Brenner and God

CHAPTER 17

It was shortly after four when Brenner finally stopped thinking. But don’t you go thinking he fell asleep or died. No, instead of “Foxy Lady,” Mitch Mitchell switched to “Castles Made of Sand” all of a sudden-in other words, Milan was calling Brenner’s cell phone. You’ve got to picture this: it’s after midnight, you’re lying in bed with a South Tyrolean, and before you can really get going, the kid shows up, and a few hours after that, Milan’s calling you, too-straight from a Yugo-disco. Because he’d found Sunny.

“If you ask me, she’ll be back there in no time,” Milan explained to Brenner.

But he didn’t understand. Acoustically, sure, understood, cell-phone-wise a first-rate connection-unheard of-but strictly brain-wise, it didn’t fully compute. You can’t forget, half an hour earlier the South Tyrolean had forced another glass of warm milk with honey on him because the sound of his grinding teeth kept waking her up. Warm milk with honey is the besht sleeping pill in the world, she’d proclaimed yet again. But as for the actual sleeping pill that she’d put in his milk, she didn’t say a word. And right about now when it’s starting to take effect, here’s Milan on the phone.

After everything that had happened, it seemed to Brenner like the call luring him out to the Yugo-disco at four in the morning was stretching him to about eight feet. And Brenner had never been the tallest, so you couldn’t say, eight feet doesn’t mean a whole lot because your average medieval rack in the rec room could manage that. The phone call was pulling his head in the Yugo-disco’s direction, but sleep was pulling his feet in the opposite direction.

And so you see how a person’s mind can get a little dull when it’s stretched too far, because-with the South Tyrolean in his right arm and the cell phone in his left hand and the child’s snoring in his right ear and weariness in his bones and medicated sleep in his veins-Brenner couldn’t understand what Milan could possibly mean.

“What does that mean, ‘she’ll be back there in no time?’ ” he murmured into his sweaty pillow.

And Milan said, “If she keeps on like this, she’ll be pregnant again in no time.”

“Aha,” Brenner said, excitement tugging on his hair and the sleeping pill tugging on his leaden toes.

“But nothing to worry about,” Milan said.

“Nothing for you to worry about, or nothing for her to worry about?” Brenner asked.

“Nothing to worry about. Because in three months she’ll be fourteen,” Milan said. “Then an abortion won’t be a problem anymore.”

“Right,” said Brenner.

“Or at least it won’t be a problem for her boyfriends.”

Okay, that last bit wasn’t on the phone anymore. The excitement had yanked him so hard and the sleeping pill, thank god, had surrendered-otherwise Brenner would’ve been torn down the middle, like that fabled child whose two mothers pulled for so long that the child broke in half, and ever since there’s been man and woman-in other words, the eternal struggle over surrender. Brenner didn’t break in half, though. Instead, he sprang out of bed at four thirty in the morning and sped over to the Yugo-disco so he could talk with the girl.

He didn’t have to speed at all, though, because Sunny was still dancing like a wind-up toy when he got there. There was nothing left for Brenner to do now except for what men do best at a disco, i.e., drink beer and gawk.

“So what’s her real name? Where did you find her?” Brenner asked.

When someone asks two questions at once, there’s always a third in the throat. Because you have to wonder, what’s behind it, why did he ask two questions at the same time? Well, I’ll tell you two things. First, Brenner was far too tired to go breaking his head over old police academy wisdom. And second, it was about to get much worse, because Milan answered with yet another question now.

“Do you like lasagna?”

“Lasagna? Do they have that here?”

“No, that’s her name. If you drop the ‘la.’ ”

“Sagna? Why can’t you just say it normally? Simple: ‘Her name is Sanja,’ ” Brenner suggested.

“If I say Sanja in this noise, you’ll hear Tanja,” Milan yelled in his ear. “But if I say lasagna without the ‘la,’ then right away you understand Sanja.”

Milan looked stern yet sly, like one of those natural healers who condemns you to death for coffee or alcohol or enjoying life.

“Not bad,” Brenner answered. “So where did you find her?”

“Here,” Milan said.

“Where?”

“There!” Milan yelled and pointed with his index finger to somewhere vaguely in front of his feet. It was so loud now and the music was so good that even Brenner’s foot began to tap a little.

“There?” Brenner yelled back. “Like ‘over there’ without the ‘over’?”

