It's all been said, perhaps someone said too much and is now holding his hand to his mouth in dismay, but God's always in his son's way, who's simply younger and better-looking, he's gathered a group of disciples around him, whom he's keen on, and God is already regretting having taken him back and taken him in. He himself became younger as a result, at least he looks like it, but it's also more of an effort keeping up with the young people until one's 47. Jesus wants to do sports, Jesus wants to make work for himself and catch souls, Jesus is constantly dragging in errors and cobbling together eternal truths out of them, always the DIY freak, well, he's not very skillful, the way he does it. And at the moment the Country Police are going tirelessly from house to house and conducting interviews, they've got to do that themselves, no one will do it for them. Narrative debris rains down on them, sometimes followed by stubborn, persistent silence, just like the rockfalls at the moody Neuberg Rock, from which they sometimes come thundering down for days on end and then for days there's nothing, and decorate car roofs with dents, but there the Lord God has much nicer decorations, big halos, which he could break off if he intervenes too vigorously in our life. He doesn't do it anyway. Here is the office of the company for which Gabi worked, and he's already hanging here too, the man on the cross, in the boss's office, not in the sand, but hanging in the corner. A plain, modern cross, bought in a craft shop, and the prominent victim is so full of pride at his stiff price that he's almost bursting out of the screws with which he is fastened to his instrument, which is, I believe, by now more immortal than the sportsman on it, we could just drop him; yes, you are seeing properly: beneath it a candle and a heart-shaped vase, with a bunch of dried flowers sticking in it, that's how the personal secretary likes it, who distinguishes herself from all the other women in the company and likes to emphasize this distinction in her appearance, she has, e.g., cemented her hair with hair lacquer. And then there's yet another figure who is distinguished from the secretary by not appearing at all anymore: a young dead woman. The company is in a state of agitation because of it. If the young commercial apprentice is already dead, why poke around in her life and leave behind prints that could then be mixed up with those of the murderer? It really was only a vague hint by a girlfriend. We're going to follow it up now, we followed up quite different ones that led us nowhere, and we've often had our heads in our hands, always one bit of head in two hands or a bucket of sand, which extinguishes everything it gets hold of. Can't you remember anything concrete, anything? Any detail, no matter how small, could be important, please try to remember. One colleague remembers that Gabi was the only person in the company who, because she was still attending technical school, got her travel by rail and bus reimbursed. The officers are instantly electrified: do you still have these tickets? Of course we still have them. Take a look: Neatly stuck to A-4 pages are all the tickets. Gabriele Fluch collected fifteen schillings for every ticket. One takes what one can get, and then runs and sees how far one can go with it. Not far enough. The officers take the sheets away and decode the number codes stamped when the tickets were cancelled. Result: More than half the tickets were bought at quite different stops, often even going in the opposite direction beyond Murzsteg and Frein. Now we've got another clue and immediately attach a belt, so that we don't lose it again and can hold on to it; given how our own ships of life sometimes pitch and roll, we can do with it. It turns out there are several colleagues who regularly gave the girl their used tickets. They say they didn't give it a second thought and never asked any questions. Only one female colleague, with whom Gabi often ate her sandwich at break-time and afterwards emptied her yogurt tub, throws a little find at the officers' feet, which she'd been chewing on for quite a while, so that there's not much left of it: She has someone who gives her a lift, she said that to me once, Gabi, but I shouldn't tell anyone. And another colleague remembers once having met Gabi at work, before the Mariazell bus had even arrived. (Is later confirmed by several employees.) Now the narrative water begins to flow, even among Gabi's colleagues; almost all manifestations of water appear pretty to me, above all the high-proof ones, ice is also nice to look at, perhaps to eat or for ice-skating as well, but not for walking on. And I don't really like steam, then I'd rather go on stumbling through the narrative debris, there I know where I am and what I'm doing, it slips away under my feet more often than I would like, but it's not as perfidious as steam, which obscures things, and ice, which comes up at me from below and unexpectedly smacks me in the face. Why is this road suddenly folded up, it's not a spare bed? An employee states that he saw Gabi one afternoon in the post office in Murzzuschlag, where she was posting company mail. She left the building before him. He himself drove straight home. On his way he passed Gabi's parents' house and saw her already crossing the road; it was long before the bus was due. The girl must therefore have been brought home by car, but by which one? At the time Gabi was not yet a spirit being, they're up to every trick, and so couldn't overtake herself, since she was not yet in eternity and still knew where front and back, past and future were, even though she would no longer experience her future in person. What does an outsider know. The only concrete lead from the neighborhood so far also relates to this car: A neighbor diagonally opposite confirms that once in the morning he saw Gabi come out of her house and without hesitation or hanging around get into a parking loted around the corner. This neighbor, a retired woodcutter and still active poacher, like most of the men here, states the girl had certainly given the impression that she had been expecting the car at just this spot. So she got in without hesitating or even talking to or conferring with the driver. When that was, what kind of car and who was sitting in it, the neighbor knows none of that. Most of the other neighbors say nothing. It's always the same. The country police officers, among them Mr. Janisch, whom everybody here knows, a good-looking man (strange, how often this attribute is applied to him. As if one had a blood purity medal to award, but knew he didn't need to accept it; because once he at last has an opportunity to do so, he will only accept cash or good old real estate, which always comes more than one at a time, because one piece of real estate alone would not be a match for Mr. Janisch; and he will take every opportunity to press up against younger colleagues, to pass his hands over their hips and to let them properly feel his little fellow, from behind, as if they didn't have any eyes there. None of them dares say anything!), knock at the door, talk to the people on their list and hear not a word more nor less, which would be less than zero. The people listen to the questions, but mostly they don't react at all, as Kurt Janisch and his colleagues soon readily have to agree. Their statement sheets are as empty as the Gobi desert, and their content tells us less than that of a prayer book, because we don't believe the people, as God doesn't believe us either. The doors are silently closed behind the officers, and Kurt Janisch and his colleagues go away from the houses again and their buttoned-up inhabitants. It is a world of silent witnesses, none of whom have seen how regularly for more than a year a girl didn't get onto the bus only a hundred yards away, but into a strange car, which really no one recognized. A pity. We all have cars ourselves, except me, and so cannot call each and every one that doesn't belong to us by its first name. Other girls often kept a place for her in the bus, but they also never saw who gave Gabi a lift when she wasn't with them. Nor did they talk about it. And her mother and her boyfriend heard nothing and saw nothing, for over a year. That's odd, isn't it? This one cup of cocoa, half drunk, which was all that was left from the party, luckily it exists, so that the forensic doctor is able to state, with considerable certainty, that Gabi was probably already dead one hour after leaving the house, at the very latest one and a half hours.