Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 151, Nos. 1 & 2. Whole Nos. 916 & 917, January/February 2018

The Final Analysis by Luciano Sivori

Translated from the Spanish by Josh Pachter

This story by Luciano Sivori, of Bahia Blanca, Argentina, made its way to us in a remarkable way. As a boy the author found some EQMMs from the 1970s n his parents’ attic. One contained a story by Josh Pachter that affected him profoundly — so much so that, many years later, he blogged about it. While searching the Internet for pirated reprints of his stories, Josh chanced upon the Sivori post. He wrote to thank his admirer, discovered that the young engineer was also a writer (author of the novel El Alma Dividida), and, athough his Spanish is mostly from school days, offered to translate a Sivori story. The result speaks for itself!

The last days of autumn dissolved into mist.

No, wait. That’s no way to begin a story. What writer would dream of starting with such a bland sentence, devoid of impact or intrigue? It is a sorry introduction; the opening moments of a tale should initiate a dialogue, a sense of complicity between author and reader. Where, in the sentence above, is the surprise attack of the first impression, the fireball of emotional energy, the magnetism of the narrative voice?

And yet it is true as written. It was indubitably during the final days of the fall that the story I am about to tell you occurred. That morning, Roberto Guiraldes was sitting comfortably on a wooden bench in the shade of a stand of eucalyptus trees in the heart of May Park, cradled by a gentle breeze that carried the scent of an approaching storm. Therefore, in this one case, perhaps I can be forgiven for opening a story in such an unimaginative manner. For the following paragraph — which really ought to be this narrative’s first — is too unthinkable, too strange, too bizarre for me simply to fling it at the reader without any prior preparation:

A man without eyebrows approached Roberto Guiraldes in the park, sat down beside him, and whispered, “It is done. God will understand. Because, you see, he deserved it.”

Why did the man have no eyebrows? Why did he whisper? And why deliver his outre message to Roberto Guiraldes? To answer these questions would cause the reader to suspect that the mysterious stranger was not in his right mind, was in fact unhinged, like the old men seen wandering Alem Avenue, preaching that the End Times are upon us. But considering that this seemingly reasonable theory would be entirely incorrect, the reader will perhaps permit me to go on with the story.

That moment in the park was, without doubt, the moment that changed everything for Roberto Guiraldes.

“Excuse me?” was all he could think of to say in response.

The man without eyebrows studied him, evidently confused. For almost a minute, they observed each other. The wind blew from nowhere to nowhere. Then the stranger disappeared. Not literally, of course. He got to his feet, turned away, and walked off, his hands buried in his pockets. He vanished almost as sudddenly as he had arrived.

“It is done. God will understand. Because, you see, he deserved it.”

That cryptic message was all he left behind. Three simple sentences, a mere dozen words.

This bizarre situation in which Roberto Guiraldes found himself would have shaken any ordinary human being, yet it produced in him an intense and inexplicable emotion. He was captivated, enthused, seduced. Never had such an incongruous event brought such a tremor to his lips, such palpitations to his heart, such an acceleration to his breath.

But perhaps I should begin at the beginning.

Roberto entered this world, a citizen of Argentina, late in 1935, during the presidency of Agustin Pedro Justo. He took his first steps the week the Obelisk was inaugurated in Buenos Aires, commemorating the four-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the city. By the time Ramón Castillo was ousted from his brief presidential term in 1943 — as war raged in Europe and the Far East — Roberto was speaking fluently... and unnecessarily, since he had nothing of interest to say. His political consciousness blossomed as Juan Domingo Perón faced off against the Catholic Church. At the same time, he became an avid reader of crime fiction.

After high school, he wandered the country without purpose or destination. What little money he earned was spent in the used-book stores in Fitz Roy Street, in the Palermo Hollywood section of the capital. He collected the crown jewels of the crime writer’s art: yellowed paperbacks by Edgar Allan Poe (obviously!), G.K. Chesterton, Raymond Chandler, Patricia High-smith. The detective stories of his countrymen Manuel Peyrou and the pseudonymous H. Bustos Domecq were particular favorites.

