The Bone Man (13 page)

“Does Marko live here in the farmhouse all year?”

“Half the time he’s in Graz. Apart from yesterday, the last time I saw him was a good week ago. He’d had quite an argument with Jacky—I could hear it from over here. Jacky probably wanted his money.”

“Marko was a customer of Jacky’s, too?”

“Everyone’s a customer of Jacky’s. But Marko’s shortcoming was that he never paid. And Jacky wasn’t the only one he ran up debts with. He’d buy my paintings but never pay me for them. Invite you for blood sausage but never give you the money.”

“It’s always the same with rich people. I just wonder whether it’s the millionaires who are all tight-fisted or whether it’s the misers who all become millionaires.”

“Don’t make me laugh. Marko, a millionaire. Horvath was his last hope.”

And now, Brenner’s technique for sounding someone out: don’t follow up. And this time it worked. Because Palfinger filled both their bowls again, and then he said, “Do you even know how Marko made his millions?”

Even though the soup was making Brenner so hot that sweat was streaming down his forehead, he started in with his spoon again right away, i.e. I eat, you talk.

“Tires,” Palfinger said.

Brenner now: “Can you really earn that much off tires?”

“If they’re bulletproof, and if a war breaks out a few kilometers away, where bulletproof tires are needed for the vehicles, then, sure. That first year of the war, Marko was raking it in like a fool. Most of us artists profited from it. The prices of paintings skyrocketed. Because a big collector in a small
country—he can drive prices up. And Marko bought everything that he could find.”

Brenner drew his head down a little and continued spooning up the soup, well behaved. And Palfinger kept talking, well behaved.

“But when the boycott on imports went into effect, Marko was left sitting on his pile of tires. And this enormous factory with two hundred employees. That’ll eat up your fortune pretty quickly. By the time Marko was getting rid of his collection, the price of paintings had hit rock bottom, too. He only held on to a few artists.”

“You and Horvath, for example.”

“Except, then, the rumor sprang up that Horvath was dead and prices skyrocketed again. That saved Marko.”

“So his only hope is that Horvath doesn’t turn back up.”

“At least not before the big exhibition next month. With the sculptures. Because this week they started with the prints. But Horvath’s really a sculptor.”

“How close friends are you and Horvath, really?”

“Horvath was a loner. He didn’t let anyone get close. And you couldn’t get him to eat with you, either. He was the best cook I’ve ever known.”

It seemed a little strange to Brenner that these artists were all so crazy about cooking. And he would have liked to ask Palfinger how that happens. But he knew that on no account could he say anything now, and so he let Palfinger keep talking.

“Horvath had a sense of taste that I would best compare to having perfect pitch. You could season something with twenty-five spices, and after the first bite, he’d have listed them all off.
And he didn’t cook like a cook, but like an alchemist in his laboratory.”

“What a bunch of crap.”

Shit, that slipped out of Brenner. He’d just never been able to stand it when the better folks talked about cooking. This whole nouveau riche pretense, how they examine the wine with a thermometer first before they drink it. Maybe he was only sensitive to it because it always managed to remind him of the certified interpreter he’d once schlepped to Florence, and after two days, they were fighting so much that they had to travel home separately.

But it didn’t bother Palfinger one bit that this had slipped out of Brenner.

“A bunch of crap,” he nodded, “That’s how it must have seemed to Horvath, too. He suffered from compulsive eating. Eating, puking, eating, puking, eating, puking.”

“Usually only women do that.”

Brenner tried to say that as casually as possible. Maybe too casually. Because Palfinger didn’t say anything in response.

Maybe he hadn’t really heard it. Or didn’t want to hear it. Or honestly didn’t know that, for nearly a full year now, Horvath had been working at the Löschenkohl Grill as a waitress, and night after night, serving as his own lover.

Real quick now. Brenner got a ride back with the noon mail truck, and somehow he managed not to puke it full up to the parcel rack. Not because of the Klachl soup but on account of this one little thing that Palfinger had told him.

