Murder on the Leviathan

by Boris Akunin

  Another pregnant silence followed, but a perfectly civil one. The man was simply waiting to see what would come next. His blue eyes were alert. The diplomat had clear skin, as smooth as a peach, with a bloom on the cheeks like a young girl's. But he was no mama's boy, that much was obvious straight away.

  The commissioner decided to try a different tack

  'Do you travel much?'

  A non-committal shrug.

  'I believe you're in the diplomatic line?'

  Fandorin inclined his head politely in assent, extracted a long cigar from his pocket and cut off the tip with a little silver knife.

  'And have you ever been in France?'

  Again an affirmative nod of the head. Monsieur le russe is no great shakes as a conversationalist, thought Gauche, but he had no intention of backing down.

  'More than anything I love Paris in the early spring, in March,' the detective mused out loud. 'The very best time of the year!'

  He cast a keen glance at the other man, wondering what he would say.

  Fandorin nodded twice, though it wasn't clear whether he was simply acknowledging the remark or agreeing with it. Beginning to feel irritated, Gauche knitted his brows in an antagonistic scowl.

  'So you don't like your badge then?'

  His pipe sputtered and went out.

  The Russian gave a short sigh, put his hand into his waistcoat pocket, extracted a golden whale between his finger and thumb and finally condescended to open his mouth.

  'I observe, monsieur, that you are interested in my b-badge? Here it is, if you please. I do not wear it because I do not wish to resemble a caretaker with a name tag, not even a golden one. That is one. You yourself do not much resemble a rentier, M. Gauche - your eyes are too probing. And why would a Parisian rentier lug a civil service file around with him? That is two. Since you are aware of my professional orientation, you would appear to have access to the ship's documents. I assume therefore that you are a detective. That is three. Which brings us to number four. If there is something you need to find out from me, please do not beat about the bush, ask directly.'

  Just try having a nice little chat with someone like that!

  Gauche had to wriggle out of it somehow. He whispered confidentially to the excessively perspicacious diplomat that he was the ship's house detective, whose job it was to see to the passengers' safety, but secretly and with the greatest possible delicacy in order to avoid offending the refined sensibilities of his public. It was not clear whether Fandorin believed him, but at least he did not ask any questions.

  Every cloud has a silver lining. The commissioner now had, if not an intellectual ally, then at least an interlocutor, and one who possessed remarkable powers of observation as well as quite exceptional knowledge on matters of criminology.

  They often sat together on the deck, glancing now and then at the gently sloping bank of the canal as they smoked (Gauche his pipe, the Russian his cigar) and discussed various intriguing subjects, such as the very latest methods for the identification and conviction of criminals.

  'The Paris police conducts its work in accordance with the very latest advances in scientific method,' Gauche once boasted. 'The prefecture there has a special identification unit headed by a young genius, Alphonse Bertillon. He has developed a complete system for classifying and recording criminal elements.'

  'I met with Dr Bertillon during my last visit to Paris,' Fandorin said unexpectedly. 'He told me about his anthropometric method. Bertillonage is a clever theory, very clever. Have you already begun to apply it in practice? What have the results been like?'

  'There haven't been any yet,' the commissioner said with a shrug. 'First one has to apply bertillonage to all the recidivists, and that will take years. It's bedlam in Alphonse's department: they bring in the prisoners in shackles, measure them up from every angle like horses at a fair, and jot down the data on little cards. But then pretty soon it will make police work as easy as falling off a log. Let's say you find the print of a left hand at the scene of a burglary. You measure it and go to the card index. Aha, middle finger eighty-nine millimetres long, look in section No. 3. And there you find records of seventeen burglars with a finger of the right length. After that, the whole thing is as easy as pie: check where each of them was on the day of the robbery and nab the one who has no alibi.'

  'You mean criminals are divided up into categories according to the length of the middle finger?' the Russian asked with lively interest.

