Fever (14 page)

Is that another one getting up? A white habit waving, a goatee fluttering in the breeze . . . Studer raises his hand and lets it fall flat on the blotting pad.

The apparitions vanish.

Not yet. Not quite. Marie has stood up. There is a man facing her, broad-shouldered, bulky, with a thin face and a pointed nose sticking out. His mouth is covered by a thick moustache that already has many, far too many grey hairs. The broad-shouldered man bows to Marie, produces his wallet and takes out a piece of paper. There is a number on the piece of paper that has so many noughts it makes the man dizzy – 15,000,000. Fifteen million! “That belongs to you, Marie,” the man says. “
Merci
, Cousin Jakob.” – “You're welcome, Marie.”

The flat of his hand comes down again. Studer rubs his eyes.

“No,” said Studer out loud, “the solution's not in Bern. Millions!” He could feel the word filling his mouth.

The lamp on the desk had a flat green shade, the steam clunked in the radiators and the north wind whistled outside. But the sergeant was far away. He saw plains stretching as far as the horizon, and then came the sea. The plains were grey, no houses, no shacks, no tents. Suddenly derricks shot up out of the ground, up and up, higher and higher, and at the top they fluttered like black flags lashed by the wind.

Millions . . . oil . . . a rise in salary for the cantonal police. And who was it who did it all? Sergeant Studer, Cousin Jakob, Köbu, who's got a screw loose . . .

The telephone rang. Studer picked up the receiver.

“Cousin Jakob,” a voice said. “Help me, Cousin Jakob. Please, you must help me.” A click. The sergeant jiggled the telephone cradle feverishly. No reply. He dialled the exchange. “Where did the last call to police headquarters come from?” – “One moment
. . . Are you still there? . . . From Basel, a telephone booth at the station.” Studer was too preoccupied to say thank you.

He stood up and stretched. Then he sloshed some water over his hands from a tin hanging from the wall in the corner of the room, dried them slowly and thoroughly, and stared for a long time at the doodles on the sheet of blotting paper. Finally he tore it out of the pad, folded it up and put it in his pocket. The corridors were empty. Faint light dribbled down from dim carbon-filament lamps.

He went to have dinner at an inn; he didn't feel like going home to see Hedy. He drank four large beers, but there was a memory he couldn't get out of his mind:

He's in his parents' bedroom. There's a thermometer on the wall. Studer is six, and he climbs on to a chair to look at the thermometer close up. Eventually he's holding it in his hand – and he drops it. Tiny globules of mercury roll across the floor. The little boy jumps down and chases the little gleaming balls, but he can't catch them. If he pushes a sheet of paper under them they refuse to stay on it, they join together, split up again . . .

Just like the people in the case of “the clairvoyant corporal and the temperature chart”, as Studer has christened it. They were elastic, slippery, and the light bounced off them, just as it did off the globules of mercury. Starting with Father Matthias, who fainted when he heard the name of a long-dead girl mentioned, who hired a taxi at eleven o'clock at night in Basel, took a room in the Hotel zum Wilden Mann, then left his suitcase there, contents: blue raincoat, grey off-the-peg suit, white shirt. And as well as a worn-down toothbrush, there was a bottle of Somnifen in
the room where the priest had been staying . . . Did he suffer from insomnia too? And the other man, the man in the blue raincoat who had hired a Buick from the Agence Américaine in Basel, wasn't he a globule of mercury as well? Impossible to get a grip on, impossible to pin down. At six the man hires the Buick, at nine the priest hires a taxi . . . How did the blue raincoat come to be in the priest's hotel room?

“Coffee and a kirsch,” said Studer in a loud voice, as the waitress was hovering round his table.

“Certainly, Sergeant.”

Marie! . . . Why had the girl lived together with that Koller man? Hmm?

The waitress just caught him as he was going out. “That's three-twenty, Sergeant, if you don't mind: dinner, plus four b—”

“Yes, yes, there you are.” And Studer slammed the door shut with such force it was a miracle the panes of glass didn't shatter.

Eleven o'clock. The sergeant was crossing the deserted Kirchenfeld Bridge. He walked slowly, his raincoat open, his hands clasped behind his back.

He had been back to the Hotel zum Wilden Mann, where he had learnt that at eight o'clock that morning a lady answering the description of Marie Cleman had taken room 64, the room next to the priest's. She had left the hotel at three in the afternoon, accompanied by a man wearing a blue raincoat, his face concealed behind a woollen scarf.

When had Father Matthias appeared in Sophie Hornuss's apartment? At nine. When had he left Studer's apartment? At two. And at three a man had come to fetch . . .

Thunstrasse. Studer buttoned up his raincoat since the wind was blowing straight at him now.

At five in the afternoon the Buick had been returned to the Agence Américaine in Basel. By a man in a blue raincoat. Two blue raincoats? There had been a blue raincoat in Father Matthias's hotel room, but Father Matthias had boarded the train to Geneva at a quarter past three.

At a quarter past three . . .

Muggers in Bern and a sensible wife

Sergeant Studer was walking slowly up Thunstrasse. He kept his head down so that the broad brim of his hat blocked the view ahead.

