The Mattress House: A Kovacs and Horn Investigation (Kovacs & Horn 2)

by Paulus Hochgatterer

  “You were beaten up by something black, is that right?” he asked. “Yes,” the boy said, looking him in the eye.

  “And were you scared?”

  “No.”

  “No? Was it big?”

  “A bit.”

  “What do you mean by ‘a bit’?”

  “Not as big as Batman.”

  “As tall as me?”

  “Not saying.”

  “Why not?” The boy lowered his gaze and knocked the bottom of his water bottle against the tabletop. Horn looked at the policewoman. She was sitting on a chair by the window, writing in a notebook on her lap. She’s in the right job, Horn thought, she’s got the necessary concentration, and when the situation demands it, she lets someone else take over. Most people knew they were in the right job; this policewoman did, Hrachovec and Lisbeth Schalk did, Leonie Wittmann probably did, too, and Irene, his wife, did especially. But he didn’t. He never talked to anyone about it.

  “Are you scared of it now?” Horn asked. “Scared that it might suddenly turn up and hit you on the head again?” The boy raised his eyes. “And shoulders and back,” he said.

  “There, too?”

  “Yes, that’s how it is.”

  “Who says that?”

  The boy took the top off his water bottle. “Who says that’s how it is – on the head, on the shoulders and on the back?”

  The boy raised the bottle to his face, closed his right eye and looked into the neck of the bottle with his left. “It’s black in there, too,” he said.

  “Why won’t you answer me?” Horn said.

  “If I talk the same will happen to me.”

  “What do you mean the same will happen to you?”

  The boy clicked the top back on the bottle and stood up. “It says if I talk, exactly the same will happen to me, the bad stuff that I can’t talk about. Can I go now?” Horn turned to the policewoman. She raised her eyebrows and shrugged. Yes, he could go, Horn said.

  When he got to the door, the boy turned around. Satan was also black, he’d forgotten to say that, he was more cunning than any human being and had a white patch on his chest. He knew all the commands, including the secret ones you didn’t learn about on the course.

  The policewoman snapped shut her notebook and stood up. The boy had talked about Satan the whole way there, she said, about how he ate only a handful of flakes a day, and if need be could go without food altogether, and also about how he was the best finder of missing people in the world. So the boy thought that he could go missing and he wouldn’t have to worry about it.

  “Are you saying we can’t be sure that Satan is a normal dog?” Horn asked. “Precisely,” the policewoman said with a smile. The light from behind cast a golden glimmer on her hair. For a brief moment Horn was seized by the desire to run his fingers through it.

  The astonishing thing, he said, was that the boy didn’t appear in the least traumatised, but it was as if he’d made a promise, like a sort of vow. A vow tied up with a huge threat, the policewoman said, almost as if this threat were hell itself. She gets involved and she has imagination, Horn thought. Then he thought that the whole story was fairly straightforward and, to be honest, a little exaggerated. As far as he was concerned there was only one unanswered question – why the boy had talked about an it at the end.

  “That’s easy,” the policewoman said. “It. The black owl. We heard that this morning.”

  SEVEN

  “A criminal’s weapon or the tooth of a wild animal?” Lefti asked, pointing to Ludwig Kovacs’ right forearm. “Going beyond my remit plus senile dementia,” Kovacs said. There was no way he could be considered old, Lefti said, and Kovacs muttered that he could do without the Maghreb smarminess.

  Lefti threw a white-and-blue striped linen tablecloth over the round table on the terrace and put a glazed clay bottle of olive oil in its centre. “The usual, I assume, Herr Commissar? And the bandage looks a bit like a dog’s breakfast, if you don’t mind my saying,” he said. No reason for him to turn rude all of a sudden, Kovacs replied. What’s more, Lefti was very welcome to show him how he was supposed to deal with it, being right-handed. He wouldn’t deal with it at all, Lefti said; he’d leave the wounded area to the care of those hands to which he generally preferred to entrust his body. “You talk so beautifully about your wife that sometimes I’d like to smack you one, just like that,” Kovacs said. Lefti looked at him in horror. “Don’t worry, I wouldn’t actually do it,” Kovacs said. Lefti bowed politely.

