Brenner and God

CHAPTER 8

Thirty hours after the girl’s disappearance, Brenner was back at large. Outside it was raining, and later on he’d often think about how the moment he set foot on the street, what shot through his head were the words “Zone of Transparency.” Because let’s be honest with each other, a normal person wouldn’t think “Zone of Transparency” when he walked out of the police station and into the rain ten times and saw on his watch that the mishap occurred exactly thirty hours ago.

The rain, by and large, had never bothered Brenner much, and when the windshield wipers were doing their job well it was always calming, meditative for him. Helena was completely in love with the windshield wipers anyway, often he’d switch them on briefly even in the nicest weather just to delight her. But when you’re a chauffeur without a car who’s standing in the rain, then, subjectively speaking of course, that’s the moment when it hits you that you’re having a crisis. And the colossal duffel bag wasn’t exactly making things any easier.

You should know by now: crisis always equals opportunity! And before you start feeling sorry for Brenner-how he stood there in the rain without a car and without a job and without an apartment and without an umbrella and without a plan and with only this cheap duffel bag and this nuisance of a brainworm, “Zone of Transparency”-there’s one thing I need to tell you: if it hadn’t been raining, if Brenner weren’t so depressed walking in the rain, as if he’d never heard of a bus or a train or a taxi, he might never have noticed.

When a man follows you for a while in the rain, at some point you ask yourself, why is he doing that? Add to that, when the man, like Brenner, has no umbrella, but unlike Brenner, not a single hair. Total baldness might even be an advantage in the rain, because at least you don’t have wet hair afterward. But Brenner’s shadower was bald in such an old-fashioned way, with a wreath of hair around his head, i.e., the worst kind in the rain, because the raindrops hammer away at the unprotected bald part, and regardless, wet hair.

The aggravating presence of his shadower pulled Brenner out of his lethargy a little. To this day I don’t know what aggravated him more: that they still held him suspect and had him shadowed, or that baldy was such a dilettante about it.

And there you have it, once again, the best proof that there’s nothing in the world that doesn’t also have its good side. Because your average Viennese citizen might find it depressing that a new off-track betting parlor opens up every day, but purely for detective street practices, it’s convenient when you can wait in the entrance of the next betting parlor for your shadower.

“Next time, wear a sign that says ‘Shadowing’!” Brenner advised his trusty stalker, who nearly ran smack into him. “Then maybe you’d be less conspicuous.”

And not just his face, of course, but his whole bald head, too, turned red, only his lips were white as they said, “I need to speak with you.”

“There are easier ways to go about it.”

“I wanted to make sure that we weren’t being shadowed.”

And at that moment, as the man offered him his hand, it occurred to Brenner where he’d read the heading “Zone of Transparency.”

“Sebastian Knoll,” the man chipperly introduced himself.

I don’t know if it was because of the sleepless night in the holding cell at the police station, or simply the state of shock Brenner had been in for thirty hours now, that could explain why he suddenly had the feeling he’d better hold on tight to the door frame to keep himself from sinking into a fever dream.

In the green light of the betting parlor’s neon sign, he could see all too clearly the large raindrops crawling through Knoll’s wreath of hair. The purple spider veins on his earlobe, from an ancient piercing that had since closed up, looked to Brenner like a cryptic sign of either a cult or something extraterrestrial. Through the open door, racehorses and race dogs and race cars could be seen flickering across a TV screen. Outside, an unnaturally red streetcar sailed elegantly through the spray of rain, and above the door the ventilation system whooshed with the placing of bets, while just a few centimeters in front of Brenner, the dripping wet face of Knoll, the abortion fanatic, was claiming he must urgently speak with him.

Brenner wasn’t really listening to him, though, because the moment Knoll said his name it occurred to him that one of Knoll’s activists had shoved a brochure into his hand a few weeks ago in which he’d read the heading “Zone of Transparency.”

Pay attention: that’s what the glassy membrane of the ovum is called, into which the sperm implants itself-science, as it were. And believe it or not, for that first cell to divide: it takes thirty hours exactly. While the bald-headed man’s voice got increasingly impatient, from the betting commotion and the ventilation system drowning him out, Brenner couldn’t fight the thought that, exactly thirty hours after Helena’s disappearance, a chain reaction was now being set into motion. Just like the automatic sequence depicted so nicely in the brochure, how day after day the cells divide, and divide again, and divide again, without any human intervention. Suddenly he felt certain-or did it just seem that way to him in retrospect, what with the full knowledge one acquires in retrospect-that for anti-abortionist Knoll to turn up exactly thirty hours after the child’s disappearance was a sign that catastrophe would only multiply as automatically as cell division itself, just not in the direction of life. Rather, in the opposite direction.

