“What do you mean, ‘pretty clear anyway’?” Kovacs asked.
“An ancient Vredestein tire, production ceased thirty-five years ago. Used to be fitted onto small military troop transporters, Bedford breakdown trucks, vehicles like that.”
“How do you know all that?”
“From my contacts in the Danish Kriminalpoliei,” Mauritz said. “Funnily enough, they’re the experts in anything to do with tires.” Maybe there’s a tire specialist in Copenhagen or Växjö with blond braids and big hips, Kovacs thought, who’s got something to offer her Austrian colleague Mauritz. He meets her once a year at an international forensics conference, and afterward they discuss rubber compounds and the minutiae of tire wear on whispering asphalt. He thought about Marlene’s hips, which were also fairly broad, and about the slender figure of Elisabeth, Mauritz’s wife. “He treats her as if she’s got brittle-bone disease,” Frau Strobl, the secretary, had once whispered to him—a keen observation.
Mauritz dismissed Kovacs’s suggestion that he should ask for Lipp if he needed help—he’d be fine on his own. Demski had already collared Lipp in any case, and it would be inadvisable to try competing with him.
On the walk back, Wieck and Fux discussed desensitization to bee venom, which happened to some beekeepers and not to others. They also talked about the versatility of honey, and Fux told her about the classes of primary schoolchildren who visited him, the respect that they all had for the bees, and the reverence with which they put on the beekeeping hat. Kovacs walked behind them. They’re behaving as if they were father and daughter, he thought: a pretty, radiant daughter and a father in a ripped, threadbare coat. For a fraction of a second his eyes focused on a minute detail, and at the same time the recollection of an unresolved question flickered in his mind. The two were connected: a fleeting, shadowy double outline that he could not quite grasp.
When they emerged from the woods, they were blinded by the white expanse in front of them. A magnificent day, he thought. A day for sitting on Lefti’s terrace and eating a decent portion of lamb tagine followed by one of Szarah’s desserts that cemented your teeth together. Not at all a day for thinking about sending a representative to Wilfert’s funeral, about who should deal with the New Year’s Eve break-ins, or with a child’s broken bones, and about how to bring some sort of order into the chaos of the world.
“It’s still there,” Kovacs said when the roof of the Puch G emerged above a hilltop. Wieck gave him a confused look, and he felt that she was very close to asking, “What did you expect?” but had kept quiet given all that had happened. Anybody capable of flattening beehives would presumably not have a problem with stealing a police car. “The woodpile might have collapsed on it too,” Kovacs said, and she laughed. As he opened the passenger door for Fux, he reflected on the official name for the color of this car: “midnight blue.” The middle of the night was never blue; it was always pitch-black. When he looked through his telescope at the most glorious stars, an abyss gaped beyond them: the bottomless pit that knows no color.
Demski and Bitterle were discussing the story of an Apulian olive farmer who the year before had decapitated his neighbor’s sheep and entire family. The man had ended up in a high-security psychiatric institution, diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
“It wasn’t him,” Demski said.
“Why not?” asked Kovacs.
“Because an Apulian decapitator wouldn’t even go as far as Rome—that’s assuming he managed to escape from psychiatric incarceration.”
“Do you know that many Apulian decapitators?”
“Do you know a single Apulian who’s ever made it this far?”
Kovacs racked his brains. “The house red at Piccola Cucina,” he said. Demski removed his black-framed glasses and rubbed his forehead.
Lipp arrived in the meeting room with a tray balancing a teapot and cups. “Where exactly is Apulia, anyway?” he said.
“For God’s sake,” Demski groaned. Kovacs thought of the young woman in the dark-red sweater with gold stars and her many limoncellos. He wondered how she had spent New Year.
“The stiletto,” Bitterle said.
Lipp gave her a stupid look. “The what?”
Bitterle tore a piece of paper from her notebook, sketched a quick outline, and marked one place with a star. “The pencil heel of the Italian peninsula—that’s Apulia,” she said. Lipp blushed and murmured something about “not really liking it at school.”