You see, just before complete catastrophe, right before the world ends, there’s often a moment when human beings are in the mood for one more joke. But, okay, Brenner couldn’t have known, per se, about catastrophe and the world ending. And Brenner wasn’t thinking about what came after yet, but about what came before, i.e., whether it had been a terrible mistake to leave Helena in the South Tyrolean’s care till morning. Should he have brought her to the police immediately? Should he have notified the Frau Doctor right away? Could it possibly be a horribly bad sign that not even ninety-two hours had passed and the Zone of Transparency was already starting to rupture even though the fifth day had not yet begun? He thought about this while he watched Sanja dancing and Milan talking, because he could only hear Milan when he shouted directly into his ear.

Sanja danced with a stamina like she wasn’t interested in anything else in the world, and Brenner began to wonder whether she would ever stop.

“What did you mean by that?” he yelled into Milan’s ear.

“What?”

“What did you mean by what you said earlier?”

“Yeah, I’m not deaf! But what did I mean by what?”

“Her boyfriends who it won’t be a problem for. What did you mean by that?” Brenner yelled a little softer.

Milan pulled one of those free daily newspapers out of his bag, and the newspaper reminded Brenner of the South Tyrolean the first time he saw her, when he’d only paid attention to the newspaper and not to the milk. He was almost certain, too, that the South Tyrolean wouldn’t pull any nonsense. Almost. Almost completely certain. The South Tyrolean’s intentions weren’t bad. He was almost certain. He’d promised her that after all this was over, he’d help her out in court. So that she’d walk away from it with probation. And she wasn’t completely crazy, not technically. Instead, more of a mixture of opportunity offender and-. Almost certain.

Brenner tried to calm himself down by thinking the same thoughts over and over, just like Sanja made the same moves on the dance floor over and over. He needed to justify over and over to himself, it was pure impulse, as if things would only go well for so long, as long as he could convince himself that enlisting the kidnapper as a babysitter for a few hours would be an acceptable solution in an emergency-community service instead of prison, as it were. And what else was he supposed to do? Because as soon as you get a kidnapped child back, the biggest question right off the bat: where am I going to get a babysitter now?

“The guy who got her pregnant,” Milan said.

“What about the guy?”

“For a detective, you’re awfully slow.” Milan casually pointed to the newspaper page he’d opened up in front of him.

It was an article about MegaLand that Sanja’s aunt had given Milan. You should know, Sanja’s aunt was Zivka, who was from the Lovrec area, and Milan’s sister’s husband, Dusan, was from Katuni. And Dusan’s cousin Cvetanka was from Kresovo. And Cvetanka went to a trade school in Lovrec with Zivka’s little brother-well, not with Radan but with Todor. And that’s how Milan found out that the girl in the picture is Darko’s cousin. And from Darko he learned that his mother, i.e., Zivka, had just showed him a photo in yesterday’s free sheet, where her niece-so, his cousin Sanja-had squarely and firmly claimed that the man in the photo was her rich friend.

Brenner gathered from the article that the construction of MegaLand was nothing but advantageous for all involved. Because the jobs, the tax revenue, the infrastructure-all for the general public. Quite remarkably, the Lilliput Rail extension, which was slated to run around the MegaLand Discovery World and down to the Greenland Schrebergarten, had been canceled. And Schrebergarten residents would each get a free parking place in the underground garage as a gift.

Brenner started sweating a little when he read that. Believe it or not, of the four people in the photo, he knew three: Kressdorf he recognized right away of course, Congressman Stachl and Reinhard right away, too, because it hadn’t been that long since he’d seen them in Klosterneuburg. And the fourth was a high-ranking Vienna politician, who I have an agreement with not to identify him by name. You’ll have to take my word on it because-sources.

Milan casually gestured at the photo with his chin and said, “Him there.”

“Which one?”

“The one on the end.”

“Left end or right end?”

“Edge of the page,” Milan said and checked how his sunglasses were sitting on his head, he wore them like a headband, don’t ask me why.

“That sick bastard!”

Milan didn’t react to Brenner’s outrage, and in fact, he looked so coolly at the dance floor that it was as if he hadn’t heard him cry out at all. And Brenner was probably the only one anyway who was surprised by his outburst, because as I’ve said, since the pills-often spontaneous emotions. They simply came out of him like hiccups or opinions do for other people.

And maybe it was only to calm Brenner down just then that Milan said, “I got hold of a gun for you.”

He said it as casually as if he were telling Brenner about the gas station’s latest offer of a free cookie.

“That fast?”

“Yeah, but not a real one,” Milan said.

“What’s ‘not real’ mean?”

“A toy gun that looks one-hundred-percent real. Better than nothing,” Milan said.

