by Wolf Haas
“That would look great to the Frau Doctor,” Brenner said helplessly, and gestured to the waitress for the bill.
“Enough already!” Knoll yelled, a bit frazzled, and turned his cell phone off in mid-ring. “You’ll have to excuse me,” he sighed, “but you can’t imagine what kind of an uproar my people are in. They’re being called kidnappers and murderers in broad daylight.”
“At least they’re getting a taste of their own medicine.”
Brenner simply couldn’t resist that one. But Knoll dismissed it as if it were nothing. “You’re an ex-cop, you know the first thing that gets asked after a crime: who’s profiting from it?”
“I’m wondering how you know that I used to be a cop.”
Because, so it goes. Brenner was fairly certain at first that Knoll wasn’t behind the kidnapping. And this attempt to breed suspicion made Brenner mistrustful all over again.
Knoll just looked at him sympathetically, though. “You wonder why I know something about your past, but you’re confident that I would go and kidnap a child?”
“You threatened the Frau Doctor that you’d take her child away.”
Knoll hesitated a moment, and then his seductive smile climbed from deep within him and stopped just before reaching his lips. “A threat made without any witnesses can be easily refuted. But I want to be frank with you. I think you’re a good person. Truly, it happened in a moment of anger. I said something to Frau Doctor Kressdorf that one shouldn’t say. But I said it differently. I didn’t say anything about myself. I asked her whether she wasn’t afraid that the good lord, from whom she’d taken so many children, might take her child away, too, some day.”
“It’s the same thing,” Brenner protested.
At that moment, several of the screens hopped from snooker to dog racing.
“Good lord!” Knoll said once more. “Not to me. First of all, I’m no kidnapper, and second, I’m not stupid.”
“And the good lord is stupid, or what?”
When they were suspended in slow motion, you could see how the muscular bodies of the dogs deformed out of sheer centrifugal force. Their flews were blown straight back and almost didn’t catch up with their heads, their saliva flew with the bets into the sand, and Brenner wished that time would stand still in this lovely twilight created by the rainy day and the flat screens, because he had the feeling that there was no stopping now, and that everything had already been decided long before the first dog crossed the finish line.
“Listen to me: this kidnapping doesn’t benefit me in any way.”
“Unless the kidnappers don’t make contact, and the Frau Doctor shuts down the clinic because it’s her last hope for her child to turn up again.”
By all appearances, Brenner spoke objectively. His eyes were glued to the screen and his words clung to his sense of reason. But the worm had worked its way in, he noticed it right away. Because the suspicion aroused by Knoll began to nag at him.
“We haven’t gotten that far yet,” Knoll said. “It used to look like we’d be the ones who’d shut down under public pressure and have to leave.”
Brenner nodded in order to act like he was listening to Knoll. To his arguments. But he was only really listening to the worm that nagged at him.
“Up till now the kidnapping’s only helped the clinic,” Knoll blathered on. “Police protection round the clock. Public opinion wholeheartedly against us.”
But while the dogs crawled breakneck around the bend and somersaulted over each other in slow motion, as if that in itself were the contest, Brenner could only think about what Knoll had said before. About the good lord. The good lord might have personally taken Helena. And a terrible fear took hold of Brenner that he might possibly have an almighty thug as an opponent.
“They just want to delay my terminating their lease. Until their new Super Practice in MegaLand is finished,” Knoll said.
“Why MegaLand?” Like a track-standing cyclist trying to maintain his balance, who, at the last moment before falling over, rescues himself with the push of a pedal, Brenner rescued himself back into the conversation again. “It’s going to be a recreational park. Golf course, swimming pool, shops, movie theater, that kind of thing.”
“Haven’t you ever noticed how private practices are popping up in retail centers these days? The dental clinic in the train station, the cosmetic surgeon at the mall.”
“Sure, I’ve noticed the dental clinic.”
