Brenner and God

CHAPTER 6

It belongs to the less sympathetic side of human beings that the anger felt toward one person should get taken out on another. You kick over your beer bottle because you got a sausage that’s more casing than meat. You yell at your wife because your mistress asked a stupid question. Or you blame the detective because the child entrusted to you got kidnapped from your car.

As an ex-cop himself, Herr Simon had to know that Peinhaupt was only doing his job. Peinhaupt had to whether he wanted to or not. Sure, he was a little over zealous with the interrogation, that’s obvious. After the disgrace in the operating room, of course, two-hundred-percent bull, don’t even ask. He snapped the case right up, and every single word out of Peinhaupt had a harshness and a consequence, as if it were shooting straight from his intact spermatic cord at the last possible second, i.e., the empire was fighting back.

It was driving Herr Simon crazy, how much time Peinhaupt was squandering by using the fact that he hadn’t called sooner against him. Because-old chestnut-everything in the world would only take half as long, all work would go three times as fast, if there wasn’t always a man needing to prove that he was one. Just look at Peinhaupt. With the energy he spent shaking down the chauffeur, he could have sired ten new Helenas. But the one who this was all about, he’d lost sight of a little.

At least that’s how it came across to Herr Simon. Because, fourth round of questioning already-hourlong interrogation after the arrest, the interrogation last night, the interrogation this morning, and now, instead of lunch, more grilling. As an ex-cop, of course, he waas coming from the know-it-all’s point of view-law of nature, as it were. And to be perfectly honest, he even criticized the police for wasting their time with him instead of going after the kidnappers, but he wasn’t exactly helping matters, either, with his stubborn insistence that the interrogation get its show on the road and fast. Because when a person has a guilty conscience, most of the time he just makes everything worse. So, out of a guilty conscience-and sheer man-versus-man-Herr Simon gave the longest speech of his life.

“You’ve asked me three times now whether I locked the car, and I’ve told you three times, yes, locked. And before you fritter away any more time, I’ll go ahead and say it a fourth time: the car was locked! Not open! Closed! I learned in the police academy, too, that Verhor comes from verhoren, but…”

I should explain briefly what all that with the verhoren was about. Because, old interrogation trick-act like you mishear, or verhoren, the first time. So if somebody says the car was locked, then five minutes later in the interrogation, or Verhor, you act like he said it wasn’t locked. Inside police joke: Verhor comes from verhoren. So Herr Simon was offended, of course, that Peinhaupt came at him with that old stunt. He couldn’t have known what Peinhaupt had gone through yesterday, or else maybe he wouldn’t have given such a long speech just now.

“And now you can ask me five more times,” he-I need to quickly add here-shouted, “whether I noticed anyone following me, and I’ll tell you five more times, nobody followed me. And you can ask me ten more times why I didn’t gas up the night before, and I’ll tell you ten more times, I don’t know, it was an oversight, there were no bad intentions, just like there are no bad intentions on your end, trotting out pointless questions here for all of eternity, instead of searching for the child. No, you just can’t do any better.”

“And the car was locked?” Peinhaupt asked blankly and shot him a stupid look, like a man might look at a woman after saying to her for the third time: and you’re completely sure that we’re better off going to my place instead of yours. Even though she’s already told him twice, leave me alone, you jackass.

Herr Simon wasn’t honestly sure himself whether the car-before he locked and unlocked it a thousand times-had been locked in the first place. But, locked or unlocked, that makes about as much of a difference to a criminal as a bullet entertaining the question of which SPF sunscreen you’ve got on as it bores its way into your forehead.

“Leave me alone, you jackass,” he answered Peinhaupt.

Because he knew perfectly well that for Peinhaupt it wasn’t about whether the car was locked. That much he still remembered from his own police days, how you’d make a big deal out of something insignificant for hours, and then slip in the crucial question completely off the cuff. Not unlike death, which, more often than not, will pick you up for skin cancer on account of an old sunburn, and so you see once again how sunscreen’s more important than ducking bullets your whole life.

