by Wolf Haas
PRAISE FOR BRENNER AND GOD
“A must for crime fiction lovers with a sense of humor: In Simon Brenner, Wolf Haas has created a protagonist so real and believable that I sometimes wanted to tap him on the shoulder and point him in the right direction!”
—ANDREY KURKOV, AUTHOR OF DEATH AND THE PENGUIN
“Brenner and God is one of the cleverest—and most thoroughly enjoyable—mysteries that I’ve read in a long time. Wolf Haas is the real deal, and his arrival on the American book scene is long overdue.”
—CARL HIAASEN, AUTHOR OF SICK PUPPY
“A meticulously plotted, dark, and often very funny ride.”
— THE MILLIONS
“Brenner and God is a humdinger … a sockdollager of an action yarn, revealed via the smart-ass, self-effacing narrative voice that’s a sort of trademark of author Wolf Haas.”
—THE AUSTIN CHRONICLE
“[A] superb translation of one of Austria’s finest crime novels … Haas never loses the thread of investigation, even as he introduces off-beat characters and a very complex plot … This is the first of the Brenner novels in English. We can only hope for more, soon.”
— THE GLOBE AND MAIL (TORONTO)
“Even as Haas darkens the mood of this sly and entertaining novel, he maintains its sardonically irreverent tone.”
— THE BARNES & NOBLE REVIEW
“A pacey and gripping read.”
—EURO CRIME
“A gleaming gem of a novel.”
—CRIMESPREE MAGAZINE
“This quirkily funny kidnapping caper marks the first appearance in English of underdog sleuth Simon Brenner … Austrian author Haas brings a wry sense of humor … American readers will look forward to seeing more of Herr Simon.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
PRAISE FOR THE BONE MAN
“Darkly comic … American mystery fans should enjoy Haas’s quirky, digressive storytelling style.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
“It’s a novel that leaves you laughing even as you work to solve the mystery.”
—THE GLOBE AND MAIL (TORONTO)
“A brilliant book … Already among the greats of mystery fiction.”
— BOOK DEVIL
“The most original figure here is the narrator, who hovers above the action with matter-of-fact detachment, ever alert for moments when he can swoop down and set you straight about what’s going on or change the subject entirely.”
—KIRKUS
PRAISE FOR RESURRECTION
“It’s truly amazing to see Brenner finally put the pieces together … Add a narrator whose rapid-fire monologue piles additional layers of digression atop Brenner’s own circumlocutions, and you have the shaggiest detective currently working the field.”
—KIRKUS REVIEWS
“If you like the Coen brothers, you will adore Inspector Brenner.”
— THE GLOBE AND MAIL (TORONTO)
WOLF HAAS was born in 1960 in the Austrian province of Salzburg. He is the author of seven books in the bestselling Brenner mystery series, three of which have been adapted into major German-language films by director Wolfgang Murnberger. Among other prizes, the books in the series have been awarded the German Thriller Prize and the 2004 Literature Prize from the city of Vienna. Haas lives in Vienna.
ANNIE JANUSCH is the translator of the Art of the Novella series edition of Heinrich von Kleist’s The Duel, as well as the first three books in Wolf Haas’s Brenner series, Brenner and God, The Bone Man, and Resurrection.
ALSO BY WOLF HAAS
Resurrection
The Bone Man
Brenner and God
MELVILLE INTERNATIONAL CRIME
COME, SWEET DEATH!
First published in Germany as Komm, süßer Tod
Copyright © 1998 by Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH, Reinbeck bei Hamburg
Translation copyright © 2014 by Annie Janusch
First Melville House Printing: July 2014
The verses quoted from St. Matthew’s Passion are in Robert Bridges’s 1899 translation.
Melville House Publishing
145 Plymouth Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
and
8 Blackstock Mews
Islington
London N4 2BT
mhpbooks.com facebook.com/mhpbooks @melvillehouse
Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Haas, Wolf.
[Komm, süsser Tod. English]
Come, sweet death! / Wolf Haas; translated by Annie Janusch.
pages cm
First published in Germany as Komm, süsser Tod 1998 by Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH, Reinbeck bei Hamburg.
ISBN 978-1-61219-339-7 (paperback)
ISBN 978-1-61219-340-3 (ebook)
1. Private investigators—Austria—Vienna—Fiction. 2. Ambulance drivers—Austria—Vienna—Fiction. 3. Murder—Investigation—Austria—Vienna—Fiction. I. Janusch, Annie, translator. II. Title.
PT2708.A17K613 2014
833.92—dc23
2014012225
The translation of this book was supported by the
Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Arts, and Culture.
v3.1
Contents
Cover
About the Authors
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
CHAPTER 1
Well, something’s happened again.
A day that starts off like this one can only get worse, though. Now I don’t mean for that to sound somehow superstitious. I’m definitely not the type to get scared when a black cat crosses my path. Or an ambulance goes driving by, and you’ve got to make the sign of the cross right there on the spot—just so you won’t be the next in line to get sliced up into a hundred thousand pieces by a CT scanner.
