by Wolf Haas
Brenner felt so sorry for her that up until the moment when he got out of the car, he’d been considering whether to betray every shred of common detective sense and tell her that Knoll was dead. And you see, that was exactly the wrong question. Because really he should have been asking himself why her voice changed so suddenly, why she revoked her trust in him when he told her the story about the police academy. If he’d just tugged on these flimsy strings, the entire solution probably would have presented itself, and five people wouldn’t have had to die.
But maybe the time simply wasn’t ripe yet, seventy-four hours after the disappearance. Because one thing you can’t forget: the Zone of Transparency doesn’t tear open until the fifth day, i.e., one hundred hours, at the very earliest.
CHAPTER 15
Between the seventy-fourth and the eighty-eighth hours, Brenner did some first-rate investigative work that was never fully appreciated afterward. It all got overshadowed by the next day’s madness. Obviously, with a development like this, the detail work gets lost. The carpenter can’t bid personal farewell to every wood shaving with a thank-you speech for the top-notch collaboration, and once a crime really gets escalating, when a murder is paid a visit by its little children, the subsequent murders, then a detective can’t be praised for everything that he did right.
But because everyone glossed right over it, I’d like to at least touch on it briefly. I have to say, it was brilliant how Brenner spearheaded the search for the Yugo-girl. For Sunny. He achieved peak detective form there, and there’s only one thing to be said: hats off.
I don’t get it either. It’s a sign of our times that nobody properly appreciates these things anymore. The clean detective work, the police procedural, the craftsman’s skill, none of it has any worth today. Even Brenner himself didn’t think anything of it, or didn’t look back proudly on it later. Because it is what it is, and what it is is his job. And I can understand it somehow, too, how he didn’t pat himself on the back; how, even though he was exhausted from his encounter with the Frau Doctor, he still managed to drum up the only people who could get him in the door of the Yugo-scene. And how he tracked down Milan, freshly fired from the gas station, home in front of the TV, and sent him through the Yugo-disco circuit with Sunny’s photo. Milan was thrilled about his new assignment. The only touchy subject was when Brenner asked whether he could maybe get hold of a gun. Brenner hadn’t meant any offense, along the lines of, anyone who sells beer out the backdoor can get hold of a gun, too. He just didn’t feel completely at ease anymore since he’d discovered Knoll. But that was also the only mistake he made that day, everything else first-rate.
For Brenner, things were going exactly like they would for everyone else afterward, which is a way of saying, what happened to him would radiate out to everyone else that night. But we haven’t gotten nearly that far yet. Because seventy-seven hours after Helena’s disappearance he hired Milan, and seventy-eight hours after Helena’s disappearance he already had two liters of weak Schrebergarten coffee in his stomach, half a kilo of powdered sugar in his blood, and twenty Schrebergarten scandals in his thick skull. Among them, though, was the explanation for why Knoll had bought the cottage. Believe it or not, his attorney had filed a neighbor’s injunction against the MegaLand project—in other words, immediate halt to the construction.
Eighty hours after Helena’s disappearance, Brenner picked up pills for his headache at the drugstore, and as soon as they started working a little, not quite eighty-one hours after Helena’s disappearance, he called Kressdorf and disguised his voice, posing as a journalist who was hoping to find something out about MegaLand’s halted construction. Interesting, though: Kressdorf wasn’t impressed one bit and was even quite confident that the injunction wouldn’t hold for long.
He didn’t get anything more out of Kressdorf, and I have to say, it’s for the best. Because otherwise maybe Brenner wouldn’t have wrung from his frustration the courage to call Natalie, too. And he really did learn something from Natalie. Or better put, from the truth written in flames. But for now, pay attention.
Eighty-three hours after Helena’s disappearance, Brenner persuaded Natalie to meet him. At first she was rather rigid and resolute in her claim that she couldn’t explain why the Frau Doctor would have Congressman Stachl’s telephone number, either. Of course, there was no reason why she should be able to explain it, that’s true enough. But why would Natalie get so red in the face while saying so, like a shy girl who was telling a lie for the first time in her life?
