Fever (18 page)

“Room 138, right at the top.”

“
Merci
,” said Studer, not pronouncing the word with the drawn-out vowel, as was usual in the Bernese dialect.

Long corridors, stairs covered in dust, another long corridor. Now he was on the very top floor. It was dark, there were no lights on. In the flickering flame of a match Studer finally found the number.

Godofrey's welcome was touching. He was wearing an old lab coat, which had once, a long, long time ago, been white. Now it was brightly coloured with red, blue, yellow. And his laboratory stank, but the stench was pleasanter than the smell of dust and floor polish.

“Ah, Inspector Studère! How nice to see you in Paris again. I keep asking after you – but,” said Godofrey, fluttering around like a colourful bird, “since the day before yesterday the
patron
's furious with you.”

Yes, Studer replied, he'd noticed. Madelin had suddenly made himself scarce. What was going on?

“Politics!” whispered Godofrey in an urgent voice, adding that Studer had only himself to blame.

“Me?” the sergeant asked. “Whatever for?”

“They suspect you're a German spy.”

That made the Swiss detective laugh, though it wasn't a hearty laugh. This was degenerating into farce! It explained the man in the bowler hat. Madelin had put a tail on him – on him, Sergeant Studer! It was beyond belief!

Godofrey tiptoed over to the door, listened, then flung it open – just like in a film! He came back into the room, closed the door behind him and waved Studer over like a conspirator. Studer put his ear close to the little man's lips and Godofrey whispered, “You've been asking about the Mannesmann brothers. That was enough, more than enough, that was all it took. The War Ministry asked Madelin what he thought he was doing. The Mannesmann files? Out of the question. Why was he asking? they wanted to know, yes, him, Commissaire Divisionnaire Madelin? . . . Aha, for a friend? A Swiss policeman? From Bern?
Un Boche, bien sûr
! Impossible – Yes, the War Ministry sent the
patron
off with a flea in his ear.”

Silence. I've stirred up a hornet's nest there, Studer thought. An awkward business.

Little Godofrey chattered on. “Sit down, Inspector. You've been rash. Why didn't you come to Godofrey? Godofrey knows everything. Godofrey's a walking encyclopedia. Godofrey knows all the cases, French and foreign, from the Landru case to the Riedel-Guala case. And it didn't occur to you that he'd know about the Mannesmann case? Why did you bother the
patron
with the matter?”

Studer lit himself a Brissago – and it tasted good. The most sensible thing would be to sit there quietly and let the little man do the talking.

Godofrey continued: a year ago he'd been working
in the War Ministry on an espionage case, and – purely by chance – the Mannesmann files had come into his hands. “The name struck me because in my profession I use Mannesmann tubes. That's what they call containers – as I presume you're already aware – in which you can store gases at high pressure. I wondered whether they were related to
that
Mannesmann, so I had a look at the files. Yes, at first I just leafed through them, but then I read them carefully. Two brothers, supposedly Swiss.”

“Yes, I know all that,” Studer broke in. “They were prospecting for lead, silver and copper, and they were shot, for high treason.”

“That's right,” said Godofrey. “But what you don't know is the following: the two of them wanted to buy land and always carried a lot of gold and silver coins around with them. The Arabs down there don't trust paper money. When they were arrested and shot, their luggage was searched. There was no sign of the money.”

Godofrey paused for effect.

“They didn't have an account with the Banque Algérienne, so the assumption was that they'd hidden the money somewhere. An officer of the Deuxième Bureau – you know the Deuxième Bureau, it's our intelligence service – disguised himself as an Arab and set off to make contact with the geologist, Cleman, since he'd worked for the Mannesmann brothers and was also the one who had informed on them. Lyautey, the resident general governing the protectorate, was furious, he needed money for his colony. Why weren't they interrogated? he roared. But it was too late.

