Boris Akunin: Murder on the Leviathan

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 Mine 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.