friday, the murderers will be safely behind bars; we can rest quite easy.”

  “Then they aren’t planning a fourth crime?”

  “Precisely because they are planning a fourth crime we can rest quite easy.”

  Lönnrot hung up the receiver. An hour later, he was traveling on a car of the Southern Railways on his way to the deserted villa Triste-le-Roy. To the south of the city of my story flows a dark muddy river, polluted by the waste of tanneries and sewers. On the opposite bank is a factory suburb where, under the patronage of a notorious political boss, many gunmen thrive. Lönnrot smiled to himself, thinking that the best-known of them—Red Scharlach—would have given anything to know about this sudden excursion of his. Azevedo had been a henchman of Scharlach’s. Lönnrot considered the remote possibility that the fourth victim might be Scharlach himself. Then he dismissed it. He had practically solved the puzzle; the mere circumstances— reality (names, arrests, faces, legal and criminal proceedings)—barely held his interest now. He wanted to get away, to relax after three months of desk work and of snail-pace investigation. He reflected that the solution of the killings lay in an anonymously sent triangle and in a dusty Greek word. The mystery seemed almost crystal clear. He felt ashamed for having spent close to a hundred days on it.

  The train came to a stop at a deserted loading platform. Lönnrot got off. It was one of those forlorn evenings that seem as empty as dawn. The air off the darkening prairies was damp and cold. Lönnrot struck out across the fields. He saw dogs, he saw a flatcar on a siding, he saw the line of the horizon, he saw a pale horse drinking stagnant water out of a ditch. Night was falling when he saw the rectangular mirador of the villa Triste-le-Roy, almost as tall as the surrounding black eucalyptus trees. He thought that only one more dawn and one more dusk (an ancient light in the east and another in the west) were all that separated him from the hour appointed by the seekers of the Name.

  A rusted iron fence bounded the villa’s irregular perimeter. The main gate was shut. Lönnrot, without much hope of getting in, walked completely around the place. Before the barred gate once again, he stuck a hand through the palings—almost mechanically—and found the bolt. The squeal of rusted iron surprised him. With clumsy obedience, the whole gate swung open.

  Lönnrot moved forward among the eucalyptus trees, stepping on the layered generations of fallen leaves. Seen from up close, the house was a clutter of meaningless symmetries and almost insane repetitions: one icy Diana in a gloomy niche matched another Diana in a second niche; one balcony appeared to reflect another; double outer staircases crossed at each landing. A two-faced Hermes cast a monstrous shadow. Lönnrot made his way around the house as he had made his way around the grounds. He went over every detail; below the level of the terrace he noticed a narrow shutter.

  He pushed it open. A few marble steps went down into a cellar. Lönnrot, who by now anticipated the architect’s whims, guessed that in the opposite wall he would find a similar sets of steps. He did. Climbing them, he lifted his hands and raised a trapdoor.

  A stain of light led him to a window. He opened it. A round yellow moon outlined two clogged fountains in the unkempt garden. Lönnrot explored the house. Through serving pantries and along corridors he came to identical courtyards and several times to the same courtyard. He climbed dusty stairways to circular anterooms, where he was multiplied to infinity in facing mirrors. He grew weary of opening or of peeping through windows that revealed, outside, the same desolate garden seen from various heights and various angles; and indoors he grew weary of the rooms of furniture, each draped in yellowing slipcovers, and the crystal chandeliers wrapped in tarlatan. A bedroom caught his attention—in it, a single flower in a porcelain vase. At a touch, the ancient petals crumbled to dust. On the third floor, the last floor, the house seemed endless and growing. The house is not so large, he thought. This dim light, the sameness, the mirrors, the many years, my unfamiliarity, the loneliness are what make it large.

  By a winding staircase he reached the mirador. That evening’s moon streamed in through the diamond-shaped panes; they were red, green, and yellow. He was stopped by an awesome, dizzying recollection.

  Two short men, brutal and stocky, threw themselves on him and disarmed him: another, very tall, greeted him solemnly and told him, “You are very kind. You’ve saved us a night and a day.”

  It was Red Scharlach. The men bound Lönnrot’s wrists. After some seconds, Lönnrot at last heard himself saying, “Scharlach, are you after the Secret Name?”

  Scharlach remained standing, aloof. He had taken no part in the brief struggle and had barely held out his hand for Lönnrot’s revolver. He spoke. Lönnrot heard in his voice the weariness of final triumph, a hatred the size of the universe, a sadness as great as that hatred.

