by Wolf Haas
So just when his fear had ventured this guess, it also seemed like the vibrations from the braking and accelerating and turning were confirming his suspicion. Or at least not disproving it! And don’t forget how well he knew the route. That could be the traffic light just before the on-ramp to the autobahn, he guessed, it’s always so ill-timed that if you want to make the second light up ahead, you need a rocket launcher. And that could be the off-ramp now, he guessed, when he got slammed against the side of the trunk so roughly that the centrifugal force nearly broke his neck. He hadn’t guessed anything else yet, of course. Namely, how much he’d be wishing in just a few hours that the centrifugal force really had twisted his neck. But no such luck, neck-wise Brenner took after his sturdy grandfather, in other words, his neck held out easily.
Then the car straightened out so fast and clean and suddenly, it was like Brenner was a suitcase in a spaceship being hurtled into the next galaxy. You also have to be careful with blind guesses, though. Under no circumstances may you succumb to the intoxication of a blind guess and adopt an anything-goes stance—from a spaceship to I don’t know what. Instead, always stick with the most probable variant, and you see, here the facts come back into play. Because if they’ve thrown me into a trunk, then I can’t suddenly be lying in a spaceship now. Much more likely: autobahn.
They were on the autobahn so long that Brenner’s perception of the infinite glide and soft ascent made him all the more certain of his prognosis: four-hour drive to Kitzbühel. Your sense of time gets a bit tricky in the dark, of course, and time in the trunk’s always relative. Brenner was sticking to his prognosis now, although they hadn’t been on the road more than two hours according to his sense of time. But his spaceship-trunk was also traveling at an incredible velocity. Which Brenner ascertained from being stuck to the back wall the whole ride. He couldn’t rule out the possibility that the milk and honey were still overpowering him for a few minutes longer.
And one thing you can’t forget. When they exited the autobahn, he got chucked forward so brutally that it was like they were cruising at 250 into a well-cushioned wall. No chance to somehow absorb it, of course, when your hands are bound—in other words, nose and a rib. Because nose- and rib-wise Brenner took after his other grandfather, almost too delicate for his profession. Or then again, maybe not. It’s exactly that kind of delicacy which you need. Brenner owed some important information about the speed they were traveling to his rib and nose—in other words, hellish. And without the rib, without the nose, it’s possible that he would’ve thought it was too soon to be Kitzbühel. But he knew he could calmly cling to his assumption. Or, better put, he had to cling to it. Because you’re not as apt to cling to a guess taken out of fear as you are to one taken out of, let’s say, hope.
And this feels just like the road that runs through the town of Kitzbühel, he thought. His broken rib really didn’t need that pothole before the right-hand turn. And here we go steeply uphill, and those must be the switchbacks, and that’s got to be Schotterstrasse now, and this here—where they’re yanking me out of the trunk so savagely that I’m landing on the street with my broken rib and my broken nose and silencing the birds with my screams of pain, and where I’m polluting the majestic mountain air with my petrified sweat and where my teeth are biting into the sweet mountain grass—must be a place where there’s no one near or far, i.e., in front of the cabin where I last saw Knoll alive. And this would have to be the door, if I’m not mistaken, being unlocked by that panting roughneck with the ghoulish nicotine fingers, that just muffled another scream of pain from my throat.
Look, sometimes you can guess as accurately as a clairvoyant and you can observe as closely as an Apache and the whole bit won’t do you any good. Because if Brenner hadn’t guessed so well, if he’d fooled himself, if he’d fallen prey to an illusion, or expected an apology for his unjust dismissal along the lines of, Kressdorf is flying me to Las Vegas for a surprise concert, and if Brenner was just now figuring out that he’d deceived himself—because in reality he’d just been shipped to Kressdorf’s house in the mountains—then he wouldn’t have been any worse off for it. In fact, he’d be in the same exact god-awful place. Because accurate predictions won’t do you any good when you’re locked in a trunk and can only predict that soon I’ll probably be in an even more hopeless place. And even if you can predict with an almost uncanny clairvoyance that after being freed from the trunk the nicotine fingers will hold a gun to my temple, then you have no real advantage when it really does happen, except that you can be proud of what a good brain you’ve got waiting in your head for that gun.
But people are stubborn in this regard. Even in a hopeless situation, a person will still try to predict what’s going to happen next. Because there’s nothing else to be done. And Brenner, of course, was feverishly doing just that while his life was at its greatest risk—or would you say while his death was at its greatest risk? You see, I don’t know anymore, life at risk or death at risk. Anyway, Brenner was in the middle of it, ninety-five and a half hours after the South Tyrolean stole Helena from his car, i.e., half an hour before the start of the fifth day.
Where exactly they’d locked him up wasn’t difficult to guess, even with his eyes blindfolded. Because you can’t forget the smell of the rabbit pen. The animals weren’t there, of course, Kressdorf only got them on special occasions from their foster family. But the smell—merciless. It was the one thing that even the girls complained about when Bank Director Reinhard kept them behind the glass panel for hours on end before granting them a personal appointment. Congressman Stachl hated this quirk of Reinhard’s because then the girls would smell like the pen, of course, especially their long hair—dreadful. And in a weak moment he’d even spoken with Kressdorf about whether Reinhard just didn’t notice, whether his olfactory nerves were just that bad due to old age, or whether he was just making a point.
