The Book of Murder - By Guillermo Martinez & Sonia Soto Page 0,33

have dreamed that, after all the accusations he’d just read, this was what might bother him.

“Something closed, I see. So who would you be? The open Overt?”

I found this doubly surprising. I would never have imagined that Kloster had read Henry James, much less that he would fling the name of one of his characters at me out of the blue, like a taunt. It could only mean one thing: Kloster had read my series of articles on James. And if he’d read those, he must have seen my attack on him, which had appeared in the same journal, and he was now playing cat and mouse with me. I said only the first part—that I would never have suspected he might be interested in Henry James. He seemed offended by this.

“Why not? Because in my novels there are never fewer than ten deaths and in James’s the most that ever happens is that someone doesn’t get married? As a writer yourself, you shouldn’t be confused by trivia such as murders and marriages. What is it that counts in a crime novel? Definitely not the facts, or the succession of dead bodies. It’s what you should read behind them, the conjectures, the possible explanations. And isn’t James’s central theme precisely that: what each character conjectures? The possible reach of every action, the abyss of consequences and bifurcations. “Man is no more than the series of his actions,” Hegel once wrote. Yet James constructed his entire oeuvre in the interstices between actions, between lines of dialogue, in characters’ second and third intentions, in the agony of hesitations and calculations and strategies that precedes every action.”

“You might also say that in James’s novels marriage is a form of murder,” I ventured.

“Of course: a kidnapping followed by death,” he agreed, as if he’d never thought of it like that and was surprised that I had uttered an entire sentence with which he agreed. “Strange that we should be talking about James,” he said, and his tone, for the first time, was slightly less hostile, “because it was a book of his that began everything: the Notebooks.” He pointed to one of the uppermost shelves. “If you’ve ever had a look at them, you’ll remember the preface by Leon Edel. I’d never read a biography of James. As a rule I’m wary of writers’ biographies, but in that introduction I found something very interesting: at a certain point James stopped writing by hand and started dictating his novels to typists and stenographers. I was having a similar problem at the time. Not exactly tendonitis—that would hardly be likely in my case. But I’ve always found it easier to think on my feet and I could never sit at my desk for long. I’d pace the room, then sit down to write a few lines, but if I wanted to continue I had to get up again almost immediately. It made progress painfully slow. When I read the preface to the Notebooks I suddenly found the solution. That’s how I came to hire Luciana.”

“How did you find her?” I asked. I had always wondered.

“I put an ad in the paper. It was an easy choice: she was the only applicant who could spell. Of course I was struck immediately by how pretty she was, but I didn’t think it would be a problem—she wasn’t my type. To put it bluntly, she had no tits. But I’m sure you know that better than I do,” he shot at me. “Anyway, it seemed ideal: as I said, I wanted to get more work done, not less.”

“So none of what she said about her relationship with you actually happened?” I asked. At this he looked annoyed again.

“It did, but quite differently from the way she describes it. That’s why I wanted to tell you a couple of things. At first everything went well. Incredibly well. Luciana passed my ex-wife’s initial inspection. Mercedes had a practised eye for spotting a potential threat in any woman who came near me. I think she discounted Luciana because she looked so young. Or maybe because she had that thin teenager’s body and the look of a conscientious schoolgirl. At that first interview, I didn’t get any sexual vibe from her either. Anyway, she soon let me know she had a boyfriend and it was all as clear and distinct as in Descartes’s Discourse. My daughter adored her right from the start. She drew her a picture every day. And she rushed to