*
At the fountain outside the housing blocks of the Walzwerk estate a young, dark-haired man was sitting asleep. Kovacs did not wake him. It was warm enough. The man, drugged up to the eyeballs, was probably a crony of Sharif Erdoyan, the Sheriff. If you ever asked any of them a question none of them knew a thing. Cinn perhaps, Kovacs thought, the new herbal drug. Someone from his team should get onto it, Sabine Wieck would be best: she could do with boosting her reputation. Anyway, the other two were hopelessly overworked – George Demski with the international child porno-graphy business, which meant he was forever dashing all over the place; and Eleonore Bitterle, who still seized on the minutest thing and, if in doubt, made it a matter for the Furth criminal police.
The streets were empty. Kovacs drove westwards along the northern side of the lake. When he reached the edge of town he put his foot down. At half past three on a Thursday morning his colleagues in the traffic department would still be snoring, for certain. At the entrance to the village of Waiern he overtook a moped which was swerving from side to side. The rider was wearing a black half-face helmet. Judging by his clothes he was an older man. Kovacs stopped in the car park by the landing stage. A spring night peopled with suspicious characters, he thought: a young Turkish lad under the influence of drugs, a drunk old man and an unwashed criminal commissar. He looked up at the sky. The old favourites: Daneb in Cygnus, Altair in Aquila and, almost at the zenith, Vega in Lyra. Insomniacs like him were able to see the Summer Triangle already in April.
A dirt track led through a strip of sparse meadow to the dinghies. They were secured by chains to a low concrete wall. Kovacs undid his padlock, fetched his boat, threw in his rod case, net and tackle box, and jumped aboard. As soon as he had set up the oars and taken the first stroke he started to feel good.
The wind was still and the lake was a smooth expanse before him, like a mirror. He rowed out to the middle, towards the Sankt Christoph lighthouse. Apart from the first signs of the dawn in the east, it was still dark. He switched on the headlamp, opened the plastic box, and took out a white rubber fish with golden speckles. He assembled the shorter of the two rods, fastened on the multiplier reel and attached the lure to the line. Then he flicked open the lock and cast. Everything was the same as usual: the short, sharp plop as the weighted head of the rubber fish hit the surface of the water. Then imagining it descending, determined and energetic, in a long, oblique line. He counted to nine, flicked back the lock, and began to row carefully. Others counted to ten or thirteen or twenty; from childhood he had harboured the idea that multiples of three were magical. Three, nine, twenty-seven – these were his numbers. He manoeuvred the boat westwards at first, broadly following the axis of the lake, and then took a wide arc back towards the northern shore. This was the most likely spot for predators – pike, sander and char. He kept checking the line tension with his finger. Every few hundred metres he reeled in the lure and cast again.
“Why don’t women go fishing?” he asked Marlene once, and her reply was that it obviously had something to do with a specific male disorder, and in any case, women didn’t find it so easy to bludgeon living things to death. He had once read that hunting was all about aggression and angling about sexuality; that was about as smart as saying that the whole of life was about sexuality. The simpler truth was that women got cold easily and never stopped talk-ing; neither of these was particularly desirable for going fishing. He did not say this to Marlene, not least because she had recently attended a frightfully expensive filleting course run by a celebrity chef, just to please him.
It was getting cold. This was probably why such thoughts had entered his head. The sky above Furth was turning a delicate shade of yellow, and close to the shore a thin layer of mist had settled above the water. There were no other boats to be seen. He was casting more frequently now, parallel to the shoreline, and each time he reeled in again quickly. This kept his circulation going.
He felt the bite after he had stopped expecting one, just by Waiern, at a spot where a narrow stream flowed into the lake. The lure moved horizontally at first, and then plunged straight down. The pull was so strong that Kovacs had difficulty loosening the reel lock to prevent the line from snapping. A sander, he thought, a powerful bugger. He was delighted. It could not be anything else. The salmonids in the lake, char and trout, took it half a metre down at most and could never summon such force; pike could be substantially bigger, but were passive in a struggle and gave up easily; while carp never went for rubber lures in the first place.
What he finally hauled onto the boat in his net was a huge chub, silver and shining, as thick as his forearm, and maybe three-quarters of a metre long, with eyes the size of thumbnails. Still Kovacs felt dissatisfied. True, he had never caught such a splendid white fish, but these creatures had millions of bones. “A non-predatory fish that behaves like a predator deserves to die, you know that,” he said, dropping the beast to the floor of the boat. The chub made a rasping sound. “You can speak, can you?” Kovacs asked. He put on a cotton glove to give himself a better grip, and took the long-handled hook remover from his box. The rubber lure was in fairly deep, but it came out of the gullet relatively easily. “There you go,” Kovacs said, lifting the creature with the net and heaving it back into the lake. The fish shimmered red in the rising sun before vanishing into the depths.
