Come, Sweet Death

by Wolf Haas

  And just as Berti was telling him: “I’ve been here nearly three years now, first as an Eight-K and now staff. But you know what, it’s a detective agency that I find really appealing,” thought-wise, Brenner was already with old Frau Rupprechter, the diabetic who they were on their way to pick up from the hospital just then.

  Every day she got delivered to the hospital and every day she got picked back up again. Banker’s widow, she’s got the insurance, don’t even ask. And on top of that, she’s already donated two ambulances. And if Frau Rupprechter thought it’d be a lark to lug her Döblinger villa on a trailer behind the ambulance day after day, why, they would’ve arranged that, too.

  Brenner went to pick her up from internal medicine, while Berti waited in the vehicle. Interesting, though: in reality, she was a few years older than she was on Brenner’s thought-jet. And the skin on her cheeks, a little thinner. And her wrath, a little more biblical.

  “Next time why don’t you just let me spend the night here!” she said, hollering at Brenner and beating her cane on the cement floor. Even though Brenner had arrived five minutes early like he always did for Her Rupprechtress.

  It didn’t put him out any, though, because of the marathon substance. And then, as she launched into her endless litany about the ninnies on the nursing staff, Brenner simply booked a return flight on his thought-jet, back over to Berti, where he could now listen to what Berti had told him a few minutes ago, practically a mental VCR.

  “At the start of the VISTAA program, we all had a basic training together. There were thirty-eight of us at the time. A few then went on to the fire department, a few to the nursing home, a few to the state government, and so on. A guy I got along with pretty good ended up over at Pro Med. Well, last week I call him up to see whether I might tempt him to open up a detective agency with me.”

  A staccato rapid-fire pierced through Brenner’s thoughts. It was Frau Rupprechter’s cane, which she was rapping on the floor like the needle of a sewing machine.

  Because she could tell for a fact that Brenner wasn’t paying attention. She was still yammering on about the incompetent nursing staff. And one really oughtn’t speak ill of the dead, but that was no concern of Frau Rupprechter’s. Because she was even laying into Irmi now, who’d been her home health care nurse for years. You’d have thought she was mad at Irmi for getting herself shot. Practically an imposition for the ninety-year-old Frau Rupprechter to have to get used to a new nurse now.

  “A curious person,” Frau Rupprechter griped.

  “Yes, Frau Rupprechter.”

  “Sticking her nose all over the place.”

  “Yes, Frau Rupprechter.”

  “That nosy gal!”

  “Yes, Frau Rupprechter.”

  You could tell from his monotonous replies that Brenner had already hit cruising altitude back on the other thought-jet. Berti and his detective agency were, at this moment, still better than Her Rupprechtress.

  “So my pal at Pro Med says: he’s not interested in opening up a detective agency, but he’ll be glad to help out. Well, I had last week off—basically a test to see if I’ve got what it takes, detective-wise. If, in one week, I can find out who beat you up out front of the Golden Heart.”

  You’d like to think that Frau Rupprechter and her endless litany wouldn’t be interesting enough to make Brenner swerve back and forth from Lil’ Berti to her.

  But that’s the old irony of travel. The far-flung always strikes you as more interesting even if, viewed from up close, it’s completely uninteresting. Although I’ve got to say, a case of persecution mania like Frau Rupprechter’s isn’t actually all that uninteresting—just horribly irritating, but that’s a whole ’nother subject altogether.

  And one thing you can’t forget. These days when you’re severely diabetic, you’re automatically half blind, too. That’s the cow-blindness that comes from sugar, don’t ask me how, I’m no optometrist.

  “She thought I couldn’t see how she was constantly rummaging around in my papers,” Frau Rupprechter said, giving the woman—who’d been her in-home nurse for years—hell all the way to the grave.

  “Didn’t she have paperwork to take care of with you?” Brenner asked, playing the interested part a little, because Frau Rupprechter, always a generous tipper.

  “Of course!” Rupprechter barked at Brenner. Because, after her treatments, Rupprechter was always a little more intolerant than usual, i.e. flip side of the coin she tipped you.

