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

by Paulus Hochgatterer

  *

  He had as little time for pharmacies as he did for doctors. The smell of them made him feel sick, and he was also repelled by the tactic of masking disease and decay, mainly by filling shelves with boiled sweets and sun creams. He could just about bear the Dromedary Pharmacy. This was because of the dromedaries and Viktoria Stich. He had liked dromedaries since childhood, their ascetic lifestyle, the proud way they held their heads, their legs which were endlessly long and yet broad as they moved, and the ambling pace with which they overtook a car in the desert if they wanted to. He liked Viktoria Stich, too. The young pharmacist was small, moody, a homeopathy freak, and told police jokes the moment anyone from the force entered her premises. “No,” Kovacs said when he saw her grinning, “no jokes today and none of those homeopathic pills. I’m wounded, and my bandage is a mess. At least that’s what the ladies in my office say.” He took off his jacket. “They’re right,” the pharmacist said. “Do you just want to buy the stuff, or shall we do it here?” Kovacs was briefly irritated, then he looked around. Apart from an assistant, who was processing a heap of prescriptions and arranging small boxes of medicines on the rack in front of a huge cabinet, there was nobody in the shop. Other people have affairs, Kovacs thought, I have women who bandage me. He pushed up his shirtsleeve. The pharmacist cut through the gauze and removed the bandage in one piece. “Does it hurt?” she asked. Kovacs shook his head. The cotton cloths had absorbed Szarah’s secret paste and everything that had seeped from the wound, presenting a shockingly colourful picture. Beneath was the gash in Kovacs’ forearm, smooth and dry with a thin crust. “What on earth did you put on it?” the pharmacist asked, frowning and chucking the old bandage into the bin with a pair of plastic tweezers. “A Moroccan spice mix,” Kovacs said. “Chilli, cumin, coriander.”

  “Looks like it.”

  “But it worked.”

  Yes, she said, apparently it had. But to be honest she suspected that he’d been secretly taking the Aconitum C 200 that she’d given him when he had stomach cramps. “Stomach cramps?” he asked.

  “Commissar!”

  “O.K., stomach cramps. Many years ago.”

  While the pharmacist was applying the aluminium-coated dressing pad, a slim, grey-haired man entered the shop. She waved at him. He stayed in the background. “How is she?” she asked. “The usual,” the man said, brandishing a prescription. “She’s on a new antipsychotic. And she’s not sleeping again.” The pharmacist wrapped the dressing in a self-adhesive bandage. How did he get this injury in the first place? she asked. Kovacs noticed that something was making him tense. “You’re not going to tell any jokes today, and I don’t have to tell any stories,” he replied, before paying and leaving.

  Outside he took a deep breath. It’s strange, he thought, I think I’m dealing fine with my own insomnia, but if somebody else talks about sleep disorders I feel as if I’m standing on the edge of the abyss. Apart from that he suddenly felt that he had betrayed Szarah, and at the same time had the irrepressible urge to have sex with Marlene.

  There was a note on the shop door: CLOSED TODAY DUE TO HOUSE CLEARANCE. Kovacs reached for his mobile. “Who are you clearing out?” he asked. “An architect who’s moving to Finland to be with her husband,” Marlene replied. “Finland, oh God,” Kovacs said. “Darkness, alcoholism and suicide. And saunas save only a very few of them.”

  “The midnight sun, a thousand kilometres of canoeing and elk calves aplenty,” she said. “What do you want?”

  “To get straight inside you, to tell the truth.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “So why are you asking?”

  “Because I wanted to hear it.”

  In fact she was quite taken by the idea of having sex right now, Marlene said, but there were more than a hundred items of clothing and all sorts of odds and ends, so he’d just have to be patient. A hundred black roll-neck jumpers, Kovacs said, that wouldn’t take long to sort out, and she replied that there was a little more variety amongst female architects. She’d still need a good hour there, then they could meet at his flat. Kovacs tried again: “I’ll come and help you sort through the clothes.” The architect wouldn’t like that, she said. “You win,” he said. “So what am I going to do for an hour?” “Go to Lefti’s, or make yourself something to eat,” she said, giving him a kiss down the telephone. “Animal,” he said, and hung up.

