Come, Sweet Death

by Wolf Haas

  Schimpl was already waiting in the vehicle when Brenner finally came running out. Brenner was already apprehensive that Schimpl would start lecturing him right away, because he was one of those people who give their unsolicited opinions to all and sundry. And then, as a matter of fact, a lecture, but not about Brenner’s dawdling.

  Because “Franz Josef Station. Fifteen S.” was coming in over the radio now. And so Schimpl felt compelled to explain the underlying problem to Brenner: “It’s insane how many sandlers we’ve got in this city. It’s getting to be practically every other call now. Get this, we’re allowed to play taxi to Herr Sandler, but we’re not even allowed to say sandler anymore. No, these days, you’ve got to say homeless.”

  You should know, 15 S was the radio code for an unconscious sandler. That was the only radio code with an S, otherwise just numbers, because where in the world have you seen a radio code with an S in it. But 15’s unconsciousness, and S is just a covert way to indicate a sandler.

  Of course, indicating something like that’s verboten—only information about the type of emergency, not the type of person. Strictly insofar as humanitarian things go internationally, it’s not in compliance. On the other hand, it actually does provide the driver with a certain amount of orientation when he gets the S. Because for every code 15 you get, you’re risking life and limb for an unconscious person. And then, when you get there and it’s just a drunk sandler, well, as an EMT, you’ve got to watch out that you don’t cause him a little 15 with your own shoe.

  Maybe that sounds brutal, but you can’t forget the hormones that come pouring out of you when you’re driving in full-on lights-and-sirens emergency mode. Starting with adrenaline all the way to—but I’m no doctor. All I know’s that these hormones make you aggressive. Because you actually need the aggression if you’re going to be charging through a couple of red lights and shooing cars and bicycles and pedestrians over to the side everywhere you go.

  And then, when you meet a drunk Sandler, who you’ve put your life on the line for, needless to say, your vaccine wears off a little.

  That’s why Junior decided at some point, We’d better add the S. You drive more leisurely when it’s a sandler, and that way, you don’t get as aggressive. I think it was five, six years back now that there was that sandler story about the head injury. You know, where the newspapers wrote about it.

  The drunk fell onto the sidewalk, and then, so it said in the newspapers, he got a little, well, by the EMT—clumsily handled, i.e. intent. Personally, I can’t fathom it, and you can’t believe everything that’s in the papers today.

  But Junior, of course, always thinking about the public. And it’s better that way, too, because without donors, you might as well pack it in. Blood donors, organ donors, money donors, all of them. Now, he invented the code S for the radio. And I’ve got to say, great invention. A hundred years from now, we might not know anything else about Junior except that he invented the code S. Because ever since he did, the EMTs? Much less aggressive when they have to go on a sandler call.

  That’s why Schimpl was already jabbering on about it on the drive over now, because, from the S, he knew exactly who they’d be meeting there. “I’ll tell you something: you give a homeless guy a home, and he’ll be burning that house down before the day is done. And you know why? Because he can’t stand being under a roof. So nobody better come to me and start talking about the poor homeless. Because we used to call them sandlers. And it’s still a better word for them if you ask me. Because a sandler wants to sleep in the sand. A home, though, he doesn’t really want one. So why shouldn’t I say sandler?”

  “Go right ahead and say it.”

  “And I will.”

  Brenner hoped that he’d momentarily cut off the power to his cranky commentary. But not with Schimpl:

  “And another thing. Because, it’s getting to the point these days that a person can’t say what he thinks anymore.”

  “You always do.”

  “I always do.” Schimpl took it as a compliment—and as license to keep on talking with all-new zeal. He explained to Brenner that there are different types of sandlers. As if Brenner didn’t know that already. As if Brenner didn’t have to pick up a couple of sandlers off the streets every single day. Schimpl, though, was very precise in his classifications of them, like a butterfly collector. All according to cause: bad family, bad divorce, bad character, bad accident.

