The Bone Man (9 page)

“That’s Palfinger,” Angie said.

“I don’t know any Palfinger.”

Angie didn’t buy it at first. “Where’d you go to school?” she said, then knocked back the last sip of her sparkling wine and disappeared.

And when she came back freshly made up a minute later, she didn’t sit down by Brenner anymore but by Palfinger, because she must get a higher commission there. But today just wasn’t Angie’s day, because before she could fully
sit down, Palfinger booted her right in the can. And I’ve got to be honest—that Palfinger was so agile, well, I’m surprised, too.

The folks at the Borderline weren’t surprised in the slightest, though, because they were used to his behavior. And even Angie was laughing, now that she’d recovered. And you see, that settled it for the whore: she simply sat back down beside Brenner and asked him if he’d buy her another peewee. But before Brenner could even give her an answer, Palfinger grunted over at her: “Get out of my spitting range, Angie.”

And even though Angie cleared out instantaneously, it wasn’t fast enough for Palfinger. From a distance of four, five meters—right in Angie’s face.

When Angie was finally able to get back behind the bar, Brenner started looking around for another place to sit, too, because, no surprise, of course, he was thinking:
if I don’t, I might be the pig’s next target
. But before he’d even finished the thought, Palfinger was already way ahead of him. “There’s a seat here at my table, bone-sniffer.”

With something like this, there’s always the old trick of acting like you didn’t hear anything. And as far as your peace of mind goes, it remains one of the best options. How should I put it, though, maybe peace of mind wasn’t what Brenner was necessarily looking for just now when he said, “What, can’t hit a target twice from that distance?”

“Well, no need for a man to be shy in a brothel, bone-sniffer. It’s like mountain climbing, once you reach two thousand meters, anything goes, and that’s true for cathouses, too. Come, join me, and I’ll tell you something. I never spit twice in one day. On principle.”

“You can just as easily tell me that something of yours from where you’re sitting now. A little distance never hurt.”

Palfinger struggled like a person who’s old and seriously ill, and it took him a few minutes before he’d finally freed himself of the low armchair and was standing on his matchstick legs.

Then, he slowly walked to the door in the back and called Jacky in. And it was now that Brenner saw that Jacky hadn’t been too far off about his idealism. Because his real money was tied up in something else.

When Palfinger came back with some fresh grass, he sat down next to Brenner and extended his hand to him, perfect etiquette. “Allow me: Julius Palfinger. Please do me the honor of smoking with me. Jacky’s finest harvest.”

He talks about as stilted as he moves
, Brenner thought.
The man’s almost more unpleasant when he’s friendly than when he’s kicking your ass
.

“I don’t smoke.”

“No vices?” Palfinger smiled to himself.

Brenner was amazed by how quickly Palfinger’s fat fingers could roll a joint. He lit it with an overlong match, like you’d use to light the pilot on a gas stove. After his first drag, Brenner thought,
now he’ll get on with whatever his important story is
. But then, a second drag, and then, holding the smoke as long as possible in his lungs, and only then did Palfinger say, “May I ask whether in the course of your investigation you’ve come across any trace of my friend Horvath who’s disappeared?”

It’s an ironclad rule. People who claim they have something to tell you in truth only want to pump you for information. And those who act like they just have a quick question always want to tell you god knows what.

“You mean the artist, Horvath?”

“To others perhaps, he’s the Artist, Horvath. To me, he’s my friend Horvath.”

“And who is it exactly that he’s the Artist Horvath to?” Brenner asked. Because, as a detective, you’re not there to let other people ask the questions.

“To his gallerist, he’s the artist. And to the art collectors. And above all, to Marko.”

“He’s no friend to them?”

“Do you cash in on your friend when he hasn’t even been missing a whole year?”

“Seems that way.”

“Herr Gallerist Haselsteiner and Herr Art Collector Marko couldn’t possibly have anticipated that they’d be the ones who would end up orchestrating the Great Horvath Sell-out.”

“So, you’re not on good terms with the two of them,” Brenner said.

“Name me an artist who’s on good terms with his gallerist and his largest collector.”

“So you’re an artist, too.”

