Brenner and God

CHAPTER 12

Mankind could not have invented anything better than driving a car. Especially when you have someone you can follow. Because then it’s not so boring. The constant looking in the rearview mirror just made Brenner realize how often he would check to see if Helena was okay when he was driving, if she needed something, if she was sleeping, if she was smiling, if she was sitting comfortably, if she wanted a sip of something, if her teddy bear had fallen over, if she’d care to discuss something, or if she’d like to have her peace and quiet.

And every time now, no Helena in the rearview mirror. It pained Brenner so much that he even let out a cry. Because that’s one of the many advantages of a car. You can listen to music in private, you can enjoy nature without exertion, and when in despair, you can let out a cry.

For the sake of the car chase, of course, it was good that Brenner’s rearview glancing should plummet so dismally into emptiness. Because, he was all the more sensitive to what he saw behind that emptiness. Never before had a detective tailed a suspect as attentively as Brenner did Knoll-from the rearview mirror. Because he always left enough distance, and where Helena’s face would’ve been in the rearview mirror, Knoll’s black Volvo was gliding along in the back window, but very tiny. The best music Brenner had heard in years was on the radio, the sun was laughing, traffic was rolling smoothly along, and it annoyed him at first when the programming got interrupted. But then, of course, believe it or not, the dead-serious news announcer reported that the case of Helena Kressdorf’s kidnapping had taken a dramatic turn due to a bloody incident with the ransom handover.

And you see, that’s the downside of driving. Because you think you’re the only one experiencing something, you think the world stands still while you’re in motion. But in reality, you’re the one sitting with one foot on the gas pedal and the other on the clutch until the radio tells you that the outside world just turned in a bloody direction.

So what happened while Brenner and Knoll were rolling merrily down the autobahn like two innocent children on the Lilliput train pretending to be cops and robbers?

Listen carefully. You need to take note of the following: the difficult thing about a kidnapping is always the ransom handover. If that weren’t true, everybody would be kidnapping everybody else. It would be paradise on earth! Imagine, no one would have to work anymore; instead everyone would make a living purely by kidnapping. You wouldn’t have to do anything to the kidnapped victim-treat them well even, better meals than at home, warm room, color TV, everything, and as soon as I have ten million in my account, he’s free to go home. It wouldn’t have to be a major drama. On the contrary, maybe he’d even go home with some spiritual gains.

Unfortunately, the handover, though. That’s where things went awry. The worm is simply always inside somewhere. And so there you have it. Train, highway overpass, remote-controlled things, and, and, and. Always the unlikely endings, alas, where the kidnapper hunts a police squad through the city for days, from phone booth to phone booth, from message to message, pointless merry-go-round. That never pays off! I say, when you’re the kidnapper, and you steal time from the police for days, then you can’t be surprised. Because that young cop’s got a girlfriend, he’d also like to go home and watch TV, another one’s got a second job as a security guard, he loses the extra pay, or the single mother has to skip out on her appointment with the child psychiatrist all because of your ransom money handover. Naturally these public servants are going to become aggressive.

Prime example, the husband of the nanny who Brenner always dropped Helena off with and picked her up from. He came up with the idea of making his wife’s nursery school the ideal place for the handover. Because the middle of a group of children, of course, not so easy for a sharpshooter. Flip-side of the coin: he’s all the more nervous. And you see, that was the moment when Brenner lost radio reception. You should know, they were just racing past Salzburg, i.e., the German border-you barely notice it these days. So they’re already over the border, more or less, and in the middle of the report about the kidnapping, the signal switches over to Bavaria 3. While Brenner’s frantically dialing around on an unfamiliar radio, he loses Knoll from the rearview mirror.

To this day I’d be interested to know whether he lost Knoll merely because of that-because Knoll heard the report, too, and slowed down to search for better reception.

Now for some brief, general considerations until they get the station back. The proof that you actually have the kidnapped victim is child’s play today compared to how it used to be, i.e., forensic evidence. It used to be that a finger would have to get hacked off, an ear, a toe, it was a dreadful burden for victim and perpetrator alike, because you don’t just go cutting off someone’s finger no matter how desperately you need the money. And today a hair suffices, a fingernail, and it makes it that much easier for all involved.

