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

by Paulus Hochgatterer

  There was something reassuring about the housing development. It housed people and it had no pretensions. At most there was the odd length of showy terrace railing, or a sign at one of the garden gates warning of an alarm system. No advertising, no display windows, no brass plaques belonging to doctors’ or lawyers’ practices. In one of the front gardens a man was using a strimmer. A well-maintained structure of compulsive behaviour is the motor of European society, Horn thought, the trimming of lawns, the drafting of food standards and the squeezing of people into a uniform straitjacket of lifelong learning. Behind all this, nothing but greed and hatred; at best there was a slight diversity of focus: a little more infantile orality in Italy, more aggressive narcissism in France, and in Austria that friendly brand of malice, which was actually none other than a defence mechanism against the certainty of a permanent erectile dysfunction. “In this country we don’t like shagging that much,” his training analyst had once said. “We prefer going to church or parent–teacher evenings, and afterwards we beat the shit out of other people,” she had added.

  At the turn off to Linzer Straße a patrol car drove towards him. He thought of the detective who had come to see him twice recently, the first time with Felix Szigeti, then with Britta, the blonde girl whose surname he could not remember. There had been something extremely reassuring about the young woman, both in general and in the way she dealt with children. He imagined her behind the wheel, stopping, opening the window and asking him if he would like a lift. He would get in and gaze at her out of the corner of his eye. When the car passed him he noticed two uniformed policemen through the window. One of them was Töllmann, the other he did not recognise. Töllmann was known as the sniffer dog of Furth police, with an unerring instinct for finding illegal substances and relentless in his pursuit. The junkies hated him, as did his colleague Mike Dassler, head of the addiction unit. Dassler took a more moderate line; Töllmann took no notice and often got quite rough if anybody hesitated, even for a second, when emptying their pockets. Recently he had brought the thirteen-year-old Diego Veith to the department in handcuffs, because after a body search he’d said that he would not only knife his fucking parents, but Töllmann too, the moment he got the chance. Raimund had asked Töllmann whether it was really necessary to handcuff a child, and Töllmann had said he was of the old school, and anyway, a thirteen-year-old criminal was primarily a criminal rather than a child. Horn suddenly pictured Tobias being caught by Töllmann with a pot pipe in his mouth, and being led away in handcuffs. He pictured himself raising a revolver and aiming it at Töllmann. This did not make him feel bad.

  *

  A few hours later they were climbing the steps to the children’s department. They talked about Margot Frühwald, who had suffered a grand mal seizure during admission to P2, and who was recovering very slowly; about Marcus who, since he had woken up from his sedation, had been sitting on the bed with his eyes closed, one hand on the body of his Dark Fire, totally silent; and about Sabrina’s father. The man had been stalking up and down outside the department in a patterned woollen jacket and bright-green shirt, playing the pseudo professional at the top of his voice, and trying to see his daughter. Sabrina had threatened to cut off her little finger if they let him in, nothing would stop her, not even ten thousand euros, and Leonie Wittmann had gone out to tell him the price was ten thousand euros, and even then there was a degree of uncertainty as to whether Sabrina would actually allow him to see her. Absolutely she would, the man had said, even if it meant he had to come with his lawyer, and Wittmann had told him to go ahead and do that, his daughter would probably amputate her ring finger as well. “The man stinks of aftershave and cat’s piss, wears the ghastliest jacket imaginable, and is one hundred per cent sure that nobody can touch him,” said Renate Mutz, the social worker. “Which is true,” Christina replied. Kiddie fiddlers, Horn thought, and was surprised by the banality of the term. With some men you knew it the moment you saw them, and to a certain extent he could explain this. It was a mixture of self-love and sleaziness, a marked tendency to rush straight in on the attack, plus reaction formation as an underlying principle: threatening others with the very thing you were threatened with yourself, the judge or the police, for example. The younger the children when their torment started, the more assured were the men. An abused four-year-old was worthless in court later on. A school beginner who had had a man’s thing shoved in her mouth for long enough would be guaranteed to stay silent whenever questioned. Sabrina’s father was not quite so assured. “Maybe I’ll bring him in myself,” Horn said. “Do that,” Christina said. Occasionally, if the children had sufficient protection, there would be conversations in Horn’s room which had never become official. Horn did not know whether they served any purpose, but at least he felt better afterwards. If anybody asked him what he had been discussing with these gentlemen, he would say there was no discussion; he had merely been making them aware of certain things. He would always begin in the same way: “I grew up in the country, you know, in a pack of children. We were organised into gangs and I was always the strongest.”

