Brenner didn’t even attempt to turn her argument around on her, along the lines of, I’m a graduate of Puntigam’s Elite Sex University, where the Kama Sutra comes from. And here you can see how exhausted he must have been to leave something like that out. Although, to be frank, since the pills, he hadn’t been all that interested anymore, and strictly speaking, he wouldn’t have needed Knoll’s death as an excuse for why he preferred to sleep alone.
The apartment was half the size of South Tyrol, on the ground level of an old building across from the gas station, cheap and dank and loud and all, but enormous. In spite of this, he wasn’t allowed to choose which room he got to sleep in, because she told him he should just take the first one if he was so afraid of plants.
“And besides, this way you won’t be far from the bathtub. Did you shwim in sewage?”
Brenner declined the warm milk with honey that she wanted to prepare for him-world-renowned South Tyrolean sleeping pill-because, on principle, no milk. And I have to say, the South Tyrolean was even looking at him a little amorously because it was a commonality that seemed terribly meaningful to her. With a certain pride that women often resort to when they can tack a minor health deficiency or nutrition problem onto their breasts, she explained to Brenner that she didn’t even have the enzyme necessary to digest milk. She couldn’t impress Brenner any more tonight, though, because he was already so tired that the word “enzyme” sounded like something inflammatory creeping into his ears.
He only sat there as long as he did because the few steps to the bedroom seemed insurmountable to him. And one thing you can’t forget-the plants kept growing all the while. What he really would’ve liked was to ask the South Tyrolean for a machete. Somehow the room came to him, though, and really he would’ve liked to just let himself fall into bed. Her comment about the smell had already grabbed hold of his pride, though, and so, with his remaining strength, he overcame the philodendrons and fought his way into the bathroom.
He slept so deeply that the next morning he didn’t know where he was. For a moment he thought he might have drowned in the cesspit like Knoll, slipped in while he’d been on the phone, fell on his head and straight up to heaven. You should know, it had been years since he’d felt refreshed upon waking up. He lay there so delicately covered, bundled, and swaddled, all in clean white, where a man might get to thinking, you see, you could live like this if you bought into marriage. And it wasn’t just the bedding he was covered with that was white but also the bed frame that cradled him on all sides like he was a newborn. Or let’s put it this way: Brenner was just now realizing that he’d fallen asleep in the bathtub last night, and slept so soundly that there had been nothing else for the South Tyrolean to do but cover him up right there in the tub.
A human soul has never traveled quite so fast from heaven to hell, though. Because Brenner was also just realizing why he’d woken up. The cell phone in his heap of clothes was ringing, and he would have given anything in the world for it to be “Unknown Caller.” But it was no unknown caller. Believe it or not, seventy-one hours after the disappearance of her daughter, the Frau Doctor was calling him.
Twenty minutes later her BMW was pulling into the gas station. Because that’s where Brenner had told her to go-not very sensitive I have to say, but in his grogginess he couldn’t come up with anything better than the gas station across the street.
Brenner stood there dumbfounded a moment before opening the passenger-side door, because the idea of the Frau Doctor sitting at the steering wheel and he getting into the passenger seat seemed very strange to him all of a sudden.
“The car’s the only place right now where I don’t have the feeling that I’m being listened in on,” she said in greeting.
“By the police or by the kidnappers?”
Brenner had never seen a person change so much in three days. Except for someone getting an arm or a leg shot off, that’s always a sudden change, or slipping under a bus, both legs gone, something like that’s a sudden change, too, of course, but right after that would come Frau Doctor Kressdorf’s change. Because she must not have eaten a bite since the day her child disappeared, and even that doesn’t explain it, either, because-completely different type of person. If there is such a thing! It even looked to Brenner like her hair and eyes were a different color, but not what you’re thinking: dyed. No, like they’d really changed.
Character-wise, absolutely unchanged. And that was a huge relief to Brenner right now. No hysterical outbursts, no embittered remarks, not even a sigh or an accusatory look. Brenner was profoundly impressed by her self-control. She was utterly calm as she drove downtown, no aggressive accelerating, no abrupt brake slamming, no accusatory gear shifting, no demonstrative temperature adjusting, no frantic windshield wiping, no nervous window opening, no sacrificial-lamb turn signaling, no lane changing where it wouldn’t have been advisable to do so, and where the sensitive passenger and child-loser might’ve detected a sighing rebuke.
Brenner thought to himself, other families who’ve been affected by kidnappings should really look to her as a model. Not always making things more complicated, because when you’ve been affected by a kidnapping, you see it as your great hour having arrived. Finally, the big chance and now it’s my turn for once, now people will indulge all of my whims, and now everything around me will have to pay until it doesn’t know which way’s up anymore. Brenner had experienced this more often than not in his days on the force. Because the motto of families affected by kidnappings: the police will pay for everything that’s ever been done to me in life. And families affected by kidnappings wield power, you wouldn’t believe it, they drive doctors, psychologists, and social workers to suicide-ergo, all new victims of kidnappings.
“I have to tell you something,” Frau Doctor Kressdorf began abruptly after driving for a full minute in silence. But then she fell silent again, and it was only as she was turning onto the Ringstrasse that she found her words. “There’s something I can’t tell the police. If you can’t, or won’t, keep it to yourself, please tell me right now.”
“No problem. No one will hear anything from me.”
He would’ve liked to have said that with a little more conviction, but personally I think a dry promise isn’t the worst, because how do you prove to someone that you won’t tell someone else? It basically only applies to your best friend anyway, who’ll probably tell his wife the very same evening, who’ll solemnly swear not to tell anybody else, and her best friend will have to swear the same thing half an hour later. The more adamantly a person vows to keep a lid on it, the more certain you can be that, come tomorrow, the entire world will know. And you see, Brenner said it just that dryly, and he’s probably the first person in the world who’s never actually spoken a dying word of it to anybody. These are the things I like about Brenner. But since it’s just us, I’ll make an exception and tell you what the doctor said.
“I’ve done something that I could go to prison for.”
“You?”
Pay attention: if one of the advantages of driving is the freedom to shout openly, it only applies, of course, to when you’re driving alone. So why is Brenner shouting so loudly now when he’s sitting right next to the Frau Doctor:
“You?”
And what kind of a shout was that? A shout of surprise? A shout of rage? A shout of pain? I’m tempted to say, all of them together. Surprise, because naturally he expected her secret to involve her husband, the Construction Lion, who’d lured Knoll out to his house in the mountains. And rage, because he sensed that she’d already decided, before she even began her story, to withhold half of it. And pain, I don’t even need to explain to you, when you’re speaking for the first time with the mother-who looks like she’s aged thirty years in seventy-two hours-of the child you lost.