Fever (15 page)

But Studer bridled at that. He'd swear in his own home if he felt like it. No one was going to tell him —

“Jakobli's a really clever little boy,” his wife said, changing the subject. “He'll be just like his granddad.”

Studer looked up. Hedy was nobody's fool. Was she having a dig at him? His wife was sitting at the table,
her hair shining in the lamplight . . . She looked so young . . .

“Listen, old girl,” said Studer, clearing his throat, “did I tell you about Marie Cleman?”

Frau Studer bent lower over her knitting. She didn't want her husband to see the smile she could not repress. That was the third time Jakob had asked that question, the third time in an hour. Her husband seemed pretty concerned about this Marie Cleman. But that was Jakob all over. Only last year there'd been another case involving a girl, a girl who'd been engaged to a man who'd been in prison. And Jakob had got pleurisy because he'd driven a motorbike with the girl in the pouring rain. Not to mention the car accident that had closed the case. And why had Jakob put his health, his life even, at risk? To prove the innocence of the ex-convict. It was just the way he was, there was nothing you could do about it. And that business with the bank? And the case in the lunatic asylum? Hadn't women been the decisive factor in those too? It sometimes seemed to Frau Hedwig Studer as if her husband's bulky frame concealed the soul of a medieval knight fighting against dragons, death and the devil to protect the innocent. Without looking for any thanks. And now this Marie Cleman had come along.

“No,
Vatti
,” said Frau Studer softly. “What's the problem with this Marie?”

Studer flew off the handle. Would she stop calling him
Vatti
! He was overwrought. He'd had a long day and a lot had happened, it was understandable if he lost his temper – and Frau Studer understood.

“The problem is,” said Studer, tapping the temperature chart with the straw sticking out of his Brissago, “that Marie doesn't fit into the case. She ran off to
Paris with her late father's secretary – are you with me, Hedy? – because her mother told fortunes with the cards. And now this Koller's gone bankrupt. Koller! Everyone involved in this business's called Koller!” He paused and crossed his legs; the temperature chart fluttered to the floor beside Frau Studer's chair. Hedy picked it up.

So Studer told her the story. And as he told it, it seemed as if the chaos began to sort itself out. The various Kollers took shape: Father Matthias and the other one, the philosophy student who had met Ulrike Neumann in the Hotel zum Wilden Mann in 1903 . . . And the third Koller, Jakob Koller, who had gone to Morocco with the geologist, as his secretary. It was quite understandable that the second Koller – Victor Alois – had changed his name. He had been afraid of being found out; did he not have the death of Ulrike Neumann on his conscience?

Studer's brain was functioning effortlessly. Father Matthias had admitted that the geologist was his brother, his stepbrother, he'd said. Stepbrother or not, Father Matthias had admitted they were related.

That left the question: were the clairvoyant corporal and the geologist one and the same? Various factors spoke against that assumption. What reason would the geologist have had to change his name again and assume the identity of the medical orderly Collani? And why had the geologist with the curly beard waited fifteen years before sending word to his wife in Basel?

If, on the other hand, one were to assume that Father Matthias was the late geologist Victor Alois Cleman, alias Victor Alois Koller, and a guest in the Hotel zum Wilden Mann, then the whole thing looked more reasonable. A young philosophy student kills his lover. In order to frustrate the police investigation, he
changes his name and his nationality, then reacquires Swiss citizenship under the new name of Cleman. And it is under that name that he gets married, first of all to Sophie in Bern. But the death of Ulrike Neumann weighs on his mind and he talks to his wife about it . . . Sophie's not stupid. Now she knows something, she uses her knowledge to exploit her husband.

