Come, Sweet Death

by Wolf Haas

  Very rarely, though, do you hear someone who laughs quite like Lungauer. Pretty much the complete opposite of people with nothing to laugh about. Because they might be pretty and healthy and well-dressed and have a bunch of money and work in film or “media” or architecture. On the inside, though, they’re so empty that the moment they open their mouths—immediate casualties. On account of the vacuum implosion. My two cents.

  “At first I thought you might be working for Junior,” Lungauer said, suddenly very serious.

  “Well, that’s true.” Brenner was just playing dumb, though. Already he could tell that Lungauer wasn’t trying to make a point just because he was on Junior’s payroll.

  “So you’re a dog?”

  “I sniff around, yeah.” Because once you spend a little time with a word-twister like this one, you start to understand him better and better—it happens faster than you might think. And once you’ve been with him a little while longer, you even start to word-twist yourself. Brenner, though, no problems now: “Do you remember Lanz?”

  “Angelika’s father.”

  “He got arrested.”

  “I know.”

  “But his daughter thinks that he didn’t do it.”

  “And he didn’t.”

  “What?”

  “Lanz didn’t kill Big.”

  Was Brenner just imagining it, or did Lungauer suddenly get a little more fluent just now?

  “I started at Rapid Response twelve years ago. We were three times as big as the Pro Meddlers were at the time. That was still under Senior. Then, out of nowhere, Pro Med grew so fast, they nearly caught up to us.”

  Every sentence took Lungauer forever. And even as bad as Brenner usually is about this kind of thing, I can tell you right here: Brenner’s operating speed was exactly right for listening to a sick man tell his story in his own good time.

  “After Senior died, Pro Med pulled the better political contacts. They picked up Watzek as a sponsor, and in return they got city contracts. We still had the better donors, though.”

  Brenner almost got dizzy, looking straight down twenty-three floors at the street below, as Lungauer continued talking.

  “People don’t know what to do with their money after they die—if they don’t have kids, that is. Most of them leave everything to the church. Trying to secure their spot in heaven. Some of them appoint us as their beneficiary, though. That helped keep us ahead of Pro Med for a while. On the other hand, modern medicine. So, people are getting older and older and living longer. So we started getting fewer big donors. Because people just weren’t dying.”

  I’ve always been vertigo-free, Brenner reflected. But the tremble that slowly entered his knees now had nothing to do with the twenty-third floor. No, listen up to what Lungauer had to tell him over the next half hour. It might’ve taken a healthy person only five minutes. But Brenner was glad it didn’t go that fast. It was hard enough to digest as it was.

  How Junior formed a trauma team with Lungauer and Bimbo. How Bimbo and Lungauer were always the ones to get dispatched where there were rich old ladies to be chauffeured. How they took a cue from Czerny, who’d coaxed a villa out of a widow. Unlike Czerny, though, not for their own personal gain, no, they did it all for Vienna Rapid Response.

  “Unfortunately, that only worked some of the time, though,” Lungauer stammered out. “So you court ten ladies, and maybe one of them gets the idea of leaving us something. And in spite of all of this, Pro Med still managed to expand faster and faster. Because needless to say, Pro Med had its own brand of widow care. So Junior starts to get suspicious that Pro Med is cutting in on his share of the elder-care market.”

  Brenner wondered why suddenly Lungauer wasn’t mixing up his words anymore now. By his account, it was often just a matter of planting the idea in the old ladies’ heads of leaving their fortunes to the Response Center. Because often they were so senile that they didn’t know they even had fortunes anymore.

  “So, Junior got a better idea. You know how much insurance paperwork there is, don’t you, with the Scheisshäusltouren. So it became really quite simple to coax a signature out of an old woman without her even noticing that she’d just signed away her entire fortune to the Vienna Rapid Response.”

  “Could it be that you’re only playing the part of the aphasic because you’re afraid of what Junior would do if he found out?” Brenner asked rather abruptly.

  “Hahahahahahaha!”

