Brenner and God

CHAPTER 13

In hindsight it came to this: why didn’t Brenner? Because it’s always simple in hindsight. I like how the clever people went and criticized him of all people, though, when the whole thing never would have gotten off the ground without him.

And besides, what was he supposed to do? Call the police so that he could get arrested again? Or pound on the door with his own fist and say, “The game’s up”? Or climb onto the roof and storm down the chimney like some kind of Santa Claus in order to free Helena?

Those people, really, I could just partially-. And from his parking spot at the Hegl Mountain Inn, he had box seats. The Kressdorf cabin gleamed in the sun-no match for van Gogh-except his view of the two cars was cut off by the cabin. The most brilliant sun wouldn’t have done him any good. But nothing was stirring around the cabin anyway. Nobody came and nobody went. It’s no wonder then, that as the time wore on, Brenner became more aware of the impressions streaming in at him from his immediate surroundings. Namely, the magnificent aroma coming from the restaurant at the Inn. Nobody thinks of that, either, that Brenner hadn’t eaten anything all day. As a detective you’re supposed to resist everything, and in hindsight that means: Why didn’t he? What was he supposed to do?

He quickly got himself something to eat from the Inn, and before anybody gets excited: in those five minutes absolutely nothing happened. And while he was eating his bacon rolls in the Mondeo, nothing happened, either. And then nothing happened for another hour. And then another hour and nothing happened. The Inn closed and the waiter drove off. The sun slowly made its way down toward the mountain peaks, the cabin cast an increasingly ominous shadow, and Brenner began to grow nervous that he’d have to spend the night there.

It’s interesting, though, what looking off into the distance can do to you. It simply affects the thought process. A monk or a hermit can spend years doing something like this, and you can only imagine how much they must experience if a few hours is enough for Brenner’s question to be suddenly freed of snow in his mind, like after a long hard thought-winter: why did the Frau Doctor have Congressman Stachl’s cell phone number? And so you see once again how unjust the unconscious can be. Because the mistrust that had sunk its teeth into Brenner ever since he saw how friendly Kressdorf had been in greeting Knoll was now spreading to his wife, and what was she doing with Congressman Stachl’s cell phone number at all?

You’re going to say, my god, business crony, guest at the house, so the woman has his cell phone number, or maybe her husband gave her the number for emergencies, maybe in her panic she’d called the congressman’s office and gotten the number. You see, you’re exactly like Brenner! He was telling himself that, too, now to put his mind at ease, my god, business crony, and so on. But when a question like that washes to the shore of your consciousness, you don’t get rid of it that quickly. You look away briefly, and then look back again and-it’s a little strange that she sent the congressman a text message. And so you toss the question aside again, but when it comes back yet again, you know you need a better answer.

As Brenner was looking down at the cabin below, where it was still completely quiet, he thought about whether he should call and ask Natalie. Or even Peinhaupt, because he’d mentioned during the interrogation that the poor mother hadn’t been able to reach her husband at first, and even then it was via the congressman. Brenner didn’t think anything of it yesterday, because when you’re wading deep in feelings of guilt, you don’t ask a question that concerns the child’s mother, of all people. And even now he shoved the question aside, but then- I could ask Harry. You should know, Harry was Congressman Stachl’s chauffeur, terribly fat, for years he was the driver of the mayor of Vienna, but when there wasn’t room in the car for two anymore, he got decommissioned to the slim congressman. Brenner had talked to Harry two or three times at the MegaLand construction site, a pleasant enough person, but he didn’t end up calling him now after all. Namely, because he didn’t have Harry’s cell phone number, and you see, there was that question again: why then would the Frau Doctor have the congressman’s cell phone number when I don’t even have Harry’s?

I don’t know where you stand on things like telepathy. Personally, I’m totally against it, pure nonsense if you ask me. Is it supposed to get transmitted over the airwaves or something? How do people imagine this working? But if I ever let myself get talked into believing in it for at least one second, then case in point-Brenner’s looking down at the cabin, has no idea what Knoll’s talking to Kressdorf about, and voila, this question occurs to him. A person gets to thinking.

In hindsight, of course, it gave Brenner something to think about, too. But he couldn’t have known at the time that the two of them were inside the cabin just then, discussing the very question that was going through his head, too. And he didn’t have any more time to preoccupy himself with the question, either. Because fifty-seven hours after Helena’s disappearance, the black Volvo suddenly rolled back out onto the street and drove down into the valley. Brenner expected the jeep to soon follow, but nothing doing, the jeep didn’t stir from its place.

