Fever (8 page)

The man talks just for the sake of talking, Studer thought. Empty words. He shivered again, despite his coat. He buttoned it up and turned the collar up too. Father Matthias went chattering on. From Pythagoras's theorem he got on to the games of cops and robbers the boys played and from those childhood memories to the Moroccan
djishes
, what they called the bands of robbers on the borders of the great desert, he explained . . . he'd once been attacked by one of them . . . The words kept pouring out, like a stream cascading into a rocky pool.

“You can go,” Studer broke in, turning to the lady. “Your statement was very informative. Perhaps it will help us. Thank you, madame –
Goodbye
,” he added, to show that he could speak some English.

But the lady seemed to feel that was being too familiar. She wrinkled her nose and left the apartment without a word. From the floor below she could be heard going on about something in shrill tones, interrupted by calming words from a deep voice.

“It's true, you can hear what's going on in the other apartments, can't you, Father Matthias?”

The priest stood up, his
sheshia
sitting crookedly on his small head. He kept his eyes fixed on Studer's breast, as if in mute appeal to the organ that is generally regarded as the seat of our emotions. But the sergeant's heart did not respond to the silent call.

“I'll be back in a minute, then we can go,” said Studer, leaving the priest standing. When he returned, accompanied by Frau Tschumi, Father Matthias was still standing in the middle of the kitchen, a long-suffering expression on his face.

Studer nodded towards the man in the white habit and asked, “Yes?”

“
Yes
,” said the lady, falling back into English in her excitement. With a look of disgust on her face she waved away the drift of blue smoke from the sergeant's Brissago. “The eyes,” she went on, “I think the eyes are the same.”

“
Meeerci
,” said Studer in a broad Swiss accent, and the lady departed.

The silence in the brightly lit kitchen was becoming oppressive, but neither of the men seemed to feel like breaking it. Studer made a business of putting his gloves on – thick, grey woollen gloves. His Brissago was dangling down from the corner of his mouth, which probably explained why the following words sounded somewhat strained:

“You do realize you're a suspect, Father? The lady thinks she recognizes you. You're the right height, she says, and your eyes, too, they . . . You'll have to prove exactly when you left Basel yesterday, when you arrived in Bern. And I'd like to see your papers, too.”

Now there was a thing! Tears appeared in the old man's eyes, they ran down his cheeks, clung to his sparse beard, then more came, and a gulp that sounded like a sob, and another. His right hand dug into his deep pocket while his left clung on to the edge of his habit. A handkerchief appeared – he needed to use it – the magnifying glass, the snuff box and finally a passport.

“
Meeerci
,” said Studer, with the same broad accent as before. But the emphasis was different, there was an undertone of excuse in the word.

Passeport Pass Passaporto . . . pour . . . für . . . per . . .

“What on earth does this mean?” Studer asked.

After the three prepositions came:
Koller, Max Wilhelm
.

Sergeant Studer took off his grey woollen gloves again, stuffed them in his pockets, sat down on the kitchen stool, took his new ring binder out of his breast pocket and said, without looking up as he licked his index finger and leafed through the passport with gestures you see in policemen all around the world, from Cape Town to the North Pole, from Bordeaux to San Francisco, “Sit down.”

He did not look up, but he heard the creaking of the springs in the leather armchair – the armchair in which the old woman had fallen asleep for good.

But the interrogation was not to proceed uninterrupted. An elderly man appeared in the doorway asking, in a strong Bernese accent, whether there was a detective here, he had something to tell.

The elderly man did go on rather, but what he had to say could be summarized in a few sentences: When he had come home late the previous evening – he lived on the ground floor, he told them, from which it was not difficult to guess that he was the man who kept forgetting his keys – he had seen a car waiting outside the house and a tall man had been walking up and down on the pavement. He'd asked this man if he was waiting for someone, but all he had received in reply was a surly grunt. Immediately after that a man in a blue raincoat had come dashing out of the building, grabbed the tall man by the arm, pushed him into the car, slammed the door and away they'd gone. He'd thought – Rüfenacht, Ernst Rüfenacht, by the way – he'd thought the cops – sorry, the police – might be interested, the skinny cow – sorry, the dancing teacher on the first floor had suggested he should inform them of what he'd seen. Which is what he was doing . . .

“
Merci
,” said Studer for the third time, rather brusquely. Since he was conscientious, however, he
wrote
Rüfenacht, Ernst, 44 Gerechtigkeitsgasse
down in his notebook since, like Frau Tschumi, the man was a possible witness.

Then he just sat there on the stool at the kitchen table covered with its oilcloth, staring into space. As the ash on his Brissago grew longer and longer, the silence grew more and more oppressive. From time to time it was broken by a shy sniff. Then Studer squinted from beneath his half-closed lids at Father Matthias, whose passport called him “Max Wilhelm Koller” while he claimed to be the brother of the dead geologist. But his name had been Cleman, not Koller . . . What had Koller to do with Cleman – or Cleman with Koller, for that matter?

Two men. A short man in a blue raincoat and a tall man waiting out in the street . . . An old woman playing patience in her lonely apartment. Or had she been playing something less innocent? Had she been telling her visitor's fortune from the cards? Or her own? And her visitor? He was short, so he'd been told – like the priest. And he was afraid – like the priest! At least that was what Frau Tschumi had said.

The cup with the coffee grounds and traces of Somnifen in the bottom had been rinsed out. When? The sergeant had walked round the apartment and when he'd got back to the kitchen the priest had been sitting in the leather armchair. Strange, too, how well Father Matthias knew his way around: there's the coffee and there's the kirsch. Had he been surprised to learn there were fibres stuck to the keyhole of the lock that had been broken off? Not a bit of it. But he'd suddenly burst into tears, like a little child, when he'd been accused of the murder and asked to show his papers.

