The photographs, of Tiflis and Adriana Pizarro—was he the one who took them? Of course not. Then who was it? He told me, when he placed all of it in my hands, that they came to him from a respectable professional. Well, that respectable professional learned of the mutilation of the corpse before either the widow or the police did. He’s the one who instigated the investigation and warned the wife, and before that, to provoke both anxiety and trust, and to obsess her, he sent her the photo. What was his aim? To destroy the secret society, if it even exists? Was he a traitor to the clan? That may be, and it may not be. He’s not the one who claimed that Tiflis’s brotherhood was responsible, that was the wife. Why she’s doing that, I can’t imagine. But there is someone out there mutilating corpses, and he, the sender of the photos, knows or suspects who it is, and wants to eliminate that person without showing his face, so he incites the widow and she does precisely what he expected: She goes running to the police. “If you tell me who it is,” I say to the boss, “the story has an ending.”

“Before writing the ending,” the boss requests, not the least bit dazzled by my thesis, “explain one contradiction to me. A corpse is exhumed with part of the body missing, and a millionaire’s club is raided, and all the while not a single newspaper gets wind of it—”

“Or does get wind of it but doesn’t publish.”

“That may be. Around here, at least, we didn’t know anything about it. But I’m focused on a different angle. Hear me out. Three, four, or five months after the case was closed, somebody puts three photographs at the disposition of an international press agency: One is of Juan Tiflis, whose death may entangle many people. Let’s ask ourselves, why didn’t the agitator who doesn’t show his face alert the press when it all happened, and why is he doing it now?”

The boss’s mediocre grasp of the situation is making me feel quite astute. “He got the widow all wound up so people would start poking around and there would be an investigation, right?”

“It certainly looks that way. That may be right.”

“That’s it. The investigation happened, but it failed. And now, what’s he doing? He’s winding up a new pair of puppets: you and me.”

He’s lost but doesn’t give up. “I think we have to go back to where it all started. And it did not start with the particular case of Juan Tiflis and his posthumous mutilation, that’s no more than a detective story we can use to our advantage. What I asked you for is something different: the mystery of people who kill themselves. We have our starting point: those two faces.”