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

by Paulus Hochgatterer

  Konrad Seihs, the brand new Business Party deputy in the regional parliament, leered at him from an electronic advertising screen at the corner of the Fernkorns’ garden. Kovacs turned away. There were some people he did not want to see, not even on advertising hoardings. Demski sometimes asked him why that shitface got him so worked up, and he would say that he was thinking of his fellow inhabitants on the Walzwerk estate, of the women who took off their headscarves before going shopping, and of old Yiledi, who was still afraid of being deported even though his application for asylum had been accepted a long time ago. In any case, he inherently loathed people who felt the need to have fighting dogs at their heels. Eleonore Bitterle said that people who kept fighting dogs were like people who carried guns: men plagued by a fear of castration, most of them hopelessly impotent, and Kovacs replied that she was in the right job with the police. He did not like people who only felt strong when others felt weak, irrespective of whether they were impotent.

  He walked for a while along the promenade. Just before the lido he sat down on the jetty and looked out across the lake. The wind was now blowing strongly and the mist had dispersed. Further in the distance the crests of the waves were starting to foam white. Kovacs thought of his boat, of Marlene’s hydrophobia and this morning’s chub. He looked at the bandage on his forearm. His mind was filled with images of Szarah’s hands, the fine trickle of that pale-yellow olive oil, and koftas and ajran. He reached for his mobile.

  The Sheriff always answered, even when he was having lunch at his mother’s house. “Bismillah, Monsieur Erdoyan,” Kovacs said.

  “Hello, Commissar. What have I done now?”

  “The usual. You know I write everything down in my notebook. I’ll cross out two black marks next to your name if you tell me what comes to mind when I say a group of young people who regularly go to the Tin for koftas and ajran.”

  “Only koftas and ajran? You want some grilled aubergines with that.”

  As he was neither a chef nor a doctor of internal medicine, Kovacs said, he had no intention of discussing the finer points of particular diets. If a name might help, the young man he was interested in was called Florian Weghaupt.

  “Weghaupt? But he’s dead.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “If you cross out three black marks …”

  “Watch it, sonny!”

  Florian Weghaupt had bought amphetamines from time to time, the Sheriff said after pausing briefly to reflect, small amounts as a rule, never any opiates. He could not say anything about cannabinoids, but this was practically impossible now, as home-growing had totally ruined the market. All in all, his consumption pattern was what you would expect from a young creative type. “Consumption pattern – you’re talking like a drug therapist,” Kovacs said. “Narcotics consultant,” the Sheriff said. “Narcotics consultant for the soft- and low-dose sector.”

  “Yeah, right, as low-dose as you’re slim.”

  “Exactly. By the way, I’m below one hundred and fifty kilos now, Commissar.”

  “Your coronary arteries must be delighted,” Kovacs said.

  Erdoyan laughed. What, in his opinion, did Florian Weghaupt have to do with young creative types? Kovacs asked. He didn’t know for sure, the Sheriff said, but he got the impression they were a group of musicians, at any rate they didn’t speak about anything else but music. I know that already, Kovacs said and hung up.

  *

  He took the path which curved along the river outlet. In spite of the wind it smelled of brackish water and slightly of oil. It always did in this place. A grey-haired jogger in a black-and-silver striped shirt came towards him. He did not recognise the man. When the hospital and the hills above Mühlau came into view behind a stand of goat willow on the northern shore, Kovacs turned off towards the town centre. There was a trace of mint in his mouth. His arm would not hurt again, he was now sure of it.

  The Weghaupt case must have been an accident. Maybe some substances had played their part, but nobody had pushed him. People had accidents: they swerved off the road, drove into the pillars of bridges, or fell from scaffolding. Accidents were common, murders were not.

  Kovacs found himself looking into the window of Guys & Dolls, searching for the price tag of a woman’s yellow belt studded with rhinestones. When a young man stopped next to him, he felt a combination of anger and shame well up inside him, and went quickly on his way.

