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

by Paulus Hochgatterer

  Lara flinches a little, but that’s all. By the end Longbottom is barking. She puts her hand around his muzzle. I tell her it’s over.

  She asks whether she can touch the cuculla again. I hold out a sleeve to her. Her fingers do the same tiny movements again. “Cowl,” she says. “Everybody thought it was owl.”

  *

  I open the D.V.D. player. The picture with the white froth and the bubbles disappears. I take out the D.V.D. and put it under the yellow one. That’s the most important part, I say. I take off the cuculla, fold it up, then take the book with the brown cover and the four pieces of paper out of my coat pocket. “The book with the pelican stories,” I say. “That’s part of it, too. And the list.” I shove the four things into a dark-blue nylon canvas shoulder bag with the word Apollo printed on it. Apollo is the god of youth and poetry, I say. Lara asks if I will read her a pelican story and I say maybe later.

  No, nothing’s going to happen to her, it’s all over now, and I say that she should tell the other three it’s not going to happen to them any more. “You are the four that know,” I say, “and I’m the black cowl, the dark snow.” Then I say that I’m going to do what snow usually does – melt away.

  I put the bag on her shoulder and repeat what she has to do. She knows. “I can’t feel anything any more,” she says. Longbottom looks at me with mistrust.

  Before we go I fetch the Hattori Hanz sword from the tool drawer, lay it on the workbench and undo the towel I wrapped it in. “Now it’s perfect,” I say. I tell her how difficult it was to sharpen the outer edge of the blade, how it didn’t work with the blowtorch, and how in the end the lubricated grindstone was the answer. “Razor sharp on both edges,” I say, taking her hand. “Do you want to touch?” I ask. She recoils, shaking her head. She asks whether she has to take the sword with her, too, and I say, no, she doesn’t have to.

  *

  Outside, Longbottom noses the Apollo bag. “It’s something new to him,” Lara says. Then he starts snuffling madly around the elder bush that grows alongside the shed. “He can smell Findus, the wombat,” I say. “Nonsense,” she says.

  TWENTY-ONE

  He reserved a space for her in the choir stalls, only a few metres from the orchestra. If the lardy-arsed, mouthy parish councillors can sit there, then so can she, he said. No doubt someone will bitch about it, but she does not care. He turned up at the last minute, as always, during the opening bars of Mozart’s “Requiem” to be precise, an iPod headphone in his left ear, and she felt embarrassed for him as if she were his wife. “Take it out,” she whispered to him, and he grinned, humming “Spirit on the Water”, and obeying her for the very first time.

  To begin with the issue had been controversial, luring the fundamentalists in the parish out of their holes. Even the papers had reported on it: “Church as Marketplace?” The critics were only silenced when Clemens wrote a circular in which he put himself at the centre of the whole thing, saying he thought there was nothing nicer than celebrating the Resurrection in a full church and so, to his mind, a concert before the Easter vigil was a brilliant idea.

  “Do you know the soloist?” she asked him before the middle piece, a Benjamin Britten cello sonata. “You bet,” he said, grinning. The piece, two short, wild movements beginning with a pizzicato section that sounded like tiny explosions, followed by a sequence of martial marching rhythms, practically overwhelmed her. The cellist had sat there with glowing cheeks, the tip of her tongue between her teeth, and she had found it wonderful that someone with ears that stuck out like that could be so beautiful.

  She was the psychiatrist’s wife, he whispered to her before Bruckner’s “Te Deum”. The church was probably full of his cronies, she replied, and he said she should just enjoy the men, the black-haired tenor and the bearded bass-baritone who had sung the “Tuba mirium” as if he were a trumpet himself. She tried but it did not work. The truth is, I’m only interested in him, she thought, and suddenly she felt very vulnerable.

  After the foods have been blessed, she squeezes past the people to the side altar on the left, to look for her basket with ham and eggs. Something prods her in the back of her knee. She thinks it must be Bauer and does not react. She is prodded again. “Stop that, I’m looking for our dinner,” she says. “Stella.” She turns around. It is Lara.

