“What does that mean?”
“I sit there for the sessions and she doesn’t turn up.”
“Do you get annoyed?”
Yes, she did, but that wasn’t important. So what was important? he asked.
“Merely that I’m there and that there’s a place she can be, both for real and in me, that’s what’s important,” Wittmann said. Some people have a lot of room inside them, Horn thought, and others none at all, some you can enter, find yourself a corner and lie down, and with some it already looks such a crush from the outside that you decide it’s better to do an immediate U-turn. He was about to ask how she thought about her daughter when she spoke to someone like Sabrina, but then he remembered the rumours about the sculptures out of waste packaging and he let it drop. She interests me and she doesn’t give anything away; I’d love to know what she eats for breakfast, whether she’s got a cat or a tortoise, and she tells me nothing. Actually I’d like to know what it would feel like to kiss a mouth with teeth like that, he thought, putting a finger to his lips for safety. She grinned all the same.
They’re all there, Andrea Emler said, and if they had cameras around their necks you could easily mistake them for a party of Japanese tourists. Chinese, Horn said, these were Chinese people, and Emler said, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans – they were all the same to her, and pretty unbearable in groups of more than five. That’s exactly what I think, Horn thought, but I don’t say it. There were five exactly, no more, waiting in the outpatients’ area, and as a bonus a powerful-looking man he did not know, but he was definitely not Chinese.
She thought he might want to speak to the whole family, said the woman who approached him first, by now her son had sort of got used to dealing with doctors and hospitals, but he didn’t really know what to expect from a psychiatrist and, if she were to be honest, neither did she. “Psychiatrists are peculiar,” Horn said. “They don’t wear white coats, which means you can’t recognise them, they want to know everything and if you ask them something they either say nothing, or ‘I fear you will have to learn to live with this uncertainty’.” The two girls whispered while the man came and stood hesitantly beside his wife. He essayed a smile and offered Horn his hand. The boy remained seated, looking out of the window. His left arm was wrapped in a Gilchrist bandage. There’s very little of the tourist group about this lot, that’s a good sign, Horn thought, no loudness and only a minor tendency to knock people out of the way. The man at the back got up. He was even more of a giant than he had seemed at first. “You’re taller than me,” Horn said, “and I’m almost one ninety.” “Sorry,” the man said. His name was Mauritz, and he was the head and only permanent member of the local forensics team. Today he was standing in for his colleague, Frau Wieck, who was completely tied up with the black owl business. He knew a little bit about children, even if his own son wasn’t yet a year old. He had promised Sen that he would show him his Aladdin’s Cave of forensic equipment, and Sen had seemed to be very taken by the idea. “I’ve already met the inspector’s little son, because the inspector’s wife is my boss,” Frau Wu said, beaming. The large inspector shrugged. It’s true, I’m afraid, he said. His wife ran the town’s mobile care for the elderly service and Frau Wu worked there as a nurse. Frau Elisabeth is a fantastic boss, Frau Wu said, and Nikolaus a delightful little boy, but you can’t yet tell who he looks like. “My wife, thank God!” the inspector interrupted. “These people are so polite.” An idyll is born from the most bizarre situations, Horn thought: his wife is her boss, she thinks his son is sweet, and both men have the same hedgehog haircut. All of a sudden even the size difference between the inspector and Herr and Frau Wu seemed insignificant.
While Horn took the inspector and the boy to his room, a saying came to mind he loathed because of its revolting imagery: It’s a dog’s breakfast. “That’s what I think, too,” the inspector said. His belly quivered as he laughed.
*
Horn caught himself staring into the boy’s eyes. “Do you want to take a closer look?” the boy asked, bringing his chair nearer to the desk. “No,” Horn said, “no, I’m sorry.” “Everybody wants to look at my eyes,” the boy said. “They all say it’s not so common with type one.” He held open the lids of his right eye with thumb and fore-finger. “Thanks, I’ve already seen it,” Horn said, leaning back. It’s like in the textbook, he thought, he really does have blue sclera, the dark-brown iris that you’d expect, and sky-blue conjunctivae all over, as if it were a manufacturing defect. “He showed me it, too,” the inspector said. “I think it looks great, like an alien.”
