“OK,” he said after a while. “What the hell do we do now?
Please be kind to somebody who’s about to become an old aged pensioner! What the hell do we do now?”
“Hmm,” said Munster. “That’s a good question.”
“I have one more week before I retire,” said Bausen, blow ing his nose. “Fate seems to want me to spend it trying to find one of my inspectors. Find her in some damn ditch with her head cut off-that’s what I call a great way to end a career.”
“Oh, shit,” said Munster.
Nobody spoke. Bausen had clasped his hands in front of him now and closed his eyes. For a brief moment it seemed to
Munster that he was praying, but then he opened both his eyes and his mouth again.
“Yes, a big heap of shit is what I’m surrounded by,” he said.
“Ah, well,” said Van Veeteren, sitting down. “That could well be. But perhaps we ought to spend a little less time swear ing and a little more trying to get somewhere-that’s just a modest suggestion, of course.”
“Excuse me,” said Bausen, sighing deeply. “You’re right, of course, but we might as well wait for the coffee, don’t you think? Kropke, you can tell us the Podworsky story, as we intended in the first place.”
Kropke nodded and started sorting out his papers.
“Shall we make this public knowledge?” asked Mooser.
“That she’s… disappeared, I mean.”
“Let’s take that later,” said Van Veeteren. “It can wait for a second or two, I think.”
“Podworsky,” said Kropke. “Eugen Pavel. Born 1935. Came to Kaalbringen as an immigrant at the end of the fifties. Got a job at the canning factory, like so many others. To start with, he lived in the workers’ hostel down there; but when they pulled it down, he moved out to the house on the heath. It had been empty for a few years, and the reason he was allowed to move in was that he was engaged to Maria Massau, whom he was liv ing with. She’s the sister of Grete Simmel-”
“Aha,” said Munster. “Ernst Simmel’s brother-in-law.”
“More or less, yes,” said Bausen. “Carry on!”
“Podworsky has always been an odd type, you could say.
Difficult to deal with, as many people have found to their cost.
On the booze from time to time-the very thought of allow ing that poor woman to live out there on the heath-well, it can’t have been a great time for her…”
“Go on,” said Bausen.
“Then there was that killing in 1968. For some unknown reason-and entirely out of character-Podworsky had in vited some fellow workers out to his house-men only, if I’ve understood it correctly?”
Bausen nodded.
“There was some hard drinking, one assumes, and eventu ally one of them made a pass at Maria-a bit of flirting, proba bly no more than that, but Podworsky was furious. He started an enormous row that ended with him kicking the whole lot of them out of the house, apart from the one who had made the pass. He kept him inside, and beat him to death with a poker later that night-Klaus Molder, his name was.”
“Found guilty of manslaughter,” said Bausen, taking up the tale. “Was inside at Klejmershuus for six years. In the mean time, Maria Massau fell ill with leukemia. She’d had it since she was a child, it seems, but it had been dormant. She got worse and worse, and died the same month that Podworsky was released.”
“Did they let him out on parole to see her?” asked Van
Veeteren.
“Yes, but she didn’t want to see him,” said Kropke, taking over once again. “I don’t think she needed to, in fact. She was living with the Simmels for most of the time-more often in the hospital toward the end, of course. When Podworsky got out, he moved straight back into the house, even though it was
Simmel who owned it and had only allowed him to live there because of the family connection, as it were. Anyway, Simmel tried to kick him out several times, but he eventually gave up.”
“Why?” asked Van Veeteren.
“Dunno,” said Kropke.
“No,” said Bausen. “It’s unclear if he simply got tired of try ing, or if there was some other reason, as rumor had it. Has had it for years.”
“What kind of rumor?” wondered Munster.
“All kinds,” said Bausen. “That Podworsky had scared the shit out of Simmel, for instance-to put it bluntly-or that he had some kind of hold over him.”
Van Veeteren nodded.
“OK,” he said. “They weren’t especially well liked in Kaal bringen, either of them, if I’ve understood the situation cor rectly?”
“Right,” said Kropke.
“Why was Podworsky given early retirement?” asked Van
Veeteren. “Was that immediately after he was released from jail?”
“More or less,” said Bausen. “He’d managed to pick up a back injury or something of the sort while in prison-didn’t have much chance of getting another job anyway, I suppose.”
“And so he’s been living out there on his own ever since,” said Kropke. “Since 1974… a real prairie wolf, you could say.”
“No more brushes with the law since then?” asked Munster.
“Well…” said Bausen. “It was rumored that he was distill ing and selling moonshine, or buying it from the Eastern bloc duty-free. I was out there at the end of the seventies, but I didn’t find anything. Maybe he’d been tipped off.”
Van Veeteren scratched his head with a pencil.
“Yep,” he said. “And then there’s this Aarlach business…”
“I must say it’s a damn peculiar coincidence,” said the chief of police. “Don’t you think? What the hell was he doing there? It’s a hundred and fifty miles from here, and Eugen Podworsky has never been renowned as a great traveler, quite the contrary.
What was the date, by the way?”
“March 15, 1983,” said Kropke. “For some reason or other he gets involved in a violent barroom brawl with two young med ical students, one of whom is Maurice Ruhme. They smash up furniture and fittings to the tune of thousands of guilders, and both Podworsky and Ruhme’s pal are hospitalized for several weeks. There’s talk of prosecution, but eventually a settlement is reached-”
“Jean-Claude Ruhme?” said Van Veeteren.
“Presumably,” said Bausen. “We have to dig deeper into this, I guess. Get more flesh on the bones from Melnik; and track down this other student, Christian Bleuwe, wasn’t that his name?”
“Unfortunately-” said Van Veeteren.
“Unfortunately what?”
“He’s dead. It doesn’t say so in the report, but I phoned
Melnik this morning and he told me. Died in connection with an explosion two years ago. I asked Melnik to find out more details of that brawl as well. He says he’ll get back to me.”
Kropke was making notes. Bausen frowned.
“An explosion?” he said.
Van Veeteren nodded and dug into his breast pocket.
“No toothpicks left,” he said. “Do you happen to have a cig — arette?”
Bausen handed over a pack.
“What kind of explosion?”
“A terrorist thing, it seems,” said Van Veeteren, clicking away at his lighter. “Basque separatists, according to Melnik, but he wasn’t sure.”
“Where?” asked Munster.
“Where?” said Van Veeteren, managing to light his ciga rette at last. “In Spain, of course. Somewhere on the Costa del
Sol. Car bomb. Bleuwe and two Spaniards killed-”
Kropke stood up and seemed to be chewing his words.
“Was it… was it in… what the hell’s the place called?”
“Could it be that you are trying to think of Las Brochas?” wondered Van Veeteren, attempting to produce a smoke ring.
He sometimes almost excels himself, thought Munster.
“Las Brochas, yes, that’s it!” almost yelled Kropke.
“Not quite,” said Van Veeteren. “Fuengirola, but that’s only a dozen miles away.”
“But what the hell does all this mean, in fact?” said Kropke.
“Can somebody explain it to me?”