Eternal Life (8 page)

Lorenz nodded. He was so thin that Brenner wondered how he could even hold his head up.

“No. Ten minutes.”

Now, either Lorenz was a chain smoker or he was very nervous, because in the ashtray there were already four cigarette butts. And if he was nervous, then was it on account of Brenner, or was he just always that way.

“How are you?” Brenner asks and then takes a seat vis-à-vis Lorenz.

Lorenz does this movement for a second time now, maybe on account of Brenner wondering how he could even hold his head up. It starts out first as a nod, except the only difference is that his head doesn’t come back up. And that’s
the precise moment when he’d sweep his blond curls off his forehead—or were they more white? Right in the middle, you couldn’t really say.

Interesting, though. The next time he does this, he nods just like before and leaves his head down again. So, somehow he has to get his head surreptitiously back up, because how else can he start the next downward nod if not from the up-beat again.

“What’re we having?” Erni the waitress asks.

Lorenz already had a glass of club soda sitting on the table, so it was clear that the “we” only applied to Brenner. It was always when Erni didn’t quite know how she should address a customer that she talked to them like this.

A few days earlier she’d addressed Brenner with this “we” for the first time. And Brenner seized the opportunity right away, because he played dumb and asked the waitress, does that mean you’ll be joining me for a drink. So, she had to knock back a glass on Brenner’s dime. And maybe that’s why she was grinning so cheekily now when she said:

“What’re we having?”

“A beer,” Brenner says, even though, normally he wouldn’t drink beer this time of day.

“Thanks for taking the time,” he says to Lorenz, and Lorenz does his half nod again, sweeps his curls off his forehead and takes a drag on his cigarette.

“You know why I want to speak with you.”

Lorenz, again, with the half-nod.

“Did you know the victims very well?”

“No thanks,” Lorenz says.

“And with your uncle, you don’t have the best relationship, either.”

Pause. Then Lorenz says slowly:

“Why are you asking? If you already know.”

“But why were you with him, then, on the night of December twenty-first?”

Pause. Now it was slowly dawning on Brenner that the medication from the psychiatric clinic hadn’t exactly made Lorenz any quicker.

“How often am I supposed to explain this exactly?”

“One more time,” Brenner says.

“Every year I go to my uncle’s on December twenty-first. That’s my Christmas.”

“On the twenty-first?”

“Yes. Because the twenty-third’s my uncle’s company Christmas, ski school, I mean. Gondolas on the twenty-second. And family on the twenty-fourth.”

“When did your father die?”

“That was when he was exactly as old as I am now, that’s when he died.”

Lorenz appeared completely emotionless to Brenner—that, too, must’ve been the meds, and that’s why, without giving it a second thought, Brenner asked him:

“And what did he die of?”

“Don’t know.”

“You don’t want to talk about it?”

Lorenz gave another half-nod and fished the next cigarette out of his pack. Then he says:

“Lung cancer.”

Says Brenner:

“How old were you at the time?”

Says Lorenz:

“Thirteen.”

Says Brenner:

“And who was your guardian, then?”

Says Lorenz: “My uncle.”

Says Brenner:

“So, is Vergolder your uncle on your father’s side or your mother’s side?”

Says Lorenz:

“Both sides. He’s my uncle on both sides.”

Says Brenner:

“Now, that you’re going to have to explain to me.”

Says Lorenz:

“My father wasn’t my biological father. Because I never knew my biological father. And my mother disappeared. After my birth, I mean. Probably in the lake, people say. That’s why I don’t swim. I’ve never gone swimming in the lake. That’s why people think I’m crazy. One time I did go swimming. At night. In the winter, though. Nearly drowned. But my father was still alive at the time. I caused him a lot of worry. My father died of worry, you know.”

Says Brenner:

“Your adoptive father.”

Says Lorenz:

“If you like, sure, my adoptive father.”

Says Brenner:

“Why did he take you in?”

Says Lorenz:

“He was my uncle. I had two uncles. Two brothers of my mother’s. One of them took me in.”

Says Brenner:

“But the two brothers didn’t get along very well.”

Says Lorenz:

“Hated, you might say.”

Says Brenner:

“What kind of work did your father do?”