Contradictory, that was the only word for it.

At times the sergeant felt he could trust the man in
the white habit, and then at others he distrusted him. When he lectured him – about Cardinal Lavigerie or Pythagoras's theorem – there was something childlike about the way he talked; but when he was silent there was something sly, something devious in his silence. The childlike, unworldly side to him could be easily explained: it was not for nothing that he had spent years roaming the wide plains as a missionary, saying mass in distant outposts, hearing confession. And his devious side? Was devious the right word for it? Might his behaviour, his exaggerated self-assurance in a room which had, after all, been the scene of a murder, not come from something like embarrassment? Embarrassment: the improbable story of the clairvoyant corporal in Géryville . . .

And while the silence continued to hang heavily over the kitchen, Sergeant Studer wrote in his new ring binder:
Get Madelin to enquire whether Corporal Collani really disappeared
.

He cleared his throat, knocked the ash off his Brissago, found it had gone out, relit it and asked, without looking up, “Why do you have a different name from your brother?” The words echoed round the kitchen, and it was only when he had finished that Studer noticed he had used the familiar form to the priest, as if he were just an ordinary suspect.

“He was” – a sob – “my stepbrother, from . . . from my mother's first marriage.”

Studer looked up and could not suppress a smile. Once more Father Matthias had his
sheshia
balanced on his right index finger and was making it spin round by prodding it with his left hand. His tears dried up without needing to be wiped away. But after that one answer his lips remained sealed and Studer gave up the interrogation.

Two hours later – by that time it was half past twelve – a sergeant of the Bern cantonal police and a priest in a white habit with open-toed sandals were walking along, much to their mutual embarrassment, through the arcades of the city of Bern. Much work had been done in those two hours, work that had borne some fruit, for which the sergeant had his good fortune to thank, and his contact with a man who, instead of postage stamps, collected fingerprints, fingerprints of all Swiss criminals. Criminals, note, old Herr Rosenzweig was not interested in lesser miscreants. The walls of his study were covered in pictures – all framed and under glass – which looked like reproductions of surrealist paintings. In fact, they were enlarged photographs of thumbs, index fingers, palms, enlarged ten, twenty times, with tiny dots among the loops, whorls and arches: the pores . . .

Before Studer left the priest in Sophie Hornuss's lonely flat, he said, “As far as I'm concerned, you can run away if you feel like it, though I don't advise it, we'd soon get you again. I have to go and see an acquaintance of mine. Since my friend Madelin recommended you to me, I don't like just to take you to the police station and lock you up there. Let me go and visit my friend, that might perhaps clear up a few things. After that I'll come back for you and then we can see what the next step is.”

Sounds good, thought Studer, see what the next step is . . . But what will that next step be?

Old Herr Rosenzweig, who collected photos of fingerprints as avidly as an art lover might collect African carvings, lived on Bellevuestrasse. Studer took the bus.

The door was opened by a tall, bony man with gold-rimmed spectacles perched on the end of his nose. Clean-shaven, his hair cropped close, he had small, podgy hands.

“Ah, it's Studer.” Herr Rosenzweig's welcome was hearty, and in the same breath he asked whether the police were stuck again. It was happening more and more now, he said, someone was coming to see him almost every day. Wouldn't it be simpler if the authorities were to set up their own fingerprint collection, eh?

“The crisis,” said Studer apologetically, “the world economic crisis.”

That set the old gentleman off on a rant. “Always the same old excuse! The crisis, the world economic crisis! The crisis is a very convenient excuse. But what have you got for me today, Sergeant?”

Studer took the cup out, very carefully, so as not to touch the sides. Herr Rosenzweig picked up one of the shakers of fingerprint powder that he always kept on his desk, as other people would a lighter or an ashtray. Herr Rosenzweig never smoked.

The cup was light coloured, so graphite powder was carefully sprinkled over it, then blown away: two clear prints.

“Thumb and index finger,” said Herr Rosenzweig, taking up his magnifying glass. He examined the prints for a long time, shook his head, looked at Studer, then finally asked him, intrigued, “Where did you get this, Sergeant?”

Studer told him the whole story. The old gentleman stood up murmuring something about a scar . . . a scar, and took down a file from a shelf (Studer saw the date, 1903), leafed through the contents and thrust a sheet under the sergeant's nose.

“It's guesswork, of course,” he said, “but it could be
right. To do it properly we'd have to photograph the prints on the cup. We can do that later, but
à première vue,
as our French neighbours would say, they seem to be from the same person. Have a look yourself, Sergeant.”

Studer compared them. A demanding task. Finding fibres on a keyhole was simplicity itself by comparison. But there was definitely a certain similarity between the thumbprint on the cup and the thumbprint on the photograph. At the bottom of the photograph it said:
Unknown
.

“What case was that?” Studer asked.

“Nineteen hundred and three, the beginnings of fingerprinting. This is unique, Sergeant, the first photograph of a fingerprint taken in Switzerland. You won't find it anywhere else – I mean the reproduction of the fingerprint. Locard once spent a whole hour begging for it, he'd come straight from Lyon, it was Reiss in Lausanne who'd wished him on me. But I stood my ground and said no. I don't know why. When I'm dead my collection will go to the Canton of Bern – it's in my will – and the cousin of some member of the Federal Council will be appointed custodian. But he won't bother with the collection much, he'll go off and play cards instead and when a visitor happens to come along it'll be closed. Ah well . . . But I'm supposed to be telling you about this. Right, then . . .”

The first thumbprint

“Fribourg . . . You know Fribourg, Sergeant? An old town, very pretty. A girl was found murdered there on 1 July 1903. At first it was assumed it was suicide. There was a glass on the bedside table with prussic acid in it, or KCN, to be more precise, potassium cyanide.