They walked through the administrative wing to get to K1. It was the quietest area of the entire hospital. An elderly lady with a patent leather bag was waiting outside the entrance to the accounts office, but otherwise they did not meet anybody. Ernst Maywald kept his gaze fixed straight ahead. Horn noticed that he took giant steps, which meant that Katharina had to walk pretty quickly next to him. When he had asked for Horn they had sent him to I22. The man apologized; he was unaware that psychotherapy took place elsewhere, and his daughter had not been able to tell him the right way. Katharina did not appear to detect any reproach in her father’s words. She made her way determinedly to the ward door and only turned around when her father called to her that he was off now and that her mother would come to collect her. When he waved to her she just looked at him in silence.
Katharina came into the room and went straight to the bookshelves. She seemed very happy to find the princess doll exactly how she had left it the last time. She took it off the shelf, together with the book of heroic legends, and put both things on the floor in the middle of the room. Then she took off her boots and coat, circled the room in her tights, and got a medium-size drawing pad and the tin of oil pastels from the art drawer. She squatted on her heels, took a pastel out of the tin, turned the pad around, and started to draw. Horn leaned back in his desk chair. There was a marked reduction in the girl’s tension since their last session. The grandfather was finally in the ground; now she seemed able to calm down. Out of sight, out of mind: for the most part the psyche of a seven-year-old child still worked in concrete fashion—that, at least, one could bank on. It was obvious she had not seen the murderer; as far as she was concerned he did not exist.
The first thing that Katharina drew was a large rectangle a few centimeters in from the edges of the paper. She then drew a second rectangle, another centimeter or so inside the first. A frame that provides stability from the outside, he thought—something we’d all like. He thought of Ley and his mother; and of Bauer, who was forever going on runs around Furth and plugged in his earphones in the cemetery. He also concluded that the continual reworking of psychiatric theories was nothing more than the desperate attempt to construct a more or less sustainable framework around madness.
Beginning at the bottom left-hand corner, Katharina meticulously colored in the space between the two lines. Only in the middle of the lower bar did she leave a space free. She stopped, appeared to think for a while, and then wrote something in the space in block capitals. “What are you writing there?” Horn said. She looked at him and said nothing. When he leaned over to take a look at the word, she covered it with her hand and pulled the paper to her chest so that he could only see the reverse side.
After a while she slid away from him, looked around the room, and then pushed the book of legends to a spot on the floor where there was direct sunlight. She put the drawing on top of the book and then the doll inside the frame. A girl lying on her bed, Horn thought, and underneath there’s a book with a hundred knights—a strange version of “The Princess and the Pea.” “The princess is lying in the sun,” he said. Katharina looked at the palm of her right hand and then stood up. She went to the desk, glanced into Horn’s eyes, and took the small scissors out of the cylinder-shaped wooden box that contained the pens. She kneeled again, grabbed the doll, and carefully started cutting into the outer layer of the tulle dress from the lower rim. Horn was tempted to intervene, but he held himself back. The beginning of a reaction formation, he thought. The identification with the perceived aggressor. This is how her unconscious attempts to come to grips with fears of being killed.
Katharina cut out a square piece of tulle from the dress and put it on the puppet’s face. Horn pictured the knights with their helmets, and Katharina’s grandfather who had not had a visor in front of his face. She is the doll, he thought. She’s protecting herself in his place, and she’s also showing that she can defend herself.
Katharina remained kneeling on the floor and seemed to be thinking. At that moment the phone rang. Horn cursed to himself when he picked up the receiver. Katharina lifted the scissors and, with purposeful snips away from the seam at the waist, began cutting the dress off the princess.
It was Edith, one of the experienced sisters in casualty surgery. “Mike said I should ask you to come. The little Schmidinger girl has been crying and vomiting for an hour.”
“Is Mike with her?”
“No, I am.”