  Gauche chuckled condescendingly into his moustache. 'There is a whole system involved, my young friend. Bertillon divides all people into three groups, according to the length of the skull. Each of these three groups is divided into three subgroups, according to the width of the skull. That makes nine sub-groups in all. Each sub-group is in turn divided into three sections, according to the size of the middle finger of the left hand. Twenty-seven sections. But that's not all. There are three divisions in each section, according to the size of the right ear. So how many divisions does that make? That's right, eighty-one. Subsequent classification takes into account the height, the length of the arms, the height when seated, the size of the foot and the length of the elbow joint. A total of eighteen thousand six hundred and eighty-three categories! A criminal who has undergone full bertillonage and been included in our card index will never be able to escape justice again. They used to have it so easy - just give a false name when you're arrested and you could avoid any responsibility for anything you did before.'

  'That is remarkable,' the diplomat mused. 'However, bertillonage does not offer much help with the solution of a particular crime if an individual has not been arrested before.'

  Gauche spread his arms helplessly.

  'Well, that is a problem that science cannot solve. As long as there are criminals, people will not be able to manage without us professional sleuths.'

  'Have you ever heard of fingerprints?' Fandorin asked, presenting to the commissioner a narrow but extremely firm hand with polished nails and a diamond ring.

  Glancing enviously at the ring (a commissioner's annual salary at the very least), Gauche laughed.

  'Is that some kind of gypsy palm reading?'

  'Not at all. It has been known since ancient times that the raised pattern of papillary lines on the tips of the fingers is unique to every individual. In China coolies seal their contracts of hire with the imprint of their thumb dipped in ink.'

  'Well now, if only every murderer were so obliging as to dip his thumb into ink and leave an imprint at the scene of the crime . . .' The commissioner laughed good-naturedly.

  The diplomat, however, was not in the mood for joking.

  'Monsieur ship's detective, allow me to inform you that modern science has established with certainty that an imprint is left when a finger comes into contact with any dry, firm surface. If a criminal has so much as touched a door in passing, or the murder weapon, or a window pane, he has left a trace which allows the p-perpetrator to be identified and unmasked.'

  Gauche was about to retort ironically that there were twenty thousand criminals in France, that between them they had two hundred thousand fingers and thumbs and you would go blind staring at all of them through your magnifying glass, but he hesitated, recalling the shattered display case in the mansion on the rue de Grenelle. There had been fingerprints left all over the broken glass. But it had never entered anyone's head to copy them and the shards had been thrown out with the garbage.

  My, what an amazing thing progress was! Just think what it meant. All crimes were committed with hands, were they not? And now it seemed that hands could snitch every bit as well as paid informants. Just imagine, if you were to copy the fingers of every bandit and petty thief, they wouldn't dare turn those filthy hands of theirs to any more dirty work. It would be the end of crime itself.

  The very prospect was enough to set a man's head spinning.

  Reginald Milford-Stokes

  2 April i8y8

  18 hours, 34½ minutes, Gree
nwich time

  My precious Emily,

  Today we entered the Suez Canal, In yesterday's letter I described the history and topography of Port Said to you in detail, and now I simply cannot resist the temptation of relating to you certain curious and instructive facts concerning the Great Canal, this truly colossal monument to human endeavour, which next year celebrates its tenth anniversary. Are you aware, my adorable little wife, that the present canal is actually the fourth to have existed and that the first was excavated as long ago as the fourteenth century Before Christ, during the reign of the great Pharaoh Rameses? When Egypt fell into decline the desert winds choked up the channel with sand, but under the Persian king Darius, five hundred years Before Christ, slaves dug out another canal at the cost of 120,000 human lives. Herodotus tells us that the voyage along it took four days and that two triremes travelling in opposite directions could easily pass each other without their oars touching. Several ships from Cleopatra's shattered fleet fled to the Red Sea by this route and so escaped the fearful wrath of the vengeful Octavian Caesar.

