Sponer lit his, and the blonde and her partner walked onto the dance floor and began to dance.
“Pity you don’t want to dance,” the brunette said.
“Well,” Sponer said, but just then the waiter appeared with their orders. The girl asked for some bread, which was passed to her, and she began to eat. Sponer looked across to the blonde. He concluded she was the prettiest one there. He took a sip from the glass. The music stopped, but started up again after the dancers had clapped a few times.
While he kept looking at the dancers, Sponer suddenly again had a feeling of total unreality, this time not about what had happened, but what was actually happening. It struck him as totally incredible that, after driving like a madman for two hours with the dead man through the whole town, he should now be sitting with the girls, drinking and smoking; or, to be more precise, with his spirits raised by the music and the alcohol, he could momentarily no longer dissociate the deed of the stranger and his own flight from the consequences that were bound to follow. Since he hadn’t observed the actual murder and indeed hadn’t even seen the murderer, he was pretty sure that as soon as the crime was discovered it’d be put at his door, so that in the end he began to feel as though he had in fact perpetrated it himself. And had he really been the murderer, in all probability he wouldn’t have been behaving any differently from the way he was now. He’d just be sitting with the two girls, smoking and drinking. One knows how often criminals, after committing a crime, seek the company of women simply in order to forget.
The brunette may well have tried to engage him in small talk a couple of times, and he might have replied without thinking, but just then she repeated something to which he had apparently not responded. “There’s something on your sleeve,” he heard her repeat.
He glanced down. She had got hold of the right-hand sleeve of his coat and was looking at the material. There were a couple of dark stains at the bottom edge.
It was dried blood.
He shuddered. “Get out of here!” a voice cried within him. “Now! Immediately!”
“Oh,” he said with apparent unconcern, though haltingly, “it’s… it’s nothing. Just some… p-paint. Th-that’s all it is.” He pretended to look at it and at the same time felt sweat break out on his forehead. He stood up. “I–I’ll…” he stuttered, “I must… wash it off with some water…”
“Come with me,” she said, “I’ll do it for you.” And she, too, was about to get up. “There’s bound to be some warm water in the kitchen…”
“No,” he said. “Thanks all the same. Don’t worry. I’ll… I’ll be back in just a second…”
“But it’s no trouble,” she interjected.
“Just don’t worry!” he said. He had already taken a few steps from the table, but came back and without a word picked up his cap, which he had left behind.
The girl looked at him in amazement.
He ignored her, reached into his pocket, tossed a couple of coins on a table as he passed, and made for the exit. He almost ran the last few steps. He indicated to a waiter, who had suddenly appeared in front of him, where he had thrown the money. As he did so he could see the brunette still staring at him goggle-eyed. Next moment he was out on the street.
Rain glistened in the light of the street lamps.
He ran to the right and turned the corner.
A man was standing by his cab, and had his hand next to the steering wheel as he kept honking the horn for all he was worth.
“Cabby!” he shouted as Sponer rounded the corner.
Sponer was at his side in a flash.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing!” he hissed, and yanked the man’s hand away from the horn.
“You weren’t here!” the man yelled back. “You think I like standing out in the rain? Metternichgasse, number nine!” and he reached for the door handle as if to get in.
Sponer jumped in and turned on the engine.
“The door won’t open!” the man shouted. Instead of answering, Sponer engaged second gear, put his foot down and sped off.
The man tumbled back and swore after him.
*
Driving at speed along Wiedner Hauptstrasse, Sponer lifted up his arm to have a look at the stains on the sleeve.
“Dammit!” he swore.
At Paulanerkirche he turned left.
Not to have noticed the blood! Perhaps there were more stains on his suit and collar. He turned the mirror and looked. As the street lights flashed past, he saw only his white face with its dilated eyes, almost dark blue, lighting up and dimming at intervals.
He didn’t even notice that he had crossed Alleegasse. At the Schwarzenberg Palace he slowed down.
The large clock over the ring road showed nearly ten.
He drove down Lastenstrasse.
The interior of the car was full of blood, too, no doubt — the seat, the carpet! And the bullets, after passing through the body, must be lodged somewhere in the upholstery!
This man had messed up everything with his death.
The blood could be washed off, though one would have to explain away the damage. How though? Surely he’d find a way, provided the dead man and his luggage were disposed of, provided they simply weren’t there any more. As if they’d never existed, neither the man nor his cases. “A Mr So-and-so?”—“No record of him here.”—“He travelled to Vienna?”—“Definitely not.”—“And he didn’t check in?”—“He didn’t check in anywhere.”—“Did he check out at the other end?”—“Yes, but didn’t arrive here.”—“When did he leave?”—“Tuesday.”—“Really? Time of arrival?”—“Eighteen thirty-five… at the Westbahnhof.”—“Yes, he should have been on that train, but the fact is he wasn’t…”—“What?”—“The drivers?”—“Yes, one of them… Yes, the porter said that… Yes, to the Bristol.”—“But that must’ve been someone else. Nobody by that name had checked in at the hotel…”—“What do you mean, nobody had checked in?…”—“He must’ve though, but…”—“What was the driver’s name?”—“Ferdinand Sponer.”—“I beg your pardon?”—“Yes, of course.”—“Yes, sir, certainly. We’ll bring him in for questioning.”
There could be mail waiting at the Bristol, which was no longer being picked up; there could have been meetings arranged, which someone had failed to attend; someone might have been expected, but hadn’t turned up. In each and every case they would notice a person was missing, and in each case they’d finally ask Sponer, “Where is he?”
He who had imagined he was lost if the body were found now realized he was lost if the dead man didn’t turn up safe and well at the hotel.
Having sized up the situation, he stopped agonizing. He simply went into action.
He drove up Lastenstrasse, turned into Marxergasse, crossed the Rotunden Bridge over the Danube Canal and, taking Rustenschacherallee, ended up in Lusthausstrasse.
The huge oaks and poplars in the Prater rustled in the wind and rain.
Just before the second flower-bed island in the road, he emerged onto Hauptallee. At the Lusthaus — the Pavilion — he had planned to drive up Enzersdorfer Allee, a potholed street, overgrown with grass and lined with ancient trees, but changed his mind when he spotted a mounted policeman on patrol, who could have stopped to ask him what he was up to on that bumpy, almost impassable pitch-black road.
Consequently, he took the right fork along the Poloplatz and the stands of the Freudenauer racecourse till he reached the Danube Canal again and finally ended up at some warehouses where he was able to turn left once more and go back the way he had come, thereby making a circuit of the racecourse. The roads here were no more than raised gravel embankments, poorly lit as was to be expected in the middle of the meadow lands. A disused tramline ran in the centre of the road.