  Brenner wasn’t upset for long, though, because in his head, he was back with Berti.

  “So my buddy asks around Pro Med a little. Well, it’s an open secret there that it was two truck drivers from the Watzek cement company that worked you over.”

  “Watzek’s the one that’s got their corporate logo on every other Pro Med vehicle.”

  Alas. This reply didn’t occur to Brenner until just now, when he was finally getting Frau Rupprechter, who was only able to inch her feet forward, into the vehicle. And you see, that’s why I always say, always respond right away if you can. Because as Brenner’s opening the door now, he says:

  “You should definitely open up a detective agency.”

  And only then did he lean into the cab and see that, in the meantime, Berti had disappeared into thin air.

  CHAPTER 9

  Brenner definitely wasn’t the type to immediately fear the worst all the time. Quite the opposite, back when he was on the force, he even skipped a couple of assignments because, false alarm, he thought. And then it took him three times the effort to sweep the case under the rug.

  So, when a person like this immediately fears the worst, needless to say, twice as alarming. He gave it five minutes before he couldn’t stand waiting anymore, and then, he just let Frau Rupprechter sit up front with him. He drove over to Rosi’s and asked her if she’d seen Lil’ Berti.

  “Go ask at the Laundromat,” Rosi advised him. “They face out onto the parking lot there.”

  “Where’s the Laundromat?”

  “Over there where they’ve got the mirrored windows.”

  Brenner was still a little puzzled why the Laundromat of all places would have mirrored windows. When he went in, though, he got why. Leave it to Rosi to call a morgue a Laundromat.

  Back in high school, Brenner once visited the Puntigam brewery on the day when it would annually open its doors to the public. Needless to say, free beer, and his first bout of intoxication was so horrendous that it was also his last. He was still shy at the time, though, and the visitors were all led into this enormous hall—big enough to hold a swimming pool. No pool, though, just a bathtub next to some other vats, because that’s where the beer’s stored until it’s ready to drink. And as Brenner entered that refrigerated hall of beer, what was his first thought: This is just how I imagine a morgue to look.

  And, for a fifteen-year-old, not a bad thought! Though everything here at the morgue was different in the details: only two bathtubs, and a refrigeration wall, and tables and gurneys with corpses on them, but the overall impression, quite similar nonetheless. And even the young technician in his lab coat now reminded Brenner of the Puntigam brewing engineer who’d led the tour back then.

  He was no mere corpse-bather, though, no, he had a specialized task. Because at a hospital as huge as Vienna General, needless to say, a lot of amputated limbs, and they’ve got to be disposed of. The embryo goes into the skin cream, so it’s got another use, but a smoker’s leg, for instance, can’t recycle that. And you can’t just toss it into the garbage can, either.

  “Hello, can I help you with something?” the young man asked, politely enough but without looking up, because he was struggling a little with a leg that was almost too long for the oven. “My colleagues are all on their lunch breaks right now.”

  Brenner was so surprised to find a smart young person working here that his purpose almost escaped him. “I’m looking for my co-worker.”

  The medical-waste technician jammed the oven door shut behin
d the leg and turned around to face Brenner: “He’s not one of these?” he pointed at the five, six corpses that were lying out in the open.

  “My co-worker’s not dead,” Brenner said. But he also must not have been completely certain at that moment, or else he wouldn’t have cast a cautious glance at the corpses.

  “Then you’re in the wrong place,” the boy said with a smile. He had such a perceptive face that Brenner thought: Probably either a student or a perv.

  “You look out onto the parking lot from here,” Brenner began. Because, on that account, Rosi was right, these were bona-fide panoramic views of the emergency vehicle lot.

  “Not very often. It’s more interesting here inside,” he grinned.

  Maybe not a student after all, Brenner reconsidered.

  “Nevertheless, did you by any chance notice anything unusual outside there in the last half hour?”

  “Something unusual in the emergency parking lot? You mean like an EMT without sunglasses or a mustache?”

  “EMT, sunglasses, no mustache, nearly six and a half feet tall, and skinny as Mickey Mouse.”