Kovacs looked at Bitterle. She was wearing a turtleneck sweater and pants, as she always did at this time of year. Not particularly memorable clothes. Stilettos are just geography to her, he thought, nothing else. “Mrs. Brain” would never wear a red sweater with gold stars. I’m not so sure about the limoncello, he thought—she might perhaps drink a limoncello with Demski. He was the one she had been closest to from the beginning, before her husband died. She could even get emotional in Demski’s presence, although her conversation always retained an intellectual element. The two of them loved to engage in animated diatribes against the arrogance of certain self-professed authorities in criminal psychology, who gave themselves the pompous label of “profiler,” and who wrote books with titles such as Human Monster or What Jeffrey Dahmer Taught Me. “This garbage is sold to people with repressed aggression and low intelligence quotients,” Demski used to say, and Bitterle would nod back with glowing cheeks. He is clever and arrogant, and she is clever and modest, Kovacs thought; the bottom line is that each thinks the other is bright, and that produces an obvious trust.
When anybody asked Demski what he did for a living he usually replied, “student,” which was correct in the sense that he had been doing a very irregular correspondence course at a Belgian university for years: sociology, ethnology, and group dynamics. Nobody could judge whether he was making any progress. From time to time he talked of essays he had to write; the most recent one a meta-analysis of the literature on job satisfaction among female Turkish academics within certain EU countries. That sort of thing sounded plausible, in a way, although none of his colleagues had ever read a single line of his work. There’s something sketchy, Kovacs sometimes thought; a sore point, a dark place—something that makes him hide a part of himself. Perhaps it was connected with his Christian name, George, which he pronounced with a French accent on account of his mother, who had been born Bequerel in a small hamlet near Grenoble; or perhaps it was just pretension on Demski’s part. He lived with Monika Spängler, a very thin physiotherapist, and their six-year-old son in one of the rental apartments that the diocese had built in the largest of the abandoned farm buildings. In spite of the staggering annual subscription he was a member of the fly fishing association, owned a dinghy that was moored in the municipal yacht club, and was a regular visitor to the opera or concerts in Vienna. He liked sitting in Café Peinhaupt on the Rathausplatz, where he would drink a coffee or Pernod. In summer he and his family were quite frequently to be found in the public pool by the lake, and every other winter the three of them would take a vacation by some tropical sea. These details were common knowledge, as was the fact that Demski smoked cigarillos, never carried a firearm, and was reliability personified.
“Have you found anything apart from Apulia?” Kovacs asked.
“A perverted Bavarian stable groom—he started by mutilating the genitals of Haflinger mares, and when he got bored of that he got stuck into little girls,” Demski said.
“There’s no direct connection with heads.”
“No, but with animals.”
“True. What happened to him?”
“Psychiatric institution, like the Italian.”
Overall, Bitterle reported, their research of the accessible international databases confirmed and unfortunately repeated what they knew already from the literature on the subject: individuals who cut off heads and mutilated faces were almost always psychos, predominantly schizophrenics, sometimes people with what was known as “psychotic personality disorders.”
�
�We’re talking about those pallid boys who, when they realize that they’re never going to get away from their mothers in this life, grab the cleaver or butcher’s knife and separate her head from her shoulders.”
“Sounds wonderful,” said Wieck.
“It’s not,” Demski said.
“I mean ‘separate her head from her shoulders.’”
“Just the language, you mean?”
“Exactly, just the language.”
I wasn’t wrong about her, Kovacs thought. She pays attention to nerve-ridden beekeepers and to the minutiae that nobody else notices. He looked at her in profile. She’s got a beautiful nose, he thought, large, the tip turned slightly downward. She was wearing a wine-colored fleece coat; the sleeves were ten centimeters too long. For some strange reason, that doesn’t bother me, Kovacs thought.
Lipp put a cup in front of each of them and poured out the tea.
“Who’s got the most legible writing?” Kovacs asked.