  “No,” said Scharlach. “I’m after something more ephemeral, more frail. I’m after Erik Lönnrot. Three years ago, in a gambling dive on the Rue de Toulon, you yourself arrested my brother and got him put away. My men managed to get me into a coupé before the shooting was over, but I had a cop’s bullet in my guts. Nine days and nine nights I went through hell, here in this deserted villa, racked with fever. The hateful two-faced Janus that looks on the sunsets and the dawns filled both my sleep and my wakefulness with its horror. I came to loathe my body, I came to feel that two eyes, two hands, two lungs, are as monstrous as two faces. An Irishman, trying to convert me to the faith of Jesus, kept repeating to me the saying of the goyim—All roads lead to Rome. At night, my fever fed on that metaphor. I felt the world was a maze fr
om which escape was impossible since all roads, though they seemed to be leading north or south, were really leading to Rome, which at the same time was the square cell where my brother lay dying and also this villa, Triste-le-Roy. During those nights, I swore by the god who looks with two faces and by all the gods of fever and of mirrors that I would weave a maze around the man who sent my brother to prison. Well, I have woven it and it’s tight. Its materials are a dead rabbi, a compass, an eighteenth-century sect, a Greek word, a dagger, and the diamond-shaped patterns on a paint-store wall.”

  Lönnrot was in a chair now, with the two short men at his side.

  “The first term of the series came to me by pure chance,” Scharlach went on. “With some associates of mine—among them Daniel Azevedo—I’d planned the theft of the Tetrarch’s sapphires. Azevedo betrayed us. He got drunk on the money we advanced him and tried to pull the job a day earlier. But there in the hotel he got mixed up and around two in the morning blundered into Yarmolinsky’s room. The rabbi, unable to sleep, had decided to do some writing. In all likelihood, he was preparing notes or a paper on the Name of God and had already typed out the words ‘The first letter of the Name has been uttered.’ Azevedo warned him not to move. Yarmolinsky reached his hand toward the buzzer that would have wakened all the hotel staff; Azevedo struck him a single blow with his knife. It was probably a reflex action. Fifty years of violence had taught him that the easiest and surest way is to kill. Ten days later, I found out through the Jüdische Zeitung that you were looking for the key to Yarmolinsky’s death in his writings. I read his History of the Hasidic Sect. I learned that the holy fear of uttering God’s Name had given rise to the idea that that Name is secret and all-powerful. I learned that some of the Hasidim, in search of that secret Name, had gone as far as to commit human sacrifices. The minute I realized you were guessing that the Hasidim had sacrificed the rabbi, I did my best to justify that guess. Yarmolinsky died the night of December third. For the second Sacrifice’ I chose the night of January third. The rabbi had died on the Northside; for the second ‘sacrifice’ we wanted a spot on the Westside. Daniel Azevedo was the victim we needed. He deserved death—he was impulsive, a traitor. If he’d been picked up, it would have wiped out our whole plan. One of my men stabbed him; in order to link his corpse with the previous one, I scrawled on the diamonds of the paint-store wall ‘The second letter of the Name has been uttered.’ “

  Scharlach looked his victim straight in the face, then continued. “The third ‘crime’ was staged on the third of February. It was, as Treviranus guessed, only a plant. Gryphius-Ginzberg-Ginsburg was me. I spent an interminable week (rigged up in a false beard) in that flea-ridden cubicle on the Rue de Toulon until my friends came to kidnap me. From the running board of the carriage, one of them wrote on the pillar, ‘The last letter of the Name has been uttered.’ That message suggested that the series of crimes was threefold. That was how the public understood it. I, however, threw in repeated clues so that you, Erik Lönnrot the reasoner, might puzzle out that the crime was fourfold. A murder in the north, others in the east and west, demanded a fourth murder in the south. The Tetragrammaton—the Name of God, JHVH—is made up of four letters; the harlequins and the symbol on the paint store also suggest four terms. I underlined a certain passage in Leusden’s handbook. That passage makes it clear that the Jews reckoned the day from sunset to sunset; that passage makes it understood that the deaths occurred on the fourth of each month. I was the one who sent the triangle to Treviranus, knowing in advance that you would supply the missing point—the point that determines the perfect rhombus, the point that fixes the spot where death is expecting you. I planned the whole thing, Erik Lönnrot, so as to lure you to the loneliness of Triste-le-Roy.”

  Lönnrot avoided Scharlach’s eyes. He looked off at the trees and the sky broken into dark diamonds of red, green, and yellow. He felt a chill and an impersonal, almost anonymous sadness. It was night now; from down in the abandoned garden came the unavailing cry of a bird. Lönnrot, for one last time, reflected on the problem of the patterned, intermittent deaths.