“You’re Knoll?”

Interesting, though. Just now Brenner noticed that the entrance to the betting parlor was also surveilled with a camera. You can understand why they’d surveil it, because a betting parlor attracts a certain kind of person. Surveillance cameras were such a sore spot for Brenner, though, that he pinned this cheap dummy right on Knoll’s shoulders, even though there was no Sectec logo on it like on the cameras in the clinic. Well, figuratively pinned it on his shoulders, because very calmly he said, “I’ve always heard that Knoll never reveals himself, that he just pulls strings from the background.”

And just to escape the camera, Brenner went inside the betting parlor and sat down at the first empty table he saw. He ordered an espresso. Knoll ordered a hot tea, because he was afraid of catching a chill in his wet clothes. And when the drinks came, he said, “I’m sure you’ve heard quite a bit about me. But, the things that get said about people aren’t true most of the time, you know. Things have been said about you, too, which I hope aren’t true.”

The arrogance with which he said this rubbed Brenner entirely the wrong way. But he couldn’t help but like how modestly Knoll wiped his bald head dry with the small napkin placed between his tea cup and saucer.

“Now I finally know what these doilies are good for,” Knoll said, grinning. “Otherwise, they stick so badly to the bottom of your cup that you wonder what the point of them is. If you don’t spill, you don’t need them, and if you do spill, they just spread the mess farther.”

“What do you want from me?”

Knoll balled up the napkin, but instead of putting it in the ashtray, he slipped it as inconspicuously as possible into his pocket, like someone who doesn’t like to leave any trace behind.

“I’d like to see the Kressdorf kid returned as quickly as possible.”

“Talking to me is only going to make you look more suspicious to the police,” Brenner said. “Besides, I just got taken off of it.”

“It’ll look much the same to the good Frau Doctor. Fired! Without even batting an eye at employment law, of course.”

“Yeah, well. Gross negligence is reason enough.”

“They’ll always find something!”

Knoll had such an inscrutable smile on his lips that Brenner wasn’t sure how serious he was being. The ironic smile fit with his abortion fanaticism about as much as the pierced ear did with his respectable appearance.

“She would’ve liked to see me thrown out of my own building. And every accidental power outage got pinned on me like it was a terrorist attack and then would appear instantly in the newspapers. These old buildings just have bad wiring. Do you have any idea what maintenance costs are for an old building like that?”

A few of the gamblers let out a loud communal groan, not out of sympathy with Knoll, though, but because one of the races had produced an unpopular result.

“And when she’s not capable of looking after her own child, that gets pinned on me, too. Or the driver is guilty.” Knoll signaled to the girl behind the counter that he’d like another cup of tea, since he’d gulped the first one down when it was still scalding hot. “What’re you going to do now that you’re out of a job and an apartment?”

Didn’t miss a beat. And Brenner might have fallen for Knoll’s concerned tone. Because the pro-life boss had years of practice, of course, coaxing a vulnerable person over to his side. But Brenner kept his cool and answered absolutely correctly, “At the moment, I’m not worried in the least.”

“I’ve been searching for a bodyguard for the longest time.”

“Aha.”

“You could do the same job for me that you did for Kressdorf. As of immediately.”

Brenner was speechless for a moment. He couldn’t believe how shamelessly Knoll was already scheming about how next to provoke the Frau Doctor.

“You wouldn’t have to run around with a walkie-talkie and a revolver. It’d be enough for me if you worked as my driver.”

Fortunately, at that moment Knoll’s cell phone rang. Or unfortunately, I don’t know which I should say. You never know when all is said and done: Was it more fortunate or was it more unfortunate? Will you regret it or not? Not to mention being born. A person’s got to decide even the tiniest little thing in total blindness. The good lord’s a bit of a sadist about it, because you never know: this or that, what’s better for me and all involved when all is said and done? Brenner’s the perfect example right now: would everything have turned out even worse if Knoll’s cell phone hadn’t rung and Brenner had given him the answer that was perched on the tip of his tongue, and what kind of answer would Knoll have given him in return? We can’t know all that, or is it unfortunate that the phone call spared Brenner from answering, summa summarum, resulting in fewer deaths?

