by Wolf Haas
“Don’t you dare leave all that out in the courtyard, now, or else I’m taking you up to Steinhof and getting you locked up—you already pulled out the straitjacket. It’ll only take a few seconds, Brenner, and then you’re going to have that straitjacket on you. And Bimbo used to be able to get to Steinhof in eleven minutes. Eleven minutes, Brenner, until you’re in a padded cell.”
Hansi Munz got some backup now, too. Fat Nuttinger, in all his corpulence, was standing in the doorway to the dispatch center and yelling: “What’s going on, Brenner? Don’t you have anything to wear? You’ve got to ask first, though, if you want to take something from our clothes stash. Because they’re for the needy Yugos, not for you.”
Brenner didn’t care about Hansi Munz or fat Nuttinger. And he wasn’t going to clean up the clothes from the courtyard, either.
He just went back into the 740 garage, and there among the pigsty of his own making, he searched for the crowbar. The crowbar’s intended use is actually for car accidents so that you can free the people who are trapped before they burn to death.
And not for the locker in the old clothes garage that only Bimbo had a key for.
Who knows where he hid it—maybe he gave the devil the key as a burial gift on his way to hell. Anyway, Brenner had no time for foraging now; he took the shortcut, i.e. crowbar.
That’s when he saw the most beautiful breasts that he’d ever encountered in all his life. “Springtime in Provence,” was the caption of the photo that Bimbo had hung in his locker with Steri-Strips. It must’ve been a pretty old photo, though. Because I always say, breasts as magnificent as those, you just don’t find them anymore today. Whether it had something to do with the emancipation movement or not, I don’t know.
Believe it or not: Brenner wasn’t really giving the photo its due regard, though. Because underneath the photo was the screwdriver, and next to the screwdriver was a drill. But that wasn’t any ordinary drill.
As Brenner walked out of the garage with the gun—which was so heavy that just carrying it nearly broke open his appendectomy scar—neither Hansi Munz nor fat Nuttinger made a sound.
All you could hear was a soft splash. From the rivulet winding its way to the garage drain from Hansi Munz’s pant leg.
CHAPTER 15
“The decision is yours now: you can stand on the right side of history, or the wrong side,” Brenner said, and I’ve never seen him this serious before.
“I always stand on the right side,” fat Nuttinger answered.
“Then you’ll go back to the dispatch center and look up a few things in the computer for me now.”
“You think just because you’ve got a Schweizerkracher of a gun in your hand that I’m going to start dancing to your tune all the sudden?”
“This was Bimbo’s Schweizerkracher.”
“Bimbo?” fat Nuttinger asked, his brow furrowing. “Wait a minute, Bimbo who used to work for us?”
“Bimbo who shot Irmi.”
When Nuttinger furrowed his brow like this, the skin-folds over his eyes resembled sausage links. “And all Stenzl did was throw himself heroically in between, like some kind of bodyguard, right?”
“All Stenzl had to do was hold his head up. But there was so little in that head of his that the bullet zipped right through like, pfffft, nothing.”
Fat Nuttinger just grinned.
“And if you let me onto your computer now”—Brenner just wouldn’t relent—“then maybe later it’ll look as if you took a stand and did the right thing.”
But fat Nuttinger had no intention of letting Brenner into his dispatch system.
He was still enjoying the fact that Brenner was no longer under Junior’s protection. Of course, he didn’t understand that he himself wasn’t under Junior’s protection anymore, either. Because Junior needed all the protection he could get for himself now.
Little did fat Nuttinger know, of course, that a second later he’d be storming back into the dispatch center and barking into his microphone: “Seven-forty, return to station immediately!”
Because that was Brenner in the now-empty 740. He’d barreled out of the station so fast that the folks returning home with their shopping bags stopped to make the sign of the cross right there on the sidewalk. Although, making the sign of the cross doesn’t actually have anything to do with the church of commerce. They’ve got their own rituals, you take money into your hand and then you give it to an officer solely responsible for such transactions, what’s called a cashier. Making the sign of the cross, though, in and of itself, not really done. But when Brenner sped through the first red light with lights flashing and sirens blaring—forcing a tour bus to slam on the brakes—he saw a woman in the rearview mirror put her shopping bags down in order to make the sign of the cross.