“Julius Palfinger,” he introduced himself for a second time to Brenner and shook his hand again. But this time he added, “Austrian National Prize for Fine Art. Peggy Guggenheim Museum, Tate Gallery, Biennale, Documenta. Munich, Berlin, Zürich.”

“Munich, Berlin, Zürich?” Brenner said. “I know those from playing DKT.”

And true, in fact, there was a brief time when they didn’t play Mau Mau on the nightshift, but DKT.
Das Kaufmännische Talent
, where you buy up properties and houses and hotels. But
a game of DKT simply lasts too long when you’ve always got assignments coming in on the side. And so it just as quickly fell out of favor, and they picked up the Mau Mau cards again.

“So?” Palfinger said, startling Brenner out of his thoughts, “have you heard anything about my friend Horvath?”

“First, I need to find the woman who hired me.”

“And what’s with Ortovic?”

Brenner only shrugged his shoulders and asked Palfinger, “Do you know his girlfriend, Helene Jurasic?”

“I know every whore in Austria.”

Don’t follow up. Palfinger stubbed out his joint so meticulously, you’d have thought he was trying to win the Olympic medal in precision engineering. And then he said, “If I tell you where Jurasic is, then you’ll tell me where Horvath is?”

“Okay.”

Normally, Brenner never would’ve said “okay,” and right there you could tell that he was lying. Because at that moment he still didn’t have the slightest clue where Horvath was. He didn’t even have the makings of a suspicion—for all he knew, the bones found at Löschenkohl’s could have been Horvath’s.

“Helene disappeared up to Vienna,” Palfinger said.

“How do you know that?”

“I know every whore in Austria.”

Palfinger’s friendliness was beginning to fade again now. “And where’s Horvath?”

“Dead.”

Brenner only said that because he was afraid if he admitted that he didn’t know, Palfinger might’ve gone totally Rambazamba again.

And actually, it was probably for the best. Because Palfinger
remained very quiet—the only conversation he struck up over the next few hours was with Jacky’s finest harvest. Until three-thirty, when the music stopped. Because maybe you’re familiar with how quiet it gets when early in the morning the music suddenly gets turned off at a bar. And that was the moment when Palfinger’s soft voice could be heard again, “Happiness and grass: both’ll come back to bite you in the ass.”

He only said it softly to himself. But Brenner could still hear it from three tables away. Even though he was in the middle of discussing the topic of flunking with a colleague of Angie’s.

Maybe the whole story would have turned out differently if the next day Brenner had driven to Vienna and looked for Ortovic’s girlfriend. It’s four hours to Vienna, though, and Brenner thought to himself,
Graz is on the way, and so I’ll take advantage of an opportunity
.

Graz isn’t even an hour away from Klöch. Nevertheless, a different world. And one thing you can’t forget. Brenner was from Puntigam—practically a suburb of Graz—where the beer comes from, Puntigamer. You’d like to think this might take him back, you know, memories and all. Because he hadn’t been to Graz since his father’s funeral, and that must have been, unbelievable, six years ago.

But nothing, no sentimentality, where you might say: a childhood experience here, or a movie theater there, me and a girl for the first time here, and I fell off my moped once over there. Because Brenner had had a souped-up moped. When Brenner was applying to become a cop, they almost didn’t take him on account of his record.

Then, nineteen years, police, and barely ever in Graz. Because he’d let them transfer him a few times, early on when his motto was: I want to see something of the world while I’m still
young. Eisenstadt, Salzburg, Linz, Landeck, Attnang—he was everywhere, just not in Graz.

And now, all of the sudden, back in Graz, a certain sentimental impulse would’ve been understandable. Where you think to yourself,
I was so young, I had such high hopes, and now, it’s just a matter of time before I’m wearing the wooden pajamas
. Because that was a saying on the force. But you’d have to ask a psychologist about it, and I’d be curious to know whether it still means something today for a person to call a casket “the wooden pajamas.”

And it’s that type of man exactly who tends to be sentimental. But Brenner was anything but sentimental now. He was just glad to have that fried chicken joint and that Klöch behind him. And Graz with its 300,000 inhabitants, Brenner breathed a sigh of relief—you just don’t breathe that easily in Manhattan.