  So you can imagine that Brenner was pretty happy when he saw Franz Josef Station up ahead. In spite of the code S, at the last intersection, he ran the red light out of sheer relief. Like those confused drivers who seem to fall asleep at the wheel when the light goes to green, and only accelerate as it’s turning red.

  “S!” Schimpl yelled, frantic, because he’d compartmentalized his life so rationally that he couldn’t comprehend whatsoever why Brenner would risk chauffeuring them under a truck. And then, needless to say, brain contusions, and then, loss of inhibitions, and then, sex maniac, and then, found guilty, divorced, and then: sandler. We’ve seen it all before!

  But thank god there was no more time to discuss it now.

  Because the station master was already motioning to them. An old railway man with teeth like that French actor. Usually I can’t stand French movies, the way, oftentimes, nothing gets said for ten minutes. But this one was good, with the guy who always played Don Camillo, and when he laughed: teeth like a horse.

  The station master wasn’t laughing, though. Surprised, he asked: “What’re you two doing here?”

  “We got called by the luggage office. You’ve got another sandler in the storage lockers.”

  “Wasn’t the luggage office that called. I called it in myself—fifteen minutes ago! It’s been happening almost every day now that those little shits go and shut some sandler up in a locker.”

  “Shut them in! Don’t make me laugh,” Schimpl protested. “They shut themselves up in there. To them, it’s a cheap place to sleep.”

  “Maybe, but they don’t lock themselves in,” the railway man said, cutting Schimpl short.

  “In some countries, they don’t even have lockers anymore, on account of the bomb threats.” Schimpl always knew better. “And soon there won’t be any more here, either, because every locker’s getting converted into a hotel room for Herr Homeless.”

  Now, this was just starting to get uncomfortable for Brenner, and he said to the railway man with the Don Camillo teeth: “It’s worth the twenty schillings to those little shits that some poor schmuck spends a few hours scared to death.”

  “Most of the time, one of my men hears them banging and lets them right back out. Then, it’s not so bad. But this one today was half dead. Shit himself right up to his neck out of fright.”

  “Cry me a river,” Schimpl chimed back in. “Where is he, then?”

  “Well, that’s why I’m surprised.”

  And then the station master gave Brenner a look of slight embarrassment. The railway man with the horse face suddenly got about as taciturn as a French film.

  “What do you mean, ‘surprised’?” Schimpl wanted to know.

  “Well, I’m surprised you’re still here. Pro Med Vienna already came and took him away five minutes ago.”

  “What do you mean, ‘Pro Med Vienna’?”

  “Just what I said, Pro Med Vienna.”

  “Did you call them, too, or something?”

  “What did I tell you?”

  “What do you mean, what did you tell me?”

  You see, that’s why I’ve always said: Court interpreter, or maybe professor, those would’ve been the right careers for Schimpl. EMT, though, he was just too easily ruffled.

  Especially now. When the old railway man said: “I was surprised, too, that they came. And just five minutes before you did, no less.”

  And to tell you the truth, Brenner was getting a little ruffled now, too. Because one thing you can’t forget. For a Rapid Responder, there’s nothing worse than when a call gets snatched ri
ght out from under your nose by your EMS rival, Pro Med.

  CHAPTER 3

  By the end of his shift, Brenner had completely forgot about the incident at Franz Josef Station. He couldn’t have known just how often in the coming days he’d find himself still thinking about that snatched-up sandler. Maybe it was a premonition somehow that he was sitting in his apartment as cranky as he was this evening.

  He watched TV till nine, and then he began deliberations. I don’t mean to say: melancholic, just a little, you know, like how his grandmother always used to say to him, very stern: “This is why you shouldn’t brood!”

  Now, too, as he sat in his apartment, he could’ve used someone to give him a shake and remind him: “You shouldn’t brood!”

  But with honest-to-goodness brooding, you don’t typically brood over something concrete. Brooding for the sake of brooding, as it were. Tonight, though, Brenner was brooding over whether he should still go down to the Kellerstüberl for a beer or not.