Says Lorenz:

“My father helped my uncle with his gilding. He was an actual
Vergolder
. Church painter. Didn’t have any time for gilding, though. So, he trained my father to.”

Says Brenner:

“And you? What’s your trade?”

Says Lorenz:

“I helped my father with his gilding.”

Says Brenner:

“And how do you support yourself today?”

Says Lorenz:

“Vergolder is a parasite. Parasite on society. And I am a parasite on Vergolder.”

Says Brenner:

“Why did you give your uncle a false alibi, then, if you think so little of him?”

Says Lorenz:

“Hate, you might say.”

Says Brenner:

“Okay, let’s say hate.”

Says Lorenz:

“Because I have an appreciation for him. I appreciate him, I do. On December twenty-first, I go to his house. There, I always get a passbook to a savings account.”

Says Brenner:

“And why didn’t you go up to his place this year, then, of all years? And why did you testify that you were up there with him?”

Lorenz gestured to Erni to bring him another club soda. And Brenner knew, of course, that the best way to recognize an alcoholic is by their constant seltzer-ordering. He took a slug of beer to give Lorenz time. Maybe, somewhere along his convoluted way, he’ll find an answer to my question after all, Brenner thought.

“All that about the nervous breakdown, I explained it to my uncle,” says Lorenz.

Says Brenner:

“You had a nervous breakdown?”

Says Lorenz:

“The mountains’ nervous breakdown. The people will see. In December, they’ll see.”

Says Brenner:

“What’s in December?”

Says Lorenz:

“You’re in for a surprise.”

Says Brenner:

“Me?”

Says Lorenz:

“No, all you people.”

Says Brenner:

“And what kind of a surprise?”

Says Lorenz:

“It upset my father that I was so excited about gilding. At first he wanted me to help him, but then it upset him. Because I was only helping him because he couldn’t manage the work alone anymore. But he didn’t mean for me to get so into it. I was just, let’s say, nine or ten years old. Vergolder had a souvenir shop, maybe you know it,
Rieder
it’s called, but Vergolder owns it.

My father taught me about nature. He used to like to draw. We all have a talent for painting—grandfather, too, a church painter. But he had no choice but to gild. Kids and so on. But now, he was teaching me about nature. Because he saw right away that I have talent. Then, when he took me into the souvenir business because he couldn’t manage the work alone anymore, he was disappointed. Since I was crazy about the gilding, and even about the souvenir business, too. Because I was still just a kid, and I liked all that
Klimbim
.

And the drawing, maybe he was too strict with me. He always said, you don’t need gold because the landscape glows all on its own. When I was a child I didn’t really understand that, of course.

Also, the real gold is just fool’s gold, my father says in his hoarse voice, because that was the lung cancer already, but we didn’t know it yet. I didn’t understand about the fool’s gold.

At first he took me to work with him, and then, I just
couldn’t understand it, not yet. My father says, the landscape glows all on its own. If you only look at it long enough, then you can feel its nerves. I didn’t understand what that was supposed to mean, though, that you could feel the landscape’s nerves.

I only felt my own nerves. Why would the gold suddenly stop glowing, I wondered, if I’d seen it glowing. Everything in the souvenir shop gleamed, even the schoolgirls’ lipstick cases and the cigarette holders gleamed. Only the landscape didn’t. After my father died, I slowly began to feel like the mountains were getting more and more nervous.”

It often works this way that a person is sometimes thinking about things, and right at the wrong moment—something completely incongruous. And now Brenner was briefly entertaining what Meierling, well, his boss, I should say, because, Meierling wasn’t his real name, just the agency was called Meierling, his name was Brugger. What Brugger would make of this, how he would take what Lorenz was saying and put it into a ten-line summary.

Lorenz was already lighting one cigarette off the other, and Brenner took advantage of the break now to ask one more time:

“What’ll happen in December?”

Lorenz says: “When I was little, my father always called the mountains elephants. Then, they started cutting the forest down. To make way for the ski lifts. But when there weren’t any more leaves withering along the elephants’ backs, then it was like when somebody takes a rheumatoid arthritis blanket made of dry leaves and yanks it off you.”