Demski groaned and stood up. “What do I put where?” he asked.
“In ‘What have we got?,’ ‘dead bees’; and just underneath it, ‘a connection—tire marks.’”
Demski went over to the board, pushed it closer to the table and looked for a marker pen on the shelf below. Kovacs saw that in the meantime all sorts of stuff had been written on the board. In “What do we need?,” for example, someone had scribbled “a motive” and “a murderer”; or in “Who’s doing what?,” “Demski’s on vacation.” The more people you’ve got working on a case, he thought, the more childish they become. But he kept quiet.
While he took his first sip of tea, scalding his tongue in the process, he could see that there was something else on the board: a name with a question mark after it—small, purple, written in those precise block letters. He read it and felt a minute triumph welling up inside him. Even Maestro Demski made the odd mistake.
“Daniel Gasselik is in prison,” he said, blowing into his cup and eyeing the board above its rim.
Demski shook his head. “He’s not.”
Kovacs put the cup down. “What do you mean ‘He’s not’?”
“Our Herr President . . .” Demski said.
Kovacs closed his eyes. He could see himself leaning there against the back wall of the courtroom and could hear Nortegg, that powerful white-haired man who was also known to be very youth-friendly, saying without any hint of regret, “In view of the extraordinary brutality of the crime and the lack of remorse shown by the defendant, this court sentences him to nine months’ imprisonment. The time spent on remand will be deducted from the overall sentence.” He could still sense some of the relief he had felt back then, and he remembered how this feeling of relief had helped him forget the annual Christmas amnesty that was in place. I’m such an idiot! he thought.
“Why didn’t anybody tell me?” he bellowed, crashing his fist on the table. The cups jumped and were now sitting in their own individual footbaths. Nobody moved. Kovacs got up, silently, fetched a cloth from the kitchen, and cleaned up the mess. This sort of thing happened to him every few years.
“I did tell you.” It was Lipp.
Kovacs pulled a doubtful frown. “When?”
“On that ramp up to the barn. I’d photographed everything and you were coming out of the house with the Maywald children and their father. Mauritz was there too.”
Nothing, thought Kovacs. It’s all gone as if it’s been deleted. And Lipp is still being nice and not telling everyone that I forgot the camera on that occasion. “Well, I must have missed it amid all the chaos,” he said. A whole week, he thought. For a whole week we’ve neglected to chase up Gasselik just because I thought he was still in prison. He stared at the board. “Do you think he could have done it?” he asked after a while.
Demski raised his shoulders. “Of course I do,” he said. “In theory I think he’s capable of doing anything.”
“What do you mean ‘in theory’?”
“I think he still lacks the resources for a case like the Wilfert one.”
“Resources?”
“Muscle power and driving license, for example.”
Kovacs could see a pale Demski following the lanky boy out of the interview room, a scarcely controllable anger in every movement he made. “If it had gone on any longer I’d have slammed my fist into his face,” Demski had said, and nobody had doubted him. Gasselik had spent the first hour and a half lying to them, even though there was a mountain of evidence against him, then he did an instant U-turn and explained in a calm manner why he had jumped on the boy’s arm: first, because the latter’s behavior had warranted it; and second, because that was the only suitable way of dealing with fucking niggers. The worst thing of all, Demski said, was the continual smirk on his face; Gasselik smirked throughout the interview, closing his eyes from time to time as if in a dream, like some birds do with their third eyelid. “As if in a dream,” Demski said—Kovacs remembered the exact words. The atmosphere surrounding that case was also very peculiar. Bitterle had broken off her interview with Gasselik’s mother after twenty minutes, saying that she could not deal with such a soulless individual any longer. The woman did not even know whether or not her son had passed his school exams. Of course he got the odd dose of corporal punishment, but for some time now that had been solely her husband’s responsibility because he was a good deal stronger than she was. Under questioning, Daniel’s father, Konrad Gasselik, told Strack he was quite sure his son was in the right, and that the little Turk had not just gotten in his way but had also provoked him, as Turks are wont to do. Then Herr Gasselik asked him what car he drove and invited Strack to pop in one afternoon for an extended test drive. He had a first-rate restored E-type Jaguar in the showroom, for example, which was perfect for a gentleman graying at the temples. Strack had responded with a quizzical laugh, and nobody ever found out whether he went to see old Gasselik or not. Anyway, not long afterward this tin duck appeared on Demski’s desk, with half of its right eye missing. Demski said that he wound it up at home sometimes, and then it would shoot through the apartment at high speed and with such accuracy that you thought it might take off at any moment and fly away. He usually took it home on weekends, and Kovacs pictured it sitting on his bedside table, keeping watch while Demski slept.