  It goes without saying, though, when you’ve been brooding over a dilemma like this for three hours, you’re pretty close to certified brooding. He could see from his apartment that the lights were still on in the bar down in the basement below the crew room. Every night there were poker games down there, and his co-workers often played for money, don’t even ask. The element of risk from working in emergency services gets so ingrained that, even after your shift ends, you still need it.

  But instead of going down to the Kellerstüberl, he brooded his way back to the first time he’d ever been in a Kellerstüberl. Because one thing you can’t forget: When Brenner was a kid, the War still wasn’t all that long ago. People were just glad to have a roof over their heads. Then came the years when people were putting in new heating systems. And then, the years when everybody was getting a new bathroom installed. And then, the years when everybody was getting new furniture. And then, the years when everybody was getting a new kitchen put in. And then came the years when everybody had everything.

  And then came the year—I remember it exactly, 1968, when the Olympic Games were in Grenoble—when everybody was building a bar in their basement, what we call a Kellerstüberl.

  Back then, Brenner would give his grandfather a hand in his carpentry workshop during school vacations. And on this particular vacation, they had to dress up the ceilings of ten Kellerstüberls with wood paneling. Every Kellerstüberl had its own character somehow, and somehow every Kellerstüberl was exactly the same. An overstuffed L-shaped sectional, a black coffee table. A fold-out bar with interior lights, full of cheap whisky and cognac. A lit-up Venetian gondola. A turntable with three Elvis records, or, for my part, “Take the A-Train.” And a wood-paneled ceiling with recessed lighting.

  And Brenner, needless to say, of a certain age at the time. Because in the winter of 1968, Brenner was, hold on, a good seventeen years old. All I’ll say is this: wood paneling wasn’t the only thing he nailed in the various Kellerstüberls of his summer vacation. Girls, too, so to speak. But enough about that. What it comes down to is this: You shouldn’t brood!

  At midnight Brenner finally realized this, too. But a bad sign must’ve been hanging over him today. Because instead of just going to sleep and putting an end to his bad day, he went down to the Kellerstüberl anyway.

  When he first started working here, he’d often pop down for a beer. But ever since Bimbo and Munz made it into the Kronenzeitung, things had got a little trying with his co-workers. I don’t mean to say megalomania, but, well, get a load of this.

  Surely you’re familiar with how the newspapers are always taking these photos where people are pointing off in some direction. Let’s say somebody rescues a kid out of some raging torrent of a river. Then, some press photographer goes and says to the brave mensch: Stand over there and point at the river. And beneath the photo it says: “The brave child rescuer points to the treacherous rapids from which he rescued the child.” Or somebody sees a UFO, and he points to the place where he saw the UFO. Or somebody breaks into your house, and you point to the empty place where, until recently, your entertainment center once stood.

  No other examples are coming to me now, but I think you get the general idea. And that’s exactly how Bimbo and Hansi Munz were pointing at Rosi’s stand outside Vienna General in the newspaper, where the director of the Vienna blood bank was so savagely shot that it took his girlfriend Irmi right with him.

  “AMBULANCE ARRIVES WITHIN SECONDS—TOO LATE” was the headline. And beneath the photo it said: “First Responders Big and Munz point to the place where Leo Stenzl and his paramour were struck down.”

  When you read something like that in the newspaper, you might well be troubled by the kinds of things that go on in the world. But you don’t think about what a photo like that can do to a person like Bimbo.

  Bimbo immediately exchanged his Ray-Bans for a pair of mirrored sunglasses: “So that my groupies out on the streets don’t rip me right out of my vehicle,” he was constantly saying. Or: “So that those lusty nurses over at the trauma center don’t start nibbling at me before they’ve even stuffed their patients into the elevator.” Doesn’t matter, though, what Bimbo said—ever since his photo appeared in the Kronenzeitung, he just said it twice as loud as he used to. And he never used to be the quietest, either.

  You’re going to say, Maybe Brenner was just jealous of Bimbo’s fame. But I’ve got to tell you, save the psychologizing for somebody else.

