by Wolf Haas
He didn’t have to speed at all, though, because Sunny was still dancing like a wind-up toy when he got there. There was nothing left for Brenner to do now except for what men do best at a disco, i.e., drink beer and gawk.
“So what’s her real name? Where did you find her?” Brenner asked.
When someone asks two questions at once, there’s always a third in the throat. Because you have to wonder, what’s behind it, why did he ask two questions at the same time? Well, I’ll tell you two things. First, Brenner was far too tired to go breaking his head over old police academy wisdom. And second, it was about to get much worse, because Milan answered with yet another question now.
“Do you like lasagna?”
“Lasagna? Do they have that here?”
“No, that’s her name. If you drop the ‘la.’ ”
“Sagna? Why can’t you just say it normally? Simple: ‘Her name is Sanja,’ ” Brenner suggested.
“If I say Sanja in this noise, you’ll hear Tanja,” Milan yelled in his ear. “But if I say lasagna without the ‘la,’ then right away you understand Sanja.”
Milan looked stern yet sly, like one of those natural healers who condemns you to death for coffee or alcohol or enjoying life.
“Not bad,” Brenner answered. “So where did you find her?”
“Here,” Milan said.
“Where?”
“There!” Milan yelled and pointed with his index finger to somewhere vaguely in front of his feet. It was so loud now and the music was so good that even Brenner’s foot began to tap a little.
“There?” Brenner yelled back. “Like ‘over there’ without the ‘over’?”
You see, just before complete catastrophe, right before the world ends, there’s often a moment when human beings are in the mood for one more joke. But, okay, Brenner couldn’t have known, per se, about catastrophe and the world ending. And Brenner wasn’t thinking about what came after yet, but about what came before, i.e., whether it had been a terrible mistake to leave Helena in the South Tyrolean’s care till morning. Should he have brought her to the police immediately? Should he have notified the Frau Doctor right away? Could it possibly be a horribly bad sign that not even ninety-two hours had passed and the Zone of Transparency was already starting to rupture even though the fifth day had not yet begun? He thought about this while he watched Sanja dancing and Milan talking, because he could only hear Milan when he shouted directly into his ear.
Sanja danced with a stamina like she wasn’t interested in anything else in the world, and Brenner began to wonder whether she would ever stop.
“What did you mean by that?” he yelled into Milan’s ear.
“What?”
“What did you mean by what you said earlier?”
“Yeah, I’m not deaf! But what did I mean by what?”
“Her boyfriends who it won’t be a problem for. What did you mean by that?” Brenner yelled a little softer.
Milan pulled one of those free daily newspapers out of his bag, and the newspaper reminded Brenner of the South Tyrolean the first time he saw her, when he’d only paid attention to the newspaper and not to the milk. He was almost certain, too, that the South Tyrolean wouldn’t pull any nonsense. Almost. Almost completely certain. The South Tyrolean’s intentions weren’t bad. He was almost certain. He’d promised her that after all this was over, he’d help her out in court. So that she’d walk away from it with probation. And she wasn’t completely crazy, not technically. Instead, more of a mixture of opportunity offender and-. Almost certain.
Brenner tried to calm himself down by thinking the same thoughts over and over, just like Sanja made the same moves on the dance floor over and over. He needed to justify over and over to himself, it was pure impulse, as if things would only go well for so long, as long as he could convince himself that enlisting the kidnapper as a babysitter for a few hours would be an acceptable solution in an emergency-community service instead of prison, as it were. And what else was he supposed to do? Because as soon as you get a kidnapped child back, the biggest question right off the bat: where am I going to get a babysitter now?
“The guy who got her pregnant,” Milan said.
“What about the guy?”
“For a detective, you’re awfully slow.” Milan casually pointed to the newspaper page he’d opened up in front of him.