  He gazed at the window display for a while, at a pink suit with the sign ONLY WORN TWICE, at a raw-silk grey trouser suit with the label NEW, SMALL FLAWS IN THE WEAVE, at a row of size thirty-seven women’s shoes, and at a collection of Hummel porcelain figurines with absurdly chubby cheeks. Offer of the week was a pair of Murano glass swans, one petrol-green, the other dark red, on sale for €23.50. The woman I’m sleeping with earns her living from stuff cleared out of people’s houses and kitsch, he thought, and in a funny way that makes me happy.

  When he turned south at Rathausplatz and drove past the abbey, he saw that the granite flagstones of the courtyard were being scoured by two tractor-like cleaning machines. He had last seen Easter-time cleaning back in his childhood, soft soap and gloss wax, taking curtains down and chamois leather for the children to wipe the windows dry with. His mother would spend a week prowling irritably through the house, and his father would disappear off somewhere. That was the only good thing about it. Yvonne had had a fundamental objection to cleaning, and Marlene did it when she felt like it. For the last two and a half years he had employed Sznezana, who lived at the eastern end of the Walzwerk estate in one of the former workers’ blocks, and who came to his flat for one morning a week. He thought of Gerlinde Weghaupt, of the fact that there were other reasons for cleaning apart from dirt, of the ornate writing on the inside of the piano lid, and why he had from the very beginning ruled out the possibility that Florian Weghaupt had committed suicide. Then he thought about Marlene again, about her brash humour, about the fact that she could never be angry for long, and about how she went completely silent if sex was particularly good.

  *

  As always at this time of day, children on their way home from school were loitering around the fountain. In the very middle of them were Hakan, the Sheriff’s youngest brother, who was the most promising young talent in the field of shady deals, despite being wheelchair-bound because of a congenital spine deformity and Isabella Neulinger, the school ghost. Nobody could remember who had first given her this name. Although she was almost permanently absent from class, somehow she always managed to submit good-quality work and gave legendary talks on drugs and child prostitution, thereby splitting the teaching staff at the secondary school right down the middle. Ever since the time that Töllmann had handled her more roughly than usual, her only way of communicating with the police was with her middle finger. She simply ignored Kovacs. He took that as a tribute.

  Slightly apart from the group, a girl with a signal-green mohican was kneeling on the ground, throwing bottle tops at a black-and-white cat. Kovacs did not know the girl. The cat belonged to Alexander Koesten, the architect who lived directly below him. Its name was Koolhaas, and roughly every other day it would leap from the balcony into the juniper bush below. Each time Koesten would get into a flap and suspect his neighbours of kidnapping the thing.

  As he was rummaging around for his key, Kovacs narrowed down his choices to an omelette or a ham and cheese toastie. His preference was for an omelette, but there was a slight uncertainty over the egg situation. In the past he would have been able to list the contents of his fridge off the top of his head. But this was no longer the case. I’m getting old, he thought.

  “Hello.” Kovacs was startled. The girl with the green mohican was standing behind him, smiling awkwardly. She was wearing a black, studded leather jacket with a ripped shoulder seam, several rings through her nose, and a silver skull in her left ear. “Hello,” Kovacs said. “Can I help you?” “Dad!” the girl said.

  There were moments when life chucks a spanner in the wor
ks, so abruptly that you can no longer move your arms and you fall flat on your face. It takes a while to get to your feet again. “Dad?” the girl said again. Kovacs stared in turn at the key, which was still in his hand, and at the girl. “What have you done to yourself?” he asked, finally. “I’ve lost a bit of weight,” she said, “and I’ve got older.” Kovacs pressed his fingers onto his eyes, before putting the key in the lock. “Where’s the cat?” he asked. The girl pointed at the fountain: “With the others.”

  They went up the stairs in silence, Kovacs first. When he reached his front door, he turned to the girl. “Eighteen months ago you were a sack of potatoes,” he said. “What are you now?”

  “A sort of punk.”

  “I know nothing about punks. How long are you staying?”

  The girl smiled awkwardly again and shrugged. “As long as I’m allowed,” she said. “It’s the Easter holidays.”

  “Have you got any stuff?”