  There was a strange mood in the office. Sabine Wieck was stomping up and down the corridor, Eleonore Bitterle had closed the door, and Christine Strobl, the secretary, was spooning yoghurt out of a carton without looking up. “What’s up?” Kovacs asked, “communal pre-menstrual syndrome?” “I’m not going to answer that,” Frau Strobl said, and carried on eating. Kovacs went into his room. Sometimes this was precisely what he wished for: a team that acted up and refused to do their duty, which would give him no other option but to pack up his things and go home.

  “George rang.” Eleonore Bitterle was standing in the doorway, her arms folded. “And?” Kovacs asked. He would be staying on there for two or three more days, she said.

  “Holiday, or what?”

  No, she said, in light of recent events the pornographers’ meeting had been extended. “In light of recent events?” That’s how Demski had put it. He had also said that his work could happily wait, nobody need bother about it. “And an idiot like me goes climbing up scaffolding for him.” Kovacs stretched out his arm. “Nice bandage,” she said. Demski was a good detective, they all knew that. He was passionate, erudite and, when it mattered, precise to the point of pedantry. On the other hand he was definitely not a team player. “The truth is, he hasn’t thought for a moment about whether his work here can actually wait,” Bitterle said. “And then he’s giving us new tasks.”

  “What’s that? He’s giving you tasks?”

  They were on the trail of a number of networks, he had said. The hub of one of these was in Italy and, as there was clear evidence of Austrian involvement, he had asked her to examine again all cases in the last few years that had anything to do with sex and children. “Sex and children,” Kovacs said. “I can’t listen to any more.” He pictured Demski and his colleagues in Berlin sitting in an old brick building in front of a row of computer screens, exchanging I.P. addresses and setting up caller identification facilities. In the evenings they would gather in one of the Unter den Linden cafés and compare notes. Demski would drink two or three Pernods, smoke a cigarillo, and be delighted if there was a high proportion of academics on the list. For some reason he had it in for the doctors, teachers and priests amongst the kiddie fiddlers. If you asked him why he was pushing on with his studies so single-mindedly, he would say that he wanted to know how these arseholes operated. Demski had an eight-year-old son he protected like gold, a probable anorexic physiotherapist for a partner, and an old tin duck which he chatted to from time to time. Bitterle loved Demski only as far as she could allow herself to love after the death of her husband, and Demski benefited from her intellectual brilliance. Nobody knew whether he loved her a little as well. But the two of them would work together whenever possible.

  “And?” Kovacs said.

  “What do you mean ‘and’?”

  “What do you think I mean?”

  A hint of a smile crept across her face. Over the past decade, she said, Furth police had intervened in one hundred and seventeen cases dealing with sex attacks on children. Seventy-one of these had resulted in a criminal investigation, forty-three in a court case, and eleven in a conviction. There had been nineteen acquittals and thirteen trials had collapsed. “You’ve memorised all those figures?” Kovacs asked. “Thirty-two offenders who’ve got away with it,” she said.

  “Or thirty-two people who were wrongly accused.”

  Bitterle ignored his comment. Talking of sex attacks, the station incident had been resolved. What station incident, he asked, and she said, the green-rimmed spectacles. The culprit was an assistant at the Graz municipal
gardening office who spent his free afternoons travelling around chatting up girls. Their colleagues in Wiener Neustadt had picked him up as he was getting off a train. A number of schoolgirls had pointed the finger at him without any prompting. “That’s really dumb,” Kovacs said. “If I were a paedo I wouldn’t wear green glasses.”

  “But you aren’t one.”

  “True. But even if I were, I wouldn’t wear them.”

  “There you go. The municipal gardening assistant probably isn’t one either.”

  “What then?”

  It was more likely to be a case of a repressed neurotic, she said, for whom getting caught and being punished was all part of the unconscious performance. “Someone who masturbates in the loo and then spends half a day washing his hands,” Kovacs said.