It was an article about MegaLand that Sanja’s aunt had given Milan. You should know, Sanja’s aunt was Zivka, who was from the Lovrec area, and Milan’s sister’s husband, Dusan, was from Katuni. And Dusan’s cousin Cvetanka was from Kresovo. And Cvetanka went to a trade school in Lovrec with Zivka’s little brother-well, not with Radan but with Todor. And that’s how Milan found out that the girl in the picture is Darko’s cousin. And from Darko he learned that his mother, i.e., Zivka, had just showed him a photo in yesterday’s free sheet, where her niece-so, his cousin Sanja-had squarely and firmly claimed that the man in the photo was her rich friend.
Brenner gathered from the article that the construction of MegaLand was nothing but advantageous for all involved. Because the jobs, the tax revenue, the infrastructure-all for the general public. Quite remarkably, the Lilliput Rail extension, which was slated to run around the MegaLand Discovery World and down to the Greenland Schrebergarten, had been canceled. And Schrebergarten residents would each get a free parking place in the underground garage as a gift.
Brenner started sweating a little when he read that. Believe it or not, of the four people in the photo, he knew three: Kressdorf he recognized right away of course, Congressman Stachl and Reinhard right away, too, because it hadn’t been that long since he’d seen them in Klosterneuburg. And the fourth was a high-ranking Vienna politician, who I have an agreement with not to identify him by name. You’ll have to take my word on it because-sources.
Milan casually gestured at the photo with his chin and said, “Him there.”
“Which one?”
“The one on the end.”
“Left end or right end?”
“Edge of the page,” Milan said and checked how his sunglasses were sitting on his head, he wore them like a headband, don’t ask me why.
“That sick bastard!”
Milan didn’t react to Brenner’s outrage, and in fact, he looked so coolly at the dance floor that it was as if he hadn’t heard him cry out at all. And Brenner was probably the only one anyway who was surprised by his outburst, because as I’ve said, since the pills-often spontaneous emotions. They simply came out of him like hiccups or opinions do for other people.
And maybe it was only to calm Brenner down just then that Milan said, “I got hold of a gun for you.”
He said it as casually as if he were telling Brenner about the gas station’s latest offer of a free cookie.
“That fast?”
“Yeah, but not a real one,” Milan said.
“What’s ‘not real’ mean?”
“A toy gun that looks one-hundred-percent real. Better than nothing,” Milan said.
“That’s worse than nothing!” Brenner felt his anger rising all over again.
But he pulled himself right back together, because Sanja was finally making her way over to them. She ordered a Diet Coke, and she was sweating so much that Brenner almost told her not to drink her Coke too fast or else the ice cubes in it wouldn’t cool her down. You can’t forget, Sanja reminded Brenner a great deal of Greenspan, Renate, who’d sat next to him in school for six months because they’d put him next to a girl as punishment. Of course, Diet Coke wasn’t around yet back then, just regular Coke, or rum and Coke, but otherwise, Sanja: pure Renate. Everything, the hair, the nose that would’ve been the envy of every Indian chief, and then those eyes. I’ll just say this much-Renate’s last name was actually not Greenspan but Haller. Greenspan was a nickname, cf. eyes.
He’d only really gotten as far as he did in high school because of Renate, even though his grandfather would have held a place open for him at the mechanics’ school, and to
this day Brenner was still sorry that he hadn’t become a mechanic. But Renate was such a good student that his note taking alone improved, and then on to the next grade at school, and then the police academy instead of mechanics’ school, just how life plays out.
Milan was telling Sanja some story about Brenner needing the address of where to get an abortion for an underage girl. She in turn gave Brenner a look that was just like the look Renate always used to give him, but he wasn’t sure whether Sanja was spurning him because he was a man who had gotten a young girl pregnant or because he was a loser who didn’t know where to get an address for a thing like that. Because despite her youth, Sanja’s pretty Renate-eyes revealed a certain worldliness, and Brenner could read in those eyes that she’d never be so stupid as to let herself get taken advantage of by a loser.
