Eternal Life (14 page)

So that he wouldn’t inadvertently look to his left and at Nemec, Brenner jerks his head stiffly to the other side now, where Andi was clinging to the handless German’s arm. But no matter how long he looked at Andi, or how often Andi’s testimony from the
Pinzgauer Post
shot through his head, there was nothing that could’ve helped Brenner:

“I just sat there, surprised that Lorenz would go out to help his uncle. He took the nozzle out, but instead of
sticking it in the tank of the four-by-four, he pointed it like a pistol at his uncle. Who’s really the guilty one here because he had that cigarette burning in his mouth again. Of course he’s standing in flames. And then, all I know is how the fire caught Lorenz and then the four-by-four, and then I see myself as I’m running on the promenade by the lake. There are a few hundred meters in between, but I don’t know anymore, and then I hear the sirens and then the hospital.”

“It used to be that everybody only put geraniums on the balcony, because they wintered well,” Brenner hears that familiar voice now in his left ear.

“Geraniums, that’s right. Not as pretty nowadays. Petunias though.”

“Mm, very pretty, petunias. Very, very pretty. But tough to winter.”

“Wintering, who even does that today. Since we got the sauna, I don’t have any more room in the basement for wintering the balcony flowers.”

“Well, you need a good place. And even then, with petunias, it’s still not a sure thing.”

Now, Brenner knew for a fact that he knew this voice. Knew it well. But he simply couldn’t come up with who it belonged to. It was needling him so bad now that this little slip kept happening to him where he wants to turn around, but on the wrong side. And needless to say, he wasn’t going to get very far with Nemec standing there. He looked Nemec right in the eyes. And Nemec grins at him and says:

“Do you know this one?”

It looked to Brenner like Nemec was nodding his head
in the priest’s direction, who was just sprinkling those standing around him with holy water. Of course he knew the priest, it wasn’t that long ago that he’d gave him the idea about Engljähringer. But the nimble little man from the Saturday-afternoon mass, it was like, transformed. With his pale, skeletal figure and his lopsided ash-blond head, he looked like he was laying it on a little thick for the funeral today. Now, a person’s apt to ask himself, how does he pull a wedding off, or something cheerful, say, what does he do at a resurrection.

But, once again, Brenner had misunderstood his ex-boss’s question. Because Nemec hadn’t actually been nodding his head over at the priest. Really, Brenner had to have known what Nemec meant when he asked:

“Do you know this one?”

Because this was a habit of Nemec’s. He always tossed his head back so peculiarly before he told a joke that you’d have thought he must be rattling a forgotten joke out of his subconscious and back into his memory again.

“Woman goes into a sex shop and buys a vibrator,” Nemec says.

But Brenner turned his head demonstrably away and looked back at the priest.

“Asks the salesman how you use it, and he says, just like you would a man’s penis.”

Nemec wasn’t even making an effort to whisper. An altar girl—that’s the daughter of Fürstauer from over at the deli—passed the priest the censer now. And with solemn movements the priest wafted the smoke over the whole cemetery.

You’d have thought a gas station was burning somewhere.

You’ve got to picture it like this: he’s holding the silver censer by the silver chain, high above his head, and that’s how he swings it. And every time the censer swings back, it clinks against the silver chain: “clink—clink—clink—clink,” you could hear it throughout the cemetery, even if you were standing in the back and couldn’t see anything.

But Brenner saw it all of course. It didn’t do him any good, either, I mean, that he was making a point of watching the priest as Nemec was trying to tell him his joke. Nemec showed no sign of irritation at all and said:

“Next day the woman goes back to the sex shop and wants to file a complaint.”

The other altar girl passed the priest a little shovel that he strewed some dirt over Lorenz’s grave with. And around the cemetery a few people started blowing their noses as the priest put on his doleful voice and said:

“Remember, O mortal, for dust you are and to dust you shall return.”

Brenner didn’t laugh at Nemec’s joke, though. He didn’t grimace. He just said:

“And so it was Lorenz who put the two Americans in the lift. All the sudden you guys are completely sure about that.”

“Compweetwee pfshure!” the cop answered, still making like the toothless mouth of the woman in the sex shop. It only looked like he had no teeth, you know, with his lips sucked in over them like this. Nemec had always had such thin lips.