  “How do you know that?”

  “I’ve got a mother, too,” he said. The way she bandied around terms like neurotic and unconscious performance, he added, he couldn’t understand why she hadn’t gone straight on to study psychology. She had, she said – law, philosophy and psychology, all in Salzburg, none of it completed.

  “Why not?”

  “You’ve got your mother and I’ve got my father. But you know the story, don’t you?”

  Kovacs nodded. There were some things you asked about even though you already knew the answer. Either they were extremely hard to believe, or they were simply not right. Only things that were concluded were right for Mrs Brain, nothing else.

  Kovacs enquired about cases on her list where there had been violations of the child pornography law, and Bitterle said that until Demski had hooked up with the Interpol group they had been very thin on the ground. In other words, nothing except an accusation made against a retired forest supervisor a year ago, which had almost certainly been a case of revenge and was without any substance at all. Demski would find something, Kovacs said, a V.P.N. or L.F.T.

  “V.P.N.?” Eleonore Bitterle asked.

  “Virtual Private Network,” said Sabine Wieck, who had appeared behind her.

  “And L.F.T.?”

  “No idea,” Kovacs said. “Just made it up. Maybe a disease of the liver.”

  Bitterle raised one eyebrow disapprovingly. The person who had filed the accusation had been the neighbour, and it was all to do with rights of use of a farm track, she said, nothing virtual; all this had emerged when the two men were questioned. Demski could uncover a sex crime even in a dispute over a right of way, Kovacs said.

  Let him get on with it then, in Berlin or wherever else, Sabine Wieck said. She was resting one arm on Eleonore Bitterle’s shoulder and casually brandishing a piece of paper with the other. “What’s that?” Kovacs asked. “A problem,” she said.

  Evidently, the launching of the police investigation had not been enough to satisfy Stephan Szigeti. He had turned up the day before at his son’s school and threatened the headmaster that if he didn’t find out who’d beaten up his boy soon, he’d set the regional school board onto him, as well as everything else he’d surely rather do without. The headmaster had replied that he, Szigeti, ought to calm down, after all his son was not the only child this had happened to. Kovacs pinched his temples. “Exactly,” Wieck said. Szigeti had written a woefully long e-mail to Eyltz, the chief of police, Steinböck, the mayor, and Jelusitz, the district governor. After the incident with his son, now another child from the first year had become the victim of an unspeakable attack, and the authorities had not lifted a finger. On the contrary, his son had been examined by a psychiatrist, as if it were the boy they actually thought was mad rather than the perverse and violent criminal wreaking terror around the place. As all too often, the police were failing in their duty, so he felt it necessary to call for the establishment of a private security service that would guarantee the children’s safety.

  “A Schutzstaffel,” Kovacs said. “A what?” Wieck asked. “Forget it,” he said.

  The three recipients of the e-mail were fuming, she continued. Eyltz was demanding results and insisted on being given regular progress updates, Steinböck was worried about the possible effect on tourism, and Jelusitz was already assuming that the Turks were to blame. “Because they whack their children as a matter of course, we all know that don’t we? And I can deal with Eyltz,” Kovacs said.

  “I don’t know,” Sabine Wieck said. “There’s something else.”

  “Besides the second child, you mean?”

  “Yes. A c.c.”

  “A what?”

  Szigeti had copied his letter to the editors of relevant newspapers and every radio and television broadcaster he could find, as well as posting it in various places on the Internet.

  “So everybody’s to know, are they?” Kovacs asked. He realised just how much he hated those c.c.ing and forwarding psychopaths, the kinds of individuals who took a wicked pleasure in putting pressure on other people under the pretext of information disclosure. “We’ve already had a call from the Kurier,” Wieck said. “What should we tell them?” “Anybody who smacks their children is a suspect,” Kovacs said. “That’s what we’ll tell them.”

