The Bone Man (8 page)

“And the striker went straight to the newspapers?”

“He was an honest Yugo.”

“And Löschenkohl?”

“Kicked straight out of the club. Made a nice, high arc, too. What else were we supposed to do?”

“But he didn’t admit it.”

“Nobody ever does. But it was obvious. I knew Ortovic personally. And I have to say, a pity, such a nice guy. And a good striker. And a favorite with the ladies, of course, because Orto, he was a real character—not very big, but a little devil, and strong as a steer.”

Ferdl had a look of outright pleasure on his face as he described Ortovic. But don’t get any ideas—because it’s true: you often hear that about coaches, all that about the smaller boys, it’s not purely athletic interest that motivates them. But a certain something else, too.

But Ferdl—never. On that I’d lay my hand in the fire. Because he was a real lady-killer himself, and frankly, when he was describing Ortovic, he saw himself in it a little, too. And if you look at it that way, it was truly from an honest heart that he said, for a second time: “A real pity about that guy.”

“And so it was because of Ortovic’s testimony that you threw Löschenkohl junior out of the club?”

“We had to distance ourselves from the management, of course. So that everyone would see: it was only the tip of, of, of—”

“Of the iceberg?”

“No, of—of the club, I mean. Of the management. Only the president. Just Löschenkohl.”

They were driving up to the border now. No drawn-out formalities, though, because Ferdl knew the customs officer. I don’t want this to come out the wrong way but—certain agreements were in place. Anyway, they waved the bus right through, and then, once they were across, the driver said, “They’re always lined up here at night. Yugo-whores. Just like the soccer players who play for us, the whores earn a little foreign money, too.”

All this about the foreign currency really seemed to bother Ferdl. As a chauffeur, you probably have a certain relationship to it. Really not a bad profession, and one where you can get to know a lot over time. It goes without saying, Ferdl had a good general knowledge: “The Yugo-whores are cheaper and better than the ones at home.”

“Just like the soccer players,” Brenner said.

“Yeah, exactly. Like the soccer players,” Ferdl laughed. And then he nodded his head toward the side of the road and said, “First one’s already standing there. Especially on the weekends, though, it’s just teeming with them. Ortovic’s girlfriend always used to stand there, too. Before she disappeared.”

“Did she run out on Ortovic?”

But, now—and you see, that’s what I’ve been trying to say this whole time! Follow-up question at the wrong moment, and just like that—it’s all over.

Because it was now that Ferdl realized: Brenner wasn’t a sports reporter. If he didn’t even know that Yugo-striker Ortovic and his girlfriend had disappeared a few days after the bribery scandal broke. From one day to the next, as if swallowed up by the earth.

Ferdl lapsed into an icy silence from behind his steering wheel. Brenner could follow up or not follow up, and the only answer he’d get: icy Ferdl-silence. Until Brenner tickled him with the miracle blanket. That got the chauffeur finding a few choice words again.

In the end, though, he didn’t know anything else, except that Ortovic, the Feldbach striker, had popped back up again two days ago. In FC Klöch’s ball bag. Roughly three days after Klöch’s goalkeeper Milovanovic disappeared without a trace.

Now, this is where the story gets a little uncomfortable, of course. Because Brenner’s thinking,
Ortovic’s girlfriend, the missing prostitute, maybe I’ll go to Radkersburg, say, to the Borderline, maybe there I’ll find something out
.

Now, you’re going to say, that’s a good excuse. And I can just hear folks talking already: Brenner certainly didn’t go unwillingly to the Borderline. And you can’t hold it against anybody for thinking that. Just between us, Brenner himself wasn’t entirely certain, either,
am I going for the research, per se, or is there a little, you know, too
. So I don’t see why I even need to bother. Practically speaking, Brenner’s only a man.

And street prostitution—needless to say, another thing altogether, and there you’d be right in saying, what was Brenner looking for at the Borderline. But when everybody’s always thinking they know better, then it’s up to me to be the one who says: it was here, at the Borderline of all places, that Brenner got somewhere, one decisive millimeter farther. And without this millimeter, the Bone Man might never have been caught—might still be running around Styria on a brutal rampage—and to this day mothers might not dare let their kids play in the streets. No children’s bones were ever found among the bones at Löschenkohl’s, of course. These days, though, if you’re a mother, well, needless to say—caution, mother of all wisdom.