Now, why do I say “Manhattan”? You can’t forget that Brenner had the impossible habit of whistling. And when he was a kid in Puntigam, hanging around his grandfather’s carpentry workshop,
Ö-Regional
’s requests and dedications show played on the radio the whole time. I’m not going to apologize for Brenner’s taste in music, though. And only time will tell if what’s on the radio today is any better than “Die Rittersleut,” which Brenner was now whistling to himself unawares.

There, now it’s out. “Die Rittersleut,” deepest depths of the beer hall, no way around it, it has to be said. But you can’t forget, Brenner only knew one stanza of the song, listen up:

This should tell you how much everything in Klöch was weighing on him, the chicken, the staff quarters, the bone-grinder. And Ortovic’s head turning up instead of Löschenkohl’s daughter-in-law. And all of a sudden Brenner felt—and I don’t mean for this to sound somehow, you know—like somebody was practically clamping down on his lifeblood. Picture a garden hose, then somebody steps on it, and no more water can go through. And it was only in Graz that the heavy shoe finally lifted.

Now he was making his way through thousands of shoppers in the pedestrian mall and whistling “Die Rittersleut.” And sure enough, all that about the change of scene was only half-true. Because now he was starting to feel like he was in Manhattan a little: the crowds in the pedestrian mall, the countless signs for businesses that he passed, and how people just need to spend all of their money the first Saturday of the month—it all just felt so right to him at this moment. Although Brenner was usually a real spendthrift, and he’d often wear a pair of shoes until his toes poked through.

Maybe this only occurred to him now because he’d arrived in front of the shoe store he was looking for. It belonged to the sister of Löschenkohl’s missing daughter-in-law, and as Brenner looked through the display window, he wasn’t just whistling, he was even singing softly to himself.

Maybe it was the springtime, too. Or he’d acquired a bit of a taste, let’s say, at the Borderline last night. And that’s why he
was singing this song. I’m no psychologist, I don’t know. But one thing I do have to say. The woman who he saw through the display window, well, she’d get any man to thinking.

Brenner waited there in front of the store until there weren’t any more customers inside. But just like a jinx, whenever one customer would finish up, another one would go striding into the shop. Quite good for the saleswoman, of course, but not good for the detective.

Through the display window, Brenner was struck by how much the shoe seller resembled the Löschenkohl’s proprietress. Löschenkohl junior had given him two photos of his missing wife. And ever since, Brenner had been asking himself just one thing:
how could a woman as attractive as her get the idea of marrying into a chicken dynasty?
Because you would’ve guessed just about anywhere—Paris, or over there where they’ve got all the swimming pools. Klöch, though. Anyhow, Brenner could understand perfectly well why the woman would run off.

And now the sister. When Brenner walked into the shop, he had to consciously restrain himself from whistling. And not that old-time whistling, maybe you still recall, where men would whistle after women on the street.

No, not to whistle his song. Because one glance at that woman had him silently whistling “Knight of Manhattan” to himself. Needless to say, something had stirred in Brenner, a feeling, and he was utterly relieved:
I’m still a man
. Because a mid-life crisis is a given these days when you’re forty-five and stuck tying one on in Klöch.

“Can I help you with something?

Now for some help. Brenner knew exactly what he needed help with. But he also knew what that would entail, which is
why all he said now was, “Your sister’s husband, Herr Löschenkohl—”

The sister’s contemptuous smile got under Brenner’s skin—don’t even ask. But he bravely continued—“told me I might be able to find—”

“She’s not here.”

“No, not your sister. You.”

“Me?”

“I’m a private detective. Brenner.”

“Aha.”

Aha. Very interesting. A second ago Brenner was still being cocky, now his confidence was sinking away, as if into one of those deep bogs, where one minute you’re up to your neck, and the next, of course,
arrivederci
.

“Herr Löschenkohl said your sister would often turn to you.”

“Mmhmm.”

“You don’t happen to know where she is?”

“Can I help you with something?”

She was so stunningly friendly now, and when I said confidence and bog just now, then I must have meant: if Brenner’s up to his neck, then his only hope is in that mop of hair of his.