Milan must have noticed, too, that Sanja wasn’t exactly laying a good groundwork for conversation with Brenner, because he explained to her now that Herr Brenner was the grandfather of the pregnant girl. Milan meant well, but Brenner was a little insulted because he thought “father” would have sufficed, “grandfather” was an exaggeration. But “a little insulted” was only his initial reaction. Because within seconds the insult had worked itself into the wildest frenzy. Grandfather! There went another one of those emotional hiccups that he’d sometimes felt since the pills and that wouldn’t stop now. In order to distract himself, Brenner ordered another beer, but when he pointed at his beer, he saw that the bartender hadn’t given him a nonalcoholic beer before, even though he’d asked an extra two times whether they had nonalcoholic beer. And he felt so angry at the bartender that he would have liked to smash the bottle right over his head.
And you see, that was the itinerant rage. It’s a survival reaction-just like the body falls over when too little blood goes to the head, anger travels when you’re about to burst. It’s purely for release, you have to picture it like an athlete who always rotates which muscle group he’s working out. And once it hits a certain magnitude, peak rage needs to be constantly rotated, just like overworked muscles, so that the person carrying the rage doesn’t explode-in other words, the rage has to get rolling. The rage strolls from one circumstance to another, from one person to another, from the man in the newspaper to the man behind the bar, from the bartender to Renate, from Renate to Diet Coke, from Diet Coke to the music, from the music to Milan’s sunglasses, to anything that you see or hear or smell-a rage that rotates is a rage you won’t choke to death on.
And believe it or not, the alcohol and the pills and the despair and the exhaustion and the memory of Knoll in the cesspit and of Kressdorf opening the door to Knoll and offering him a friendly hand, and above all of Reinhard-his magnanimous thousand-euro benefactor, who spends his nights in his domicile and his days in his refuge and who can currently be identified in the photo in the newspaper-filled Brenner with such rage that he didn’t know any other recourse. And for the first time since he’d fought with Renate over some stupid little thing, Brenner went out onto the dance floor, just so he wouldn’t have to look at haughty Sanja with her Renate-face any longer.
Brenner was a terrific dancer, the likes of which you’ve never seen-everything that has ever moved to music between New York and the Yugo-disco is just a limp-chested chicken dance by comparison, because Brenner was an elemental force. But the Yugo-kids didn’t understand and started leaving the dance floor one after another-in protest, if you will.
And when he returned to the table, Milan and Sanja were gone. He didn’t find them outside, either, and not at the entrance, not by the coat check, not at the bar, not in the bathroom. Sanja had disappeared. And when Brenner’s itinerant rage took square aim at himself now-you can’t even imagine. At first at himself, but then at Milan. When he nearly bumped into him. Right next to the men’s bathroom, by the delivery entrance. Now, even though it was only just getting light outside, Milan had his sunglasses right on his nose. But Brenner could tell from a single glance that he was dead.
CHAPTER 18
It had to come to this, though. When you’ve got Knoll murdered in the cesspit, then it’s safe to assume that somewhere, his murderer is running around. And you can’t expect him not to care, when day and night you’re thinking about why Knoll landed in that cesspit. Well, just thinking about it’s okay. But asking around, poking around, rummaging around Schrebergartens, newspaper photos, Yugo-discos! That kind of thing makes even the most well-tempered murderer nervous.
And when the murder victim is lying in your former boss’s cesspit, and when, shortly before his murder, he brought about a halt in construction to your boss’s biggest development project, and when, before his murder, he was still the main suspect in the kidnapping of your boss’s child, and when, on top of that, you saw your boss personally greet the murder victim in front of his house-then you can’t be surprised. So, of course, a few minutes after finding Milan, Brenner was lying in the trunk of a car, tied up as tightly as for a seafarer’s burial, and being transported to god knows where.
Interesting, though: even if you can’t see anything at all, you try to orient yourself somehow anyway. Where are they taking me? As far as your senses go, you haven’t got a chance in a trunk, of course. In a situation like this, when you can’t see anything, and you can’t hear anything either, except for traffic noise, you have no choice but to venture a good guess. You’ve got to gather your wits about you with a vengeance and bravely settle for a hunch-straight out of your head and into the blindness. And only afterward can you say-from how well you intuited the jolting, the turning, the braking and accelerating, the uphill and downhill-okay, hunch, right or wrong.