*
Kovacs took a hot shower, put on fresh clothes and made a pot of tea. Before leafing through the newspaper he called Marlene. I feel bad doing this, he thought, but I have no choice. “Are you in the shop already?” he asked. What on earth did he think she might be doing in the shop at half past six in the morning, she replied, perhaps he could enlighten her. And she might also point out that he had rung the landline, her flat indeed, so unless he’d installed some crafty diverting equipment his question was doubly strange. “I’m going senile,” he said. “I’m sorry.” She said senility didn’t come into it; he was merely exhibiting fundamental husband-like qualities: being clingy and behaving like a zombie. And this behaviour was getting more extreme.
“A zombie? You’re pissed off with me.”
Pissed off was not quite right, she said, at that very moment she had her tights on her left leg, but not yet on her right – in case he wanted to know the precise details – so she was not pissed off, but in a rather delicate state of limbo. “I caught a chub,” Kovacs said.
“A what?”
“A chub.”
She was silent for a few seconds, then said, “Hold on a second. Just so I know. A criminal or a fish?”
“Fish,” he said.
“So what? You’re always catching fish.”
“Not chub.”
Did this mean that a chub was the albacore tuna or blue marlin of Lake Furth? Could you only eat it by risking your life, like the pufferfish? Would he mind explaining what was so special about this fish?
“He’s an imposter,” Kovacs said. “A what?” Marlene asked. “A non-predator that sort of thinks it’s a predator, and which sometimes eats its own fry.”
“Don’t like the sound of that,” she said, and he replied that nature had punished it by giving it so many bones that it was totally unsuitable for eating, so on that score she had nothing to fear. “That’s a relief,” she said. So, to recap, he had called to tell her about a fish he had caught but wouldn’t eat because of its complicated personality and excess of bones.
“Exactly,” he said. “Did you kill it?” she asked.
“No.”
“No? Do you mean it’s still swimming around, trying to dupe the other fish and eating its own children?”
“That’s right.”
“Excellent, Herr Commissar!”
It’s a spectacular fish nonetheless, Kovacs thought. But there was something else he had to tell her.
“What’s that?”
“Charlotte’s coming.”
“Charlotte? When?”
“Tomorrow, I fear.”
“Tomorrow? G
reat!” She was assuming he’d come up with something for that weekend which, if her memory served her correctly, they had planned to spend together. Having said that, she pointed out that she was only acquainted with Charlotte from photographs, and he knew the score with daughters of divorced fathers and their new girlfriends. Kovacs suddenly felt a fit of giggles bubbling up inside him, without a clue where it was coming from. “You could always go fishing,” he said before snorting with laughter. “I’ll lend you my boat.” She hung up.
Kovacs poured himself a cup of tea. As he buttered a slice of bread he pictured Marlene putting on her tights, combing her hair, and uttering a steady flow of short, irate sentences. I’m a wretched father, he thought, and I love this woman.
*
He walked along past the Walzwerk estate towards the centre of town. The morning traffic had not yet built up. I feel like an officer on the beat, he thought, the operational side of law and order. He liked living in this area, even if the basic idea of social integration which was the premise behind the Walzwerk project had not really worked. The three former factory buildings were inhabited by Bobos between the ages of twenty-five and forty, most of them with an attachment to the proletariat that was more sentimental than anything else. They pranced around their loft apartments and penthouse flats, while the former workers’ quarters were home to the underdogs: people on social benefits, migrant families and single mothers, all with exactly the same story – alcohol, domestic violence, if you divorce me you’ll never see me again, child benefit. The first lot installed new alarm systems or C.C.T.V. cameras every week; the others would smash their car wing mirrors. Kovacs was very grateful not to belong to either of these groups. Because of his job he earned the respect of everyone on the estate, even the members of the Turkish underground who kept their distance from him. Given that he had bought his flat in Hall B just after the development had been launched, when prices were still reasonable and there was no sign yet of the smarty-pants set with their free-standing Philippe Starck bathtubs and holidays to Vietnam, he was clearly not one of them either.
The young man who had been sleeping by the fountain a few hours earlier had gone; he was probably in bed by now. What was cinn? A kind of herbal crack? Or just ground cinnamon bark, as some people claimed? Cinn from cinnamon? The drug scene worried Kovacs. Although the Sheriff said he had everything under control, for a while now he had appeared nervous. Some-body else was pulling strings in the market, and nobody had a clue who it was. It had started in people’s flats with cocaine that was especially pure and twenty per cent cheaper than the norm, followed by events: raves and large birthday bashes and parties. Apart from the cocaine, different types of ecstasy had popped up, the classic round tabs, green ones stamped with pictures of clowns, or purple lozenges with tiny elephants on them. The people at ChEckiT, the drugs advisory service, were amazed at the quality, or rather the chemical manufacture of the narcotics, as they called it, and the Sheriff had put himself on a war footing. Now not a single party took place without his people on duty, he had eyes and ears everywhere, and yet the alien gear still turned up, each time, as if from nowhere. Sometimes someone would say that Keyser Soze, the bloodthirsty avenger from “The Usual Suspects”, must be the brains behind it all. The Sheriff did not find this funny.
