The D Case

THE RUIN LIES THERE IN THE RAIN, a great fossilised eye-socket staring emptily at nothing, like a long-silenced witness; it is now no more than a traffic-island beset on all sides by raging motor vehicles. Some way off, a black and a grey umbrella stand and gaze at it in long puzzlement.

‘I don’t know,’ the grey umbrella says at last. ‘I think it’s the anachronism that bothers me most. All these mechanised vehicles, this motorised intrusion . . .’

A solitary yellow-green van accelerates in pursuit of the wave that has just surged by, and for a few seconds the asphalt lies empty and glistening before them.

‘Ah, but where does the anachronism begin, mon cher?’ smiles the black umbrella. ‘Do you think that seventeenth-century coaches or fiacres, or horse-drawn omnibuses, would look any less incongruous? Any less . . . degrading?’

Two bad-tempered little cars charge forward through the rain, jostling for position and duelling furiously with their horns, while the massed army of which they form the vanguard snarls and chafes still at the traffic-lights.

‘Excuse me, did you say chariots?’ a passing umbrella interposes. ‘But they never held races here. Besides . . .’

The next maddened herd of traffic roars forward, flinging up great spattering wings of water, shattering every drop in its path into myriads of glittering granulets.

‘Besides, in this city . . .’ The new arrival tries to speak again. But then resigns himself and waits. The thunderous roar fades into the perpetual dull rumble that passes for silence in this neighbourhood, and the rain is heard again drumming on their umbrellas, feebly re-asserting its own sonorous independence.

‘Besides, in this city, if I remember correctly from my seminary days, the Lex Julia Municipalis of 45 B.C. forbade the circulation of any vehicle during daylight hours. The only exceptions were the fire-brigade and refuse-carts.’

‘Ah,’ says Grey Umbrella, somewhat piqued, ‘but this Lex: did they abide by it? Because from what I remember from school, the poet Juvenal complained that the traffic . . .’

Black Umbrella has meanwhile recognised the third umbrella (which is so shabby and bedraggled as to be of no definable colour) and greets it effusively.

‘What a pleasure to meet you, mon père! I did not know you were here too.’

‘I think we’re all here, more or less. But I’m not quite sure when this blessed convention is supposed to open. At three o’clock? At five? They were rather vague at the hotel this morning.’

‘They advised us to be back by half past three,’ says Grey Umbrella, ‘and so we’ve kept our cab. Would you like to join us? You’ll find it difficult to get another one in this rain.’

All three climb into the taxi waiting there with its engine running, and as they drive away, the great ruin dissolves and vanishes behind them like a pointillist mirage.

What is this ruin? The perspicacious reader will have deduced from certain clues that it can only be the Colosseum. He will also have guessed that the three umbrellas must belong to three foreigners, who are specialists in some discipline as yet to be ascertained, and who have come to Rome for one of the many international conventions held here. They probably all arrived this very morning. The downpour, the fury of which now abates, took them by surprise while they were making a short tour of the city. But who are they?

One is apparently an English Roman-Catholic priest. The other two, judging by their umbrellas, at least, also seem to be English. But it will have been noticed that the shorter one uses occasional French expressions. The clouded windows of the car frustrate any further attempt at identification. The reader will have to contain his curiosity until the taxi arrives at their hotel.

It is fortunate at least that they are not staying at the Excelsior or the Grand Hotel, or indeed any of the central hotels, which would be impossible to reach in this traffic. Instead, the taxi is now progressing (and even here ‘progressing’ is a relative term) along suburban streets, down avenues, and through squares, all anonymous in their geometrical exactitude, but which all lead towards an unmistakable architectural clue: a monumental grey cube of a building with six storeyed rows of arches.

This tells us that we are skirting the EUR quarter of Rome, and we leave it now on our right as we make our way into the Cecchignola area, with its wilderness of cranes and almost virgin building-sites. We finally draw up at a parallelepiped which is almost as imposing in its proportions as the cube we passed earlier: the Hotel Urbis et Orbis, the name abbreviated on the towering signboard to a succinct U&O.

The building is of steel and crystal, and is surrounded by a park somewhat meagre in extent but rich in bushes and trees, benches and gravel-paths. A great red banner hung across the hotel’s entrance pillars announces that . . .

No, it doesn’t announce. The wind has flapped and wrapped it drunkenly around itself. We have to go into the lobby and look at a free-standing notice-board to read about the convention that is opening today:

COMPLETENESS IS ALL

An International Forum on the Completion of Unfinished or Fragmentary Works in Music and Literature

The Italian notice is not ready yet, they tell us at the reception-desk, but the English one presents the Italian reader with no problems of translation. It is clearly the six works cited – beginning with Schubert’s Symphony No. 8 (‘The Unfinished’) – whose completion is to be discussed and planned.