  Then Lungauer was silent a moment. He took a breath so deep that Brenner got scared it might be his last. But then he carried on, as though Brenner hadn’t said anything. “We weren’t necessarily doing anything bad yet. Because if an old woman like that leaves her whole fortune to a bunch of hardhats or us, what’s the difference? And the hardhats have got their own elder care, too. And so, all the sudden we had twice as many wills and testaments as before. So we were able to keep our lead over Pro Med for two more years. But then they inched back up on us again.”

  Brenner was still surprised that Lungauer wasn’t mixing up his words anymore. Had he really been playing dumb this whole time? Or was it just the result of momentary concentration? Or did Brenner himself have a part in it—maybe he was unconsciously correcting for the mixed-up words?

  I don’t know. All I know is that as Lungauer went on, Brenner would’ve given anything for it to be a simple case of pathological word-twisting.

  “The problem was that we were sawing off the branch we were sitting on. The better we worked, the fewer people died. The less often it was that we got left anything. But then suddenly three huge wills got executed in one month. Normally, three wills in a year would’ve been a lot. And the next month, four wills. Always on the calls that Bimbo and Junior took.”

  Maybe it’s all just one big mix-up of words, Brenner thought, clutching at straws, as it were. And the saying’s not for nothing when they say: you shouldn’t clutch at straws.

  Because when Lungauer said “died,” he didn’t mean “survived,” but “died.” When he said “euthanized,” he meant “euthanized,” not “resuscitated.” And when he said “killed,” he meant “killed” and not “saved.”

  “Then, three died in one thing,” Lungauer said.

  “Three in one thing?”

  “Two in one day even. And the third later that same thing.”

  Week. Brenner wondered if there was a rule for when Lungauer mixed up his words and when he didn’t. But you see, it’s always the big questions that you send skipping down the longest pier because there’s always something more important to inquire about.

  “What was the cause of death?”

  “Always the same thing,” Lungauer said. Without batting an eye, he simply used the word “thing” for “thing.”

  “You know as well as I do that one Scheisshäusltour’s just like the next.”

  Scheisshäusltour. I say, how sick can you be not to forget a word like that?

  “Dialysis or diabetes,” Brenner said.

  “In this case it was diabetes,” Lungauer answered. “The old ladies that Bimbo was supposed to bring to the hospital to get their sugar levels checked? Well, he’d just put them on a drip.”

  “That’s what we do anyway with acute diabetic shock.” Brenner didn’t want to believe it at first.

  “Sure. But Bimbo’s drip was pure sugar water.”

  Brenner just whistled softly to himself. Not in the way that a person whistles when they’ve just heard something sensational, but that melody of his. You know the one.

  But he was whistling so softly that it was inaudible, practically pantomime. The way a person whistles who’s afraid of waking somebody up. A sleeping dog, say. Of course, it would’ve been better for him not to whistle near one such sleeping dog. Say, a bloodhound.

  CHAPTER 14

  And then, needless to say, out of the room. Out of the apartment. Out of the twenty-three-floor petit-bourgeois tower. Out of the whole complex. And into the taxi that Brenner had called from the Lungauers’ p
hone.

  While he racked his brain for who the automated voice of the taxi operator reminded him of, he was struck by a faded photograph next to the telephone. A young man exuding vitality, like a strapping farm boy from the old black-and-white movies.

  “Is that your husband?” he asked Lungauer’s mother, because the taxi operator still had him on hold.

  “My son.”

  “Oh, you have two sons—”

  For Christ’s sake. Think before you speak, a time-worn rule. And Brenner would’ve been better off now, of course, if he’d observed his Latin teacher’s old rule. Because, midsentence, two things shot through his head simultaneously: The automated operator voice reminded him somehow of his half-sister, who got married and moved to Berlin when he was twelve years old. To some guy named Gunter Schmitt. Brenner hadn’t grown up with her, though, and in the thirty-five years since her wedding, he’d seen her at most two or three times, and believe it or not: sometimes he even forgot that he had a sister.

