Fever (24 page)

“Do you mind if I fill my pipe?” Studer asked, unperturbed. Even as he asked, he took out his tobacco pouch and calmly proceeded to fill the bowl, tamping the tobacco down properly with his thumb. Then he got up and stayed standing there for a while, a tall, broad, massive figure, before he strode over to the fireplace with heavy steps, bent down, took out a piece of kindling with a little yellow flame, lit his pipe, went back to his chair and blew clouds of smoke into Lartigue's face.

“Once the court had answered that initial question,” he said, “I would go on, ‘Gentlemen, it is true that I am travelling on a forged passport. But I have never engaged in espionage. I am a Swiss policeman investigating a double murder, which I have been given the duty of . . . of . . .'” Studer searched for a suitably impressive word, but, not finding one, he simply ended with, “‘ . . . solving.'”

He fell silent and stroked his upper lip, feeling for his moustache; twirling it had always calmed him during awkward discussions. Not finding it, however, he resorted to a thorough clearing of his throat. Then he continued: “Anyway – and I'll be quite open with you,
mon capitaine
– I am not only looking after the interests of my country, but those of a young woman, whose father . . . But I don't think that would be of interest for your court-martial. And to return to those proceedings: first of all I would demand to be treated as a representative of my country. Since that request would probably be refused, I would take the liberty of following a highly idiosyncratic interpretation of the law of self-defence. Two Brownings contain sixteen rounds, assuming my arithmetic is correct.”

“Bravo!” said Captain Lartigue. “Marie's description hit the mark exactly.”

“Mar—” Studer said, but he was interrupted by a woman's voice.

“Evening, Cousin Jakob.”

Studer grasped the bottle of date brandy, filled his glass, emptied it and put it back down.

“Hello, Marie.” His voice was perfectly steady.

A morning in the fort of Gourama

“Cousin Jakob,” Marie asked, “have you got the temperature chart?”

Studer nodded, nodded and nodded, his head wouldn't stop. Marie had sat down on the couch where, not too long ago, the captain, the dog and the gazelle had been fast asleep. And Studer was still sitting in the armchair with the comfortable shape that had allowed him, too, to rest and close his eyes. The book with the lines

                            
The sky above the roof,

                            
So blue, so calm . . .

was still lying on the little table. But Marie's arrival had changed the mood in the room. She was wearing a white linen apron, such as nurses wear as part of their uniform, with a thin hairnet held by a linen band tied round her forehead. And proudly in the middle of the linen band stood a red cross. Marie sat on the couch in a modest posture, hands clasped, elbows resting on her knees. Beside her sat Captain Lartigue in his crumpled khaki uniform, leaning so far back that there was only a dark blue cushion between his shoulder-blades and the wall. At his feet sat the dog and the gazelle, like a tangled ball of brown and black wool.

Yes, he had the temperature chart, Studer said, staring at the floor. That is, to be precise, he had one half
of the chart; the other half was safely locked up in a lawyer's office in Bern.

Now it was Marie's turn to nod. And she did. Slowly and repeatedly. Finally she asked whether no one had any cigarettes in the room. Cousin Jakob – what she actually said was
l'oncle Jacques
– had his pipe to smoke, what about her? Studer sighed. How many names had he had to put up with in this messy case? For Madelin he was “Studère”, for the dance teacher “Styoodah”, for Murmann “Köbu”, on his passport he was called Joseph Fouché, and for Hedy he was “
Vatti
”. Marie had christened him “Cousin Jakob”. He was happy with that. But “
Oncle Jacques
”! It was too much. And as Captain Lartigue took a blue packet – similar to the blue packet on the seat beside the then unknown girl in the Paris–Basel express – out of one of his pockets and offered Marie a cigarette, Detective Sergeant Studer gave vent to his protest, a protest expressed in the most vigorous Swiss terms.