“And an abortion between shopping and bowling at MegaLand, it all fits smartly together. Baby Be Gone in designer ambience. With a ten-percent-off coupon for the next time.”
Brenner was almost relieved to see Knoll’s eyes light up with zeal now. Suddenly, he was back on familiar turf with the pro-life boss. Unbelievable, though, how easily a fanatic like that can rattle you when you’re feeling weak and running around with an enormous amount of guilt.
“Baby Be Gone. You’re pretty cynical.”
“I’m not cynical. The people responsible for such a thing are cynical. Mega-Abortion-Land, financed by a million children’s deaths.”
“Alright, that’s enough.” Things were slowly turning sour for Brenner.
“Something like this has to be professionally branded so that it sells. Mega-Abortion-Land,” Knoll said with that amused look again. “Maybe I should go into business with them and sell them the name.” He was getting carried away by vanity now, and Brenner hoped he might make a decisive slip. “At her new super clinic in MegaLand she’ll have to triple her earnings in order to recoup the costs. But I don’t want to bother you with our fanaticism.”
Knoll pronounced “fanaticism” as if he’d had some kind of tainted alphabet soup for breakfast that only had quotation marks in it, which were gurgling up inside him at this very moment. “Or might I still convince an old workhorse like you of the miracle of life?”
“I’ve even looked at the brochures that your people hand out in front of the clinic. Nature sure puts on a show.”
“A show!” Knoll repeated, scornfully.
Brenner had drawn out the word “show” in order to provoke Knoll. “Miracle” would have worked, too, because back when the brochure fell into his hands, he’d thought to himself: hats off to nature. It wasn’t new to him, of course, what happens behind the scenes during those nine months, but a while indeed since he’d first applied himself to the subject back home in Puntigam, and at that time, of course, he’d only been interested in the procreative part, or better yet, on preventing new life.
“It’s only at a certain age that you can fully appreciate nature,” Brenner formulated, a compromise, as it were. “It’s true, though: your fanatic views do nothing for me. I saw too many fully grown deaths when I was on the force—you can’t be looking out for a bunch of cells, too.”
“So when does life begin for you, if I may ask?”
Brenner wanted to steer the conversation gradually in another direction, but he had to give Knoll a quick answer. “Where I’m from, in Puntigam—”
“You’re from Puntigam? Where the beer’s from?”
You see, that really got Knoll smiling, he was happy to actually meet someone from Puntigam.
“Exactly. In Puntigam, there was an old saying that children were told. Before you were born, you were just flying around with the gnats.”
“I know that one, too. You were just flying around with the gnats. We used to say that as children, too.”
“That’s a good enough explanation for me,” Brenner said. “That you fly with the gnats before—and maybe you fly with the gnats again afterward, too. I think it’s a good solution. For logistical reasons alone. That’s why I don’t understand why you’d waste this short stopover arguing about life. When you consider how short the time is compared to the gnats’ time.”
“You have that worked out quite comfortably. And otherwise, there’s nothing else that interests you about life?”
“I’m interested in what you want from me.”
“I w
ant you to find the girl for me.”
The gamblers grew restless, and Brenner, too, couldn’t tear his gaze away from the screen, as the news came that one of the two dogs, whose sudden collapse was being shown over and over again, had broken its neck. Which is why he thought Knoll was talking about Helena at first, until he noticed the photo Knoll had laid on the table.
“How old would you guess this girl is?”
“No idea,” Brenner said, giving the photo a quick once-over. “Sixteen? Fifteen?”
It wasn’t a particularly good photo. A girl with long dark hair, walking, photographed from an odd angle, like an actress being hunted by the paparazzi. And only on the second glance did Brenner recognize the surroundings, because the photo had been taken right in front of the entrance to the abortion clinic.
“Twelve.”
“Huh, crazy, the Mediterraneans often look downright grown-up for their age. A pretty girl,” Brenner said, indifferently, as if Knoll had shown him a photo of his favorite niece.
