Short Stories of Jorge Luis Borges - The Giovanni Translations by Jorge Luis Borges (trans. by N.T. di Giovanni)

everyone knows, brings together the hateful blank white walls of a hospital, the numbered chambers of a cell block, and the overall appearance of a brothel) there arrived on the third of December Rabbi Marcel Yarmolinsky, a gray-bearded, gray-eyed man, who was a delegate from Podolsk to the Third Talmudic Congress. We shall never know whether the Hôtel du Nord actually pleased him or not, since he accepted it with the ageless resignation that had made it possible for him to survive three years of war in the Carpathians and three thousand years of oppression and pogroms. He was given a room on floor R, across from the suite occupied—not without splendor—by the Tetrarch of Galilee. 
    Yarmolinsky had dinner, put off until the next day a tour of the unfamiliar city, arranged in a closet his many books and his few suits of clothes, and before midnight turned off his bed lamp. (So said the Tetrarch’s chauffeur, who slept in the room next door.) On the fourth of December, at three minutes past eleven in the morning, an editor of the Jüdische Zeitung called him by telephone. Rabbi Yarmolinsky did not answer; soon after, he was found in his room, his face already discolored, almost naked under a great old-fashioned cape. He lay not far from the hall door. A deep knife wound had opened his chest. A couple of hours later, in the same room, in the throng of reporters, photographers, and policemen, Inspector Treviranus and Lönnrot quietly discussed the case.
    “We needn’t lose any time here looking for three-legged cats,” Treviranus said, brandishing an imperious cigar. “Everyone knows the Tetrarch of Galilee owns the world’s finest sapphires. Somebody out to steal them probably found his way in here by mistake. Yarmolinsky woke up and the thief was forced to kill him. What do you make of it?”
    “Possible, but not very interesting,” Lönnrot answered. “You’ll say reality is under no obligation to be interesting. To which I’d reply that reality may disregard the obligation but that we may not. In your hypothesis, chance plays a large part. Here’s a dead rabbi. I’d much prefer a purely rabbinical explanation, not the imagined mistakes of an imagined jewel thief.”
    “I’m not interested in rabbinical explanations,” Treviranus replied in bad humor; “I’m interested in apprehending the man who murdered this unknown party.”
    “Not so unknown,” corrected Lönnrot. “There are his complete works.” He pointed to a row of tall books on a shelf in the closet. There were a Vindication of the Kabbalah , a Study of the Philosophy of Robert Fludd , a literal translation of the Sefer Yeçirah , a Biography of the Baal Shem , a History of the Hasidic Sect , a treatise (in German) on the Tetragrammaton, and another on the names of God in the Pentateuch. The Inspector stared at them in fear, almost in disgust. Then he burst into laughter.
    “I’m only a poor Christian,” he said. “You may cart off every last tome if you feel like it. I have no time to waste on Jewish superstitions.”
    “Maybe this crime belongs to the history of Jewish superstitions,” Lönnrot grumbled.
    “Like Christianity,” the editor from the Jüdische Zeitung made bold to add. He was nearsighted, an atheist, and very shy.
    Nobody took any notice of him. One of the police detectives had found in Yarmolinsky’s small typewriter a sheet of paper on which these cryptic words were written:
    The first letter of the Name has been uttered
    Lönnrot restrained himself from smiling. Suddenly turning bibliophile and Hebraic scholar, he ordered a package made of the dead man’s books and he brought them to his apartment. There, with complete disregard for the police investigation, he began studying them. One royal-octavo volume revealed to him the teachings of Israel Baal Shem Tobh, founder of the sect of the Pious; another, the magic and the terror of the Tetragrammaton, which is God’s unspeakable name; a third, the doctrine that