  When, shortly before midnight, Brenner opened the door to the Kellerstüberl, he was almost sorry that he’d left his apartment. Because the curtain of haze that met him, that was no joke. Unbelievable how six, seven EMTs could produce a haze like that.

  The haze wasn’t just from the cigarettes, though. Although it was about as smoky as a high school bathroom in there. And it wasn’t just the beer haze, either, even though all three tables were overflowing with empty and half-full beer bottles. The Kellerstüberl was just way too small for the Rapid Response Center. Two average-sized rounds of poker, and it was already crowded. And when you’ve got six men in there, smoking for hours on end, and seven men drinking—because Hansi Munz didn’t smoke—you’d like to think that’s reason enough for there to be a haze.

  And it would’ve been enough, too—it would’ve been three times enough. But that wasn’t even all of it.

  You see, we didn’t used to know this, but today we do. About the hormones. The sexual ones. There’s a hormone all its own for that—that nature gave us, I mean—and there’s nothing inherently bad about it, either. And the men have got their own and the women have got their own.

  The men’s one is called testosterone, technical term, as it were, but the EMTs know their way around technical terms a little. Because, courses and training, the works. But you don’t actually have to know your way around technical terms—anybody that set foot in the Kellerstüberl at that moment would’ve had to struggle to keep from passing out. Because the air was practically held together by testosterone.

  Back to the science again: when the man is sexually en route, so to speak, his body just pumps out this hormone. And when you’ve got seven men en route—because Hansi Munz, although he didn’t smoke, testosterone nonetheless—and it’s just a small room, like it was in the Kellerstüberl, then—that’s a smell I don’t want to describe in any detail.

  Now, Why the smell? you’re asking yourself.

  I said: six men were smoking and one was not. But I haven’t even got to the feminine side yet. Because there was also a woman there. Old Lanz’s daughter, sitting right in the thick of all these EMTs, and you could tell right away that she already had a few beers in her.

  Angelika still lived with her father, even though she was fast approaching twenty-five. But her mother died when she was sixteen, and ever since then, she’s run the household a bit for her father.

  But don’t go thinking Angelika was a child of grief. Quite the opposite. Because she was the only young, unmarried woman living at the Rapid Response Cent
er. And surrounded by any number of men, young and athletic and in uniform and everything. Needless to say, Angelika got a little curious, too, now and then, about what’s under that uniform.

  But that’s how people are. You appreciate what’s off in the distance more than you do what’s under your nose. Now, over the past few years, Angelika had sampled her way through the ranks of the Vienna Rapid Response a bit, but it was only six months ago that she truly fell in love—with the boss of Pro Med Vienna of all people!

  Needless to say, major hullabaloo among the Rapid Responders, but before the rumor ever really got off the ground, it was already over between Angelika and the Pro Meddler, and at least that way, she didn’t have to move out of the Rapid Response Center.

  For a few months there, Angelika had been looking as if god knows what kind of fish had slipped through her fingers, but a few days ago, she was seen talking to Bimbo for an hour and a half down in the courtyard, and now here she is, first time back down in the Kellerstüberl again.

  Her hair, bleached and ruined by some beauty-shop butcher, seemed to have awoken to new life—I don’t know if it was due to the witching hour or the recessed lighting or the hormones or Bimbo, who happened to be giving her a light with his Zippo just now.

  “Suck!” Bimbo roared at Daughter Lanz, as he held a humongous flame to her that nearly sent Angelika’s straw-dry mane up in flames. “Suck! Don’t blow, Angelika!”

  But Angelika Lanz already knew that when it comes to cigarettes, you’ve got to inhale, because she’d chain-smoked her way through the last ten years. And what Bimbo explained to her next, she’d also already heard hundreds of times:

  “That’s why they’re called suckerettes.” This was Bimbo, mind you. Anyway, she played along, inhaling a deep lungful so that the tip of the cigarette glowed orange like a Roman candle.

  “Suck! Don’t blow, Angelika,” Bimbo said again, but provocatively quiet for how drunk he was now.