Boris Akunin: All the World's a Stage

This development involved new methods for dealing with witnesses and suspects: how could one induce them to be entirely candid? In barbaric times a means that was both cruel and unreliable had been employed – torture. Now, however, it had emerged that the most complete and veracious results could be achieved by using a combination of three methods – psychological, chemical and hypnotic. If a person who possessed the required information, but did not wish to part with it, was first of all assigned to the correct psychological type and appropriately prepared, and his will to resist was weakened with certain specific compounds, and he was then hypnotised, his candour would be absolute and complete.

The experimental results had appeared impressive. However, serious doubts had arisen concerning their practical value. The problem was not even that Fandorin would never, for anything in the world, have shared his discoveries with the state (it was terrible to think what use could be made of such a weapon by the unscrupulous gentlemen of the Okhrana or the gendarmerie). And in the course of an investigation, Erast Petrovich would scarcely have permitted himself to transform another person, even a bad person, into an object of chemical manipulation. Immanuel Kant, who asserted that human beings must not be treated as a means for the achievement of a goal, would not have approved – and after a year of philosophical studies Fandorin regarded the sage of Königsberg as the supreme moral authority. Therefore Erast Petrovich’s research into the criminalistic ‘problem of candour’ was rather abstractly scientific in nature.

Of course, it remained an open question whether it was ethical to use the new method in investigating especially monstrous atrocities, as well as crimes fraught with serious danger for society and the state.

Fandorin had been pondering intently on precisely this subject for more than three days now – since the moment when news had broken of an attempt on the life of the chairman of the council of ministers, Stolypin. On the evening of 1 September in Kiev a certain young man had fired two shots at the most important figure in the political life of Russia.

Many aspects of this event appeared phantasmagorical. Firstly, the bloody drama had unfolded not just anywhere, but in a theatre, before the eyes of a large audience. Secondly, the show had been an extremely jolly one – an adaptation of Pushkin’s Tale of Tsar Saltan . Thirdly, the audience had included a real tsar, not of the fairytale kind, whom the killer had left untouched. Fourthly, the theatre had been so well guarded that no one could possibly have infiltrated it, not even Pushkin’s hero Gvidon when he transformed himself into a mosquito. Viewers had only been admitted on the basis of individual passes issued by the Department for the Defence of Public Security – the Okhrana. Fifthly, and most fantastically of all, the terrorist had actually been in possession of such a pass, and not a counterfeit, but the genuine article. Sixthly, the killer had not only managed to enter the theatre, but also to carry in a firearm…

To judge from the information that had reached Erast Petrovich (and his sources of information were reliable), the arrested man had not yet given any answers that provided a solution to this riddle. Now this was a case where the new means of interrogation would have been useful!

While the head of the government was dying (the injury, alas, was fatal), while the incompetent investigators simply wasted their time with fatuous nonsense, an immense empire, already overburdened with multitudinous problems, was trembling and swaying – it could topple over at any moment now, like an overloaded cart after the wagoner has tumbled out of it on a steep bend. Pyotr Stolypin had been altogether too important to the stability of the nation.

Fandorin’s feelings about this man, who had governed Russia singlehandedly for five years, were complicated. While respecting Stolypin’s courage and resolute spirit, Erast Petrovich regarded many items on the premier’s policy agenda as mistaken or even dangerous. However, there could be no doubt whatever that Stolypin’s death would strike a terrible blow at the state and threaten to plunge the country into fresh chaos. A very great deal now depended on the speed and efficiency of the investigation.

There could also be no doubt that Fandorin would be invited to take part in this effort as an independent expert. This had happened repeatedly in the past when the investigation of some exceptional case ran into a dead end, and it was impossible to imagine any case more exceptional and important than the assassination attempt in Kiev. Especially since Erast Petrovich had been acquainted in person with the chairman of the council of ministers – on several occasions he had participated, at Stolypin’s request, in investigating puzzling or especially delicate cases of national importance.

The times were long over when a quarrel with the authorities had obliged Fandorin to leave his native country and home city for many long years. Erast Petrovich’s personal foe had once been the most powerful man in the old capital, but now he (or rather, the little that remained of his most illustrious body) had long been reclining in a grandiose sepulchre, mourned but little by his fellow Muscovites. There was nothing to prevent Fandorin from spending as much time as he wished in Moscow. Nothing, that is, except an addiction to adventures and new impressions.

When he was in town, Erast Petrovich lived in a rented wing of a house on Little Assumption Lane, known in popular parlance as Cricket Lane. A very, very long time ago, about two hundred years in fact, a certain merchant by the name of Cricketinov had built his stone mansion here. The merchant had passed on, the palatial dwelling had changed hands many times over, but the cosy name had been retained in the tenacious grip of Moscow’s memory. When resting from his wanderings or investigations, Fandorin lived a steady, quiet life here – like a cricket behind the stove.

The accommodation was comfortable and rather spacious for two: six rooms, a bathroom, plumbing, electricity, a telephone – for 135 roubles a month, including coal for the Dutch stove heating. It was within these walls that the greater part of the intellectual and sporting programme devised by the retired councillor of state was put into effect. Sometimes he enjoyed imagining how, surfeited with travelling and adventures, he would settle down permanently in Cricket Lane, devoting himself completely to the enthralling process of growing old.

Some day. Not just yet. Not soon. Probably after seventy.

Erast Petrovich was very far from surfeited as yet. Beyond the bounds of the cricket world behind the stove, there still remained too many fantastically interesting places, occurrences and phenomena of all kinds. Some were separated from him by thousands of kilometres, some by centuries.

About ten years previously Fandorin had developed a serious fascination with the underwater world. He had even built a submarine according to his own design, which was registered at the distant island of Aruba, and had constantly improved its construction. This had involved immense expenditure, but after he had successfully used his own submarine to raise a precious cargo from the seabed, his hobby had not merely paid for its own costs with plenty to spare, it had freed Erast Petrovich from the need to charge a fee for working as a detective on investigations or as a consultant on criminalistic matters.

Now he could take on only the most interesting cases, or those which, for one reason or another, it was impossible to decline. In any case, the status of an individual acting out of benevolence or kindness was very much more pleasant than the position of a hired functionary, no matter how authoritative.