  “In your maze there are three lines too many,” he said at last. “I know of a Greek maze that is a single straight line. Along this line so many thinkers have lost their way that a mere detective may very well lose his way. Scharlach, when in another incarnation you hunt me down, stage (or commit) a murder at A, then a second murder at B, eight miles from A, then a third murder at C, four miles from A and B, halfway between the two. Lay in wait for me then at D, two miles from A and C, again halfway between them. Kill me at D, the way you are going to kill me here at Triste-le-Roy.”

  “The next time I kill you,” said Scharlach, “I promise you such a maze, which is made up of a single straight line and which is invisible and unending.”

  He moved back a few steps. Then, taking careful aim, he fired.

  The Life of

  Tadeo Isidoro Cruz

  (1829-1874)

  I’m looking for the face I had

  Before the world was made.

  Yeats, A Woman Young and Old

  On the sixth of February, 1829, a troop of gaucho militia, harried all day by Lavalle on their march north to join the army under the command of López, made a halt some nine or ten miles from Pergamino at a ranch whose name they did not know. Along about dawn, one of the men had a haunting nightmare and, in the dim shadows of a shed where he lay sleeping, his confused outcry woke the woman who shared his bed. Nobody ever knew what he dreamed, for around four o’clock that afternoon the gauchos were routed by a detachment of Suárez’ cavalry in a chase that went on for over twenty miles and ended, in thickening twilight, in tall swamp grasses, where the man died in a ditch, his skull split by a saber that had seen service in the Peruvian and Brazilian wars. The woman’s name was Isidora Cruz. The son born to her was given the name Tadeo Isidoro.

  My aim here is not to recount his whole personal history. Of the many days and nights that make up his life, only a single night concerns me; as to the rest, I shall tell only what is necessary to that night’s full understanding. The episode belongs to a famous poem—that is to say, to a poem which has come to mean “all things to all men” (I Corinthians 9:22), since almost endless variations, versions, and perversions have been read into its pages. Those who have theorized about Tadeo Isidoro’s story—and they are many—lay stress upon the influence of the wide-open plains on his character, but gauchos exactly like him were born and died along the wooded banks of the Paraná and in the hilly back country of Uruguay. He lived, it must be admitted, in a world of unrelieved barbarism. When he died, in 1874, in an outbreak of smallpox, he had never laid eyes on a mountain or a gas jet or a windmill pump. Nor on a city. In 1849, he went to Buenos Aires on a cattle drive from the ranch of Francisco Xavier Acevedo. The other drovers went into town on a spending spree; Cruz, somewhat wary, did not stray far from a shabby inn in the neighborhood of the stockyards. There he spent several days, by himself, sleeping on the ground, brewing his maté, getting up at daybreak, and going to bed at dusk. He realized (beyond words and even beyond understanding) that he could not cope with the city. One of the drovers, having drunk too much, began poking fun at him. Cruz ignored him, but several times on the way home, at night around the campfire, the other man kept on with his gibes, and Cruz (who up till then had shown neither anger nor annoyance) laid him out with his knife.

  On the run, Cruz was forced to hide out in a marshy thicket. A few nights later, the cries of a startled plover warned him he had been ringed in by the police. He tested his knife in a thick clump of grass and, to keep from entangling his feet, took off his spurs. Choosing to fight it out rather than be taken, he got himself wounded in the forearm, in the shoulder, and in the left hand. When he felt the blood dripping between his fingers; he fought harder than ever, badly wounding the toughest members of the search party. Toward daybreak, weak with loss of blood, he was disarmed. The army in those days acted as a kind of penal ins
titution; Cruz was sent off to serve in an outpost on the northern frontier. As a common soldier, he took part in the civil wars, sometimes fighting for the province of his birth, sometimes against. On the twenty-third of January, 1856, in the Cardoso marshes, he was one of thirty white men who, led by Sergeant Major Eusebio Laprida, fought against two hundred Indians. In this action he was wounded by a spear.

  The dim and hardy story of his life is full of gaps. Around 1868, we hear of him once more in Pergamino, married or living with a woman, father of a son, and owner of a small holding of land. In 1869, he was appointed sergeant of the local police. He had made up for his past and, in those days, may have thought of himself as a happy man, though deep down he wasn’t. (What lay in wait for him, hidden in the future, was a night of stark illumination— the night in which at last he glimpsed his own face, the night in which at last he heard his name. Fully understood, that night exhausts his story; or rather, one moment in that night, one deed, since deeds are our symbols.) Any life, no matter how long or complex it may be, is made up essentially of a single moment—the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is. It has been said that Alexander the Great saw his iron future in the fabled story of Achilles, and Charles XII of Sweden, his in the story of Alexander. To Tadeo Isidoro Cruz, who did not know how to read, this revelation was not given by a book; it was in a manhunt and in the man he was hunting that he learned who he was. The thing happened in this way: