by Wolf Haas
And I’ve really got to congratulate Brenner on that. Because he was about to win Ferdl over with a single word.
“Oberwart,” Brenner said. “Was that just the crowning point of your life, or what?”
And you should’ve seen it, what a difference it made to Ferdl, the topic of their victory in the Cup. You’ve got to picture it like this, like when the sun comes out on a cloudy day—yes, that is the best comparison. How Ferdl’s expression, all of a sudden—it just really brightened up.
Because the “Portrait of the Week” series in the sports section—it had always been his boyhood dream to make it into there. And people could talk all they wanted about the senior citizens’ tours, fraud or no fraud. Ferdl put all of that money into the club anyway. He would’ve given a thousand Miracle Blankets just to make it into the “Portrait of the Week.” And now the “Portrait of the Week” was standing right in front of him in the flesh, and he’d almost been unfriendly.
“You’ll have to excuse me. Nothing personal. It’s just that—it’s chaotic with the club right now.”
Brenner just nodded.
“But you know what,” Ferdl said, “let’s chat about the Cup victory on the bus. Because I still have to pack up all this stuff right now.”
“That’ll be tough.”
“Yeah, not easy. All this stuff in half an hour. We have to be back at six, though. The old folks’ homes are very strict.”
“For us to have a conversation on the bus, I mean, it’ll be tough.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because you’re the driver.”
“Yeah, of course, I’m the driver.”
“So, it’ll be tough for you during the ride to come to the back of the bus, where my seat is.”
All of a sudden, Ferdl got serious—the last time he’d been this serious, he was taking Ortovic’s head out of the ball sack. Brenner was afraid he suspected trickery. And these days when you’re a detective and you want to get something out of somebody, that’s rule number one: you can’t ever give him the feeling that you’re tricking him. You have to trick him, of course, but you just can’t give him the feeling that you’re doing it. That’s the art of it.
No chance of Ferdl feeling tricked, though. Because he was saying, dead-serious now: “Then, we’ll find a solution.”
And then, a marvelous solution. The hostess would give up her co-driver’s seat to Brenner. She’d be standing practically the entire trip anyway and making empty chitchat with the people. Because she had to get them fired up for the next trip. Jealous, nevertheless, of course, Brenner getting to sit up front like that.
Brenner had a magnificent view of the countryside from right behind the panoramic windshield, and it’s been said that a magnificent view is liberating for the soul. And maybe there’s something to that, why it was all just tripping off his tongue now.
He was talking so snappily with Ferdl that surely you would have taken him for a sports journalist, too. And this in spite of Brenner not knowing the first thing about soccer.
“Your man in the goal, he’s a real miracle worker.”
“You can say that again.”
“Did you discover him?”
“Milo had quit playing altogether.”
Brenner didn’t ask any follow-up questions. Because it had been his experience that you learn a lot more from people when you don’t follow up. As soon as you do, they get wary. But if you wait patiently and aren’t too interested, they’ll tell you everything. But you’ve got to wait with feeling, and attention, sure, interest, too, even a key word here or there, but don’t ever pose a question. There’s a golden rule for you to take note of.
But it was Ferdl now, of all people, who didn’t continue, so Brenner had no choice but to ask: “And how did he end up coming to Klöch then?”
“Milo played Division One back in Yugoslavia. So I’d always seen him on TV. Because we get the Yugo-channels down here. Can’t understand a word of it, but the soccer’s superb. And I was often struck by Milovanovic—he was a top goalkeeper. World class. Of course, never in his dreams did he think he might play for us. But then, five, six years ago, a Belgrade Partisans’ striker smashed his skull. Usually a striker hangs back. But this one charged full-on. Jaw broken, nose broken, cheekbones broken, and, and, and—don’t even ask. Intensive care and, and, and. How do you think he looked after that?”
“In a coma, too?”
“Yeah, of course, coma, and, and, and. Until they put him back together again.”
“Silver plate, too?”