“It took the officer of the Deuxième Bureau two months to find Cleman – you know that he was a fellow-countryman of yours, Inspector? Yes? . . . Good. He
approached Cleman but got nothing out of him. At that time the geologist was working in the area round Gourama, looking for oil and coal. There were also a couple of lead-smelting furnaces in operation there that the Mannesmann brothers had built. We couldn't do anything about Cleman, he had a Swiss passport and Belgian papers as well. The Belgians were our allies. Cleman said he'd taken residence in Switzerland so that he could get a Swiss passport in order to be able to travel to Germany freely. He claimed he could only get the machines he needed in Germany. Since he had unmasked the Mannesmann brothers, the officer believed everything he told him. Moreover Cleman was well liked by the Berbers of that district. The Deuxième Bureau officer returned without having got anywhere.

“Cleman spent a further year in Gourama, returned to Switzerland, then was recalled by Lyautey and sent back to Gourama. He'd managed to get into the general's good books. When he fell ill, Lyautey had him flown to Fez. Cleman died there, of malaria, during a smallpox epidemic. Cleman's secretary, a certain Jacques Koller, settled in Paris and set up as a stockbroker. As his assistant – his secretary, if you like – he employed the daughter of his late boss, the geologist Victor Cleman.

“And now? Now the affair, which has lain dormant for years in the vaults of the War Ministry, seems to have been reactivated: the secretary, Koller, disappears; Cleman's second wife dies in a strange manner in Basel. You told Madelin that, and he told me. And then you, Inspector, suddenly turn up in Paris asking to see the Mannesmann files. Is that not enough to arouse suspicion? Can you blame the French government for assuming you've come to look for the
Mannesmann brothers' lost hoard? It was 200,000 francs after all – and in pre-war currency. All in silver and gold coins. Perhaps Cleman buried the money. So now people are assuming you've come to play the treasure hunter and they intend to stop you. Aren't they right?”

Studer was sitting on a table, head bowed, among test tubes, flasks, Bunsen burners and bottles, sparse light trickling down from a skylight onto his back. Godofrey was walking up and down, with short, stiff steps, and when he stopped and gazed at Studer he looked like a wise old owl.

“My wife sends her warmest thanks for the
pâté de foie gras
,” said Studer, with apparent irrelevance.

The little man seemed delighted: he pursed his lips and whistled, very softly. With his stiff owl's gait he came closer, bent down to Studer's ear and whispered, “Please pass on my respect, my profound respect to your wife.” He grinned. “But I, Godofrey, will help you. The pair of us will play a trick on the
patron
, and I know that he will not take it amiss. In fact, he's not angry with you at all, it's the War Ministry he's cursing. You'll have to disappear, Inspector. If you try to go to Morocco, they'll arrest you under some pretext in Marseilles and deport you as an undesirable alien. It can take a long time, the deportation I mean, you could very well rot away while you're waiting, in some damp dungeon . . . No, we'll do it differently. You'll be able to shake off your shadow, won't you?”

Godofrey was looking at the sergeant in his guileless manner and could not understand why his friend should start at the word “shadow”. Shadows! The case was full of shadows! Studer shook his head in irritation.

Godofrey went on. “Sergeant Beugnot, who has
been instructed to follow your every step, is not the brightest . . .” He fell silent and took to pacing up and down again.

Studer was sitting hunched up on the table, staring at his dangling feet as if they were objects of the greatest interest. Could he really trust this Godofrey, whom he did not really know, apart from their police work together? Perhaps . . . After all, he had not got to the ripe old age of fifty-nine without acquiring some ability to judge character. Godofrey's type was not unknown to him. The little man had become a forensic scientist, of this he was sure, in order to escape boredom. Godofrey needed to be busy. He was one of those people who pray, “Give us this day our daily problem.” It was a type that was to be found not only among policemen, but also among philosophers, psychologists, doctors, lawyers. A not unattractive type if a little wearying, perhaps, when you had to deal with them all the time. Studer decided to risk it. His voice was gentle, caressing, as he said, “So you want to help me, Godofrey, old friend?”

