Gernot Pfeiler

Gernot Pfeiler is 47 and for eleven years has looked after the museum's alarm system, among sensors, cables and a panel he calls his home. Born in Linz, the son of a railwayman and a seamstress, he took a technical electronics course and at 24 joined an alarm company that grew with him. He likes to say he knows the building better than the board, and the board, almost always, doesn't argue.

He lives in a semi-detached house in FloridsdorfFloridsdorf A residential district on the northern bank of the Danube in Vienna., with a basement workshop where he repairs old radios and builds a miniature railway that fills two tables and already has a tunnel, a station and a wire bridge. Everything in the basement has a drawer labeled in his handwriting and a copper wire coiled by size. He always eats the same ham sandwich for lunch and, when he argues, explains the subject as if giving a lecture.

He is stocky and broad-shouldered, with a round, ruddy face, a thick brown mustache and thin hair combed to the side. He wears metal-framed glasses and a navy technician's coverall, with thick, short-fingered hands that can nonetheless solder a wire the size of a hair. He is self-assured, technical, speaks slowly and repeats the most important words. He says he has been writing reports on the museum's old system for five years, and that nobody reads a technician's report.

About the night of the crime, his account is one line: he slept at home from 11. About the alarm, it is longer: with the scaffolding and the construction dust, the window sensors go off for nothing, and he warned of that in writing. The guard, in his view, sleeps on her shift: he tells you to look at the round book, the 2, 3 and 4 a.m. entries written with the same pen and the same hurried handwriting.

Gernot knows whoever knows the alarm from the inside is the first asked how someone got past it. When the detective accuses him of going up the scaffolding, he adjusts his metal-framed glasses, denies it with the calm of someone who installs and doesn't break in and warns that he'll only speak in front of the company's lawyer. The grievance of a technician who warned for years, or a lecture given so nobody asks: the steady voice serves both readings.