You can’t be ungrateful, though, because the nicotine fingers that groped his face and tore off his blindfold weren’t that bad now compared to the smell in the pen. Interesting, though: Brenner felt blinder without the blindfold. Because of the mirrored glass separating the hunters’ den from the animal pen. From the other side you could see into his zone perfectly, but from the inside you couldn’t see who was behind the glass, you could only see yourself. Reinhard liked it that way, that he could see the girls but they couldn’t see him.
When you feel blind, your sense of smell intensifies, of course. And even Mr. Nicorette’s sense of smell might have been slowly returning to him in his withdrawal period. Because he told his freckled friend now that he badly needed to get out into the fresh air, he was suffocating in here.
But the foreman shook his head and pointed outside, where the sound of a car being parked could be heard. “There’s no time for that now. Just hurry up with him, then you can get some fresh air,” he said and then left the two of them there in the pen together. Nicorette looked offended and stuck his white plastic pipe back into his mouth. And it was this piddly little straw, of all things, that terrified Brenner. Because an interrogator’s cigarette would have been the protocol. Offer a cigarette, blow smoke in the face, ever see a match burn twice, and so on, all common cruelties, but the withdrawal pipe gave the thug a human quality, and a human quality is always life threatening.
“Did you know that decades of smoking reduces sperm count?” Brenner said. Because he thought he absolutely had to cover up how weak he was feeling.
The security guard from the construction site replied in his own way, i.e., with an attempt at ruining Brenner’s sperm count for good. But the poor watchdog didn’t have that much air left in him, because the kick sent sweat running down his forehead—you’d have thought it hurt him more than Brenner—and it was only after sucking on his straw a few more times that he’d pumped himself back up. He used his gangster patter on Brenner, he could find out fast or slow, nice or rough, however he liked—but anyway, what he was interested in: “Where’s Helene?”
“What’s that, Herr Simon? Cat got your tongue? Where’ve you got Helene?”
It struck Brenner that he pronounced her name about as wrong as the South Tyrolean and her Marlbooro. And believe it or not, that reminded him of the only book that his grandparents had owned, or better yet, of a story in the four-inch thick Pious Helene by Wilhelm Busch. That’s how the tattooed ox pronounced her name, like Pious Helene. No, that’s not true, his grandparents had two books, the Wilhelm Busch and The Doctor Pays a House Call. And very good pictures in both! But around a certain age he stumbled upon The Doctor’s hiding place, and Pious Helene became boring to him, so from that point on, only The Doctor, don’t even ask.
Brenner criticized the tattooed ox now, but not for pronouncing “Helena” like Pious Helene. He acted like it didn’t bother him, because whoever has the gun gets to decide on matters of taste, that’s true the world over. Instead, Brenner answered, “You know for a fact I’m the first person who’d like to know where the girl is.”
“You’re the first person who’d like to know? Before her parents, even, or what? Are you the one suffering here or what?”
“No. The first aside from her parents, of course.”
Yup, you see here, the construction-site ox was just too stupid, because otherwise maybe he would’ve been able to detect from his hasty correction that Brenner was lying. But fine, analysis wasn’t his job anyway. He was just in charge of the questions. For the analysis, that’s what the gentlemen behind the glass were for. Don’t forget the baby monitor that Kressdorf would sometimes switch on, much to Bank Director Reinhard’s delight. He always liked listening to the girls babbling over it, background music, as it were, while he and Congressman Stachl negotiated life’s serious matters. Brenner, of course, was thinking only of the gentlemen behind the screen now, as the tattooed ox sucked the next question out of his little straw. “If you don’t want to say where Helene is—”
“Helena,”—now Brenner did interrupt him—“her name is Helena, and I don’t know where she is.”
“—then maybe you’d like to tell us where your friend Knoll is.”
Ah, of course. Knoll. For the first time Brenner saw that he might have a chance to walk away from all of this with his life. He wasn’t going to tell them where Helena was, in order to protect the South Tyrolean. He hadn’t given any thought yet to his own survival. But now all of a sudden he saw a chance for Knoll to save him again.
He was focused so intently on the room behind the glass that it almost seemed like he could see how the Bank Director and the Construction Lion and the Congressman were sitting and observing him. But not just him; they must have been observing each other, too. He realized now that at least one of them didn’t know anything about Knoll in the cesspit, or else they wouldn’t be letting the ox ask such stupid questions.
“Why should I know where Knoll is?”
“Because maybe you were the last person he was seen with. Nothing goes unnoticed in a Schrebergarten, you should really know better.”
“I followed Knoll there because I thought he would lead me to Helena.”
After half a ton of ersatz nicotine, the tattooed ox found his tongue again. “And him acquiring Neighbor’s Rights by purchasing that Schrebergarten dump, you didn’t know anything about that either of course. And that his lawyer’s already obtained a halt to the construction.”
“I don’t believe this!”
“What don’t you believe?”
