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.
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.