The Paris Enigma by Pablo De Santis

alreadyhad a good buyer for it. So he decided to steal the book during the night. Rasmussen, who was working late, surprised him. Numau got frightened and shot him.
    â€œâ€˜How did you find me?’ the killer asked before he was taken away by the police. I showed him the volume of the Brothers Grimm. ‘This book showed me that one has to learn to tell the wet from the dry.’ ‘As a child, this was my favorite,’ said Numau. ‘If any book had to bring me down, I’m glad it was this one.’”
    Arzaky took Tobias Hatter’s toy and amused himself for a few seconds, making drawings and then erasing them.
    â€œThis is like my memory. I erase everything in seconds.”
    â€œBut something remains behind on the black sheet, Detective Arzaky,” said Hatter.
    â€œI hope so.”
    Sakawa came forward and handed Arzaky what appeared to be an urgent message. It was a blank page.
    â€œWhat’s this? Invisible ink?”
    â€œAn enigma. This is what the enigma always is for us: a blank page.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?” asked Rojo, the Spanish detective. “That we don’t actually do any investigating? That we make it all up? Why they’ve even gone so far as to accuse me of inventing my fight with the giant octopus!”
    â€œNo, of course not. But the mystery isn’t hidden at some unattainable depth; it’s right on the surface. We are the ones who make it what it is. We slowly construct the facts; they become a riddle. We are the people who say that one mysterious death is more important than a thousand men lying dead on a battlefield. This shows us the Zen of the enigma: there is no mystery, there is only a void and we make the mystery. Our desire for this, not the movements of killers in the night, guides our footsteps. Perhaps we should set aside crimes for a moment, forget about guilty suspects. Haven’t we realized that we all see different things in the same mystery? Perhaps, in the end, there isnothing to see. And even more in my case than in each of yours. As you all know, my specialty is finding something more ephemeral than the enactor of poisonings, gunshot wounds, or stabbings; I search for what we call grasshopper hunters.”
    â€œGrasshopper hunters?” asked Rojo. “Are you sure that’s what you meant to say?”
    â€œI didn’t misspeak. Grasshopper hunters are what we call those who incite others to take their own lives. They are the subtlest type of killers. I’ll explain the origin of the name a little later.”
    As he spoke, Sakawa slowly, and almost casually, moved toward the center of the room.
    â€œGrasshopper hunters kill without weapons. Sometimes they do it with a few lines published in a newspaper; other times it’s an insidious comment or a gesture made with a fan. There are those who have murdered with a poem. And I have devoted my life to the subtle hunt for those who leave grasshoppers. But sometimes I ask myself: what if I’ve been mistaken about all this from the very beginning? Perhaps I should let men commit suicide, and not try to alter the course of things. Was I finding a puzzle to solve in behavior that wasn’t mysterious in the least, in people who were fated from birth to their unique deaths? I don’t have nightmares about crime; I dream about the blank page, I dream that I am the one who draws the ideograms where there was nothing, where there should always be nothing. And that is what I want to ask you all: Should we be not only the solvers of mysteries, but also the custodians of the enigma? Our Greek colleague gave Oedipus and the sphinx as an example. I say we are both Oedipus and the sphinx. The world is becoming an open book. We must be the defenders of evidence, the exterminators of doubt, but also the last guardians of mystery.”
    Sakawa’s words left the detectives perplexed. If he had been a Westerner, they would have argued with