  A painful injury plus an oversensitive partner plus a daughter who was after his money – not a good combination. Added to this was a group of noisy Carinthians sitting to his left, and to the right a young family with a baby who was whining, even though the mother was forcibly ramming a bottle into its mouth. There were times when Kovacs did not like people. His gaze wandered along the shore, from the wildlife observation centre, past the area of reeds by the river outlet, the hotel roofs, the marina, to the jagged edges of the Kammwand which towered straight above the heads of the Carinthians. Marlene had kept trying to drag him into the mountains. He had put her off with the argument that his star sign was Cancer, the crab, an animal which on land moved in reverse gear at best, which was not really much use to him or her. Then, almost exactly a year ago, she managed to get him, just once, with the night-sky trick. Picture the total darkness and the clarity – no haze, no urban light pollution, no headlights. After a three-and-a-half hour walk they had sat, frozen, outside the Paul Preuß hut, two thousand metres up, staring at an overcast night sky. Time and again she had said that these things were unpredictable, sadly, and he had sunk one schnapps after another. What is more, the May sky would have been a treasure trove of riches. Arcturus in Boötes, that impressive red giant, Coma Berenices, or Gamma Leonis, the binary star which made up the shoulder of Leo. The bedroom in the mountain hut had stunk of mouse piss – he remembered that.

  “What’s this supposed to be? Are you punishing me now?” Kovacs asked when Lefti placed a pot of peppermint tea and three narrow glasses with handles beside him. He was long over his crisis, he said, he had the booze under control, and it was well known that too much peppermint tea gave you tummy bugs, worms or helicobacter as they were called these days. He was sorry if he’d been fierce a moment ago, but he’d really like a beer now, please. Lefti poured tea into the glasses. Then he stepped aside.

  Although he had known Szarah for fourteen years, Kovacs still shuddered whenever he bumped into her. Maybe it was to do with her figure, which was like a juvenile poplar, or a cypress, maybe it was her narrow face, like a bird of prey, or perhaps her hair, which she always wore tied up, its bluish-black lustre now interwoven here and there with strands of grey. Perhaps it was for quite different reasons, but whatever they were, Kovacs regularly lost the power of speech whenever she appeared in her silent, sleek way. “Salam aleikum, Commissar,” she said, carefully pushing a dark wooden tray with silver handles between the tea glasses. It held several white porcelain bowls – one filled with yellow and red powder, the others empty – a small, curved horn spoon and a pile of folded cotton cloths. “Hello Szarah.” Kovacs felt the need to stand, bow and tell her that she looked like a princess. He also knew, however, that it would be stupid and that he was too cowardly.

  Lefti handed him a glass of tea. “Drink, Commissar,” he said. Kovacs pointed to the tray. So it was right what they said, a Moroccan restaurant was nothing more than a front for dealing drugs, and what he saw in front of his eyes had to be this trendy new drug. “Cinn,” Lefti said. “Cinn in the Tin, everybody’s saying it, so it must be right, Commissar.”

  “Cinn in the Tin. And are you taking a commission?”

  “Fifteen per cent, like any agent, plus a further fifteen risk premium.”

  “Because of the danger of gang warfare?”

  “No. Because of the police presence.” Lefti sipped his tea. Now and then he would smoke half a cigar, and after a large meal might drink an aniseed schnapps,
but otherwise he had no interest in addictive substances. Kovacs was aware of this and he had instructed the Sheriff to ensure that the Tin remained clean. In return the Sheriff would get the occasional lamb tagine and a friendly glance from Lejla, Lefti’s eldest daughter.

  Szarah placed a chair to the right of Kovacs, sat down, and carefully started to unwind the bandage on his forearm. “It’s because of that Florian Weghaupt,” Kovacs said. He could not remember the last time somebody had bandaged him. Maybe it had been Yvonne, his wife, he thought, but he could not be sure. “They ate koftas and drank ajran,” Lefti said. “What do you mean they?” Kovacs asked. Young Weghaupt and his friends, Lefti said. They had been extremely polite and had talked about music. Kovacs said that at a certain age music was what people did talk about mainly, and Lefti said that it had been slightly different on this occasion.