“Silver plate, the works. You can build a whole business off a player like Milo.”
“How much did you buy Milo for?”
“Ah, okay, I see where you’re going. That’s good. All right, listen up. After the accident, nobody heard a word out of Milo.”
“Left the building.”
“Yeah, but really left. The building. Didn’t hear a thing for years. I completely forgot about him. Because that’s how it goes in soccer. If you’re famous today, everybody celebrates you. But once you’re gone, you’re really gone.”
“But you didn’t forget about him, did you?”
“When our goalkeeper got sold off to another team last year—Kaup, he’s a third-string goalie now for the Graz Sturm—that’s when Milovanovic crossed my mind again. I thought to myself, he might be healthy by now. Or at least healthy enough for Klöch. And because I drive down there every weekend, needless to say, I’ve got my connections. It wasn’t long before I’d found him, Milo.”
“And where was he?”
“Where else would he have been? At the construction site, of course. He’d started building a house back when he was earning good money playing professional ball. Now, he’s left to finish it himself.”
“And it was easy to convince him?”
“Not easy, exactly. But needless to say—” the chauffeur rubbed his thumb and index finger together with relish. “He couldn’t say no.”
If you could’ve seen Ferdl like this, you would’ve thought they were shelling out a hundred thousand a month to Milo.
“You couldn’t be paying him that much to play for Klöch,” Brenner said, even though Milo himself had told him for a fact: two thousand schillings a month, base salary.
“Oh, he gets paid well. For a Yugo. Foreign currency exchange—he can put it all into his house.”
“But he’s still got to work at Löschenkohl’s on the side.”
“Yeah, exactly. He earns even more foreign money over at Löschenkohl’s.”
“So it seems. He earns a little something from the club. And then he earns a little more at Löschenkohl’s. And at Löschenkohl’s he’s not paid too badly, either.”
Löschenkohl. Löschenkohl. Löschenkohl. One thing you’ve got to hand to Brenner. He might be a little longer-winded than the next guy, but he’d just brought Ferdl, nice and slowly, right to where he wanted him. And now he says, “Löschenkohl junior’s got his toe in the team, too.”
“Had.”
Pause.
“Had!” the driver says again. “Because he doesn’t have a say in the team anymore.”
“On account of him bribing Ortovic?”
Ferdl didn’t say anything for a while now. He was only being silent, though, because that’s what you do with a sad topic. And then he said, “Löschenkohl junior caused a lot of damage to our team. Nevertheless, I’m not angry at him. Because he hurt me.”
“How did he hurt you?”
“Don’t you know him?”
“I’ve only seen him.”
“He’s a poor bastard. Our club’s president bribing Feldbach’s striker. You could only dream up something like that. It’d never happened before in the minor leagues. Not in our whole history.”
“And the striker went straight to the newspapers?”
“He was an honest Yugo.”
“And Löschenkohl?”
“Kicked straight out of the club. Made a nice, high arc, too. What
else were we supposed to do?”
“But he didn’t admit it.”
“Nobody ever does. But it was obvious. I knew Ortovic personally. And I have to say, a pity, such a nice guy. And a good striker. And a favorite with the ladies, of course, because Orto, he was a real character—not very big, but a little devil, and strong as a steer.”
Ferdl had a look of outright pleasure on his face as he described Ortovic. But don’t get any ideas—because it’s true: you often hear that about coaches, all that about the smaller boys, it’s not purely athletic interest that motivates them. But a certain something else, too.
But Ferdl—never. On that I’d lay my hand in the fire. Because he was a real lady-killer himself, and frankly, when he was describing Ortovic, he saw himself in it a little, too. And if you look at it that way, it was truly from an honest heart that he said, for a second time: “A real pity about that guy.”
“And so it was because of Ortovic’s testimony that you threw Löschenkohl junior out of the club?”
“We had to distance ourselves from the management, of course. So that everyone would see: it was only the tip of, of, of—”
“Of the iceberg?”
