and a senator, suspected of electoral fraud. He acted the cockerel in front of his thickset wife, but the cannier agents directly subordinate to Mr Costache used to call him, with a hidden meaning, Cato the Elder. As for Costache himself, they called him Taki the Great, a double-edged epithet, since their dear chief was rather short, although well built and possessed of handsome eyes with velvety depths, seemingly unsuited to his profession. Apart from that, there was constant ill feeling and backbiting among the agents, sergeants and constables of the Prefecture. The turkeys, that is, the sergeants, who had numbers on their caps, laughed at the goldfinches, that is, the constables, because of the green or red patches on their shoulders. And the goldfinches called the commissars and sub-commissars, that is, Costache’s men, who had degrees in law and spoke French and German, coxcombs, bookmen and earwigs. Mr Costache heaved a sigh. Ultimately, the quarrels and the prefects flowed by like water, while he, like a rock, remained. But it was not easy to be a rock.
At the Bucharest Police, they had been taking fingerprints for almost three years, since before the arrival of Caton Lecca. They had first done so thanks to Dr Minovici, the oldest of the three physician brothers, who had experimented with ‘dactylloscopy’ on dozens of convicts. A year later, Costache had proposed that he himself take over the Judicial Identification Service, a department such as existed in other parts of the world to deal with the biggest malefactors, criminals, forgers and rapists. They had anthropometric records, with photographs and fingerprints. Costache had secretly conducted an experiment on Fane The Ringster: he had demanded that his fingerprints be taken the first time he was arrested. It was a real honour for a jewel thief like Fane, who had not understood what was happening and thought it was some kind of signature – which only went to shown his innate canniness – and all the while he had shouted at the top of his voice that he confessed to nothing and that he wouldn’t sign anything. Now, on his second arrest, Fane shouted no longer.
He merely looked at Costache from under lowered eyebrows and said: ‘What you want from me, Jean? Why do you keep forcing me to get me hands dirty? What you got up your sleeve? What you accusing me of? I work clean, so I do, I don’t maim or kill! I just steal.’
Costache requested the old fingerprints from the archive and studied them for an hour under a magnifying glass with an ivory handle. He could swear they were identical. But he did not know whether the two years that had elapsed were sufficient to provide conclusive evidence. We shall see in ten years whether they’re like tree rings or not! At home, he had dipped his own fingers in violet ink, but nothing clear had resulted on paper. Then he got the idea of using wax. He dripped some wax from a candle and straight away pressed his the tip of his right index finger into it. He would have to wait a few years before repeating the exercise. Yesterday, he had had the fingerprints of the foreign-looking gentleman taken, the rather curious man Petre had brought in, and not only had he not been at all surprised, but he had seemed to know what it was all about. Only one conclusion could be drawn: he was an international crook, perhaps from New York, where, as he had seen in a photograph in the newspaper, criminal files were kept in a room whose walls were covered from top to bottom in hundreds of little drawers. It was Costache’s ambition to have a similar room in Bucharest. He would have to keep this Dan Crețu under close surveillance, to see whether he had accomplices. Sooner or later he would give himself away.
Setting aside the snowflakes and his plans for reform, he went back into his office, rolled a cigarette, lit it, inhaled the aromatic smoke with great pleasure, and pressed a bell. A strident buzz was heard. When the balding head of the sergeant appeared in the doorway, he asked that Petre be brought in. Petre, known as Rusu, the coachman of the Inger family, knew the man who had been found almost frozen. Costache again recollected the advertisement for the cake shop adjacent to his announcement, but he swatted the thought away, like a fly.
‘I’ve called you here to tell me all about the hijinks of yesterday.’
The coachman twisted his cap in his hands, and his cut finger seemed to throb. He answered determinedly: ‘The man’s from the madhouse, your worshib. I think he shot that blond lad, but he don’t want to admit it. He kebt shouting: I recognize nothing! I recognize nothing!’
‘But why was that? After all, nobody was accusing him of anything, like the police...’
‘I accused him, like the bolice, I did! And he goes: I don’t know how to shoot a gun – imagine that! – and that I take him to the hosbital quick, lest he die, I ain’t got no gun, he says, I don’t know where I am, I don’t understand nothing, I recognize nothing, berhabs something hit me on the head! He’s guilty, your worshib! But what about the blond boyar, didn’t he die?’
Costache regarded the cake shop owner’s coachman carefully: ‘Why do you wish to know?’
Petre fidgeted and answered to the effect that it was a Christian sort of question. Costache changed his tone and threatened that if he were hiding anything from the police he would be in big trouble, and from the frightened expression on Petre’s face he drew the conclusion that he had not told him everything. He did not think it was anything important: perhaps he had taken a ring from the man’s finger or something of the sort, but sooner or later it would be revealed.
‘What was he doing when you found him? Was he awake?’
‘He was lying on his side and goggling at the horse, which was taking a biss, bardon my language, as if he’d never seen a horse bissing in his life. I found him just as I was about to go back to town. He could hardly sit ub. I was afraid he might fall off the box. I thought he was blind drunk.’
It did not seem that the coachman had anything else worthwhile to tell. He sent him away, first giving him an order to pass on to the confectioner, since on Christmas Eve he was invited to the house of both the Margulis family and the Livezeanu family (he had not yet decided which invitation to accept). He had not been hoping for very much from the coachman and he had not been mistaken. He rang the bell once more, calling the slow-witted old man back from the door and feeling sorry for him. He discovered that the coachman who had been assigned to follow the man named Crețu was in the building and he demanded to see him straight away. He received a report on all the details of the previous night, the man’s crazy journey around the streets, his encounter with Nicu outside the Central Girls’ School, his visit to the Icoanei Church, lasting one hour and twenty minutes, his knocking on the locked door of the deacon, something about a plump woman (named Epiharia) who presumably knew more, his departure holding a blanket, and the hours and hours he had gone round in a circle, at random, as if he were trying to make fun of those following him and had irked the trusty coachman more than he cared to say. He had tugged on the reins dozens of times, until the horse was dizzy. And then there was his chasing after a passer-by on Brezoianu Street, and finally, at the very end, his taking refuge inside a hovel next to the Church of St Stephen, also known as the Stork’s Nest. At this point, the Police coachman had cheated: between midnight and the first cock’s crow, he had gone home to bed, sure that the man was not capable of taking one more step, because, unexpectedly for a man of his status, he had not taken a single cab or coach ride during all his lunatic roaming.
‘I’ll bet you anything he’s a madman. We ought to ask Mărcuța, and Dr Șuțu on Plantelor Street, and Dr Marinescu, at the Pantelimon Hospital.’
‘Bravo, well said, Budac. I shall ask you to go there right away. I want an answer by this afternoon. And before anything else, go to the Hospice in Teilor to see how the young man who was shot is doing. If he is conscious, come back immediately. It is extremely important that I talk to him.’
Rather than clicking his heels and saying: ‘Yes, sir!’ the Police’s best coachman soundlessly moved his lips. He knew very well that at Dr Rosenberg’s Hospice, patients without any name or papers were taken in, many of them in a serious condition. The City Hall paid an annual fee to the Hospice for this service, and likewise to Dr Șuțu’s establishment on Plantelor Street, where persons with no means of subsistence were treated. And on top of this, his wife was expecting him at home, as he had to slaughter the pig. It was the Feast of St Ignatius, after all. You can tell the chief’s a bachelor! He thought to himself. Why had he got it into his head to make a suggestion like that, when he knew the chiefs’ working method: if you’re the one who comes up with an