by Boris Akunin
The others all seemed to feel much the same.
The silence that descended in the Windsor saloon was tense and uncomfortable.
The commissioner and Truffo came back half an hour later. Both of them looked grim.
'What we ought to have expected has happened,' the diminutive doctor announced, without waiting for questions. 'This tragic story has been concluded. And the final word was written by the criminal himself
'Is he dead?' exclaimed Renate, jumping abruptly to her feet.
'He has killed himself?' asked Fandorin. 'But how? Surely you took precautions?'
'In a case like this, of course I took precautions,' Gauche said in a dispirited voice. 'The only furniture in the cell where I interrogated him is a table, two chairs and a bed. All the legs are bolted to the floor. But if a man has really made up his mind that he wants to die, there's nothing you can do to stop him. Renier smashed his forehead in against the corner of the wall. There's a place in the cell where it juts out . . . And he was so cunning about it that the sentry didn't hear a thing. They opened the door to take in his breakfast, and he was lying there in a pool of blood. I ordered him not to be touched. Let him stay there for a while.'
'May I take a look?' asked Fandorin.
'Go ahead. Gawp at him as long as you like, I'm going to finish my breakfast.' And Bulldog calmly pulled across his cold omelette.
Four of them went to look at the suicide: Fandorin, Renate, the Japanese and, strangely enough, the doctor's wife. Who'd have thought the prim old nanny goat would be so inquisitive?
Renate's teeth chattered as she glanced into the cell over Fandorin's shoulder. She saw the familiar body with its broad shoulders stretched out diagonally on the floor of the cell, its dark head towards the projecting corner of the wall. Renier was lying face down, with his right arm twisted into an unnatural position.
Renate did not go into the cell, she could see well enough without that. The others went in and squatted down beside the corpse.
The Japanese raised the dead man's head and touched the bloodied forehead with his finger. Oh yes, he was a doctor, wasn't he?
'O Lord, have mercy on this sinful creature,' Mrs Truffo intoned piously in English.
'Amen,' said Renate, and turned her eyes away from this distressing sight.
They walked back to the saloon without speaking.
They got back just in time to see Bulldog finish eating, wipe his greasy lips with a napkin and pull over his black file.
'I promised to show you the testimony of our former dining companion,' he said impassively, setting out three pieces of paper on the table: two full sheets and a half-sheet, all covered with writing. 'It's turned out to be his farewell letter as well as his confession. But that doesn't really make any difference. Would you like to hear it?'
There was no need to repeat the invitation - they all gathered round the commissioner and waited with bated breath. Bulldog picked up the first sheet, held it away from his eyes and began reading.
To Commissioner Gustave Gauche, Representative of the French police
19 April 1878, 6.13 a.m. On board the Leviathan
I, Charles Renier, do hereby make the following confession of my own free will and without duress, solely and exclusively out of a desire to unburden my conscience and clarify the motives that have led me to commit heinous criminal acts. Fate has always treated me cruelly . . .
'Well that's a song I've heard a thousand times over,' remarked the commissioner. 'No murderer, robber or corrupter of juveniles has ever told the court that fate had showered its gifts on him but he squandered them all, the son of a bitch. All right then, let us continue.'
Fate has always treated me cruelly, and if it pampered me at the dawn of my life, it was only in order to torment me all the more painfully later on. I was the only son and heir of a fabulously rich rajah, a very good man who was steeped in the wisdom of the East and the West. Until the age of nine I did not know the meaning of anger, fear, resentment or frustrated desire. My mother, who felt homesick for her own country, spent all her time with me, telling me about la belle France and gay Paris, where she grew up. My father fell head over heels in love the first time he saw her at the Bagatelle Club, where she was the lead dancer. Francoise Renier (that was my mother's surname, which I took for my own when I became a French citizen) could not resist the temptation of everything that marriage to an oriental sovereign seemed to promise, and she became his wife. But the marriage did not bring her happiness, although she genuinely respected my father and has remained faithful to him to this day.
When India was engulfed by a wave of bloody rebellion, my father sensed danger and sent his wife and son to France. The rajah had known for a long time that the English coveted his cherished casket of jewels and would not hesitate to resort to some underhand trick in order to obtain the treasure of Brahmapur.
At first my mother and I were rich - we lived in our own mansion in Paris, surrounded by servants. I studied at a privileged lycee, together with the children of crowned monarchs and millionaires. But then everything changed and I came to know the very depths of poverty and humiliation.
I shall never forget the black day when my mother wept as she told me that I no longer had a father, or a title, or a homeland. A year later the only inheritance my father had left me was finally delivered via the British embassy in Paris. It was a small Koran. By that time my mother had already had me christened and I attended mass, but I swore to myself that I would learn Arabic so that I could read the notes made in the margins of the Holy Book by my father's hand. Many years later I fulfilled my intention, but I shall write about that below.
'Patience, patience,' said Gauche with a cunning smile. 'We'll get to that later. This part is just the lyrical preamble.'
