Brenner and God

by Wolf Haas

  “Mine calls all day, too,” the thin one announced, loudly enough for the gas station attendant to hear it, too, from where he was putting away a stack of frozen Napoli pizzas in the refrigerated cases. “I don’t know what it is with women.”

  Herr Simon took advantage of the gas station attendant’s brief glance over to point to his empty cup. And the gas station attendant gave a nod as if to say: I’ll just quickly put away the pizza boxes so that they don’t start thawing, and then I’ll bring you another espresso.

  “That they have to have their beaks flapping all day long,” the thin one said.

  “Tee tee tee tee tee tee tee!” the beer belly said in a high-pitched voice and made a motion like a bird’s beak with his chubby little left hand, a babbling goose, as it were.

  “Not picking up’s the only thing that helps sometimes,” the thin one said. “Right, Milan?”

  “Tee tee tee tee tee tee tee!” went the beer belly. I don’t know why the beer belly had such a high-pitched voice, presumably the female hormones in hops, and if you’re a man then you get breasts and a high-pitched voice, but what would be interesting is whether that’s true for nonalcoholic beer, too.

  As he walked past, Milan said, “Your wife’s always on the phone with her boyfriend. Yugo-lover!”

  The thin one laughed because he didn’t have a wife anyway, so the comment couldn’t really be taken as an insult, and in fact, was even very nice of Milan, who otherwise didn’t give the thin one an answer very often because when you’re a gas station attendant, your head grows weary of your gas station drunks over the course of the day.

  “Tee tee tee tee tee tee tee!” went the belly-talker’s sausage fingers again. It had definitely been fifteen minutes already since Jimi Hendrix last sang, and Herr Simon still didn’t think anything of it. When Milan came with the espresso, the chauffeur asked him, “And your wife? What’s her name?”

  “What’s your wife’s name?” Milan asked, smirking, and passed the question along to the thin one.

  “Angelina Jolie.” The thin guy looked as serious as if he were providing the name of his wife to the emergency room at the hospital.

  “Heidi Klump.” The fat one was quick to introduce his wife, too.

  Herr Simon didn’t laugh, though. “The woman on the surveillance tape,” he pressed Milan. “The red-haired one who shops here every day.”

  “No clue. She lives right over there. I always see her going into that house. But her name, no idea. She often comes in twice a day and buys—”

  What she buys, Herr Simon didn’t catch. But that you can’t criticize him for, because it was drowned out by the forceful shouts and by the loud clattering of the CD rack and the box of lighters and the flashlight special and the lottery ticket dispenser and the keychains, all crashing to the floor.

  He shouldn’t have overlooked the fact that his cell phone had been silent the whole time he’d been in the bathroom. The gas station’s bathroom, picobello, immaculate, that never happens—but pay attention, Herr Simon had left his cell phone lying out on the table, didn’t think anything of it and when he came back from the bathroom it wasn’t ringing anymore. So it’s almost his unconsciousness that you have to find fault with. Every human being has secret desires, don’t ask, and it’s possible he just wanted to be caught finally, possible he even wished for it somewhere in the very back of his head, yearned for the fat drunk to seize the opportunity and pick up the phone on a lark while he was in the bathroom.

  Herr Simon wasn’t angry at the gas station drunk for it afterward. On the contrary, he even invited him out after the funeral. He was only mad at himself, and I should add that, for someone who used to be on the police force, there’s reason not to be purely happy in a situation where your cell phone stops pestering you. Because when relentless phone terrorizing has been going on for more than an hour and suddenly comes to a stop, you have to ask yourself why. It’s like how if your spouse stops nagging you, then you know he’s cheating on you. And if the parents of your kidnapped child stop calling, then you know they’ve got you.

  It was only at that moment when the police officer was behind him, grabbing him between the legs in a brutal manner, that Herr Simon realized amid his shriek of pain that he hadn’t understood the officer’s question correctly, even though he had yelled it into his ear: “Where have you got the kid?”