  The girl nodded and gestured with her thumb to a silver-coloured plastic bag with a red volcano on it that hung over her shoulder. “Is that all?” he asked.

  “I don’t need anything else.”

  Girls generally had endless amounts of gear, Kovacs said. She didn’t think she was like other girls, his daughter said.

  Kovacs took off his jacket and threw it onto the chair in the hall. Then he untied his shoelaces. The girl just stood there, watching him.

  “I’d like to ask you something,” he said. “And think carefully before you answer. Have I ever hit you?”

  Kovacs could see tears slowly welling up in the girl’s eyes. “You say such stupid things,” she said eventually.

  TWELVE

  The soul is three finger-widths below the navel. In a single motion you thrust the tant vertically into that point, until its tip is touching your spinal column, push the blade to the right, then upwards in an arc, and when you can hear your insides gurgling, you lay your chin on your chest for the kaishakunin’s strike. The whole thing is a fluid movement, and your face shows neither fear, nor anger, nor humility, nor doubt, but the world as it is, nothing and everything.

  Some days I just sit here looking at things on the Internet. When Frau Steinmetz comes into the classroom and points to her watch inquiringly, I just say please, please, and she laughs and lets me. I read about India, about Mumbai and Delhi, about the beaches in the west and the town which I think is mine. I print out some things and put them in a plastic sleeve. I read about Gatka, the Sikh martial art, the clothes they wear, the moves and the weapons. Since I’ve had the film with the red and yellow cover I’ve also been reading about Japan and the samurai, about the katana, the wakizashi and the tant. I’m not a Sikh and I’m not Japanese so it’s all the same to me. I read about seppuku, about the correct posture, about the duty of the friend, and about the final poem. They play it safe, I like that. Seppuku knows when you’re dead. Others don’t.

  I come home and the mad woman has a go at me, asking me where I’ve been again. I tell her that there’s not always a P.C. for everybody, not even in I.T. classes, and as my parents haven’t bought me a notebook yet, sadly, I’m sometimes second and have to wait longer. She says I’m a lying toad and she doesn’t believe a word I say, and I clasp my hands in front of my chest and bow. She leaps up, slams the door and runs off.

  There’s a funny smell in the room. I know what that means and take a look around. Switi’s not lying where she usually does, by the bed. The wardrobe door is slightly ajar. I open it wide. She’s curled up on the bottom shelf, like a cat. She darts a look at me then shuts her eyes again. I kneel down, reach into the cupboard and pull her out. She’s wet and stinky.

  When I come out of the bathroom with two towels, one wet and one dry, the mad woman is on the landing. “Has she shat herself again?” she asks. I say yes, I’ll deal with. She says, “She’s a little pig!”

  She does everything I tell her. She sits by the bed, she puts her arms up so I can take her dress off, she stands up. She keeps her eyes closed the whole time. There’s a ring of white around her lips, it looks funny. I take off her knickers. Down below there’s a mixture of red and brown. I wipe it all away for her. Under that she’s slightly bluey-black. That’s from before. She stays perfectly still when I clean her up round there. I tell her, I’ve bought you some ointment, a magic ointment, it’s in my desk drawer.

  While I rub in the ointment I tell her that I was in the Dromedary Pharmacy and that I said to the lady there that my sister’s skin is so thin in places that she bruises easily, and she gave me this ointment in the blue and white tube. She listens. She keeps perfectly still. I tell her she has to stay like that for a few minutes so that the ointment can be absorbed. She stands there, lifting her arms from time to time as if I were trying to take her dress off again. I tickle her under her arms and try to laugh. She tries to laugh, too. Then she lies down.

  I tell her, you’re lying there like a dormouse. She doesn’t say anything, but how would she know what a dormouse was? “I know what they do,” I say, and tell her about the orange rubber tube that they shove into you from behind so that you’re totally clean inside, and that after a certain time nothing helps any more because they do it to you for longer. I tell her how they sometimes blindfold you and how they wear a stocking over their heads, and how only the man I call Bill is never masked because he stands behind the camera and you don’t need one there. By the time I start talking about who prefers which room, she’s fallen asleep. That drives me a bit mad. I grab her by the hair and say that it’s bad to be sleeping all the time. Her green Manka thing is on the carpet by her mouth. I push it right up to her lips.

