He took a look at his schedule. Visits, therapy meeting, two outpatients. Unremarkable and straightforward. Something was missing. He had no idea what it was.
*
They went to the end of the ward. Before turning right into the first room, they paused by the long corridor window and looked out over the river and the town. “‘One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest’,” Raimund said. “Pardon?” Christina asked, and he said that just then it felt as if they were all in the film, a group of madmen who walk along to the end of a corridor where they stand in silence by a pane of bulletproof glass, staring at the clouds. Christina looked up at the ceiling. Raimund said she could roll her eyes as much as she liked, but it would not change the fact that in this film it was the ward sister who was really the evil one, and Herbert tapped his forehead.
“Are you going to cope?” Horn asked, grasping the door handle. Raimund cast him a blank look.
“With what?”
“In there’s a young lady who’s waiting for you to lose your cool.”
Raimund attempted a smile. If he, Horn, meant that thing with the Internet, he needn’t worry, he was enough of a professional. “Do you want to talk about it?” Horn asked. Raimund shook his head. “Talking is silver,” he said.
Sabrina was sitting on the bed with her knees up, listening to music. “Where’s your room-mate?” Horn asked. The girl turned away without saying a word. “Fine, forget it,” Horn said, making to go back out again.
“I sent her to do some shopping.” She pulled out one of her white earphones.
“Shopping?”
“Razor blades and painkillers.”
She looks like she could be Isabelle Huppert’s daughter, Horn thought, red-haired with wild freckles. “Painkillers?” he asked. “Yes. It hurts when you cut yourself, you know.” She had never been given any decent painkillers by doctors and nurses, and in any case she got fed up with having to beg for them the whole time. “What are you listening to?” Horn asked. “My music,” she said, stretching out on the bed and closing her eyes. Horn could see Christina clenching her fist beside him. “Any responses to your photos yet?” he asked. Sabrina did not reply. “Some of them are out of focus,” Raimund said. The girl’s arm twitched briefly.
“And the composition’s poor.”
He’s losing it, Horn thought, but before he could react Wittmann had grabbed Raimund’s shirt and dragged him out of the room. Sabrina lay there, straight-faced. Horn asked whether she could tolerate the antipsychotic she had been prescribed a few days ago, and whether she still didn’t want her parents to visit. There was no answer. “You look like you could be Isabelle Huppert’s daughter,” he said. Then he left the room.
Leonie Wittmann was leaning against the wall and tapping her head with her fingertips. “What did you do with Raimund?” Horn asked. “Sent him out for a smoke,” she said. “We’ve got to watch out.”
“Watch out? For what?”
In her opinion it was a classic key–lock situation. Raimund hated Sabrina, but at the same time he had fallen head over heels in love with her, and the girl could sense this in every pore. “We’ve got to keep him away from her,” she said. “He loses it in seconds.” Horn nodded and thought about how Raimund had been full of both rage and lust when insisting he was a professional. It’s true what that little cow put up on the web, he thought, it’s one hundred per cent true. And he reflected that there were some things which turned you on, whether you wanted them to or not. This was true for Raimund, for Lisbeth Schalk, for himself and, who knows, even for Wittmann.
“Who’s doing her therapy?” Horn asked. “I am,” said Wittmann with a crooked smile. “Who else?”
“Indeed, who else? But why you?”
“She leaves me cold. That’s why.”
Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. Horn thought. Four times a week she picks up all the rage, despair and malice that this wreck of a creature offloads, a sort of acid-resistant dustbin. On Wednesdays she drives along Waschstraße and, for a while, she is back to her usual self: pale, blonde and clean. There are times when I’d like to hug her, Horn thought, very tight, to find out what she smells like, and sometimes I’d like to run the palm of my hand down her back and over her bum. Leonie Wittmann looked at him with her usual hint of scepticism, but this time he had not been thinking aloud.
The sunshine made no difference – there were moments when Horn knew exactly why he couldn’t stand junkies. Fehring was sitting beside a packed bag on his bed, beaming. He’d done it this time, he said, he just knew it. He felt like a brand-new person. His girlfriend had picked up on it yesterday. He was suddenly giving off this strength that had never been there before, she’d said, something really powerful, a sort of godlike energy. Life was a series of episodes, he said, good and bad, and this time he was putting a bad one behind him. I’ll get a mirror so he can see the godlike power he gives off, Horn thought, from his spidery fingers, from his grim set of teeth and from those sad eyes that dart around in their sockets like a pair of tadpoles.
“We too,” Herbert said from right behind him. “We’re putting a bad episode behind us, too.”
Fehring paused and smiled sheepishly. “What do you mean?”
“You know precisely what I mean,” Herbert said. “You’ve been dealing your stuff in here, haven’t you?”
Fehring leaped up and eyeballed Herbert. “Who says?”
“Your clients. Several of them.”
“Prove it!”
Herbert pointed to Fehring’s bag. “Can’t. The vendor’s tray is bound to be empty.” “Exactly,” Fehring hissed. “You can’t prove anything, you Nazi!” “For you, I’d happily be one. Goodbye, Herr Fehring,” Herbert said, leaving the room. Horn suddenly remembered what Sabrina had said about painkillers, and he wondered just how much he was kept abreast of what went on in the department.