  “Have you got a basket up here, too?” she asks. Lara shakes her head. In the last lesson before the holidays she, Stella, had said “Happy Easter”, she says, and “Maybe we’ll see each other, on Palm Sunday perhaps, or at the Resurrection concert”, which is why she knew that she would be here. Longbottom finds people he knows easily. Lara takes off the bag hanging across her torso and holds it up to Stella Jurmann. APOLLO, she reads. It does not mean anything to her. “I’m to give it to you,” Lara says. “What is it?” Stella asks.

  “You’re not to look at it until you get home,” Lara says.

  “Who gave you this bag?”

  “Fanni.”

  Which Fanni? she asks, and Lara says Susi’s sister. “Our Susi?” Stella Jurmann asks. Lara nods and says nothing. Stella starts to open the bag. “No!” Lara says, “Please don’t!” “It’s O.K.,” Stella says, resting her hand on Lara’s shoulder, “I won’t look at it till I get home.” Longbottom grumbles. He always does that when someone touches Lara.

  *

  Bauer is waiting outside on the steps by the railings. “What took you so long?” he says. She had been looking for their dinner, she says, and then Lara gave her a present. She raps her knuckles against the bag hanging over her shoulder. “APOLLO,” he reads. “What’s inside?” He reaches for it. She turns away. “Not till we get home,” she says. “I want a present too,” he says. She laughs. “Where’s your iPod?” she asks. He shrugs. He never needs it after the celebration of the Resurrection, he says.

  The southerly wind drives her onwards. She can see the odd star in the sky. She thinks of how assuredly Lara moves, of her position in the class, and wonders whether it is only in the minds of sighted people that being blind from birth is so terrible. “The world is unjust,” she says. “Lara sees too little, you hear too much.” He gives her a poke in the side. “Cheesy joke,” he says. “I know,” she says.

  *

  She comes out of the kitchen with a tray and gets a fright. “What on earth?” she says. “It’s not Carnival time.” He stretches out his arms and spins around. It was in the bag, he says. He’s got an identical one in his cupboard – a cuculla. “A what?!” she asks. He looks like a ghost and anyway, what was he doing opening her present? He says he’s sorry, sometimes things still get the better of him. Then he says, “Cuculla, the cowl, a monk’s robe for feast days,” and points at the table. Those were also in the bag – a book, a few pieces of paper and a double D.V.D. “Take it off,” she says, and he does.

  When she opens the book and reads the first page she begins to feel ill. “What’s wrong?” he asks. She pushes it over to him. “Switi and Fanni in the mattress house,” he reads out aloud. “And the second sentence: I am the black cowl, dark snow that covers everything.” He leans back. He says he doesn’t understand.

  “Britta,” she says after a while. She drums her fingernails on the table. “Sorry?” he asks. Britta Kern said “plack awrl”, it was that simple.

  *

  He leafs through the brown book. “Just pelican stories,” he says. “One to nine, and one other text at the end.” She asks him to read her a pelican story. Which one? he asks, and she says the first one.

  He reads about a pelican who has a small elephant for a friend. The elephant is a bit clumsy, like all elephants really, and is frequently responsible for the failure of the pelican’s ambitious projects. Amongst other things he swims terribly slowly, he doesn’t like eating fish, and he can’t fly at all, even though the pelican has heard of a small elephant who could fly perfectly well by flapping his enormous ears. The small elephant gets sad because he realises that he’s not up to the pelican’s high expectations, so h
e decides to swap his pelican friend for another elephant.

  “That’s it,” he says. “What?” she says. Sorry, but that’s how the story ends, he says. “Another one,” she says.

  The parents of a small pelican are killed by a ravenous sea lion. The pelican decides he wants to live somewhere else and so moves to Africa. There he meets a wise chimpanzee who reveals to him that he will not find peace until he avenges his parents’ death. So the pelican learns a variety of martial techniques and transports an entire arsenal of weapons back to his beach. He starts fighting the sea lion, attacking with his beak, missiles and poisoned fish. Nothing works. In the end a cormorant recommends that he should ask the sperm whale. The sperm whale listens to his story, swims to the pelican’s beach, and eats up the sea lion.