  Later we go for a ride on our bikes. I try to teach her the different makes of cars. I’ve got the feeling that cars might be important, but I don’t know why. She plays pretty dumb and calls all cars Volvo. I don’t like that because I think Volvos are a bit ugly. We cycle towards the river and then along the embankment until she’s complaining too much about the gravel and wants to go back. We sit there for a while and look at the foaming water, the bikes by our feet. “Tell me a pelican story,” she says eventually. Sometimes I get a bit cheesed off with pelican stories, but I don’t tell her that. I tell her about a pelican who heads for the South Pole because he wants to have a penguin for a friend. All his friends advise him against it because it’s dark and cold there, but he won’t be put off. He flies via Borneo and Australia, and meets a porcupine and a wombat. When he gets to the South Pole it really is dark and cold. The penguins warm him up between their folds of fat, and from time to time they put a fish into his bill. His new friend is all fluffy and doesn’t have a clue about pelicans, but that doesn’t matter. When, a few months later, it gets light and warmer, the pelican has had enough and flies back home. “No,” Switi says. “What do you mean No?” I ask.

  “Again – with the proper ending!”

  “What is the proper ending?”

  The friend has to fly back with the pelican, she says, and when I say that penguins can’t fly, she says: “The pelican takes him on his shoulders then.” “Or in his throat,” I say. “Does that work?” she asks, and I say that the most unbelievable things can fit into a throat like that.

  On the way back a grey Chevrolet stops dead in front of us and we almost smash into the driver’s door. A man gets out and starts shouting at us. Switi pedals furiously and screams loudly, “Volvo!”

  Before our house comes into view I say, “Escape route number one. I’ll show you something.” She knows what to do and turns into the cul-de-sac by the florist’s. I overtake her and we cycle past the housing development to the yellow factory building. Above the gate you can see some old-fashioned, dark-red writing: WIRE FACTORY. SCYTHE PRODUCTION. GALVANISING PLANT. I once looked up what galvanising means, but I can’t remember exactly. I do know that it’s got something to do with electricity and acid. We push the bikes along the side wall of the shed for a bit, then lie them under an elder bush. Here, nobody can see us from th
e street.

  At the corner of the shed there’s a rusty tin barrel standing on a row of wooden boards. I push the barrel aside and lift up three of the boards. A narrow set of stairs leads down. “Don’t be scared. It’s light inside,” I say.

  Inside, the factory is divided by brick walls and wooden planks into a number of areas. My room is directly below one of the paned windows. “This is my workshop,” I say. In a strip of wood on the wall are thirty-four scythe blades, all of them completely rusted. On the workbench that runs the length of the room, there’s one which isn’t so rusty any more. “I’m making a Hattori Hanz sword,” I say. “It’s hard work, but I’ve got time.” I hold the scythe blade in front of her and try to get her to touch it, but she doesn’t dare. “It’s not dangerous yet,” I say. She puts her arms behind her back and shakes her head. “The curve is wrong,” I say. “That’s the challenge. Where it’s blunt there at the end it’s supposed to be sharp.” I show her my tools, a hammer and file, both of them from our shed at the house. “The file is too fine,” I say, “I need a coarse file, tons of sandpaper and something I can make it red hot with.” Switi is only half listening to me. She runs her finger through the dust on the workbench and then puts both her hands into it, leaving two prints.

  When we get back to the elder bush there’s a grey dog sniffing around our bikes. I know him, he belongs to the second house after the florist’s and his name is Findus. Switi points her finger at him and starts to laugh. “He’s a wombat,” she says. “I say he’s a wombat.”

  Escape route number four, opposite direction. I know the code for the garage door. The mad woman has a problem remembering things and writes them down on pieces of paper; one of these is tacked onto the calendar in the hall. Two letters and three numbers.

  The X6 is not there, but the Mini is. We lean the bikes against the wall and go quietly into the house. You never know what will come into her head. I pause in the hallway and listen. Nothing. Eventually we find her in the sitting room. She’s snoring. A spit bubble is swelling in the right-hand corner of her mouth. There’s a packet of pills on the coffee table in front of her. “We can go upstairs,” I say to Switi. She looks at the floor and shakes her head. “You have to,” I tell her.