“I was about to ask your pardon for my interruption. It was unnecessary, I should not have said it.”
“Well, I realise that you know better yourself,” said Riedau, now quite friendly again, “and now what else have you to say? Do you really think that what the young man has just told us is of any value at all for this case?”
“It seems to me as if it might be of value to us.”
“Oh, it seems to you, eh? Your imagination is working overtime again, Muller,” said the commissioner with a laugh. But the laugh turned to seriousness as he realised how many times Muller’s imagination had helped the clumsy official mind to its proudest triumphs. The commissioner was an intelligent man, as far as his lights went, and he was a good-hearted man. He rose from his chair and walked over to where the detective stood. “You needn’t look so embarrassed, Muller,” he said. “There is no cause for you to feel bad about it. And--I am quite willing to admit that my remark just now was unnecessary. You may give your imagination full rein, we can trust to your intelligence and your devotion to duty to keep it from unnecessary flights. So curbed, I know it will be of as much assistance to us this time as it always has been.”
Muller’s quiet face lit up, and his eyes shone in a happiness that made him appear ten years younger. That was one of the strange things about Joseph Muller. This genius in his profession was in all other ways a man of such simplicity of heart and bearing, that the slightest word of approval from one of the officials for whom he worked could make him as happy as praise from the teacher will make a schoolboy. The moments when he was in command of any difficult case, when these same superiors would wait for a word from him, when high officials would take his orders or would be obliged to acknowledge that without him they were helpless, these moments were forgotten as soon as the problem was solved and Muller became again the simple subordinate and the obscure member of the Imperial police force.
When Muller left the commissioner’s room and walked through the outer office, one of the clerks looked after him and whispered to his companion: “Do you think he’s found the Hietzing murderer yet?” The other answered: “I don’t think so, but he looks as if he had found a clue. He’ll find him sooner or later. He always does.”