Boris Akunin: Murder on the Leviathan

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. Gauche 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.