“The Frau Doctor came to me today,” Brenner said, “even though she shouldn’t have, if it’s a police matter.”
As he spoke, her rosiness faded again but only from her face. Because the red spots on her neck darkened all the more. It looked to Brenner as if the truth which hadn’t escaped Natalie’s lips was searching her neck for an emergency exit.
“She talked to me for hours”—he wasn’t cutting Natalie any slack—“but I sensed that, at the last second, she didn’t trust me with the secret she’d actually come to me with.”
The red flames spread from her collarbone to her jaw now, as if the intrepidly silent Natalie were hastening her body to write the truth in flames on her neck so that she wouldn’t be forced to say it aloud. But I always say, a truth written in flames is written in haste. But you’ve got to be able to read it right. And just between us, Brenner had no grand gift for language. You could write something out for him in flames, and he wouldn’t understand it. He just stared at it long enough until Natalie took it upon herself to spell it out for him. Because, “written in flames,” what’s that mean? Written in blood, you’d have to say. After all, it was the blood that pushed itself to the surface of her neck, and blood was exactly what this story was about, when she finally came out with it. But pay attention now, because this gets interesting.
Natalie told him that Kressdorf’s and his daughter’s blood types don’t match. My dear swan, the heat was even rising to Brenner’s head now. Adrenaline surge: understatement.
“I don’t understand why she hasn’t told the police,” Natalie erupted. “If it were a matter of my daughter’s life and death, I’d tell them everything! They tried artificial insemination for years because Kressdorf’s sperm quality wasn’t good. We learned about it at the clinic. And then all of a sudden she was pregnant!”
“Right around the time Congressman Stachl started showing up around the clinic?”
“Why are you asking me, if you already know?”
“And Kressdorf? Does he know?”
Natalie shook her head. “The Frau Doctor would often cry on my shoulder back then because she was so done in by the hormone treatments. She had eight failed attempts altogether. Do you know what that means for a woman? And then suddenly she was pregnant.”
“And you suspected the truth from the start.”
“No, mostly it just surprised me. I didn’t suspect anything at all. I was honestly happy for her. And the thought never even would’ve occurred to me, if our receptionist wasn’t always coming up with a new diet every few months.”
“The blood-type diet.”
You’re surprised that Brenner knew about this fad. Simple explanation: the receptionist had tried to convert him to the blood-type diet his very first week on the job. He didn’t tell Natalie this now, though, because he didn’t want to interrupt her explanation.
“Our receptionist asked each of us what blood type we were. For a few weeks there, until she came up with the next diet, everyone knew each other’s blood types. The Frau Doctor was A, and her husband A, too. But, no one asked which blood type Helena was. I’d noticed back when she was born, though, that she was the same as me. But a child can’t be type B if both parents are A.”
“I don’t know offhand which blood type I am,” Brenner said, and maybe you can tell from his pointless comment that the story was starting to get on his nerves.
And maybe, too, he wanted to spare Natalie from having to say, “I can never fo
rgive myself for letting it slip to the receptionist. I impressed upon her that she could not, under any circumstances, tell anyone else, but you know how that is. I have no idea how many people know about it now.”
“Knoll, anyway.”
Interesting, though: Natalie turned an entirely different shade of red now than before. And that’s why I say the red spots on her neck were really meant as a message from Natalie’s unconscious. What else are you supposed to do when you’re the unconscious? You can’t talk out loud, as Natalie now did when she asked Brenner, “Do you think it has something to do with the kidnapping?”
“No clue.”
And I’ve got to say, Brenner had seldom been so right. Within just a few hours he would become all too conscious of just what little clue he truly had at that moment.
But for now, pay attention.
