Twilight of Gutenberg

by Hitoshi Goto

  Since the Manteuffels were not in the mansion and the door of the bunker was closed, it was assumed that they must be inside the bunker. This meant it was necessary to look inside, but this was no easy matter given that it was a strong structure built to withstand a large bomb. In the end it was decided to break through the air vent in the side of the mound. Nevertheless, it was necessary to use a drill to open up a hole around the vent. Fortunately there was a drill in the tool shed, and they started work immediately. That was the noise we had heard.

  Once the work was done and they could shine a light through the narrow hole, they saw the couple collapsed in the middle of the room inside. They were still dressed in the clothes they had worn for the reception, and there did not appear to be any blood.

  They used a large jackhammer to break down part of the wall so the investigators could go inside.

  The couple were lying face up, dead from cyanide poisoning. They had no external injuries, and from the contents of their stomachs, they had taken the poison at around 15.30 to 16.00 hours. Other than the couple, there was no sign of anyone else, nor was there a suicide note or any signs of a struggle. Inside the bunker, there was nothing suspicious. The investigation report included a carefully sketched map of the bunker’s interior.

  “What do you think? There doesn’t seem to be anything particularly suspicious, does there?” Kenichi asked me as I puzzled over the document with the help of a dictionary.

  “But even so…” he added, half incredulously. “You were so against coming to Germany, yet now there’s been a death in suspicious circumstances you want to stay here instead of escaping quickly back to Paris! What’s more, you’ve turned our office into a temporary private detective firm. Aren’t you more suited to being a detective than an artist?” he said with a wry smile. “Rear Admiral Kojima is allowing you to do it out of appreciation for your helping out in that case on Guernsey, but what on earth has got you so interested in it?”

  Even while he teased me, I was thinking about a point I didn’t quite understand. There was no way I could believe the Manteuffels had taken poison of their own accord. Even if they really had done so, there hadn’t been any need to come to this dark bunker to die. Wouldn’t it have been more keeping with their aristocratic status to have died in their comfortable guesthouse room? It looked suspiciously like a locked room scenario had been created in order to purposely make it look like suicide.

  “Was it really suicide?” I asked again.

  “Oh, come on,” Kenichi responded. “Had it been murder, someone would have had to make them take the poison. So where are they? The door was locked from the inside. Is there any other way for someone to get in and out of the room? The only other person there at the time was that crippled butler. Are you saying it’s all a crime of his making?”

  “No, I never said that,” I said, then bowed to him and begged, “Please, won’t you negotiate with the German government to have them show me the crime scene?”

  †

  “Some Japanese really are eccentric, aren’t they?” muttered Inspector Kripp, the police detective who accompanied me to the bunker the next day.

  “He wants to leave flowers for the Marquis von Manteuffel and his wife, who were so kind to him when he was in Guernsey,” was the pretext Kenichi had given to the German Foreign Ministry in order to get permission for me to go. In spite of myself, I thought it was a good excuse.

  “But the bodies are no longer in there,” he was told, which he countered with, “In Japan we believe that the soul remains in situ,” and eventually received the permission.

  The door to the bunker was now wide open, unlike when the bodies had been found. I walked through it, and turned on the lights although some light shone in through the hole made with the jackhammer.

  A dark blue carpet covered the floor. Chalk outlines in the centre of the room marked the place where the bodies had been found. I gently laid down the flowers I had brought with me, and put my palms together in prayer.

  The walls were of bare concrete. There were a number of wooden shelves. I peeked into some boxes and saw cans of food and torches, lamps, a radio and so forth neatly packed inside. There were also camp beds, and some tables and chairs in the room.

  On the far right inside the room was a large fan. Since a hole had been drilled from the outside, it now lay broken on the floor.

  On the far left there was what looked like a bathroom and shower room.

  “The wall’s a slightly different colour there, isn’t it?” I said, pointing to the wall next to the shower room. There was a patch about fifty centimetres high by ten centimetres wide that was a slightly different colour.

  “That’s very perceptive of you. Apparently some cracks appeared some time after construction was finished, and they were finally fixed on the very day of the deaths, in the morning. Oh, it’s okay to touch it now.”

  I touched the wall. The new plasterwork had completely hardened.

  I looked inside the shower room. There was a completely ordinary shower, and a drainage outlet about ten centimetres in diameter. The floor of course was concrete.

  Next to this were a washstand and a flush toilet. The washbasin was connected to the sewers by a pipe. The floor was lined with bricks, the gaps between them filled with plaster. Maybe the reason this place alone had a brick floor was to make repairs easier in the event of water leakage.

  “What do you think?” the inspector asked. “I can’t speak for ants, but not even a child could get out of here, could they? Which means they committed suicide,” he added confidently.

  “So what do you think, Yasuo? Are you convinced now?” Kenichi asked me, a faint smile playing on his lips.

  “Yes, I’m convinced. Just, I can’t quite get it out of my mind that there was one part that was replastered the very same day.”

