Summary
The Assistant Commissioner turns out to have a vested interested in Michaelis by way of his wife’s participation in the social circle of the latter’s patroness. This upper-class lady took an interest in Michaelis and helped get him out of prison early because of her philanthropic feelings towards his seemingly humanitarian sensibility and the disdain for the bourgeois society that she shares with him.
Sensing that the Chief Inspector is hiding something, the Assistant Commissioner presses him to keep off of Michaelis’ case and to reveal the nature of his connections. The Chief Inspector shows the scrap of fabric he has taken from the crime scene and points out an address – Mr. Verloc’s – sewn into it. He has in fact known of Mr. Verloc and the latter’s work as a secret agent for seven years and has visited the man at his shop. The Assistant Commissioner expresses his disapproval for the use of secret agents and the Chief Inspector’s keeping matters from him.
Analysis
As has happened so often in previous chapters, the point of narrative focalization shifts from one character to another – Chief Inspector Heat to his superior, the Assistant Commissioner – in this chapter. As with the socialists, the policemen, who are supposed to work together, indulge in petty power plays against each other and play a conversational game over the question of whose methods are the more effective – all of which belies their ultimate, comic fecklessness. The element of hierarchy and bureaucracy adds an addition dimension to the humor of the policemen’s situation, as Inspector Heat, being the underling, is forced to express his disdain for his superior in terms that cannot be construed outright as insults. So, for example, he boasts of his longstanding connection with Mr. Verloc, and though he wants to answer the Assistant Commissioner’s question about how long he has known the secret agent by saying “Long before you were even though of for your place here,” he leaves the sense of seniority and superiority implicit by just stating the time: “I saw him for the first time in my life a little more than seven years ago, when two Imperial Highnesses and the Imperial Chancellor were on a visit here” (94).