His protest died away. Studer had the impression he was talking to two dolls. He felt a pang of sadness. Lartigue was looking at Marie and the girl only had eyes for the captain. There was a French expression
faire le Jacques
, which could perhaps best be translated as “to play the fool”. The sergeant could not get the silly pun out of his mind.

What did these two, there on the couch, care about the temperature chart? What did they care about the treasure under the cork-oak beside the red rock that looked like a man? What was the tragedy of two old women, who had both come to a miserable end in their kitchens, to Captain Lartigue, livestock dealer, garrison commander, military strategist, doctor and father to his men? Could two lovers spare a thought for things that quickened the pulse of every detective?
The “Big Case”, for example? Studer sighed, and since, at the same time as he sighed, he knocked out his pipe on the rim of a pottery ashtray, the two finally looked across at him. And about time too!

“Let's leave the serious business until the morning,” said Captain Lartigue. “You're tired now, Inspector. We'll have some supper, then you can have a good night's sleep and tomorrow we'll see what's the best way to sort out our affairs.”

“Our affairs,” the young French whippersnapper had said. Our affairs! If he insisted. It was fortunate that “our” affairs included supper. It was lavish, and it turned into a pleasant meal, too. The captain's batman, a Hungarian with a beard like Old Father Time, served it up.

Lamb chops. Risotto garnished with chicken livers. Artichokes with mayonnaise. Salad. Cheese. To wash it all down was a wine called Kébir.
Kebir
, the captain explained, was the Arabic for “great”. The wine deserved its name.

The camp-bed had been set up in an empty officer's room. It was narrow, but that made no difference. The sergeant immediately fell into a deep sleep. When he woke up and looked at his watch, ticking on a chair beside his bed, it was five o'clock. He got up and went out of the room. The sky was an immense sheet of wild silk, very bright, with folds here and there; the folds were darker.

At first it seemed as if the fort was as quiet as the grave. The huts grouped round the one-storey tower, which was more or less in the middle of the fort, had no windows. Studer crossed the sandy yard in almost complete silence; he had put on his leather slippers
with soft soles, which made his steps nearly inaudible. He tried to orientate himself. Yes, that must be where the way out was. He set off towards it. What he had in mind was to go out of the fort and have another look at the cork-oak, to check again that there really was nothing there.

There was the gate. A legionnaire was sitting on a kerbstone with his rifle, bayonet fixed, leaning against the wall beside him, his head in his hands – he was asleep. To the right of the entrance crouched a hut that didn't look at all like the other huts, even though it was actually built in the same way: whitewashed walls, corrugated iron roof. But in the first place it had two doors, made of massive beams, with heavy iron bolts. The ends of the bolts went into the wall. Then – and that was the really striking thing – that hut had windows. Two windows. And the windows were barred.

The sentry at the gate was asleep. Studer crept up to one of the windows. If he stood on tiptoe, he could see inside.

A cell, roughly six foot by four and a half. A cement block along one side formed a bed. A man was sitting on the block. It was dark in the cell and therefore a bit difficult to see what the man was doing. Studer leant forward, taking care not to cast a shadow in the cell with his head. He couldn't say why he felt it was so important the man didn't notice him, but he did. Now he could see clearly: the man had a pack of grubby cards in his hand. He shuffled them, put the pack down beside him, cut them, then began to lay them out in a row.

He laid out four rows, they were clearly visible, four rows of nine cards each. Then the man shook his head, gathered them up, shuffled them again, cut – with his left hand – and played a different solitary game.

He took three cards, picked one out and threw the other two away. He picked three more, looked at them and threw all three away. He took another three, kept one of those three and threw two on the pile of discards. He continued to do this until he had been through all the cards Then he took the discards, shuffled them, cut and started all over again. The cards he had picked out were laid down in an odd arrangement; it looked like a cross.

The sentry sitting by the gate was still asleep. But the fort was no longer silent. There was a distant sound of pans being bashed against each other. Invisible hands pulled the wild-silk curtain away from the sky. Now it was the blue of coloured glass.