“Twelve,” Knoll repeated, and all the more somber for it. “On her way to the abortion clinic.”
“Is that illegal?”
“No, it’s not.” Knoll reminded Brenner of an oracle who says everything twice, first normally, then a second time with grave foreboding, listen: “No, it’s not. For the unborn, there is no protection in our society.”
He pushed the photo at Brenner and offered him 10,000 euros if he found the girl, whose name he didn’t know.
“Seems to me, the unborn matter more to you guys than the born do,” Brenner said. “I was on the force for nineteen years. And I didn’t go trumpeting all over the place that I was fighting for the lives of the born, either.”
Knoll didn’t let himself be provoked, though. You could tell right away that he was used to these kinds of discussions, and he had roped Brenner into a conversation about unborn life and about morality at large, for and against, pro and contra—you could transcribe it for the pages of Religion Today every single time.
And to be perfectly honest: if Brenner didn’t have his own brand of fanaticism, in which he believed himself to be the only one capable of finding Helena, and if rage wasn’t burning in him like a vaccine, then I wouldn’t exactly stick my hand in the fire about whether Knoll stood a chance at persuading him yet. And maybe Brenner would be standing in front of the abortion clinic today with a rosary and an embryo sign and a pious expression on his face, and on the other side of the clinic’s entrance, the young security woman with the lawn-mowed do would have no idea that the old nut was actually Brenner, who used to be a cop and a detective and everything.
And that would be the same Brenner who people tell heroic tales about today, the stuff of wonder, beginning with the cell phone that he swiped from Knoll’s pocket in the betting parlor, allegedly like a real trickster thief. Seldom did anything in life go that smoothly for Brenner. You should know, Knoll made exactly the same mistake that Brenner did at the gas station and went to the bathroom at the betting parlor without his cell phone. And maybe Brenner only really took it because of that, in order to even the score for his own disgrace. But that’s how people are, and if a person’s solved the most spectacular murder case, then he’s absolutely got to be a magician with the little things, too.
But, right now, something much more important. Because believe it or not, Bank Director Reinhard was calling Brenner back.
CHAPTER 9
Now why is Brenner back at the gas station? Are his pangs of guilt pulling him there? Does he want to take another look at the surveillance video? Or is he hoping that the gas station’s drunks will adopt him, i.e., third musketeer?
Pay attention. Brenner was thinking to himself, Milan will definitely know someone who can unlock Knoll’s phone for me, the sort of thing someone at a gas station knows. But no luck on that front, because instead of Milan there was another attendant behind the cash register. The two drunks were there, of course—should I say “again” or “still,” I don’t know, they might have lived there. In any case, they shot him a smirk but didn’t say a word.
Brenner asked the new guy about Milan. The guy didn’t want to say anything at first, but then he came out with it. Milan got fired. Picture this: he’d been keeping a case of beer up at the counter and selling it on the sly. And the whole thing got exposed in the police raid because the cops turned everything over and scrutinized it three times, of course, and what did they find? Just Milan’s backdoor beer. In other words, Milan: second Brenner-victim of the day.
The new attendant just looked irritated by the question of whether he could unlock a cell phone because after the incident with his predecessor, he thought the company had sent a hired goon into the shop to test him. Nevertheless, he sold the test-goon a nonalcoholic beer, was even particularly friendly about it. Brenner stationed himself right back at the counter and briefly contemplated whether the answer might lie in Milan’s dismissal. Maybe the case of beer was just a front and was actually a connection to the kidnapping because the attendant had seen something, and now was being made to keep his mouth shut due to the intrigue surrounding the case of beer.
Brenner was so captivated by this theory that he ordered an espresso and a second nonalcoholic beer.
