Murder on the Leviathan

by Boris Akunin

  The second suspect was M. Gintaro Aono, a 'Japanese nobleman' (or so it said in the register of passengers). He was a typical Oriental, short and skinny. He could be almost any age, with that thin moustache and those narrow, piercing eyes. He remained silent most of the time at table. When asked what he did, he mumbled in embarrassment: 'An officer of the Imperial Army.' When asked about his badge he became even more embarrassed, cast a glance of searing hatred at the commissioner, excused himself and left the room, without even finishing his soup. Decidedly suspicious! An absolute savage. He fanned himself in the saloon with a bright-coloured paper contraption, like some pederast from one of those dens of dubious delight behind the rue de Rivoli, and he strolled about the deck in his wooden slippers and cotton robe without any trousers at all. Of course, Gustave Gauche was all in favour of liberty, equality and fraternity, but a popinjay like that really ought not to have been allowed into first class. And then there were the women.

  Mme Renate Kleber. Young, barely twenty perhaps. The wife of an employee of a Swiss bank, travelling to join her husband in Calcutta. She could hardly be described as a beauty, with that pointy nose, but she was lively and talkative. She had informed him she was pregnant the very moment they were introduced. All her thoughts and feelings were governed by this single circumstance. A sweet and ingenuous woman, but absolutely insupportable. In twelve days she had succeeded in boring the commissioner to death by chattering about her precious health, embroidering nightcaps and other such nonsense. Nothing but a belly on legs, although she was not very far along yet and the belly was only just beginning to show. Gauche, naturally, had chosen his moment and asked where her emblem was. The Swiss lady had blinked her bright little eyes and complained that she was always losing things. Which seemed very likely to be true. For Renate Kleber the commissioner felt a mixture of irritation and protectiveness, but he did not take her seriously as a client.

  When it came to the second lady, Miss Clarissa Stamp, the worldly-wise detective felt a far keener interest. There was something about her that seemed not quite right. She appeared to be a typical Englishwoman, nothing out of the ordinary. No longer young, with dull, colourless hair and rather sedate manners, but just occasionally those watery eyes would give a flash of devilment. He'd seen her type before. What was it the English said about still waters? There were a few other little details worthy of note. Mere trifles really, no one else would have paid any attention to that kind of thing, but nothing escaped Gauche, the sly old dog. Miss Stamp's dresses and her wardrobe in general were expensive and brand new, everything in the latest Parisian style. Her handbag was genuine tortoiseshell (he'd seen one like it in a shop window on the Champs-Elysees - three hundred and fifty francs), but the notebook she took out of it was old and made of cheap writing paper. On one occasion she had sat on the deck wearing a shawl (it was windy at the time), and it was exactly like one that Mme Gauche had, made of dog's hair. Warm, but not at all the thing for an English lady. And it was curious that absolutely all of Clarissa Stamp's new things were expensive but her old things were shoddy and of the very poorest quality. This was a clear discrepancy. One day just before five o'clock tea Gauche had asked her: 'Why is it, my dear lady, that you never put on your golden whale? Do you not like it? It seems to me a very stylish trinket.' And what was her response? She had blushed an even deeper colour than the 'Japanese nobleman' and said that she had worn it already but he simply hadn't noticed. It was a lie. Gauche would have noticed all right. The commissioner had a certain subtle ploy in mind, but he would have to choose exactly the right psychological moment. Then he would see how she would react, this Clarissa.

  Since there were ten places at the table and he only had four passengers without their emblems, Gauche had decided to make up the numbers with other specimens who were also noteworthy in their own way, even though they had badges. It would widen his field of inquiry: the places were there in any case.

  First of all he had demanded that the captain assign the ship's chief physician, M. Truffo, to Windsor. Josiah Cliff had muttered a little but eventually he had given way. The reason for Gauche's interest in the physician was clear enough - skilled in the art of giving injections, he was the only medic on board the Leviathan whose status entitled him to a golden whale. The doctor turned out to be a rather short, plump Italian with an olive complexion, a tall forehead and a bald patch with a few sparse strands of hair combed backwards across it. It was simply impossible to imagine this comical specimen in the role of a ruthless killer. In addition to the doctor, another place had to be allocated to his wife. Having married only two weeks previously, the physician had decided to combine duty and pleasure by making this voyage his honeymoon. The chair occupied by the new Mme Truffo was completely wasted. The dreary, unsmiling Englishwoman who had found favour with the shipboard Aesculapius appeared twice as old as her twenty years and inspired in Gauche a deadly ennui - as, indeed, did the majority of her female compatriots. He immediately dubbed her 'the sheep' for her white eyelashes and bleating voice. As it happened, she rarely opened her mouth, since she did not know French and for the most part conversations in the saloon were, thank God, conducted in that most noble of tongues. Mme Truffo had no badge of any kind, but that was only natural, since she was neither an officer nor a paying passenger.