But a drunk came along towards him, singing. This was striking in a town like Bern, where the authorities have the habit of shutting even moderate drinkers away in labour camps. Still, this man was singing, so Studer looked up and he could see the man was staggering. The drunk was tall, an imposing figure, insofar as one could use the word imposing, given his state. All at once – only three seconds before he had been ten yards away – he was standing right in front of Studer and sticking his fist under his nose. In a voice that sounded remarkably sober – and he wasn't swaying any more either – he said, “Just you wait, you bloody cop.”

The movement Studer suddenly made could only be described as a reflex action, but it was an action that proved he was not yet ripe for retirement. He kicked out behind him with his left leg, like a young foal, while at the same time his fist, which was fairly large, struck the drunk on the jaw, just below his left ear. The drunk slumped to the pavement without a sound, but behind him Studer heard a shrill cry. He turned round. Doubled up on the ground clasping his stomach was a little man; there was a cosh beside his right hand. Studer nodded. Not a bad idea: the tall drunk to keep him occupied with his insults and swearing,
giving his mate time to use the cosh. What the pair of them did not know was that a detective who is worth his salt has eyes in the back of his head.

“Muggers in Bern!” There was genuine regret in Studer's voice. “What do you think you're doing, Blaser? You were only released from the Big Moss in December.” By “the Big Moss” he meant Witzwil Labour Camp. He knew the little man. A petty thief.

“What's all this about, Blaser? Didn't I treat you right the last time? Didn't I buy you a drink? Eh? Where's your manners? And as for your friend here . . .” He bent down over the tall drunk. “Schlotterbeck! That really is the limit!”

Schlotterbeck: chronic alcoholic, St Johansen Clinic, Witzwil Labour Camp. The last time he'd got two years in Thorberg Prison for grievous bodily harm. Who on earth had hired this pair?

“Right, then,” said Studer. Schlotterbeck laboriously levered himself up onto his backside and stared at the sergeant uncomprehendingly. “Why did you attack me?” The sergeant grasped Blaser round the back of the neck with one hand, lifted him up and stood him unceremoniously on his feet. “Now talk.”

It was a strange story the two had to relate. They told it as a duet, Blaser's hoarse voice complementing the alcoholic's narrative, delivered in a voice vibrant with injured innocence.

At lunchtime, they said, a man had appeared in the Witzwil Waiting Room – that was the name of a dive in the town centre – sat down with them and bought them a round. Then he'd asked whether they had the guts for a tricky little job. They'd said yes, so the man had told them Sergeant Studer had a valuable document in his wallet. Did they think they could get it? Five hundred each, 100 in advance.

“We followed you, Sergeant, but you never took a tram, so we tried it here.”

“When did you meet this man?”

“At half past twelve.”

“Was he wearing a blue raincoat?”

The astonished Blaser nodded vigorously.

“Where were you to take the document?”

“He gave us an address . . .” Blaser rummaged in his trouser pocket, brought out a crumpled piece of paper and handed it to the sergeant.

Studer read it out as he deciphered the crinkled script: “30–7 Poste restante, Port-Vendres.”

Port-Vendres? Where was Port-Vendres? A port somewhere, but there were plenty of them, on the Mediterranean as well as on the Atlantic coast . . .

Apprehensively, the two would-be muggers stood before the sergeant. He looked at them. They had no overcoats on and their hands were blue with cold. Studer was not a man to bear grudges; really, he felt like inviting them home for a hot toddy. But that was out of the question. What would Hedy say?

So he just told the pair of them to get the hell out of there.

As he strode on, he grinned to himself. There were two things about the attack that pleased him. Firstly, it meant that the temperature chart really was of some value. Secondly, two authentic Bernese had finally appeared in this mess of a case. That they both had records and had tried to knock him out did nothing to lessen his pleasure.

“And what did you think of the priest, Hedy?” Studer asked his wife. He was sitting in a comfortable armchair
beside the green tiled stove, wearing his grey pyjamas and felt slippers on his feet.

“A nice man,” said Frau Studer, who was knitting a tiny pair of rompers. “But I have the feeling he's afraid of something. I was watching him the whole time. I think there was something he'd have liked to tell you but didn't have the courage to.”

“Yes,” said Studer, lighting his fourteenth Brissago of the day. He was wide awake and had decided to stay up all night. Not that he expected to solve the case, there were certain key facts he lacked for that. But in the first place he wanted to wait for Madelin's telegram and in the second he intended to talk – or, to be more precise, to hold a monologue – to his wife about the case.

“Did you see him again?” she asked.

“No.”

“Why not? Didn't he come to see you?”

“He got the train to Geneva, at half past three.” Studer wasn't looking at his wife. The temperature chart was on his knees. He muttered, “15 July, morning: 36.5, evening: 38.25; 16 July, morning: 38.75, evening: 37. That would mean we're starting off with the numbers 3653825387537. Could the 3 have some special meaning?”

‘What're you doing, Köbu?” Frau Studer asked.

“Nothing,” Studer growled, and he went on muttering to himself. “You could write it out as fractions:
. . . Jesus . . .”

“Language, Köbu,” said Frau Studer mildly.