Now, what was it that Peinhaupt was going to casually ask the suspicious chauffeur? How well he knew Knoll, of course. But there was no way of posing the question of the pro-life boss himself without making everything immediately obvious. How often Herr Simon had seen Knoll. Whether he’d ever spoken with him. What he made of the threats that Knoll had issued against the Frau Doctor.

“Why didn’t you just ask me that from the beginning?” Herr Simon yelled. I have to say, I hardly recognize him like this. It’s my suspicion that the pills were now to blame for his sudden aggression. “Why have you been screwing around here this whole time with whether I saw someone in the rearview mirror or whether the car was locked?”

“Or why you didn’t call us right away.”

“Or why I didn’t call you right away. Maybe I was in shock, or maybe-”

“Maybe you were in cahoots with Knoll.”

“If you’re so certain that Knoll’s behind it, why don’t you just go pick up the kid from him?”

The detective made a dopey face, as if to say, like we’re going to tell you of all people what we’re doing with Knoll right now.

“Well now, someone’s in an awful hurry all of the sudden, Herr Simon.”

“Where would I know Knoll from? You know for a fact that Knoll doesn’t stand there himself in front of the abortion clinic.”

He was right on that account, of course. Knoll didn’t personally stand in the street and try to prevent patients from entering the clinic with his own hands. You don’t ever do something like that yourself! A bank director like Reinhard doesn’t personally carry the TV out of the house when someone defaults on a loan, either. Knoll had enough church-types to stand in front of the clinic for him all day with rapt expressions on their faces and holding photos of embryos up in the air with the word “Murder” written across them.

“Just how am I, of all people, supposed to have kidnapped Helena?”

“Egypt’s third president was assassinated by his own bodyguard.”

“I wasn’t hired to be a bodyguard. I was hired to be a driver!”

Peinhaupt reached for the telephone and called up front to see whether the Frau Doctor was in the building. That sent Herr Simon into a panic-you’d have thought Peinhaupt had called in the bloodhounds.

“I’m just a driver,” he said, so sheepishly that he held himself in contempt.

“The Frau Doctor told us she and her husband selected you from a large number of candidates because of your police background.”

“So what?”

“So what. So that’s exactly why you were more than just a driver, Herr Simon. Do you think, with the threat being as great as it was, that they would have entrusted their child to just any stranger?”

You should know, back before Herr Simon had been hired, Knoll once said to the Frau Doctor during an argument that she should watch out for her only child so that the good lord doesn’t make her child disappear-like all those children she’d taken away from the good lord.

“Anti-abortionists don’t kidnap! They’re just poor crazies, slinging their rosaries. The anti-abortionists aren’t anti- children-they’re pro — children!”

“And the threats from Knoll you simply didn’t take seriously. Maybe you know him so well that you can assess his character that accurately?”

“He’d be the first kidnapper to announce the kidnapping ahead of time.”

“Don’t play any dumber than you already are. That’s exactly what’s so funny about it. If a kidnapper wants to extort money, then naturally he’s not going to announce it beforehand. But if he has a higher purpose, that’s something else altogether.”

“So that’s what you learn at the police academy these days?”

“As long as the kidnapper doesn’t make contact, then the demand is from Knoll to shut down the clinic, the only lead we’ve got anyway. And it can be assumed that a desperate mother like the Frau Doctor will grasp at any available straw. The longer the kidnapper’s silent, the more weight’s given to Knoll’s old demand. Without even having to send word. And no ransom to be handed over, either. A kidnapping without a neuralgic point, my dear Simon.”

I have to say, Knoll’s plan wouldn’t have been half bad. First, the casually made threat, without any witnesses in the room, of course, and not too long thereafter, the kidnapping. Because there’s nothing worse for the family than a kidnapping where no demand is made. And nothing worse for the police than a kidnapping where no ransom is handed over. As soon as the Frau Doctor closes the clinic on her own initiative without the kidnapper having to make a single call, the kid will turn back up safe and sound. Coincidence.

“Then it’s Knoll you’re after and not me. I’ve never seen the man before.”

“A woman’s waiting outside for you,” Peinhaupt said with a smirk and handed him the protocol to sign.

But his signature looked like two-year-old Helena had scrawled it for her driver. His hand trembled so much out of fear of her mother that Doctor Parkinson himself would have been proud of Herr Simon.