Szigeti had called early the previous evening, Eleonore Bitterle explained. He was completely beside himself. His son had been beaten at school, in the face and on the back, something had to be done immediately. Was it a teacher or another pupil? she asked. Neither, he replied, and when she asked whether it might have been the caretaker, he started screaming down the phone. People never took him seriously, he was fed up with the impertinent, wishywashy cynicism in this country, he wanted to speak to her supervisor, immediately – the usual, basically. With a great deal of patience she had calmed the man down and eventually discovered that, although the incident had happened in lesson time, nobody was sure exactly where it had occurred, probably somewhere between the classroom and the Szigetis’ house, and that the boy himself had not said anything except that he’d been beaten by something black. No, he wasn’t injured, not physically anyway, he was sitting on the floor of his bedroom, shell-shocked, obstinately playing with his Gameboy. She said she didn’t know whether it should be a case for the criminal police department, and he said he understood that, but insisted that his son be questioned, and whatever happened he was going to press charges against the unknown person. To be on the safe side, she had spoken to Raffael Horn and asked him for some expert advice, so that later on nobody could claim that all the police were capable of was re-traumatising children.
Eleonore Bitterle stood there in her pleated trousers and a white, long-sleeved blouse; yet again she was prudence personified. In theory a godsend for any man, Kovacs thought; in practice a godsend for me. He took a sip of his coffee.
“What’s that got to do with my e-mails?”
“Szigeti sent it in writing, in four versions, each one more detailed than the next, to me, to you and to Eyltz.”
“To Eyltz?”
“Things that get sent to the chief of police are bound to be dealt with more rapidly – he’s on the right track there. Perhaps they hunt together.”
Not all men hunt, Kovacs thought, some go fishing. A brief glance at Eleonore Bitterle’s green eyes was all it took to convince him that she wouldn’t be the least bit interested in what he’d caught an hour ago, a chub, a trout, or a shark. Philipp Eyltz, the town’s chief of police, wore dark-blue blazers with gold buttons, hand-stitched shoes and a signet ring bearing his family’s coat of arms. He loved to gloat over his collection of hand-chased hunting rifles mounted on a wall in his house, but was only ever seen out hunting if there was a press photographer in the vicinity.
“So what did Eyltz say?” Kovacs asked. “Top priority,” Bitterle said. Of course. One of those spoilt brats from a frightfully important family gets the hiding they’ve probably long deserved, and suddenly there’s intervention from on high. Kovacs could feel himself getting angry. She interrupted him. “Just think about what you’re saying – I’m dead against children being hit.” Kovacs took a deep breath and raised his hands in conciliation. “And the boy isn’t even seven,” she said. My daughter’s sixteen, he thought, and in the past five years there were probably two occasions when I might have hit her … in theory.
The front door was pushed open and they could hear what sounded like a heated discussion. “Who’s bringing Sabine today?” Kovacs asked. Bitterle put her head back, glanced into the corridor and just had time to take a step backwards before Mauritz, all hundred plus kilos of him, appeared in the doorway. “I’m not doing it!” he bellowed with a crimson face. “Wouldn’t even consider it!” “Forensics is being difficult,” Kovacs said. “What am I supposed to do?” George Demski had left him written instructions, which he regarded as an impertinence in itself, Mauritz said, “and now this!” “Now what?” Kovacs asked. “Weghaupt,” Sabine Wieck hissed from behind Mauritz, and grimaced. He didn’t know the details, Kovacs said, either Weghaupt jumped or he was pushed, that was the only question. Exactly, Mauritz said, agitated; despite the fact that the scene of the incident had been photographed thoroughly the first time around, now Demski had had the scaffolding sealed off and was instructing forensics to look at the whole thing again. “And?” Kovacs asked. “I’m not doing it,” Mauritz barked. “I’m not going up there!” “Is this a body mass problem?” Kovacs asked. Mauritz did not answer.
“Or one of coordination?” In the background Wieck covered her eyes. “Fear of heights?” Bitterle asked. “Yes, of course! Stop giving me that stupid look!” He had suffered from it since he was a child, Mauritz said, it had got better over time, but he still couldn’t cope with scaffolding and church steeples, and he asked them to please stop pretending they’d never heard of it. “The Hitchcock film where James Stewart climbs up the tower at the end,” Kovacs said.