CHAPTER 16
These days, everybody knows the standard links between sex life and human life, where it’s typically thought that the one arises from having done the other—causal relationship, as it were. Not just causal, but a temporal relationship, too, because the one’s always nine months before the other, or maybe even eight or seven months. A pro-lifer would even say, a single day after the former and you’ve already got the latter. But nobody would dispute that, strictly speaking, the one’s always got to come before the other. No one would claim that a special exception can be made and it can happen the other way around—credit at the sperm bank, as it were—and you’ve had your kid two, three years already before you find a five-minute window in your planner to quickly do the sex part for your progeny who’s already making prettier drawings than the other children in kindergarten.
You see, they haven’t invented that yet. It’s been going on for long enough without any personal contact—i.e., porno mag and a reagent cup—that they have it well in hand these days, but even that doesn’t work the other way around, where you’ve already been on vacation with the kid twice when one day the collection letter comes that you’re finally supposed to sire the child. No, everything’s got to wait its turn: first beget, then have.
Just so you understand why Brenner was so shaken up when suddenly it did get reversed. Because what he was about to experience on this night, no man before him had ever lived to tell; on that I’ll stick my hand in the fire.
Watch closely: around one in the morning, after the South Tyrolean had placed another plate of the world’s best midnight spaghetti on the table, and after Brenner had fallen deeply and soundly asleep on a full belly and within five seconds was dreaming about some police academy nonsense, the South Tyrolean hopped into bed with him.
I don’t know, there are often different rituals with women—one says this, another says that—and the South Tyrolean belonged strictly to the group that says: with me, not a chance, bed, sex, case closed, and especially not with you. And when, as a man, you completely understand that, when you’re tired yourself and happy to be crawling into a freshly made bed, when you’re already falling asleep, when you’ve possibly already been the best wife to yourself, when you’re blissfully dozing off—that’s the moment she crawls into bed with you, and the rules don’t apply anymore because she’s changed her mind.
And quite energetically in fact, the South Tyrolean. I’ve honestly got to say, she awoke a young Brenner within the old Brenner. But maybe the sudden change of heart wasn’t the South Tyrolean’s doing alone. I could thoroughly imagine it being his fault. Because one thing you can’t forget: since finding his way back onto the detective track again, Brenner was exuding a completely different magnetism.
You’re going to say, by now Brenner’s already put the longest day of his life behind him—he’d looked the Frau Doctor in the eye, he’d called her husband, he’d read off of Natalie’s neck that Stachl was the father of Kressdorf’s kid, he’d ventured into the Schrebergartener’s lair, he’d found Milan and hired him to find Sunny, he’d done more police work in one day than some of his colleagues had in their entire civil service careers—and so he’s allowed to say let me sleep without his honor as a man being at stake. And even if you’ve slept in a guest bed ten times, you’re allowed to turn down even the best hostess, midnight spaghetti or no midnight spaghetti. But no chance of that, because the secret behind her surge of energy and his newly raging detective hormones weren’t having it. Believe it or not, when the South Tyrolean came to him, he didn’t even cry for help; on the contrary, he said to himself, why not, we’re not getting any younger.
Now surely you still recall the trend that was once popular among tennis players where they’d let out a powerful groan with every stroke. At the time, my dear swan, people said, the way tennis players exult over every ball could put thoughts into even the most respectable person’s head. But here we go again with the before and after. Because these things can flip themselves around like desperation on a surveillance video, and all of a sudden now—as the South Tyrolean grew more and more animated—Brenner thought of televised coverage of women’s tennis. And while the South Tyrolean took ever greater delight in her guest, every possible name of tennis players he’d seen on TV ran through his head, the Czechs were good for a while, the one was lesbian, and the other was even named Hantuchova, now he was just thinking about her, about Hantuchova—when all of a sudden the door opened, and eighty-eight hours after her disappearance, Helena stood in the doorway crying.