  The inside layers of the bandage were stuck fast to Kovacs’ skin. Szarah poured peppermint tea into a bowl, checked the temperature, dampened one of the cotton cloths, and pressed it onto the scabs. After a while the bandage came away fairly easily. “I reckon a few stitches might have helped there,” Lefti said. Kovacs tried to pull together the edges of the gash with the thumb and index finger of his left hand. “Yes, roughly like that,” Lefti said. “Stitches don’t work the next day, then?” Kovacs asked.

  “At least that’s what the doctors say.”

  Szarah squeezed drops of peppermint tea into the wound. “Doctors should be trusted, Commissar,” she said. No, Kovacs thought, doctors should not be trusted. Then he thought of Patrizia Fleurin, the forensic pathologist in charge of the district. He trusted her from time to time – when she said something about dead people at least. A yellowy-green lake had formed in the narrow, perhaps ten-centimetre-long fissure in his skin. Kovacs imagined a boat on it and, at the bottom of the lake, a chub stalking its prey. Some days there’s nothing in my world but thieves and crooks, he thought. It was Demski’s fault, he said, Demski with his crazy child-abuse obsession, and Mauritz’s, who ought to lose a few kilos for a change. Strictly speaking it was his daughter’s fault, too, which might sound a bit strange now, but he’d been thinking about her the whole time before the accident. “And these were not good thoughts?” Szarah asked. Kovacs did not answer. He took a sideways glance along the elegant curve of her eyelashes to the tiny scar on the bridge of her nose, and wondered whether there were other people who were not particularly happy when they thought about their children. Mauritz was the best forensics officer he had come across in his career, with a love of detail that bordered on the pathological, but also calm when everything else around him was in freefall. In even the most barren situations he was always able to conjure a creative idea from his mind. In private he was the husband of a pale, thin social worker who coordinated the town’s mobile care service for the elderly, father of nine-month-old baby Nikolaus, and a formidable table tennis player to boot. “An outand-out attacking player,” Kovacs said, something you would not imagine at all if you looked at him. If Demski had not attended this meeting of pederast detectors, but gone about his work as usual, Mauritz would not have had to expose his neurosis, and he, Kovacs, would not have had to clamber up that scaffolding. Yes indeed, scaffolding, he said in reaction to Lefti’s enquiring look, steel tubing joined with sleeve couplers, boards of wood and aluminium sheet, the whole thing six storeys high, on one of those faceless constructions north of the river. “Neptun Insurance?” Lefti asked.

  “How did you know?”

  “We do the odd catering job for them.”

  “Is there anywhere in this town where you haven’t got your fingers in the pie?” Kovacs asked. Lefti bowed his head. “We are given eyes to see with and ears to hear with.”

  “And a mouth to spread the word of the Prophet amongst the people.”

  “Do you not wish to convert, Commissar?”

  “What good would it do?” Anyway, he had stepped over the police tape and climbed the vertical steel ladders, annoyed by the camera swinging heavily back and forth, and even more annoyed by the fact that his daughter was coming to screw him for money. When he reached the fourth storey he was utterly wound up and glad that nobody had come with him. The place where the boy had fallen was properly marked, so he had found it straight away – a jumble of footprints in an area demarcated by spray paint. One look told him that they were not going to get anything from forensic technology, but he got down on his knees anyway, to take a few photographs. At that moment the camera slipped from his shoulder. He instinctively grabbed for it with his left hand, and for the nearest hold – the transverse strut on the scaffolding – with his right, in the process failing to notice a metal pin which had been stuck through a hole in one of the sleeve couplers. The sharp end of the pin had easily perforated his sweater and shirt and cut through his skin like a knife. “A knife? My my,” Lefti said. “Like a badly sharpened knife, whatever,” Kovacs muttered. At first he was just irritated by the tears in his clothes, and in fact he had taken a few photographs, but then he had seen the drops of blood on the plank he was standing on. “Then everything became clear,” Lefti said.

  “Yes, everything became clear. I was the murderer and I had no other choice but to give myself up to the police.”

  Meanwhile, Szarah had put some spoonfuls of the red and yellow powders into a bowl and added a little olive oil from the clay bottle. With tiny circular movements she stirred it all into an ochre-coloured paste. Then she carefully dipped the edge of one of the cotton cloths into Kovacs’ wound and waited until the liquid was soaked up. Using the tips of her fingers she dabbed the paste across the length of the gash in his skin. All the while Kovacs just watched without saying a word. She’s giving you the sort of attention which knocks you sideways, he thought. Lefti poured some tea. “In our country all our wives are also qualified nurses,” he said. “You’re absolutely right, we are very lucky.”

