Boris Akunin - Murder on the Leviathan

‘Is he dead?’ exclaimed Renate, jumping abruptly to her feet.

‘He has killed himself?’ asked Fandorin. ‘But how? Surely you took precautions?’

‘In a case like this, of course I took precautions,’ Gauche said in a dispirited voice. ‘The only furniture in the cell where I interrogated him is a table, two chairs and a bed. All the legs are bolted to the floor. But if a man has really made up his mind that he wants to die, there’s nothing you can do to stop him.

Renier smashed his forehead in against the corner of the wall.

There’s a place in the cell where it juts out … And he was so cunning about it that the sentry didn’t hear a thing. They opened the door to take in his breakfast, and he was lying there in a pool of blood. I ordered him not to be touched. Let him stay there for a while.’

‘May I take a look?’ asked Fandorin.

‘Go ahead. Gawp at him as long as you like, I’m going to finish my breakfast.’ And Bulldog calmly pulled across his cold omelette.

Four of them went to look at the suicide: Fandorin, Renate, the Japanese and, strangely enough, the doctor’s wife. Who’d have thought the prim old nanny goat would be so inquisitive?

Renate’s

teeth chattered as she glanced into the cell over Fandorin’s shoulder. She saw the familiar body with its broad shoulders stretched out diagonally on the floor of the cell, its dark head towards the projecting corner of the wall. Renier was lying face down, with his right arm twisted into an unnatural position.

Renate did not go into the cell, she could see well enough without that. The others went in and squatted down beside the corpse.

The Japanese raised the dead man’s head and touched the bloodied forehead with his finger. Oh yes, he was a doctor, wasn’t he?

‘O Lord, have mercy on this sinful creature,’ Mrs Truffo intoned piously in English.

‘Amen,’ said Renate, and turned her eyes away from this distressing sight.

They walked back to the saloon without speaking.

They got back just in time to see Bulldog finish eating, wipe his greasy lips with a napkin and pull over his black file.

‘I promised to show you the testimony of our former dining companion,’ he said impassively, setting out three pieces of paper on the table: two full sheets and a half-sheet, all covered with writing. ‘It’s turned out to be his farewell letter as well as his confession. But that doesn’t really make any difference.

Would you like to hear it?’

There was no need to repeat the invitation - they all gathered round the commissioner and waited with bated breath. Bulldog picked up the first sheet, held it away from his eyes and began reading.

To Commissioner Gustave Gauche,

Representative of the French police

19 April 1878, 6.ij a.m.

On board the Leviathan

I, Charles Renier, do hereby make the following confession of my own free will and without duress, solely and exclusively out of a desire to unburden my conscience and clarify the motives that have led me to commit heinous criminal acts.

Fate has always treated me cruelly …

‘Well that’s a song I’ve heard a thousand times over,’ remarked the commissioner. ‘No murderer, robber or corrupter of juveniles has ever told the court that fate had showered its gifts on him but he squandered them all, the son of a bitch. All right then, let us continue.’

Fate has always treated me cruelly, and if it pampered me at the dawn of my life, it was only in order to torment me all the more painfully later on. I was the only son and heir of a fabulously rich rajah, a very good man who was steeped in the wisdom of the East and the West. Until the age of nine I did not know the meaning of anger, fear, resentment or frustrated desire. My mother, who felt homesick for her own country, spent all her time with me, telling me about la belle France and gay Paris, where she grew up. My father fell head over heels in love the first time he saw her at the Bagatelle Club, where she was the lead dancer. Francoise Renier (that was my mother’s surname, which I took for my own when I became a French citizen) could not resist the temptation of everything that marriage to an oriental sovereign seemed to promise, and she became his wife. But the marriage did not bring her happiness, although she genuinely respected my father and has remained faithful to him to this day.

When India was engulfed by a wave of bloody rebellion, my father sensed danger and sent his wife and son to France.

The rajah had known for a long time that the English coveted his cherished casket of jewels and would not hesitate to resort to some underhand trick in order to obtain the treasure of Brahmapur.

At first my mother and I were rich - we lived in our own mansion in Paris, surrounded by servants. I studied at a privileged lycee, together with the children of crowned monarchs and millionaires. But then everything changed and I came to know the very depths of poverty and humiliation.

I shall never forget the black day when my mother wept as she told me that I no longer had a father, or a title, or a homeland. A year later the only inheritance my father had left me was finally delivered via the British embassy in Paris.

It was a small Koran. By that time my mother had already had me christened and I attended mass, but I swore to myself that I would learn Arabic so that I could read the notes made in the margins of the Holy Book by my father’s hand. Many years later I fulfilled my intention, but I shall write about that below.

‘Patience, patience,’ said Gauche with a cunning smile. ‘We’ll get to that later. This part is just the lyrical preamble.’

We moved out of the mansion as soon as we received the terrible news. At first to an expensive hotel. Then to a cheaper hotel, then to furnished apartments. The number of servants grew less and less until finally the two of us were left alone. My mother had never been a practical person, either during the wild days of her youth or later. The jewels she had brought with her to Europe were enough for us to live on for two or three years, and then we fell into genuine poverty. I attended an ordinary school, where I was beaten and called ‘darky’. That life taught me to be secretive and vengeful. I kept a secret diary, in which I noted the names of everyone who offended me, in order to take my revenge on every one of them. And sooner or later the opportunity always came. I met one of the enemies of my unhappy adolescence many years later. He did not recognize me; by that time I had changed my name and I no longer resembled the skinny, persecuted ‘hindoo’ - the name they used to taunt me with in school. One evening I lay in wait for my old acquaintance as he was on his way home from a tavern. I introduced myself by my former name and then cut short his cry of amazement with a blow of my penknife to his right eye, a trick I learned in the drinking dens of Alexandria. I confess to this murder because it can hardly make my position any more desperate.

‘Well, he’s quite right there,’ Bulldog agreed. ‘One corpse more or less doesn’t make much difference now.’

When I was 13 years old we moved from Paris to Marseille because it was cheaper to live there and my mother had relatives in the city. At 16, after an escapade which I do not wish to recall, I ran away from home and enlisted as a cabin boy on a schooner. For two years I sailed the Mediterranean.

It was a hard life, but it was useful experience. I became strong, supple and ruthless, and later this helped me to become the best cadet at the Ecole Maritime in Marseille. I graduated from the college with distinction and ever since then I have sailed on the finest ships of the French merchant fleet. When applications were invited for the post of first lieutenant on the super-steamship Leviathan at the end of last year, my service record and excellent references guaranteed me success. But by that time I had already acquired a Goal.