“South Tyrolean!” he yelled. This time with a note of urgency. To no avail, though. She didn’t turn around, and when he yelled his cell phone number out after her, she was already through the door and outside before he got to the last digit. He watched through the glass how she walked left around the gas pump, good figure and everything, Brenner thought to himself, if I had met her in my day, and he kept gazing after her as she crossed the street, with the newspaper and milk in her left hand and the pack of Marl boo ros in her right, and disappeared into the house opposite the gas station.
CHAPTER 10
He didn’t get the cell phone unlocked at the gas station, and he didn’t find anything out from the South Tyrolean, either. But pay attention to what I’m telling you: nothing’s ever for nothing in life, most of the time you find something different than what you’re looking for. And Brenner now found someone returning a rental car to the gas station. A purple Ford Mondeo, and ten minutes later it was his Mondeo because he told them they didn’t need to wash it, and so you see, he drove the Mondeo to the Lilliput Cafe, and there they unlocked the cell phone for him right away.
PATRON OF LILLIPUT CAFE. Naturally, that’s how it was later portrayed in the newspaper, as if Brenner had been a regular there, those people really busted his chops on that one, don’t even ask. But my feelings vis-a-vis the Lilliput Cafe are very clear. Listen up: if after everything that’s happened, someone’s still pointing a finger at the Lilliput Cafe, then I honestly have to say, it’s roughly like telling a starving person to put the menu down just because, according to Chinese thought, the micronutrients aren’t in the fifth house right now.
Brenner knew the Lilliput Cafe because at least once a week he’d picked Kressdorf up from the construction site near there. Or better put, from the planned construction site, on account of the protests of course, and there being not much to see except construction fences and steam shovels and pits. Or he would bring Helena by so that Kressdorf could spend a few minutes with his daughter between appointments. They’d ride the Lilliput train through the wooded areas of the Prater Park and around the site slated for MegaLand, and so Brenner would sometimes wait for the two of them at the Lilliput Cafe.
Helena was a total fanatic for the Lilliput train rides, and Brenner was a little jealous of her father, because if just once he’d said to his daughter, you know what, today Herr Simon’s going to take you for a ride on the train, he would have done it on the spot, no discussion. But no, when the ride was over Helena would always bawl her head off, and do you think Kressdorf might have given in just once? He didn’t let his daughter wear him down, though. No, Herr Papa got even stricter and: “That’s enough now.”
Just so you understand why Brenner was so familiar with the Lilliput Cafe. Because he never went for the other things that were there, smuggled cigarettes or a fake wristwatch, and the Lilliput Cafe’s main business was with the parents, of course. Driven to despair by the screams of their Lilliput-train-addicted children, they could get their mothers’ little helpers at the Lilliput Cafe, more convenient than the pharmacy and qualitatively better, more effective and all, where you find yourself saying, it may not be entirely legal but at least I can make it another three days smiling at my child instead of tossing him headfirst over the fence so that the neighbors can smile at him.
They unlocked the cell phone for him in a matter of seconds. His nonalcoholic beer wasn’t even in front of him yet before he was holding the phone in his hand with a new PIN. You’re going to say, Brenner must have deliberated over the PIN for a long time, because what’s the best combination of numbers to choose? But quite the opposite, Brenner shot it out like a pistoclass="underline" 1706, because that was Helena’s birthday. But then he reconsidered after all, because a gravestone suddenly floated in front of his eyes, where the date of birth always appears above the date of death, bad omen, as it were. To be on the safe side, he went with a date of death instead. You should know that on November 12, 2008, the last member of Jimi Hendrix’s band, Mitch Mitchell, died-because none of them was granted a long life. Jimi Hendrix was born in November, Mitch Mitchell died in November, and believe it or not, Noel Redding also had an 11 on his gravestone because he died on the eleventh of May. But Brenner was already using Noel Redding for his own cell phone’s PIN, so he dedicated the PIN on Knoll’s cell phone to Mitch Mitchell, i.e. 1211. So you weren’t totally wrong, he did mull the PIN over a bit.
But he didn’t get around to listening to Knoll’s voicemail, because: “Hey, Herr Simon, over here!”
Just what he needed. But that’s exactly how it goes when you seek out familiar places. You have to take into account that you might run into people you know. At least it wasn’t Kressdorf himself, but just the watchdog from his construction site. Brenner didn’t recognize him right away because beefcakes with crewcuts and tattoos up to their eardrums, you see them so often on the street today that you can’t know them all by heart. It was the white straw he was sucking on that gave him away, i.e., nicotine withdrawal. Also the be-freckled foreman who he came in with. You should know, the few times Brenner had seen the nicotine-addicted watchdog, he’d always been with the foreman from the MegaLand site, as if he always needed to be hanging on to one of them, cigarette or foreman, didn’t matter which.
“Waiting on a new job offer?” the foreman asked, and a hundred thousand freckles loomed in front of Brenner’s face.
“With your qualifications, it’s no wonder your phone’s ringing up a storm!” the watchdog continued and pointed at Knoll’s phone with his plastic straw. Because now that it was unlocked, the messages were chiming up a lightning storm like you wouldn’t believe.
“A nice steady ball like you two are rolling is what I’m looking for,” Brenner answered. “Sitting in a cafe all day on Kressdorf’s dime, that’s for me.”
“You wouldn’t be very happy working with us. There’s nothing left at KREBA for someone like you who goes around losing people’s kids.”
Brenner was getting annoyed by the belt of freckles around the foreman’s stupid grin, because something as nice as a face full of freckles can make a cruel smile even crueler. I can understand where Brenner was coming from-strictly speaking, it’s a betrayal of freckles.
“Because Kressdorf doesn’t have any more kids to lose,” the one with the straw explained.
“Explaining somebody else’s joke,” Brenner said, “is that a side effect when you quit smoking?”
The nicotine addict sucked on his straw like a wheezing asthmatic on an inhaler. And it might have done him some good, because once he got his fill again, all of a sudden he acted completely normal with Brenner. Even professional, presenting himself as a colleague, because construction-site security, i.e., armed security services: practically the police.
Brenner asked him how he knew for a fact that he used to be on the police force, but please-it was a convenient topic for him. So he let the straw-man pass, and he acted like it was the highest caliber of police work, spending all day on the lookout so that nobody steals from the construction site or damages the fences or goes sniffing around the site or hangs up a banner against the Prater Park development. And I honestly have to say, with a project like MegaLand, where you’ve got half the city against you because your boss only has enough money to bribe the other half, it’s not completely outrageous for the security guard to puff up his feathers a little.
Brenner let the two of them explain the world to him for a while, what Kressdorf does all wrong, what Congressman Stachl does all wrong, what all of them at the top do all wrong, and how someone just needs to do a better job of explaining to the masses that there’s something in it for them, too, if the Prater starts charging an entrance fee, because golf, tennis, wellness, movies, shopping, entertainment squared instead of just trees and pampas-for that even the little guy doesn’t mind paying a little. Brenner let them pump him about the kidnapping, i.e., where exactly, when exactly, how exactly. And he was even obliging enough to laugh at the crass jokes they cracked about Knoll. When you’re a detective, you can’t be fussy about things like this-you don’t get anything out of people if you don’t let them talk.