“No, of—of the club, I mean. Of the management. Only the president. Just Löschenkohl.”
They were driving up to the border now. No drawn-out formalities, though, because Ferdl knew the customs officer. I don’t want this to come out the wrong way but—certain agreements were in place. Anyway, they waved the bus right through, and then, once they were across, the driver said, “They’re always lined up here at night. Yugo-whores. Just like the soccer players who play for us, the whores earn a little foreign money, too.”
All this about the foreign currency really seemed to bother Ferdl. As a chauffeur, you probably have a certain relationship to it. Really not a bad profession, and one where you can get to know a lot over time. It goes without saying, Ferdl had a good general knowledge: “The Yugo-whores are cheaper and better than the ones at home.”
“Just like the soccer players,” Brenner said.
“Yeah, exactly. Like the soccer players,” Ferdl laughed. And then he nodded his head toward the side of the road and said, “First one’s already standing there. Especially on the weekends, though, it’s just teeming with them. Ortovic’s girlfriend always used to stand there, too. Before she disappeared.”
“Did she run out on Ortovic?”
But, now—and you see, that’s what I’ve been trying to say this whole time! Follow-up question at the wrong moment, and just like that—it’s all over.
Because it was now that Ferdl realized: Brenner wasn’t a sports reporter. If he didn’t even know that Yugo-striker Ortovic and his girlfriend had disappeared a few days after the bribery scandal broke. From one day to the next, as if swallowed up by the earth.
Ferdl lapsed into an icy silence from behind his steering wheel. Brenner could follow up or not follow up, and the only answer he’d get: icy Ferdl-silence. Until Brenner tickled him with the miracle blanket. That got the chauffeur finding a few choice words again.
In the end, though, he didn’t know anything else, except that Ortovic, the Feldbach striker, had popped back up again two days ago. In FC Klöch’s ball bag. Roughly three days after Klöch’s goalkeeper Milovanovic disappeared without a trace.
CHAPTER 6
Now, this is where the story gets a little uncomfortable, of course. Because Brenner’s thinking, Ortovic’s girlfriend, the missing prostitute, maybe I’ll go to Radkersburg, say, to the Borderline, maybe there I’ll find something out.
Now, you’re going to say, that’s a good excuse. And I can just hear folks talking already: Brenner certainly didn’t go unwillingly to the Borderline. And you can’t hold it against anybody for thinking that. Just between us, Brenner himself wasn’t entirely certain, either, am I going for the research, per se, or is there a little, you know, too. So I don’t see why I even need to bother. Practically speaking, Brenner’s only a man.
And street prostitution—needless to say, another thing altogether, and there you’d be right in saying, what was Brenner looking for at the Borderline. But when everybody’s always thinking they know better, then it’s up to me to be the one who says: it was here, at the Borderline of all places, that Brenner got somewhere, one decisive millimeter farther. And without this millimeter, the Bone Man might never have been caught—might still be running around Styria on a brutal rampage—and to this day mothers might not dare let their kids play in the streets. No children’s bones were ever found among the bones at Löschenkohl’s, of course. These days, though, if you’re a mother, well, needless to say—caution, mother of all wisdom.
And it’s only a handful of mothers today who realize that it’s Brenner they should be thanking for the fact that they can let their children back out into the open countryside. And badminton, and swimming, and bike riding, yes, my dears, what fun—and all just because Brenner went to a brothel. The way I see it: so be it if a certain something else played a part in Brenner’s decision, i.e., not one hundred percent research. Is it so terrible, if we have a few less deaths in Styria today?
You’ll have to excuse me, but it really gets on my nerves sometimes, how sanctimonious people can be. Now, where’d I leave off.
It was a Sunday night, two days after the bus trip to Maribor. Because Saturday night at a brothel is just too much of a production, Brenner thought. Better to go on a Sunday night, when there aren’t that many customers and it’ll be easier to strike up a conversation with the girls.