Roberto traveled by train, spent some time in Peru, but then returned home. He ate inexpensively, smoked — he smoked a lot — and never stopped reading. Those marvelous fictions with their abundance of ingenious deductions intoxicated him. Real life — that which we call “real life,” at any rate — rarely includes occurrences that challenge the established order; it is devoid of serious conflict. Roberto did not deny the real-world existence of men with the souls of bloodhounds, men with the ability to sniff their way through unknown territory in search of hidden truths. But the possibility of becoming involved in such exploits himself was another matter entirely.

By the age of twenty-two, he had found work at a newspaper in Bahia Blanca, his hometown. Nothing he wrote was of particular importance, but he was the author of several published articles. He became a father at twenty-six, and again at twenty-eight. He had never realized that children could be such a double-edged sword. Each birth left him with less time to read and write. And the comfortable bubble of home life pushed the prospect of adventure ever further away.

At thirty-four, he divorced.

A year later, he was on the road again, resuming his explorations of his homeland. Without really understanding how (or why), he eventually published more than a hundred short stories in newspapers and magazines. Several of them attained a notoriety he could never have anticipated. He won national and international awards. He was invited to Stockholm, to Brussels, to the United States. On one occasion, he even got to shake the hand of Jorge Luis Borges! He never stopped reading. Or writing. But in the depths of his soul, he never lost the yearning to participate in a story of his own. That dream was deferred for almost four decades, until the day a stranger approached him in May Park and whispered, “It is done. God will understand. Because, you see, he deserved it.”

By that time, Roberto’s day-to-day existence had lost any pretense at excitement. He had grown old, spoiled, and tired. We might even say that he was sickly. The synaptic connections that provide memories of the past were already beginning to fray. His modest pension kept him in food and medicine, and (due to his ample girth) he spent most of his time sitting on a bench in the park. If you pass your days in the open air, in a sort of natural waiting room, surrounded by some fifty or sixty others much like yourself, you are likely to find yourself thinking some rather unusual thoughts. In Roberto’s case, we must also consider that his only real companions were the likes of Dashiell Hammett, Harlan Ellison, and Argentinian novelist Adolfo Bioy Casares.

One of the few plusses in Roberto’s personal ledger was that he was blessed with fine eyesight and a talent for observation. He noticed people. He inspected them, but he wasn’t one of that uneducated rude type who stares at you blatantly. Instead, he was always discreet. His eyes and brain recorded the many almost imperceptible details that lie at the heart of any large city, of any neighborhood: the subtle variations of light, the settings, the people. All that is happening when it would seem to the unobservant that nothing is happening. No one notices the ordinary, precisely because it is ordinary. No one pays attention to the passage of time, to the leaves, the cars, the clouds. Nothing surprises us, nothing provides us with useful information. To Roberto, it seemed that the rest of us exist under a cloud of anesthesia, on cruise control. The habits of a city’s inhabitants, more often than one might think, are the habits of automata.

The protagonists of the novels he read, however, were quite the opposite. Meticulous, sensitive to hidden truths, always alert to the challenges of the current mystery. Roberto Guiraldes felt alive like that himself, in the moments leading up to his encounter with the man without eyebrows. Earlier that very morning, he had finished rereading The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins’s famous first detective novel. The air was fresh and cool, sunlight skated across the roofs of houses in the distance. It was a wonderful day to be in the park. He had his newspaper, some cookies, a yerba maté bag, a thermos of hot water. What more could he ask for? What more could anyone ask for?

He glanced at his watch: It was 10:15 A.M. He sighed deeply, enjoying the scene as it began to come to life. I’m not going to interrupt the story to describe the park; everyone knows what a park is like, and you can imagine this one as you please. You can see it in your mind’s eye: endowed with beauty, teeming with living nature and the dying leaves of autumn, pleasantly illuminated, smelling of green and the tang of burning charcoal. Families clustered here and there, children playing ball. Hundreds of simultaneous actions, Roberto told himself, a swirl of micro-events. There is something frightening in the idea that no one in the world is paying the slightest bit of attention.

