From Nobel Laureate Imre Kertesz comes this riveting novel about a torturer for the secret police of a Latin American regime who tells the haunting story of the father and son he ensnared and destroyed. Now in prison, Antonio Martens is a torturer for a recently defunct dictatorship. He requests and is given writing materials in his cell, using them to narrate his involvement in the torture and assassination of a wealthy and prominent man and his son whose principled but passive opposition to the regime left them vulnerable to the secret police. Inside Martens's mind, we inhabit the rationalizing world of evil and see firsthand the inherent danger of inertia during times of crisis. A slim, explosive novel of justice railroaded by malevolence,Detective Storyis a warning cry for our time.

Imre Kertesz, who was born in 1929 and imprisoned in Auschwitz and Buchenwald as a youth, worked as a journalist and playwright before publishing Fatelessness, his first novel, in 1975. He is the author of Looking for a Clue, The British Flag, Kaddish for an Unborn Child, Liquidation, and Gallery-Diary 1961-1991. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002. He lives in Budapest and Berlin.

Chapter 1

The manuscript that I am hereby making public was entrusted to my care by my client, Antonio R. Martens. As to who he is, you will learn that from him in due course. All that I shall say in advance is that, given his scholastic attainments, he evinced a surprising flair for writing, as indeed does anyone, in my experience, who for once in his life steels himself to face up to his fate.

I was appointed by the court as counsel for his defense. In the course of the criminal proceedings that were initiated against him, Martens did not try either to deny or to gloss over the charge against him of complicity in multiple murders. He did not fall into any of the behavioral categories with which the experience that I have gained to date in similar cases has made me familiar: either stubborn denial in respect to both material evidence and personal responsibility, or else that species of tearful remorse whose true motives are brutal unconcern for the victim and self-pity. On the contrary, Martens freely, readily, and uninhibitedly acknowledged his crimes as a matter of record—and with such stony indifference, it was as if he were giving an account of someone else’s actions, not his own, those of another Martens with whom he was no longer to be identified, even though he was prepared to accept the consequences of his deeds without batting an eyelid. I considered him cynical in the extreme.

One day he turned to me with the surprising request that I secure the authorization needed for him to write in his cell.

“What do you wish to write about?” I asked him.

“About how I have grasped the logic,” he replied.

“Now?” I was flabbergasted. “You mean you didn’t understand it during your actions?”

“No,” he replied. “Not during them. There was a time beforehand when I understood, and now I have understood again. During one’s actions, though, one forgets. But then”—he gave a dismissive wave—“that’s something people like you can’t understand.”

I understood better than he might have believed. All that surprised me was that I had not supposed that, with his being a lowly cog in a big machine and so having relinquished all powers of discernment and appraisal of a sovereign human person, that person might stir again in Martens and demand his rights. That is to say, that he would wish to speak out and make sense of his fate. In my experience, that is the rarest case of all. And in my view, everyone has the right to do so, and to do it in his own way. Even Martens. So I set about securing what he requested.

Do not be surprised by his way with words. In Martens’s eyes the world must have seemed like pulp fiction come true, with everything taking place in accordance with the monstrous certainty and dubious regularities of the unvarying dramatic form—or choreography, if you prefer—of a horror story. Let me add, not in his defense but merely for the sake of the truth, that this horror story was written not by Martens alone but by reality, too.

Martens finally handed the manuscript over to me. The text that is published here is authentic. I personally have not interfered with it in any way apart from making corrections where stylistic shortcomings absolutely demanded it. What he had to say, I have in all places left untouched.



Chapter 2

I wish to tell a story. A simple story. You may ultimately call it a sickening one, but that does not change its simpleness. I wish therefore to tell a simple and sickening story.

My name is Martens. Yes, the very same Antonio Rojas Martens who is presently arraigned before the judges of the new regime: the people’s judges, as they like to call themselves. You can read more than enough about me these days, as the tub-thumping tabloids have made sure that m

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Excerpted from Detective Story by Imre Kertész
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