And it’s only a handful of mothers today who realize that it’s Brenner they should be thanking for the fact that they can let their children back out into the open countryside. And badminton, and swimming, and bike riding, yes, my dears, what fun—and all just because Brenner went to a brothel. The way I see it: so be it if a certain something else played a part in Brenner’s decision, i.e., not one hundred percent research. Is it so terrible, if we have a few less deaths in Styria today?

You’ll have to excuse me, but it really gets on my nerves sometimes, how sanctimonious people can be. Now, where’d I leave off.

It was a Sunday night, two days after the bus trip to Maribor.
Because Saturday night at a brothel is just too much of a production
, Brenner thought.
Better to go on a Sunday night, when there aren’t that many customers and it’ll be easier to strike up a conversation with the girls
.

Twenty years ago, when Brenner was still in the police academy, he went to the cathouse a few times, because that’s what you do—young man, part of a group, you go to a cathouse once. But you can’t always use a group as an excuse, because, as far as that goes, Brenner hadn’t exactly been the voice of dissent—I don’t want to sugarcoat anything. But since the academy, he hadn’t had anything to do with prostitutes—well, once, at most, in an official capacity, but not privately.

It’d been such a long time that he was a little nervous now, buyer’s anxiety, so to speak. A moment later, though, he was already feeling right at home again, because he met an old acquaintance at the door. Turns out, Jacky wasn’t unemployed after all—he only had time to hang around Löschenkohl’s all day long because by night he worked as a bouncer.

“Ah, so this is your business, Jacky.”

“No, it’s my idealism,” Jacky grumbled. He was still a little sensitive, because it was only recently that he’d had to start working back at the Borderline again.

Just a month earlier he’d been thrown out by the chief physician in Graz when, out of nowhere, two of her nurses got pregnant. Supposedly, that’s even why she wasn’t promoted to medical director, because the people down here are always a little weird about a fifty-year-old taking a thirty-year-old lover. I don’t know if there’s any truth to the rumor, but it might have a speck of a kernel of a truth.

Jacky held the door open for Brenner, and then the heavy red curtains, then a black door with a round glass window, and then, of course, big surprise.

And you could see how times have changed. People always say that, especially about kids, you’re supposed to see how the times change. Well, Brenner was seeing it now at the brothel. Because it was a distant echo of the brothels of twenty years ago when he’d been in the academy.

Music, artificial fog, a spotlight—I can’t even begin to describe it. Imagine New York, or imagine Paris—or if you’re me, Moscow—but whatever you do, just don’t imagine East Styria. It seemed like Brenner’s entire body had grown ears, every pore an ear—you’ve got to picture this for yourself—and so the music was getting inside of him everywhere.

“Why so glum? You look like you just flunked your GED.”

Suddenly, a redhead was standing beside Brenner—didn’t even see her come in. He was still miles away in his head and remembering how once, on the force, they’d sat an entire night on standby and not a single call came in. They played Mau-Mau
till four in the morning, a schilling a point, when all of a sudden, Oberascher goes out to the evidence room and comes back in with the cocaine they’d confiscated the day before.

And that’s the dangerous thing about that fiendish stuff—years later, you’ll often have some backlash like this, and out of nowhere, you’re being dragged back into that trip, middle of broad daylight, even though you haven’t taken any in years. And we even have a word for it here: flashback. English, you see, because that’s how horrible it must be if nobody dares say it in German.

If there is such a thing! For Brenner it’d been, wait—thirteen, fourteen, no, fifteen years ago already, and now a flashback that practically had him clinging on by his toenails. And that’s why at this moment he said to himself: “I think Löschenkohl fried my chicken in coke today.”

But the whore must have understood it in spite of the deafening music, or she could read lips, I don’t know. Anyway, she doubled over laughing, practically to her knees, and when she came back up, she giggled, “Chicken fried in cocaine! That’s a good one! What’s your name?”

She was still shuddering with laughter, but Brenner wasn’t so dazed that he couldn’t tell she was just waiting for an opportunity to jiggle.