“Does it actually hurt?” Horn asked, pointing to Sen Wu’s shoulder. The boy shook his head. It had never hurt, apart from the very first night when he turned over in his sleep.
“And is the bandage now helping?”
“Yes,” the boy said, nodding keenly. The doctor had said that it was very important to keep the strap in place. “Do you understand why?” Horn asked. “Because of the collagen triple helix,” the boy said, looking at him trustingly. He’s an eight-year-old clever clogs, Horn thought, understands the basics of his illness, and yet does what any child with a Gilchrist bandage would do – when it suits him he slips the strap off. He asks the boy whether he’s good at school and what he’s interested in, and the boy says, one, yes, he thinks he is, and two, geography. Yes, he’d been abroad twice already, to Croatia and Hungary, he especially liked Lake Balaton, where he went out on a pedalo when it was choppy. He might go to China next year, maybe the year after, to see his grandparents and his father’s sister, his mother didn’t have any brothers or sisters. They hadn’t been able to do this trip yet as it costs a fortune for five people. “What’s the capital of Denmark?” the inspector asked from behind the boy. “Copenhagen,” Sen Wa said.
“Portugal?”
“Lisbon.”
“The longest river in the world?”
“The Amazon.”
“The highest mountain in North America?”
He wasn’t that interested in mountains, the boy said, did that matter? No, on the contrary, the inspector said, the fewer mountains the better. What was the deepest point in the world’s oceans? “The Mariana Trench,” the boy said, although this was not definite, as they were forever measuring the depths of the oceans. The city with the most inhabitants? Mexico City. The longest river in Africa? The Nile. The largest city in Asia? Easy – Shanghai. And a difficult capital city question, what was Australia’s? Also easy – Canberra. O.K., the most difficult capital city question of them all – Florida’s. The boy thought about it. The real capital in this case was Washington, he said, but he surely wasn’t thinking of that. “No,” the inspector said, “the capital of the of Florida state.” Miami, Orlando, Tampa, Horn thought. He pictured this enormous man as an eight-year-old, poring over the atlas and encyclopaedia and learning capital cities by heart, and the following day he’d be called names at school like swot and creep, and would be the last boy chosen for the football team. “Tallahassee,” the boy said. “Good grief!” The inspector slumped back into his chair. He couldn’t believe it, this rascal had scarcely learned how to read but he already knew Tallahassee. The boy looked at the table, embarrassed. Horn was certain that he had been reading for some time.
He wondered, Horn said, whether a boy who knew about Tallahassee and Canberra and the Amazon, i.e. a boy who was up to third-year standard at least, knew first-year children such as Felix Szigeti and Britta Kern. Yes, the boy said, and Felix lived nearby, too, and not long ago the two of them had saved Hermine, the tame but rather stupid guinea fowl belonging to Hrdlicka the junk dealer, from a stray dog. “Did he want to eat it?” Horn asked. “Maybe,” the boy said. He, Sen, must also know that something similar had happened to Felix and Britta as had happened to him, it was not as serious, of course, because the other two hadn’t broken any bones. The boy nodded. Had he ever spoken to them about it? No, not yet, the boy said. “What do you mean by not yet?” Horn asked.
�
��I might.”
Horn pointed to himself and the fat inspector. “And how about us?”
The boy closed his eyes and shook his head. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because the same thing will happen to me.”
“The same thing? What same thing?”
“The thing I saw.”
“What did you see?”
He mustn’t tell.
“Because otherwise it will happen to you?”
“Exactly.”
And if he spoke to Felix and Britta about it, it wouldn’t happen?
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
“Because they’re part of it.”
“What are they part of?”
The boy swallowed and said nothing. He’s not as cool as Felix Szigeti and not as stubborn as Britta Kern, Horn thought, with him the fear is most palpable. Horn stood up and fetched a pad of paper and coloured pencils from the therapy materials cupboard. These sorts of conversations were like gym lessons, he explained, sometimes you needed a bit of free time. The inspector raised his hand. “Have you got a pencil for me too, my biro’s given up the ghost,” he said. Horn tossed him a felt tip.