We moved out of the mansion as soon as we received the terrible news. At first to an expensive hotel. Then to a cheaper hotel, then to furnished apartments. The number of servants grew less and less until finally the two of us were left alone. My mother had never been a practical person, either during the wild days of her youth or later. The jewels she had brought with her to Europe were enough for us to live on for two or three years, and then we fell into genuine poverty. I attended an ordinary school, where I was beaten and called 'darky'. That life taught me to be secretive and vengeful. I kept a secret diary, in which I noted the names of everyone who offended me, in order to take my revenge on every one of them. And sooner or later the opportunity always came. I met one of the enemies of my unhappy adolescence many years later. He did not recognize me; by that time I had changed my name and I no longer resembled the skinny, persecuted 'hindoo' - the name they used to taunt me with in school. One evening I lay in wait for my old acquaintance as he was on his way home from a tavern. I introduced myself by my former name and then cut short his cry of amazement with a blow of my penknife to his right eye, a trick I learned in the drinking dens of Alexandria. I confess to this murder because it can hardly make my position any more desperate.
'Well, he's quite right there,' Bulldog agreed. 'One corpse more or less doesn't make much difference now.'
When I was 13 years old we moved from Paris to Marseille because it was cheaper to live there and my mother had relatives in the city. At 16, after an escapade which I do not wish to recall, I ran away from home and enlisted as a cabin boy on a schooner. For two years I sailed the Mediterranean.
It was a hard life, but it was useful experience. I became strong, supple and ruthless, and later this helped me to become the best cadet at the Ecole Maritime in Marseille. I graduated from the college with distinction and ever since then I have sailed on the finest ships of the French merchant fleet. When applications were invited for the post of first lieutenant on the super-steamship Leviathan at the end of last year, my service record and excellent references guaranteed me success. But by that time I had already acquired a Goal.
As he picked up the second sheet of paper, Gauche warned his listeners:
'This
is the point where it starts to get interesting.'
I had been taught Arabic as a child, but my tutors were too indulgent with the heir apparent and I did not learn much. Later, when my mother and I were in France, the lessons stopped altogether and I rapidly forgot the little that I knew. For many years the Koran with my father's notes in it seemed to me like an enchanted book written in a magical script that no mere mortal could ever decipher. How glad I was later that I never asked anyone who knew Arabic to read the jottings in the margins! I had decided that I must fathom this mystery for myself, no matter what it cost me. I took up Arabic again while I was sailing to Maghrib and the Levant, and gradually the Koran began speaking to me in my father's voice. But many years went by before the handwritten notes - ornate aphorisms by Eastern sages, extracts from poems and worldly advice from a loving father to his son - began hinting to me that they made up a kind of code. If the notes were read in a certain order, they acquired the sense of precise and detailed instructions, but that could only be understood by someone who had committed the notes to memory and engraved them on his heart. I struggled longest of all with a line from a poem that I did not know:
Death's emissary shall deliver unto you
The shawl dyed crimson with your father's blood.
One year ago, as I was reading the memoirs of a certain English general who boasted of his 'feats of courage' during the Great Mutiny (the reason for my interest in the subject should be clear), I read about the gift the rajah of Brahmapur had sent to his son before he died. The Koran had been wrapped in a shawl. The scales seemed to fall away from my eyes. Several months later Lord Littleby exhibited his collection in the Louvre. I was the most assiduous of all the visitors to that exhibition. When I finally saw my father's shawl the meaning of the following lines was revealed to me:
Its tapering and pointed form is like a drawing or a mountain.
And:
The blind eye of the bird of paradise
Sees straight into the secret heart of mystery.
What else could I dream of during all those years of exile if not the clay casket that held all the wealth in the world? How many times in my dreams I saw that coarse earthen lid swing open to reveal once again, as in my distant childhood, the unearthly glow that filled the entire universe.
The treasure was mine by right - I was the legitimate heir. The English had robbed me, but they had gained nothing by their treachery. That repulsive vulture Littleby, who prided himself on his plundered 'rarities', was really no better than a vulgar dealer in stolen goods. I felt not the slightest doubt that I was in the right and the only thing I feared was that I might fail in the task I had set myself.
But I made several terrible, unforgivable blunders. The first was the death of the servants, and especially of the poor children. Of course, I did not wish to kill these people, who were entirely innocent. As you have guessed, I pretended to be a doctor and injected them with tincture of morphine. I only wished to put them to sleep, but due to my inexperience and fear that the soporific would not work, I miscalculated the dose.
A shock awaited me upstairs. When I broke the glass of the display case and pressed my father's shawl to my face with fingers trembling in reverential awe, one of the doors into the room suddenly opened and the master of the house came limping in. According to my information his Lordship was supposed to be away from home, but suddenly there he was in front of me with a pistol in his hand. I had no choice. I grabbed a statuette of Shiva and struck the English lord on the head with all my might. Instead of falling backwards, he slumped forwards, grabbing me in his arms and splashing blood onto my clothes. Under my white doctor's coat I was wearing my dress uniform - the dark-blue sailor's trousers with red piping are very similar to the trousers worn by the municipal medical service. I was very proud of my cunning, but in the end it was to prove my undoing. In his death throes my victim tore the Leviathan emblem off the breast of my jacket under the open white coat. I noticed that it was gone when I returned to the steamship. I managed to obtain a replacement, but I had left a fatal clue behind.