Now, Brenner could’ve made light of this and swept the whole thing off the table as pure craziness. But, on the other hand, he thought, it’s not all that different, what Lorenz is saying here and what you read everyday in the papers. And so he didn’t lose his patience and asked:

“What’ll the people be surprised about come December?”

And Lorenz says: “When the rheumatoid arthritis blanket gets yanked off of them, the mountains will begin to tremble in order to warm themselves again. Not noticeably, not so much that you’d notice. Only the dam walls will feel it. The Limberg Dam and the Drossen Dam. And the Mooser Dam. One and a half million cubic meters of concrete. The Symbol of the Republic. Indestructible. When the mountains begin to tremble, the dam walls will break away from their holdings. The dam waters will flood the Zell basin—a full meter high—and twenty thousand people will drown. Because it’ll happen so fast, they won’t even have time to think.”

Lorenz ordered another club soda from the waitress now, even though the glass in front of him was still half-full. And once Erni was out of earshot, Brenner says:

“And that will happen this December?”

Lorenz says: “No, no. In December we’re putting on our play. Andi and the German. And Clare.”

“And you.”

“And me.”

When it comes to Saturdays, it’s a big deal. Not always easy for people to bear, Saturdays. For Brenner, it wasn’t much different. Two days after meeting Lorenz, he was sitting right back at the Feinschmeck. Seemed to him like he’d been sitting here the whole time, though, and was only just now leaving.

As Brenner walked out of the Feinschmeck, Zell appeared more deserted than ever before to him. But there was something else different about it now, too. Because what a Saturday means to the course of a week, let’s say, well, that’s what the end of a season is to the course of a year. In Zell, anyway, that’s how it is. So far as desertedness goes. And as Detective Brenner’s walking down the street, he realizes now, even before the automatic door-closer can draw the door to the Feinschmeck shut: end of a season and a Saturday, at the same time.

What more do you need. Brenner crossed the church square that was normally teeming with tourists. But, now, not a single tourist on the Kirchplatz. Only a few old ladies, he saw, as they flitted into church. And because it was the
end of a season and the end of a week at the same time, he simply followed them into the church.

Or was it also on account of that thing that Lorenz had told him about two days ago. Exactly the same as what Andi had told him. That they’d been rehearsing with the community theater. That they’d be performing it in December. That that’s why he hadn’t actually been at Vergolder’s. But in a play that was about Vergolder. And how surprised people would be when they performed the play in December. Lorenz and Andi. And the German, in effect, the director.

And, then, this girl that Lorenz had mentioned. Clare Corrigan, not her real name at all, she simply went by that. Brenner had noticed her around Zell here and there. Because one thing you can’t forget. In a big city, nobody gets excited when an adolescent behaves provocatively these days. But, in a small town, another story altogether. Needless to say, Clare, with her painted incisor, not to be overlooked in Zell.

But that’s how it is in the provinces, Brenner thought. Either the people don’t care at all about the trendy stuff that’s so important in the cities. Or, they don’t waste any time going overboard with it. Mail-ordering the unhealthiest fads that can only be found in the
Quelle
catalogue. And pyelitis, that’s out. He knew that one all too well from growing up in Puntigam. Jimi Hendrix must’ve been on TV all of once. And the very next morning, guaranteed, the police found a drug O.D. in the bathroom at the train station.

In the church now, Brenner started brooding. He hadn’t been to church more than two or three times in the last twenty years. Now he was remembering his sister’s first
wedding, she married a real showboat, wore a white suit to their wedding, needless to say, divorce soon after, what can I tell you. And then, two and a half years ago, the funeral for his colleague Schmeller, who, during the bank robbery at the, uh, the, where was that now—well, he lost his life. And by a shot to the neck, no less, but that was a damned stupid coincidence, bad luck on both their parts, Schmeller and the bank robber, because he’d meant to shoot into the air, that was obvious.

Tunzinger was the one on duty there in Oberndorf—right, at the Raiffeisen Bank in Oberndorf, that’s it. And at the memorial service for Schmeller, he whispers to Brenner that it’d been a mistake. But, in front of the judge, naturally, he keeps his mouth shut. There’s no two ways around it, murder of a cop—needless to say, nobody wanted to hear any different.