“You say that every time you come here.”
He said nothing. She is so damn precise in her observations and has a memory like an elephant, he thought.
“Let’s get to the important stuff right away.” Kovacs looked at her left collarbone and nodded.
Fleurin took away one of the cloths. Using a piece of plastic wrap, she had shifted upward the mass that was once Wilfert’s chin and lower jaw, thus exposing the neck section. Underneath, as far as the voice box, everything had been completely wrecked; the lingual bone had been broken several times and pushed back. However, a centimeter below the thyroid cartilage—itself undamaged apart from some torn tissue right at the top—there was a wide, diagonal slit. Because it been covered by the crushed chin, she explained, it had not been visible at first.
“And?” Kovacs said.
“A very sharp tool and a very definite cut.”
Kovacs shut his eyes for a moment. He had been worried that he would be sick, but the moment passed.
Fleurin took two long pairs of tweezers from her instrument tray and pulled apart the two sides of the wound. The cut was almost horizontal, she explained, perhaps angled just a touch from top left to bottom right and, apart from the strand of blood vessels on the right, it had severed all the organs of the throat, including the esophagus and the left-hand sternocleidomastoid muscle. If one assumed that the cut was made from behind, then this pointed to a right-handed suspect. She showed him the cut marks in the depths of the wound, which ran across the front of the fourth cervical vertebra like a notch. All one could infer from this was that the perpetrator had used a very well-sharpened blade-like tool.
“What you’re saying is that the neck was cut through, so to speak,” Kovacs said. He did not know where to put his hands.
“So to speak, yes.”
“And then the guy’s head was run over.”
“No,” the forensic pathologist said. “Certainly not.”
For a few seconds Kovacs stared straight at her. She looked absolutely sure of herself. She’s wrong, he thought, she’s utterly wrong. The one thing I’ve taken for granted up till now was the tractor tires grinding over the old man’s head. Fleurin said she had not found traces of earth or gravel anywhere around the shattered skull; on the contrary, the wound area was astonishingly clean—an impossibility if the head had been run over. What was more, Mauritz had come to the same conclusion; she had talked to him on the phone about an hour ago. I wanted to call Mauritz; she did it, Kovacs thought—I’m too slow.
“How then?” he said, putting his arms to his sides beneath the apron.
“I don’t know,” she said. “There is a large dent at the front of the skullcap, and it burst at the lambdoid and sagittal sutures because of the internal pressure. Perhaps a huge sledgehammer. From the few spatterings of blood and brain he was able to analyze, Mauritz says it looks in all seriousness as if the poor old chap was hit bang in the face by a meteorite.”
Kovacs closed his eyes again. Mauritz had never joked about his astrophilia. I’ve got to keep a clear head, he thought, and I mustn’t allow myself to become paranoid.
“A meteorite?” he said. “And Mauritz took it home with him, I suppose!”
Fleurin shrugged. “Mauritz says that meteorites vaporize on impact with the Earth.” Sometimes they make a crater, Kovacs thought, and sometimes they leave behind tiny clumps of ice.
“Who is capable of doing such a thing?” he said. “What monster could do something like that?” And he recalled how Wieck had vomited over the yellow police tape that early morning. He would ask for her. Demski was still on vacation and it would not work with Eleonore Bitterle alone. He would also ask for young Lipp. Lipp was fearless and he listened.
“Why ask me?”
“They say pathologists always know everything.”
“. . . but always too late. Very original!”
Kovacs was close to apologizing, even though that old chestnut had not crossed his mind. He felt comfortable in this woman’s presence, and that unnerved him. It might have been her freckles and the red hair, but more likely it was the way her presence radiated. You could put her behind an electronic microscope or the wheel of a mechanical digger, hand her a garden rake or a Glock 17 pistol—she would always look right.
“I know that ultimately it’s up to me to find the answer to that question,” he said. “But sometimes there are just certain situations . . .”
Fleurin made a placatory gesture with her hand and then pulled away the cloth that covered the rest of Wilfert’s head. “That’s all right,” she said. “I think that people who do things like that must either harbor a huge amount of hatred . . .”