  And needless to say, the man in the photograph was Lungauer himself. Before Bimbo bored a hole into his brain with a screwdriver.

  He must’ve lost at least thirty kilos since the accident, Brenner guessed. Even though he knew by now that it hadn’t been any accident.

  Brenner kept his head ducked the whole taxi ride, because when you work in EMS, needless to say, the streets are just teeming with your peers who might catch you skipping school. After all, what he was doing was verboten—asking an 8K to take the wheel all by himself for an hour so that Brenner could do a little private investigating on the clock. That was at a quarter after ten, and now it was one-thirty already.

  There was no real reason why it should’ve mattered to him now. Not after Lungauer had told him everything. How it’d gone from widow care to wills getting falsified. And then it went from wills getting falsified to wills being executed. And then, when it got to be too much for Lungauer, he took a screwdriver to the head.

  And how Lungauer’s girlfriend, then, continued investigating on her own. How Irmi had believed she could seek justice for Lungauer.

  “Well, aren’t we cheerful,” the taxi driver said to his whistling passenger.

  Brenner gave him no reply, though. It’s always risky to give a Viennese taxi driver an answer. That’s a cautionary nugget for you to take on your life’s journey. Because, guaranteed, he’ll give you an answer back, then, and generally speaking, not intended for your amusement. I’m not going to say anything else about it.

  “Cheerful much?” the taxi driver asked again.

  Brenner’s answer was to quit whistling. Because it was only now that he noticed that perpetual melody back on his lips again.

  He made it back to the station shortly before two. Slinked past the surveillance cameras in the courtyard and darted straight up to his apartment.

  There he perched at his window, keeping watch over the driveway for Hansi Munz to return.

  At twenty to three, the 740 pulled back in. Brenner ran down and intercepted Hansi Munz in the courtyard. “Do you have five minutes?”

  “Sure.”

  “Can you come up to my apartment real quick?”

  Though this surprised Hansi Munz, he nevertheless followed Brenner without any protest.

  “Nice place you’ve got,” he said, taking an appraising eye to the living room. “Where you’d get those nice walnut cabinets?”

  “From my grandfather.”

  “Inherited? Not bad.”

  “Inherited. And he died all on his own.”

  “Dying tends to work that way.”

  “Yeah, most of the time.”

  “Death’s the freebie.”

  It’ll cost you your life, though, Brenner normally would’ve said now. And the last five thousand times he did say it. But this time: “Real funny.”

  “What’s with you today? Did a louse run over your liver or something?”

  Amazing, Brenner thought. How one and the same sentence can sound so different coming out of Klara’s mouth than it does out of Hansi Munz’s dumb mouth.

  “Why’d you say ‘liver’?” he shot back.

  “Are you nuts? Why shouldn’t I say it?”

  “Do you still remember when Bimbo got that liver transplant? The day the Duke of Smoochester got shot?”

  “Monday, May twenty-third, five-oh-three p.m.”

  “Why do you know the precise time?”

  “It’s not every day that you see a person get killed.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “In the army, the smell of gun oil was enough to make me sick.”

  “And the liver transplant didn’t make you sick?”

  “What’re you going on about the liver transplant for?”

  “Can you remember where Bimbo was standing while he waited for his liver transplant?”

  “Where else would he been standing? Right where we always stand, by Rosi.”

  “Was he standing there alone?”

  “No, Lanz pulled up just ahead of us. That’s why it took so long.”

  “Did you see Lanz standing there?”

  “Why do you even want to know?”

  “Did you see him?”

  “You know damn well that from the parking spot you can only see the back of Rosi’s stand.”

  “Did you see Lanz walk over there?”

  “Hey, I really had better things to be looking at.”

  “You were watching the couple make out.”

  Hansi Munz tried on a filthy grin, but needless to say, a risky move. It’s like when you’re doing the high dive, and only when you’re perched on the edge of the ten-meter platform do you realize that you chose a level that’s too difficult, and then, when you don’t quite land it, you look especially stupid.