The Art of the Fugue, Turandot, and The Mystery of Edwin Drood were all cut short by the death of their authors; whereas it was Poe himself, terrified perhaps by the phantom that suddenly looms at the end of Chapter 25, who broke off the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket at its very climax. Of the six, only Titus Livius’s monumental work was ever concluded, although we possess only XXXV books out of its CXLII. The organisers of the convention wish to remedy this regrettable situation. But how can they hope to succeed?

Or rather: how can they hope to succeed better than their predecessors? For attempts have been made to complete all the works in question, with the exception of Livy’s, for which scholars have made do with ancient summaries. Dickens’s disturbing Mystery, for example: at least two hundred different solutions have been devised for it.

But this is precisely the point. The very fact that the solutions are so at variance with one another (one might say in discord, in the case of the musical works) proves that up to now the task has been handled in an amateurish fashion, without the right tools, without any real method, and above all without the backing of a strong organisation. Here the circumstances will be very different. The convention has been arranged and is being run by highly methodical people, practised masters in the planning, programming, and accomplishment of anything and everything. It is they who have booked the entire Hotel Urbis et Orbis for a week (four hundred rooms, four-and-a-half-star category), attracting specialists from every age and country by means of irresistible perquisites. They are paying. They are the sponsors.

Even the slowest reader cannot fail to catch on: yes, they are Japanese. No one else could have conceived so bold and ambitious a programme of ‘integrative restorations’. Of course, nobody ever gives something for nothing, and the sponsors are to receive, for the next fifty years, the royalties of the ‘integrated’ works. But they expect a more immediate (if less pecuniary) return in terms of ‘image’, especially since the two companies involved in the courageous joint-venture are by their very nature dedicated to completeness: one of them dominates the world-market in automobile spare-parts; the other produces a relentless supply of electronic components.

We have lost sight of our three umbrellas amidst the cosmopolitan crowd clogging the lobby of the U&O. But here they are again – closed now, of course – following the arrows on the arcades and pillars, and thus making their way to the bar of their particular section. The convention will be inaugurated in half an hour, and they just have time to warm themselves with a quick cappuccino.

The room they enter is dimly lit and caressed by velvety background music. Numerous other experts in their field sit at the bar and at the tables. They are together for the first time, but they are all known to one another, as indeed they will be to any devotee of fictional detection.

Noticing that their colleagues have already done so, Black Umbrella and Grey Umbrella pin their identification badges on to their lapels: ‘H. Poirot’ and ‘Capt. Hastings’. Shabby Umbrella pins his on to his cassock: ‘Father Brown’. They are all sipping their cappuccini when a tall man, whose billowing cloak and singular cap identify him at once, comes up and examines their badges with a large magnifying-glass.

‘May I make so bold? Holmes,’ he announces, and then introduces his companion, whose lapel-badge reads: ‘Dr Watson’.

Yes, reader! Thanks to the initiative and ingenuity of Japanese industry, all or nearly all the world’s best-known investigators are here assembled – masters of intuition and deduction, experts in strange coincidences and suspicious omissions, supreme solvers of riddles!

There are other famous duos, apart from the two we have just identified: at one table sits Auguste Dupin, the founding father of all private eyes, alongside his inseparable though anonymous companion; by the window we can see Dr Thorndyke with his colleague Astley, and Nero Wolfe with his assistant Goodwin; while Philip Marlowe and Lew Archer clutch double bourbons at the bar. The lone detectives and occasional investigators such as Father Brown are far too numerous to be listed now. And, of course, there are plenty of representatives of the official police forces. Scotland Yard naturally dominates, but not to the exclusion of the Parisian Préfecture de Police; nor, we are happy to say, to that of some of our own Questure.

Within the framework of the convention, all these people (including a colonel of the Carabinieri, who has just this moment turned up) constitute the ‘Drood work-group’. It is up to them to disentangle this knottiest of cases, to solve the mystery that Dickens left at his death. When that has been done, it will be child’s play for the computers of the two sponsoring companies to provide the world’s readers with the completed novel.

At this point a smiling hostess (her name is Loredana) in a lavender-coloured dress enters and announces (in Basic English) that there will be a slight change in the programme.

The Italian reader – and the foreign reader, a second or two later – will no doubt mutter that this was only to be expected. It is fitting, perhaps inevitable, that the undisputed capital of ruins and restorations should have been chosen to host such a convention. But Rome is also the equally undisputed capital of strikes, muddles, and traffic-jams, a city whose airport rarely functions and whose town council is in permanent crisis. Thus it can come as no surprise that the mayor, the central figure in the solemn inauguration ceremony, is held up at an interminable council session at the Campidoglio; that the Minister of Culture is stuck at Lamezia Terme on account of the non-arrival of the plane from Catania; and that the plane from Tokyo with the sponsors on board has been diverted to Pisa.