Now, surely you know the interesting phenomenon of cell phone contagion. I won’t go so far as to say the most serious disease worldwide, but among the front-runners in any case. All it takes is the ring of one cell phone for everyone else to check whether they might have at least gotten a new message. That’s exactly how it went for Brenner now. He played nervously with his phone as if he were silencing a call, while he listened to Knoll explain and calm down his callers, they shouldn’t let the reports about the kidnapping dissuade them, because clear as day, the clinic itself is behind the kidnapping, and so the week’s motto: rosary now more than ever.

After ten minutes of listening to Knoll talk on the phone, it got unbearable for him, and so he called someone, too. Believe it or not, Bank Director Reinhard. Without the job offer from Knoll, which Brenner had never taken seriously, he probably wouldn’t have come up with the idea. Sure, Reinhard had always been friendly to Brenner, never arrogant, where you might think he’s looking down at you. Once in Kitzbuhel they chatted about hunting, and another time even about nature. Trees, birds, all of it. And one thing you can’t forget: when Reinhard’s chauffeur wasn’t around, Kressdorf sometimes loaned Brenner out to him. Maybe that’s a way of demonstrating friendship among the better people, just like how the little people might lend and borrow tools among themselves, salt, milk, an egg, and the middle people, maybe the car or the spouse, so among the better-off you’d say, you know what, take my driver, I don’t need him just now, he’ll get you out to Klosterneuburg pronto.

But don’t go thinking it bothered Brenner. Because Reinhard-always a good tipper, don’t even ask. Brenner hadn’t told the bank director that he had no interest in hunting, of course, and now he was glad about that. Because otherwise, Reinhard certainly never would’ve said he was such a good driver that in case he ever stopped working for Kressdorf for some reason, he could be in touch anytime.

Brenner hadn’t taken it seriously at the time, because first of all, he had no intention of swapping Helena for Reinhard anyway, and second of all, life experience told him that a guy like Bank Director Reinhard enjoys appearing as his Sunday best, but when it comes down to it, there’s a secretary saying, we’ll call you.

What can I say, that’s exactly how it was. With Reinhard’s supposedly private number, Brenner advanced only as far as the secretary, and naturally, the Herr Director wasn’t in, and in case the Herr Director should ever be truly in need of a driver, we’ll call you. Brenner didn’t need to go back out into the rain for this short conversation, but he didn’t exactly want to make the call with Knoll on the phone next to him, and although it initially struck him as a good phone booth there beneath the covered entrance, the loud ventilation ended up sending him outside.

I have to be completely honest: no one who saw Brenner standing there in the rain would have guessed his detective past. Or predicted how in the coming weeks he would shake up the city. And you see, it’s for these things exactly that I admire Brenner. Because he didn’t give up after the faux-friendly “We’ll call you.” Instead he called up the Hotel Imperial and asked for Bank Director Reinhard.

You should know: once while they were waiting in Kitzbuhel, Reinhard’s driver had told Brenner that Reinhard kept a permanent suite at the Imperial where he liked to go on his lunch hour to stretch out a bit. Because, stressful sixteen-hour days, and how do you think he always manages to still make the drive to Klosterneuburg when he’s tired from business lunches, or just wants to relax a little now and then? That’s what he had the hotel suite for. But Reinhard never said “hotel room” or “suite,” instead, listen closely: “refuge.” And he always said that Churchill always said that “with a nap midday I get two days in one.”

On this day, though, Director Reinhard must not have had time for two days, because Brenner didn’t get hold of him at his refuge, either, and so he went back inside the betting parlor.

“Phone calls constantly!” Knoll said apologetically. Because he must not have noticed that in the meantime Brenner had made a phone call, too. “And? Have you thought it over?”

“What?”

“Are you going to work for me?”

“That would look great to the Frau Doctor,” Brenner said helplessly, and gestured to the waitress for the bill.

“Enough already!” Knoll yelled, a bit frazzled, and turned his cell phone off in mid-ring. “You’ll have to excuse me,” he sighed, “but you can’t imagine what kind of an uproar my people are in. They’re being called kidnappers and murderers in broad daylight.”

“At least they’re getting a taste of their own medicine.”

Brenner simply couldn’t resist that one. But Knoll dismissed it as if it were nothing. “You’re an ex-cop, you know the first thing that gets asked after a crime: who’s profiting from it?”

“I’m wondering how you know that I used to be a cop.”

Because, so it goes. Brenner was fairly certain at first that Knoll wasn’t behind the kidnapping. And this attempt to breed suspicion made Brenner mistrustful all over again.