Fehring was standing with his arms raised. Let them search him, his luggage, his clothes, he had nothing on him, not a speck, and he was absolutely furious about the allegation that nurse had just made. They knew damn well that he had never brought anything in, and when he said never, he meant it. “Is someone collecting you?” Horn asked. Yes, Fehring said, his girlfriend would be there any minute. Horn offered him his hand. I’d be delighted if I never saw him again, he thought, and when I say never, I mean it.
Friedrich Helm, the manic–depressive court usher was visibly recovering from his lithium overdose and, if the latest laboratory tests were to be trusted, he would not suffer any damage to his kidneys. Frau Hrstic and Frau Steininger were accusing each other of stealing the newspaper, as they did every day. Frau Hrstic called Frau Steininger “Anna”, which was correct. The latter denied it was her name. A new development in their relationship. Christina was wearing her fierce ward-sister’s expression during the rounds, so nobody dared crack any Alzheimer’s jokes. Erika Ressel, the sociophobic florist with a proclivity for esotericism, said she was making amazing progress with her programme of exposure to the outside world. Recently she had even been to La Piccola Cucina, had sat in the company of strangers, and eaten a cassata. A cassata? Horn asked, and Frau Ressel said yes, a cassata. Frau Schalk had ordered a lemon ice cream with prosecco and mint, to celebrate the first warm day of spring. Lisbeth Schalk turned red, and luckily nobody came out with any comments about drinking prosecco on duty, not even Herbert.
“Do you want to take a look at Marcus, even though he’s asleep?” Wittmann asked by the door that led to the secure area. Horn nodded. There are few things more comforting than seeing someone sleeping who’s tried to commit suicide, he said, and Hrachovec said he thought so too.
The young man was lying in bed, slim, dark-haired, and with a sparse, soft beard. Rope marks were visible as purple, finger-width stripes across the front of his neck. “He looks like a young Dustin Hoffmann,” Raimund said softly. Horn ran it over in his mind, but could not think of a single film with the young Dustin Hoffmann. “‘The Graduate’,” Raimund said, grin
ning. Nerd, Horn thought, the key thing is that he doesn’t look like Tobias, the key thing is that someone who tries to hang himself doesn’t look like either of my sons. “Who’s the woman?” Hrachovec asked. Horn did not grasp it straight away. “Which woman?” “Anne Bancroft,” Raimund said, “the seductress with the wide mouth.” Leonie Witt-mann cast him a poisonous look. He did not appear to notice.
A black leather jacket with a studded collar was hanging over the chair, a guitar case leaning up against it. “Did he have this when he was admitted?” Horn asked. No, Christina said, a friend of his delivered it to the ward early this morning. The boy turned up out of the blue, uncombed hair, bright-green tracksuit top, put down the case and said it should be with Marcus, end of story; he, by the way, was the drummer. “The what?” Hrachovec asked. “They play in a band,” Herbert said. He was trying to open the case and having trouble with the clasps. After a while the lid flipped open, offering a view of a gleaming, reddish-brown electric guitar. Awestruck, Herbert took a step back. A Dark Fire, he said, the latest Gibson model, a piece of electric magic and, as everyone could see, just beautiful. Raimund plucked one of the strings. “So would you please explain to me why someone who almost killed himself has a guitar next to his bed?” he asked. “Because it’s all he’s got,” Herbert said, grabbing Raimund’s forearm. “All he’s got – do you understand?” He must play himself, Horn thought, or he used to play, in a band maybe, when he was twenty-one. This powerful, awkward man who mucks around with toy rabbits was suddenly fired with a passion he had never exhibited before. Horn thought of how Irene sometimes talked about her cello, with an affection and intimacy that was never evident elsewhere. It always made him feel an outsider and terribly distant, as if her dark Neapolitan instrument was her sole possession, as if there were nothing else in the world, not him, not Tobias, and certainly not Michael.
*
Two hours later Herbert had assumed the care of the young guitarist, Leonie Wittmann had talked to Raimund about aggression as a projective phenomenon, and more specifically about the need to keep his distance from Sabrina, and in an instant Hrachovec had prepared a discharge letter for Fehring, which stated quite categorically that the patient had yet again brought his stay to a premature end against all medical advice. Horn had first gone to the café with the therapy team, then listened to a tax officer with bacteriophobia talk about how nasty human beings were, increased the man’s dose of anxiolytic, and now he was sitting opposite Dorothea Müllner, a chubby, retired lingerie saleswoman who, as a result of her paraphrenic syndrome, kept hallucinating about men in uniform. There had been two of them this time, she said, one with mutton chops like Emperor Franz Joseph, and a slightly younger one, who had been wearing a black eyepatch. “Like Moshe Dayan,” Horn said. This surprised Frau Müllner. “How did you know that?” Horn shrugged. “Just guessed,” he said. “Wotan wouldn’t have been right.”
“Which Wotan?”