“Or?”
She hesitated. “Or nothing at all. Actually there’s no ‘or.’ I know that’s not much help at the moment, but I can’t think of anything else.”
The old man’s skull had changed quite a lot, as if the whole thing had shrunk, not just the freely dangling eyeball that had lost all its luster and now looked like a light-gray shriveled fruit. You could hardly distinguish Wilfert’s hair from its surroundings, and the dried blood had colored it blackish-brown. The artificial denture, the only solid thing in the mush of tissue, had been removed.
“How strong does someone have to be to cause that much damage?” Kovacs asked. Fleurin stared at him.
“You’ve wielded a sledgehammer before, haven’t you?”
Kovacs nodded. “It was meant to be a rhetorical question,” he said. She covered the head and neck again.
“You’d need less power after having slit his throat.”
What makes an attractive woman become a forensic pathologist? he wondered. He then remembered how he had driven the wooden stakes into the frozen ground by the ramp up to the barn, one after the other, but with the head of an ax, not a sledgehammer. He looked at Groh, who was sitting on a yellow plastic chair by the wall of the room, leafing through a motorbike magazine. Groh noticed that Kovacs was looking at him. He grinned from ear to ear. “One meter ninety-eight and 119 kilos,” he said. “I’d be a fantastic murderer.”
On the drive back he had started to make his calls. Mauritz answered right away, as if he had been expecting it. “Aren’t you amazed?” he asked, and Kovacs said that was the most stupid remark he had heard recently. Mauritz apologized and summarized what he knew at present: tons of bloodstained slush, more in evidence to the left of the skull and shoulder than the right because of the severed vessel in the neck, no hint of a struggle. Also, the pattern of the splattered tissue on the ground looked as if Wilfert had suffered a single, powerful blow. So much for the meteorite, Kovacs said, and Mauritz ignored the comment, as if it had not been made. Overall the case was anything but clear-cut, and there was even something peculiar about the tire marks that were all over the place. After the initial examination Mauritz had insisted that the large tracks must have been made by the back wheel of a tractor, but these were the only ones that had been found near the body. From this one had to conclude that it must have been a vehicle with four equally large wheels and not a tractor normally found around these parts. “What else?” Kovacs asked. Mauritz said that it was most likely to have been a type of truck. Also, it was pretty certain that where the body had been found was also the scene of the crime, and that the frozen ground had provided an ideal level of resistance for the mass that had come smashing down onto Wilfert’s skull, be it a sledgehammer or anything else. “You know what that means, don’t you?” Kovacs said, and Mauritz sighed deeply. “Sunday duty, the little shovel and sieve, on my knees the whole time, just like an archaeologist.” Kovacs promised to ensure that nobody disturbed him, and Mauritz said, “Great!”
Philipp Eyltz, the local police chief, had been in the tearoom of the Hotel Bauriedl with a former school friend to celebrate the birth of the latter’s granddaughter. Kovacs had uttered the words “Code Red” on his voice mail, and so the call was returned in an instant. The system worked, even though Kovacs thought Eyltz was
a fraud, while Eyltz, in turn, never missed an opportunity to describe Kovacs as a “highly misanthropic investigative machine.”
They had settled the matter in a seating area of the Bauriedl lobby, Eyltz with a brandy, Kovacs with nothing. Mauritz would get the assistance of a uniformed officer, and another would be sent to guard the crime scene at night, just in case. They would leave it until Monday before passing any information to the media—the run-up to New Year was expected to be a pretty quiet time, anyway. Kovacs could, of course, carry on investigating however he liked, while the reassignment of Lipp and Wieck was fine for the duration of the investigation. Eyltz wore a white-and-yellow striped shirt under a dark-blue blazer with golden buttons, as well as handmade, black, lace-up ankle boots. He had his usual supportive smile, an expression that Kovacs always felt the urge to wipe off with a high-pressure water blaster. I’m getting more and more sensitive, he thought. I’m not as tolerant as I once was. Eyltz is trying to be constructive and yet he’s driving me around the bend.