Katharina wrapped the two strips of tulle that she had cut off around the doll’s head several times. Then she put the scissors to one side, sat down, pulled her knees up to her chest, and looked at her work.
“Can you get Mike for me?”
“I’m afraid I can’t at the moment.”
“Why not?”
“He’s got to stay by the ward entrance.”
With the tip of her index finger, Katharina stroked the tulle cocoon around the doll’s head.
Then she said something, a single word.
Horn jumped. He instinctively reached out into the room with his left arm. Catch the word, he thought. Stop time and catch the word.
“Are you still there?” Edith asked.
Yes, I’m still here, Horn thought. I’m standing here like Moses parting the Red Sea, trying to catch a word.
“Yes, I’m still here,” he said. “What’s Mike doing at the ward entrance?”
“He’s making sure that the father doesn’t come back in.”
“Which father?”
“Birgit’s.”
Horn hung up. For a second he felt all light-headed. Stop time, catch the word, put my arm down, he thought, and then: Schmidinger.
He got up carefully, as if he might break something, stepped over to the girl, and kneeled beside her. “I heard what you said just then. I made a note of it, you can be sure of that.”
Katharina lifted her finger away from the doll’s hood. Now Horn could see what she had written in the empty space in the black frame: LOVREK. It took him a while to grasp it. Bauer, this morning, he thought. Impressions from the funeral, the coffin-sinker. Year one in primary school, he thought, she can write lots of letters already. Sometimes she gets them mixed up.
The phone rang again. As he got to his feet he felt himself getting annoyed. Two words, he thought: one spoken and one written. Two girls—one who needs urgent help and one who is still providing conundrums, plus a psychopath—and the telephone ringing all the time. “I’m coming,” he barked into the receiver.
It was not casualty, but Irene. She spoke softly. “Please don’t be angry that I’m disturbing you. I just wanted to tell you I’ve decided not to play the Tchaikovsky.”
He suddenly felt helpless and empty and did not know why. Although the girl was sitting next to him on the floor and could hear everything, he said, “Katharina has just spoken for the first time. She said a very peculiar word. Before that she wrapped some tulle around a doll’s head.” Irene said nothing. He listened to the silence.
Nineteen
It was a sort of déjà vu. Kovacs felt a childish pleasure when he realized it. Demski had called him at home only once, three years earlier when late one evening he had tripped over the edge of the shower and smashed his face against the fittings. Demski had injured a cheekbone and with the best will in the world it was obvious that he would not be in a fit state to come to work the next day. He had still apologized a thousand times, for his “blunder,” as he described it.
Now he was apologizing again, and again a thousand times, and in the same tone. This time he did not call it a “blunder” but an “error.” In fact he said, “It’s possible that I’ve been taken in by an error.” Kovacs felt a brief and childish pleasure for a second time, because Demski had never been taken in by an error before.
As agreed, he had called Grimm, the probation officer. Gasselik had indeed been allocated to him. Grimm said that he did not very much like young psychopaths, in part because their prognosis was so poor: all of them sooner o
r later got a long spell in the clink for serious violent offenses. But, oh well, a job was a job. He had visited Gasselik twice in prison at the end of his sentence, to explain the function of probation, but he had hit a wall of utter disinterest. They had not developed anything approaching a relationship so, to be honest, he had not been surprised when the young man had neither showed up at their first scheduled meeting, nor phoned him. Prior to Gasselik’s early release Grimm had spoken with two prison officers, to discuss any particular personality traits etc., and both had smiled in a curious way and said, “You’ll see, that one’s going to turn into something.”
Kovacs was attempting to put a sock onto his foot with only his left hand. “Did Grimm undertake anything on his own initiative?”
“What do you mean by ‘undertake’?”
“Did he call him? Did he go and see him?”
“He didn’t say anything to that effect.”
To be paranoid and bone idle was a very disagreeable combination, Kovacs said. The first thing was that Grimm’s Taser must be taken away, because he was just using it to defend his own passivity. The sock remained hanging from Kovacs’s little toe and he could not shift it any further. Kovacs cursed.