Because, given how incensed he’d been about Horvath’s delicate sense of taste, Brenner only had a few seconds to press for the truth. And then, it dawned on him. And then, he had to ask himself why the waitress had only been eating sausages for months on end but avoided the fried specialities of the house like the plague. And then he had to go and connect that observation with this question: the human bones found at Löschenkohl’s—where exactly did the flesh end up?

And at the very thought that he himself might have ingested one of these fried bits of flesh, well, it stretched Brenner so far that the half-hour ride on the mail truck seemed about as long to him as his entire life up until now.

When he got back to Klöch, it was peak business time at Löschenkohl’s. Hence, down to the basement to see Jacky’s mother, who’d just finished mopping the hallway.

“Where’s Jacky?”

The bathroom attendant was always so cheerful that it got Brenner to thinking:
you see, this is good for a depressive mood—if
you have to be preoccupied with the negative
. Philosophy, as it were: one person’s interested only in fashion and trifles, but secretly he’s depressed, but the bathroom attendant—who has to clean up after everybody else—pure sunshine.

No sunshine today, though, no—eyes puffy from crying and a trembling voice: “Gone.”

Brenner waited, but that was her entire answer.

“What happened, then?”

The bathroom attendant didn’t utter a word.

And then, I can’t explain it any other way—she must have felt ashamed all of a sudden. Because she turned around and disappeared into the women’s bathroom.

Needless to say, an awkward situation for Brenner. On the one hand:
should I follow her?
On the other:
as a man nowadays, you don’t just go into the women’s bathroom without batting an eye
. But when the bathroom attendant didn’t come back out after a few minutes, and because there was nobody around just then, for the second time in his life, Brenner went into the women’s bathroom.

Because there was this one time in Lofer when he’d had to collect a suicide from the women’s bathroom at Café Moser. He could still remember how the kitchen was right next to the bathrooms and the whole time he could hear the chef’s radio. And when he pulled the suicide’s ID from her wallet, at that very moment, Udo Jürgens was singing from the kitchen, “Siebzehn Jahr, blondes Haar.” And believe it or not, the dead girl, also seventeen with blond hair, just like the song.

Now that Brenner was in the women’s bathroom at Löschenkohl’s, he didn’t see the bathroom attendant. With fifteen stalls, though, needless to say, she could be anywhere.

“Frau Trummer!” he called, but no response. “Frau Trummer, say something please!”

Frau Trummer didn’t say anything, though. He didn’t hear a peep out of her. So Brenner looked to see whether any of the stalls were locked because—you know how it is with restaurant bathrooms, depending on whether a red or green status indicator is visible on the lock, you know right away: Vacant or In Use. A good invention actually, for once somebody came up with something. All the stalls were empty, though, Vacant indicators everywhere. So Brenner started opening the doors, one after the other.

When he was already on the second-to-last door, Frau Trummer—still nowhere. And then the last door, not only no Frau Trummer but not even a toilet inside. Only an empty stall. And no tiles on the wall either, just another door.

Brenner knocked, and he could hear Frau Trummer’s sobs from behind the door now. Brenner still thought it was a broom closet that she was hiding in, and so he opened the door slowly.

But then Brenner was in for a surprise. Because it wasn’t the door to the broom closet that he’d opened. It was the door to Frau Trummer’s apartment. She not only spent her entire day working in the bathroom. She lived in the bathroom, too. She was sitting there on her old rust-brown divan in her ten-square-meter hole in the wall that only got a little bit of light from her two basement windows.

Now, Brenner was momentarily a bit speechless when he saw old lady Trummer sitting there in her basement hole with her head in her hands.

But maybe a person shouldn’t be so thoughtless as to call
another person’s apartment a hole. And even if it was only ten square meters and practically dark even in the light of day and toilet smells and sounds inside—to Frau Trummer, it was still her apartment. And so a person doesn’t need to come down here and condescendingly call it a hole, just because chance has treated a few other people a little bit better than this. Because there are people who own entire houses, and from the rooftop terrace you can see all the way to Africa. And despite this they still have a hole—in their heads—and that’s what I think about that!