Roberto closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Breathing hurt, walking hurt. Living most definitely hurt. He dipped his tea bag in his thermos and unfolded the newspaper. When his yerba mate was ready, he allowed himself one smoky sip per article. The news was all same-old, same-old. The world was spinning out of control. They estimated (the liars) that inflation was up by twenty-eight percent. American dollars were selling for over ten pesos on the black market. The theft of a famous diamond remained unsolved. The body of a dead priest, Father Lichtenberg, had been found.

Roberto read on. A group of students had vandalized Valentin Vergara High School. The Malaysian government claimed that Flight 370 had been diverted intentionally. A car had overturned on Route 51. The city was shocked by the accusation that a former municipal official had attacked a homosexual. The more pages he turned, the more he grew convinced that reading the news was an extraordinarily depressing activity.

“It is done. God will understand. Because, you see, he deserved it.”

Roberto Guiraldes heard that enigmatic phrase at 10:20 a.m., but he had seen it coming a minute beforehand. The stranger caught his attention at once. He wore a pair of those Wrangler jeans, two sizes too big for him. He was skinny — scrawny, really. Close-shaven, almost bald. His most distinctive feature, of course, was the lack of eyebrows. Because the eyebrows are an integral part of most facial expressions, their absence is startling, almost horrifying. The sight of this sinister apparition caused Roberto to tremble. Was the man coming to confront him?

The man with no eyebrows took a seat beside him on the bench and stared straight ahead, as if hypnotized, toward the horizon. For several moments, neither of them spoke. Silence descended around them. Had the air grown still, or was that merely the stranger’s influence? Roberto wished to return to his newspaper but found himself incapable of doing so. Instead, he began to rock forward and back on his bench. When the stranger drew closer, he started in dismay. He looked at the man. They looked at each other. The very air between them seemed to hold its breath.

“It is done,” Mr. No-Eyebrows said. “God will understand. Because, you see, he deserved it.”

The words were whispered in Roberto’s ear. The sound was so faint it was nearly swallowed by the wind.

“Excuse me?” was all he could think of to say in response.

The man with no eyebrows seemed disoriented. He had not anticipated this reaction. A few seconds later, he was gone, vanished as abruptly as he had arrived.

His words, however, whirled crazily within Roberto’s head, a distant echo of present terror. And that echo was so potent that it overshadowed all other voices.

Suddenly, Roberto burst out in uncontrollable laughter. Something wonderful had happened to him at last. Something wonderful but, without a doubt, absurd.

Twelve simple words, he reflected. I should be able to build a chain of logical deductions from that starting point.

So he began to think about it.

There’s not much to work with. I suppose I should commence with the obvious: Some task has been performed. And he did it himself, I would say, using his own resources. Some sort of commission, an obligation discharged. “It is done,” he told me, as if he were advertising the fact. He has completed some task, and now he feels remorse — or at least he is upset about it. He did not relish this mission with which he was entrusted — or was it he himself who decided upon the action to be taken? — but he felt that he had no choice, though no one forced him, no one pressured him.

Roberto shook his head, unable to awaken from his trance. A chill ran through his body.

All right, not particularly impressive, I know, though his statement could equally indicate mere anxiety. But it is understandable that my first deductions would be the most obvious. My next conclusion is that the task he spoke of was not something he did every day. It was, instead, something exceptional, unique — perhaps illegal? Yes, probably illegal. It was something he planned out in advance, a calculated act. But the man without eyebrows did not say, “I have done it.” He said, “It is done,” almost offhandedly, as if he had been thinking about it for some time. And that phrase, that phrase: “Because, you see.” That suggests to me a combination of indecisiveness and rationalization. His actions, then, were morally questionable, even a bit unethical. Under certain circumstances, some might call it an aberration, though others would find it perfectly justifiable.

“It is done. God will understand. Because, you see, he deserved it.”

