Fever by Friedrich Glauser

Author:Friedrich Glauser [Glauser, Friedrich; Mitchell, Mike ]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781904738473
Publisher: Bitter Lemon Press

Commissaire Madelin goes to ground

The chief of police was a quiet man who did not look at all like a man who spent his time indoors. His face was tanned because he went climbing in the mountains summer and winter. He also bred dogs, and that morning he was in a good mood because one of his bitches, Mayfair III, had had a litter of four pups. Studer had to listen in reverent silence for a quarter of an hour to the chief discoursing on the difference between various pedigrees.

Then the sergeant told him his clairvoyant story.

In every public organization there is at least one man whom one might call the salt of the whole organization. He’s looked on as a bit of an outsider and not too much routine work is demanded of him; the hum-drum, everyday business is kept away from him, or, rather, he sees to it himself that it’s kept away from him. This man only comes into his own – and this is his value – when there’s something out of the ordinary to be done. Then he is needed, then he’s indispensable. When things are slack and he lounges around or goes for a stroll, his bosses turn a blind eye, since they know that the time will come when the man will be indispensable: he’ll find ways of unravelling a tangled situation, he’ll know how to put another organization, that has got a bit above itself, in its place; in a couple of hours this outsider will clear up a piece of urgent business a plodding pen-pusher would not be able to sort out in two weeks.

Sergeant Studer was the salt of the Bern cantonal police, and that was presumably one of the reasons why the chief of police raised no objection to the his planned trip. The other was not difficult to guess: Chief Inspector Gisler of the city police had prepared the ground. For a moment Studer had the feeling he could read the thoughts making their sluggish way through his boss’s mind. Millions! was one of them. Another was: Studer’s always been a bit round the bend. If he finds the money, I’ll get the glory; if he doesn’t, we can always pension him off. And the third: it makes no difference whether Studer’s lounging around here or goes off on holiday and makes the Basel force look fools. But not one rappen expenses.

It was this final thought Studer took up when, after he had finished explaining the case, he said, “There’s nothing more I can do here. I could have stopped the priest leaving, but then I’d have had to lock him up, and I didn’t want to do that.” He repeated his joke about the Vatican, that he didn’t want to get into an argument with the Pope. “The others I don’t know. I can’t sort things out over the phone, I have to go to Paris, perhaps even further. I need to find the geologist’s secretary, Koller, and the clairvoyant corporal.

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