“Systemically inherent situational constraints have resulted with progressively increasing frequency in much more active involvement by forensic pathologists in the investigative work of our colleagues in criminal investigation units.”
I thought maybe I hadn’t heard him correctly. Martin had unleashed the full, unmitigated linguistic power of his medical education. Cool.
“But…” the jellyfish tried to blabber in between, but my forensic pathology adviser kept going right on at him, interlocuting as trenchantly as he cut.
“Multidisciplinary competencies have long formed part of the professional profile in academic environments, and this trend has been steadily gaining in relevance. Investigative teams today no longer consist solely of narrow-minded specialists. But if you have a problem with the management of the case-oriented knowledge here, you can file a complaint with the oversight board.”
Wow! And he came up with that without even having to look anything up in a Latin dictionary. Point to Martin, but apparently he didn’t quite know how to bring the matter to a victorious conclusion, because the jellyfish was still standing in front of him exuding aggression.
At first I kept my trap shut because I didn’t really understand this situation. In my world an argument runs like this: two people one-up each other, the register of discourse declines a step with each additional utterance, and when there aren’t any variations left of “rat-fucked elephant-cock-sucker,” you duke it out. The version we had going here wasn’t bad, either. I just couldn’t predict what would come next. Jellyfish apparently didn’t either: his crest began to deflate, if you’d like to phrase it poetically. And with that, Martin became master of the situation. Just by droning on! I think this was the very moment when my slow learning process with language truly began. After all, verbal communication was the only thing I still had going for me in my current form of existence. I couldn’t ram my knee into someone’s crotch, pick up a chick, or take part in any of the beautiful, purely physical forms of expression at all anymore. Language was the only thing I had left, and that’s why I urgently needed to elevate this form of expression in myself above the three-hundred-word threshold that I had sunken into in recent years. Well, at the time I still lacked any epically broad awareness of all this, so please keep reading.
I’ll omit the abundantly brainless “ums” and “hmms” that Jellyfish uttered—ultimately I don’t want to bore you, and they didn’t contribute much to the progress of the negotiation anyway.
“Your turn,” I said at some point to Martin, who did not appear to have gotten that he was in charge.
“Let’s get out of here,” Martin thought, trying to go around the car to the driver’s side. However, that was too abrupt for Jellyfish; he hadn’t yet processed what Martin had said. He took another step forward.
“If you’re looking for someone who had a burning hatred for Pascha, sir, then you should probably talk to Pablo,” Jellyfish said. He’d managed to find his way to a new, more civilized mode of discourse after all, even addressing Martin as “sir.”
“Your intended did mention that name,” Martin said, and I swear on every beer I’ve ever downed that he actually said intended. “Is he that dealer?”
Actually all Martin wanted was to get away, but he’s just so polite and doesn’t interrupt a conversation midway through. Even if he’s chatting with a small-time criminal who has just threatened to cut off his little pig ears.
“Exactly.”
“I think he’s in prison,” Martin said.
“Not anymore,” Jellyfish said, apparently feeling super stoked because he finally knew something that might be of interest. “Good behavior and all that shit. He’s out. For the last two or three weeks or so.”
“Thank you,” Martin said, now pushing his way past the tub of lard to get into his car. I was quick to dart in, too, and looked back as Martin pulled out into traffic. My ex had clearly gone downhill, I thought. Her fat jellyfish just got blabbered down by a chubby little man in a duffle coat. Lame, Girl. Totally lame.
—•—
“You really kept on him,” I said, and Martin turned the steering wheel the wrong way, almost taking out a guy on his bike. In my view that wouldn’t have been a bad thing; bike riders in traffic are about as pleasant as boils in your armpit, but Martin would likely have viewed this differently.
“Oh God, you’re here?” he moaned. And when I say he moaned, then that’s what he did, because he didn’t say anything out loud but only thought it, and in your thoughts you can also moan a short phrase like that. I figured he didn’t have much of his eloquence left over. Maybe he had only a certain quantity available per day, and he had burned himself out between writing clever reports all day and now talking down the fat “I’ll save the honor of my disreputable girlfriend” dude.