People take the Lord’s name in vain more often than I would like. They mention it in circumstances that have little or nothing to do with religion. But that’s not the case here. He needs God’s understanding to justify his actions. “When I am judged for what I did, God will understand my reasons.” I am beginning to believe that each of his words was necessary, that his entire statement functioned synergistically. Especially that key phrase, “Because, you see.” Mr. No-Eyebrows leaned close to my ear and whispered those exact words. He wanted to be sure I knew that God would understand that some “he” deserved some “it.” And why the “Because, you see”? Perhaps because, you see, the “he” involved was someone directly related to God? A priest, perhaps?

I feel I am beginning to hit the mark. Now, what is the only thing that God cannot forgive? All of his commandments, in principle. But of those, the only one that cannot be taken back is “Thou shalt not kill.” But who truly deserves to die? The criminal, the rapist, the murderer?

Roberto Guiraldes, lost in thought, began to consider the subject of ethics. Under what conditions is killing justified? When you look around, he thought, it is worth asking if society in general mightn’t benefit from the elimination of certain people. The problem, he reflected, is hypocrisy. Imagine that a group of students is discussing the death penalty, debating whether evil people deserve to die. Fine... let us agree that all of them will give the politically correct answer, especially if their conversation occurs in a public setting.

Killing people is wrong, they will say: improper, inhuman, unthinkable. That’s what civilized people are bound to proclaim. In a society, we must keep up appearances. And if someone were to devote his life to eliminating the planet’s garbage on his own initiative, most of us would object, and would refuse to support his actions.

Anyway, he went on, I must not accept those words on their own merits, without considering the speaker and the circumstances. Language does not exist in a vacuum — it lives within a particular context. Therefore, before I continue I must propose a hypothesis: This action, whatever it was, occurred somewhere not far from here.

On what do I base this deduction? On a number of facts. First, he was aware of the existence of this park. He wasn’t roaming aimlessly. He approached me with an air of confidence, like a man who knew where he was going. Perhaps he wasn’t looking for me in particular, but he was looking for someone. The action itself may have taken place earlier today, or possibly yesterday, but not much before that.

I consider myself to be an observant fellow. When someone attracts my attention, I take in every detail of his appearance: his clothing, his hair, everything. Although Mr. No-Eyebrows had neither hair nor beard, I noted that his shirt was wrinkled, which could suggest that he had not taken time to bathe or change his clothing after the event. In support of this theory, I point out that the words he spoke indicated an urgent need to confess, to share his secret.

The point is that — not only now, in retrospect, but even at the time — there was something about him that perplexed me.

No, it wasn’t the fact that his shirt — apparently new, despite the wrinkles — was only partially buttoned, or that the left sleeve was missing. Nor was it the slight swelling on his right cheek. It was a much smaller detail, a detail that in any other circumstances might have gone unremarked.

The subject wore a magnificent Cartier watch, whose age I would estimate at twenty to thirty years. I had less than ten seconds to observe it, but that was enough for me to understand that this was a rather careless man. The lower edge of the bezel showed two large dents, and there were scratches on the crystal. He is probably in the habit of dropping his watch onto a table at the end of the day, along with other hard objects, such as a ring of keys. I would not be surprised to find similar signs of wear on his cell phone.

That a man would treat an item of such value with so little respect suggests to me that he is unconcerned with material things. Perhaps he inherited the watch from his father and has never really thought of it as a luxury item. I conclude that he is a humble man — thus far my chain of reasoning has brought me.

And the watch was stopped! During the short time Mr. No-Eyebrows sat beside me, its hands never moved, not a single tick. Quarter past three. And this unusual fact, when added to the previous indications, allows me to extrapolate further: There had been a confrontation, a fight. Was this battle the “it” to which the man referred? If so, then there can be little doubt: “IT” was done either in the middle of the afternoon or, more likely, in the middle of the night.

Roberto covered his face with his hands, concentrating his memory. He wanted to summon forth more details, all the details. But the power of recall is transitory, notoriously unreliable, haunted by the specter of oblivion; it is, in short, both human and social. And it is also selective: We choose what to remember and what to forget, just as we choose whether to take the path to the left or the path to the right, basing our actions on our personal ethics, progressing swiftly or slowly through time. And formal logic was incapable of helping him. Pure reasoning has no way of knowing whether any individual deduction is true or false. It hasn’t the slightest idea — and, to be honest, it couldn’t care less. To make things even worse, Roberto knew that a conclusion could be perfectly logical yet completely inaccurate. Deep within him, a shameful realization blossomed... he was unconvinced that his arguments, despite their logic, contained even a single molecule of truth.

