Brenner and God

CHAPTER 14

Sixty-three hours after Helena’s disappearance and just before midnight, Brenner stood in the South Tyrolean’s doorway, and immediately, she rolled her eyes. And believe it or not, Brenner rolled his eyes, too. Let’s be honest, great love stories don’t usually begin this way, but the eye rolling was warranted, and in fact, both sides were fully entitled.

Brenner rolled his eyes because he could barely make it through the door on account of all the plants-“gardening” doesn’t come close. And she rolled her eyes because Brenner still gave off a residual whiff of cesspit, even though he’d showered for fifteen minutes in the cabin’s swank bathroom and then put on a fresh set of clothes from his duffel bag. And before you ask what he did with his dirty clothes-he threw them into the Kitzbuhel Ache River. But the stink must have settled somewhere deep in his pores, or else the South Tyrolean simply had an acute sense of smell. Her description of the woman at the gas station was the opposite of acute-exactly as vague as his whiff of cesspit. Approximately all the women in the world were brought under suspicion. No height, no hair color, no nothing. And as for the child, she wasn’t even a hundred percent certain whether there’d been one.

“But she wasn’t a man-that you’re sure of,” Brenner grumbled. Because he was starting to get the suspicion that she had lured him over under false pretenses, just because she was getting bored without a newspaper.

“You think I don’t have eyes in my head?”

Brenner didn’t say anything to that, because first of all, he was far too tired to argue, and second, the South Tyrolean had cooked him such good midnight spaghetti that he nearly fell blissfully asleep at the table. Because South Tyrolean women: always good cooks. And when, after three plates of pasta, Brenner felt more pregnant than any patient who’d ever shown up at the abortion clinic, the cook even offered that he could spend the night. Not what you think, though! Because the South Tyrolean made it abundantly clear to him that he shouldn’t misunderstand her.

“Woascheh,” the South Tyrolean said to Brenner, but it was in South Tyrolean and really only meant, “You know, eh?”

Brenner understood it, no problem, because a classmate of his at the police academy was from Sterzing. Ladinig was his name, always won all the executive ski championships, and an avid mountain climber in the summer, driving home every weekend and mountain climbing. Interesting though, it wasn’t in South Tyrol where he crashed, but on the Matterhorn. Two weeks after their graduation from the police academy. Ladinig had always used the catch-all “Woascheh,” too, and so Brenner was able to understand the South Tyrolean now without any trouble.

And interesting: after just that one word he knew truly everything, and she wouldn’t have to explain in any detail why the topic of sex had long been, and would always be, off-limits for her. She wouldn’t have to open up to Brenner about how, during her early active years in South Tyrol, she’d already completed a comprehensive study of this science. Brenner would’ve understood, too, if she didn’t want to list off every fire department, every music festival, every small town disco, every teacher, every priest, every church choir director, before coming to the conclusion that “Tyrolean men are such emotional halfwits, you can’t even imagine.”

That surprised Brenner, because Ladinig had been one of his nicest classmates, beloved by women and everyone else. Personally, I can’t fathom how the Tyroleans could be such losers and brutes, but that’s exactly how Monika saw them. I think if she’d happened to grow up somewhere else, maybe she would’ve blamed it on that region, but she never came down off it, the Tyroleans in general and the South Tyroleans specifically-coldhearted Pinocchios.

Brenner didn’t even attempt to turn her argument around on her, along the lines of, I’m a graduate of Puntigam’s Elite Sex University, where the Kama Sutra comes from. And here you can see how exhausted he must have been to leave something like that out. Although, to be frank, since the pills, he hadn’t been all that interested anymore, and strictly speaking, he wouldn’t have needed Knoll’s death as an excuse for why he preferred to sleep alone.

The apartment was half the size of South Tyrol, on the ground level of an old building across from the gas station, cheap and dank and loud and all, but enormous. In spite of this, he wasn’t allowed to choose which room he got to sleep in, because she told him he should just take the first one if he was so afraid of plants.

“And besides, this way you won’t be far from the bathtub. Did you shwim in sewage?”

Brenner declined the warm milk with honey that she wanted to prepare for him-world-renowned South Tyrolean sleeping pill-because, on principle, no milk. And I have to say, the South Tyrolean was even looking at him a little amorously because it was a commonality that seemed terribly meaningful to her. With a certain pride that women often resort to when they can tack a minor health deficiency or nutrition problem onto their breasts, she explained to Brenner that she didn’t even have the enzyme necessary to digest milk. She couldn’t impress Brenner any more tonight, though, because he was already so tired that the word “enzyme” sounded like something inflammatory creeping into his ears.