  I tell you, though, at that second Peinhaupt wasn’t exactly in prime condition to receive an immediate answer. No, he had a scandal to defuse that his two colleagues—who were securing the escape routes, Zand, Erich the gas station entrance and Sykora the back exit—had surprised him with on the sterilization table that fateful morning. After the creepy phone call with the gas station drunk, the clinic director’s panic became Peinhaupt’s chance at redemption, of course. And so maybe you grab on all the more doggedly, even though you don’t realize yet that you’re standing right behind the biggest case of your life.

  CHAPTER 6

  It belongs to the less sympathetic side of human beings that the anger felt toward one person should get taken out on another. You kick over your beer bottle because you got a sausage that’s more casing than meat. You yell at your wife because your mistress asked a stupid question. Or you blame the detective because the child entrusted to you got kidnapped from your car.

  As an ex-cop himself, Herr Simon had to know that Peinhaupt was only doing his job. Peinhaupt had to whether he wanted to or not. Sure, he was a little over zealous with the interrogation, that’s obvious. After the disgrace in the operating room, of course, two-hundred-percent bull, don’t even ask. He snapped the case right up, and every single word out of Peinhaupt had a harshness and a consequence, as if it were shooting straight from his intact spermatic cord at the last possible second, i.e., the empire was fighting back.

  It was driving Herr Simon crazy, how much time Peinhaupt was squandering by using the fact that he hadn’t called sooner against him. Because—old chestnut—everything in the world would only take half as long, all work would go three times as fast, if there wasn’t always a man needing to prove that he was one. Just look at Peinhaupt. With the energy he spent shaking down the chauffeur, he could have sired ten new Helenas. But the one who this was all about, he’d lost sight of a little.

  At least that’s how it came across to Herr Simon. Because, fourth round of questioning already—hourlong interrogation after the arrest, the interrogation last night, the interrogation this morning, and now, instead of lunch, more grilling. As an ex-cop, of course, he waas coming from the know-it-all’s point of view—law of nature, as it were. And to be perfectly honest, he even criticized the police for wasting their time with him instead of going after the kidnappers, but he wasn’t exactly helping matters, either, with his stubborn insistence that the interrogation get its show on the road and fast. Because when a person has a guilty conscience, most of the time he just makes everything worse. So, out of a guilty conscience—and sheer man-versus-man—Herr Simon gave the longest speech of his life.

  “You’ve asked me three times now whether I locked the car, and I’ve told you three times, yes, locked. And before you fritter away any more time, I’ll go ahead and say it a fourth time: the car was locked! Not open! Closed! I learned in the police academy, too, that Verhör comes from verhören, but …”

  I should explain briefly what all that with the verhören was about. Because, old interrogation trick—act like you mishear, or verhören, the first time. So if somebody says the car was locked, then five minutes later in the interrogation, or Verhör, you act like he said it wasn’t locked. Inside police joke: Verhör comes from verhören. So Herr Simon was offended, of course, that Peinhaupt came at him with that old stunt. He couldn’t have known what Peinhaupt had gone through yesterday, or else maybe he wouldn’t have given such a long speech just now.

  “And now you can ask me five more times,” he—I need to quickly add here—shouted, “whether I noticed anyone following me, and I’ll tell you five
more times, nobody followed me. And you can ask me ten more times why I didn’t gas up the night before, and I’ll tell you ten more times, I don’t know, it was an oversight, there were no bad intentions, just like there are no bad intentions on your end, trotting out pointless questions here for all of eternity, instead of searching for the child. No, you just can’t do any better.”

  “And the car was locked?” Peinhaupt asked blankly and shot him a stupid look, like a man might look at a woman after saying to her for the third time: and you’re completely sure that we’re better off going to my place instead of yours. Even though she’s already told him twice, leave me alone, you jackass.

