by Wolf Haas
Look, my take on it-think what you want! All I know is that as Brenner searched the cesspit for the corpse by the light of the evening sun, he was surrounded by an almost supernaturally glowing aura of insects-half beekeeper-at-sunset, half Jimi-Hendrix-in-a-spotlight. And who knows, maybe Jimi Hendrix was only lit up so ethereally in those colorful hippie photos because the spotlight was fractured into millions of invisible festival insects that were already luring Jimi, at the age of twenty-seven, toward the exit, without anyone in the audience noticing.
From Brenner’s point of view, of course, nothing was illuminated at all, just black clouds rising from the cesspit, because that’s how it is in the physical world, solid matter, liquid matter, gaseous matter. And maybe from a distance it looked nicely lit and sparkling in the last rays of sun, but to Brenner it looked as if the brown sauce in the cesspit was transforming from liquid matter to flying matter. The swarms of gnats rose out of the cesspit but didn’t fly any farther. Instead, there just seemed to be more and more of them the longer he stared into the pit and hoped that it wouldn’t turn out badly for him.
He took a pitchfork down from the shed and poked around in the brown soup with the handle, not with the tines. Let’s be honest, though, if someone was down there, it really wouldn’t matter, handle or tines, but somehow it goes against something, purely some inner code, to jab a person with a pitchfork. At any rate, Brenner had the pitchfork flipped over and was poking with the handle. He noticed right away, though, that the pitchfork was too short and couldn’t reach the bottom, but just as he was about to give up and look for something longer, he hit something that felt suspicious, a strange resistance, half hard, half soft.
You can picture it for yourself now, and I’ll leave out the grisly details. I’ll just say that without the pills he would have lost his mind by now, at the very least. Although the corpse was still completely covered with, with, with… He couldn’t get a good grip on it, instead, picture it like this: someone with a pitchfork struggling against a sludge-covered underwater monstrosity. And at that moment, when Brenner realized that it wasn’t going to work any other way, when he flipped the pitchfork over and began jabbing at the corpse with the iron tines, and when, with his left foot at the very edge of the pit, the shit started seeping into his shoes, he heard a voice.
The voice of Jimi Hendrix. Brenner took his cell phone out of his pocket, and believe it or not, “Unknown Caller.”
“Brenner?”
That he even answered the phone, of course, can only be explained by the fact that in an extreme situation like this, man brings everything to bear on himself-epicenter of the world, as it were. And it wouldn’t have surprised him if, on the other end of the line, the good lord himself had laughed into the phone while observing Brenner through a telescope from his hiding place.
“South Tyrolean shpeaking,” a woman’s voice said into the telephone.
It took at least three seconds for Brenner to switch gears. Probably because he was struggling so hard to keep the slippery corpse from slipping right away from him. With his left hand now he simply reached into the putrid sauce while holding the cell phone in his right, but still his wires were crossed. Even though the voice said, “South Tyrolean shpeaking,” and not “It’s Monika,” because then it would have been excusable for him not to recognize it, or even more than excusable, it would have been understandable, because he had no idea that the South Tyrolean’s name was Monika. But even so, when she said, “South Tyrolean shpeaking,” it took him half an eternity.
At that moment Brenner was overwhelmed by the greatest feeling of happiness of his entire life. But not because of the South Tyrolean. Because at that moment he realized that it wasn’t a child’s body. You should know, fifty-eight hours after Helena’s disappearance, Knoll’s face came bobbing out of the mud.
“From the gas shtation,” the South Tyrolean said, trying to jog his memory.
He looked at Knoll desperately, as if maybe he could explain to Brenner how the South Tyrolean got his number.
“Or do you go shouting your telephone number out after every woman you meet?”
But it was all he could do to keep Knoll and his cell phone both from sliding into the cesspit, and you can’t be angry at him for not having a good line at the ready. He really couldn’t believe what an uncanny memory she had for numbers.
“What’s wrong with you?” the South Tyrolean asked.
“Why, what would be wrong?”
“You sound like you jusht saw the devil.”
“Why would the devil show his face to me?”
“Maybe this isn’t a good time? You’re gashping like you’re-”
“Why wouldn’t I be gasping?”
Then Brenner puked into the cesspit, but don’t go thinking that he at least hung up the phone first. No, the South Tyrolean was allowed to hear everything beautifully, and she asked him, “Did you jusht throw up?”
“Why would I throw up?” Brenner asked.
“There’s shomething important I need to tell you.”
Brenner would have preferred to tell her to keep it to herself, that important something. Because he’d never liked it when a woman started off with, there’s something important I need to tell you. It’s always, every single time, something unwelcome! And you always have to act interested because otherwise it instantly means: or are you just not interested?
“Or are you jusht not intereshted?” the South Tyrolean asked.
“Tell me.”
“I hope your phone hashn’t been tapped.”
Brenner began to tremble, out of fright that Knoll was dead and out of relief that it wasn’t Helena, so much so that he wasn’t really listening to the South Tyrolean anymore.
“Because I did in fact see shomeone that day.”
“This just occurred to you?”
Now she was the one who didn’t answer.
“What did he look like, then?”