“Seven-forty, return to station immediately!” fat Nuttinger barked again. By that point, though, Brenner was already long gone. And the shoppers, long gone, too—off to the first store they could find, and just as a precaution, purchasing something for the next clothes drive in order to keep the EMS, or the devil, at bay.
“Seven-forty, return to station immediately!”
Fat Nuttinger was a highly irritable person, but I can’t recall him ever losing his dispatch demeanor like this before. Because now he was shouting:
“All emergency vehicles! All emergency vehicles! Stop Seven-forty!”
“Location?” the emergency vehicles radioed back.
“Unknown!” fat Nuttinger shouted.
“Six-ninety to dispatch!” Schimpl said excitedly.
“Go ahead, Six-ninety.”
“Seven-forty has been ID’d on Triester Strasse outbound.”
“Six-ninety copy. Follow Seven-forty!”
“Seven-forty is driving a hundred and sixty.”
“On Triester Strasse?”
“Affirmative.”
“Then drive one-seventy!”
“Roger wilco,” Schimpl said, and with such grit, that I’ve got to say, theater of war’s got nothing on him.
Then a brief hiatus, because fat Nuttinger had to dispatch a vehicle to a heart attack in the Herrengasse. But then, Schimpl, right back at it:
“Six-ninety to dispatch!”
“Go ahead, Six-ninety.”
“Serious accident!”
“Where?”
“Triester Strasse, intersection of Anton-Baumgartner-Strasse.”
“How many injured?”
“Three seriously injured.”
“Attend to the injured at the scene. I’m sending immediate backup.”
“Six-ninety to dispatch!” Schimpl wasn’t even trying to keep calm anymore.
“Six-ninety?”
“We’re the ones who are injured!”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“Vehicle overturned while pursuing the seven-forty.”
“You goddamned assholes!” fat Nuttinger barked into the microphone, and then, unfortunately, Brenner couldn’t hear how the rest played out because he was already at Alt Erlaa. He parked out in front of apartment block three and went up to the second floor, where Herr Oswald lived—at most a hundred meters from Lungauer.
Now, universal truth: men often make the mistake of not getting up when the doorbell rings at home. More often than not, it’s the wife who ends up answering because the couch is just so comfortable, or Soccer Sunday, let’s say.
And then, when the wife opens the door—too late. The unpleasant surprise is already there. Case in point: When Frau Oswald opened the door, Brenner saw Herr Oswald on the couch right away, and Herr Oswald saw Brenner in the doorway. But Herr Oswald thought he was seeing a ghost, and Brenner thought he was seeing an acute 21, i.e. heart attack triggered by seizure.
“A Herr Brenner is here for you,” she said, turning to her husband, and Brenner was immediately struck by her mannered way of speaking. A splendid look, I’ve got to say, hair all done up, full skirt and apron, the works. On TV she would’ve been the wife of a co
untry doctor, but in real life she was just the wife of Herr Oswald.
And the furnishings, also quite elegant: white walls, white carpet, white leather sofa, white face on the gentleman of the house.
“Yes,” he managed to get out, “Herr Brenner!”
“Long time no see, Herr Oswald.”
“This is Herr Brenner,” he stammered in his wife’s direction. “We know each other.”
“Do come in,” she said to Brenner, friendly-like, and offered him her hand.
“No, allow me!” Herr Oswald intervened. “I’ll see Herr Brenner out.”
And then, needless to say, questioning look from Frau Oswald. There’s this nice expression for when a couple of people are in a room and suddenly the conversation comes to a complete standstill. You say: An angel’s passed through the room. I don’t know where it comes from, either, maybe because in a situation like that you always get a creepy feeling, practically a draft from the great beyond. Almost like when you’re shopping and you walk into a store and all the shelves are bare.
