Morgue Drawer Four (20 page)

Martin looked at her as though he were only just now waking up.

“His sister?” he asked.

“Yes, that anonymous body who died from anaphylactic shock,” Katrin said. She was suddenly talking the way you do to a child who’s a bit slow.

“What’s the man’s name?” Martin asked.

“Sjubek Laringosch,” Katrin replied without hesitating but rolling the R nicely. “Sounds mysterious, huh? It’s Moldovan.”

“Moldovan?” Martin asked back. “The guy is…”

“Yes, from the far-flung regions of Eastern Europe that the EU has not yet assimilated and that reject the blessings of both standardized European condom sizing and even the euro itself, which I understand people are now calling the yoyo,” Katrin confirmed, batting her eyes and smiling. “A well-hewn representative of a mysterious steppe people, with eyes as shiny and black as the polished obsidian of a signet ring.” She sighed and became serious. “At least, that’s what I thought yesterday. Today he’s just some poor bastard who committed suicide far away from home, presumably consumed by grief for his dead sister.”

“Murdered,” Martin said absentmindedly. “Not a suicide.”

“Sorry?” Katrin asked. “Murder?”

Martin nodded. “What was the sister’s name?” he asked.

“Semira,” Katrin said. “I was actually surprised that he would come to the Institute at all and open himself up to trouble with the police just so he could bury his sister appropriately back in Moldova, only then to throw himself under a train. It doesn’t make sense somehow.”

“What was his trouble with the police?” Martin asked.

“He doesn’t have a visa or an entry stamp in his passport.”

“What does that mean?” Martin asked. His brain was really light-years away from its normal performance level.

“He’s here illegally, and I assume not just since yesterday,” Katrin said.

Martin’s boss popped in through the door. “Dr. Gänsewein, I have signed your application here.”

Martin silently stood up, removed his headset, took the paperwork, added his signature to the bottom, and grabbed his duffle coat.

“See you,” he said, and he left the office without turning around once.

“This is great! Now that you’ve got some time off, you’ll have more time for the investigation,” I said on our way to the car.

Martin’s response left much to be desired: he didn’t respond at all.

“I’ve been giving some thought to the best way for us to proceed,” I said. “I think we should resume our investigation by focusing on Semira.”

“The police will do that; we don’t need to get involved,” Martin murmured.

“But they aren’t going to come up with anything,” I said.

We were already sitting in the trash can, but Martin showed no signs of turning the ignition.

“The detectives on the case—or to be more precise, my friend Gregor—have apparently also been told that I was walking around door to door the other night, showing people a drawing and telling some completely wacked story that I assume absolutely no one believes.”

“Yes, but we were on the trail of something completely different then,” I said impatiently.

“And the police
were
able to figure out where that woman lived,” he hastened to add.

“Also something completely different,” I said even more impatiently.

“I see,” Martin said, and I thought he sounded a bit sarcastic.

“First of all, the bouncer was a rat who didn’t pass on any relevant information about Semira’s identity, just an observation to his control officer in the police.”

Martin winced when I said “control officer,” but I didn’t let him mull that over at all. “Plus, now we’re trying to get hold of information that it is a crime to even know, information about an illegal immigrant. No one can pass that information on to the police here because then you’d be admitting to harboring an illegal.”

Martin had to take a moment to think about that as he started his trash can’s toy engine. God, that sound totally makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Spectrally, of course.

“Why are you so convinced that the woman has any significance in this case?” Martin asked.

“Well, because she comes from the East,” I said. How was it that Martin hadn’t gotten this yet?

As expected, he lived up to my worst fears and asked: “From the East?”

OK, just between us: Martin’s mental potency has degraded dramatically over the past few days. I’m not sure what’s been causing it exactly, but the trend has started worrying me. He’s been acting like some blond bimbo who you want to explain the theory of relativity to, but who doesn’t get that time isn’t merely what passes while her nail polish dries.

“Pay attention,” I began, trying to lay out the Big Picture for Martin in lots of tiny, manageable baby steps. “It started when I stole a car.”

“It isn’t certain whether that event triggered subsequent developments or whether it just coincidentally occurred a few days before you died. In fact, if I understand correctly, this was just one of hundreds of previous car thefts,” Martin threw in.

Well, I stood corrected. The degradation was not in his mental potency in general. Apparently he could still reflect on things theoretically. What had degraded was his ability to appreciate the brutality and affliction of living and dying in the real world. Was his telling me this supposed to give me hope now?

“While it is true that I’ve pinched plenty of cars in my time, never an SLR and never one with a body in the trunk,” I replied as dispassionately as possible, trying to sound objectively cool and logical.

“OK,” Martin relented. I was slowly getting the impression that his mental lethargy was abating. I always say work limits human development, and this forced leave of absence was already starting to show its healing effect.

“So,” I began again. “I steal a car with a body in it, a couple of days later I feel like someone is following me, and then I get pushed off a bridge. At the time I didn’t consciously register him, but since then I’ve grown pretty sure that I did see the Bulgarian or whatever he is multiple times during the last two days of my earthly life.”

“Uh-huh.”

“OK. So then, Semira’s body was missing for a few days and then it shows up with signs that animals had started eating it, indicating that she had been unloaded somewhere in the woods,” I continued.

