“Who?” the policeman yelled. “What’s his name?”
Let’s get out of here, Sponer thought. Quick, before I start saying things that aren’t true, otherwise they’ll keep me here, and in the car they’ll find the… “No, Inspector,” he mumbled, “he’s not here yet, but he’s sure to…”
“What’s his name?” the policeman bellowed.
“Georg… Georg Haintl,” Sponer mumbled.
“Right!” The policeman grabbed a notepad. “And his registration number?”
Sponer was spared the need to answer. Just at that moment the drunk, having shaken off the three men who were holding him down, noiselessly and unexpectedly leapt to his feet and launched himself with all his force in a flying tackle from the back, straight at the knees of the policeman who was questioning Sponer. The officer fell down with a crash, but was instantly back on his feet with a cry of rage, and the four again pounced on the drunk. Sponer turned on his heel and ran out.
The policeman was still standing outside the main door. He hadn’t a clue that there was a dead man in the car just three paces away from him. Sponer jumped into his seat and sped off.
For about ten minutes he raced aimlessly though the streets, then he came to his senses and looked round. He was in the ninth district, not far from the Liechtenstein Palace. He turned off the meter without thinking. The person for whom he’d turned it on wouldn’t be paying for the journey now.
He drove on and tried to recall the events. He found it impossible to gather his thoughts. It was as if there were an empty space, a blank between his brain and his thoughts. He couldn’t concentrate on what he wanted to think about, because all kinds of unrelated matter kept racing through his head like mad. The moment he tried to think what he should do next, all kinds of thoughts tumbled through his head, except the one he wanted to focus on. As clearly as a maniac sees visions, he kept on seeing one of the two men get into the cab at the station, followed immediately by the other man jumping onto the running board from the other side and opening the door as the cab drove off. The two men were now screaming at each other, but he couldn’t hear this due to the noise of the traffic, and then came the shots drowned by the noise of the confounded lorry and sounding confusingly like an exhaust backfiring; a split second later, the murderer had slammed the door shut and jumped clear. Had it not been for the lorry, Sponer would have turned around when he heard the bangs and seen the bastard jump clear. As it was, he hadn’t turned around, and… But even if he had seen him, the man would still have jumped off and run away! But at least he could have claimed the man was wearing a brown coat, say, or he was tall perhaps, wearing a round hat; he could have seen him running off, he could have said the fellow looked such-and-such, but he just ran away. “What was I supposed to do? Run after him? He was going like a bat out of hell, Inspector! A man who jumps onto a moving car in the middle of the traffic and shoots someone!..” However, supposing he were to drive to a police station and simply say he’d seen the murderer jump off?… “Where, sir?”—“Right by the station, between the dark… between the patches of open ground…”—“What time?”—“Well, the train arrived at five minutes past the half hour, it’s a couple of minutes to the exit, and then one, or at most two minutes on the road… It’d be about a quarter to…”—“Hell! A quarter to seven! It’s already half past!”—“Half past seven?”—“Yes! Where have you been in the meantime?”—“Where have I been?…”—“And how did you get here from the Westbahnhof?”—“How did I get here?…”—“Yes! Didn’t you stop immediately?”—“Yes, I did… no, yes… no, it wasn’t at the West… it wasn’t at the Westbahnhof at all, it happened in Währinger Strasse…”—“Did it now? Where did the man get in then?”—“Where?… Yes, he got in… he got in at the station, of course, but in the meantime I stopped…”—“Where did you stop in the meantime?”—“I broke down…”—“What was the matter?”—“I had a puncture…”—“And where in fact did the man ask you to take him? Hotel Bristol? How then did you manage to end up in the ninth district?”—“No, he wanted to go to… to Berggasse!”—“I see. What were you doing at the Opera House intersection in that case?”—“At the Opera?…”—“Yes, it says here in the report that you drove backwards and forwards like a madman over the Opera House intersection! You must have known at the time that the man was already dead, otherwise you wouldn’t have panicked as you did…”—“Yes, I panicked…”—“For three-quarters of an hour? You heard shots, you saw a man jump off, you didn’t stop, and only three-quarters of an hour — no, it’s now nearly a whole hour — later, you come here and…”—“I really… I really panicked, I can’t even think straight any longer, I don’t even know… I…” He leant forward with a groan as though about to slump over the wheel to hide his face, but then threw himself back again, clenched his teeth, and banged a couple of times with his fist on the edge of the car door. He couldn’t just carry on driving with the dead man in the car… He had to decide. He could no longer make a statement to the police. He had to get rid of the dead man.