“Can you imagine it, Hedy?” Studer asked when his conjectures had reached that point. “The marriage? The wife knows her husband's a murderer. She demands money – Koller-Cleman's on a good salary and she has her own bank account. And the nights? Can you imagine their nights together? You haven't seen the apartment in Gerechtigkeitsgasse. An old house with mould on the walls. And the mould gradually gets into their souls, poisons them. Victor Alois can't say a thing; as soon as he opens his mouth it's ‘Shut up, murderer.' How long can a man put up with a marriage like that? One year? Two years? During the time of the marriage there are the trips to Morocco, contact with the Mannesmann brothers. His travels are the only reason they didn't get divorced sooner. You should have seen the two sisters – their pictures, I mean. When I saw him in the Gerechtigkeitsgasse apartment this morning, the monk showed me pictures of the two women when they were young. Sophie – you know the kind of woman: blouse buttoned up to the neck, a pointed chin resting on a stand-up collar with stiffeners. And her eyes! They gave me the shivers, and I'm not particularly sensitive.”

Studer paused. His wife sat in silence at the table with a sheet of paper on it in front of her – the temperature chart. She had long since stopped knitting, she just nodded now and then as her husband told his story.

A church clock rang out, four high notes and one low rumble – one o'clock. Other churches joined in, among them the nearby school with its hurried, perfunctory jingle, like a schoolboy parroting a verse. And all the notes bounced on the window-panes and came quite close before fading away somewhere far off in the dark sky, leaving the room in even deeper silence.

“Divorce . . .” said Studer softly. “The man can't stand the marriage any longer. He sees his wife's sister, compares them. It does happen, doesn't it, Hedy? Two sisters who are completely different? One sometimes seems to have kept all the goodness for herself, the other all the nastiness. Josepha's good-natured. Koller-Cleman marries Josepha. He's happy. The other woman accepts it. Did she make sure she was paid off? . . . And then the war comes. The geologist loves his daughter, but he has to earn money. He probably still has to pay for Sophie's silence, he can't afford the carefree life he would like to give his second wife and little daughter. Suddenly there's an opportunity to set up on his own. The Mannesmann brothers are guilty of treason and Koller-Cleman denounces them. Now he can prospect on his own account. And he does. He identifies deposits of petroleum. He hears about a gigantic project: a line is to be built across the desert from Oran to the French colonies in Equatorial Africa. They'll need fuel for the line. He speculates, he invests all his savings. Then he falls ill, is taken to the hospital in Fez.”

A match flared up. Studer was relighting his Brissago, which had gone out.

“Two alternatives,” he said. “Either Koller-Cleman managed to get hold of Collani's papers during the smallpox epidemic in Fez. That would mean Collani's dead and the geologist is serving in the Foreign Legion.
Or, delirious with fever, the geologist told Collani his story and gave him the temperature chart, which is supposed to say where the iron chest has been buried. That leads to two further alternatives: Collani is the executor of Koller-Cleman's will, or Koller-Cleman is still alive. In which case he must be —”

“The monk!”

“The monk, the priest. Quite right, old girl.”

Frau Studer got up and went over to her sewing table by the window. After having rummaged around in it for a while, she went back to the dinner table with a piece of paper and a pencil. She put them down, went over to the bookshelves in the corner of the room and got a couple of illustrated magazines. Then she sat down again.

Studer went on.

“Let's assume Collani really is Collani, a former medical orderly. That's our first alternative. He's been told to wait fifteen years. Why fifteen years? Because after fifteen years the statute of limitations comes into force. Cleman-Koller wanted to be absolutely sure. The murder of Ulrike Neumann – if it really was murder, that's all supposition – happened in 1903. Perhaps he thought that after thirty years he was in the clear. Remember, he was a geologist, not a lawyer. If it's assumed he's dead, then he can be sure his estate will finally go to his daughter. For he loved his daughter. And after thirty years Sophie, who knows about the murder, knows about his past, can't do anything about it. In this version – always assuming the monk wasn't having me on – Koller-Cleman is dead. But someone who knew about it is still alive, the other Koller, the one with the same first name as me, Jakob Koller, his secretary. He knows something about purchases of land, buried treasure. That Koller disappears from
Paris in September and a few days later a foreigner appears in Géryville, an Algerian hamlet in the back of beyond. Why would the foreigner go there? To talk to Collani. And Collani, the clairvoyant corporal, disappears. The pair of them go looking for the temperature chart. Collani had posted it off to Basel. So they go to Basel. And an old woman dies. But they don't find the temperature chart. The chart is found by a detective sergeant who has a reputation for having the odd screw loose. So what do the two of them do? They hire a Buick and drive to Bern. Perhaps Josepha sent the chart to her sister? That's another well-known fact: if there are two sisters and one's nasty, while the other's good-natured, the good-natured one will always be tyrannized by the nasty one. And Bern is a repeat of Basel . . .