And Friday the Thirteenth, don’t get me started. Because it was Monday the 23rd that Ettore Sulzenbacher was lying in the middle of Pötzleinsdorfer Strasse and crying so bad that it would’ve broke your heart.
When Frau Sulzenbacher found her son there, at first she thought he was just yammering on again about the name she’d given him some seven years ago. But then she saw the cause of his despair. Because there beside the bawling child was his dead cat, Ningnong.
An ambulance—lights flashing and sirens blaring—had squashed Ningnong. By the time Ettore discovered his dead black cat, though, the ambulance was already long gone. It’d gone barreling down Pötzleinsdorfer Strasse so fast that it was a stroke of luck that Ningnong had been the only victim.
And no amount of bawling on Ettore’s part was going to bring him back—the cat was gone. What I don’t know is whether that’s supposed to bring more bad luck or less when you run over a black cat that crosses your path.
Either way, Paramedic Manfred Big gave it zero thought at the time. He was en route at such a clip that he didn’t even notice when his ambulance flattened Ningnong into a black omelette. He was in a hurry to catch the next red light.
Because when they’re out on an emergency call nowadays, it’s kind of trendy for ambulances to tally up how many intersections they can take against a red. A bit of a record-setting mentality, like you find everywhere today. The lawmakers have prohibited ambulances from pr
oceeding through intersections against a red traffic signal. People just think it’s allowed because they see it so often—an ambulance with lights and sirens, thundering through a red light. When in fact it’s verboten. Red is red. Even for ambulances.
Even for Manfred Big, who his colleagues had always just called Bimbo. I don’t know how he got that name, either, but I’d guess it had something to do with his bulging eyes and that thick red orangutan neck of his. And needless to say, the Jheri Curl wasn’t exactly helping him any. But Bimbo was only twenty-eight and already starting to lose his hair a little, and a nurse, who’d been a hairstylist before she became a nurse, well, for 190 schillings, she gave him those glossy little curls and a private appointment, basically a cover-up. Interesting, though! The less hair he had on his head, the bigger and thicker his mustache seemed to get.
Now, red lights, verboten. Needless to say, Bimbo breezed right through the intersection. Because that was a way for the ambulance drivers to protest. Against the lawmakers. There you are, risking your life for others, day in day out, just so you can scrape them off the street in the nick of time before the vultures do, but do you think you’d ever get a “Thank you” out of those tight-lipped lawmakers? Or that it’d kill them to let you blow a red light now and then? Forget it. The lawmakers just put obstacles in your path. And won’t grant you a red. Purely legally speaking, of course.
Practically speaking, another thing altogether. Because Ningnong hadn’t even landed splat on the asphalt yet before Bimbo Big was flitting through the next intersection against a red.
Because one thing you can’t forget. Bimbo had this arrangement with a couple of his fellow EMTs. A little game. And why not, if it brings a little levity to the daily grind? An ambulance driver like that’s got enough to put up with, and so I say, why shouldn’t he be allowed a little fun, even if maybe—purely legally speaking—it doesn’t quite obey the letter of the law?
Pay attention, this is how it works: When a dispatch came in over the radio, Bimbo would yell: “Five!” or “Eight!”—or, for all I care, “Three!”—for every location. And that meant how many minutes Bimbo thought he could make it in. And if his partner yelled back, “More!” then, that meant he accepted the bet. And if Bimbo’s run took longer, his partner got a C-note, but if it didn’t, he paid Bimbo the hundred.
But because Bimbo almost always made it, the EMTs were accepting his bets less and less. So Bimbo had to come up with times that were even more hair-raising to get them to take the bait. And then Bimbo would have to drive like the devil, of course.
I’m just saying: Südtirolerplatz to Taborstrasse, eight minutes, in rush hour, that’s a suicide mission, and any EMT that rides along with him once is going to end up swearing to himself that he’ll never bet against Bimbo again—not because the hundred bucks has him scared, mind you, but because he’s scared he’ll barely escape with his life.
Bimbo’s partner on this day in question was Hansi Munz. A Monday—Hansi Munz would never forget it his whole life long. Not because Bimbo was tearing down the kilometer-long Gersthofer Strasse at the speed of hell, but because—hold on, though.
Bimbo wasn’t daredeviling along, suicide-like, with lights and sirens, on account of some bet with Hansi Munz. Because Hansi Munz was such a tightwad that he never would’ve wagered even a schilling. But because Bimbo had to pick up a liver transplant from Vienna General.
“Milka!” Hansi Munz shouted all the sudden, as Bimbo pummeled down Wahringer Strasse at a hundred and twenty.
Because that was all he managed to get out when he saw the Milka chocolate truck parked outside the bank. Bimbo rushed the Milka truck without braking, though. And even though Hansi Munz knew just how sensitive Bimbo got when his co-driver acted more like a backseat driver, Hansi Munz just couldn’t hold back any longer and out came a word of warning. Out of sheer fright, though, he didn’t manage to blurt out more than just that one word, maybe because it’s the kind of word you’ve known ever since you were a kid.
And believe it or not: Bimbo neither crashed into the Milka truck, nor did he swerve to the left at the very last second—and all the while, he did not brake.