For a moment now, Brenner considered whether he should do what he’d surely been wanting to do a couple hundred times over these last few years. But, then, he didn’t deck Nemec in the middle of the funeral. Instead, he said, while still not looking the toothless woman in the face:

“That’s awfully convenient for you, anyway.”

Now, not what you’re thinking, that Brenner was actually doubting, let’s say, that Lorenz had done it. It was more because, up against Nemec, nothing else occurred to him at that moment. Because it was in the
Pinzgauer Post
after all, and people weren’t talking about anything else. That Lorenz had been sending these letters for years. Heidnische Kirche, that really only could’ve been Lorenz’s idea. And then, of course: that Lorenz didn’t get his savings passbook from Vergolder this year at Christmas.

And then, of course, the checks. Lorenz had a talent for drawing, Vergolder could’ve kept it hidden. Ran in the family. Just like everybody in the Moser family are all musical, or Mayr the butcher, they always make the best
Leberkäse
. Lorenz copied the signature, so exact it made the experts’ eyes pop out of their sockets. But now that his photo had appeared in the paper, a bank teller remembered him.

“All that about the letters you guys figured out pretty fast, though,” Brenner cut a little deeper.

“Actually, it should’ve been clear six months ago,” Nemec says, “but, unfortunately, if you want something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself.”

Now, of course. Six months ago, that was Brenner’s job back then. He no longer had any desire to prove anything to
Nemec. Because Nemec had been the one who’d held him back at the time.

Brenner just wanted out of the cemetery now. But as he turned around, he was reminded all over again that the cemetery was stuffed full of mourners. Making it to the exit would be hopeless.

And besides. What good would it have done him if he’d gotten out of the cemetery. He wouldn’t have known where to go. Because, before he turned around, he was still thinking he could go to the Feinschmeck. That he could go crawling back to Erni the waitress.

But Erni was right there with him. Serious and silent as a stuffed dress form, she stared at Brenner as he turned around. And she had such a look of despair that you’d have thought, she simply couldn’t get over it—over Lorenz, his death, or over the question of how the flowers on her balcony would get through the winter.

It goes without saying. There wasn’t much else for Brenner to do in Zell now. For over half a year he’d lived in room 214 at the Hirschenwirt. But now he just wanted to write his report and just get on with it and out of Zell.

He understood now, too, why he’d been resisting the report so much this whole time. There must’ve been something in the air somehow that this would be his last report for the Meierling Detective Agency, the conclusion, so to speak.

What he didn’t understand was why he was sitting all depressed in his room. Since he’d got back from the funeral at four-thirty, he’d been sitting on the edge of the bed, you’d have thought he’d been struck dumb right at the moment he was about to lie down. And he’d been studying the carpet pattern ever since, and, how should I put it, it was not a very interesting pattern.

Now one thing you can’t forget. Brenner was the kind of person—how should I explain it to you. The job in Zell had helped him not to think too much. Because you can’t forget, it was only a good six months earlier that he’d quit the force, and that’s a situation where you’ve got to make your peace with it first.

And so the months in Zell helped him, of course. The coincidence that there was work for him here right away. But it couldn’t go on like that forever, and now it was over.

And how I should put it, maybe the story with Nemec played a part, too, in why he was so downtrodden now. That it wasn’t him who solved the case but Nemec. In other words, basically six months for nothing.

Never mind. The carpet pattern, it was a floral motif, but more like cogs, so if you can imagine: interlocking flowers. And if you looked at them long enough, you’d have thought they were turning.

Or maybe he was so depressed because, after all, it was a human tragedy. And suddenly it became clear to him. Lorenz. Vergolder. It came as a surprise, why now all of the sudden, why didn’t it become clear to him earlier. But that’s people for you, all of the sudden it becomes clear to you, and you yourself don’t know why.

A few days ago he’d sat with Lorenz for hours and he’d talked to Vergolder. And now there wasn’t even enough of them left for a proper burial.

The carpet was a color you almost can’t describe, like honey that’s gone hard. And the rotating flowers were basically the same color—in the light of day you couldn’t really see them. But they popped out under artificial light.