Sir had taught them that many years ago, their only instructor at the police academy to always wear a suit, and for that they nicknamed him Sir. They’d laughed at Sir back then, because that was a time when people were saying, just the facts, we’re not interested in anything else. And I’m apt to say, as long as the facts work, I’m fully in favor. But, in the dark, of course. In the trunk. With your eyes blindfolded. Blind like an embryo. Brenner was experiencing firsthand now how, in such godless darkness, you can’t look to the facts too much, and you can’t endlessly analyze the vibrations, either, because-it’s hopeless. Sir had been completely right about this: you must first start with the guess, the hunch, the maybe, the probably, the possibly. And Brenner’s the prime example of this right now. They wouldn’t take me to Kitzbuhel was his first thought in the trunk. That was actually more of a fear than a guess, but pay attention to what I’m about to tell you: a fear is also a guess.
So just when his fear had ventured this guess, it also seemed like the vibrations from the braking and accelerating and turning were confirming his suspicion. Or at least not disproving it! And don’t forget how well he knew the route. That could be the traffic light just before the on-ramp to the autobahn, he guessed, it’s always so ill-timed that if you want to make the second light up ahead, you need a rocket launcher. And that could be the off-ramp now, he guessed, when he got slammed against the side of the trunk so roughly that the centrifugal force nearly broke his neck. He hadn’t guessed anything else yet, of course. Namely, how much he’d be wishing in just a few hours that the centrifugal force really had twisted his neck. But no such luck, neck-wise Brenner took after his sturdy grandfather, in other words, his neck held out easily.
Then the car straightened out so fast and clean and suddenly, it was like Brenner was a suitcase in a spaceship being hurtled into the next galaxy. You also have to be careful with blind guesses, though. Under no circumstances may you succumb to the intoxication of a blind guess and adopt an anything-goes stance-from a spaceship to I don’t know what. Instead, always stick with the most probable variant, and you see, here the facts come back into play. Because if they’ve thrown me into a trunk, then I can’t suddenly be lying in a spaceship now. Much more likely: autobahn.
They were on the autobahn so long that Brenner’s perception of the infinite glide and soft ascent made h
im all the more certain of his prognosis: four-hour drive to Kitzbuhel. Your sense of time gets a bit tricky in the dark, of course, and time in the trunk’s always relative. Brenner was sticking to his prognosis now, although they hadn’t been on the road more than two hours according to his sense of time. But his spaceship-trunk was also traveling at an incredible velocity. Which Brenner ascertained from being stuck to the back wall the whole ride. He couldn’t rule out the possibility that the milk and honey were still overpowering him for a few minutes longer.
And one thing you can’t forget. When they exited the autobahn, he got chucked forward so brutally that it was like they were cruising at 250 into a well-cushioned wall. No chance to somehow absorb it, of course, when your hands are bound-in other words, nose and a rib. Because nose- and rib-wise Brenner took after his other grandfather, almost too delicate for his profession. Or then again, maybe not. It’s exactly that kind of delicacy which you need. Brenner owed some important information about the speed they were traveling to his rib and nose-in other words, hellish. And without the rib, without the nose, it’s possible that he would’ve thought it was too soon to be Kitzbuhel. But he knew he could calmly cling to his assumption. Or, better put, he had to cling to it. Because you’re not as apt to cling to a guess taken out of fear as you are to one taken out of, let’s say, hope.
And this feels just like the road that runs through the town of Kitzbuhel, he thought. His broken rib really didn’t need that pothole before the right-hand turn. And here we go steeply uphill, and those must be the switchbacks, and that’s got to be Schotterstrasse now, and this here-where they’re yanking me out of the trunk so savagely that I’m landing on the street with my broken rib and my broken nose and silencing the birds with my screams of pain, and where I’m polluting the majestic mountain air with my petrified sweat and where my teeth are biting into the sweet mountain grass-must be a place where there’s no one near or far, i.e., in front of the cabin where I last saw Knoll alive. And this would have to be the door, if I’m not mistaken, being unlocked by that panting roughneck with the ghoulish nicotine fingers, that just muffled another scream of pain from my throat.