  The nice thing about the conference room in the children’s department was that it was in the far south-western corner of the building, right above the escarpment of the hill, so you got the impression that it was jutting over the river. Directly opposite, the remains of the old town wall extended above the eroded riverbank, and in the middle of this stood a squat round tower with slate conical roof, which without any historical justification was called The Coinmaker’s House. A little to the west began the reed bed of the river outlet, and beyond that lay the dark-green lake.

  I’m here because that’s exactly what I want to be looking at, Horn thought, the movement of the reeds, the towers of the abbey church, the coinmaker’s house, the conglomerate layers of the riverbank and the silhouette of the Kammwand. To those who talked scornfully of petty bourgeois mentality and rural idylls he would assert that people who got all puffed up about rural idylls were in fact fighting against their own longing for security, he knew this because he’d been married to a militant idyll evangelist for more than twenty years now, and that for once he was actually interested in appearances, in how things looked. Nothing in life was without consequence, he would say, especially not the things you looked at every day, sometimes even from early childhood; so somebody who had grown up in a narrow valley and had to lift their head to see a horizon would behave differently from a Greenland Inuit, for example, or a Mongol. If anybody suggested that such a notion might not be particularly popular amongst the inhabitants of narrow valleys, he would reply that popularity was not a factor in the understanding of the human psyche.

  Besides Renate Mutz and Christina there was Lisbeth Schalk, who usually conducted the psychological examinations of the children, Strasser, head of the children’s department, Roman Wagner, his senior outpatient doctor, and Evelyn Heimerle, his deputy ward sister. Tamara Shafar, the paediatric gynaecologist, was the last to arrive as always, trying to rearrange her curly hair with her fingers and complaining quietly about Jarovsky, her boss, who had once again put her down for the first block of morning surgery. Even though he knew exactly when the child protection group met. Jarovsky was a hypomanic anarchist, but then so were many others in surgical disciplines.

  Seeing as she was already up to full speed, would she please start the meeting off, Wagner said. It was just the sort of comment she had expected, Tamara Shafar hissed, rummaging through her notes. If she couldn’t find anything she really wanted to discuss, she would leave again immediately. Wagner held up his hands apologetically and swore to dispense with the paediatric jibes. The sarcastic straw-blond Prussian had a thing for the small, surly half-Egyptian with her fiery eyes, everybody could see it. Wagner’s girlfriend, who worked as a midwife in the same department as Shafar, could probably see it, too. Horn pictured the two women standing opposite each other, tense and mistrustful, eventually turning away, one to the left, the other to the right, without saying
a word. Then he looked at Lisbeth Schalk, who was sitting opposite him, and tried to imagine Irene beside her. He could not.

