Boris Akunin - Murder on the Leviathan

Clarissa glanced around with a bored look on her face to see if anyone was watching and only then peeped cautiously round the corner of the deck-house.

The Japanese was sitting alone on the quarterdeck with his legs folded up underneath him. His head was thrown right back and she could see the whites of his eyes glinting horribly between the half-closed lids. The expression on his face was absolutely impassive, inhumanly dispassionate.

Br-r-r! Clarissa shuddered. What a strange specimen this Mr Aono was. Here on the boat deck, located just one level above the first-class cabins, there was no one taking the air, just a gaggle of young girls skipping with a rope and two nursery maids exhausted by the heat who had taken refuge in the shade of a snow-white launch. Who but children and a crazy Oriental would be out in such scorching heat? The only structures higher than the boat deck were the control room, the captain’s bridge and, of course, the funnels, masts and sails. The white canvas sheets were swollen taut by a following wind and Leviathan was making straight for the liquid-silver line of the horizon, puffing smoke into the sky as it went, while all around the Indian Ocean lay spread out like a slightly crumpled tablecloth with shimmering patches of bright bottle-green. From up here she could see that the Earth really was round: the rim of the horizon was clearly lower than the Leviathan, and the ship seemed to be running downhill towards it.

But Clarissa had not drenched herself in perspiration for the sake of the sea view. She wanted to see what Mr Aono was up to. Where did he disappear to with such unfailing regularity after breakfast?

And she had been right to be curious. Look at him now, the very image of the inscrutable Oriental! A man with such a motionless, pitiless mask for a face was capable of absolutely anything. The members of the yellow races were certainly not like us, and it was not simply a matter of the shape of their eyes.

They looked very much like people on the outside, but on the inside they were a different species altogether. After all, wolves looked like dogs, didn’t they, but their nature was quite different.

Of course, the yellow-skinned races had a moral code of their own, but it was so alien to Christianity that no normal person could possibly understand it. It would be better if they didn’t wear European clothes or know how to use cutlery - that created a dangerous illusion of civilization, when there were things that we couldn’t possibly imagine going on under that slickly parted black hair and yellow forehead.

The Japanese stirred almost imperceptibly and blinked, and Clarissa hastily ducked back out of sight. Of course, she was behaving like an absolute fool, but she couldn’t just do nothing!

This nightmare couldn’t be allowed to go on and on for ever.

The commissioner had to be nudged in the right direction, otherwise there was no way of knowing how everything might end. Despite the heat, she felt a chilly tremor run through her.

There was obviously something mysterious about Mr Aono’s character and the way he behaved. Like the mystery of the crime on the rue de Grenelle. It was strange that Gauche had still not realized that all the signs pointed to the Japanese as the main suspect.

What kind of officer was he, and how could he have graduated from St Cyr if he knew nothing about horses? One day, acting purely out of humanitarian motives, Clarissa had decided to involve the Oriental in the general conversation and started talking about a subject that should have been of interest to a military man - training and racing horses, the merits and shortcomings of the Norfolk trotter. He was no officer! When she asked him: ‘Have you ever taken part in a steeplechase?’ he replied that officers of the imperial army were absolutely for bidden to become involved in politics. He simply had no idea what a steeplechase was! Of course, who could tell what kind of officers they had in Japan - perhaps they rode around on sticks of bamboo - but how could an alumnus of St Cyr possibly be so ignorant? No, it was quite out of the question.

She had to bring this to Gauche’s attention. Or perhaps she ought to wait and see if she could discover something else suspicious?

And what about that incident yesterday? Clarissa had taken a stroll along the corridor past Mr Aono’s cabin after she heard some extremely strange noises. There was a dry crunching sound coming from inside the cabin, as if someone were smashing furniture with precisely regular blows. Clarissa had screwed up her courage and knocked.

The door had opened with a jerk and the Japanese appeared in the doorway - entirely naked except for a loincloth! His swarthy body was gleaming with sweat, his eyes were swollen with blood.

When he saw Clarissa standing there, he hissed through his teeth:

‘Chikusho!’

The question that she had prepared in advance (‘Mr Aono, do you by any chance happen to have with you some of those marvellous Japanese prints I’ve heard so much about?’) flew right out of her head, and Clarissa froze in stupefaction. Now he would drag her into the cabin and throw himself on her! And afterwards he would chop her into pieces and throw her into the sea. Nothing could be simpler. And that would be the end of Miss Clarissa Stamp, the well-brought-up English lady, who might not have been very happy but had still expected so much from her life.

Clarissa mumbled that she had got the wrong door. Aono stared at her without speaking. He gave off a sour smell.

Probably she ought to have a word with the commissioner after all.

Before afternoon tea she ambushed the detective outside the doors of the Windsor saloon and began sharing her ideas with him, but the way the boorish lout listened was very odd: he kept darting sharp, mocking glances at her, as though he were listening to a confession of some dark misdeed that she had committed.

At one point he muttered into his moustache:

‘Ah, how eager you all are to tell tales on each other.’

When she had finished, he suddenly asked out of the blue: ‘And how are mama and papa keeping?’

‘Whose, Mr Aono’s?’ Clarissa asked in amazement.

‘No, mademoiselle, yours.’

‘I was orphaned as a child,’ she replied, glancing at the policeman in alarm. Good God, this was no ship, it was a floating lunatic asylum.

‘That’s what I needed to establish,’ said Gauche with a nod of satisfaction, then the boor began humming a song that Clarissa didn’t know and walked into the saloon ahead of her, which was incredibly rude.

That conversation had left a bad taste in her mouth. For all their much-vaunted gallantry, the French were not gentlemen.

Of course, they could dazzle you and turn your head, make some dramatic gesture like sending a hundred red roses to your hotel room (Clarissa winced as she thought of that), but they were not to be trusted. Although the English gentleman might appear somewhat insipid by comparison, he knew the meaning of the words ‘duty’ and ‘decency’. But if a Frenchman wormed his way into your trust, he was certain to betray it.

These generalizations, however, had no direct relevance to Commissioner Gauche. And moreover, the reason for his bizarre behaviour was revealed at the dinner table, and in a most alarming manner.

Over dessert the detective, who had so far preserved a most untypical silence that had set everyone’s nerves on edge, suddenly stared hard at Clarissa and said:

‘Yes, by the way, Mile Stamp’ (although she had not said anything), ‘you were asking me recently about Marie Sanfon.

You know, the little lady who was supposedly seen with Lord Littleby shortly before he died.’