Then the worst thing that can happen to a detective happened to Brenner. Fifty-seven hours after the girl’s disappearance, he became innocent. Which is awfully dangerous in a situation like this. And when you, the detective, begin to sense that you’re innocent, then it’s only right that you rehash ten times whether you’d convinced yourself of things just so you could justify taking action. And one thing you can’t forget: due to the personal shock, due to the pangs of guilt, even Brenner was in danger of making a move too soon. He convinced himself that he’d seen Kressdorf sitting in Knoll’s Volvo earlier. Then he pulled himself back together, because how’s the naked eye going to recognize who’s sitting in a car from this distance?

After half an hour he couldn’t stand it anymore and drove down. He hid the Mondeo in the wooded bend before Kressdorf’s driveway, then crept around the cabin three times. Heart pounding, don’t ask, because it had been a while since he’d done something like this-and no more guns since the pills because the lawmakers had said, it’s wiser if you give us back your gun license.

Just to be on the safe side, he knocked, because he’d have to come up with something if Kressdorf opened the door. But nobody opened it, nothing moved at all. The jeep was still parked in front of the house, but Kressdorf wasn’t there anymore.

Fifty-seven and a half hours after his little ward disappeared from his car, dissolved into nothingness, dematerialized in her car seat, got swallowed by the Zone of Transparency-Brenner only needed half a minute to climb up over the wooden balcony and into the cabin. And while he searched the lavishly appointed cabin for Helena, while he searched the living room, searched the rabbit pen, searched the upstairs bedrooms, searched the closets, searched the bathroom, with every centimeter that he searched, he became more depressed. Interesting, though, how often depression will send you searching for false assignments of guilt! At this point Brenner wasn’t connecting his depression with his fear of finding Helena dead, because he didn’t dare think that far ahead yet; instead it was the cabin that was to blame. Brenner escalated to full-blown cabin rage now. Everywhere you go, these cabins, Schrebergarten cottages, mountain houses-why can’t rich people just live in normal palaces? There was once a revolutionary who said, War on the Palaces, Peace to the Cottages, his slogan, as it were. He’d like the look of things today. Because these days, when rich people are caught up in such a house-frenzy, where the largest businesses snap up the ski and beach and mountain houses, he’d have to say: War on the houses! And everyone who inhabits a farmhouse or a mountain house or any kind of house-but the only calluses on their hands from playing golf-take up your torches!

Brenner stormed out into the fresh air with rage in his belly. But there was no relief outside either. And certainly no reason to take a deep breath. The insects descended on him, reminding him of his conversation with Knoll about the gnats. They let loose on him like he was crossing the most poisonous river, say, the Jordan. Especially back behind the moldering shed it was completely black with gnats, maybe because of the rotting wood that Kressdorf had deliberately left there, because he said, it has a certain flair, the original, and don’t just renovate everything to death. But Brenner couldn’t see much of the ornamental decay because there was nothing but gnats and more gnats. And the longer he searched, the more flies that joined the gnats. More and more flies and more and more hornets and more and more gnats. He imagined this being the right track now-where there were more and more flies and gnats, then his friends, the flies and gnats, would lead him to Helena.

But behind the shed door that hung on rotting hinges, no Helena, beneath the shed’s outer steps, no Helena, in the firewood bin, no Helena. He turned every woodpile over, all but reaching into the molehills. He slowly began to realize that the insects were leading him in circles. Here and there he’d make a point of walking away from the gnats and flies and searching off on his own. Even though he knew for a fact that he had to be inside the swarm for the gnats to lead him, not out on the flowering meadow.

But easier said than done of course, when your greatest fear is that in searching you might find something. He stepped off course again now, away from the foul recesses where the squadrons of insects wanted to lure him, out to the yarrow, out to the chrysanthemums, out to the spignel. To the burnet, to the white clover, to the lady’s mantle. Out to the devil’s claw. He was so exhausted by his fear about Helena at this point that he lay in the grass and thought about how easily he used to deal with the basic questions surrounding death. How he used to have a good handle on the hereafter when he was a young man.