No, with a big grin on his face he clattered to the right of the Milka truck—well, between the Milka truck and the bank—and up onto the sidewalk. And if an ambulance is two meters wide, then, between the Milka truck and the bank, there were maybe two hundred centimeters, definitely not a hair more than that. And Hansi Munz sure felt it—felt like the skin was getting grated off his shoulders a little, left and right, both, I’m talking flat-out bodily sympathy with the paint job.
But you’ve got to grant Bimbo this: he smuggled that ambulance between the Milka truck and the bank with real elegance, I don’t know how he did it, but by the skin of his teeth somehow.
Hansi Munz, of course, huge sigh of relief. Because it wasn’t just the damage to the paint job that made it seem like his goose bumps were flaking off. Even worse was the dread of what the boss would do to them if they came home with a dent.
“Junior’s going to skin us alive if we bang up the new seven-forty.”
“Nobody’s banging up anything,” Bimbo said, still smiling about his performance, as he bolted up the Währinger Gürtel in the wrong direction. Three lanes of one-way traffic were coming straight at them. They would’ve had the right of way on the other side of the beltway, but the hospital entrance—way too complicated.
“And what would you have done if the door to the Milka truck had swung open?”
“Ducked.”
“You really are crazy.”
“It’s about the liver transplant, Munzi.”
“If you keep on driving like that, it’s only a matter of time before our organs are the ones getting donated. What would you have done if somebody had come out of the bank?”
“Nobody did.”
“But if they had!”
“He would’ve been in luck. If you’re going to get run over by a car these days, then you should count yourself lucky if it’s an ambulance that does the running over. We would’ve put him right back on his feet.”
“You’ve got a lot of nerve.”
“Might as well retire if you don’t have any nerve. Driving an ambulance is no kid’s birthday party.”
Hansi Munz could tell that Bimbo didn’t want to hear anything else out of him right now, and in fact, Hansi Munz was glad, too, that they were still going to make it in time for the liver transplant.
Because it was three minutes before five, and they were practically there already. Thanks to the sidewalk action and going the wrong way on the one-way, Bimbo had definitely gained two minutes.
“Shit!” Bimbo yelled, as they approached the hospital entrance. Because from the opposite direction—swimming with the current, so to speak—the 720 was coming straight at them with lights and sirens.
“What kind of a jackass drives a seven-twenty today?”
Needless to say, the 720 wasn’t going to yield a millimeter. All of ten meters from their front bumper, it shot into the main gate.
“Lanz.”
“Of all people.”
Bimbo didn’t want to believe that an old ninny like Lanz had outdone him on a liver run.
“We can still make it,” Hansi Munz said, trying to calm Bimbo down.
The vehicle hadn’t even come to a complete stop before Bimbo was already out the door. Because on odd days, it was the driver who always did the liver runs, and on even days his partner did—that was the ancient agreement between Bimbo and Hansi Munz. And today, Monday the 23rd, odd day, Hansi Munz would never forget it, even if he lived to be a hundred and ten years old like Frau Süssenbrunner, who they’d driven to her Parkinson’s therapy for the last time just two weeks ago.
It was maybe fifteen, twenty meters from where they were parked over to Rosi’s. Because her stand was on the lawn, right next to the new music pavilion. Still more than a minute left to cover those fifteen meters, Bimbo really didn’t have to run like t
hat. Two liver transplants with pepperoni and sweet mustard—they’d still get their orders in before it closed at five. Because Rosi was strict about that: whoever orders before five gets something, but when the clock strikes five, she doesn’t take any more orders.
Hansi Munz’s stomach was already growling, and he was annoyed now, too, that Bimbo had to get in line behind Lanz. He had prepared himself for the eventuality that it could be a little while before he got his hot liver transplant. I don’t know, either—the expression got started at some point by one of the EMTs, and now all of them use it. Then, a few years ago, even Rosi herself started writing it on the chalkboard next to the pickup window: liver transplant 32, heart transplant 60 (that was back then, today it’s already up to 39 schillings for a liver transplant, and just you wait, only a matter of time before the forty-schilling sound barrier gets broken, too).
Needless to say, though, complaints from patients, and the hospital lawyer got to be a little too much for Rosi, so, obligingly, she went back to writing on her chalkboard: ¼ kilo Leberkäse and ½ kilo Leberkäse. But the lawyer can’t do a thing, of course, about how people talk, so it’ll be a liver transplant for the lesser appetite and a heart transplant for the hardier eaters from now until the end of time.
And after all that excitement, Hansi Munz had worked up such an appetite that he was almost sorry he’d only asked Bimbo to order him a liver transplant. On the other hand, there was no way anyone could be hungry enough to finish off a heart transplant without getting sick.
He may have been hungry, but Hansi Munz wasn’t bored. There, in the narrow pathway between Rosi’s stand and the music pavilion, was a pair of lovers in need of no Leberkäse at all. Because the real danger was that the two of them would devour each other.
The woman had on a white lab coat, and she was at least a head shorter than the man who was cramming his head into her neck—just watching was enough to make Hansi Munz’s neck sore.
“That dirty bitch,” Hansi Munz muttered as the nurse tilted her neck back even farther.