“But there are still a few things I can't explain. Why use such a complicated method for the two murders – if that's what they were? And why in each case did I find a pack of cards laid out with the jack of spades in the top left-hand corner? Why did the priest rinse out the cup with the traces of Somnifen in the coffee grounds? And, above all, how did the first thumbprint in Herr Rosenzweig's collection come to be on the cup? A thumbprint with a scar? When the priest's thumb has no scar?

“Now I know you're going to object, old girl,” – Frau Studer had no thought of raising any objections at all – “that at the time when Rosenzweig photographed a thumbprint on a tumbler in Fribourg, the study of fingerprints was in its infancy. True. But a scar is a scar, and the monk's thumb bore no resemblance whatsoever to the one on Rosenzweig's photo, nor to the one on the cup.

“So what now? What is needed is some on-the-spot
investigation. So far I only know what I've been told. The monk may be a reliable witness, but who's to say he isn't Koller-Cleman after all? That thumbprint bothers you, doesn't it, Hedy?”

Frau Studer shook her head. She was busy writing letters on the sheet of paper, dictating them to herself, “U, I, L, N, T, L, F . . .”

“What's that you're you doing, Hedy?” Studer asked. His wife waved his question aside impatiently. So Studer got up, went across to the table and leant over his wife's shoulder. She had put the sheet of white paper on the table and fixed the temperature chart to it with four drawing pins in such a way that the narrow side was at the bottom and the lines representing temperatures were vertical. Then, using a ruler, she had continued each of the lines onto the paper above the chart and written a letter at the top of each of them. At the end of the line for 35.5° was the letter A; B was in the space between 35.5° and 36°, while 36° was C. Now she started to translate the morning and evening temperatures recorded for Victor Alois Cleman into letters. On 12 July his morning temperature had been 36.5° – Frau Studer wrote E; for the evening 38.25° had been recorded – Frau Studer wrote M. On 13 July, 38.75° – Frau Studer wrote O. The result was the following series:

U I L N T L F I Z N Z P H Z I H H V X L I P L Z P I L X P I V W N Z M

Studer stared at the row of letters. There was something about it that struck him as familiar. His elbow was on his wife's shoulder.

“Jakob,” Frau Studer groaned, “you're squashing me flat.”

But Studer was deaf to her complaint. That . . . that was . . . surely that was the most primitive of secret codes – the inverted alphabet.

“Get up,” he ordered. With a smile, Frau Studer gave up her chair to him.

Underneath his wife's large, slightly clumsy letters, Studer wrote in his tiny handwriting, which bore some similarity to Greek:

F R O M G O U R A M A K S A R S S E C O R K O A K R O C K R E D M A N

He read it out in a low voice: “From Gourama
ksar
SSE cork-oak rock red man.”

Silence. Frau Studer had her forearm resting on her husband's shoulder. She read the words on the paper and asked, “SSE? What's that?”

“South-south-east. The direction. And
ksar
? It must be the name of a village. Or the Arabic word for village.”

Of course. A clever lad was our Köbu.

Studer looked up. Was that more mockery? But this time he didn't rise to it, merely replied that his wife's cleverness must have rubbed off on him. For once, Hedy blushed.

Then Sergeant Studer went back to his armchair beside the green-tiled stove, the damn monster that refused to draw properly for him. He held the temperature chart and its transliteration up in front of him and couldn't take his eyes off them. With typical male self-centredness, he immediately forgot the part his wife had played in deciphering the cryptogram.