“I don’t want to have anything to do with types like that,” Martin said. “Investigations are for the police.”
His voice was trembling a little, and the persuasiveness he had just been using to weave jargon and borrowed words into a delicate chain of language was flushed down the toilet. I vacillated between feeling irritated and sorry for him, though actually I was tending quite uncharacteristically toward feeling sorry, but in my situation that was not something I could really afford. If I were to pat his head and say everything will be OK and he didn’t have to talk to that nasty scumbag anymore, then my case would never be resolved; a murderer would continue to walk free and—even worse—Cologne’s alternative crowd would forever remember me as that floor gymnast who fell off the bridge totally drunk. So, stay firm, no feeling sorry.
“Weeping is for women, that’s why they both start with w,” I said—not very eloquent, I admit, but I’m also just starting to further my study of language. “So act like a man, and embrace challenge.”
Big words that I got out of some made-for-TV movie. Presumably a movie where all the heroes were wearing cowboy hats and never walked on foot but only rode horseback. But maybe also a movie where a totally regular citizen is under threat from some maniac, so for the first time in his life he rustles up his shotgun out of the sock drawer where it’s been since his grandfather handed it down to him, and he suddenly turns into an ice-cold killer. Totally Hollywood in any case, and thus an excellent guide for how to behave in my current situation, traveling within a millimeter per hour of the velocity prescribed by the posted speed limit, sitting inside a rolling trash can weaving through a snow-covered Cologne with a duffle-coated forensic pathologist at the wheel. High time that I find my way back to reality.
“The police have decided to leave my murder not only unpunished but also uninvestigated,” I said in a voice so chilling a Hollywood hero could not have been more ominous. “A human being with alcohol in his blood and the broken remains of a schnapps bottle in the pocket of his jacket apparently doesn’t deserve any further consideration.”
Of course I knew saying that stupid passive-aggressive stuff wasn’t fair, first to the system in general, and second—and especially—to Martin personally, but I was desperate and determined to tighten any screw I could reach. And the only thing in reach was Martin, who was now zigzagging through traffic like a monkey on a scooter under fire all because his cell phone had started ringing.
“Gänsewein.” He actually answered very nicely and courteously with his name—and he was following the moving-vehicle code to a T by using his hands-free device, to boot.
“Hi, it’s Gregor. We had talked about grabbing a beer. How about now?”
“Um, well, you know, I’m not feeling very well right now…”
“Is everything OK, Martin? Are you sick?”
“No, I’m not sick,” Martin said. His voice sounded like he had at least one bullet lodged in his diaphragm.
“Last night you were a bit off, too,” Gregor said, sounding him out. “You can tell me if something’s wrong. Is something not OK?”
“It’s green,” I interrupted, because the stoplight that had allowed him
to stop and talk had since turned again.
“I know that it’s green,” Martin said out loud and irritated into the phone.
“What’s that?” Gregor asked back.
“Nothing, just the stoplight is green,” Martin replied. “So, everything is just fine with me, I’m just feeling a little wiped.”
Yikes, he got “wiped” from me—it actually didn’t belong in his vocabulary at all. Gregor pretended he hadn’t noticed anything. “Well then, maybe tomorrow…”
“Hold on!” I yelled, and Martin gasped in fright.
“What it is?” Gregor called, apparently highly alarmed by the frightened gasp. Presumably he suspected an accident or something.
“What about the SLR?” I asked.
“The SLR?” Martin echoed.
“What did you say?” Gregor asked.
“You wanted to ask him whether an SLR had been reported stolen,” I reminded Martin.
“Say, do you know if a Mercedes SLR was reported stolen last week?” Martin babbled obediently into his headset. He had apparently lost all will to argue with me.
“No idea,” Gregor answered. “Why are you interested in that?”