The barriers came down just before Ludwig Kovacs reached the level crossing. A bad omen, he thought, at the same time feeling ashamed for being so superstitious. He climbed over the bar and crossed the tracks. A woman with grey hedgehog-like hair stared at him angrily from her Fiat. He gave her a friendly nod. Idiot, he thought, I’m police. As he passed the abbey he met a group of Benedictine monks. He recognised one of them, Joseph Bauer. They said he was a complete nutter. Apparently he listened to music on his iPod while celebrating mass. He claimed it helped banish his acoustic hallucinations. Even so, two years ago Bauer had played a key role in solving the murder of an old man. Back then Kovacs had not thought him mad at all, quite the opposite in fact. It was only at the funeral that he had behaved a little oddly.
Kovacs crossed the triangular Rathausplatz and walked down the short avenue of chestnut trees that led off it. Then he took the turning towards the lake. Crates of cherry tomatoes and heads of lettuce were being unloaded outside the supermarket. Yesterday’s menu at La Piccola Cucina had included sea bass on a bed of rosemary potatoes and lamb ravioli; it was written on the board by the entrance. Hunger. He wondered whether it was his turn to bring breakfast. No, it was not.
*
When he opened the door to the commissariat he was met by the smell of coffee. “Want one?” Eleonore Bitterle’s voice. “Please.” He went into his office, slipped off his jacket and took his notepad from the desk. Always the same routine, he thought, every day, like an obsessive old man. He perched on the windowsill and started to think. He would normally use this time before the morning meeting to organise himself and decide what was important and what was not. In the new housing development in north Furth, two flats had been burgled and cleared out, right in the middle of the morning. The usual things had gone: jewellery, watches, a laptop, some cash. The only odd thing to have disappeared was a collection of model cars from the fifties. The burglars had opened the door without making a scratch. At the station there had been a second incidence of a man asking some schoolgirls whether he could photograph them naked. It would only take half an hour and he would pay them 50 euro. Staying calm, the girls had taken out their mobiles, and the man had run off. He was shortish, stout, middle-aged and wore green-rimmed glasses – the girls had given a precise description. And finally there was the Florian Weghaupt business. The young builder’s apprentice had fallen sixty metres from scaffolding while carrying out insulation work on the facade of the Neptun insurance company offices. He had struck the edge of the pavement and died on impact. A passer-by had claimed that the man toppled over the railing with his arms stretched out in front of him, shouting something; she was quite sure she’d seen a second person standing right behind him before he fell. This contradicted the statement given by Weghaupt’s two colleagues, who said that all three men were busy lagging and filling on different levels; each man had been allocated his own floor and nobody was near anybody else.
“There you go.” Eleonore Bitterle put a cup of coffee in front of him, black with a touch of sugar. “You should read your e-mails today, just for once,” she added. Kovacs looked up from his notepad. “How far has George got with the Weghaupt case?” he asked. “No idea,” she said. “He flew to Berlin yesterday evening; you ought to know that.” It’s true, Kovacs thought, I really am going senile. About a year ago George Demski had joined an international working group to combat child pornography. He had been summoned to Berlin because of a meta-analysis he had produced of criminal psychological studies on biographies of abusers. The article, which he had published in a sociology journal, was the by-product of a correspondence course that he had been doing for years at a Belgian university. Whenever he was asked what, in fact, he was studying, he would say “everything”, and if anybody tried to delve a little deeper, he would scowl. While Demski was committed and brilliant at his job, he had of late increasingly been neglecting his day-to-day work “I’ll give him a call,” Kovacs said. “Good luck,” Bitterle replied. Arms crossed, she was standing in the doorway, lanky and gaunt, her grey hair in a bun. She suffered most from Demski’s absence. He had been her partner, her alter ego, especially after her husband’s death when she had more or less cut off contact with other people. The two of them were known as Maigret and Mrs Brain, he on account of his French mother, she because of her analytical mind. Now he was in Berlin and she was lonely.
“What was that about e-mails?”
“Read them, please.”
“Why?”
“My God!” She rolled her eyes. It was to do with Stephan Szigeti, she said.
“The plastics man?”
“Yes, him.” Istvan Szigeti had come to Austria from Hungary in his mother’s belly
, an inter-uterine immigrant, as he was wont to say. He was born and grew up in Vienna, studied petrochemistry, and worked for several years as a university assistant with polyhalogenated polymers. Finally, after an argument with the head of his institute at the university, he left Vienna and rented an empty warehouse in Furth’s industrial estate. Nothing happened for a while, then he brought in machines on an ancient juggernaut – where from, nobody knew – employed a handful of labourers, and after a few months started manufacturing petrol canisters. The firm now employed one hundred and eighty people and was producing all sorts of plastic containers, from tiny bottles for eye-drops to oil tanks. Whatever people had to say about a rags-to-riches story, he was a successful man, and nobody held it against him that when he started the company he changed his name from Istvan to Stephan with a “ph”.
The Mattress House: A Kovacs and Horn Investigation (Kovacs & Horn 2) Page 4