“Aw, you’re awake, Schatzele!” the South Tyrolean said tenderly and pushed her long red hair back from her face.
Brenner would always remember the faint electric zap as one of her strands of hair left his sweaty neck. Otherwise, complete mental standstill for Brenner. In a situation like this, of course, when you’re lying in bed and had been asleep before, you can easily escape into the hope that you’re dreaming. But for how long? Two, three seconds? After that, Brenner played for time a few seconds more by contemplating whether it wasn’t just alcohol that was forbidden while on the pills but sexuality, too—ergo, side effects, e.g., hallucinations—and he was just imagining that little Helena was standing in the doorway crying, imagining that there were rivulets of tears running down her upset face, as the South Tyrolean said, “Aw, come here, Schatzele. Did you have a bad dream?”
And you see, that’s what I wanted to say. Before they were even halfway done with the sex part, Brenner and the South Tyrolean were already lying in bed like the happiest married couple with their child. And believe it or not, Helena fell asleep on the spot, because there between the South Tyrolean and Herr Simon was as good as anywhere. The bit of sleeping pill that the South Tyrolean had put in her milk before putting her to bed was having a slight effect still. And because I’m talking about milk: I don’t know whether this stood out to you, but it was definitely taunting Brenner now that he’d overlooked it. The South Tyrolean had explicitly told him that she didn’t drink milk, she couldn’t digest it, she didn’t have the enzyme, and what did she buy the first time he met her at the gas station? A liter of milk! He’d wondered about the newspaper that she bought but didn’t read. But the milk he’d let slip right past. And so you see how often we very nearly miss things in life, because you go looking to the newspaper when the interesting news is right there in the milk.
“Well, now you know that I took her,” she said quietly. “But only because you left her sitting there in the car for hours on end. In the heat! If you’d done that to a dog, there’d be a national uprising and a warrant out for your arresht.”
Brenner’s heart was beating with such relief that he didn’t hear what the South Tyrolean was saying at all. He was just amazed that Helena could even sleep when just a few centimeters away, his heart was beating like a baby dinosaur that was about to hatch out of his chest and greet the world. But the beating was so loud and so rhythmic that no such musical dinosaur could exist, Brenner thought. It sounded like it had swallowed Jimi Hendrix’s drummer, Mitch Mitchell, and he was playing “Foxy Lady” in honor of the red-haired woman in bed.
You kn
ow what’s interesting, though? When Brenner really did lose his mind out of fear eleven hours later, he didn’t fully realize it. But, for now, he lay there with a clear mind, watching Helena sleep and thinking to himself, so this is what it’s like when you lose your mind.
The pills probably helped save him from the brink. Because eighty-eight hours after Helena’s disappearance and a few minutes after her reappearance, the pills in him said: these things just happen in life. And as you’ve already noticed, the pills reassured him, the South Tyrolean is a little strange. My god, she took the child. Better than if someone else had taken her. She just borrowed Helena for a few days. “Borrowed” or “born,” they sound so similar that it can’t be that bad. You hear time and time again—the pills floated before his eyes—about women who don’t have children sneaking into maternity wards and snatching newborns. And anything that happens over and over isn’t not a little normal, the pills in Brenner argued. But the dinosaur in his chest said, Here I come! But the pills said, that can’t be a dinosaur, because—too musical, it must be Mitch Mitchell, who, out of thanks that you dedicated the PIN to him, is playing “Foxy Lady” for the South Tyrolean.
You should know, it was the pills that were holding Brenner’s mind together. And he didn’t actually lose his mind. He listened to his heart’s drummer drumming his heartbeat the whole night through and thought about what he should do now. And about why Knoll had landed in the cesspit if he had nothing to do with the kidnapping. How is it all connected, he asked himself, while Mitch Mitchell wouldn’t, wouldn’t quit hammering his foot into Brenner’s chest. He simply didn’t, didn’t get tired, and Brenner couldn’t, couldn’t stop thinking.