  His stupid grin erased itself immediately, though, when Brenner said: “And what if I told you that Lanz wasn’t at Rosi’s at all. Because Lanz was taking a donor kidney up to surgery.”

  “But then Bimbo would’ve been back at the vehicle with our liver transplants much sooner.”

  “Suppose he did something else in the meantime. You didn’t see him, did you?”

  “What’s he supposed to have done, then?”

  “Nothing crosses your mind?”

  Hansi Munz didn’t say anything. But the firmer he pressed his lips together, the farther his eyes popped out of his head.

  “Well, aren’t we cheerful,” Brenner said, in the same tone of voice as the taxi driver. Which only made Munz look all the more alarmed.

  “Are you nuts? Where would Bimbo have put the gun, then? They already scoured everything!”

  “Did you drive the seven-forty today?”

  “You know damn well that I’ve been driving the seven-forty ever since Bimbo died.”

  Munz was so proud of his retort that it quickly got the better of him. “Junior won’t let anybody else behind the wheel of the new seven-forty. But next month, the new seven-ten’s coming. By those standards, the seven-forty looks ancient. I’m telling you—it’s even got an automatic transmission. If I get the seven-ten, you can have the seven-forty. Be sure to look into it when the time comes. All I can tell you is that those old crates we’ve been driving? No comparison.”

  Brenner was already on his way to the garage, though, and Hansi Munz was trailing behind because, needless to say, somehow he already had an uneasy feeling. But he never would’ve thought Brenner capable of this type of madness. Because Brenner walked right into the 740’s garage and started tearing the vehicle apart. Hansi Munz began to hop from foot to foot nervously.

  “Are you nuts or what? I’ve got to turn right back around and go out on a run! Don’t you tear my vac mat out!”

  But before he could finish saying “vac mat,” the vacuum mattress was already lying on the ground.

  And before Munz could shout: “And you don’t need to go unfolding my body bag, either!” the body bag and the AIDS gloves and the gauze pads and the antiseptic wipes were already strewn a
cross the garage floor.

  And as Hansi Munz kept on shouting: “If you go and empty out my trauma kit, too, now—,” the contents of all twenty-four compartments were scattered across the garage floor, and the transfusions, running into the drain. And the safety goggles and the butterfly bandages and the straitjacket and the crowbar and the oxygen tanks, all of it, dumped onto the garage floor by Brenner.

  “I’m serious—you’re going to be cleaning all this up tonight, I swear to you,” Hansi Munz whimpered, as Brenner emptied out the towels and the first-aid tape and the burn dressings and the urine bottles.

  Until finally, the garage and half the courtyard were so littered that you’ve got to admit, unbelievable what can fit inside an ambulance like that—more than in the garage itself, which, if you think about it, the ambulance fits inside of. In some ways, organization is just a good trick. But, flip side of the coin: the more immaculately organized, the more wildly the scraps fly when all hell breaks loose.

  “Shit,” Brenner said in a huff, after he’d emptied out every last thing and then saw what he’d done. “This looks worse than a clothes drive.”

  Because you probably know all about that, right? How the Rapid Responders are always holding used clothes drives, a great thing really. The fact that Bimbo was in charge of it, though, that you couldn’t have known. And it only occurred to Brenner, too, when he said it just now.

  And seconds later he was getting the key to the truck garages. And then, he was unlocking the truck garages. Three truck garages and not a single truck.

  Because they were all crammed full of old clothes. You’ve got to stop and picture this for a second—and “old clothes” is misleading, because everything was high-fashion, brand spanking new! Everything washed and sorted, neat and tidy. Millions of purchases made out of frustration, you know like when your love life isn’t completely ship-shape, and as a consolation, you go shopping and end up buying something that you wear all of once and then it’s off to the clothes drive with that new wardrobe essential of yours. Three truck garages stuffed full up to the roof. Just let the meaning of the word “chaos” dissolve on your tongue. And think back to what I explained to you a couple minutes ago about my philosophy on organization.