The little man actually had tears in his eyes. The poor chap must be all alone, Studer thought; no one has a friendly word for him, his
patron
just swears at him or orders him about.

“I have here,” said Godofrey with an odd quaver in his voice, “the passport of a friend of mine. He looked like you, Monsieur Studère. We worked together in Lyons, but he was shot a year ago during a police raid. He was an inspector in the Sûreté there. You can have his passport – you'll just have to shave off your moustache. Then you must buy a dark coat with a velvet collar and wear a starched collar. And you mustn't forget that from now on you have the same name as the
Emperor's
minister of police . . .”

“The emperor's? The Kaiser's?”

“I was certainly not referring to Wilhelm II,” said Godofrey, with a note of rebuke in his voice. ‘There is only one Emperor,
le petit caporal
, Napoleon I. His minister was called – surely you're not going to tell me you've never heard of that man of genius?”

History was the one lesson Studer had always slept through at school. He shrugged his shoulders and gave Godofrey a questioning look.

“His Excellency Joseph Fouché from Nantes, Duke of Otranto.”

“What? I'm to be a duke,” said Studer, horrified.

“You're making fun of poor old Godofrey, Inspector. From now on you are Joseph Fouché, Inspecteur de la Sûreté. All we have to do is put the finishing touches to your passport.”

Godofrey went to a wall cupboard, took out a rather grubby-looking slim booklet and then started searching for something among the clutter on his desk. Finally he found it, a bottle of green ink with which he drew bureaucratic hieroglyphs on the penultimate page of the booklet. Then he took a smoothly polished stone from the same cupboard, greased the surface, pressed it on a document he had beside him, carefully lifted off the stone and applied the stamp he had thus created to the penultimate page of the passport. After that the green ink was required again. Holding the pen, Godofrey's hand performed elegant circles in the air before plunging, like a hawk that has spotted a chicken, down onto the paper. Then the little man waved the passport in the air, blew on the still damp ink and finally . . . finally held out the specimen of his skill for the sergeant to see.

Travelling on special orders from the War Ministry
, it said. The signature was illegible, as any genuine signature should be, and a stamp added the final touch.

“Marvellous!” said Studer. “Fantastic!”

“If we in the police can't even forge a document,” said Godofrey modestly, “then they might as well tie a bundle of files round our necks and throw us in the Seine.”

“I'm really grateful to you, Godofrey, that's all I can say. But if
you
ever need help, you know where to get hold of me.”

“Don't mention it, Inspector,” the little man said. “If we can help somebody . . .”

Studer took the open passport and leafed through it until he found the photograph at the front. The man in the picture – it was a half-length portrait – was broad-shouldered, with a lean face from which protruded a narrow pointed nose. His mouth? Studer had not seen his own mouth since he had grown his walrus moustache.

“And you think he looks like me?” Studer asked.

“He could be your twin brother. You just have to shave off your moustache, put on a homburg and you're ready to go.”

As Studer put the passport into his breast pocket a rustling reminded him – as it had done once before – of the presence of the temperature chart.

“Here, Godofrey,” he said, holding it out to the little man. “Can you decipher that?”

Godofrey grabbed the sheet of paper eagerly and pushed his horn-rimmed glasses up onto his forehead, revealing a pair of watery blue eyes, blinking at the unaccustomed exposure. He brought the sheet up to within a hand's breadth of them, turning it this way and that until he finally held it so that the horizontal axis of the graph was vertical. All accompanied by little exclamations: “Childish! . . . Childishly simple! . . . Amateur! . . . The Freemason's code . . . You can read it straight off.”

He skipped over to the table, sat down and started: “U I L N T L F . . .”

“That's enough, Godofrey, enough!” Studer cried. He suddenly started to get a little worried. The little man was to be trusted, certainly, but after all, he was French.