He only sat there as long as he did because the few steps to the bedroom seemed insurmountable to him. And one thing you can’t forget-the plants kept growing all the while. What he really would’ve liked was to ask the South Tyrolean for a machete. Somehow the room came to him, though, and really he would’ve liked to just let himself fall into bed. Her comment about the smell had already grabbed hold of his pride, though, and so, with his remaining strength, he overcame the philodendrons and fought his way into the bathroom.

He slept so deeply that the next morning he didn’t know where he was. For a moment he thought he might have drowned in the cesspit like Knoll, slipped in while he’d been on the phone, fell on his head and straight up to heaven. You should know, it had been years since he’d felt refreshed upon waking up. He lay there so delicately covered, bundled, and swaddled, all in clean white, where a man might get to thinking, you see, you could live like this if you bought into marriage. And it wasn’t just the bedding he was covered with that was white but also the bed frame that cradled him on all sides like he was a newborn. Or let’s put it this way: Brenner was just now realizing that he’d fallen asleep in the bathtub last night, and slept so soundly that there had been nothing else for the South Tyrolean to do but cover him up right there in the tub.

A human soul has never traveled quite so fast from heaven to hell, though. Because Brenner was also just realizing why he’d woken up. The cell phone in his heap of clothes was ringing, and he would have given anything in the world for it to be “Unknown Caller.” But it was no unknown caller. Believe it or not, seventy-one hours after the disappearance of her daughter, the Frau Doctor was calling him.

Twenty minutes later her BMW was pulling into the gas station. Because that’s where Brenner had told her to go-not very sensitive I have to say, but in his grogginess he couldn’t come up with anything better than the gas station across the street.

Brenner stood there dumbfounded a moment before opening the passenger-side door, because the idea of the Frau Doctor sitting at the steering wheel and he getting into the passenger seat seemed very strange to him all of a sudden.

“The car’s the only place right now where I don’t have the feeling that I’m being listened in on,” she said in greeting.

“By the police or by the kidnappers?”

Brenner had never seen a person change so much in three days. Except for someone getting an arm or a leg shot off, that’s always a sudden change, or slipping under a bus, both legs gone, something like that’s a sudden change, too, of course, but right after that would come Frau Doctor Kressdorf’s change. Because she must not have eaten a bite since the day her child disappeared, and even that doesn’t explain it, either, because-completely different type of person. If there is such a thing! It even looked to Brenner like her hair and eyes were a different color, but not what you’re thinking: dyed. No, like they’d really changed.

Character-wise, absolutely unchanged. And that was a huge relief to Brenner right now. No hysterical outbursts, no embittered remarks, not even a sigh or an accusatory look. Brenner was profoundly impressed by her self-control. She was utterly calm as she drove downtown, no aggressive accelerating, no abrupt brake slamming, no accusatory gear shifting, no demonstrative temperature adjusting, no frantic windshield wiping, no nervous window opening, no sacrificial-lamb turn signaling, no lane changing where it wouldn’t have been advisable to do so, and where the sensitive passenger and child-loser might’ve detected a sighing rebuke.

Brenner thought to himself, other families who’ve been affected by kidnappings should really look to her as a model. Not always making things more complicated, because when you’ve been affected by a kidnapping, you see it as your great hour having arrived. Finally, the big chance and now it’s my turn for once, now people will indulge all of my whims, and now everything around me will have to pay until it doesn’t know which way’s up anymore. Brenner had experienced this more often than not in his days on the force. Because the motto of families affected by kidnappings: the police will pay for everything that’s ever been done to me in life. And families affected by kidnappings wield power, you wouldn’t believe it, they drive doctors, psychologists, and social workers to suicide-ergo, all new victims of kidnappings.

“I have to tell you something,” Frau Doctor Kressdorf began abruptly after driving for a full minute in silence. But then she fell silent again, and it was only as she was turning onto the Ringstrasse that she found her words. “There’s something I can’t tell the police. If you can’t, or won’t, keep it to yourself, please tell me right now.”

“No problem. No one will hear anything from me.”