“I’m not talking about a he. It was a she.”
It seemed to Brenner like Knoll’s face was grinning snidely at him. But that wasn’t the reason why he dropped him back into the cesspit. Because let’s be honest: what else was he supposed to do with him?
CHAPTER 14
Sixty-three hours after Helena’s disappearance and just before midnight, Brenner stood in the South Tyrolean’s doorway, and immediately, she rolled her eyes. And believe it or not, Brenner rolled his eyes, too. Let’s be honest, great love stories don’t usually begin this way, but the eye rolling was warranted, and in fact, both sides were fully entitled.
Brenner rolled his eyes because he could barely make it through the door on account of all the plants-“gardening” doesn’t come close. And she rolled her eyes because Brenner still gave off a residual whiff of cesspit, even though he’d showered for fifteen minutes in the cabin’s swank bathroom and then put on a fresh set of clothes from his duffel bag. And before you ask what he did with his dirty clothes-he threw them into the Kitzbuhel Ache River. But the stink must have settled somewhere deep in his pores, or else the South Tyrolean simply had an acute sense of smell. Her description of the woman at the gas station was the opposite of acute-exactly as vague as his whiff of cesspit. Approximately all the women in the world were brought under suspicion. No height, no hair color, no nothing. And as for the child, she wasn’t even a hundred percent certain whether there’d been one.
“But she wasn’t a man-that you’re sure of,” Brenner grumbled. Because he was starting to get the suspicion that she had lured him over under false pretenses, just because she was getting bored without a newspaper.
“You think I don’t have eyes in my head?”
Brenner didn’t say anything to that, because first of all, he was far too tired to argue, and second, the South Tyrolean had cooked him such good midnight spaghetti that he nearly fell blissfully asleep at the table. Because South Tyrolean women: always good cooks. And when, after three plates of pasta, Brenner felt more pregnant than any patient who’d
ever shown up at the abortion clinic, the cook even offered that he could spend the night. Not what you think, though! Because the South Tyrolean made it abundantly clear to him that he shouldn’t misunderstand her.
“Woascheh,” the South Tyrolean said to Brenner, but it was in South Tyrolean and really only meant, “You know, eh?”
Brenner understood it, no problem, because a classmate of his at the police academy was from Sterzing. Ladinig was his name, always won all the executive ski championships, and an avid mountain climber in the summer, driving home every weekend and mountain climbing. Interesting though, it wasn’t in South Tyrol where he crashed, but on the Matterhorn. Two weeks after their graduation from the police academy. Ladinig had always used the catch-all “Woascheh,” too, and so Brenner was able to understand the South Tyrolean now without any trouble.
And interesting: after just that one word he knew truly everything, and she wouldn’t have to explain in any detail why the topic of sex had long been, and would always be, off-limits for her. She wouldn’t have to open up to Brenner about how, during her early active years in South Tyrol, she’d already completed a comprehensive study of this science. Brenner would’ve understood, too, if she didn’t want to list off every fire department, every music festival, every small town disco, every teacher, every priest, every church choir director, before coming to the conclusion that “Tyrolean men are such emotional halfwits, you can’t even imagine.”
That surprised Brenner, because Ladinig had been one of his nicest classmates, beloved by women and everyone else. Personally, I can’t fathom how the Tyroleans could be such losers and brutes, but that’s exactly how Monika saw them. I think if she’d happened to grow up somewhere else, maybe she would’ve blamed it on that region, but she never came down off it, the Tyroleans in general and the South Tyroleans specifically-coldhearted Pinocchios.
Brenner didn’t even attempt to turn her argument around on her, along the lines of, I’m a graduate of Puntigam’s Elite Sex University, where the Kama Sutra comes from. And here you can see how exhausted he must have been to leave something like that out. Although, to be frank, since the pills, he hadn’t been all that interested anymore, and strictly speaking, he wouldn’t have needed Knoll’s death as an excuse for why he preferred to sleep alone.
The apartment was half the size of South Tyrol, on the ground level of an old building across from the gas station, cheap and dank and loud and all, but enormous. In spite of this, he wasn’t allowed to choose which room he got to sleep in, because she told him he should just take the first one if he was so afraid of plants.
“And besides, this way you won’t be far from the bathtub. Did you shwim in sewage?”
Brenner declined the warm milk with honey that she wanted to prepare for him-world-renowned South Tyrolean sleeping pill-because, on principle, no milk. And I have to say, the South Tyrolean was even looking at him a little amorously because it was a commonality that seemed terribly meaningful to her. With a certain pride that women often resort to when they can tack a minor health deficiency or nutrition problem onto their breasts, she explained to Brenner that she didn’t even have the enzyme necessary to digest milk. She couldn’t impress Brenner any more tonight, though, because he was already so tired that the word “enzyme” sounded like something inflammatory creeping into his ears.
He only sat there as long as he did because the few steps to the bedroom seemed insurmountable to him. And one thing you can’t forget-the plants kept growing all the while. What he really would’ve liked was to ask the South Tyrolean for a machete. Somehow the room came to him, though, and really he would’ve liked to just let himself fall into bed. Her comment about the smell had already grabbed hold of his pride, though, and so, with his remaining strength, he overcame the philodendrons and fought his way into the bathroom.