  The commissioner had also spotted in the register of passengers a certain specialist in Indian archaeology, Anthony F. Sweetchild by name, and decided that an Indologist might just come in handy. After all, the deceased Lord Littleby had also been something of the kind. Mr Sweetchild, a lanky beanpole with round-rimmed spectacles and a goatee, had himself struck up a conversation about India at the very first dinner. After the meal Gauche had taken the professor aside and cautiously steered the conversation round to the subject of Lord Littleby's collection. The Indian specialist had contemptuously dismissed his late lordship as a dilettante and his collection as a 'cabinet of curiosities' assembled without any scholarly framework. He claimed that the only item of genuine value in it was the golden Shiva and said it was a good thing the Shiva had turned up on its own, because everybody knew the French police were good for nothing but taking bribes. This grossly unjust remark set Gauche coughing furiously, but Sweetchild merely advised him to smoke less. The scholar went on to remark condescendingly that Littleby had, admittedly, acquired a fairly decent collection of decorative fabrics and shawls, which happened to include some extremely curious items, but that really had more to do with the native applied arts and crafts of India. The sixteenth-century sandalwood chest from Lahore with carvings on a theme from the Mahabharata was not too bad either -and then he had launched into a rigmarole that soon had the commissioner nodding off.

  Gauche had selected his final saloon-mate by eye, as they say. Quite literally so. The commissioner had only recently finished reading a most diverting volume translated from the Italian. Cesare Lombroso, a professor of forensic medicine from the Italian city of Turin, had developed an entire theory of criminalistics according to which congenital criminals were not responsible for their antisocial behaviour. In accordance with Dr Darwin's theory of evolution, mankind passed through a series of distinct stages in its development, gradually approaching perfection. But a criminal was an evolutionary reject, a random throwback to a previous stage. It was therefore a very simple matter to identify the potential robber or murderer: he resembled the monkey from which we were all descended. The commissioner had pondered long and hard about what he had read. On the one hand, by no means every one of the motley crew of robbers and murderers with whom he had dealt in the course of thirty years of police work had resembled gorillas, some of them had been such sweet little angels that a single glance at them brought a tender tear to the eye. On the other hand, there had been plenty of anthropoid types too. And as a convinced anticlerical, old Gauche did not believe in Adam and Eve. Darwin's theory appeared rather more sound to him. And then he had come across a certain individual among the first class passengers, a type who
might have sat for a picture entitled 'The Typical Killer': low forehead, prominent ridges above little eyes, flat nose and crooked chin. And so the commissioner had requested that this Etienne Boileau, a tea trader, be assigned to the Windsor saloon. He had turned out to be an absolutely charming fellow - a ready wit, father of eleven children and confirmed philanthropist.

  It had looked as though papa Gauche's voyage was unlikely to terminate even in Port Said, the next port of call after Le Havre. The investigation was dragging on. And, moreover, the keen intuition developed by the commissioner over the years was already hinting to him that he had drawn a blank and there was no serious candidate among the company he had assembled. He was beginning to glimpse the sickening prospect of cruising the entire confounded length of the route to Port Said and Aden and Bombay and Calcutta - and then hanging himself in Calcutta on the first palm tree. He couldn't go running back to Paris with his tail between his legs! His colleagues would make him a laughing stock, his bosses would start carping about the small matter of a first-class voyage at the treasury's expense. They might even kick him out on an early pension . . .

  At Port Said, since the voyage was turning out to be a long one, with an aching heart Gauche bankrupted himself by buying some more shirts, stocked up on Egyptian tobacco and, for lack of anything else to fill his time, spent two francs on a cab ride along the famous waterfront. In fact, there was nothing exceptional about it. An enormous lighthouse, a couple of piers as long as your arm. The town itself produced a strange impression, neither Asia nor Europe. Take a look at the residence of the governor-general of the Suez Canal and it seemed like Europe. The streets in the centre were crowded with European faces, there were ladies strolling about with white parasols and wealthy gentlemen in panama hats and straw boaters plodding along, paunches to the fore. But once the carriage turned into the native quarter a fetid stench filled the air and everywhere there were flies, rotting refuse and grubby little Arab urchins pestering people for small change. Why did these rich idlers bother to go travelling? It was the same everywhere: some grew fat from gorging on delicacies while others had their bellies swollen by hunger.

  Exhausted by these pessimistic observations and the heat, the commissioner had returned to the ship feeling dejected. But then he had a stroke of luck - a new client, and he looked like a promising one.

  The commissioner paid the captain a visit and made inquiries. So, his name was Erast P. Fandorin and he was a Russian subject. For some reason this Russian subject had not given his age. A diplomat by profession, he had arrived from Constantinople, was travelling to Calcutta and going on from there to Japan to take up his post. From Constantinople? Aha! He must have been involved in the peace negotiations that had concluded the recent Russo-Turkish War. Gauche punctiliously copied all the details onto a sheet of paper and stowed it away in the special calico-bound file where he kept all the materials on the case. He was never parted from his file. He leafed through it and reread the reports and newspaper clippings, and in pensive moments he drew little fishes and houses in the margins of the papers. It was the secret dream of his heart breaking through to the surface. The dream of how he would become a divisional commissioner, earn a decent pension, buy a nice little house somewhere in Normandy and live out his days there with Mme Gauche. The retired Paris flic would go fishing and press his own cider. What was wrong with that? Ah, if only he had a little bit of capital to add to his pension - he needed twenty thousand at least . . .