And while the angel was taking its sweet time strolling through this here room, Brenner remembered how yesterday he’d been leafing through an issue of Bunte in the geriatric ward. They had a photo of the fattest man in the world—he’d just died over in America—believe it or not: 420 kilos! They had to knock out the walls just so they could get his corpse out of the house.
You’re going to say, why didn’t they just cut him up, would’ve been cheaper. But you see, a thing like this, it’s a matter of tact. You’ve got to have enough respect for a person, I say, not to just go and carve him up for the sake of getting him out the door. Even if later on, you just end up burning him or burying him or portioning him out ten times for the lockers of an organ bank—it’s a different thing than taking him apart purely for transport reasons. For once I’ve got to give the Americans credit.
What am I trying to say here. Brenner got the notion that the angel of that American behemoth was passing through the Oswalds’ apartment right now at this very moment. That’s how colossal the silence was that had suddenly engulfted the married couple.
And then Brenner said to Frau Oswald: “I’m from the EMS. And yesterday, your husband saved the life of a bicyclist.”
These high-rises sway pretty easily, normally you don’t feel it, certainly not down here on the second floor. But Brenner was convinced he could feel it now. On account of the boulder of relief that had fallen from Herr Oswald’s heart.
“You didn’t tell me,” Frau Oswald said, and with a pride that gave her noble eyes a rather ignoble shimmer of emotion.
“He probably didn’t want to alarm you,” Brenner leapt in with an answer.
“But I would’ve been so proud! Why didn’t you tell me, then?”
Dear women! If only you wouldn’t drill so insistently for secrets, then just maybe we men would dare creep out of our shells a little more. That would be my advice on this very fundamental problem. Although, in this case, of course, right out the window, because just one big house of lies anyway.
“The patient is now out of immediate danger,” Brenner said, taking a swing at the next lie. “And he has no greater wish than to meet the man who rescued his life.”
“Then you must go!” Frau Oswald exclaimed, and so resolutely that I have to say: a peeped-on woman would never talk that way to her voyeur. It’s enough to almost make you understand Herr Oswald’s inclinations a little.
She immediately fetched him his elegant jacket, and he put it on like a spineless child.
“See you later,” his wife said, but he didn’t say anything back. And as he took the elevator down with Brenner, he still didn’t say anything, and as he got into the ambulance next to Brenner, he still didn’t say anything, and five minutes later as Brenner raced along with lights and sirens, he still didn’t say anything. And then he yelled:
“Are you completely twisted? Have you completely lost your mind? Are you insane? Are you a sadist? Do you want to destroy my marriage? Do you have any comprehension at all of, of, of—”
“Which question should I answer first?”
But the retort stayed lodged in Brenner’s throat. Because meanwhile Herr Oswald had started shaking like an epileptic—such was the state of shock he was in that his wife had almost discovered his little hobby.
Needless to say, Brenner was sorry now that he’d disemboweled the 740 like a Christmas goose. Because otherwise all he would’ve had to do was reach into the trauma kit and give Herr Oswald one or two knockout drops. That would’ve calmed him right down, nice and fuzzy, to where he wouldn’t be hysterical anymore but would still be capable of functioning. But Brenner must’ve been afraid that Herr Oswald wouldn’t be able to cope with the task ahead in his condition.
Brenner couldn’t come up with anything better to calm him down now than the cassette that Klara had slipped him when they’d said goodbye. As the first notes came out of the quadrophonic speakers, though, Brenner was already afraid it might’ve been a bad idea. Because music like this, powerful stuff.
Even though Klara’s choir had performed without any amplification system at the time and without anything else, either, no electric guitars, nothing, just plain music, the likes of which you just can’t find anymore today. Needless to say, this did nothing to get Herr Oswald to quit his crying. If anything, Brenner had to watch out that he didn’t get started himself now. Because, memories and all.
He turned the volume down a little and told Oswald: “I know who shot Stenzl and the nurse.”