Twenty years ago, when Brenner was still in the police academy, he went to the cathouse a few times, because that’s what you do—young man, part of a group, you go to a cathouse once. But you can’t always use a group as an excuse, because, as far as that goes, Brenner hadn’t exactly been the voice of dissent—I don’t want to sugarcoat anything. But since the academy, he hadn’t had anything to do with prostitutes—well, once, at most, in an official capacity, but not privately.
It’d been such a long time that he was a little nervous now, buyer’s anxiety, so to speak. A moment later, though, he was already feeling right at home again, because he met an old acquaintance at the door. Turns out, Jacky wasn’t unemployed after all—he only had time to hang around Löschenkohl’s all day long because by night he worked as a bouncer.
“Ah, so this is your business, Jacky.”
“No, it’s my idealism,” Jacky grumbled. He was still a little sensitive, because it was only recently that he’d had to start working back at the Borderline again.
Just a month earlier he’d been thrown out by the chief physician in Graz when, out of nowhere, two of her nurses got pregnant. Supposedly, that’s even why she wasn’t promoted to medical director, because the people down here are always a little weird about a fifty-year-old taking a thirty-year-old lover. I don’t know if there’s any truth to the rumor, but it might have a speck of a kernel of a truth.
Jacky held the door open for Brenner, and then the heavy red curtains, then a black door with a round glass window, and then, of course, big surprise.
And you could see how times have changed. People always say that, especially about kids, you’re supposed to see how the times change. Well, Brenner was seeing it now at the brothel. Because it was a distant echo of the brothels of twenty years ago when he’d been in the academy.
Music, artificial fog, a spotlight—I can’t even begin to describe it. Imagine New York, or imagine Paris—or if you’re me, Moscow—but whatever you do, just don’t imagine East Styria. It seemed like Brenner’s entire body had grown ears, every pore an ear—you’ve got to picture this for yourself—and so the music was getting inside of him everywhere.
“Why so glum? You look like you just flunked your GED.”
Suddenly, a redhead was standing beside Brenner—didn’t even see her come in. He was still miles away in his head and remembering how once, on the force, they’d sat an entire night on standby and not a single call c
ame in. They played Mau-Mau till four in the morning, a schilling a point, when all of a sudden, Oberascher goes out to the evidence room and comes back in with the cocaine they’d confiscated the day before.
And that’s the dangerous thing about that fiendish stuff—years later, you’ll often have some backlash like this, and out of nowhere, you’re being dragged back into that trip, middle of broad daylight, even though you haven’t taken any in years. And we even have a word for it here: flashback. English, you see, because that’s how horrible it must be if nobody dares say it in German.
If there is such a thing! For Brenner it’d been, wait—thirteen, fourteen, no, fifteen years ago already, and now a flashback that practically had him clinging on by his toenails. And that’s why at this moment he said to himself: “I think Löschenkohl fried my chicken in coke today.”
But the whore must have understood it in spite of the deafening music, or she could read lips, I don’t know. Anyway, she doubled over laughing, practically to her knees, and when she came back up, she giggled, “Chicken fried in cocaine! That’s a good one! What’s your name?”
She was still shuddering with laughter, but Brenner wasn’t so dazed that he couldn’t tell she was just waiting for an opportunity to jiggle.
Alas, she’d miscalculated. Because, exactly the opposite effect on Brenner. He smelled her pungent perfume, and it was over. Magic gone. All at once, sober as a stick again. You can have all the music and all the fog and all the flashbacks in the world, but when Brenner smelled that perfume, it was like flipping a switch. Suddenly, the chicken was coated in coarse breadcrumbs again.
“Simon’s my name,” Brenner said, because he thought, why should I use a fake name, I’m old enough to use my real name at a brothel.
“Shymon!”
“Simon.”
“No! Shymon!” the whore shuddered with laughter again. “Because there’s no need for a man to be shy in a brothel.”
“So what’s your name, then?” Brenner asked, because he was thinking: if she’s this talkative already, can’t hurt, maybe I’ll get led to the right one.