“Anyway, he’s not so important now,” Demski said.
“Who? My sock?”
“What do you mean your sock?”
“Oh, just forget it! Get into the car and pick me up.”
“Why? What’s the plan?”
Kovacs tried to toss the sock away, hitting the table leg with his instep. He groaned. Demski was getting suspicious. “If Marlene’s with you and you’re in the middle of having sex then I could call back later,” he said.
I’ve just fucked my foot against the table leg, thought Kovacs, that’s the sad truth of the matter. “We’re going to pay Gasselik a visit,” he said, after taking three deep breaths.
“What do you mean, ‘we’?” Demski said.
“Us two, you and me.”
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“Well, you know he’s got some previous experience with me.”
“And you with him,” Kovacs said. Demski almost belted him one during the interrogation, he thought. He’s afraid of him and hates him, that’s the point. “He despises you. Perhaps that’ll cause him to make a mistake,” said Kovacs.
“Why does he despise me?” He could hear that Demski was annoyed.
“He felt your fear. Psychopaths despise people who are afraid, and at the same time they need to feel power over them.”
Demski said that he’d had far more pleasant jobs than to be the target of the sick inclinations of a psychopath, but he supposed he’d made his own bed. Made his own bed, taken in by an error: it’s all just beating around the bush, Kovacs thought. Just like me he reckons Gasselik could have done it, and like me he’s been thinking it from the beginning, so we don’t need any of this violation of probation business or Grimm’s outbursts.
“When can you get here?” he asked.
“In twenty minutes,” Demksi said. Kovacs checked the time. He was satisfied. When they rang at the door the Gasseliks would be having breakfast.
He examined the red stripe across his instep. In reality it was not so bad, yet he felt miserable. Sometimes you just wanted someone who provided a bit of sympathy, it was as simple as that. He had to admit that Yvonne had not been bad at sympathy: You poor thing! Have you hurt yourself? Shall I bring you an ice pack? Do you need a schnapps?, etc. Marlene was much more detached in this respect. But perhaps it all had to do with the moon.
Kovacs finished getting dressed. Sex with Marlene had not been that special: quick and incidental. Afterward she had just shrugged her shoulders, said perhaps it had something to do with the moon and, a few seconds later, had fallen asleep. He slipped out of her apartment and drove home. He had no desire to spend hours lying next to her in bed, staring at the ceiling and thinking how unlucky he had been in relationships throughout his life. He had treated himself to a couple of small grappas, climbed up to the roof, and focused the telescope on the Pleiades. While tilting the telescope over the lights of the town he again spotted the defect in the lens when it was very cold. This had been noticeable for about a year—a small, pale-yellow sickle in the upper right section of the lens, which disappeared as soon as the field of vision got darker. The horns of Taurus, the pale spot of the Crab Nebula approaching the zenith of Castor and Pollux. There had been a time when he could tell all these stories by heart, of Perseus and Andromeda, of Auriga with the little goat on his shoulders, or how Hercules strangled the Nemesian lion to death. His brother used to laugh at him for it; his parents had been indifferent.
The loud noise of youths arguing had risen up from the street. He had recognized, among others, the voices of “Sheriff” and his twelve-year-old cousin. Then he had decided to go back down to his apartment.
“Do you believe in the moon?”
Demski was standing in the door and looking at him as if he were stupid. Of course he didn’t believe in all that esoteric lunar nonsense, he said. On the other hand, you couldn’t deny the influence of the moon on the tides, and if it was capable of making the sea come in and go out, then there was no reason to think it couldn’t do the same with body fluids or the sap in plants. Why was he asking him such a bizarre question?
“I had a relationship problem, and perhaps it was the moon’s fault. That’s why,” Kovacs said.
“So I was right,” Demski said, giving him a look of triumph.
“What do you mean?”