  Tamara Shafar told them about a sixteen-year-old girl she had seen in the outpatients’ department seven times over the past year, each time because of a full-blown vaginal infection. They had found a variety of germs in her smear tests, gonococcus, trichomonads, fungi – whatever the zoo in question was sharing with her. This time she was pregnant too, in her tenth week, if it was possible to be certain at this stage. When asked about her sex life she had lowered her eyes and said she didn’t have one and that she couldn’t account for the pregnancy. It was only when she had asked the girl how they were supposed to explain it to her mother that she had snapped out of it and said, “No way! You can’t say anything to her, it’s the law, I know that.” When she was then asked, “And what if we tell her anyway?” the girl said, “I’ll report you to the police.” Horn thought of Sabrina, of Fehring and of all those others who insisted on their right to self-harm. Finally he thought of Tobias, how he was surely smoking dope, and how all offers of help were, without exception, rejected as unreasonable demands. When he listened to stories like that, vaginal infections and pregnancy, he was nonetheless relieved that he had two sons. Christina kicked him in the shin. Tamara Shafar jumped up and leaned over the table. “Do you really think that’s helpful?” Horn recoiled. Within half a second he understood. “I know it’s not a good excuse,” he stammered, “but I tend to think aloud.” Tamara Shafar fell back into her chair, flinging her arms out. “I could happily live with daughters, too,” Roman Wagner murmured. As far as she was concerned, his promise to leave out the silly remarks was still binding, Shafar hissed, and what was more, could someone please tell her, finally, what she was to make of this brattish girl’s story? “Is she voluntarily dropping her knickers for all-comers, or is someone forcing her to do it?” Those were precisely the two possibilities, Renate Mutz said, but either way they couldn’t do anything against her will. She had the right to assert her sexuality freely; in this, she couldn’t be safeguarded from unpleasant experiences and especially not from any peculiarities in her choice of partners. “I like ‘peculiarities in her choice of partners’,” Strasser said. “Would you put it in those very same words if she were your daughter?” The social worker did not reply. Sometimes she said that she couldn’t stand paediatricians who thought mothers were fundamentally illiterate, and that breastfeeding and changing nappies were medical procedures. And she especially loathed those who continously brought their own children into play. “Give me her phone number, I’ll invite her in for a chat,” Lisbeth Schalk said to Shafar, and with that the tension was dispelled at a stroke. She’s taking the matter in hand, Horn thought, just as she learned to do on the farm where she grew up. She knows all about wild flowers, about pregnancies, and maybe she also knows that when you’re a girl there are times you shag someone you really don’t want to be in bed with.

  Afterwards Wagner told them about a four-year-old boy who had grabbed a pan of hot coconut fat from the cooker and given himself extensive burns on his chest, and Renate Mutz talked about a family in a state of extreme deprivation, living in a former hunter’s cabin between Furth and Sankt Christoph, running water outside their door, no electricity. She was in the middle of describing the condition in which her colleague from the child welfare office had found the three children, particularly the lice infestation in the youngest – one and a half years old – when the door opened.

  Leuweritz was no taller than one metre seventy and he ran marathons. It helped you stay calm when dealing with a patient who had the tip of a fence post touching their pericardium, he said, and it was good for long operations and tiresome bosses. He was the senior casualty doctor and had been at loggerheads with Lissoni from the start. Horn had liked him even before that. “What’s traumatology looking for in these poor rooms?” Wagner asked. Leuweritz ignored the remark and took an outpatient form from his coat pocket. “Sen Wu,” he said. “Eight-year-old son of Chinese parents, born in Furth. Mother’s a carer, father’s a metal worker. Someone’s broken his collarbone.”

  ELEVEN

  The Osteogenesis imperfecta thing was just a coincidence and thus best forgotten, Eleonore Bitterle said. Nobody could say for certain that the boy’s collarbone wouldn’t have snapped in two anyway. Collarbones were not exactly the titans of the human skeleton. “But I still want to understand it!” Kovacs was edgy. They were being forced to expend their every effort on this kids’ stuff, all very vague and blown up by the media, and now that something of substance had turned up – Osteo whatever it was: brittle bone disease – he was supposed to forget all about it; no way!