“That you care more about your fucking construction site than you do about the girl!”
The giant infant had nothing to say to that, but curiously sucked a new question out of his white plastic teat. “So why are you running after Sunny, if you have nothing to do with the video?”
“So why did you go and kill Milan because of it?”
Brenner thought this might be an interesting bit of news for one or another of the fine gentlemen on the other side of the glass, too. And truly the watchdog couldn’t bring himself to answer it. The foreman stormed in, his mouth contracted so bitterly that it was smaller than his largest freckle.
“That was an occupational accident. Self-defense!” the talking freckle said. “The idiot pulled his toy gun. It’s insane that those exact replicas aren’t illegal!”
“Maybe it’s the real ones that should be kept out of your hands and the kids should be allowed to have their fun.”
“Well, it’s your fault you picked such an amateur for this kind of business. But we won’t hold it against you. Give us the video, and you can go home.”
“I have several videos,” Brenner said. “But no VCR. I don’t want to throw them away, either. They’re still memories, even if I can’t play them anymore.”
“You know damn well we’re not talking about a VHS cassette!” the tattooed ox shouted.
“A movie with Julia Roberts. A woman left it at my place when she moved back in with her husband.”
The foreman whispered something into his security boss’s ear, but Brenner simply kept talking.
“And then I’ve got another one with the 1976 men’s Olympic downhill event on it, because I got stationed in Innsbruck when I was a young cop. At one point I’m even in the picture briefly with the queen of Sweden—back then she was just a hostess with the Olympic Committee, but now she’s the queen of Sweden. That one I’m not erasing, of course. And at the end of the tape there’s a Western. But the end got cut off.”
Ninety-six hours after Helena’s disappearance, the light went on over in the hunters’ den, and Brenner saw who was behind the glass. It’s always a bad sign for the victim, of course, when the perpetrator takes off his mask. Because by that point, no further police contact is expected. Interesting, though: for some reason, what unsettled him most was the fact that Bank Director Reinhard wasn’t there.
CHAPTER 19
Ninety-six hours after Brenner had deliberated too long over which chocolate bar he should buy, Kressdorf and Congressman Stachl were standing to the left and the right of the open cesspit like two altar boys at a funeral. They looked up at the wooden balcony, where the two workers were slowly lowering Brenner down, direction: cesspit.
“Stop!” Kressdorf called out, when Brenner’s feet were still just barely in the dry. He was so businesslike that you’d have thought he was helping the crane operator at the construction site set down a slab of concrete. Then, he amicably invited the dangling chauffeur once more to tell them where the video was that Knoll had given him. Nothing better occurred to Brenner than to curse Knoll loudly for having lied about leaving the video with him. It didn’t do him any good, of course. He’d gotten the photo of Sunny from Knoll, so they weren’t apt to believe that he had no clue what kind of video they were talking about. There were a thousand possibilities, from child pornography to—. There’s nothing that doesn’t exist in the world. I’d even say that the biggest mistake in our world is that there aren’t at least a few things that don’t exist. Because more often than not, non-things and non-people are far more likable than those who’ve pushed themselves elbows first into the world. Or have a look for yourself: non-ideas! Then non-opinions, non-feelings, non-loves, non-conversations, non-thoughts! I’ll say it up front to all of them, walk right in, my door is wide open for you!
It’s always difficult with existences. That’s where the problems start. And they stop with the people who’ll drag another person through the shit. Because of a video! And Brenner with no idea what’s even on the video. But before you go conjuring thoughts into existence now, too, along the lines of maybe Reinhard with the goat or Congressman Stachl with the rabbit, I can tell you right now—all wrong. Completely
off the mark. But Brenner didn’t guess what was on the video, either.
“Lower!” Kressdorf called to the balcony. Stachl didn’t say anything, he just glared at Brenner as though he was very mad at him for dragging him into this. And Brenner stared back at him as though he couldn’t feel the gravy starting to seep into his shoes.
Still nothing of Bank Director Reinhard to be seen. A man like Reinhard wasn’t going to be coaxed out of his domicile or his refuge for a minor incident. He didn’t want to be bothered with the details. So he said, Kressdorf and Stachl will take care of it. And one thing you can’t forget: delegating was an imposition to the good boss. Maybe he even would’ve liked to personally dunk each and every deserving person in the shit himself, but he had to leave it to his coworkers in order to motivate them. And the lower rung has to delegate it to the next rung below him, and so, when you’re a Kressdorf or a Stachl, you can’t dunk Brenner with your own hands when your musclemen have been waiting for months to have a little fun.
Efficiency was the only thing that was important to the bank director. And to that end, he’d chosen superb people. You’ve even got to hand it to them, for a hundred-million-euro project, two deaths aren’t that many. Or three deaths, let’s say, if you count the nanny’s husband. And with his death, they didn’t really accomplish anything; you’d be better off blaming the South Tyrolean. Strictly speaking, Knoll himself was guilty. And Milan, too, for being so extremely eager. But even if you were to tally them all up, you’d still have to say there are so many more deaths in the world that, for a hundred million euros, purely mathematically speaking, it still errs on the humane side.