“Do you like drawing?” he asked.
“It’s alright,” the boy said.
“A tree, maybe?”
“Maybe an aquarium?” The boy gave Horn a testing look. “Is this a trick?” he said. No, it wasn’t a trick, an aquarium would be great. Horn sat down again at the table and pushed the paper and pencils towards the boy. The boy opened the box of pencils and turned the pad around once. Then he sat there stiffly. “Do you need anything else?” Horn asked. The boy shook his head. It didn’t have to be an aquarium, Horn said, he could also draw a house, a dinosaur or a tiger. “Or maybe a tree after all,” the inspector said. The boy started lining up the coloured pencils next to one another. “That’s not the problem,” he said.
“So …?”
It was because of his O.I. one, because of the collagen triple helix. Horn said he didn’t understand. The boy looked down at his bandage. “I need to take it out of the strap,” he said after a while.
There are moments when life becomes a freeze frame, Horn thought, it’s to do with recognition, mostly. Spring light poured into the room, three of the four steel chimneys of the woodworking factory sparkled in the bottom right-hand corner of the window, by the wall a two-metre-tall police inspector sat drawing spirals on a piece of paper, and right in front of him an eight-year-old boy with blue conjunctivae and a well-developed conscience was trying to make them understand that he was left-handed. “Can you not do anything with your right hand?” he asked. “I can eat with a fork,” the boy said.
“Write?”
It all goes jaggedy and horribly wrong, the boy said, which is why school had let him off writing for the moment, but in all honesty he found it a bit silly. Horn bent over and undid the Velcro on the strap on his forearm. “I won’t tell anybody and the police haven’t seen anything,” he said. The boy looked around. The fat inspector was deliberately looking at the ceiling, saying that as far as the police were concerned, taking one’s arm out of a shoulder strap did not constitute a particularly grave misdemeanour.
The boy drew an aquarium that took up almost all of the piece of paper, platyfish and cleaner wrasses, snails, crabs, lots of plants, and underneath on the bottom a grim-looking catfish. He was evidently displeased with the size of the circulating pump and his attempt at perspective. Horn praised the picture and said he thought it remarkable that a boy of his age could draw with perspective at all.
“What were you hit with?” he said straight out. “A stick,” the boy said. “You’re allowed to say that?” Horn asked. The boy shrugged.
“What did the stick look like? Normal? Long, short, thick, thin?” The boy thought for a few seconds, then shook his head. “Not normal,” he said. “What does ‘not normal’ mean?” Horn asked. The boy reached for a blank piece of paper and in no time had sketched a stick, a double line diagonally across the paper, the width of a thumb, and joined up properly at the top and bottom. Then he painstakingly drew dark knobbles at regular intervals from one end to the other. “I’ve forgotten what those sticks are called,” he said. Horn held up the sheet of paper. “But that’s easy,” the inspector said, “much easier than Tallahassee, especially for someone whose family comes from China … Come on! Pandas eat it.” The boy grasped his forehead. “I’m so stupid,” he said. “Bamboo.”
Why bamboo? Horn asked, and the boy said he had no idea, but maybe he would get his own bamboo stick soon, and all the others who were involved. Why did he think that? Horn asked. Because that’s what it said, the boy asked.
“And who are all the others – Felix? Britta? Anyone else?”
Horn saw the irritation in the boy’s face, but also a hint that he was prepared to give them some information, he saw the inspector bending forward so he could hear the answer better, and right in front of him he saw the bamboo stick and the catfish at the bottom of the aquarium with its barbels and large mouth.
Andrea Emler was a confident secretary who was rarely stressed by anything, not even by Horn. She was sorry, she said, she knew she was only to disturb him with urgent calls, but his wife was on the telephone and she sounded very worried. Horn groaned and went to the door.
Irene Horn never usually screamed. The last time she had done so was just before Michael had moved out, in the weeks when mother and son had made a pretty catastrophic attempt to clear the air between them: I’ve bent over backwards for you and I’ve never had a single word of thanks! You’re a nasty woman and you’ve never liked me! All that was five years ago, and since then the two of them had learned to give each other a wide berth.
