Detective Hornung was Inspector Schmied’s albatross, his bête noire, his—Inspector Schmied was an ardent admirer of Melville—his Moby Dick. The inspector took another deep breath and slowly exhaled. Then, only slightly less agitated, he picked up Detective Hornung’s report and read it again from the beginning.
BRANDTOUR OFFIZIER REPORT
Wednesday, November 7
TIME: 1:15 A.M.
SUBJECT: Report from central switchboard of accident at Roffe and Sons administration building at Eichenbahn factory
TYPE OF ACCIDENT: Unknown
CAUSE OF ACCIDENT: Unknown
NUMBER OF INJURED OR DECEASED: Unknown
TIME: 1:27 A.M.
SUBJECT: Second message from central switchboard re accident at Roffe and Sons
TYPE OF ACCIDENT: Elevator crash
CAUSE OF ACCIDENT: Unknown
NUMBER OF INJURED OR DECEASED: One female, deceased
I began an immediate investigation. By 1:35 A.M. I obtained the name of the superintendent of the Roffe and Sons administration building and from him got the name of the chief architect of the building.
2:30 A.M. I located the chief architect. He was celebrating his birthday at La Puce. He gave me the name of the company that had installed the elevators in the building, Rudolf Schatz, A. G.
At 3:15 A.M. I telephoned Mr. Rudolf Schatz at his home and requested him to immediately locate the plans for the elevators. I also requested the master budget sheets along with preliminary estimates, final estimates and final costs; I also requested a complete inventory of all mechanical and electrical materials used.
At this point Inspector Schmied could feel a familiar twitch starting in his right cheek. He took several deep breaths and read on.
6:15 A.M. The requested documents were delivered to me here at police headquarters by Mr. Schatz’s wife. After an examination of the preliminary budget and fianl costs I was satisfied that:
no inferior materials were substituted in building the elevators;
because of the reputation of the builders, inferior workmanship could be ruled out as a cause of the crash;
the safety measures built into the elevators were adequate;
my conclusion therefore was that the cause of the crash was not an accident [Signed] Max Hornung, CID
N.B. Since my phone calls took place during the course of the night and early morning, it is possible that you may receive one or two complaints from some of the people I might have awakened.
Inspector Schmied savagely slammed the report down on his desk. “It is possible!” “Might have awakened”! The chief inspector had been under attack the entire morning by half of the officials of the Swiss government. What did he think he was running—a gestapo? How dare he awaken the president of a respectable building corporation and order him to deliver documents in the middle of the night? How dare he impugn the integrity of a reputable firm like Rudolf Schatz? And on and on and on.
But the thing that was so stunning—that was so incredible—was that Detective Max Hornung had not even appeared at the scene of the accident until fourteen hours after it was reported! By the time he arrived the victim had been removed, identified and autopsied. Half a dozen other detectives had examined the scene of the accident, had questioned witnesses and had filed their reports.
When Chief Inspector Schmied finished rereading Detective Max Hornung’s report, he summoned him to his office.
The very sight of Detective Max Hornung was anathema to the chief inspector. Max Hornung was a dumpy, wistful-looking man, egg-bald, with a face that had been put together by an absentminded prankster. His head was too large, his ears were too small, and his mouth was a raisin stuck in the middle of a pudding face. Detective Max Hornung was six inches too short to meet the rigid standards of the Zurich Kriminal Polizei, fifteen pounds too light, and hopelessly nearsighted. To top it all off, he was arrogant. All the men on the force felt unanimously about Detective Hornung: they hated him.
“Why don’t you fire him?” the chief inspector’s wife had asked, and he had almost struck her.
The reason that Max Hornung was on the Zurich detective force was that he had single-handedly contributed more to the Swiss national income than all the chocolate and watch factories combined. Max Hornung was an accountant, a mathematical genius with an encyclopedic knowledge of fiscal matters, an instinct for the chicanery of man, and a patience that would have made Job weep with envy. Max had been a clerk in the Betrug Abteilung, the department set up to investigate financial frauds, irregularities in stock sales and banking transactions, and the ebb and flow of currency in and out of Switzerland. It was Max Hornung who had brought the smuggling of illegal money into Switzerland to a standstill, who had ferreted out billions of dollars’ worth of ingenious but illicit financial schemes, and who had put half a dozen of the world’s most respected business leaders in prison. No matter how cunningly assets were concealed, mingled, re-mingled, sent to the Seychelles to be laundered, transferred and retransferred through a complex series of dummy corporations, in the end Max Hornung would ferret out the truth. In short, he had made himself the terror of the Swiss financial community.