“That’s worse than nothing!” Brenner felt his anger rising all over again.

But he pulled himself right back together, because Sanja was finally making her way over to them. She ordered a Diet Coke, and she was sweating so much that Brenner almost told her not to drink her Coke too fast or else the ice cubes in it wouldn’t cool her down. You can’t forget, Sanja reminded Brenner a great deal of Greenspan, Renate, who’d sat next to him in school for six months because they’d put him next to a girl as punishment. Of course, Diet Coke wasn’t around yet back then, just regular Coke, or rum and Coke, but otherwise, Sanja: pure Renate. Everything, the hair, the nose that would’ve been the envy of every Indian chief, and then those eyes. I’ll just say this much-Renate’s last name was actually not Greenspan but Haller. Greenspan was a nickname, cf. eyes.

He’d only really gotten as far as he did in high school because of Renate, even though his grandfather would have held a place open for him at the mechanics’ school, and to this day Brenner was still sorry that he hadn’t become a mechanic. But Renate was such a good student that his note taking alone improved, and then on to the next grade at school, and then the police academy instead of mechanics’ school, just how life plays out.

Milan was telling Sanja some story about Brenner needing the address of where to get an abortion for an underage girl. She in turn gave Brenner a look that was just like the look Renate always used to give him, but he wasn’t sure whether Sanja was spurning him because he was a man who had gotten a young girl pregnant or because he was a loser who didn’t know where to get an address for a thing like that. Because despite her youth, Sanja’s pretty Renate-eyes revealed a certain worldliness, and Brenner could read in those eyes that she’d never be so stupid as to let herself get taken advantage of by a loser.

Milan must have noticed, too, that Sanja wasn’t exactly laying a good groundwork for conversation with Brenner, because he explained to her now that Herr Brenner was the grandfather of the pregnant girl. Milan meant well, but Brenner was a little insulted because he thought “father” would have sufficed, “grandfather” was an exaggeration. But “a little insulted” was only his initial reaction. Because within seconds the insult had worked itself into the wildest frenzy. Grandfather! There went another one of those emotional hiccups that he’d sometimes felt since the pills and that wouldn’t stop now. In order to distract himself, Brenner ordered another beer, but when he pointed at his beer, he saw that the bartender hadn’t given him a nonalcoholic beer before, even though he’d asked an extra two times whether they had nonalcoholic beer. And he felt so angry at the bartender that he would have liked to smash the bottle right over his head.

And you see, that was the itinerant rage. It’s a survival reaction-just like the body falls over when too little blood goes to the head, anger travels when you’re about to burst. It’s purely for release, you have to picture it like an athlete who always rotates which muscle group he’s working out. And once it hits a certain magnitude, peak rage needs to be constantly rotated, just like overworked muscles, so that the person carrying the rage doesn’t explode-in other words, the rage has to get rolling. The rage strolls from one circumstance to another, from one person to another, from the man in the newspaper to the man behind the bar, from the bartender to Renate, from Renate to Diet Coke, from Diet Coke to the music, from the music to Milan’s sunglasses, to anything that you see or hear or smell-a rage that rotates is a rage you won’t choke to death on.

And believe it or not, the alcohol and the pills and the despair and the exhaustion and the memory of Knoll in the cesspit and of Kressdorf opening the door to Knoll and offering him a friendly hand, and above all of Reinhard-his magnanimous thousand-euro benefactor, who spends his nights in his domicile and his days in his refuge and who can currently be identified in the photo in the newspaper-filled Brenner with such rage that he didn’t know any other recourse. And for the first time since he’d fought with Renate over some stupid little thing, Brenner went out onto the dance floor, just so he wouldn’t have to look at haughty Sanja with her Renate-face any longer.

Brenner was a terrific dancer, the likes of which you’ve never seen-everything that has ever moved to music between New York and the Yugo-disco is just a limp-chested chicken dance by comparison, because Brenner was an elemental force. But the Yugo-kids didn’t understand and started leaving the dance floor one after another-in protest, if you will.

And when he returned to the table, Milan and Sanja were gone. He didn’t find them outside, either, and not at the entrance, not by the coat check, not at the bar, not in the bathroom. Sanja had disappeared. And when Brenner’s itinerant rage took square aim at himself now-you can’t even imagine. At first at himself, but then at Milan. When he nearly bumped into him. Right next to the men’s bathroom, by the delivery entrance. Now, even though it was only just getting light outside, Milan had his sunglasses right on his nose. But Brenner could tell from a single glance that he was dead.