I do not remember how I left the house. I know I did not dare to go out through the door and I recall climbing the garden fence. When I recovered my wits I was standing beside the Seine. In one bloody hand, I was holding the statuette, and in the other the pistol - I have no idea why I took it. Shuddering in revulsion, I threw both of them into the water. The shawl lay in the pocket of my uniform jacket, where it warmed my heart.
The following day I learned from the newspapers that I had murdered nine other people as well as Lord Littleby. I will not describe here how I suffered because of that.
'I should think not,' the commissioner said with a nod. 'This stuff is a bit too sentimental already. Anybody would think he was addressing the jury: I ask you, gentlemen, how could I have acted in any other way? In my place you would have done the same. Phooee.' He carried on reading.
The shawl drove me insane. The magical bird with a hole instead of an eye acquired a strange power over me. It was as if I were not in control of my actions, as if I were obeying a quiet voice that would henceforth guide me in all I did.
'There he goes building towards a plea of insanity,' Bulldog laughed. 'That's an old trick, we've heard that one before.'
The shawl disappeared from my writing desk when we were sailing through the Suez Canal. I felt as if it had abandoned me to the whim of fate. It never even occurred to me that the shawl had been stolen. By that time I was already so deeply in thrall to its mystical influence that I thought of the shawl as a living being with a soul of its own. I was absolutely disconsolate. The only thing that prevented me from taking my own life was the hope that the shawl would take pity on me and come back. The effort required to conceal my despair from you and my colleagues was almost more than I could manage.
And then, on the eve of our arrival in Aden, a miracle happened! When I heard Mme Kleber's frightened cry and ran into her cabin, I saw a negro, who had appeared out of nowhere, wearing my lost shawl round his neck Now I realize that the negro must have taken the bright-coloured piece of cloth from my cabin a few days earlier, but at the time I experienced a genuine holy terror, as if the Angel of Darkness in person had appeared from the netherworld to return my treasure to me.
In the tussle that followed I killed the black man, and while Mme Kleber was still in a faint I surreptitiously removed the shawl from the body. Since then I have always worn it on my chest, never parting with it for a moment.
I murdered Professor Sweetchild in cold blood, with a calculated deliberation that exhilarated me. I attribute my supernatural foresight and rapid reaction entirely to the magical influence of the shawl. I realized from Sweetchild's first enigmatic words that he had solved the mystery of the shawl and picked up the trail of the rajah's son - my trail. I had to stop the professor from talking and I did. The silk shawl was pleased with me - I could tell from the way its warmth soothed my poor tormented heart.
But by eliminating Sweetchild I had done no more than postpone the inevitable. You had me hemmed in on all sides, Commissioner. Before we reached Calcutta you, and especially your astute assistant Fandorin . . .
Gauche chuckled grimly and squinted at the Russian.
'My congratulations, monsieur, on earning a compliment from a murderer. I suppose I must be grateful that he has at least made you my assistant, and not the other way round.'
Bulldog would obviously have been only too happy to cross out that line so that his superiors in Paris would not see it. But a song isn't a song without the words. Renate glanced at the Russian. He tugged on the pointed end of his moustache and gestured to the policeman to continue.
. . . assistant Fandorin, would undoubtedly have eliminated all the suspects one by one until I was the only one left. A telegram to the naturalization department of the Ministry of the Interior would have been enough to discover the name now used by the son of Rajah Bagdassar. And the student records of the Ecole Maritime would have shown that
I joined the college under one name and graduated under another.
I realized that the road through the blank eye of the bird of paradise did not lead to earthly bliss, but to the eternal abyss. I decided that I would not depart this world as an abject failure, but as a great rajah. My noble ancestors had never died alone.
They were followed onto the funeral pyre by their servants, wives and concubines. I had not lived as a ruler, but I would die as a true sovereign should - as I had decided. And I would take with me on my final journey not slaves and handmaidens, but the flower of European society. My funeral carriage would be a gigantic ship, a miracle of European technical progress. I was enthralled by the scale and grandeur of this plan. It is a prospect even more vertiginous than limitless wealth.
'He's lying here,' Gauche interjected sharply. 'He was going to drown us, but he had the boat all ready for himself
The commissioner picked up the final sheet, or rather half-sheet.
I confess that the trick I played on Captain Cliff was vile. I can only offer the partial excuse that I did not anticipate such a tragic outcome. I regard Cliff with genuine admiration. Although I wished to seize control of the Leviathan, I also wished to save the grand old man's life. I knew that concern for his daughter would make him suffer, but I thought he would soon discover that she was all right. Alas, malicious fate dogs my steps relentlessly. How could I have foreseen that the captain would suffer a stroke? That cursed shawl is to blame for everything!
I burned the bright-coloured triangle of silk on the day the Leviathan sailed from Bombay. I have burned my bridges.