The mystery of those who kill themselves! He might as well be asking me to resolve the mystery of death itself in ten six-hundred-word installments, each illustrated with five color photos, for one magazine in Haiti and two others in Senegal and Norway.

I defend myself. “You gave me two faces. I’m supposed to decipher them, right? And how can I do that without their stories? There are only two people who could help and they aren’t coming back to tell me what they saw or felt during those moments. And they are the people whose faces those are, as you know.”

He indulges me and his whole physiognomy takes on an expression of reverence. “That’s so true . . . there’s no coming back.”

He’s stuck on the most obvious point. But I understand him; anyone, at any moment, can remember that he will die and measure the significance of what he will lose—life—because “there’s no coming back,” “there’s no coming back to life.”

Nevertheless, his fear of death, like almost everyone’s, comes and then goes. He says, “I gave you three photos—”

I don’t know how he intends to finish the sentence but allow myself to interrupt. “Forgive me, someone gave you three photos, but did so to conceal his true motive: Only one of them mattered, the one of Juan Tiflis. By chance, there happened to be two, Tiflis and the Pizarro woman, with open eyes, which is uncommon among suicides, and that aspect of the matter threw us off track. Am I wrong?”

He reflects on this in silence. Then he says, “That may be the case. But I believe you’re mistaken on an important point.”

“ . . . ”

“Someone manipulated the widow, I agree, and managed to get an investigation launched. Then he provoked me, so the case would be reopened, to see if journalism could achieve what the law hadn’t managed to. Is that what you think?”

“Yes.”

“And this person, who addressed himself to the widow, and then addressed himself to me: What is he trying to do?”

“See to it that someone is punished.”

“Precisely. And who is this someone? He himself.”

He beams as if he’d won a chess match in a single move. He hasn’t won yet. I attack a position I think is weak. “If the first investigation focused on the wrong things, since the señora didn’t accuse the author of the letters but the brotherhood, or if the señora’s intuition was correct and the responsible party was a member of the secret society but the investigation was mishandled, why didn’t our agitator reorient her with further evidence? Why isn’t he helping us right now by sending us a letter every week?”

“Because he is the guilty party and if the police inquiry had succeeded or if our investigation succeeds, he’ll be found out and punished.”

“And that’s not what he wants?”