The problem, in the final analysis, is that you could look and look and look... and never see what was right before your eyes.

What did you do? What was it you did? Why did you seek me out? That had to have been a mistake on your part, you man without eyebrows. Could you simply be a madman, a lunatic who roams the planet murmuring insanities to old men in the park? That is certainly a possibility — but I don’t believe it. I can’t believe it.

From any statement, unspoken conclusions can be drawn. Dupin, Holmes, and Poirot would all agree with me. Therefore... something must have made you believe that I was the man you wanted. You had to find a particular old man, a man you didn’t know. You expected him to be sitting on a park bench, waiting for you. He was, quite possibly, the very person who proposed that you should do whatever it was you did. Yes, of course! Because he could give you God’s forgiveness for your sin! Were you expecting to meet with a priest? In fact, I wear a rosary around my neck. You saw a tired old man with a rosary reading a newspaper, and you assumed that I was the man you wanted. I had to be him!

“It is done. God will understand. Because, you see, he deserved it.”

Roberto Guiraldes sat there, deep in thought, imperturbable.

And then it happened.

A miraculous clarity descended upon him. He laughed in delight. His wrinkled old face, which was missing many teeth, illuminated. His bushy eyebrows arched, his black eyes twinkled. He returned his gaze to the newspaper story about Christian Lichtenberg, the murdered priest. Roberto had actually seen the man, several weeks previously, the one and only time he had attended mass at that rustic — though historic — church, Our Lady of Lourdes. An elderly gentleman, Christian Lichtenberg, enthusiastic, friendly. Were they not the same age, more or less?

Lichtenberg. A curious name. It struck a chord in his memory. Something from the distant past... but what? The priest’s murder had been shocking: They had found him strangled in his own confessional.

When the elusive shred of ancient history finally came back to him, he shuddered in horror. Hadn’t he had a friend in high school — yes, the name was Lichtenberg, Christian Lichtenberg — who had been accused of abusing a seven-year-old girl? The girl’s parents had sworn it was true, but no one had been able to prove it. Lichtenberg, yes... that was the name. Was this the same man? Could it be his childhood friend, grown into old age?

Human nature doesn’t change, he thought, it never changes. A grotesque image materialized with absolute sharpness in Roberto’s mind. As a teenager, he had seen Lichtenberg chatting with the girl, not once but several times. Was it possible that an abuser might wind up wearing a priest’s vestments?

At the end of the day, he philosophized, our world is an agglomeration of contradictions.

His eyelids felt very heavy.

It made sense. It all made sense.

“It is done. God will understand. Because, you see, he deserved it.”

He smiled. He smiled more broadly than he had ever smiled before. The man without eyebrows had liberated him from his lifelong desire to unravel one of the real world’s mysteries. He was free at last.

A peaceful infinity closed in around him. His muscles relaxed, abandoned their resistance to stimuli. He no longer felt any pain. He was terrified and exhilarated in equal measure.

It is said that the coordinates of time and space that structure our lives are mere products of our perceptions. If this is true, then they are subject to modification.

At that moment — that moment of triumph — Roberto Guiraldes became eternal, immortal. Nothing was important anymore. The wrinkling of his soul that had grown over time disappeared; he took it off like a girl undressing for bed. His weary hands would never again pick up a classic detective novel. But that was perfectly fine: He didn’t need them any longer.

He couldn’t stop laughing, with the tranquil joy of one who knows that — at long last — things will be fine forever, without haste, without judgments, without hesitation, without jealousy, without anger. This was his eternity, and it was perfect.

He never stopped smiling. His mouth, his eyes, his nose, everything smiled. His vision blurred, the world around him became more and more indefinite. His final thought was of Father Christian Lichtenberg.

He managed to release one last breath, and then he dissolved into mist.