  “It must be a coincidence. Or do you think someone broke through concrete tens of centimetres thick and escaped into the earth outside?”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. I had a look around outside too, but there was no sign that the earth in the mound outside the part that would correspond to the replastered section had been disturbed. Which means that was not possible as an escape route. When I followed after Ribbentrop, other than the area around the ventilation duct, there was no change in the earth mound.”

  “What about the door?”

  “It’s a strong metal door like those used in bank vaults. And when you turn the handle from the inside, it locks so that it can’t be opened from the outside. That was the case this time too.”

  “So that’s that, then, isn’t it? Even if the wall had been plastered over the same day nobody could have gone outside that way, and apart from that why would they? The Manteuffels took their own lives,” he concluded.

  When I still refused to back down, he said, “Look, think about it. We were away for at most three hours. There was only about an hour and a half when there weren’t any other people around other than the three of them—the disabled veteran butler and the Manteuffels themselves. Even if we concede that the butler called the couple out, made them take the poison and shut the door from the inside, how did he get out? Did he just become a puff of air?”

  There was nothing I could say to that.

  Would the truth to this baffling case ever be clarified? And was there any connection between the murders on Guernsey and this case?

  Intermission

  Professor Tomii’s First Deduction

  April 1967

  Kichijoji, Tokyo

  “Professor Tomii, I’m sorry to keep you waiting.”

  I had just come out of the north exit of Kichijoji Station, down a short flight of steps, and was casually standing by the bus stop when I heard her voice behind me.

  I turned to see her standing there beaming at me, and noted again her soft shoulder-length brown hair, clear blue eyes, and small
er head and stronger shoulders than Japanese women. Her name was Erika Hoshino. She was the only child of the artist Hoshino and a French mother, and I have been unable to get her out of my mind this past month as I pored over her father’s two memorandums. I had seen her only ten days ago, but I had the feeling she had grown up somewhat in that time.

  It was because of her—or rather, thanks to her—that I had been given the opportunity to solve the big puzzle posed by the memorandums left by her father over twenty years ago. In December of the year the war ended, he had encountered a murder case in a manor house in southern Germany and left a full account of it in a memorandum before he died. In addition, there was a novel, The English Shoe Mystery, which had been used in a game of deduction by those gathered at the manor house, and which was the key to solving the puzzle posed by the murder case.

  Having solved that mystery, Hoshino had ended his memorandum with another formidable intellectual challenge with regards to an even bigger historical secret hidden in the memorandum. This mystery had an extraordinary three-layer structure that I had to grapple with to solve the puzzle that at length took me to a church on the Goto Islands in Nagasaki Prefecture where I found Erika Hoshino—Hoshino’s daughter—waiting for me.

  I was then thrown a bigger mystery than I’d ever expected. In other words, the puzzle hidden in Hoshino’s memorandum didn’t end in the three-layer structure as I expected, but was the key to solving a historical secret even bigger than the one Hoshino had encountered during the war. I also learned that there were two memorandums, and I had only read the second of them. She had then given me the first one, which was even thicker, and made me swear to take on the challenge of solving what was in fact a four-layer mystery. Since then she had been making fun of me. What the heck was I? A fool?

  “No, you’re a mystery writer with a solid background as a professor of Western history,” Erika said, abruptly breaking into my thoughts.

  “Miss Hoshino, what do you mean by that?” I sputtered, desperately trying to hide my confusion.

  “After all, that’s what you were asking yourself, isn’t it?”

  “Hold on a minute! I never said anything of the sort. How did you know? Are you telling me you can read my thoughts?”

  “Not at all,” she answered innocently. “I was just watching you. In other words, it’s the result of observation.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked with a frown.

  “It’s simple. When I first spoke to you, you quickly ran your eyes over me from my face to my shoulders and legs, then looked a bit taken aback, and shook your head slightly. It’s ten days since I last saw you, but when I think about how you shook your head, probably you were thinking that during that time I’d grown up a bit,” she declared flatly.

  I blushed and said nothing.

  “And when you looked at my shoulders, your gaze flickered right and left. You were probably checking that my shoulders were broad—in other words, that my body shape is different from Japanese people, and remembered that my mother is French. Am I right?”

  She looked at me unflinchingly, and I couldn’t avert my gaze.

  “And after that, your gaze immediately shifted to my shoulder bag, and then lost its focus. Which means no doubt that you were recalling a kaleidoscope of memories such as how ten days ago in the church on Fukue I took from that same shoulder bag my father’s first memorandum. Looks like I guessed right, doesn’t it? Since you just nodded slightly.” She smiled again.

  “When your gaze refocused, you were thinking about a number of things and feeling slightly depressed—a summary and evaluation of your experiences, in other words. Finally, with a small sigh you shook your head self-deprecatingly. And so I thought probably you’d reached the conclusion that I’d deceived you, that I was making fun of you, and you were feeling disgusted with yourself and questioning who the heck you were. And so I said what I did to cheer you up. Was I wrong?”