“‘Vertigo’.”
“There’s a blonde at the top.”
“Kim Novak.”
“Is she dead?”
“Of course she’s dead.”
“How do you know all this?”
“I’m a single woman who sometimes gets bored,” Bitterle said. “So I watch old films that don’t have happy endings.” If the husband you love dies of bone cancer, Kovacs thought, then you probably do tend to watch old films with unhappy endings. He asked whether there was any hint at the scene that someone else was involved. As good as none, Mauritz replied. As good as was crap, Kovacs said, and Mauritz replied that, O.K., there was no sign, no evidence of a physical struggle, no footprints belonging to anybody else. “Was everything examined carefully?” Kovacs asked. Mauritz mimicked biting into his knuckles. “Calm down,” Kovacs said. “I know you weren’t there.” There were some things you had to do yourself if you wanted to be sure. And he definitely didn’t have vertigo. He stood up, pushing his chair back to the wall. “What are you doing?” Mauritz asked. “I’m going,” Kovacs said.
“Are we that awful?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t be silly. What are you really doing?”
“I’m going to climb the scaffolding. Someone’s got to do it.”
“But you’re not forensics.”
Kovacs did not reply. I’m the boss of a forensics officer with vertigo, he thought. By sealing off the “crime” scene Demski had once again been satisfying his all-consuming need to be absolutely sure, whereas in fact everything had happened as it appeared: the guy had stumbled, slipped and that was it. He certainly hadn’t been thinking about Mauritz. He put on his jacket. As he left the room he turned again to Bitterle. “What did Szigeti say about his son?” he asked. “How did he describe him sitting on the floor? Shell-shocked and petulant?” “Obstinate,” Bitterle said. “Not petulant. Shell-shocked and obstinate.”
“Shell-shocked and obstinate,” Kovacs repeated. He thought of Charlotte. It didn’t matter whether they were six or sixteen, children were ghastly.
FOUR
I’ve got a sister. I asked how old she was and they told me she was three and a half. Apparently she comes from the same city as me. I asked what her name was and they said: Susi. I tried using it but she didn’t answer to it. They said it’s like with a little cat, she has to get used to it first. In our language I said, “My name is Fanni.” She closed her eyes and replied with a single word: “Switi”. She’s thin and tiny and she’s got frizzy hair. She keeps closing her eyes. She’s got to stop doing that. Keeping your eyes open is the only thing that really matters. It took me a while to understand that.
It’s raining. She seems to like it. She’s standing on the steps outside the house, looking up at the sky and laughing. The water runs down her neck from her earlobes, in two small streams. “I’ll show you everything,” I say. She takes my hand.
We walk along Fürstenaustraße towards the lake, past the big houses with sloping gardens and dark glass circles above the doorbells. Those are cameras. “Rich people live here,” I say. I don’t know if my sister knows what rich means. “We’re rich,” I say. We’ve got a glass circle above our doorbell, too. To the left the path branches off into the gorge. A sign says: PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK. Beneath the writing are pictures of a baby in a pram, a man in a wheel
chair and an old lady with a walking stick. There’s a red line through all three of them. I liked that from the moment I first saw it.
Switi stamps in all the puddles. The higher the splash the louder she laughs. It’s summer so it doesn’t matter. We walk around the long bend until we get to the first viewing platform. Ahead of us is the bluish-green pool from which the stream gushes down, straight into the lake, that’s what it looks like. We can hear the whooshing. But we’d have to go further to see the waterfall. I’m going to save it for another time. I point to the Kammwand. “This is what it’s like here,” I say. “Up there are the mountains, and down there you’ve got the lake. Back home it’s different: up there’s the rain, and down there’s the thick mud.” She looks at me with wide eyes, almost as if she’s understood what I’m saying. “There’s one thing that’s the same,” I say. “The town’s all around. It’s smaller here, but you don’t always notice that.” Then we turn back.