  “And that’s it.” Better, she says, which number was that one? “The ninth,” he says. “The last one.” “Now read what comes afterwards,” she says. He looks in the book. “It’s called ‘What I’m going to do to him’,” he says. “To whom?” she asks. No idea, he says.

  *

  I’ve studied them, both of them. I’ve had long enough. I know the medicines she takes and I know when he drinks coffee. I walk up to him and whisper into his ear that I want to go upstairs with him. He’s surprised and asks why, and I say because I’m going to be a woman soon and I want him to give it to me, he owes it to me. He grins and stands up. “Alright then, let’s go on up,” he says. “Like the old days.” The mad woman is sitting on her sofa, just gaping into the distance. Up the stairs, into the bedroom, I hold my breath, the wardrobe, the picture with the eagle and the owl, the keyhole. “You open it,” he says. I run through the rooms as if I’m having a look around. Then I say, “Let’s go into the white one.” “Wherever you like,” he says. He leans against the doorframe. I get undressed. I make sure the cameras are turned off. What’s going to happen now is for me alone. I point my finger between my legs and say, “I’ve made myself smooth especially for you.” I go up to him and let him have a good look. He puts his hand on me. I don’t care. He wants to lie down. That means the sedatives are working.

  He lies on his back, I put him inside me. I bend forward, a little to the right, and pull out the Hattori Hanz sword from under the white mattress. “I am your kaishakunin,” I say. He looks at me with huge eyes and doesn’t understand anything. Hilt at the top, I raise the sword as high as I can and then thrust it straight downwards. It makes a crunching sound as the tip hits his spine. He lets out a short groan. I draw the blade down in a curve to his liver, a swift and rapid movement, then I pull it from his body. That’s when the blood appears. I bend forward and, fingers outstretched, shove my hand onto his chest. He has a crooked smile and tries to raise leg. He can’t. I lift myself off him and stand up. I don’t look at him any more. I don’t say anything.

  *

  “What’s all that about?” he asks. She does not reply. He grabs the D.V.D. box and goes out of the room.

  She takes one of the blessed eggs from the tray, knocks it against the tabletop and starts peeling it. She gets this cold sensation in her lower jaw that she has not felt for a long time. She sprinkles salt onto the egg and takes a bite. It tastes good. This surprises her.

  He calls her as she is cutting some ham. She goes into the bedroom. “I’ve found something,” he says, holding up a D.V.D. “Eating Sweet Brownie”.

  *

  A girl has an orange tube inserted into her body. That is how the film begins.

  Bubbling white froth. A concrete slab. A few blades of grass. That is how it ends.

  *

  She runs into the bathroom, smashes the toothbrush glass against the basin, and picks up the largest shard. She slashes her arm from elbow to wrist, again and again. And screams.

  TWENTY-TWO

  “Move away!” he said, with an authority they have never heard before. Horn took a step backwards and leaned against the window-sill beside Irene.

  Tobias opened two break-seal ampoules, one containing solvent, the other a white powder. He drew the solvent up into a fivemillimetre syringe, letting it slowly run over the powder. He pricked the stopper on a bottle of saline solution and injected the mixture into it. Then he attached an infusion set and gave the bottle to Irene. “At eye level, please,” he said. She raised her arm obediently.

  He lifted the cat from the bench and laid her on the kitchen table. She tried to bolt. He held her down with his forearm. “That looks brutal,” Irene said. Tobias replied that she didn’t have to watch. He stuck a subcutaneous needle onto the infusion set, removed the protective cap, squeezed up a fold in the cat’s neck with two fingers, and inserted the needle. The cat hissed. “On,” he said. Horn turned the dial. “Slow or fast?” he asked. “Fast,” Tobias said. He tickled the cat between her ears and carefully relaxed his grip. He can drive a car without my knowing a thing about it, and he knows how to prepare an infusion, he thought.

  “How do you know how to do this?” Irene asked. “Dopeheads need to know,” Tobias replied. “After all, they’ll need it later on.”

  “Don’t be so silly,” Horn said.

  “Who’s the silly one here?”