  I waved my hand exaggeratedly in front of my face. “Okay, okay, you win. I admit it. In effect I’m too honest—I can’t hide what I’m thinking.”

  “It really is spring, isn’t it?” Erika said blissfully, as if she’d forgotten all the exertion of the deductions. “Professor, I really was worried. Have you been hidden away somewhere?”

  We were walking towards the road outside the station.

  “I’m sorry. I’ve just been cooped up in the university dealing with entrance exams these past ten days.”

  I’d recovered from the shock of her surprise attack, and had finally recovered my dignity.

  “So it’s nothing like Atsushi Nakajima then,” she said, glancing up at me.

  “You mean the archer in The Legend of the Greatest Master? Huh,” I said, this time lightly parrying.

  From the expression on her face I discerned that this time I’d skilfully deflected her thrust. She pouted regretfully, and seeing the odds were against her seemed to decide to change tack.

  “Still,” she said nonchalantly, taking a deep breath, “Spring is definitely in the air.”

  The road running from the north exit of Kichijoji station was crowded as usual. A bus was making its way towards us through the wave of people, like the prow of the powerful new Antarctic observation ship breaking through a thick wall of ice.

  “Wow, look at that bus!”

  Had Erika had the same impression as me?

  “It’s like Moses parting the Red Sea!”

  In order to avoid the bus, we turned left into Heiwa Street instead of going to the station road, but she still seemed to be fixated on the bus. But her impression had been from a completely different perspective: Moses’ exodus from Egypt, brilliant. Although I didn’t quite understand the metaphor.

  She must have seen me tilt my head questioningly, for she said, “The Exodus is a strange story, isn’t it? If we assume it to be historical fact, what phenomenon could it have been? Did a huge earthquake in the Mediterranean Sea trigger a tsunami? I’d love to be able to go to Crete or somewhere and examine stone tablets from that time,” she said casually, gauging my reaction out of the corner of her eye. “But even if we suppose that Moses was strong enough to part the sea, I think that presents us with a strange puzzle.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Why did he go to the trouble of holding the sea back until the people had finished crossing?”

  “In order to get them to the opposite bank…”

  “Well, yes, of course. But if it was purely through willpower, wouldn’t it have been easier all round to carry them across?” She sighed.

  I rolled my eyes at idea. “But Miss Hoshino, in the end it was God’s doing, wasn’t it? Moses prayed to God, and his prayer was answered.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” she said, agreeing with me for once. “God never doubts which needs more willpower energy.”

  She walked on ahead of me up the street, so that I had to follow her. Just past the shopping arcade, as we were entering the residential area, she turned to me for directions and I pointed up along the street. Our destination was an unassuming coffee shop that would easily be overlooked were it not for its sign saying “Fawn.”

  I often came here on my way to or from the university, and due to certain circumstances the owner treated me like a privileged regular customer. He always let me use a private room with a four-person table whenever it was free, and never bothered me even if I stayed there until closing time.

  It probably also helped that the owner was a literary type. To the right of the counter there was a large bookcase crammed with random literary works by novelists Osamu Dazai, Ichiyo Higuchi, Doppo Kunikida, the proletarian writer Takiji Kobayashi, and the scholar Shoyo Tsubouchi. If that bookcase hadn’t been there, he would have been able to fit another table in and cater to more customers. Then again, had his main purpose been to make money, he wouldn’t have been so laid back in his dealings with customers
.

  As we went into the café the cowbell on the door rang, and the owner looked up sleepily from his place at the counter. Glenn Gould’s Bach album was playing. Luckily my usual seat was free, and I showed Erika through.

  †

  As if she couldn’t wait a moment longer, the moment we took our seats Erika demanded, “So, how about it? Have you finished reading my father’s memorandum?”

  “Up as far as the locked room murder on the outskirts of Berlin, yes.”

  “What? Oh but the most interesting part comes after that!”

  “Well, if I hurry too much I’ll slip up,” I said, sounding like a father trying to placate a child.

  Erika pouted again, and I felt my little counterattack had succeeded.

  “So far I have come up with clear answers for the ten clues your father left,” I said, spreading out on the table the piece of notepaper on which I’d written down the clues that Erika had told me about ten days earlier. Of course, I’d first had to solve the puzzle of the second memorandum, which was the condition set by her father for choosing someone to solve the major historical mystery in the first memorandum.

  Someone having such remarkable deductive powers, he can solve puzzles that thwart all others and has never left a puzzle unsolved.

  Someone with a peerless sense of curiosity. Such is his passion and curiosity, he will travel anywhere and go to any lengths in order to solve a puzzle.

  Why is English cuisine so bad?

  Thomas Beckett

  U977

  Hertha Rindt

  Thule Society

  The Gunpowder Plot

  What kind of flowers grow in the planters at Potsdamer Platz?

  Sankt Petershausen