  He was obliged to make another visit to the port - luckily the ship was delayed as it waited for its turn to enter the Suez Canal - and dash off a brief telegram to the prefecture, asking whether the Russian diplomat Erast P. Fandorin was known in Paris and whether he had entered the territory of the Republic of France at any time in the recent past.

  The reply arrived quickly, after only two and a half hours. It turned out that the chap had crossed French territory not once, but twice. The first time in the summer of 1876 (well, we can let that go) and the second time in December 1877, just three months earlier. His arrival from London had been recorded at the passport and customs control point in Pas-de-Calais. It was not known how much time he had spent in France. He could quite possibly still have been in Paris on 15 March. He could even have dropped round to the rue de Grenelle with a syringe in his hand - stranger things had happened.

  It now seemed he would have to free one of the places at the table. The best thing, of course, would be to get rid of the doctor's wife, but he could hardly encroach on the sacred institution of marriage. After some thought, Gauche decided to pack the tea trader off to a different saloon, since the theoretical hopes he had inspired had proved to be unfounded and he was the least promising of all the candidates. The steward could reassign him, tell him there was a place with more important gentlemen or prettier ladies. After all, that was what stewards were for, to arrange such things.

  The appearance of a new personality in the saloon caused a minor sensation. In the course of the journey they had all become thoroughly bored with each other, and now here was a fresh gentleman, and such a superior individual at that. Nobody bothered to inquire after poor M. Boileau, that representative of a previous stage of evolution. The commissioner noted that the person who evinced the liveliest reaction was Miss Clarissa Stamp, the old maid, who started babbling about artists, the theatre and literature. Gauche himself was fond of passing his leisure hours in an armchair with a good book, preferring Victor Hugo to all other authors. Hugo was at once so true to life and high-minded, he could always bring a tear to the eye. Besides, he was marvellous for dozing over. But, of course, Gauche had never even heard of these Russian writers with those hissing sibilants in their names, so he was unable to join in the conversation. Anyway, the old English trout was wasting her time, M. Fandorine was far too young for her.

  Renate Kleber was not slow off the mark either. She made an attempt to press the new arrival into service as one of her minions, whom she bullied mercilessly into bringing her shawl or her parasol or a glass of water. Five minutes after dinner began Mme Kleber had already initiated the Russian into the detailed history of her delicate condition, complained of a migraine and asked him to fetch Dr Truffo, who for some reason was late that day. However, the diplomat seemed to have realized immediately whom he was dealing with and politely objected that he did not know the doctor by sight. The ever-obliging Lieutenant Renier, the pregnant banker's wife's most devoted nursemaid, had volunteered and gone racing off to perform the errand.

  The initial impression made by Erast Fandorin was that he was taciturn, reserved and polite. But he was a bit too spruce and trim for Gauche's taste: that starched collar sticking up like alabaster, that jewelled pin in the necktie, that red carnation (oh, very suave!) in the buttonhole, that perfectly smooth parting with not a single hair out of place, those carefully manicured nails, that narrow black moustache that seemed to be drawn on with charcoal.

  It was possible to tell a great deal about a man from his moustache. If it was like Gauche's, a walrus moustache drooping at the corners of his mouth, it meant the man was a down-to-earth fellow who knew his own worth, not some featherbrain who was easily taken in. If it was curled up at the ends, especially into points, he was a lady's man and bon vivant. If it merged into his sideburns, he was a man of ambition with dreams of becoming a general, senator or banker. And when it was like M. Fandorine's, it meant he entertained romantic notions about himself.

  What else could he say about the Russian? He spoke decent enough French, even though he stammered. There was still no sign of his badge. The diplomat showed most interest in the Japanese, asking him all sorts of tiresome questions about Japan, but the samurai answered guardedly, as if anticipating some kind of trick. The point was that the new passenger had not explained to the company where he was going and why, he had simply given his name and said that he was Russian. The commissioner, though, could understand the Russian's inquisitiveness, since he knew he was going to live in Japan. Gauch
e pictured to himself a country in which every single person was the same as M. Aono, everybody lived in dolls' houses with bowed roofs and disembowelled themselves at the slightest provocation. No indeed, the Russian was not to be envied.

  After dinner, when Fandorin took a seat to one side in order to smoke a cigar, the commissioner settled into the next armchair and began puffing away at his pipe. Gauche had previously introduced himself to his new acquaintance as a Parisian rentier who was making the journey to the East out of curiosity (that was the cover he was using). But now he turned the conversation to the matter at hand, approaching it obliquely and with due caution. Fiddling with the golden whale on his lapel (the very same one retrieved from the rue de Grenelle) he said with a casual air, as though he were simply striking up a conversation:

  'A beautiful little bauble. Don't you agree?'

  The Russian glanced sideways at his lapel but said nothing.

  'Pure gold. So stylish!' said Gauche admiringly.