He would’ve liked to have said that with a little more conviction, but personally I think a dry promise isn’t the worst, because how do you prove to someone that you won’t tell someone else? It basically only applies to your best friend anyway, who’ll probably tell his wife the very same evening, who’ll solemnly swear not to tell anybody else, and her best friend will have to swear the same thing half an hour later. The more adamantly a person vows to keep a lid on it, the more certain you can be that, come tomorrow, the entire world will know. And you see, Brenner said it just that dryly, and he’s probably the first person in the world who’s never actually spoken a dying word of it to anybody. These are the things I like about Brenner. But since it’s just us, I’ll make an exception and tell you what the doctor said.

“I’ve done something that I could go to prison for.”

“You?”

Pay attention: if one of the advantages of driving is the freedom to shout openly, it only applies, of course, to when you’re driving alone. So why is Brenner shouting so loudly now when he’s sitting right next to the Frau Doctor:

“You?”

And what kind of a shout was that? A shout of surprise? A shout of rage? A shout of pain? I’m tempted to say, all of them together. Surprise, because naturally he expected her secret to involve her husband, the Construction Lion, who’d lured Knoll out to his house in the mountains. And rage, because he sensed that she’d already decided, before she even began her story, to withhold half of it. And pain, I don’t even need to explain to you, when you’re speaking for the first time with the mother-who looks like she’s aged thirty years in seventy-two hours-of the child you lost.

“Yes, me,” the doctor answered softly, and got honked at from behind for the crime of not stealing into the intersection while the light was still red.

Her confession of guilt made Brenner feel completely hopeless. Because one thing you can’t forget: nothing derails a manhunt more effectively than a self-afflicted guilty search party that constantly holds up the investigation with its self-blame.

Brenner would’ve preferred for her to tell him something about her husband. But the Frau Doctor didn’t have much of a clue about his construction business. That’s often how it is, that you don’t know exactly what kind of business your spouse actually does, main thing, the money’s there, main thing, the villa’s there, main thing, the park’s there, main thing, the yacht’s there, main thing, the staff’s there, main thing, the art’s there, main thing, the charity thing’s there, main thing, the therapist’s there, in other words, the most important things have got to be there, it’s got nothing to do with your own standards, my god, you could live a much more modest life by yourself, you could get by with a smaller villa, with a smaller park full of smaller trees, too, with a smaller yacht, with smaller paintings-and if you must, even with smaller charity things-but for the child it would be a pity indeed to grow up in cramped conditions, and that’s why it’s important for the family estate to be established a far cry from the poverty line. But now I’m talking as fanatically as Knoll, this kind of thinking’s contagious. You’ve got to be careful not to go sympathizing with Knoll all of a sudden just because he landed in the cesspit of a Construction Lion.

For a second there Brenner thought, the Frau Doctor knows what happened to Knoll, and she wants to tell me. He asked her very cautiously whether she believed there was a connection between her law violation and the kidnapping, and the Frau Doctor, completely calm and matter-of-fact, said, “I don’t know. In my situation, you believe everything could be connected with it.”

“We’ve all broken the law at some point,” Brenner said, purely out of discomfort.

But he was already thinking that she probably wasn’t talking about driving too fast, parking illegally, listening to loud music after midnight, vacuuming on a Sunday, or walking off with a pretty sweater from a boutique back when she was a med student.

“Terminating the pregnancy of a twelve-year-old girl.”

“Is that illegal?” Brenner asked, in an effort to cover up his relief that she wasn’t mixed up in Knoll’s murder.

“It depends.”

“You probably did it for the child.”

Already you can see how Brenner’s bad conscience had put him more on the side of the doctor than on the side of the law. Or not just a bad conscience, but sheer masculine sympathy for the doctor, too. And from a professional standpoint, it’s always better with confessions to give the confessor a good feeling. “Confession comes from comprehension”-they hammered that one right into him at the police academy, i.e., interrogation rule number one, if force doesn’t do anything.

The doctor gave him a look that made it clear she would refuse any and all excuses. Some people are so incredibly stubborn, they want the kind of guilt that they can hang on to and never let go.

“I meant to say, you must have done it for the twelve-year-old girl,” Brenner explained. Because suddenly it occurred to him that his remark-that she’d done it for the child-might have come out wrong, that maybe the Frau Doctor had thought he meant that she’d done it for the aborted child; that possibly, purely out of self-flagellation, she’d thought Brenner had referred to the aborted gnat as a “child.”

“The girl was poor,” the Frau Doctor said. “At first she didn’t tell anyone she was pregnant, and then it was too late. But I wasn’t supposed to do it. Not anymore by that point. And not before, either. Not without reporting it.”