The sergeant gave a start. A bugle, not five yards away from Studer, sent its morning song ringing round the fort . . . Was it behind that corner? The sergeant crept over. Yes, there was a man in his light-green uniform, the mouth of his instrument aimed at a dull, tired sun, which was wearily inching its way up over the red mountains – and the man was blasting his morning song straight into the weary sun's face.

Then the wall of silence in the huts began to crumble: coughing, cursing, swearing . . . Suddenly the air seemed permeated with the smell of coffee. Figures crept past carrying buckets filled with brown liquid. Their faces were covered in dust – covered in dust and thin. A few times the sergeant was unceremoniously shouldered aside, it was as if the coffee-bearers were blind. But Studer did not notice this jostling at all. There was an image he could not get out of his mind: a lonely man in a cell, laying out the cards for himself after what must surely have been a sleepless night on the cement block, in the cold, with no blankets; and now he was taking advantage of the first light of
dawn to peep behind the curtain that hid the future from him.

The cards laid out in Basel, the cards laid out in Bern. What part did the clairvoyant corporal have in all this? Who was this Corporal Collani, who had deserted from Géryville on 28 September to rejoin his mounted company, fit and well, on 15 January in Gourama? Was this shadow, who was using the first pale light of a new day to lay out the cards . . . yes, who was the shadow in the cell? An absence without leave of three months would be punished in any army, it was called desertion. The clairvoyant corporal would, of course, be treated as a sick man. There was even a marvellous scientific name for the condition from which the corporal was suffering – suffering? Maybe. It was called amnesia. Even a simple sergeant was not without a certain amount of scientific knowledge.

Amnesia. Fine. But, as he had just established, the clairvoyant corporal was now locked up behind bars. How was it possible, then, for the said Collani, even if he was one and the same as Victor Alois Cleman, alias Koller, the murderer of Ulrike Neumann, to have gone out to the man-shaped rock by the cork-oak to dig up the buried treasure? How was it possible? The answer was simple.

The man had an accomplice.

But the next question was, how did the accomplice, together with his employer, intend to go about realizing the value of the hidden treasure? That is, to put it simply, to turn it into money?

On the one side was the geologist Cleman, whether he was the clairvoyant corporal or not, together with his accomplice . . . Right . . . And on the other were the Canton of Bern and Marie Cleman, represented by Detective Sergeant Jakob Studer. Two parties. All very
neat and clear. But the equation didn't work out. To make it work out, there had to be an intermediary. An intermediary! Not a very good word. A third party, that was better, if only to demonstrate the old German proverb that when two people quarrel it's the third party that comes off best.

Who was this third party?

Studer had not noticed that he had already walked round the same hut seven times, often – very often – colliding with men who were not happy about it. Let them swear, swearing had never disturbed the sergeant when he was mulling over a problem.

On his eighth circuit he collided with someone who didn't swear, and that did rouse the sergeant from his ruminations. The someone was dressed in white, with a hairnet. The someone said, “Up so early, Cousin Jakob?”

Studer hated silly questions, so he growled an answer to the effect that if he was walking round on his two legs it was safe to assume he had got up. – Was that a way to address a lady? – Lady, lady? As far as he could see, there was no lady here, only a chit of a girl. And he would like to take the opportunity to point out once and for all that he was not called
Oncle Jacques
. That meant fool in French, and even if
he
sometimes thought he was a fool, he didn't need it confirmed by some slip of a girl . . .

With that the sergeant started to stalk off on the silent soles of his leather slippers, but Marie grasped his sleeve, saying she was sorry, she had only meant it as a joke. Everything had happened differently from the way she'd expected. She'd thought she wouldn't be able to get to Gourama until much later, and she'd expected to find her Uncle Matthias, the White Father, already here. But, with the way things were in this
world, Father Matthias had only arrived last night. And very late, at around one o'clock in the morning. That was why she'd asked the captain not to wake Cousin Jakob —