“Exactly.”
They were historical figures, he thought, an emperor and an Israeli defence minister, maybe that was significant. Dorothea Müllner’s husband had run a works canteen and had died some years ago of a haemorrhage of the aorta. He had been a passionate entomologist and had left behind thousands of beetles, all in glass boxes, and all beautifully mounted neatly. There had been days when he had not uttered a single word. Horn was mulling over the fact that he knew nothing else about Dorothea Müllner’s personal history, not even whether she had children. At that moment the telephone rang. Linda, the casualty sister, apologised, she hated to disturb him, but Kurt Frühwald had now called for a third time. He was highly agitated, saying how his wife had had an epileptic fit and that her personality had very suddenly changed, she was completely distraught. For the first time in years he felt unable to cope. He had begged for somebody to call him back immediately. Apart from that, there were a couple of people who had turned up to see him; he knew about it, apparently. Something had eluded him just now, Horn thought, he couldn’t put his finger on it. Two women, one spoke only Hungarian, the other was from the police. A slightly queasy feeling welled in Horn’s stomach. That same instant he was certain that Dorothea Müllner’s father had been a policeman. The two women had a child with them, Linda said. A hot flush suddenly came over him.
*
A warrior with a dragon water bottle, Horn thought when he saw the confused and wary boy. It also occurred to him that he was now forgetting meetings and thinking aloud, and that soon people would be making Alzheimer’s jokes about him. A young woman with chestnut-brown hair politely offered him her hand. She said her name was Sabine Wieck, she was from the criminal police and he needn’t apologise, she could well imagine that he was up to his ears in work. As he hadn’t turned up the previous day they thought it might be better to do it the other way round, so she’d driven here straight away. His secretary had said on the telephone that he was here at the hospital. The boy had enjoyed the drive in the police car, and after all it wasn’t a capital crime they were dealing with here.
A child is beaten by something black, Horn thought, that’s what this is about. I do remember some things.
Ilona was the nanny, the policewoman said, she had only arrived from Budapest the previous evening, because of what had happened. Ilona was short, sturdy and probably in her mid-twenties. “How do they communicate?” Horn asked. “They don’t yet,” the policewoman said, but as Felix had been brought up bilingual, Hungarian should work.
“Do you like her?” Horn asked. “No,” the boy said.
Horn tried using gestures to make the nanny understand that she should go and sit in the casualty waiting room. The young woman smiled. “You want me to wait here?” she said in English. What a fool I am! Horn thought.
On the way to his room he snatched several sideways glances at the policewoman. He became increasingly certain that she was not the woman he had spoken to on the phone. He stopped at the door. “Who’s going to ask the questions?” “You,” she said, “this is your realm. If I think there’s something we haven’t covered at the end I can always say so.”
He began as he always did when dealing with children. He explained what the role of a psychiatrist was, that some things were real and others not, and that people were normally able to separate the two, children as much as adults. He talked about how thought was logical, about the fact that counting was linked to the human body, to the fingers for example, even if teachers didn’t like it, about feelings and the importance of having friends. Finally he talked about injuries, physical and emotional, about fear and threats and about what it was like when somebody couldn’t stop feeling sad. The boy sat opposite him, looking over his left shoulder at the wall behind, and rolling the silver water bottle with the dragon on it back and forth. When Horn asked him if he had understood everything, he nodded. “I’ve got lots of friends,” he said.
“Lots?” Horn asked. “What are their names?”
The boy shrugged.
“They have names, don’t they?”
“Andreas.”
“Who else?”
Nothing. I’d like there to be an Iris, for instance, Horn thought, and a Maximilian, and for Andreas to have a new PlayStation and play “World of Warcraft” with his brother sometimes, even though the parents might not be so keen. I’d like him to tell me all this and yet what I see is him sitting there with the stubbornness of a seven-year-old, and I know that he’s not going to say a lot.
“What’s black?” he asked. For a second the boy looked slightly confused. After a while he tapped the dragon with his fingertip. “That.”
“That?”
“Yes.”
With a barb-tailed dragon at their side, every seven-year-old becomes invincible, Horn thought. He imagined telling this to Leonie Wittmann and how she would laugh, briefly revealing her large incisors. When he was asked what else was black, the boy thought for a while and then said: Batman, night-time and the Maybach. “The what?” Horn asked.
�
�The Maybach, it’s huge, with calf’s leather, real wood and two tellies, one in the front and one in the back.”
“With tellies?”
“Yes. The one in the back comes out of the floor when you press a button.”
“And what do you watch on this telly?”
Nothing, the boy said, nothing at all, although you can even watch D.V.D.s on it. Nothing? The Maybach was only for the business. Only for the business! The boy stressed every word. A car, Horn thought, a make I’ve never heard of. And you could eat and drink in it, there were fold-out tables, bottle holders and a little cutlery drawer. In my Volvo there are four handles for winding down the windows, Horn thought, and if you go for a while without airing it, it smells of sweaty feet.
The Mattress House: A Kovacs and Horn Investigation (Kovacs & Horn 2) Page 7