  “That’s your co-worker?”

  “Exactly. And he gave me the slip outside there.”

  “I’m afraid I haven’t noticed anyone matching that description. And I wouldn’t have had the chance to, either. Namely, because there was a truck parked in front of that window for a long time.”

  “Since when do they let trucks park out there?”

  “That’s what I wondered, too,” the boy said, and then his oven beeped, roughly like how a microwave beeps, and he opened the door and stuffed the next leg in.

  “Did the truck have a logo on it?”

  “Didn’t notice.”

  “Watzek, maybe?”

  “No clue,” the young man said, because he wasn’t some yea-sayer—students and pervs generally aren’t. Always chasing their intellectual autonomy or whatnot.

  When Brenner got back to the vehicle, the first thing he saw was that the radio microphone had been torn out. “What did you do with the radio microphone, Frau Rupprechter?”

  Believe it or not: Just because Brenner left her alone for five minutes, she tried to call for help over the radio. Needless to say, instead of pushing the one and only button on the microphone, though, in her impatience and wrath she thought it better to rip the whole cable out.

  “As soon as I get home I’m filing a complaint about you,” she said.

  “Yes, Frau Rupprechter.”

  “Where’s your colleague?”

  “Dead, Frau Rupprechter.”

  But he was just saying that to scare her now. The thing is, he ended up scaring himself more than he did the old lady. By the time he was finally rid of her, Brenner needed to return to the station and pick up a new mic.

  Back at the Response Center, nobody said anything about Lil’ Berti, and Brenner didn’t mention that he’d disappeared, either. He just hoped he’d get put on a halfway-decent call or two where he could look for Berti a little on the side. As the devil would have it, though, one emergency after another.

  And then, that evening, a call that almost made him forget about Lil’ Berti altogether.

  The woman seemed familiar to him right away. Even though age had changed her, of course. And the cancer had changed her even more. As for all the things that’d changed Brenner, well, he preferred not to know.

  Nevertheless, the two recognized each other almost simultaneously. Not right away, though. First, the timid look away, and then another sniff, and then a look away again, and then a bit of a smile, and then simultaneously:

  “Is it you—?” and then embarrassed laughter, even though they’d once sworn eternal love back in high school in Puntigam.

  “Klara!” Brenner said, grinning.

  And Klara arched her eyebrows in the exact same affected manner that had always impressed Brenner back then.

  Just so his instincts wouldn’t take over all the sudden, you know, from all the grinning and eyebrow-arching, he quickly added: “So you ended up in Vienna, too.”

  “Twenty-eight years ago.”

  Twenty-eight years ago, you were just a kindergartner back in Puntigam. Or: You must’ve just been a bun in the oven. Or: Did you get left behind on a high school field trip? Or whatever else a person might say in a situation like this.

  Maybe best not to make any jokes about age, though, to a person who’s on their way to chemo. “Twenty-eight years? Did you move to Vienna for college?”

  “Yep, and you? I thought you landed with the police?”

  “Landed! More like belly-flopped.”

  A lift of the eyebrows. “How long were you on the force?”

  “Nineteen years.”

  “Nineteen years? What, did you start in kindergarten?”

  I don’t mean to say that he fell in love with Klara all over again right there on the spot. But he sure remembered what it was about her that he’d fallen for way back when. Because his whole life long, he’d never found another woman who the banter just glided as easy with as Klara from Puntigam High.

  Even though she was from the very best of families, as people used to say, doesn’t quite add up, Brenner and his family, completely different values.

  But on the other hand, they were both from Puntigam, where the beer comes from. And Klara, from the heart of the Puntigam beer family. And beer families, well, maybe their values aren’t all that far removed from the simple folk after all.

  Even though Klara’s family really did take every possible precaution to rid themselves of the smell of hops. Fine upbringing and all. Except Klara didn’t hold out for very long at the Swiss boarding school. Of course, she also sang in a Bach choir that rehearsed twice a week back home. And needless to say, she wrinkled that fine little beer-nose of hers at Brenner’s taste in music back then.