  Following the fall of the Roman Empire, time again separated the Atlantic and Indian Oceans with a barrier of shifting sand one hundred miles wide, but no sooner was a powerful state established in these barren lands by the followers of the Prophet Mohammed than people took up their mattocks and pickaxes once again. As I sail through these dead salt-meadows and endless sand-dunes, I marvel unceasingly at the stubborn courage and ant-like diligence of humankind in waging its never-ending struggle, doomed to inevitable defeat, against all-powerful Chronos. Vessels laden with grain plied the Arabian canal for two hundred years, and then the earth erased this pitiful wrinkle from its forehead and the desert was plunged into sleep for a thousand years.

  Regrettably the father of the new Suez was not a Briton, but the Frenchman Lesseps, a representative of a nation which, my darling Emily, I quite justifiably hold in the most profound contempt. This crafty diplomat persuaded the Egyptian governor to issue a firman for the establishment of The Universal Company of the Suez Maritime Canal. The Company was granted a 99-year lease on the future waterway, and the Egyptian government was allotted only 15 per cent of the net revenue. And these villainous French dare to label us British pillagers of the backward peoples! At least we win our privileges with the sword, not by striking grubby bargains with greedy local bureaucrats.

  Every day 1600 camels delivered drinking water to the workers digging the Great Canal, but still the poor devils died in their thousands from thirst, intense heat and infectious diseases. Our Leviathan is sailing over corpses, and I seem to see the yellow teeth of fleshless, eyeless skulls grinning out at me from beneath the sand. It took ten years and 15 million pounds sterling to complete this gargantuan work of construction. But now a ship can sail from England to India in almost half the time it used to take. A mere 25 days or so and you arrive in Bombay. It is quite incredible! And the scale of it! The canal is more than 100 feet deep, so that even our gigantic ark can sail fearlessly here, with no risk of running aground.

  Today at lunch I was overcome by a quite irresistible fit of laughter. I choked on a crust of bread, began coughing and simply could not calm myself. The pathetic coxcomb Renier (I wrote to you about him, he is the Leviathan's first lieutenant) inquired with feigned interest what was the cause of my merriment and I was seized by an even stronger paroxysm, for I certainly could not tell him about the thought that had set me laughing: that the French had built the canal, but the fruits had fallen to us, the English. Three years ago Her Majesty's government bought a controlling block of shares from the Egyptian khedive, and now we British are the masters of Suez. And incidentally, a single share in the canal, which was once sold for fifteen pounds, is now worth three thousand! How's that! How could I help but laugh?

  But I fear I must have wearied you with these boring details. Do not blame me, my dear Emily, for I have no other recreation apart from writing long letters. While I am scraping my pen across the vellum paper, it is as though you are here beside me and I am making leisurely conversation with you. You know, thanks to the hot climate here I am feeling very much better. I no longer remember the terrible dreams that haunt me in the night. But they have not gone away. In the morning when I wake up, the pillowcase is still soaked with tears and sometimes gnawed to shreds.

  But that is all nonsense. Every new day and every mile of the journey bring me closer to a new life. There, under the soothing sun of the Equator, this dreadful separation that is tearing my very soul apart will finally come to an end. How I wish it could be soon! How impatient I am to see your tender, radiant glance once again, my dear friend.

  What else can I entertain you with? Perhaps at least with a description of our Leviathan, a more than worthy theme. In my earlier letters I have written too much about my own feelings and dreams and I have still not presented you with a full picture of this great triumph of British engineering.

  The Leviathan is the largest passenger ship in the history of the world, with the single exception of the colossal Great Eastern, which has been furrowing the waters of the Atlantic Ocean for the last 20 years. When Jules Verne described the Great Eastern in his book The Floating City, he had not seen our Leviathan - otherwise he would have renamed the old G.E. 'the floating village'. That vessel now does nothing but lay telegraph cables on the ocean floor, but Leviathan can transport 1000 people and in addition 10,000 tons of cargo. This fire-breathing monster is more than 600 hundred feet long and 80 feet across at its widest. Do you know, my dear Emily, how a ship is built? First they lay it out in the moulding loft, that is to say, they make a full-scale drawing of the vessel directly onto the smoothly planed floor of a special building. The drawing of the Leviathan was so huge that they had to build a shed the size of Buckingham Palace!