I stop at the top of the hill. On your left you can see the cliff that looks like an owl. If you’re lucky you can hear a train travelling through the mountain at this place. I listen. There isn’t one at the moment. The umbrellas are up in front of the hotels, white, bright green and orange. I read her the names of the hotels: Wertzer, Fernkorn and Abendroth. “With a ‘th’,” I say. “But you won’t understand that till you can read.” The dwarf goats in the enclosure beside the Fernkorn push against the fence as we walk past. She doesn’t seem to notice them. She’s looking at the lake the whole time.
At the snack bar in the marina I ask her whether she’d like an ice cream. It takes her a while to understand what I’m saying. She nods and closes her eyes. I get strawberry and chocolate, two cones. “Have you got visitors?” Gino asks. “No,” I say, “she’s my sister.” “I’ve never seen her before,” he says. “What’s her name?” “Switi,” I say. “Switi,” Gino says, “that goes with the ice cream.” I don’t ask why Switi goes with the ice cream. Gino comes from Reggio di Calabria and says his dad’s a mafia boss who runs half of Italy. I don’t believe a word of it. I’m not even sure he comes from Italy. The ice cream’s yummy, that’s all that matters.
We walk along the jetty as far as the concrete pillars with the iron rings. Ducks are swimming below us, three big ones and five little ones. One of the big ones has put her foot on her back; it looks funny. Switi points at the ducks and makes rasping sounds. Ahead of us two boats are going back and forth, one with a row of blue dots on her sail, the other with orange stripes. They’ll be looking for me, I think, they’ll knock on the neighbours’ doors and phone around. There’ll be a mixture of fear and anger in their faces.
On the way back I tell her the story of the maharaja’s daughter who runs away from her parents’ palace because she feels like a prisoner. She makes hundreds of friends who protect her from her terrible father and mad mother. When her father’s soldiers come near she hides in a pelican’s pouch. Although it smells horribly of fish, nobody can find her there. When the pelican takes off and flies around in the sky he opens his bill a little, and through the gap she can look down upon the city, the houses, the beach, the power station with its chimneys, and at the palace she will never return to. Switi doesn’t take her eyes off me. I’m sure she understands every word, even though I’m not as fluent in our language as I was. Neither of us cares that her chocolate ice cream is melting and dripping down her T-shirt.
I show her the pharmacist’s sign as we walk past it. You can see two dromedaries, a big one and a little one. I haven’t got a clue why a pharmacy in Furth am See, of all places, should be called the Dromedary Pharmacy, but sometimes things stray into places where they don’t belong. Dromedaries have one hump, normal camels have two – I learned that from this pharmacy. Furth’s also got a pharmacy near the station in Bahnhofstraße, but that’s just called Station Pharmacy – it doesn’t teach you anything. When the door opens suddenly and someone comes out I get a fright. It’s Frau Wirth, the lady who runs the kindergarten. Everyone she’s taught calls her Tante Lea. I never had her. But she still knows me. “Well, well, who have we got here then?” she asks. That’s what child abductors on the telly ask. “I didn’t know you had a sister,” she says, “what’s her name?” “Susi,” I say. “Hello, Susi,” she says. “How lovely that there are still people who call their daughters Susi.” She asks whether Susi will go to kindergarten, and I say I think so.
I wonder to myself what sort of medicine Frau Wirth might have got from the pharmacy – an asthma spray, valium, or ointment for varicose veins. When we turn the corner by the district court I ask Switi whether she, too, thinks that Tante Lea’s hair is like a bicycle helmet – stuck onto her head somehow, and making you want to give it a good thump.
When we reach the end of the wall by the abbey she holds out her arms to me. I lift her up and carry her for a while. I can’t go for long but she seems happy. We cross the railway line and climb the hill towards the Walzwerk estate. I tell her how Ümid showed me his brother’s shisha and how he said he’d used it too, which is a total lie, of course, and how he said his brother would kill him if he found out, and he would have to kill me too, unfortunately, if I told anyone a word of what he’d said. I don’t even know Ümid’s brother.