But that wasn’t it, because Brenner hadn’t turned any lights on—to do that he would’ve had to move. It was already dusk, and Brenner wasn’t quite sure whether he was still seeing the flowers or if they were only turning in his head.

The murdered Americans went through his head. What he’d read about them in Clare’s composition for school, it was all coming back up. He was even feeling sorry for the glow-in-the-dark dial painters now, even though they wouldn’t have been alive today anyway. And the forced laborers who froze to death, or fell to their deaths, building the dam.

Isn’t that just how it is these days, when you’re down in the dumps, then everything hits you all at once, and only the worst of it, of course. And that’s what was going on with Brenner now, all these images surfacing one after another, perpetually slow and sticky, but none of them would disappear again. And all of them churning together, so slow, so viscous, that you’ve got to picture it like a washing machine, except, instead of water, it’s honey.

Even Erni the waitress and her balcony were churning in the honey-washing-machine. And Andi the Fox looked so sad from the honey-washing-machine that Brenner thought: That’s it, I’m getting up and turning the light on. Because by now it was completely dark. But Brenner could still see the flowers turning on the carpet. And next to Andi the Fox in the honey-washing-machine, the handless German was standing there and looking at Brenner through those centimeter-thick bifocals of hers.

Now, pay attention. It was seven-thirty. When Brenner finally went down to the bar in the Hirschenwirt. But he didn’t take a seat. He just wanted a pack of cigarettes. Then, he went out to the street and smoked his first cigarette in eight months.

Now, as anybody who’s quit smoking more than once knows. The first didn’t taste good to him at all, more like horrible. Then, the second and the third usually taste like they used to. But the third still didn’t taste good to Brenner. So he gave up and went back up to his room and went to sleep.

As he was falling asleep, he still found it surprising that the whole time he was smoking those three cigarettes, not a single person passed by on the street. Not a car, not a nothing. Needless to say, maybe he was just asleep already and it only seemed that way, i.e. dream-deserted.

It was eleven when he woke up. Now, you should know, whenever Brenner slept more than eight hours, he woke up with a headache. But now he’d slept fourteen hours. And right about the time he wants a doctor to saw his skull off with an electric compass saw, he wakes up. Needless to say, straight to the bathroom to puke, but the headache was only more severe afterward. You’d like to believe you can puke it out but not so.

At first he just wondered why his alarm had been going off for several minutes. Because he hadn’t set it. And it was only once it’d stopped ringing that he realized that it was the telephone.

As he was finally getting into the shower, it rang again. Now for on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand. On the one hand, he didn’t want to be dumb and, just because the phone’s ringing, turn off the shower. Because, it goes without saying, nothing better to help you not feel a neck full of concrete—there’s only warm water and nothing else. On
the other hand, though, the telephone was making the exact same sound as the doctor’s compass saw—okay, it’d have to be more of a ringing compass saw.

Needless to say, cutting off his head would’ve been the best thing right now, the only thing that actually helps when you’ve got a full-blown migraine like this. Showering just doesn’t compare, compared to cutting your head off. But cutting off your head is one thing, and the sound of the compass saw is another thing altogether, because the ringing was driving Brenner crazy now. And he ran out of the shower without drying off and picked up the compass saw.

“Well, I’ll be damned, look who’s got a voice today!” the compass saw bawled.

That’s interesting, though. Before Brenner even recognized Goggenberger the cabbie’s voice, he already had the stench of Virginias in his nose. Now, of course, Brenner thought he was going to puke again, but then he said:

“Hm.”

“You!”

“Hm?” Brenner says, because he was still having a problem with his voice.

“So yesterday I make six trips to the cemetery, yesterday I did. Six times, one day, cemetery, I’ll be damned. But then they were burying Lorenz, didn’t they?”

“Mm,” Brenner says.

“I only ask because I wasn’t there. I wanted to, but I’ll be damned, a two-parter, no can do. I took a ride up to the funeral, and there I’m thinking to myself, this is convenient, you can stay right here, then, and go on in yourself. But on
the drive there, another trip comes over the radio, and then another trip and another trip and another trip and another trip and another trip and another trip.”