He slept so deeply that the next morning he didn’t know where he was. For a moment he thought he might have drowned in the cesspit like Knoll, slipped in while he’d been on the phone, fell on his head and straight up to heaven. You should know, it had been years since he’d felt refreshed upon waking up. He lay there so delicately covered, bundled, and swaddled, all in clean white, where a man might get to thinking, you see, you could live like this if you bought into marriage. And it wasn’t just the bedding he was covered with that was white but also the bed frame that cradled him on all sides like he was a newborn. Or let’s put it this way: Brenner was just now realizing that he’d fallen asleep in the bathtub last night, and slept so soundly that there had been nothing else for the South Tyrolean to do but cover him up right there in the tub.
A human soul has never traveled quite so fast from heaven to hell, though. Because Brenner was also just realizing why he’d woken up. The cell phone in his heap of clothes was ringing, and he would have given anything in the world for it to be “Unknown Caller.” But it was no unknown caller. Believe it or not, seventy-one hours after the disappearance of her daughter, the Frau Doctor was calling him.
Twenty minutes later her BMW was pulling into the gas station. Because that’s where Brenner had told her to go-not very sensitive I have to say, but in his grogginess he couldn’t come up with anything better than the gas station across the street.
Brenner stood there dumbfounded a moment before opening the passenger-side door, because the idea of the Frau Doctor sitting at the steering wheel and he getting into the passenger seat seemed very strange to him all of a sudden.
“The car’s the only place right now where I don’t have the feeling that I’m being listened in on,” she said in greeting.
“By the police or by the kidnappers?”
Brenner had never seen a person change so much in three days. Except for someone getting an arm or a leg shot off, that’s always a sudden change, or slipping under a bus, both legs gone, something like that’s a sudden change, too, of course, but right after that would come Frau Doctor Kressdorf’s change. Because she must not have eaten a bite since the day her child disappeared, and even that doesn’t explain it, either, because-completely different type of person. If there is such a thing! It even looked to Brenner like her hair and eyes were a different color, but not what you’re thinking: dyed. No, like they’d really changed.
Character-wise, absolutely unchanged. And that was a huge relief to Brenner right now. No hysterical outbursts, no embittered remarks, not even a sigh or an accusatory look. Brenner was profoundly impressed by her self-control. She was utterly calm as she drove downtown, no aggressive accelerating, no abrupt brake slamming, no accusatory gear shifting, no demonstrative temperature adjusting, no frantic windshield wiping, no nervous window opening, no sacrificial-lamb turn signaling, no lane changing where it wouldn’t have been advisable to do so, and where the sensitive passenger and child-loser might’ve detected a sighing rebuke.
Brenner thought to himself, other families who’ve been affected by kidnappings should really look to her as a model. Not always making things more complicated, because when you’ve been affected by a kidnapping, you see it as your great hour having arrived. Finally, the big chance and now it’s my turn for once, now people will indulge all of my whims, and now everything around me will have to pay until it doesn’t know which way’s up anymore. Brenner had experienced this more often than not in his days on the force. Because the motto of families affected by kidnappings: the police will pay for everything that’s ever been done to me in life. And families affected by kidnappings wield power, you wouldn’t believe it, they drive doctors, psychologists, and social workers to suicide-ergo, all new victims of kidnappings.
“I have to tell you something,” Frau Doctor Kressdorf began abruptly after driving for a full minute in silence. But then she fell silent again, and it was only as she was turning onto the Ringstrasse that she found her words. “There’s something I can’t tell the police. If you can’t, or won’t, keep it to yourself, please tell me right now.”
“No problem. No one will hear anything from me.”
> He would’ve liked to have said that with a little more conviction, but personally I think a dry promise isn’t the worst, because how do you prove to someone that you won’t tell someone else? It basically only applies to your best friend anyway, who’ll probably tell his wife the very same evening, who’ll solemnly swear not to tell anybody else, and her best friend will have to swear the same thing half an hour later. The more adamantly a person vows to keep a lid on it, the more certain you can be that, come tomorrow, the entire world will know. And you see, Brenner said it just that dryly, and he’s probably the first person in the world who’s never actually spoken a dying word of it to anybody. These are the things I like about Brenner. But since it’s just us, I’ll make an exception and tell you what the doctor said.
“I’ve done something that I could go to prison for.”
“You?”
Pay attention: if one of the advantages of driving is the freedom to shout openly, it only applies, of course, to when you’re driving alone. So why is Brenner shouting so loudly now when he’s sitting right next to the Frau Doctor:
“You?”
And what kind of a shout was that? A shout of surprise? A shout of rage? A shout of pain? I’m tempted to say, all of them together. Surprise, because naturally he expected her secret to involve her husband, the Construction Lion, who’d lured Knoll out to his house in the mountains. And rage, because he sensed that she’d already decided, before she even began her story, to withhold half of it. And pain, I don’t even need to explain to you, when you’re speaking for the first time with the mother-who looks like she’s aged thirty years in seventy-two hours-of the child you lost.