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

with a misty gray beard, shabbily dressed in black. Finnegan (who used that room for a purpose Treviranus immediately guessed) had asked the roomer for a rent that was obviously steep, and Gryphius paid the stipulated sum on the spot. Hardly ever going out, he took lunch and supper in his room; in fact, his face was hardly known in the bar. That night he had come down to use the telephone in Finnegan’s office. A coupé had drawn up outside. The coachman had stayed on his seat; some customers recalled that he wore the mask of a bear. Two harlequins got out of the carriage. They were very short men and nobody could help noticing that they were very drunk. Bleating their horns, they burst into Finnegan’s office, throwing their arms around Gryphius, who seemed to know them but who did not warm to their company. The three exchanged a few words in Yiddish—he in a low, guttural voice, they in a piping falsetto—and they climbed the stairs up to his room. In a quarter of an hour they came down again, very happy. Gryphius, staggering, seemed as drunk as the others. He walked in the middle, tall and dizzy, between the two masked harlequins. (One of the women in the bar remembered their costumes of red, green, and yellow lozenges.) Twice he stumbled; twice the harlequins held him up. Then the trio climbed into the coupé and, heading for the nearby docks (which enclosed a string of rectangular bodies of water), were soon out of sight. Out front, from the running board, the last harlequin had scrawled an obscene drawing and certain words on one of the market slates hung from a pillar of the arcade.
    Treviranus stepped outside for a look. Almost predictably, the phrase read:
    The last letter of the Name has been uttered
    He next examined Gryphius-Ginzberg’s tiny room. On the floor was a star-shaped spatter of blood; in the corners, cigarette butts of a Hungarian brand; in the wardrobe, a book in Latin—a 1739 edition of Leusden’s Philologus Hebraeo-Graecus —with a number of annotations written in by hand. Treviranus gave it an indignant look and sent for Lönnrot. While the Inspector questioned the contradictory witnesses to the possible kidnapping, Lönnrot, not even bothering to take off his hat, began reading. At four o’clock they left. In the twisted Rue de Toulon, as they were stepping over last night’s tangle of streamers and confetti,” Treviranus remarked, “And if tonight’s events were a put-up job?”
    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