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couldn't see but could hear, the riddle was miraculously
solved, and it was then, at that point in the story, said the Swabian, that the
lady, the once rich and powerful and intelligent (in her fashion, at least)
Frisian lady, fell silent, and a religious, or worse, superstitious hush fell
over that sad postwar German tavern, where everyone began to feel more and more
uncomfortable and hurried to mop up what was left of their sausage and potatoes
and swallow the last drops of beer from their mugs, as if they were afraid that
at any moment the lady would begin to howl like a Fury and they judged it wise
to prepare themselves to face the cold journey home with full stomachs.
    And then the lady spoke. She said:
"Can anyone solve the riddle?"
    That's what she said, but she didn't look
at any of the townspeople or address them directly.
    "Does anyone know the answer to the
riddle? Does anyone understand it? Is there by chance a man in this town who
can tell me the solution, even if he has to whisper it in my ear?"
    She said all of this with her eyes on her
plate, where her sausage and her serving of potatoes remained almost untouched.
    And then Archimboldi, who had kept his
head down, eating, as the lady talked, said, without raising his voice, that it
had been an act of hospitality, that the rancher and his son were sure the
lady's husband would lose the first race, and they had rigged the second and
third races so the former cavalry captain would win. Then the lady looked him
in the eye and laughed and asked why her husband had won the first race.
    "Why? why?" asked the lady.
    "Because the rancher's son,"
said Archimboldi, "who surely rode better and had a better mount than your
husband, was overcome at the last minute by selflessness. In other words, he
chose extravagance, carried away by the impromptu festivities that he and his
father had arranged. Everything had to be squandered, including his victory,
and somehow everyone understood it had to be that way, including the woman who
came looking for you in the park. Everyone except the little gaucho."
    "Was that all?" asked the lady.
    "Not for the little gaucho. If you'd
spent any longer with him, I think he would have killed you, which would have
been an extravagant gesture in its own right, though certainly not the kind the
rancher and his son had in mind."
    Then the lady got up, thanked everyone for
a pleasant evening, and left.
    "A few minutes later," said the
Swabian, "I walked Archimboldi back to the boardinghouse. The next
morning, when I went to get him to take him to the station, he was gone."
    Astounding Swabian, said Espinoza. I want
him all to myself, said Pelletier. Try not to overwhelm him, try not to seem
too interested, said Morini. We have to treat the man with kid gloves, said
Norton. Which means we have to be very nice to him.
    B ut the Swabian had already said
everything he had to say, and even though they coddled him and took him out to
the best restaurant in Amsterdam and complimented him and talked to him about
hospitality and extravagance and the fate of cultural promoters trapped in
small provincial towns, it was impossible to get anything interesting out of
him, although the four were careful to record every word he spoke, as if they'd
met their Moses, a detail that didn't go unnoticed by the Swabian and in fact
heightened his shyness (which, according to Espinoza and Pelletier, was such an
unusual trait in a former cultural promoter that they thought the Swabian must
be some kind of impostor), his reserve, his discretion, which verged on the
improbable omerta of an old Nazi who
smells danger.
    Fifteen days later, Espinoza and Pelletier
took a few days' leave and went to
Hamburg
to visit Archimboldi's publisher. They were received by the editor in chief, a
thin, upright man in his sixties by the name of Schnell, which means quick,
although Schnell was on the slow side. He had sleek dark brown hair, sprinkled
with gray at the temples, which only