Knoll just looked at him sympathetically, though. “You wonder why I know something about your past, but you’re confident that I would go and kidnap a child?”

“You threatened the Frau Doctor that you’d take her child away.”

Knoll hesitated a moment, and then his seductive smile climbed from deep within him and stopped just before reaching his lips. “A threat made without any witnesses can be easily refuted. But I want to be frank with you. I think you’re a good person. Truly, it happened in a moment of anger. I said something to Frau Doctor Kressdorf that one shouldn’t say. But I said it differently. I didn’t say anything about myself. I asked her whether she wasn’t afraid that the good lord, from whom she’d taken so many children, might take her child away, too, some day.”

“It’s the same thing,” Brenner protested.

At that moment, several of the screens hopped from snooker to dog racing.

“Good lord!” Knoll said once more. “Not to me. First of all, I’m no kidnapper, and second, I’m not stupid.”

“And the good lord is stupid, or what?”

When they were suspended in slow motion, you could see how the muscular bodies of the dogs deformed out of sheer centrifugal force. Their flews were blown straight back and almost didn’t catch up with their heads, their saliva flew with the bets into the sand, and Brenner wished that time would stand still in this lovely twilight created by the rainy day and the flat screens, because he had the feeling that there was no stopping now, and that everything had already been decided long before the first dog crossed the finish line.

“Listen to me: this kidnapping doesn’t benefit me in any way.”

“Unless the kidnappers don’t make contact, and the Frau Doctor shuts down the clinic because it’s her last hope for her child to turn up again.”

By all appearances, Brenner spoke objectively. His eyes were glued to the screen and his words clung to his sense of reason. But the worm had worked its way in, he noticed it right away. Because the suspicion aroused by Knoll began to nag at him.

“We haven’t gotten that far yet,” Knoll said. “It used to look like we’d be the ones who’d shut down under public pressure and have to leave.”

Brenner nodded in order to act like he was listening to Knoll. To his arguments. But he was only really listening to the worm that nagged at him.

“Up till now the kidnapping’s only helped the clinic,” Knoll blathered on. “Police protection round the clock. Public opinion wholeheartedly against us.”

But while the dogs crawled breakneck around the bend and somersaulted over each other in slow motion, as if that in itself were the contest, Brenner could only think about what Knoll had said before. About the good lord. The good lord might have personally taken Helena. And a terrible fear took hold of Brenner that he might possibly have an almighty thug as an opponent.

“They just want to delay my terminating their lease. Until their new Super Practice in MegaLand is finished,” Knoll said.

“Why MegaLand?” Like a track-standing cyclist trying to maintain his balance, who, at the last moment before falling over, rescues himself with the push of a pedal, Brenner rescued himself back into the conversation again. “It’s going to be a recreational park. Golf course, swimming pool, shops, movie theater, that kind of thing.”

“Haven’t you ever noticed how private practices are popping up in retail centers these days? The dental clinic in the train station, the cosmetic surgeon at the mall.”

“Sure, I’ve noticed the dental clinic.”

“And an abortion between shopping and bowling at MegaLand, it all fits smartly together. Baby Be Gone in designer ambience. With a ten-percent-off coupon for the next time.”

Brenner was almost relieved to see Knoll’s eyes light up with zeal now. Suddenly, he was back on familiar turf with the pro-life boss. Unbelievable, though, how easily a fanatic like that can rattle you when you’re feeling weak and running around with an enormous amount of guilt.

“ Baby Be Gone. You’re pretty cynical.”

“I’m not cynical. The people responsible for such a thing are cynical. Mega-Abortion-Land, financed by a million children’s deaths.”

“Alright, that’s enough.” Things were slowly turning sour for Brenner.

“Something like this has to be professionally branded so that it sells. Mega-Abortion-Land,” Knoll said with that amused look again. “Maybe I should go into business with them and sell them the name.” He was getting carried away by vanity now, and Brenner hoped he might make a decisive slip. “At her new super clinic in MegaLand she’ll have to triple her earnings in order to recoup the costs. But I don’t want to bother you with our fanaticism.”

Knoll pronounced “fanaticism” as if he’d had some kind of tainted alphabet soup for breakfast that only had quotation marks in it, which were gurgling up inside him at this very moment. “Or might I still convince an old workhorse like you of the miracle of life?”

“I’ve even looked at the brochures that your people hand out in front of the clinic. Nature sure puts on a show.”

“A show!” Knoll repeated, scornfully.