“What do you suggest?” Kovacs said.
Demski thought for a moment and then shook his head. “It wasn’t him.”
“But he’s the son of a car dealer—I bet he can drive.”
“He hasn’t yet got the right build for the Wilfert case.”
Sometimes football players don’t have the right build, Kovacs thought, for the national side, perhaps, or the Champions League. “What do you suggest?” he asked again.
“I’ll call probation,” Demski said.
“Why?”
“He must have been allocated a probation officer. Perhaps he’s picked something up.”
“Walter Grimm,” Bitterle said.
“How do you know?” Kovacs asked.
“Because in our region there are three probation officers for young offenders—Jolanthe Beyer, Irmgard Schneeweiß, and Walter Grimm—and there’s no way a woman would be chosen to look after a psychopathic bone crusher.”
Kovacs felt a little uneasy. Grimm was a small, stocky man, notorious for never leaving home without a Taser. Kovacs imagined him as someone who had been beaten up mercilessly at school, and who later needed three hundred hours of psychotherapy. The last time he had come into contact with Grimm was when one of the latter’s clients raided a gas station and shot the cashier in the upper arm. After the man was imprisoned, Grimm uttered a single sentence: “Never let him out.” Kovacs still had the vivid recollection that, at that precise moment, he thought Grimm was finished, stone dead.
“OK. You call Grimm and see if he knows anything,” he said.
Demksi gave a satisfied nod and wrote “contact probation” on the board.
“And what about Gasselik himself?” Lipp said.
“We’ll leave him alone for the time being,” Kovacs said. “He mustn’t get nervous.”
“It wasn’t him,” Bitterle said.
“Why not?” Kovacs asked.
“He’s only sixteen.”
Demski let out a loud laugh. “We’ve been there before,” he said. The truth is, Kovacs thought, nobody can stomach the idea that a sixteen-year-old could slit the throat of an old man and then smash his face. He could not stomach it either.
There was still a good hour and a half until the funeral started. Kovacs had taken Lipp with him as well as Wieck, and Demski had merely mumbled something about “always doing everything on my own” but did not offer any further protest. The two of them looked surprised when Kovacs headed for the lake, but they said nothing. They went past the district authority headquarters and the finance office and, just before the road sloped down to the leisure center, they turned into Eschenbachring. As he walked beside her, Kovacs observed Wieck’s lissome gait and realized how good he had felt in her presence since the first time he had met her. It’s different from being with Patrizia Fleurin, he thought, and completely different from being with Marlene, but it’s good. Given her age she could have been his daughter; perhaps that was the thing, perhaps it was also because his own daughter was so different. She would never move with such agility and never come close to being as perceptive of the world around her as Wieck.
“You’re not serious,” Lipp said when Kovacs made for the “Tin” terrace.
“I’m always serious about sitting in beer gardens,” Kovacs replied. He asked Lipp to clear the snow from one of the tables. Kovacs himself went inside and said hello to Lefti, who was doing a Sudoku puzzle in the lounge. “Don’t get up,” he said. “I know my way around here.” He fetched three stackable chairs with cushioned seats from the storeroom, carried them outside, and positioned them around the table. He sat and gestured to them to join him. “Perfect conditions, make yourselves comfortable.”
The Sweetness of Life Page 17