The duty clerk at the public prosecutor’s office had asked, “Are you sure?,” and Kovacs came close to saying for a second time that evening that it was the most stupid comment he’d heard for some time. But he bit his lip and just barked back that yes, he was sure and that everything would be faxed over: forensic pathologist’s findings, investigative report, etc.
Late that evening he had called Eleonore Bitterle again. She had sounded sleepy, and when he apologized she explained that she had dozed off in her steam room. “I’d like you just to think about it,” he said. “You’ve got the whole of Sunday.” It was only afterward that he realized he was ordering her back from vacation. She was always there, vacation or no vacation.
Bitterle was a gaunt, gray-haired woman of forty-two—if you believed her file—and she had been single since the death of her husband. At work they called her “Mrs. Brain,” and it did sometimes seem as if she knew everything. It was said she had embarked on several degrees—history, philosophy, and whatever else—and abandoned them all just before completion. Psychologically this could be linked to her father, who was a professor of administrative law at Salzburg University, and known to be a dictatorial asshole. She had landed up at the Bundeskriminalamt, probably thanks to her father’s intervention and had started working in Vienna, first in the criminal statistical office and later in victim support. She had then met her husband, a civil engineer from Upper Austria and moved with him to Furth. It was plain to everybody that he had been the love of her life. The two of them had bought into an ecological housing project in the northeast of the city, and they had been in the middle of planting a hornbeam hedge along the garden fence when a lump appeared on the front of his right lower leg. First they thought it was an injury, a bruise between the muscles, then an infection of the bone marrow, and when he was finally diagnosed with osteosarcoma, the cancer had already spread throughout his body. Thanks to the widow’s pension that she received in addition to her salary, she had been able to finish planting the hedge and keep the house. But overnight she had become a different person. Her hesitant intellectual approach to things had become even more accentuated, and sometimes it seemed as if she were all fear and uncertainty, even in the most harmless of situations. Kovacs tried to treat her gently, as he knew that a single flash of inspirational thinking was sometimes worth more than twenty-four hours of steel nerves. If he could say to her, as in this instance, “I’d like you just to think about it,” it was the best approach.
Kovacs had spent most of Sunday at Marlene’s. For lunch she had cooked lemon chicken with rosemary potatoes and a hazelnut soufflé with orange brittle for dessert. In spite of a double Pernod afterward, they were both so full that the sex had to wait until much later, after the siesta and short stroll. It had been leisurely and somewhat routine, and in the middle of it he had thought: those are the most wonderful breasts in the world. The scene was clear in his mind. In that same instant he had looked into Marlene’s face, but her eyes were shut.
A little earlier they had walked downstream along the river, past the rafting camp, to where the strip of woodland by the bank became very narrow and where the drop started. Marlene talked about how the shop’s turnover had been on the increase again for some months—not a dramatic rise but consistent—and how the chamber of commerce, which had promised her assistance for the rental of additional storage space, was now behaving as if it knew nothing about the matter. He said, “It’s quite simple: people are feeling the pinch again, so they’re buying secondhand things,” and she nodded. He could not think of anything to say about the chamber of commerce. When they turned back, he looked at the mountains in the southeast. The sky above the peaks had been glowing yellow; this picture was also vivid in his mind.
The tension had first stung him when he was back alone in his apartment. He had sat in front of a piece of paper and scribbled meaningless rings on it, the image of Wilfert’s gaping neck ever present in his mind. In the end he wrote a single sentence: a right-handed person slices through the throat of an old man. He read it out loud several times, until it sounded to him like a practice sentence from a German lesson. He then stood up, chucked the pen in the air, and put on his jacket.
Since Lefti was closed on Sunday, he had gone to the Piccola Cucina, a tiny trattoria on the Rathausplatz. He ordered a small carafe of house red wine, a coarse Apulian Primitivo that he knew would not fog up his head. He also ordered a plate of marinated anchovies, even though he was not in the least bit hungry yet. A young woman was sitting at one of the brown tables by the wall, wearing a dark-red sweater with gold stars. She looked like a broken woman and was knocking back one limoncello after the other. She seemed to get on well with Daniela, the round waitress with black curly hair, and from time to time they exchanged a few quiet words. Kovacs thought hard, but he could not recall where he knew the woman from.