“I was right about Marlene. And sex. Earlier, when you were waffling on about socks.”
“OK. You were right,” Kovacs lied. He fetched an aluminum pot with fresh espresso from the stove. Demski accepted. He had never done that before.
On the drive to the town center from the Walzwerk estate they were silent for a while. Then Demski said, “What have we actually got so far?”
“Nothing,” Kovacs said. “Strictly speaking we’ve got nothing at all.”
A group of schoolchildren was crossing from the Rathausplatz toward the abbey, so they stopped. “You’re being too pessimistic,” Demski said. “We’ve got a few things.”
“And what are those, if you please?”
“A right-handed murderer who acts rationally but is also full of anger. A place where the body was found that is certainly the crime scene as well. A definite tire track.”
“A green lego brick. A few nails. A button. No fingerprints. No sign of any resistance. A face that, according the pattern of blood spatters, is most likely to have been smashed by a meteorite.”
Demski cleared his throat. He’s trying to cover up a stupid comment about meteorites with a cough, Kovacs thought. When Fleurin had shown him Wilfert’s face, he had noticed how she beamed like a botanist announcing a new species of orchid. I know nothing about her, he thought. I don’t know if she’s got a husband at home, or an aquarium, or whether she presses flowers in heavy books.
“And what do you think about the stuff with the animals?” Demski said.
“Same as you,” Kovacs said. “Young psychopaths start fires, piss their beds at night, and torture animals. That’s what the textbook says.”
“And if an old man gets in their way, it’s him that’s going to cop it and not the dog.”
“Exactly.” Kovacs failed to mention that he had secretly asked Mauritz to make a more detailed examination of the broken Stanley knife blade that was stuck in the neck of Reithbauer’s fat dog, and that, besides tons of canine blood and hairs from a collie cross, Mauritz had found a single dark-green wool fiber. Nothing was official, as the killing of animals came under the banner of criminal damage; the criminal police were only brought in to deal with exceptional cases. Eyltz, the police chief, took such issues of demarcation very seriously on the whole.
They spoke a little more about Ernst Maywald, his body strength and his large hands, the strained relationship with hi
s father-in-law, and about what role his function as employee representative and socialist union worker in the woodworking factory may have played in this. In interviews the family had never tried to hide the fact there had been conflict between the two; Georg, in particular, was quite willing to talk about how his father and his grandfather had rowed. They would argue, for example, about how the roof of the house should be retiled or about the right time for cutting trees. But it had never even gotten close to the point that he might be induced to murder the old man. “It’s best to cut Christmas trees at the full moon,” Demski said. “That’s when they stay fresh the longest.”
“At least that’s what the Christmas tree sellers say.” Kovacs thought of the tiny fir tree with the three silver baubles and ten strands of tinsel that had stood on Wilfert’s chest of drawers, and he imagined that Yvonne and Charlotte had recently bought a plastic tree that they would take down on January 6 and pack away into a box to prevent it from getting dusty.
There was black ice on Severin bridge. Demski took care to reduce his speed. “According to the weather forecast it should be getting warmer soon,” he said.
“I can’t feel anything yet,” Kovacs said.
Konrad Gasselik’s bronze-colored Range Rover stood between other vehicles in the parking lot. A man in green overalls with neon-yellow stripes was chipping old snow from the asphalt surface. In most of the windows of the residential block the curtains were still closed. “They’re saving electricity,” Demski said, pointing to the street lamps. Only half of the halogen lights were on. The mental alertness that switches on automatically at the crucial moment. Kovacs took a sideways glance at Demski: a muddy-colored raw leather jacket with fur collar, freshly ironed pants, regulation haircut: short as always. In spite of everything, Demski would succeed him one day.
“Why are you grinning like that?” Demski said.
“I was thinking about the tin duck you left in the back of the car,” Kovacs said. Demski winked and said nothing. It was impossible to see whether he was blushing.
The Sweetness of Life Page 21