Alas, she’d miscalculated. Because, exactly the opposite effect on Brenner. He smelled her pungent perfume, and it was over. Magic gone. All at once, sober as a stick again. You can have all the music and all the fog and all the flashbacks in the world, but when Brenner smelled that perfume, it was like flipping a switch. Suddenly, the chicken was coated in coarse breadcrumbs again.

“Simon’s my name,” Brenner said, because he thought,
why should I use a fake name, I’m old enough to use my real name at a brothel
.

“
Shy
mon!”

“Simon.”

“No! Shymon!” the whore shuddered with laughter again. “Because there’s no need for a man to be
shy
in a brothel.”

“So what’s your name, then?” Brenner asked, because he was thinking:
if she’s this talkative already, can’t hurt, maybe I’ll get led to the right one
.

“You Man! Me Angie!” Angie said. Because in every brothel there’s an Angie, and this was the Angie from the Borderline in Bad Radkersburg. And when Brenner looked a little confused, she tried it again, the other way around.

“Me Angie!” she said and pointed at her breasts. Right, so she wasn’t wearing anything, maybe I should’ve added that. And then she clutched at Brenner’s chest and said, “You Man!”

Brenner had to buy Angie a peewee of sparkling wine, and even though he was making an effort to keep up his end of the conversation, after only her second sip she asked with great concern, “Why so glum? You look like you just flunked your GED.”

And truly, if it weren’t for the fact that this line of hers roiled him so much, Brenner might not have said just now, “How am I supposed to look when I see a pigsty like this?”

By pigsty, though, he didn’t mean, in a moral sense, the brothel, but the table next to him. And I have to be fair here: everything else in the joint was
picobello
, meticulous, but the table right next to Brenner’s, it honestly looked as though pigs had been rooting there. Broken glasses, bottles overturned,
cigarette butts all over the table and the floor—the only thing missing was someone puking.

“Oh, that’s just Palfinger,” Angie said.

“Who’s Palfinger?”

“Me Angie! You Man!”

This one’s a real mallet
, Brenner thought. And now he was actually glad that the music was as loud as it was so that he’d only have to understand half of her chatter. And these days if you only understand half of something, you can just as easily ignore the other half, too.

“That was a joke, like from Tarzan, get it? Me Tarzan, you Jane, get it: me Angie, you Man, get it? Which Tarzan do you like best? For me it’ll always be Johnny Weissmüller. They just don’t make men like him anymore. That’s something I can vouch for.”

Brenner was an expert at not hearing something he didn’t want to. Because if you spend two decades in break rooms and police stations, then maybe you’re an expert in narcotics, or a bit of an expert with homicide, or something of an expert in embezzlement. But you’re only a complete and total expert at not listening. Because, day and night, your colleague at the next desk, and the secretary dealing with her divorce over the phone—who gets the parakeet and who only gets visitation rights when all is said and done. If you’re not an expert at not-listening, you won’t survive six months.

“Why so glum? You look like you just flunked your—That’s him.”

But the art of not listening, of course, is to listen again at just the right moment. That’s why I say: expert. Because, easy enough for a person not to listen. But in the middle of
complete not-listening, for a person to listen again at the decisive moment—that’s what sets the specialist apart.

Brenner saw a fat colossus on rickety matchstick legs groping his way down the stairs. He clutched the banister anxiously, and even when he finally got to the bottom, Palfinger still needed half an eternity to make his way over to his pigsty. Then he flopped down onto the dark red armchair, causing a cloud of dust to rise, but the spotlight lent him a rosy aura of respectability.

“He even looks like a pig,” Brenner yelled into Angie’s ear.

“Shhhhhhh!”

Suddenly, it was Angie who looked like she’d just flunked her GED. “Are you out of your mind? That’s our best customer.”

“That swine there?”

Personally, I find fat people ten times more appealing than somebody who’s just skin and bones. Because we’ve got people down here who are so thin, you’d think they got sent over in return for a donation to Biafra. One glimpse of this swine, though, and I have to say, you can’t exactly get mad at Brenner for talking this way. Because it wasn’t just his corpulence, but his entire way of being.