Free Fever by Friedrich Glauser

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 inthe 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.
    â€œHe 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