  Herr Simon wasn’t honestly sure himself whether the car—before he locked and unlocked it a thousand times—had been locked in the first place. But, locked or unlocked, that makes about as much of a difference to a criminal as a bullet entertaining the question of which SPF sunscreen you’ve got on as it bores its way into your forehead.

  “Leave me alone, you jackass,” he answered Peinhaupt.

  Because he knew perfectly well that for Peinhaupt it wasn’t about whether the car was locked. That much he still remembered from his own police days, how you’d make a big deal out of something insignificant for hours, and then slip in the crucial question completely off the cuff. Not unlike death, which, more often than not, will pick you up for skin cancer on account of an old sunburn, and so you see once again how sunscreen’s more important than ducking bullets your whole life.

  Now, what was it that Peinhaupt was going to casually ask the suspicious chauffeur? How well he knew Knoll, of course. But there was no way of posing the question of the pro-life boss himself without making everything immediately obvious. How often Herr Simon had seen Knoll. Whether he’d ever spoken with him. What he made of the threats that Knoll had issued against the Frau Doctor.

  “Why didn’t you just ask me that from the beginning?” Herr Simon yelled. I have to say, I hardly recognize him like this. It’s my suspicion that the pills were now to blame for his sudden aggression. “Why have you been screwing around here this whole time with whether I saw someone in the rearview mirror or whether the car was locked?”

  “Or why you didn’t call us right away.”

  “Or why I didn’t call you right away. Maybe I was in shock, or maybe—”

  “Maybe you were in cahoots with Knoll.”

  “If you’re so certain that Knoll’s behind it, why don’t you just go pick up the kid from him?”

  The detective made a dopey face, as if to say, like we’re going to tell you of all people what we’re doing with Knoll right now.

  “Well now, someone’s in an awful hurry all of the sudden, Herr Simon.”

  “Where would I know Knoll from? You know for a fact that Knoll doesn’t stand there himself in front of the abortion clinic.”

  He was right on that account, of course. Knoll didn’t personally stand in the street and try to prevent patients from entering the clinic with his own hands. You don’t ever do something like that yourself! A bank director like Reinhard doesn’t personally carry the TV out of the house when someone defaults on a loan, either. Knoll had enough church-types to stand in front of the clinic for him all day with rapt expressions on their faces and holding photos of embryos up in the air with the word “Murder” written across them.

  “Just how am I, of all people, supposed to have kidnapped Helena?”

  “Egypt’s third president was assassinated by his own bodyguard.”

  “I wasn’t hired to be a bodyguard. I was hired to be a driver!”

  Peinhaupt reached for the telephone and called up front to see whether the Frau Doctor was in the building. That sent Herr Simon into a panic—you’d have thought Peinhaupt had called in the bloodhounds.

  “I’m just a driver,” he said, so sheepishly that he held himself in contempt.

  “The Frau Doctor told us she and her husband selected you from a large number of candidates because of your police background.”

  “So what?”

  “So what. So that’s exactly why you were more than just a driver, Herr Simon. Do you think, with the threat being as great as it was, that they would have entrusted their child to just any stranger?”

  You should know, back before Herr Simon had been hired, Knoll once said to the Frau Doctor during an argument that she should watch out for her only child so that the good lord doesn’t make her child disappear—like all those children she’d taken away from the good lord.

  “Anti-abortionists don’t kidnap! They’re just poor crazies, slinging their rosaries. The anti-abortionists aren’t anti-children—they’re pro-children!”

  “And the threats from Knoll you simply didn’t take seriously. Maybe you know him so well that you can assess his character that accurately?”

  “He’d be the first kidnapper to announce the kidnapping ahead of time.”

  “Don’t play any dumber than you already are. That’s exactly what’s so funny about it. If a kidnapper wants to extort money, then naturally he’s not going to announce it beforehand. But if he has a higher purpose, that’s something else altogether.”

  “So that’s what you learn at the police academy these days?”

