Boris Akunin - Murder on the Leviathan

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 two hundred such cabins. In addition there are 230 second-class cabins with 600 berths (I have not looked into them - I cannot endure the sight of squallor) and they say there are also capacious cargo holds. The Leviathan 5 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.

For the most part my information concerning the ship has been garnered from the explanations of Lieutenant Renier, who is a great patriot of his own vessel. He is, however, not a very likeable individual and the object of serious suspicion on my part. He tries his hardest to play the gentleman, but I am not so easily duped. I have a keen nose for bad breeding. Wishing to produce a good impression, this fellow invited me to visit his cabin. I did call in, but less out of curiosity than from a desire to assess the seriousness of the threat that might be posed by this swarthy gentleman (concerning his appearance, see my letter of 20 March). The meagreness of the decor was rendered even more glaringly obvious by his tasteless attempts at bon ton (Chinese vases, Indian incense burners, a dreadful seascape on the wall, and so forth). Standing on the table among the maps and navigational instruments was a large photographic ponrait of a woman dressed in black, with an inscription in French: ‘Seven feet under the keel, my darling!

Francoise B.’ I enquired whether it was his wife. It turned out to be his mother. Touching, but it does not allay my suspicions. I am as determined as ever to take independent readings of our course every three hours, even though it means that I have to get up twice during the night. Of course, while we are sailing through the Suez Canal this might seem a little excessive, but I do not wish to lose my proficiency in handling the sextant.

I have more than enough time at my disposal and apart from the writing of letters my leisure hours are filled by observing the Vanity Fair which surrounds me on all sides. Among this gallery of human types there are some who are most amusing. I have already written to you about the others, but yesterday a new face appeared in our salon.

He is Russian - can you imagine that? His name is Erast Fandorin.

You are aware, Emily, of my feelings regarding Russia, that misshapen excrescence that has extended over half of Europe and a third of Asia.

Russia seeks to disseminate its own parody of the Christian religion and its own barbarous customs throughout the entire world, and Albion stands as the only barrier in the path of these new Huns. If not for the resolute position adopted by Her Majesty’s government in the current eastern crisis, Tsar Alexander would have raked in the Balkans with his bear’s claws, and …

But I have already written to you about that and I do not wish to repeat myself. And in any case, thinking about politics has rather a bad effect on my nerves. It is now four minutes to eight. As I have already informed you, life on the Leviathan is conducted according to British time as far as Aden, so that it is already dark here at eight o’clock. I shall go and take readings of the longitude and latitude, then take dinner and continue with my letter.

I see that I did not finish writing about Mr Fandorin. I do believe that I like him, despite his nationality. Good manners, reticent, knows how to listen. He must be a member of that estate referred to in Russia by the Italian word intelligenzia, which I believe denotes the educated European class. You must admit, dear Emily, that a society in which the European class is separated off into a distinct stratum of the population and abo referred to by a foreign word can hardly be ranked among the civilized nations. I can imagine what a gulf separates a civilized human being like Mr Fandorin from some bearded Kossack or muzhik, who make up 90 per cent of the population of that Tartarian-Byzantine empire. On the other hand, a distance of such magnitude must elevate and ennoble an educated and thinking man to an exceptional degree, a point that I shall have to ponder at greater length.

I liked the elegant way in which Mr Fandorin (by the way, it seems he is a diplomat, which explains a great deal) put down that intolerable yokel Gauche, who claims to be a rentier, although it is clear from a mile away that the fellow is involved in some grubby little business or other. I should not be surprised if he is on his way to the East to purchase opium and exotic dancers for Parisian dens of vice. [The last phrase has been scratched out.] I know, my darling Emily, that you are a real lady and will not attempt to read what has been crossed out here. I got a little carried away and wrote something unworthy for your chaste eyes to read.

And so, back to today’s dinner. The French bourgeois, who just recently has grown bold and become quite terribly talkative, began discoursing with a self-satisfied air on the advantages of age over youth. I am older than anyone else here,’ he said condescendingly, a la Socrates. ‘Grey-haired, bloated and decidedly not good-looking, but you needn’t go thinking, ladies and gentlemen, that papa Gauche would agree to change places with you. When I see the arrogance of youth, flaunting its beauty and strength, its health, in the face of age, I do not feel envious in the least. Why, I think, that’s no great trick, I was like that myself once. But you, my fine fellow, still do not know if you will live to my 62 years. I am twice as happy as you are at 30, because I have been fortunate enough to live in this world for twice as long.’ And he sipped at his wine, very proud of the originality of his thought and his seemingly unimpeachable logic. Then Mr Fandorin, who had so far not said a word, suddenly remarked with a very serious air: ‘That is undoubtedly the case, M. Gauche, if one takes the oriental viewpoint on life, as existence at a single point of reality in an eternal present. But there is also another way of reasoning which regards a man’s life as a unified work which can only be judged when the final page has been read. Moreover, this work may be as long as a tetralogy or as short as a novella. And yet who would undertake to assert that a fat, vulgar novel is necessarily of greater value than a short, beautiful poem?’ The funniest thing of all was that our rentier, who is indeed both fat and vulgar, did not even understand the reference to himself. Even when Miss Stamp (by no means stupid, but a strange creature) giggled and I gave a rather loud snort, the Frenchie failed to catch on and stuck with his own opinion, for which all credit to him.