There are many schools of thought on this, and I tend to say you shouldn’t spend too much time thinking about it because it won’t get you anywhere. Brenner was different. Early on he’d staunchly believed that the most beautiful women would want to know whether you were one man for one brief life, or whether they could count on you in the afterlife, too. And so he developed a staggering sense for which answer would make the best impression in any given situation. For a time Asian beliefs were in demand, and reincarnation all the rage, then back to everything being contained somehow within nature as a whole, then you’d be well served by the shamans again. There were also those who needed a challenge, though, so Brenner said, alas, there’s nothing on the other side, because with them it got you farther than if you guaranteed them a heaven.

And believe it or not, just a few weeks earlier, he’d tried that route with Natalie. But alas, just the painful realization that the old recipes weren’t working so well anymore. He thought he could provoke her with a few quotes from Knoll’s brochure, i.e., when does life begin? He spited himself nicely with that one, though, and he came to understand right away that Natalie stood head and shoulders above him. She had considered the problem in such a balanced way and had such an understanding of the opposition that it was almost too much for Brenner. It’s difficult, of course, the psychologist said, to determine the exact day when you can safely say, up until this point, it can still be removed because it’s not a person yet — well, soul and all still negligible- and from that point on, it can’t very well be removed anymore, because it’s already too much of a person and even a hint of a soul.

The insects tried every means of shaking him awake and forcing him to get up. They stung him and tormented him, but he wasn’t quite ready yet, he wanted to escape a little further into this nice memory. Of this good conversation and how he’d answered Natalie that it’s difficult everywhere in life to draw such exact lines. For example, in criminal cases there’s always this type of development, too, at first it’s harmless really and not an actual crime yet, you think about it only theoretically, who you’d have to kidnap if you were to do it-a party game, as it were. And then you contemplate how the ransom handover would have to be arranged, still not a crime yet. And then maybe you do a little prep work, buy a good roll of tape at the hardware store-still not a crime yet-and finally, tidy up the basement. That, too, still isn’t a crime yet.

But then there is the one step where you can’t go back anymore, where you can’t dismiss the reality anymore, where you’ve got the child irrevocably in your stomach or the kidnapped victim irrevocably in your basement.

The insects made Brenner understand that he couldn’t go back anymore either now. He’d come along like a man sentenced to death. Nothing else could help him now. He’s already here, he’s got to finish it, too. And so the searching takes on its own dynamic entirely, and even if you hope you don’t find anything, you keep searching. He was escorted by the gnats, which he didn’t really notice anymore. Just like you stop noticing your bodyguard over time-he’s just there, and he simply must have been there when Helena was kidnapped-so, too, the insects buzzed around him now and directed him along the west side of the cabin toward the driveway. The wood still retained the warmth of the sun and smelled terrifically good, the old wood that the cabin was built from, the wooden beams, the wooden shingles, the planks of the balcony, the railing on the stairs, the window frames, and the firewood, but the bleached wood lining the driveway smelled best, i.e., the age-old boards that covered the cesspit.

When Brenner removed the first board, of course, it didn’t smell so good anymore, because a cesspit like this greets you with the stench of many generations. And with the stench came swarms of gnats, climbing out from the slats between the boards, you can’t even imagine, as though the collective dead or unborn humanity were lurking there beneath the rotting boards for Brenner.

You’re going to say, why would the gnats take Brenner under their wings, what’s their motive? Because for the average gnat, a human murder isn’t the least bit interesting, and even if you believe all that-before life, gnat, after life, gnat-then it bears saying all the more, as far as of one of these eternal gnats is concerned, a human murder’s the least interesting thing that there is.

Look, my take on it-think what you want! All I know is that as Brenner searched the cesspit for the corpse by the light of the evening sun, he was surrounded by an almost supernaturally glowing aura of insects-half beekeeper-at-sunset, half Jimi-Hendrix-in-a-spotlight. And who knows, maybe Jimi Hendrix was only lit up so ethereally in those colorful hippie photos because the spotlight was fractured into millions of invisible festival insects that were already luring Jimi, at the age of twenty-seven, toward the exit, without anyone in the audience noticing.

From Brenner’s point of view, of course, nothing was illuminated at all, just black clouds rising from the cesspit, because that’s how it is in the physical world, solid matter, liquid matter, gaseous matter. And maybe from a distance it looked nicely lit and sparkling in the last rays of sun, but to Brenner it looked as if the brown sauce in the cesspit was transforming from liquid matter to flying matter. The swarms of gnats rose out of the cesspit but didn’t fly any farther. Instead, there just seemed to be more and more of them the longer he stared into the pit and hoped that it wouldn’t turn out badly for him.