Brenner had drawn out the word “show” in order to provoke Knoll. “Miracle” would have worked, too, because back when the brochure fell into his hands, he’d thought to himself: hats off to nature. It wasn’t new to him, of course, what happens behind the scenes during those nine months, but a while indeed since he’d first applied himself to the subject back home in Puntigam, and at that time, of course, he’d only been interested in the procreative part, or better yet, on preventing new life.

“It’s only at a certain age that you can fully appreciate nature,” Brenner formulated, a compromise, as it were. “It’s true, though: your fanatic views do nothing for me. I saw too many fully grown deaths when I was on the force-you can’t be looking out for a bunch of cells, too.”

“So when does life begin for you, if I may ask?”

Brenner wanted to steer the conversation gradually in another direction, but he had to give Knoll a quick answer. “Where I’m from, in Puntigam-”

“You’re from Puntigam? Where the beer’s from?”

You see, that really got Knoll smiling, he was happy to actually meet someone from Puntigam.

“Exactly. In Puntigam, there was an old saying that children were told. Before you were born, you were just flying around with the gnats.”

“I know that one, too. You were just flying around with the gnats. We used to say that as children, too.”

“That’s a good enough explanation for me,” Brenner said. “That you fly with the gnats before-and maybe you fly with the gnats again afterward, too. I think it’s a good solution. For logistical reasons alone. That’s why I don’t understand why you’d waste this short stopover arguing about life. When you consider how short the time is compared to the gnats’ time.”

“You have that worked out quite comfortably. And otherwise, there’s nothing else that interests you about life?”

“I’m interested in what you want from me.”

“I want you to find the girl for me.”

The gamblers grew restless, and Brenner, too, couldn’t tear his gaze away from the screen, as the news came that one of the two dogs, whose sudden collapse was being shown over and over again, had broken its neck. Which is why he thought Knoll was talking about Helena at first, until he noticed the photo Knoll had laid on the table.

“How old would you guess this girl is?”

“No idea,” Brenner said, giving the photo a quick once-over. “Sixteen? Fifteen?”

It wasn’t a particularly good photo. A girl with long dark hair, walking, photographed from an odd angle, like an actress being hunted by the paparazzi. And only on the second glance did Brenner recognize the surroundings, because the photo had been taken right in front of the entrance to the abortion clinic.

“Twelve.”

“Huh, crazy, the Mediterraneans often look downright grown-up for their age. A pretty girl,” Brenner said, indifferently, as if Knoll had shown him a photo of his favorite niece.

“Twelve,” Knoll repeated, and all the more somber for it. “On her way to the abortion clinic.”

“Is that illegal?”

“No, it’s not.” Knoll reminded Brenner of an oracle who says everything twice, first normally, then a second time with grave foreboding, listen: “No, it’s not. For the unborn, there is no protection in our society.”

He pushed the photo at Brenner and offered him 10,000 euros if he found the girl, whose name he didn’t know.

“Seems to me, the unborn matter more to you guys than the born do,” Brenner said. “I was on the force for nineteen years. And I didn’t go trumpeting all over the place that I was fighting for the lives of the born, either.”

Knoll didn’t let himself be provoked, though. You could tell right away that he was used to these kinds of discussions, and he had roped Brenner into a conversation about unborn life and about morality at large, for and against, pro and contra-you could transcribe it for the pages of Religion Today every single time.

And to be perfectly honest: if Brenner didn’t have his own brand of fanaticism, in which he believed himself to be the only one capable of finding Helena, and if rage wasn’t burning in him like a vaccine, then I wouldn’t exactly stick my hand in the fire about whether Knoll stood a chance at persuading him yet. And maybe Brenner would be standing in front of the abortion clinic today with a rosary and an embryo sign and a pious expression on his face, and on the other side of the clinic’s entrance, the young security woman with the lawn-mowed do would have no idea that the old nut was actually Brenner, who used to be a cop and a detective and everything.

And that would be the same Brenner who people tell heroic tales about today, the stuff of wonder, beginning with the cell phone that he swiped from Knoll’s pocket in the betting parlor, allegedly like a real trickster thief. Seldom did anything in life go that smoothly for Brenner. You should know, Knoll made exactly the same mistake that Brenner did at the gas station and went to the bathroom at the betting parlor without his cell phone. And maybe Brenner only really took it because of that, in order to even the score for his own disgrace. But that’s how people are, and if a person’s solved the most spectacular murder case, then he’s absolutely got to be a magician with the little things, too.

But, right now, something much more important. Because believe it or not, Bank Director Reinhard was calling Brenner back.