  This miracle of a ship has two steam engines, two powerful paddle-wheels on its sides and in addition a gigantic propeller on its stern. Its six masts, fitted with a full set of rigging, tower up to the very sky and with a fair wind and engines running full speed ahead the ship can make 16 knots! All the very latest advances in shipbuilding have been used in the vessel. These include a double metal hull, which ensures its safety even if it should strike a rock; special side keels which reduce pitching and rolling; electric lighting throughout; waterproof compartments; immense coolers for the spent steam - it is impossible to list everything. The entire experience of centuries of effort by the indefatigably inventive human mind has been concentrated in this proud vessel cleaving fearlessly through the ocean waves. Yesterday, following my old habit, I opened the Holy Scriptures at the first page that came to hand and I was astonished when my eyes fell upon the lines about Leviathan, the fearsome monster of the deep from the Book of Job. I began trembling at the sudden realization that this was no description of a sea serpent, as the ancients believed it to be, nor of a sperm whale, as our modern-day rationalists claim - no, the biblical text clearly refers to the very same Leviathan that has undertaken to deliver me out of darkness and terror into happiness and light. Judge for yourself: 'He maketh the deep to boil like a pot: he maketh the sea like a pot of ointment. He maketh a path to shine after him: one would think the deep to be hoary. Upon earth there is not his like, who is made without fear. He beholdeth all high things: he is a king over all the children of pride.'

  The pot - that is the steam boiler; the pot of ointment - that is the fuel oil; the shining path - that is the wake at the stern. It is all so obvious!

  And I felt afraid, my darling Emily. For these lines contain a terrible warning, either to me personally or to the passengers on the Leviathan, or to the whole of mankind. From the biblical point of view pride is surely a bad thing? And if man with his technological playthings 'beholdeth all high things', is this not fraught with some catastrophic consequences? Have we not become too proud of the keenness of our intellect and the skill of our hands? Where is this king of pride taking us? What lies in store for us?

  And so I opened my prayer book to
pray - the first time for a long, long time. And there I read: 'It is in their thoughts that their houses are eternal and their dwellings are from generation to generation, and they call their lands after their own names. But man shall not abide in honour; he shall be likened unto the beasts who die. This path of theirs is their folly, though those that come after them do commend their opinion.'

  But when, in a paroxysm of mystical feeling, I opened the Book once again with a trembling hand, my feverish gaze fell on the boring passage in Numbers where the sacrifices made by the tribes of the Israelites are itemized with a bookkeeper's tedious precision. And I calmed down, rang my silver bell and told the steward to bring me some hot chocolate.

  The level of comfort prevailing in the section of the ship assigned to the respectable public is absolutely staggering. In this respect the Leviathan is truly without equal. The times are gone when people travelling to India or China were cooped up in dark, cramped little cubbyholes and piled one on top of another. You know, my dearest wife, how keenly I suffer from claustrophobia, but on board the Leviathan I feel as though I were in the wide open spaces of the Thames Embankment. Here there is everything required to combat boredom: a dance hall, a musical salon for concerts of classical music, even a rather decent library. The decor in a first-class cabin is in no way inferior to a room in the finest London hotel, and the ship has 100 hundred such cabins. In addition there are 250 second-class cabins with 600 berths (I have not looked into them - I cannot endure the sight of squalor) and they say there are also capacious cargo holds. The Leviathan's service personnel alone, not counting sailors and officers, numbers more than 200 stewards, chefs, valets, musicians, chambermaids. Just imagine, I do not regret in the least not bringing Jeremy with me. The idle loafer was always sticking his nose into matters that did not concern him, and here at precisely 11 o'clock the maid comes and cleans the room and carries out any other errands I may have for her. This is both rational and convenient. If I wish I can ring for a valet and have him help me dress, but I regard that as excessive - I dress and undress myself. It is most strictly forbidden for any servant to enter the cabin in my absence, and on leaving it I set a hair across the crack of the door. I am afraid of spies. Believe me, my sweet Emily, this is not a ship, but a veritable city, and it has its share of low riff-raff.