  “But I didn’t say anything.”

  “I know, Commissar.”

  It’s bizarre, Kovacs thought, I don’t begrudge him his wife. I do begrudge most other men their wives; I even begrudge someone Yvonne. He asked what was in the paste and Szarah said everything you could put in a spice mix with healing properties. “Chilli too?” he asked, and she said, “Yes, chilli too.” She trimmed one of the cloths, wrapped it twice around the wound, and stuck it with an adhesive gauze bandage which she took from her jacket pocket. “How come you’ve got something like that to hand?” Kovacs asked. “Anybody with children has gauze to hand, too,” Lefti said.

  While waiting for his food and taking the occasional gulp of his beer Ludwig Kovacs thought about the friendship that bound him and Lefti, the type of sarcasm they shared, the fact that they could not stop talking in each other’s presence, and that this Moroccan landlord was the only person apart from Marlene to whom he sent the odd text message. Lefti enjoyed his pleasures in moderation, and Kovacs admired this. He himself was a picture of self-indulgence and Lefti did not despise him for it. Lefti’s relations with other people were generally based on a respect which Kovacs for the most part admired, and sometimes could not understand. When, for example, the son of Martin Fürst, a nationalist deputy in the regional parliament, had yet again called his classmate Lejla a “harem lady” or a “stinking camel driver”, Lefti told his daughter that she should try to imagine how shameful it must be to have a father like that, instead of giving the boy a sound thrashing in some dark corner. Lefti’s daughters loved their father even though he was a wimp. Kovacs most definitely was not a wimp and Charlotte hated him for certain. He did not love her either. At least this made the situation black and white.

  The southerly Föhn wind was now blowing. A veil of mist lay over the lake, sparing only the foot of the Kammwand. The Carinthians had left and the young family’s baby was fast asleep. There were days around Easter time when it felt like summer.

  “Here you are – koftas and ajran. Normally you have the tagine of the day, Commissar,” Lefti said. “No
rmally I don’t go pointlessly climbing up scaffolding,” Kovacs replied, tucking into one of the fried meatballs. I’m trying to get on the trail of this young man by eating the same thing as him, he thought – that’s how far I’ve come.

  “They talked about music,” Lefti said.

  “Who?”

  “The Weghaupt boy and his friends.”

  “How do you always know what I’m thinking?”

  “Koftas and ajran – wasn’t hard.” No, he couldn’t remember the kind of music, but the youngsters had been wrapped in a mantle of seriousness. A mantle of seriousness, Kovacs thought, no Austrian would ever come up with that. He thought about Demski’s report which told of a young man who, in spite of having performed brilliantly at school, left early and started training as a builder, who lived at home with his younger brother and parents, and who had never had a girlfriend. Demski had also described the devastated parents, a group of distraught colleagues and a neighbourhood that was entirely at a loss. “Who would kill a person who hasn’t got a quarrel with anybody?” Kovacs wanted to know. Lefti plucked at his beard. “Someone who’s got the same problem,” he said finally.

  *

  Ludwig Kovacs walked in the direction of the lake, past the Kingdom Hall of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the old chocolate factory and the town library. He could smell spring, could feel the beer in his head, and was waiting for the pain. Chilli, she had said, cinnamon, turmeric, cumin, paprika, fenugreek and black onion seeds, besides hundreds of other ingredients that nobody knew. There was no way it was not going to hurt. He recalled the moment as a six-year-old boy when, after leaping over a pile of rubble he stood gazing at the cut across his knee, waiting anxiously for the pain and the blood. Half an hour later he was sitting on a surgery couch, watching the white-haired doctor take one of those curved needles from a metal holder with his fat fingers. He had felt a little pain and no fear at all, he remembered this very well, and also that the needle holder had looked like a sardine tin. His mother had said to him that, if he went on like that, sooner or later he would end up in a wheelchair or in his grave, but even back then he was aware that his mother sometimes said crass things. On the whole Kovacs had been spared injury in his life. As a teenager he had been operated on after tearing his meniscus, and once when he was searching a garage a concrete slab had tipped over and broken two of his metatarsals. That had happened on the case of the stolen television sets, he remembered.