Loredana announces all this very sweetly, continually brushing aside the long auburn hair that caresses her face. Her unruffled tones make it quite clear that she knows all there is to know about delays, hitches, and contretemps. The inauguration (hair to the right) will of course take place, but not until seven p.m. or thereabouts. Consequently the Cocktail Welcoming set for eight-thirty will be a Socialising Dinner. The first work-sessions, however, can begin at once, and she will now (hair to the left) escort the Drood group into the room reserved for them.

With her hair tossed back, the efficient young lady conducts her party into the U&O’s subterranean depths, a vast labyrinthine warren of congress-rooms. Similar young ladies with similar smiles or semi-smiles on their lips are already leading the other parties to their respective rooms: the Schubert Room, J. S. Bach Room, etc.

Ours is the Dickens Room, and although it is naturally not as large as the music rooms or the Livy Room, it contains numerous rows of elegant black arm-chairs, all of which are fitted with adjustable trays for notebooks and with headphones for simultaneous translation. At the front is a platform bearing a long table and four chairs, four microphones, and four bottles of mineral water. Next to the table is a rostrum, which also has a microphone. Loredana mounts the rostrum and cheerfully informs us of another ‘slight problem’. The simultaneous translation, she says, is guaranteed, but due to technical difficulties the only language available at the moment is Latin; but Latin is, after all (hair flicked forwards), the universal tongue.

This announcement is greeted with hostility by a certain H. Popeau, whom nobody appears to know, but it wins the warm approval of Porfiry Petrovich, the humanist investigator who intuited Raskolnikov’s guilt and finally induced him to confess.

‘Roma caput mundi,’ the colonel of the Carabinieri proclaims in the front row.

Everybody applauds as the first panel of three take their places at the table along with a man in a tweed jacket and with a vaguely Oxford accent, whom some mistake for Philo Vance.

But this is not the famous specialist in locked-room murders. Dr Wilmot, our hostess explains from the rostrum, is the editor of The Dickensian, the prestigious journal which since 1904 has published all that is best in Dickensian research and studies. As the leading authority in the field, he will chair this constructive debate. Anybody who wishes to contribute an observation or a question from the floor is welcome to do so, but should raise his hand first.

The young lady steps back while the chairman adjusts his bow-tie and clears his throat. But there is already a raised hand in the sixth row.

The obscure participant, Popeau, asks: ‘Is this the sort of conference where everybody is assumed to know everything already?’

Loredana at once returns to the microphone. ‘No, no, on the contrary. I apologise for not saying so at once: the text of the MED will be read in its entirety by – ’

‘The text of what?’ interrupts Popeau, whose deductive skills are perhaps not of the keenest.

‘In specialist studies of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, this abbreviation is generally adopted,’ Dr Wilmot explains. And lest there still be any doubt, he adds: ‘M = Mystery, E = Edwin, D = Drood.’

Loredana, who has just been handed a note by a messenger-boy, resumes: ‘So then, the complete text of the novel . . . that is, the complete text of the chapters we possess . . . will be read in its entirety in the course of the sessions. In that way, the participants as well as the panel . . .’

But the young lady seems to have lost the thread; seems to be no longer in control. Perhaps because she has just learned that it is she who must read aloud the complete text of the MED?

‘The fact is,’ she explains in sudden embarrassment, ‘the sponsors . . . that is, the two organising companies, to make the readings as effective as possible, booked a well-known announcer, a highly talented actress and speaker, but unfortunately she . . .’

‘Is unable, due to an indisposition and/or circumstances beyond her control, to arrive before tomorrow morning,’ the panel-member Auguste Dupin concludes, deducing these facts from the colour and format of the sheet of paper in Loredana’s hand.

‘Elementary, my dear Dupin,’ smiles Holmes, miffed that he did not say this first.

The third member of the panel is Jules Maigret, who lights his pipe (the luminous rectangular signs in the Dickens Room read, thank goodness, SMOKING) and addresses the hostess paternally. ‘Why don’t you read the first chapter yourself, mademoiselle? I’m sure that everyone present . . .’

Enthusiastic applause ensues, a genuine ovation of sympathy and encouragement, and the hesitant girl is thus persuaded to remain on the rostrum. Dr Wilmot rises and hands her a booklet with an illustrated cover (the novel, he reminds everyone, appeared in monthly numbers, beginning in April 1870, and was broken off after the sixth number).

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The Ruin Lies There in the Rain