He broke off a piece of white bread and dipped it in the oil. Whenever he was unhappy with something he would often think of thousands of other unrelated things: Yvonne, who had pushed his life in a strange direction; Charlotte, who would always look like a vegetable, even in a red angora sweater; the town, which held him in its claws; the damp winter in the Furth basin; Marlene with her housewifey ideas for New Year; the Romanians, who only came over here to break into cars; the gold buttons on Philipp Eyltz’s blazer; the Business Party, which was preying mercilessly on the country; the millions of people who refused to grasp this; his own lethargy, which hung over him every winter like a huge, languid bank of fog. He asked Daniela for a waiter’s pad, took his pen out of his pocket, and wrote things on the narrow paper, such as: “Mauritz is lazy,” “Let Eleonore think!,” and “People usually kill a member of their own family.” In the end he tried to sketch Wilfert’s body from memory, lying there upside down on the ramp up to the barn with arms stretched out wide. Daniela glanced over his shoulder and said, “Looks like someone crucified,” but he could not escape the feeling that he had not progressed one bit.
Kovacs paced up and down, clapping his hands together. He had felt a similar unease over six years before when a taxman from Wels who had taken early retirement had left a trail of sexual crimes throughout the Salzkammergut and Upper Styria. In the end, ten-year-old Michaela Moor from Waiern had been raped and then strangled, and although they had a sample of the man’s sperm, and hence his DNA, there was nothing else to go on. In a very rare moment of lucidity, Strack had then come up with the camper van idea. Soon afterward they had caught the perpetrator in a dark-blue camper, just as he was tucking an envelope with photographs of his last victim into the first-aid compartment. In spite of this the man had the audacity to deny everything, causing Kurt Niemayer to explode on the spot. The man’s nose was pulp before the others could even blink, and it was only then that Demski had been able to restrain Niemayer from behind with both arms. His overreaction was understandable: at the time both of Niemayer’s daughters had been of primary-school age, as well as the fact that he left the Kri
minaldienst when he finished his law studies soon afterward. Niemayer was now a judge in a juvenile court in Innsbruck. He would phone Kovacs from time to time, and once or twice a year he used to make an appearance at his former workplace.
Kovacs walked over to the railings on the roof terrace and looked out eastward over the roofs of the Walzwerk estate. In two hours’ time the sun would rise over the jagged peaks of the Ennsthal mountains. A white column of smoke rose vertically from one of the chimneys of the woodworking factory. The first trucks could be heard chugging on the roads into town. I’m not going to leave Furth, Kovacs thought. I’m going to continue sleeping with Marlene, probably with greater regularity, I’m going to continue gazing into the sky, and I’ll be the only person who retires here.
He did not adjust the telescope’s focus. The eyepiece was icy cold. He imagined his eyeball freezing solid to it and remaining attached to the black metal cylinder when he pulled his head away. Regulus in Leo. The pale speck of the spiral nebulus M35. Castor and Pollux. I’ve got a brother, Kovacs thought. He buses second-rate football sides and gets pissed; every time I see him he has a go at me; I don’t want anything to do with him. Kovacs loved Castor, one of the two principal stars in the Gemini constellation. What looked to the naked eye like an average, medium-size, white, fixed star, was revealed, even at low magnification, to be a cluster of six individual stars. Things are generally more complex than they seem, he thought. He put his hand into his pocket and felt the waiter’s pad he had written on. In front of him he could see the dark-red sweater with golden stars worn by the young woman with the sad expression and succession of limoncellos. Stars, he thought, stars everywhere—a distraction that is not getting me anywhere.
He knocked the snow off his boots before going down the steps to his apartment. He stood for a second in front of the hall mirror. Below his left eye he saw an age spot that was slowly getting bigger. He would not take off his jacket but go straight into the office; he would put the lights on in most of the rooms and turn on the espresso machine; then he would stand by the board and start drawing.
The Sweetness of Life Page 12