Easier and more difficult! Because nothing in the world’s got only advantages! And the great weakness of forensic evidence is the sidecar driver. Because DNA’s a real man-about-town. And one thing you can’t forget. A finger, an ear, that’s a one-of-a-kind matter. But a few hairs you can easily pluck off a piece of clothing or a comb, even if you don’t have the kidnapped child at all. Especially if you’re the husband of the nanny. And when on the same day that his unemployment benefits got cut, he read in the paper that the kidnappers hadn’t made contact, he simply plucked a hair off the sweater Helena had forgotten there.

Brenner was just hearing all of this now that he was finally able to tune the station back in. He nearly bit the steering wheel when he learned that Helena still hadn’t been found fifty-two hours after her disappearance, but that the nanny’s affable husband was dead on account of a nervous sharpshooter. Imagine, just a few days earlier Brenner had stood out in front of the building with him while he had a cigarette-because in the apartment, of course, strictly no smoking, don’t even ask.

But I have to say, for a lowly sidecar driver it wasn’t the stupidest idea. Listen up: the children his wife looked after were supposed to take a field trip on International Savings Day, and the money was to be placed in one of their little backpacks, i.e., swap-on-the-way, tiny backpack full of cash for Helena. That was his objective, ostensibly, when in reality he’d quietly taken the money out of the backpack for himself back at home before the group embarked. They caught him in spite of this, of course, and no way would he have been able to run because, old saying: well intentioned is the opposite of well kidnapped.

Or better put, of well blackmailed, because he didn’t kidnap anyone. But I say they didn’t have to go and shoot him, although I can understand that the police were nervous with so many children playing. That many children would make anyone nervous-even without a kidnapping. Brenner felt somewhat complicit because he was the one who’d forgotten the sweater at the nanny’s a few weeks ago. Well, not really forgotten, more like intentionally left behind, because he’d never liked the sweater. But maybe he was just using his guilt to whitewash his despair over the fact that Helena was still missing.

The announcer reported further information and an interview with the head of the police operation, and Brenner got incredibly annoyed when just ten kilometers past Walserberg, he lost the Austrian station for good. Suddenly, Knoll passed him out of nowhere, and the Mondeo nearly started bucking on the autobahn just to catch up even halfway to the black Volvo. He wondered whether Knoll had heard the radio broadcast, too, and he wondered where Knoll was headed, why he was driving in the direction of Innsbruck, and he hoped that any additional radio reports would come on only after they were out of the German triangle again, and he prayed he wouldn’t lose the Volvo.

Knoll exited the autobahn at Worgel, and you could learn a lot about the human brain if you were to analyze Brenner’s breakdown here. I think he just didn’t want it to be true that Knoll was headed to where he was headed. But his behavior was becoming rather textbook now, and textbook: always a bad sign. He said to himself, Bundesstrasse, better if I stay behind him because it’s better not to follow from ahead in the mountains. He thought about these kinds of things, you see. Then he dialed around the radio again to see if there was another announcement somewhere. He had to have said to himself, I’m not interested anymore, it was just a sidecar driver, it does zero for Helena, I’m casting it aside. But that’s how people are. Always backward. Then he thought of her forgotten green sweater again with the green duck embroidered on it-terrible! And it seemed to him that Helena hadn’t liked the duck, either. All of this, just so that he wouldn’t have to face facts.

When Knoll turned off just five kilometers before Kitzbuhel, things got stressful for Brenner. And I don’t mean the stress of being stuck behind a truck at a red light while the Volvo pulls ahead. I don’t mean the life-endangering stress of overtaking the truck and racing ahead, either. Because he had the Volvo right back in his sights. But then Knoll turned again. Brenner didn’t like that at all. When Knoll drove up the private street that Brenner knew so well.

There was just one more thing for Brenner, of course. He had to take the cutoff through the woods. He’d taken it once before in Kressdorf’s jeep when the access road had been closed due to a mudslide, because two weeks of constant rain set off a mudslide that even made it onto TV, and the eternal optimists, immediately hopeful: finally the lord god had a revelation and was cleaning up Kitzbuhel. The road through the woods hadn’t been a problem for the jeep back then, but it bordered on miraculous that the Mondeo was able to withstand the trip without breaking its axles. And Brenner even imagined Helena’s guardian angel watching over the Mondeo’s axles, because otherwise, inexplicable. You should know, Brenner drove like the devil. And when he finally came out up at the Hegl Mountain Inn, he could still see where just a hundred meters below, Knoll was parking in front of Kressdorf’s house.

And believe it or not, Knoll knocked on the door. And the man who came out and warmly greeted him, fifty-four hours after the girl’s disappearance, was Kressdorf.