On Fürstenaustraße, just before the place where you get a view of our house, we turn left. “From now on it’s a secret,” I say. “Escape route number one.” I’ve got a thing about escape routes; I’ve always got to have one, at home, at school, even when we’re at the swimming pool. Here we go: start off in the cul-de-sac, go past the florist’s and those four houses that all look exactly the same, as far as the yellow factory building with the sliding gates, the windows with small panes and the entrance that nobody knows except me. Head right, as far as the end of the building, and then don’t go around the corner but through a gap in the elder bushes and onto a path which starts along the edge of a bank, then there’s a wooden board over a small stream, and finally up and across the slope behind the gardens. First there’s the one that belongs to Kubiks, the optician, and his wife; then the garden that belongs to old Findenegg with his checked shirts; and, at the end, the one that matters. I stop, put a finger to my lips, and listen. Nothing. They seldom use the garden when the weather’s bad. And anyhow, the sheds block the view from the house. I’m ducking nonetheless. At the fourth section of fencing you can push the diamond-mesh to one side and bend it up far enough for someone like me to slip through pretty comfortably. It’s even easier for Switi.
On the grass under one of the damson trees is a bird I’ve never seen before: big, light brown, with black-and-white stripes on its wings. As we go past it raises its beak and fluffs up the feathers on its head. I clap my hands. It takes two hops to the side, over to the square of concrete with the iron ring that’s overgrown with weeds, but it doesn’t fly away. Switi’s not interested. She sits on the wet grass, closes her eyes and rests her head on her knees. I lift her up and carry her to the back door. I open it carefully and listen once more. Again, nothing. I take her hand and lead her to the bedroom. “Stay here,” I say. She nods. I tiptoe into the bathroom and fetch the large Lisa Simpson towel with the saxophone on it, so I can dry her. When I come back she’s lying on the floor by her bed, asleep. I sit on my beanbag and watch her breathing. “Later I’ll show you the house,” I say. “Only the ground floor to begin with; not upstairs yet.”
FIVE
“You’re my saviour,” he says softly. Her eyes are closed and she is picturing him looking through her skylight at the treetops and, beyond them, the sun rising at that very moment.
She can feel her lower lip trembling slightly as she breathes. “Are you talking to me or your god?” she asks.
“I didn’t want to wake you,” he says.
“You didn’t. What’s the time?”
“Ten to six.”
“I’ve still got a bit of time to save you, then.” She opens her arms and turns towards him. He plucks a strand of hair from the corner of her m
outh. “You don’t take me seriously,” he says. “Of course I do,” she says. Devils, witches, demons and bucketloads of fear, always the same, she thinks – of course I know I’m your saviour, and of course I take you seriously. She pulls him down on top of her and breathes hot air into the hollow of his collarbone.
“Spring is sort of an imposter,” he says. “It makes you feel like everything’s going to turn out alright.” “But it does,” she says feeling for the edge of his shoulder blade. “Someone like you should know that better than anyone.”
“Someone like me knows that it’s not true.”
“Not again. Here, put your hand on my neck.”
She can feel his fingertips on the spinous processes of her neck vertebrae. “There’s no guarantee,” he says. True, she thinks. She imagines them soaring above the clouds, fringed with red from the morning sun, and flying away over the town and the lake, nothing in sight to be frightened of. “I’m going to doze for a couple more minutes,” she says, and as she nods off she snuggles up close to him. Sometimes he says that it’s simple to drive away his madness; all he needs to do is feel her from head to toe, as many square centimetres of bodily contact as possible, and she likes this, even if it is just another of his psychotic notions.
*
For breakfast he wolfs down spoonfuls of cottage cheese, as always. He maintains that this is the best way for him to stomach his medication. She sits there, taking the occasional sip of her coffee, and looking at him. He makes me feel good, she thinks, it’s as simple as that. When he sits there in the morning light, pale and a little slouched, shovelling these little white balls into his mouth, he makes me feel good; the same when he calls and just says “you”, and he even makes me feel good when he puts his hand on my neck. Sometimes it’s the mad stuff that makes you feel happiest, she thinks, the stuff that makes other people roll their eyes or tap their heads in disbelief.
The Mattress House: A Kovacs and Horn Investigation (Kovacs & Horn 2) Page 5