Oswald, though, didn’t react at all. Just kept on whimpering to himself.
“Everybody believed that Stenzl was the one who was wanted dead. And that Irmi just happened to be there—an innocent bystander, just an accident.”
Oswald didn’t want to know about any of this. He turned his back to Brenner—well, as far as the seat belt would allow—and stared out the passenger-side window.
“Come, sweeheet crohoss,” the tenor sang. Klara had been right about that: “sweet cross,” not “sweet death.”
How, over the course of thirty years, had he managed to mix up those two words? Brenner was reminded of Lungauer with his aphasia now. The decisive word, though, needless to say, he’d got right. Because somewhere way in the back of his head, Brenner must’ve had sweet diabetic blood in his sights for some time now. Long before he knew that Bimbo, instead of rescuing his patients, was ushering them into the hereafter through diabetic shock.
But it was getting a little uncanny, even to himself now, as he thought back to when the melody had first started tormenting him. Because it wasn’t just the day he met Klara again—that was the same day where the diabetic Frau Rupprechter had told him about how Irmi had been snooping through her papers, i.e. her will. The story didn’t really register at the time. But way in the back of his head, it must’ve registered after all!
“But the truth is, it wasn’t about Stenzl at all,” Brenner went on. “Irmi was the target from the very start. And it was only to cover up his tracks that the shooter shot through Stenzl.”
Brenner could see out of the corner of his eye that Oswald was torn. He was trying not to let anything show, but, because he was now listening, he’d quit his wailing, and by that, of course, he’d given himself away.
“I don’t care,” Oswald insisted, and looked demonstrably out the side window. But it’s the demonstrables that give you away, of course.
“I told you about my co-worker, Bimbo.”
No reaction. Exactly, though: too demonstrably nonreactive.
“The incident in the Kellerstüberl,” Brenner said, digging a little deeper, “with him and the daughter of our other co-worker.”
“You’re the one who’s a perv!” Herr Oswald said to the window.
“And that bothers you?”
“At least I’m not running to your wife and telling her.”
“But your wife was downright proud of you.”
“At the very last second,” He
rr Oswald whispered. And then he turned in his seat to Brenner and shouted at him: “At the last second! At the last possible second!”
Brenner was grateful for it, i.e. a cleansing storm to clear the air. Herr Oswald was gradually getting over the shock of his wife nearly finding out his secret.
“It all went over just fine,” Brenner said, apologetic.
“Thank god.”
And then, second attempt by Brenner: “But you do remember Bimbo?”
“Of course I remember! You think I’d forget a story like that?”
“Fair enough.”
“Come, sweeheet crohoss,” the car radio kept on begging.
And to tell you the truth: Johann Sebastian Bach knew exactly what he was doing, putting all that repetition into his songs. He knew what he could fairly expect from his lot, how you’ve always got to say things a thousand times before people finally get it.
Because it was only just now that Brenner got it himself. Why he’d mixed up the lyrics to the song. Why, somewhere way in the back of his head, he’d mixed up the two words, just like Lungauer would: death and cross. Unbelievable, how long it took to make itself heard from the hinterlands of his mind: for the diabetic patients, the cross on the ambulances didn’t mean salvation, but death.
“I told you how Bimbo was there when the two of them got killed with a single shot. And it’s true, too: Bimbo was there. But not as a witness. Take a look in the glove compartment.”
The Schweizerkracher was so big that it barely fit in the glove compartment. Oswald didn’t dare touch it, just closed the glove compartment right back up again.
“It was Bimbo who shot Stenzl in the neck.”
“Come, sweeheet crohoss,” the tenor sang in an eternal loop.
“And who’s responsible for Bimbo’s murder?”
“That’s exactly what I need you for.”
Oswald gave Brenner an uneasy look and opened the glove compartment again. “Me?”
This time he stretched his hand out toward the gun but then drew it back at the last second.
“It’s okay to touch it. It reeks so bad of disinfectant that I can guarantee you, Bimbo didn’t leave a single fingerprint on it.”