Frau Trummer had appointed her apartment as nicely as possible: a small credenza, beige, like those poor people in the fifties used to have—well, these days it’s back in style. A rust-brown wicker divan, something as comfortable as this you just don’t find anymore today. A kitchen table with a starched white tablecloth, and over the tablecloth, a clear plastic runner. Which is appreciated if you spill something, because then you can just wipe it up like it’s nothing, and the tablecloth beneath stays
picobello
.

“So what happened?” Brenner asked, but Frau Trummer just shook her head.

He simply sat down on the white kitchen chair now and waited.

And after a few minutes, Frau Trummer said, “My boy’s disappeared.”

“How long’s he been gone?”

“A week,” Frau Trummer said. “That’s not it, though. Three days ago it was my sixtieth birthday. He promised that he’d take me to Graz, to the Emperor of China. And he’d never forget something like that. Even as a little boy—always kept
his promises. He said I have to try Chinese food just once because I’ve never had Chinese.” Frau Trummer pulled out a large handkerchief from beneath the divan cushion. “I don’t need any Chinese food. And I don’t need Graz. But, my son I need, because otherwise I have nothing.”

And then she blew her nose, but it was pointless, because she started crying again right away.

Brenner didn’t get much else out of Jacky’s mother. And when he saw on her old porcelain kitchen clock that it was almost two-thirty, he had to get back upstairs to catch the waitress. Because at this point there wouldn’t be any more customers, but the waitress wouldn’t be on break yet, either, so this was the best opportunity.

And if you’re going to be a detective in this day and age, you simply can’t let yourself be guided by sympathy. Sure, he liked the waitress—I like her, too, I freely admit. And on his way up to the dining room, he was still secretly holding on to one hope:
if, one by one, everyone’s disappearing, maybe in the meantime, the waitress has already disappeared, too, and I’ll get out of doing this
.

But the waitress, of course, there as ever. Not to mention the fact that she was sitting there with a schnapps. Completely alone, middle of the afternoon. And Brenner had never seen her drink anything but coffee.

“I could use a schnapps right about now, too,” he said and took a seat at her table.

“You got that right,” the waitress said, tossing the rest of her schnapps back, and walked over to the bar. She didn’t have to stagger so much, though—Brenner could already tell from the way she’d slurred her words that this wasn’t her first schnapps.
But you can take a competent waitress off her shift, but you can’t take the competency out of the waitress, and a few seconds later she was back with Brenner’s order.

Except she hadn’t brought a schnapps, not even two, but the whole bottle.

“This is the home brew. For staff only.”

“Am I staff now?”

“You sleep in the staff’s quarters, don’t you?”

“When you look at it that way, all right.”

“Whoever sleeps in the staff’s quarters is staff, so be it. And whoever doesn’t sleep in the staff’s quarters doesn’t get any moonshine.”

“Does Löschenkohl distill it himself?”

“Löschenkohl? He brews Blitz at best.”

Now, though. You don’t need to be a detective to be able to tell that the waitress had a problem. Even someone like you or me would’ve been able to tell right away. Because no one had ever seen her so vulgar before—on the contrary, a lovely woman. Competent waitress, lovely woman. And now something like this.

“This is Klaushofer’s home brew.”

Brenner didn’t say anything to that, he simply took a sip of the schnapps that the waitress had poured him. And I don’t want to alarm you now but—then he had another gulletful. There was a moment, though, when Brenner thought:
over and out—and only intravenously from this point forward
.

“Eighty-three percent, Klaushofer’s fruit mash.”

“You need a firearms permit for this.”

“But it doesn’t do anything to you,” the waitress said. “Because it’s such pure schnapps, only apples in it.”

“The apples might not do anything. But that percentage will.”

“Where, though? It doesn’t affect you at all,” the waitress said, and filled both schnapps glasses again.

“I could use it anyway,” Brenner said and reached for the freshly filled schnapps glass.

“It doesn’t hurt one bit.”

And down went the second schnapps. Interesting, though, the second burned far less than the first. Needless to say, the third—only apples and they don’t do you any harm.

“People are very distinctive when they’re intoxicated,” the waitress said.

“Very distinctive? Very different, you mean,” Brenner said, because alcohol always makes him need to be right a little.