He took a pitchfork down from the shed and poked around in the brown soup with the handle, not with the tines. Let’s be honest, though, if someone was down there, it really wouldn’t matter, handle or tines, but somehow it goes against something, purely some inner code, to jab a person with a pitchfork. At any rate, Brenner had the pitchfork flipped over and was poking with the handle. He noticed right away, though, that the pitchfork was too short and couldn’t reach the bottom, but just as he was about to give up and look for something longer, he hit something that felt suspicious, a strange resistance, half hard, half soft.

You can picture it for yourself now, and I’ll leave out the grisly details. I’ll just say that without the pills he would have lost his mind by now, at the very least. Although the corpse was still completely covered with, with, with… He couldn’t get a good grip on it, instead, picture it like this: someone with a pitchfork struggling against a sludge-covered underwater monstrosity. And at that moment, when Brenner realized that it wasn’t going to work any other way, when he flipped the pitchfork over and began jabbing at the corpse with the iron tines, and when, with his left foot at the very edge of the pit, the shit started seeping into his shoes, he heard a voice.

The voice of Jimi Hendrix. Brenner took his cell phone out of his pocket, and believe it or not, “Unknown Caller.”

“Brenner?”

That he even answered the phone, of course, can only be explained by the fact that in an extreme situation like this, man brings everything to bear on himself-epicenter of the world, as it were. And it wouldn’t have surprised him if, on the other end of the line, the good lord himself had laughed into the phone while observing Brenner through a telescope from his hiding place.

“South Tyrolean shpeaking,” a woman’s voice said into the telephone.

It took at least three seconds for Brenner to switch gears. Probably because he was struggling so hard to keep the slippery corpse from slipping right away from him. With his left hand now he simply reached into the putrid sauce while holding the cell phone in his right, but still his wires were crossed. Even though the voice said, “South Tyrolean shpeaking,” and not “It’s Monika,” because then it would have been excusable for him not to recognize it, or even more than excusable, it would have been understandable, because he had no idea that the South Tyrolean’s name was Monika. But even so, when she said, “South Tyrolean shpeaking,” it took him half an eternity.

At that moment Brenner was overwhelmed by the greatest feeling of happiness of his entire life. But not because of the South Tyrolean. Because at that moment he realized that it wasn’t a child’s body. You should know, fifty-eight hours after Helena’s disappearance, Knoll’s face came bobbing out of the mud.

“From the gas shtation,” the South Tyrolean said, trying to jog his memory.

He looked at Knoll desperately, as if maybe he could explain to Brenner how the South Tyrolean got his number.

“Or do you go shouting your telephone number out after every woman you meet?”

But it was all he could do to keep Knoll and his cell phone both from sliding into the cesspit, and you can’t be angry at him for not having a good line at the ready. He really couldn’t believe what an uncanny memory she had for numbers.

“What’s wrong with you?” the South Tyrolean asked.

“Why, what would be wrong?”

“You sound like you jusht saw the devil.”

“Why would the devil show his face to me?”

“Maybe this isn’t a good time? You’re gashping like you’re-”

“Why wouldn’t I be gasping?”

Then Brenner puked into the cesspit, but don’t go thinking that he at least hung up the phone first. No, the South Tyrolean was allowed to hear everything beautifully, and she asked him, “Did you jusht throw up?”

“Why would I throw up?” Brenner asked.

“There’s shomething important I need to tell you.”

Brenner would have preferred to tell her to keep it to herself, that important something. Because he’d never liked it when a woman started off with, there’s something important I need to tell you. It’s always, every single time, something unwelcome! And you always have to act interested because otherwise it instantly means: or are you just not interested?

“Or are you jusht not intereshted?” the South Tyrolean asked.

“Tell me.”

“I hope your phone hashn’t been tapped.”

Brenner began to tremble, out of fright that Knoll was dead and out of relief that it wasn’t Helena, so much so that he wasn’t really listening to the South Tyrolean anymore.

“Because I did in fact see shomeone that day.”

“This just occurred to you?”

Now she was the one who didn’t answer.

“What did he look like, then?”

“I’m not talking about a he. It was a she.”

It seemed to Brenner like Knoll’s face was grinning snidely at him. But that wasn’t the reason why he dropped him back into the cesspit. Because let’s be honest: what else was he supposed to do with him?