“Do me a favor and check, OK?” Martin asked in a voice underlain with deep exhaustion.
It was quiet on the line for a moment, and then Gregor asked Martin to wait for a second, and we could hear some mumbling in the background, and then he got back on the phone.
“No SLR has been reported stolen in Cologne. Not last week, not the week before, and not since. Tomorrow will you let me in on why you want to know that?”
“Yes, yes,” Martin answered, then mumbled another thank-you and hung up.
“You see?” I asked triumphantly. “People who have bodies in their trunks don’t report their cars ripped off.”
“Maybe the reason why no theft was reported was precisely because there was no theft,” Martin retorted.
“But…” I couldn’t fathom the new direction our conversation had suddenly taken.
“You told me about a theft and a body. Maybe one of the two is incorrect, maybe both are incorrect. In any case I still have no evidence to support your story.”
This whole discussion proved only one thing: that Martin was pretty clever.
We spent the rest of the ride in silence. Martin was driving like a robot, and as far as I could tell, he wasn’t thinking anything. His brain was switched off. By contrast, I was mad. I was making an effort to pump all of the energy from my frustration into the convolutions of Martin’s brain, but I couldn’t tell if he noticed. He was on autopilot; maybe he was in shock.
—•—
He parked his “car” along a quiet side street, shut it off, and dragged his feet along the sidewalk. The door to another parked car opened, Martin took a frightened leap to the side but then relaxed a bit again as he recognized the person getting out.
“Birgit! What are you doing here?”
She beamed at him; I could only gape. Her naturally blond hair fell long and smooth and shiny over the fur collar of an orange-colored winter jacket, which, unfortunately, concealed her upper torso under a bulky mass of down. Her legs were inside black pinstriped pants that ran down to black high heels. Unless her jacket was covering up some monstrous deformity, the woman had to be pretty hot. Not quite as hot as her colleague, Katrin, but still. How had Martin landed this knockout?
“I wanted to show you my new car,” she called in high spirits, hugging Martin briefly, and then hopping back across the sidewalk and opening her passenger side door for him. “Hop in.”
Martin sighed softly but sat down on the leather seat like a good boy.
“What did you do with your old Polo?” he asked.
Totally unreal: this question was so unbelievably wrong at this point in time. When someone shows off their new car for you, then you ask how many horse the thing has under its hood, if the suspension is lowered, how many watts the system serves up, and if the maximum speed shown on the speedometer is correct. You don’t ask what you did with your old car. And then just a Polo! Is there anything more trivial in life than the whereabouts of an old Polo?
“I sold it,” Birgit mumbled. “I’ve always wanted to have one of these.”
“Mmm hmm,” was all Martin could contribute. I suspect he still didn’t get what “one of these” actually meant. A BMW 3-Series convertible from the early 1980s, tiptop condition, grey exterior, red leather interior. Yeah, red! A totally awesome chick magnet. But Martin was sitting on the soft leather like a stuffed dummy, staring straight ahead, making an effort to smile and finally nodding.
“Nice,” he said.
“Martin!” I screamed. “The thing is not ‘nice,’ it’s kickass fresh.”
“Kickass fresh,” Martin repeated.
Birgit’s grin widened. “You think?”
That’s how you talk to chicks!
“Yes,” Martin said. He was acting like he’d downed a whole box of psychiatric meds.
“I’m glad,” Birgit cheered. “Should we go for a little spin?”
Martin shook his head. “Please don’t be mad, but I’m not doing that well today. I’ve got a headache.” Goodness gracious me, dear Martin was out of sorts!
“Another time, then,” Birgit said, softening her tone.
There was a short pause.
“Do you want to come up?” Martin asked.
I was amazed. That was even better, of course. Instead of adrenalin in the car, right to testosterone in the love nest. I was experiencing excited anticipation, but I kept my mouth shut.
“Sure.”
We got out of the car, climbed up to the third floor, and walked into Martin’s apartment. Birgit apparently knew her way around, and Martin disappeared into the kitchen.