Martin nodded.

“At first no one can identify the woman, and then suddenly her brother pops up—he’s the guy I recognized—to transport her home for a proper burial, and then the next day that same guy is lying dead himself in the freezer downstairs.”

Martin thought for another moment and then asked: “What does that have to do with Eastern Europe?”

“The stolen cars get sent to Eastern Europe, which also happens to be where our dead Hänsel and Gretel here come from.”

“OK,” Martin said. “So who is the murderer? Count Dracula?”

I gave a loud moan. He wasn’t taking me seriously.

“I don’t know who the murderer is,” I said. “But for me there is a clear connection between the car theft, the body in the SLR, and this most recent murder. I don’t know any more, which is why I need you so that we can find out the rest.”

“I don’t feel like finding it out,” Martin said. “I want to make up with Birgit, get my job back, and get rid of you.” He thought for a moment. “But not in that order,” he added.

Asshole.

“Do you think you can get either your job or Birgit back as long as this series of murders hasn’t been solved?” I asked.

Martin was thinking about that, I could tell, but he was able to keep his precise train of thought a secret from me. These thoughts were undoubtedly not very heartening, since his mood was darkening more and more.

“There is only one way for you to redeem your reputation as an impotent crackpot with Birgit and as a psychologically unstable scalper with your boss: you’ve got to prove to them all that your incoherent drivel wasn’t crazy talk and that you knew more from the get-go than the others did. Because I told you.”

“I’ll never speak to another living soul about you,” Martin said. “It doesn’t matter how many crimes of the century I might solve—there is no one in the world who will believe this story.”

“Then sideline me,” I relented, although I was pretty sure that he would end up breaking his vow. “But solve the crimes. Otherwise, your reputation will be permanently ruined.”

He thought again, this time for quite a while, all the way until we reached the door to his apartment.

“And what do you suggest I do next?” Martin asked.

I had him where I wanted him.

“We’ve got to figure out who owns the SLR,” I said.

“Terrific idea,” Martin said, caustically. “Unfortunately no cars of that make and model have been reported stolen, so that might be a tad bit difficult, don’t you think?”

“Semira will help us,” I said. “The woman was a whore, and whores have johns. That’s how we’ll track him down.”

Martin opened the door to his apartment, took off his shoes, arranged them neatly side by side, hung the duffle coat up without any creases on its hook, and went into the kitchen to make himself some tea.

“We’ll get going at eight o’clock,” he said. “Until then I want some peace and quiet.”

I promised him heaven and earth that I’d stay clear of him, and he parked me in front of the TV to watch talk show after talk show and soap opera after soap opera until night finally came and we resumed our investigational tour.

This time the milieu we were looking into was richer.

It still had to do with sex for sale, but not the cheap sex you buy off the street and receive on the street. We were moving into the environment Semira fit into, based on her neighbor’s description. Pricey. Martin had intentionally grabbed his long, dark winter coat from the closet, the one he’d bought for his father’s funeral and had never worn again since. At least in this coat he wouldn’t immediately look like he’d taken a wrong turn and was ringing the bell to politely ask for directions.

We had the drawing of Semira with us, hoping we could get the information we needed from one of her colleagues. It was clear that this wouldn’t be an inexpensive excursion, because the first thing a man is offered in an upscale “nail salon,” as it were, isn’t sex—but alcohol. At a price that even the Yanks during Prohibition would have deemed a rip-off.

The first problem with our plan was that it turned out Martin wasn’t actually familiar with even one whorehouse. How were we supposed to comb the appropriate body-rub parlors if we didn’t know where they are? So, I had to draw on my bad memory, even though I’d never set foot in one of these upscale riding stables; I had never gotten flush enough during my short life to afford one. But, of course, even in my crowd people are familiar with certain addresses. Definitely not all of them, but we didn’t have time for all of them, anyway. We just had to hope that we were looking in the right area. Had Semira owned a car? Presumably not, because the neighbor hadn’t mentioned anything about that. Of course, someone might have driven her to work and home again, or she might have taken any of the numerous transportation options offered by the Cologne Transit Authority…hmm, now that’s more my kind of metrosexual.

But, again, we restricted our search to the radius of what Semira could have reached by foot, also because we didn’t feel like wandering aimlessly back and forth through the whole city. And within her walking radius were some of the Russian tochkas, at which establishments the term “Russian” is used for simplicity’s sake to refer to anyone born east of Berlin. Not entirely politically correct, but easy to remember.

So Martin stopped at the ATM first, withdrew cash up to his limit, and then parked his trash can on an inconspicuous residential street near our hunting ground.

Brothel I, Scene 1—lights, camera, action: The door opens, the doorman waves Martin in. Red ultraplush. Lots of loud people of presumably Eastern European origin wearing lots of gold on their wrists, necks, fingers, and teeth.

Martin approaches the bar, orders a beer. Looks around. Much too conspicuously, and I tell him so.

“How else am I supposed to look around?” he asks.

“Inconspicuously,” I say.

“With my eyes shut, or what?” he grumbles.

We haven’t even been working for ten minutes, and already Martin’s getting cantankerous. I think we’re in for some fun and games.