  “O.K., if that’s what you want.” Bitterle went over to the white-board. She would have made an excellent teacher; that was quite obvious. When she stood there in her roll-neck jumpers, explaining the world and expressing it in pictures and diagrams, she was surrounded by a bright incandescence. She told them about the genetically determined metabolic disorder which was the basis of the brittle bone disease, explained that there was no cure and outlined the various manifestations. The extremes were type two, which was associated with a life expectancy of no more than a year, and type one, the most harmless form, which was generally discovered by chance, for example if a child broke a number of bones in a relatively short period of time. In Sen Wu’s case, he had broken his right upper arm, right shin and left radius within two years, which was why the boy had been given a closer medical examination. The father had come under suspicion in the past, comments had been made about the authoritarian way in which Asians brought up their children, and they recalled the case of Norbert Schmidinger, who had hurled his five-year-old daughter against a washing-line post, smashing both her legs. “Schmidinger’s still inside, isn’t he?” Kovacs asked. Sabine Wieck nodded vigorously.

  At the time she had stood there sobbing in the interrogation, absolutely powerless and livid, he could still picture her. Immediately beforehand she had tried to question the girl in hospital, and had come up against a wall of fear and resistance. Kovacs had stormed out of the meeting, jumped into his car, and driven straight to Erdoyan. The more that people were in your debt, the greater the latitude you had as a policeman. The Sheriff had understood at once and had only asked whether he was free to choose the method. A few weeks later Schmidinger confessed at his trial, straight up and without hesitation; he even spared them his favourite plea of psychological illness. In the courtroom Kovacs had noticed two Turkish-looking men; one of them, with a grey moustache, was bald, the other, younger man had had one of those ceramic eyes hanging around his neck. Schmidinger had turned to look at them several times. Kovacs himself had not known them. He had not discussed the matter with the Sheriff afterwards.

  “If he serves the whole of his sentence he’s got two and a half years left,” Wieck said. “We’ve crossed him off already.”

  “Crossed him off?” Kovacs was baffled. “Off our list,” Bitterle said.

  “What list? Why don’t I know about this?”

  “Because you don’t like expending your effort on kids’ stuff. As we were just hearing.”

  Kovacs muttered something under his breath. The Schmidinger affair had really upset him, too. The case they were dealing with now seemed banal by comparison. Who hit children? Everybody. Everywhere and every day. Maybe not in quite the same way that he had been hit back in his day, with belts and willow rods, but people still did it. So what was on the list, he asked eventually.

  Crimes committed against minors, domestic violence, notifications from the accident ward – basically whatever they could think of, Wieck said.

  “How many suspects does that make?”

  “One hundred and seventeen.”

  “There you go.”

  “What does ‘there you go’ mean?” Wieck asked, and Kovacs said, there you go, everybody hits their children, even if they always maintain the opposite.

  “Do you hit your chi
ld?” Bitterle asked, and Kovacs replied, “I’ll be able to tell you that tomorrow. Maybe.”

  Bitterle described Sen Wu’s injury, the marks on his skin from the beating, which suggested a stick, and said that the haematoma was relatively unpronounced, which meant the blows could not have been dealt with much force. The parents could probably be eliminated as suspects because they were aware of their son’s illness and so would have hit him on the buttocks or in the face rather than on the collarbone. “He’s a lucky boy, then, our little Chinese fellow,” Kovacs said. “You’re not taking it seriously,” Bitterle complained. “I am!” Kovas said. “What’s he himself saying?”

  “Sen Wu? He looks at the floor and says nothing.”

  “Like the others?”

  “That’s right, just like the others.”

  Kovacs asked what the three children had in common besides their age, and Eleonore Bitterle said that he was wrong: they weren’t all the same age. Sen Wu was actually in the second year of primary school rather than the first like Felix Szigeti and Britta Kern, and if you knew about children of that age you understood that they found those things very important. Apart from that Britta Kern lived with her mother and a younger sister, Sen Wu with his parents and two sisters, Felix Szigeti was an only child and his parents’ marriage was solid. They’d already been notified that Sen Wu would be seeing Raffael Horn. “Like the others?” Kovacs asked.