  *

  Britta Kern was said to be a shy and independent girl, typical of a child with younger siblings, Sabine Wieck said when the three of them were sitting in the meeting room. In her case, all the mother’s attention was taken up by her little sister. Britta liked to spend her time making bracelets and playing with her Abyssinian guinea pigs. She seemed to be interested at school, and was less easily distracted than most of the other children. Her mother worked in an auditor’s office, and her father ran a D.I.Y. store. The two had met at commercial college, Wieck added.

  “And they all lived happily ever after …” Kovacs said. Wieck put up her hand in protest. She couldn’t bear such fairytale nonsense, and anyway, the parents had separated two years ago. The father now lived in Zeltweg, in Upper Styria.

  “Commercial college graduates with back gardens and guinea pigs hit their children too, by the way,” Bitterle said.

  Kovacs looked out of the window. Two wagtails were chasing each other on the roof opposite. A garden, guinea pigs and children – these were the things most people wanted in life. Then some plummet to their deaths, while others row out to the middle of lakes on their own. He thought of Marlene, her penchant for patterned fabrics and candles on the table, and the fact that she looked at her happiest when arranging wild flowers in a vase. He thought of his brother, who drank himself stupid and kept on finding women who would stay with him even though he beat them up. Finally he thought of the yellow belt studded with rhinestones and how he had walked away before finding the price tag. The price did not matter to him.

  EIGHT

  The bright-red line runs along the doorframes, always four centimetres from the edge, up over the top and down, then runs parallel to the floor until the next door, then up over the top and down again. The windows have been spared; nobody knows why. The painters did what they were asked to do. Three doors lead off the room. Two are escape routes, the third leads to the kitchen. It’s a dead-end. Between the door to the kitchen and the cupboard with the glasses there’s a small grey mark on the wall. It’s from a meal moth. It was squashed by the man I now call Bill. Almost every creature on earth is useful in one way or another. But I’m not so sure about meal moths.

  She’s sitting on her chair and not eating anything. She always behaves like this when it’s over. She juts her chin out and, with her eyes closed, presses her lips together until it goes white around her mouth. The mad woman tries to make the roast chicken and potatoes sound appetising. There’s something songlike in her voice when she says how lovely the food is. But it doesn’t make any difference. When the mad woman gets furious her skin turns yellow. Everyone else probably sees it differently, but for me it’s the yellow of rape. Not lemon yellow or egg-yolk yellow, but oilseed rape. The mad woman spears pieces of chicken and chunks of potato on a fork and pushes it towards Switi’s face. First Switi turns her head left and right, this way and that. W
hen that doesn’t help, she starts thrashing around. The mad woman starts thrashing around, too. The fork moves along Switi’s lower lip, from one corner of her mouth to the other. The mad woman screams that she can’t do it on her own. The man I call Bill has already eaten his chicken. He gets up, walks behind Switi’s chair, and says very calmly: A child has to eat. From behind he clasps Switi’s shoulders and upper arms with his left arm, and with his right hand grips her jaw as if he were using a pair of tongs. He presses only very gently and Switi’s mouth opens like a nutcracker. “It’s pure skill,” he says. The fork goes in and out. Switi swallows like a good girl. Sometimes she has to retch. When the plate’s empty, the man I call Bill says, “Now then. That wasn’t so bad, was it?” The mad woman doesn’t say anything. Her skin is rosy again.

  When I come into the room Switi is lying curled up on the floor by her bed, asleep. It’s something you learn over time, to be able to go to sleep just like that, when you need it. I sit next to her and look at the fine hairs on her chin and the tiny nobble on the edge of her ear. There’s something on the floor by her mouth. It’s bright green and about the size of a sweet. I pick the thing up carefully and take a look at it. It’s a sort of pebble, flat and smooth. Switi opens her eyes. “Manka,” she says, taking it out of my hand and putting it back in her mouth.