  They had showed him how to hold the cat at the vet’s, Tobias said, straight after the M.R.I. The vet had looked at the pictures, said what had to be said, that the growth itself could not be halted, but that the swelling of the brain around it could be reduced with cortisone infusions, for example. He had asked how to do it, the vet had taken the stuff out of the cabinet and let him try it there and then; he could take his time because the cat was still under sedation. How on earth did he hit upon the idea of an M.R.I.? Horn asked, and Tobias said, a bit of Googling, plus he was the son of a doctor don’t forget.

  She would probably behave normally after the infusions, the vet had said, eat, run around, wash herself, nothing else. Tobias held the cat between his hands until the bottle was empty. Then he pulled out the needle, lifted up the cat and left.

  *

  Strange times, Horn thought, picking a red slug off the lawn, my son steals my car, my wife plays pieces of music I’ve never heard before, and my perception is failing me. “What do you mean by that?” Irene asked.

  “By what?”

  “That your perception is failing you.”

  “Nothing in particular,” he said. “There are things I’m not seeing or hearing, and I’m judging people wrongly.” She asked who, and he said his two sons and certain men who were worried about their wives.

  “Is that something you do, too?” she asked. What? he asked, and she said, worry about your wife, and he said no longer now that he had seen the tenor. She laughed. “Just throw the slug away,” she said.

  They talked about the concert, his surprise when he had seen the programme, how the second violins had come in at the wrong point during the “Lacrimosa”, and the tenor’s over-the-top warbling in “Sanguine, sanguine”. Then they discussed the fact that there must be something between siblings which parents could not grasp, a sort of secret relationship which involved some kind of awareness and duty. She said that as she was an only child she lacked this direct relationship, and he thought of his sister’s diary which he had opened and where he had found a passage in which she was debating whether she should give names to her breasts. He had never opened it again.

  “Do you know where Tobias has gone?” she asked. As far as he knew he was lying on the carpet in the stable, the cat on his tummy, listening to some ghastly music. Why was she asking? “I’d like to take a peek in his room,” she said. Why, he asked, and she replied she had the feeling that it was something she wouldn’t be able to do in the future. “You just want to have a sniff to see whether he’s been smoking a joint, don’t you?” he asked. She grinned. “He doesn’t smoke dope,” she said.

  They walked between the rhododendron bushes and the peony bed to the yard at the back. They looked around at the same time. “He’s not coming,” Horn said.

  Irene turned around slowly in th
e middle of her son’s room. The bed was made, there was no smell. On the desk was a box made of pine boards. It was big enough to fit a curled-up cat in. “Who made that?” she asked. “Michael, I assume,” Horn said.

  “Do you know what it’s for?”

  “No, I don’t,” he lied.

  TWENTY-THREE

  The sky was bright blue. Spring has no idea, Kovacs thought, about fathers and their daughters, or about the really bad things in life. With his thumb he traced a line across the condensation that had formed on the outside of his beer glass. Then he reached into his jacket pocket and switched off his mobile. He had had enough.

  First, Mauritz had called to tell him that the result of the chemical analysis of the sweet-like thing they had found in the victim’s mouth had left them totally baffled. This was because it consisted predominantly of snake venom. He had answered, yes, of course, just like he, Mauritz, consisted predominantly of muscle, and Mauritz had said he was being serious.

  Then Demski had been on the line from Berlin, without giving the least indication that he felt at all guilty. “We’ve got him,” he had said. “He’s a minor player.” Kovacs had answered, “The chap we’ve got is no minor player,” and Demski had said that the man he was referring to went by the name of a Greek god. I’m going to steal his tin duck, Kovacs had thought all of a sudden, and after a while the thought of this made him terribly happy.

  *

  Marlene came out onto the terrace with Charlotte and another girl. It was a few moments before Kovacs recognised her. “Let me introduce you to Isabella,” Charlotte said. “The school ghost,” Kovacs said. Sack of potatoes, school ghost – he could be pretty rude at times. The school ghost grinned.

  How was his gash? Marlene asked, sitting down beside him and taking a sip of his beer. Kovacs did not reply. “Do you know what the worst thing is?” he said. “It’s not having a clue. About anything. And then you sit there and wonder when you started to overlook things. In the end you realise that you weren’t there from the very beginning. Then you start creating your own story, any old story, and trying to imagine how it must have been.”