They were coming back around now to where they’d first turned onto the Ring. And on this second lap around, the whole thing seemed like a hand over situation to Brenner, where the kidnapper demands, drive around the Ring until you receive the next instruction, i.e., a tactic to wear you down. And maybe that’s why you see so many cars here, day and night, driving in circles, because everybody’s waiting for their kidnapper’s next instruction.

“I don’t want to justify it to myself, either, that there are countries where it’s legal.” The doctor’s voice snapped him out of his thoughts.

“On the other hand,” Brenner said, because the Frau Doctor looked so crestfallen that all he wanted to do now was console her.

“On what other hand?”

“On the other hand”-it’s always bad to begin a sentence with “on the other hand” when you don’t know what you want to say after that-“it wouldn’t have done anybody any good if the abortion had waited any longer,” Brenner stammered. “How many months along was she when she came to you?”

“We calculate in weeks, not months.”

That was her entire answer.

“Got it. There used to be a saying: ten months but no cash on delivery.”

Brenner thought he could lighten up the mood a little, but the doctor hardened at his remark, and it wouldn’t have surprised him if she’d driven straight to the Hotel Imperial.

“I just meant,” Brenner said, “if they were that poor. Twelve years old and life already screwed up. You’ve got to help. You can’t just force morality about becoming a mother on a child like that. Women used to die because of illegal abortions!”

“I didn’t come to you for consolation,” she interrupted him. “My problem is that I can’t tell the police. I was even prepared to. But my husband’s convinced that this is exactly what Knoll set out to accomplish.”

“Knoll knew about it?”

Brenner was starting to feel like he was riding a merry-go-round as the palaces along the Ringstrasse went past him again, the Opera, the Hofburg Palace, the Parliament, the Burgtheater, and down to the Mint again, to the Ring Tower, around and around in circles. Or a few laps around the Lilliput Rail, but for some reason, instead of trees they passed buildings, and for some reason instead of Helena, it was her mother who sat beside him, and for some reason instead of being happy he was-how shall I put it-devastated would be an exaggeration; more like numb.

“My husband turned to Reinhard, and Reinhard advised Knoll not to use his evidence. Or else he’d call his loan due. We’d looked it up in the Land Registry-which bank Knoll was keeping the money in that he’d bought up the other units in the building with.”

Defense Ministry, Museum of Applied Arts, City Park, Schwarzenberg Square, Opera.

“I’ve wished ever since that he wouldn’t have let himself get cowed by Reinhard. Then that maniac wouldn’t have taken my child away from me.”

Brenner shot her a look like she was only telling him half the truth. But he couldn’t very well call her on it. He wasn’t telling her everything, either; quite the contrary, he even asked her now whether she’d heard anything from Knoll in the meantime, i.e. intentional misrepresentation.

“You know what I think?” she said, while they were stopped at a red light at the Schottentor for the fourth time. “Knoll is calmly waiting for me to go to the police myself with this story about having illegally terminated the pregnancy. Then I’ll be ruined professionally, and he’ll send Helena back to me.” Her voice faltered for a moment, but she kept impressive self-control-not even half a tear. “And he’s accomplished everything without making himself known. He’ll be rid of me without ever making contact with me.”

“It really wouldn’t have been badly orchestrated,” Brenner had to admit. “But most of the time criminals aren’t thinking about it from so many angles.” He couldn’t exactly tell her that Knoll was dead. Drowned in the cesspit behind her own house.

Instead he just pulled out the photo that Knoll had given him. “Was this your underage patient?”

The Frau Doctor looked at Brenner as if he were Knoll himself.

“Do you know where she lives?” Brenner asked smoothly.

“Where did you get that photo?”

Brenner shook his head. “Surely you have her address somewhere.”

“You really don’t get it! I don’t want you to find this girl. This isn’t about her.”

“So where does she live?”

Approximately one centimeter before a jingling streetcar crossed the tracks, the doctor yanked on the steering wheel and came to a stop at an empty taxi stand in the adjacent lane. She gave Brenner a look as if to say, the entire conversation had just been sadistic foreplay leading up to this second when she was going to eat him alive, the man who’d managed to misplace her child.

“I get it, you don’t want to put your patient in a difficult position. That it’s purely about Knoll for you. But the direct route doesn’t always get you anywhere,” Brenner explained to her, and shocked himself by how consistent this was with the truth according to Knoll. “Often it’s only through the detours. Our professions aren’t so different on this score. Doctors ask, too, whether you have cold toes at night when you go to them because of a headache. And those are opposite ends of the body.”