So you see, contemplating nonsense: often very useful. Because without the contemplating he wouldn’t have stayed as long as he did at the gas station. And then he wouldn’t have been standing there with his second nonalcoholic beer when the woman from the surveillance video came in. He recognized her right away from her curls, which were so fiery red that, in all fairness, they had no business being at a gas station. She got a newspaper and a carton of milk, and asked for a pack of Marlboro Lights at the cash register. Interesting, though. She didn’t stress the “a” in “Marlboro,” but the middle instead, like this: “Marlbooro.” Brenner tried to make eye contact with the witness, but paying and pocketing the change and turning around and traipsing out were a single fluid movement with her, as if she were still being fast-forwarded on the video, and she walked past Brenner without even noticing him.
“South Tyrol!” Brenner yelled out, when she was closer to the exit than the cash register. Or actually, it was more of a murmur—no, too loud for a murmur, but too quiet for a yell, more of a medium middling volume. From the moment she asked for a pack of Marlbooros, he’d been coming up with ways to take his guess that she was South Tyrolean and turn it into a line. But unfortunately, the new gas station attendant was incredibly nimble. He gave her back her change so fast, and she’d put it away so fast, that Brenner didn’t have enough time to develop a good line.
As the woman walked past the drunks, with the milk and newspaper in one hand and the pack of Marlbooros in the other, Brenner got morose. My God, he cursed to himself, silently, I used to be able to come up with a line in a tenth of a second, I didn’t even have to think about it. And now I have this trump in my hand, I can identify where she’s from based on her cigarette pronunciation, and can you believe what I come up with?
He knew from experience that in a situation like this you simply have to lean as far out the window as possible, put yourself in a dangerous situation, and then a good line will come swimming in on the adrenaline. Which is why—as the woman flew past the potato chip rack in the direction of the newspaper rack, and then past the newspaper rack in the direction of the impulse-item rack, and past the impulse-item rack in the direction of the door—he called out to her in a way that sounded like he was murmuring, but was indeed clear and unmistakably audible: “South Tyrol!”
And the line shall follow. That was the calculation, with the meal comes the appetite, it’s the conversation that brings people together, stick your nose in other people’s business and an irresistible line will follow. Calculated error, as it were. Because no line, near or far. The two-word line echoed through the gas station, enough to make Brenner sick. South Tyrol! Nothing embarrassing had happened to him in a while. Before, he would have at least said as she walked by: “
Do they believe in love at first sight in South Tyrol—or were you planning to walk by a second time?” Or a thousand possibilities. But now, either on account of the pills or the nonalcoholic beer or quite simply from age, or a rusty brain, or withering hormones—in all events, no line.
Now, I don’t know whether you know that the South Tyroleans are the most beautiful women in the world. Well, I’ve never been to Australia, but otherwise I can personally vouch that worldwide the South Tyroleans come in first, and then there’s nothing for a while, because genetically it might just be the ideal mating: half Italian meets half Geierwally. Just so you understand what kind of pressure Brenner was under.
“That was a long time ago,” the back of the South Tyrolean said. But turn around, not a chance. She stamped on toward the exit, without missing a step, because that was the Italian half that fueled the arrogant stamping.
“Could I have a Marlbooro?” Brenner yelled out fast, just as the automatic doors were opening before her.
And believe it or not, she turned around and walked right up to Brenner. “You have good ears,” she said, tearing open the pack and holding it out to him.
“It was the Marlbooro,” Brenner explained proudly, as he waved a dismissive hand at the pack of cigarettes. “Since I don’t drink anymore, I don’t smoke anymore either.” And he pointed to the nonalcoholic label because he wanted to make himself a little interesting.
The South Tyrolean immediately took it upon herself to perform that twin feminine task, i.e., simultaneously rolling her eyes and twisting her mouth, arrogantly and in opposite directions.
Now before she turned away entirely, Brenner quickly added, “I need to ask you something important.”
And then, of course, whether she’d seen anything thirty-three hours earlier.
It really just wasn’t his day, though. Or the gas station just wasn’t his place, maybe something wasn’t right with the water. Because the woman was completely clueless. She didn’t even know what he was referring to.