“Would you like some tea?” he called.
“Please.”
What planet had I landed on? You drink tea when you’re sick. I mean, really sick. Really suffering. Puking and the runs and all that. And the first thing that you try is actually Coke, everyone knows that. But when the cholera or whatever causes such messy business has been sticking around for a while, then you switch to tea. In the face of death, and definitely not together with a chick on your couch before you get down to business. But, please, I was familiarizing myself with an entirely new world, here. A parallel universe. I was actually excited to see how things would proceed.
Martin steeped loose-leaf tea, which he had to fuss with to measure out and fill into an environmentally friendly reusable tea filter and then dispose of in the compostable-waste container. I wondered what humanity had actually invented the teabag for.
I left Martin back in the kitchen and made my way to Birgit in the living room. When I entered the room, I had a massive shock. Fine, I wasn’t really expecting Martin to hang his walls full of titty calendars, but what I found here totally shocked me. There were city maps hanging everywhere. Yeah, we encountered that already, do you remember? His colleague Jochen and the city map? So here’s where that thread finds its resolution: Martin collects city maps. Old ones and up-to-date ones. The old ones were hung behind glass on his walls. I know I personally have always wanted to see what the streets of Cologne’s medieval downtown used to be called, like, three hundred years ago. It’s totally amazingly interesting, don’t you think?
Birgit studied Cologne, Nürnberg, and Berlin—maybe she was learning a couple of street names by heart so that she could chat about them with Martin after he came back in. But maybe she was also wondering what was up with his oddball hobby, I couldn’t tell. I swirled around her the way those famous moths do to light, but I couldn’t establish any contact. Too bad. Really, really too bad.
Martin poured the tea in authentic style from a silver teapot into delicate little porcelain cups that were so thin you could almost see through them. The lady took milk. The Queen of England and her difficult family members would definitely have had fun with this game. Fortunately there was no extending of pinkies, otherwise I
’d have virtually puked, and I was afraid that would not have improved Martin’s state of mind. At the moment he wasn’t noticing me, and that was certainly a good thing.
“How are things going at the bank?” Martin asked after he had doped himself up with a couple sips of tea.
Bank! I wouldn’t have thought that of Birgit. Financial types are the absolute worst. Those arrogant pricks who jump into banking and finance programs right out of school all pretty much look like they take a swim every morning in a gigantic tub of lube. Even before starting their training at all! And after a couple of months in banking and finance their brains turn so mushy the only things they can still talk about are customers’ current-account portfolios, tax on the interest on income from wheel bolt sales, or line-of-credit-compliant correlation. Worst of all, of course, they think they’re the kings of the banking system, while in reality they’re commercial-paper tigers. They’re so dumb they put a DO NOT DISTURB sign on top of their phones during their lunch breaks and wonder why the phone still rings.
“Oh, pretty well,” said Birgit, who was actually acting like a normal person and not like a malfunctioning computer. “We just wrapped up a giant piece of business with Saudi Arabia, which is why we’ve all been doing so much overtime lately.”
Deliriously interesting what all the nation’s intellectual elite spouts forth upon the chesterfield when getting together after work for a little cup of tea. No wonder the mood in Germany never really goes up. And surely with this kind of intellectual prattle as a mating dance our declining birthrate should be no surprise.
“So, anything exciting going on at work for you lately?” Birgit asked. And then presumably picturing what Martin does she started making a silly, nervous giggle.
I immediately found her much nicer—all the dead-serious conversation had been getting to me.
“I’m sorry; I’m still not used to your job.”
Ah ha, they hadn’t known each other that long. We were still in the warm-up phase of the relationship. I wanted to seize onto hope, but then I looked at Martin with his little porcelain teacup and his neatly parted hair sitting on the couch, the legs of his creased pants pulled up slightly so that the material around the knees wouldn’t be baggy—nope, this wasn’t going anywhere.
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