Brenner and God (6 page)

“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.

Good news now. It wasn’t the Frau Doctor who was waiting for Herr Simon outside in the hallway. She had enough to deal with, what with her nervous breakdown. Instead, Natalie was sitting out on the bench and looking at him with those serious eyes of hers that Herr Simon had liked from day one. Pay attention: Natalie was the clinic’s psychologist, because a pregnancy’s never terminated without psychological counseling. And it was the psychologist, of all people, who got to experience an unwelcome side effect of the pills in his first week on the job. You should know, the pills made him a little volatile. He’d often be serenity personified, then something small would set him off all over again. Or, he’d let a stupid joke rip that never would’ve even occurred to him before. Just so you understand. Because Natalie was very hurt at the time, even though Herr Simon hadn’t meant anything bad by it. It was just a careless moment when he’d played dumb and pretended like he thought her job was to counsel the embryos: dispensing consolation along the lines of,
don’t make a big deal of it, life’s not that popular anyway, rest assured you can do without it, be glad that you can keep flying with the gnats
.

Maybe you’ve already noticed how much he liked Natalie,
because men don’t talk like such imbeciles otherwise. Did he get off on the wrong foot with Natalie? Don’t even ask. He tallied it up afterward, and believe it or not, she’d used the word “puberty” three times in one sentence.

And Herr Simon managed to insult her a second time within the same week. But to that I have to say, Natalie was being overly sensitive! Because she didn’t necessarily have to rebuff his compliment—that, in her case, it would have been a pity if she hadn’t been brought into this world—with such a scowl. My god, there will always be people who’ll make you want to say, it wouldn’t have been such a pity if their mothers had thought elsewise, and then for the vast majority, you’d say, it wouldn’t have made a difference one way or another whether they’re here or not—neutral, as it were. But very rarely is there a person who makes you say, it would’ve been an outright shame. See Natalie, with her black curls, with her white teeth, with her green specks in her dark-brown eyes, and with her mouth, which, in a single sentence, used the word “puberty” three times. But if you work in an area like the one Natalie works in, of course you don’t want to hear such a dubious compliment. I can understand Natalie on that. On the other hand, Herr Simon was brand new in the workplace at the time, he had yet to adopt the right conversational tone for the clinic, because—always a particular knowledge set, what you’re allowed to say where and how, and what you’re not allowed to say how and where.

But despite this minor friction, I don’t wish to say that Natalie didn’t like Herr Simon. Quite the opposite! Although she knew nothing of his police past, she’d felt right away that behind the slightly stiff and straitlaced chauffeur, an entirely
different person was hiding. Because you can’t fool a skilled psychologist with the Herr Simon routine when really you’re an old Brenner.

But it was jinxed for these two, because today they were back on the rocks all over again.

“My god, look at you!” they both said at the same time.

And if it hadn’t been so sad, maybe they would have laughed and could have possibly begun a love story with this simultaneous exclamation, but alas, it was only a death story.

Well, death story only in the long run, what with all that happened the next week and the dirt that got dredged up, television, newspaper, and, and, and. Short term, as long as they were sitting there on the bench in the police station, no death story, of course, no, just an eviction story. Watch closely: Natalie had his possessions in a cheap duffel bag, and she got him to hand over his car keys and his key to the chauffeur’s apartment. Because Kressdorf had built a modest chauffeur’s quarters above the double garage in the driveway to the Hietzinger villa—quite comfortable—but not Herr Simon’s apartment anymore now because the Frau Doctor said,
I never want to see that man again
. You see, she was almost more afraid of him than he was of her.

Natalie handed him an envelope containing one month’s pay, and then she offered him her hand in farewell, and said something terribly nice that pained Herr Simon more than if she’d called him a murderer. Listen closely. She said, “Herr Simon, Helena always liked you.”

“I’ll find those filthy—” he said, but his voice wobbled so much on “filthy” that he couldn’t get “pigs” out.

Natalie understood him regardless, though. She gave
him a disapproving look just like she used to do, and shook her head in warning, as if to say:
don’t make things any worse, Herr Simon
.

This treatment was preferable to him just now, though, because he’d calmed himself down enough to ask in a normal voice, “Have the kidnappers made any demands yet?”

“Herr Simon,” Natalie said, and pressed her lips so thin that a kiss would have been perilous.

“In a situation like this a private investigator can find a child much quicker.”

“Herr Simon!”

“It’ll take the police three weeks just to find someone competent, by then he’ll be out sick, and after that they’ll say: ‘Now it’s too late, statute of limitations.’ ”

“Herr Simon, listen carefully to me. You’re not to undertake anything in this case.” She looked at him so seriously with her dark eyes that everything else receded from view. “We know that you used to be on the police force.”

Naturally she felt the need to emphasize this because until recently she was the only one who didn’t know. “But you’re not on the force anymore,” the psychologist said, professional brainwashing, as it were. “You have feelings of guilt, but you’re not allowed to solve this case with your own fists.”

“I’m not talking about fists,” he said, “but—”

“We’re not talking about absolutely anything, Herr Simon. Or else, the child might be brought into only greater danger. The police have already taken the matter in hand.”

“Have the kidnappers made contact at all?”

“The detectives will take care of it.”

“Strange. Kidnappers almost always demand no police.
And these are demanding exactly the opposite: just police, no Brenner.”

“No Brenner,” Natalie said, earnestly and with that certain air of superiority that only people who know they’re doing the right thing get. But one thing to jot down for your own life. Certainty: always black ice. And Natalie didn’t realize the huge mistake she’d just made. Because that was the first time she didn’t call him “Herr Simon,” but rather “Brenner.”

And it struck Brenner that, in doing so, she was authorizing him to undertake the investigation. Unconsciously, as it were.

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.