“Tobias!” she shrieked into the telephone. “It was Tobias!” What was Tobias? he asked. “In the car, he was in the car!” she screamed. He walked into the corridor. He hated it when worry about someone in the family suddenly brewed up inside him.
“In which car?” he asked.
“In the Volvo! In your Volvo!”
The Volvo’s in the garage, he said, I’m sure it is. He’d gone by bike that morning, she’d seen him leave with her own eyes. “Exactly!” she shouted.
“What do you mean exactly?”
It was still in the garage when she got into the Suzuki at half past eight. She had done her three hours of teaching at the music school, gone to the supermarket, and then driven home again. About a hundred metres after the turn-off from the main road she met the Volvo coming the other way. She did not register it until she recognised Tobias at the wheel as the cars passed each other. The car had already reached the main road before she had time to react, and in her rear-view mirror she was unable to see whether it had turned left or right. Irene seemed to calm down a little as she told him all this. Sometimes she can be mistaken, he thought, but not this time. I mean, nobody would steal that car if it were parked unlocked on the street, let alone from a garage that only hamsters would stumble upon, or hikers if they’re lost. “I’ll call the police,” she said. Save yourself the bother, Horn said, he already had the police to hand, literally. She should wait until he got home. “When will that be?” she asked.
“As soon as I can. It’s quiet here.”
“I’m scared,” she said. Me too, he thought, but did not say so.
Inspector Mauritz was sitting next to Sen Wu at Horn’s desk, helping him draw a criminal. “A real one,” the inspector said, grinning. Because Sen had told him that the person who had beaten him was not a real criminal. Horn looked at the picture. Evil eyes, a handkerchief tied around the nose and mouth, a gun in his hand and another in his belt. The inspector was adding boots to the man; the boy was drawing a checked pattern on the handkerchief over his face. “Your son’s going to be a lucky boy,” Horn said. “Why?” the inspector asked. “Because he’s got a father who knows what a criminal looks like.” The inspector laughed. “Knowledge is always relative,”
he said. When the two had finished, Horn asked whether he might keep the drawings. The boy put the sheets of paper side by side and looked at them. Not the stick, he said finally, he wanted to keep the stick.
At the door he could smell lunch. Horn almost collided with Hrachovec, who was racing past. “What’s up?” he said. “Nothing, just Margot Frühwald,” Hrachovec said. “One should never celebrate too soon.”
*
The fat inspector and Horn walked together to the exit and discussed Sen Wu’s caution, his intelligence, his thirst for knowledge, and what he was so afraid of. They did not come up with anything new about the culprit’s personality or possible motive. If you really wanted to injure someone, though, the inspector said, a bamboo stick was not terribly efficient, unless you sharpened the end to stab with. Bamboo spears – he had read about them as a boy, Horn said, in Thor Heyerdahl’s books. “Who?” the inspector asked. “A man who crossed the sea on a raft and caught fish with a bam-boo spear,” Horn said. He was probably a little too young. The inspector laughed. One day he might take his son fishing with a bamboo spear, preferably in the reeds just down from the hospital, but just then it was not a priority. Talking of fish, while Horn was on the phone Sen Wu had said that the catfish in his picture was a Siamese rock catfish, which needed a three-hundred-litre tank at least and liked hiding in cavities. One night it had eaten all the neons. His father had been so angry that he’d almost flushed the fish down the loo, but the boy had intervened and said he’d give his father all his anthias if he liked. His father said O.K., and now the catfish was allowed to grow old. Apart from that the boy had given an odd answer to Horn’s question about who else would get a bamboo stick. He said, the wild eighty-eight, maybe it was the crazy eighty-eight – something that sounded like a children’s fantasy, like the Famous Five, SpongeBob or Harry Potter. Horn stopped him and stuck out his right hand as if he were trying to catch something. He failed.
They said goodbye and he watched the giant puffing and panting as he squeezed himself into an old silver Renault. He enjoys being a father, he thought, and his son will enjoy being a son. He’ll eat toasted marshmallows and know that Popocatepetl is a volcano.
The Mattress House: A Kovacs and Horn Investigation (Kovacs & Horn 2) Page 16