  But otherwise, I’ve really got to hand it to her. You’re not apt to find a person who thought less of herself than Klara. For that kind of money, definitely not. And even when it came to music, I’d like to think it was more Brenner and his over-sensitivity to the timelessness of Jimi Hendrix than it was Klara and her upbringing.

  “And what have you been doing these past twenty-eight years in Vienna?”

  “I’m a high school music teacher.”

  “It’s not like you need to work, though.”

  Klara smiled weakly. You know that smile that moneyed people get when they’re given to understand by some poor chump: With money like yours, you can’t possibly have any problems.

  It was equally awkward for Brenner that, after three decades, it took all of three minutes for a reference to money to slip out of him. And me personally, I’m always the first to say: If a person’s got too much money in his pockets, then he can bet the day will come when he’ll be swinging from the lamppost. But you’ve just got to take care of it quietly and professionally, you don’t need to be making jealous allusions all the time.

  “Birthright’s a bitch, huh?” Brenner said, trying to iron out his blunder with something like empathy.

  “Deathright’s a bitch, too,” Klara smiled.

  “Deathright?”

  Klara looked at him like she always used to when he was slow to catch on. Because needless to say, intelligence-wise, Klara was a tad ahead of him.

  Deathright. Brenner gave it some thought. And then it hit him: Deathright. My dear swan. If you’re headed to radiation on a day like this and pulling off a joke like that: Hats off.

  Con: Brenner couldn’t very well skirt the issue now. “What is it that’s wrong, then?” he asked as neutrally as possible.

  “Let’s just say, a louse ran across my liver.”

  “Of all things.”

  “Yep, of all things.”

  “You’d like to think that only beer can attack your liver—and even then, only if you drink it.”

  “Why drink it when you can inherit it?”

  “You always did worry too much. That your parents were to blame if some p
oor devil drank himself to death.”

  “You see, I do need the work. That’s why I’m a teacher.”

  “And what are your chances?”

  “With men?”

  “With radiation.”

  “Better than with men.”

  “Then I’ve got nothing to worry about,” Brenner said, getting choked up. Unbelievable, but he had to make a concerted effort to keep that much-touted lump-in-the-throat from making its way into his vocal cords now. Because he was having a full-blown sentimental attack.

  He remembered how he and Klara had parted back then. That pretty friend of Klara’s was to blame. Bernadette. She was even a one-time winner of the Miss Bazongas Contest at a ritzy Puntigam disco. But the contest’s judge was a well-enough-known former Schlager singer from Vienna, who stole Miss Bazongas from Brenner that very same night.

  And now, Klara and Brenner were to part again, i.e. they’d arrived at the hospital. Brenner accompanied her up to radiation, and in parting, he asked: “Do you use Rapid Response to get to your treatments very often?”

  “Just twice a week.”

  “Then I’m sure we’ll be seeing each other.”

  “I’m sure we will.” She lowered her eyebrows. But Brenner wasn’t exactly sure anymore: good sign or bad sign?

  “Well, then.”

  “Well, then.”

  He would’ve liked to say something nicer. Nothing occurred to him, though. And that’s where the advantage to the marathon substance comes in. Brenner didn’t have any more time for melancholy feelings. Because on to the next emergency, straightaway. And somebody else’s life story to have to listen to. Over and over, the same old story.

  It was only as he was returning to his apartment that evening that the substance subsided a little. He thought of Klara again, and in fact, he couldn’t get her off his mind and almost called her. I think it was a maneuver aimed more at distraction, though, because he simply didn’t know where to start looking for Lil’ Berti. Instead, he stood at the window and looked down at the courtyard. And as he did, he softly whistled this melody.

  A strange habit of Brenner’s, how he’d often go days whistling some song without even noticing that he was doing so. But then, when he actually did think about what he was whistling, the lyrics to the song were often a perfect match for his situation, even though the lyrics hadn’t come to mind at all while he was whistling. I’m talking “Foxy Lady” when he was in love with a redhead, or “I’d Rather Buy Me a Tyrolean Hat” when the barber was cutting his hair, or when, if you really want to know, he had a little performance anxiety.