“Which you don’t know everything about.”

“That the head’s on the opposite end of the body than the toes, even non-doctors know that.”

But the next moment nearly saw Brenner and the Frau Doctor become Vienna’s latest criminal case. Because a furious taxi driver pounded on the windshield, and if Brenner hadn’t immediately locked the doors from the passenger seat, everything would have been over, guaranteed. He suddenly had an inkling of what Knoll’s last seconds must have been like, because unfortunately the passenger-side window was open a crack, and the atmosphere inside the car changed because of the killer cabbie, as if the entire car were sinking into a cesspit.

Interesting, though: the attack was good for the conversation, because as they drove off in a hurry, their conversation popped back into gear.

“I don’t know the girl’s address. I don’t keep any records of my crimes.”

“And she doesn’t have a name, either?”

“I only really know her first name. And even that she told me in an immigrant’s Viennese. How the kids talk who are born here but speak another language at home.”

“Oida! Oida! Oida! Oida! Go shit I say!” Brenner thought he could impress the Frau Doctor with how well he could imitate this throat malady. Maybe elicit a small smile in the midst of a desperate situation.

“You do that very well,” she said, but not with a smile; no, so coolly that despite the 77-degree weather, the windshield-washing fluid would’ve frozen, guaranteed, had he not just refilled the antifreeze a few days ago. Under better circumstances an even wittier reply would have come to him. But stricken as he was, he only heard hurtfulness in her remark. He only detected from it that she counted him among them, her staff; that he was the sort who, right from the outset, never had a chance in his life with someone like the Frau Doctor, because of education, because of age, because of manners, because of language, because of money, because of everything.

“And her first name was probably fake, too,” she continued. One thing you can’t forget: for her, the remark had been no big deal. She really did have other concerns. “Maybe it was just a nickname: Sunny.”

“Probably short for Susanna,” Brenner said, because he couldn’t help but think of the Susanna who’d once won the grand prize at the Linzer police department’s Christmas raffle, believe it or not, a ski weekend in Hintersoder for two, and no one was allowed to call her Susi-only Sunny.

“Short for Susanna,” the doctor replied, “I don’t think so. Susanna isn’t a particularly common name among immigrant girls. I think it’s more likely English.”

And Brenner, with particularly good pronunciation, “The sunny side of the street.” Not sung, of course, just spoken.

“Sunny side,” the doctor repeated pensively, as though she had to think about what it could possibly mean.

“I once paid for a young woman’s abortion, too,” Brenner began, hoping that with this story he’d get somewhere with the Frau Doctor yet. “In my police academy days. Her name was Hansi, short for Johanna.”

“Aha.”

“It was still illegal at the time, so she drove all the way to Amsterdam. I paid for all of it. Train, hotel, abortion.”

“And you went with her?”

“No, I didn’t have enough money. Two train tickets, then staying overnight, plus meals on top of that. But in hindsight I have to say, it would’ve been cheaper if I had gone. Because she changed her mind in Amsterdam.”

“She discovered herself with drugs instead.”

“Not drugs, exactly-hashish. And after a fun week she returned without the abortion.”

“So you’re a father?”

“Was.”

The doctor looked at him with utter sympathy, and Brenner saw the old Frau Doctor in her again, the one who was always personable and friendly.

“Two years she let me pay alimony, but then the finance director in Graz married her. She was the type that men chased after. Although to be honest, I have to say, I only liked her from the side. But the finance director took her nonetheless.”

“Maybe he liked her from the front, too.”

“No, I meant he married her in spite of the kid. And after the wedding she admitted that the child hadn’t been mine at all, but another classmate’s from the police academy. He probably paid for the abortion, too. But the alimony, only me, because my classmate died on the Matterhorn before the child was born.”

Seventy-four hours after her daughter’s disappearance, the Frau Doctor began to cry because of this story. Brenner apologized for mentioning his classmate’s death. But she said it was okay, her nerves were just fried, and really she should be the one to apologize for burdening him with her story. And you see, that’s another similarity between the medical profession and the detective profession. Because just like patients will often change their minds in the waiting room, my tooth doesn’t hurt after all, so too did Helena’s mother lose her courage, and instead of wanting any more help from Brenner, she just wanted to be rid of him as soon as possible.

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.