  “As long as the kidnapper doesn’t make contact, then the demand is from Knoll to shut down the clinic, the only lead we’ve got anyway. And it can be assumed that a desperate mother like the Frau Doctor will grasp at any available straw. The longer the kidnapper’s silent, the more weight’s given to Knoll’s old demand. Without even having to send word. And no ransom to be handed over, either. A kidnapping without a neuralgic point, my dear Simon.”

  I have to say, Knoll’s plan wouldn’t have been half bad. First, the casually made threat, without any witnesses in the room, of course, and not too long thereafter, the kidnapping. Because there’s nothing worse for the family than a kidnapping where no demand is made. And nothing worse for the police than a kidnapping where no ransom is handed over. As soon as the Frau Doctor closes the clinic on her own initiative without the kidnapper having to make a single call, the kid will turn back up safe and sound. Coincidence.

  “Then it’s Knoll you’re after and not me. I’ve never seen the man before.”

  “A woman’s waiting outside for you,” Peinhaupt said with a smirk and handed him the protocol to sign.

  But his signature looked like two-year-old Helena had scrawled it for her driver. His hand trembled so much out of fear of her mother that Doctor Parkinson himself would have been proud of Herr Simon.

  CHAPTER 7

  Good news now. It wasn’t the Frau Doctor who was waiting for Herr Simon outside in the hallway. She had enough to deal with, what with her nervous breakdown. Instead, Natalie was sitting out on the bench and looking at him with those serious eyes of hers that Herr Simon had liked from day one. Pay attention: Natalie was the clinic’s psychologist, because a pregnancy’s never terminated without psychological counseling. And it was the psychologist, of all people, who got to experience an unwelcome side effect of the pills in his first week on the job. You should know, the pills made him a little volatile. He’d often be serenity personified, then something small would set him off all over again. Or, he’d let a stupid joke rip that never would’ve even occurred to him before. Just so you understand. Because Natalie was very hurt at the time, even though Herr Simon hadn’t meant anything bad by it. It was just a careless moment when he’d played dumb and pretended like he thought her job was to counsel the embryos: dispensing consolation along the lines of, don’t make a big deal of it, life’s not that popular anyway, rest assured you can do without it, be glad that you can keep flying with the gnats.

  Maybe you’ve already noticed how much he liked Natalie, because men don’t talk like such imbeciles otherwise. Did he get off on the wrong foot with Natalie? Don’t even ask. He tallied it up afterward, and believe it or not, she’d used the word “puberty” three times in one sentence.

  And Herr Simon manage
d to insult her a second time within the same week. But to that I have to say, Natalie was being overly sensitive! Because she didn’t necessarily have to rebuff his compliment—that, in her case, it would have been a pity if she hadn’t been brought into this world—with such a scowl. My god, there will always be people who’ll make you want to say, it wouldn’t have been such a pity if their mothers had thought elsewise, and then for the vast majority, you’d say, it wouldn’t have made a difference one way or another whether they’re here or not—neutral, as it were. But very rarely is there a person who makes you say, it would’ve been an outright shame. See Natalie, with her black curls, with her white teeth, with her green specks in her dark-brown eyes, and with her mouth, which, in a single sentence, used the word “puberty” three times. But if you work in an area like the one Natalie works in, of course you don’t want to hear such a dubious compliment. I can understand Natalie on that. On the other hand, Herr Simon was brand new in the workplace at the time, he had yet to adopt the right conversational tone for the clinic, because—always a particular knowledge set, what you’re allowed to say where and how, and what you’re not allowed to say how and where.

  But despite this minor friction, I don’t wish to say that Natalie didn’t like Herr Simon. Quite the opposite! Although she knew nothing of his police past, she’d felt right away that behind the slightly stiff and straitlaced chauffeur, an entirely different person was hiding. Because you can’t fool a skilled psychologist with the Herr Simon routine when really you’re an old Brenner.

  But it was jinxed for these two, because today they were back on the rocks all over again.