Somewhere on the road, together with his luggage! Let the others, when they find him, work out for themselves how and when he’d been shot! He, Sponer, had nothing to do with it. Had he attacked him? No, it was rather the other way round. The chap had boarded an unsuspecting man’s cab, had snuffed it there and left the driver to pick up the pieces. How? Very simply. Out you go, my fellow, in some dark spot, suitcases and all! You can’t really expect me to do the decent thing, sit around for weeks, lose my job and get mixed up with the police, until, perhaps, one day they catch the real murderer. Or perhaps they won’t. It’s the least of my worries. You two can sort it out amongst yourselves!”
He looked around. He was now in the seventeenth district, on the road to Dornbach. Fine! In the hills of Dornbach, between the villas, there were a number of lanes running through the gardens and the shrubbery, and poorly lit roads connecting the villas, where you hardly saw anyone after dark. He could stop there and, when the coast was clear, drag the dead man out, throw him onto the roadside, together with his bags, and clear off. He’d lie there till someone found him. They wouldn’t know how he got there. They’d find out who he was, of course. He probably had some documents on him, a passport… But he, Sponer, could take care of that. They’d obviously open the suitcases and perhaps find something there, letters and such like, which would reveal the identity of the dead man… But one could throw the suitcases away somewhere else, a few hundred yards up the street… or perhaps right here, straight away? Maybe someone would see them lying there and simply take them home because of their contents. One doesn’t look a gift horse in the mouth… But what if they are were handed in?
Why not take them to his lodgings instead?
Suppose, though, they did find out who the dead man was from his distinguishing features, for the police were trained in that sort of thing.
As far as he was concerned, what did it matter if they found out? But in fact it did… it did matter. Once they’d found out who the man was… “Arrived at the Westbahnhof. And? Took a taxi? Which one?” The other drivers, put on the spot, insist, “Not ours.” But one of them could have seen Sponer drive up. “Ferdinand Sponer from the Brandeis Garage.”—“Did you pick up a fare?”—“Yes.”—“What did he look like?”—“I don’t know.”—“You don’t know?”—“No! He got in the cab when my back was turned, I only saw…”—“What did you see?”—“He was wearing an overcoat.”—“What sort of overcoat?”—“A large grey one.”—“And you saw nothing else?”—“No, all he said was…”—“What did he say?”—“He said… He said…”—“‘The Bristol’,” the porter intervenes. — “Yes, ‘the Bristol’. Hotel Bristol.”—“And what about you?”—“Me?… I took him there.”—“To which one?”—“To… the old one.”—“But when he got out and paid, you must have seen what he looked like.”—“No… Yes. That is…”—“Well?”—“I don’t remember precisely.”—“OK, not precisely! But roughly. What do you remember roughly?”—“He… he wasn’t very tall…”—“Not tall?”—“No.”—“But not very short either?…”—“That’s right.”—“Roughly what age?”—“Not old.”—“And what about his hair? Was it fair? Brown?”—“No, not fair… but not brown either…”—“Really? Not tall, not small, not old, not young, not fair, not brown? And what did he do when he got to the Bristol?”—“He paid the fare and went into the hotel.”—“What about his suitcases?”—“A… a hotel porter took them from the cab.”—“And went into the hotel with them, too?”—“Yes.”—“What about you?”—“I drove off.”—“So, he entered the hotel and the porter carried the suitcases in after him?”—“Yes.”—“You saw all this?”—“Yes.”—“Now, I put it to you that neither he nor his suitcases ever reached the hotel!”