Morgue Drawer Four (10 page)

“No,” Martin said.

I could feel his fear, but as a scientist he was able to evaluate the consequences of potential actions on his own, and it was clear to him we wouldn’t be able to get rid of these two characters at all if he handed over the key now.

“No problem,” King said, smashing in the driver’s side window.

“Hey, stop that!” Martin yelled.

A car thief with any pride at all is not in the habit of stealing French-made toy trash can cars, which is why King didn’t know any of the tricks for opening the door in a flash, and he didn’t have a tool with him. So we had a tiny bit of time to convince the two bruisers that they had better not lay into the chubby little man in the bulky little coat. As fast as I could, I ran down all the information I had about Mehmet and his illegal gambling operation and implored Martin, if his life meant anything to him, to just talk them to death now. And he obeyed instantly.

“Mehmet ought to be keeping things a bit more discreet,” Martin’s mouth quacked obediently. “The regular visitors to his back room would surely not appreciate it if, at five tomorrow morning, the police disturbed their beauty sleep and started asking questions about certain ‘gentlemen’s events.’”

Kong was the smarter of the two. He visibly winced. That this little man standing in front of him knew anything at all about the back room was a shock. But now we were just getting started.

“The poker round last Thursday was illegal solely on the basis that it was ‘gambling for money,’” Martin adlibbed, based on what I was dictating. “Quite apart from the fact that a felon with an open arrest warrant was in attendance, who additionally attempted to engage in the illegal ‘procuration of women for immoral purposes.’”

Kong took a step back; King still had his hand on the driver’s side door. He didn’t move.

“Who are you?” Kong asked.

Martin was able to suppress his instinct to answer the question properly the way his mommy taught him just in the nick of time. Instead, he continued to recite the script I was feeding him.

“Then there is the delicate matter of Mehmet operating the back room without the knowledge of the game hall’s owner, which is putting him into a pretty shitty situation.” The word “shitty” was hard for Martin to get past his lips, but he made an effort.

“Are you a cop?” Kong said in a renewed attempt to put his relationship with Chubby onto a more familiar basis by getting to know him better.

“Shut up,” I said, and Martin actually repeated me! And this time without hesitation and with amazing intensity. And then all on his own he said it again: “Shut up.” Then he turned to King. “Take your hand off of my car, take three steps backward, and let me go before I unload my knowledge about Mehmet at another location.”

I was impressed. He definitely had a long fuse, but when you finally got his ass in gear even Martin the Gosling could turn into a rapacious bird of prey. Well, almost.

King gawked at Kong, who nodded, and the two withdrew. Martin unlocked the trash can and laid in a pretty smooth racing start.

“Hey, nicely done,” I exclaimed. “You really showed them.”

“Shut up,” Martin shouted at me.

He was still in the rush of his newly found register.

“It’s me, Pascha,” I reminded him in the hope we would now resume talking to each other like two reasonable people.

“Exactly, Pascha. Shut up.”

Somehow he was pissed off, and somehow at
ME
! But I hadn’t smashed in his stupid window. Quite the contrary. I had supplied him with the ammunition that got him out of that sticky situation. And instead of thanking me, he was chewing me out. Again! I was insulted and didn’t say anything else.

He drove to the Institute, opened the door, said good night, and vanished. I disappeared into my morgue drawer and sulked.

I just dozed the whole night and only really came to again when the first couple of morgue drawers pulled open. There were two new arrivals, and one body was taken out of the morgue drawer at the upper left and served up for its postmortem. And then a fresh body arrived that was wheeled straight into the autopsy room. I wasn’t particularly interested in all that today; I was still in a bad mood. For me, Mehmet was not out of the running as the murderer. Not after that encounter with his two pool-playing gorillas. Mehmet himself couldn’t have pushed me from the bridge; as I said, I would have gotten a whiff of him even at two hundred meters against the wind what with the cloud of perfume around him that was as unrelenting as it was nauseating. But he might well have sicced his two rabid gorillas on me. It wasn’t entirely clear to me what he hoped to gain by doing that, because a dead debtor can’t pay back his debts, but who knew what exactly was really going on in the cerebral gyri of other people. Anyways, I hadn’t checked him off my list just yet.

And the fat jellyfish who’s been fooling around with my ex lately? What did I know about him? Nothing other than that he was horrifically flabby. And that was a far cry from saying that he couldn’t have been a murderer, too. He’d just be a flabby murderer then—so what?

The fact was that I still didn’t have the foggiest who had pushed me from the bridge onto the sidewalk and thereby promoted me from life to death, and this slight disgruntlement between Martin and me was definitely not helping solve the crime. So I had to make sure he started talking to me in full sentences again and not just in demands of dubious amicability, such as: “Shut up.”

I spirited through the offices and break rooms looking for him, but I couldn’t find him anywhere. I was afraid he was in the autopsy room dissecting bodies. I wasn’t actually that interested in all the snip-snip stuff, but on the other hand I was really restless and wanted to make up with Martin again as soon as possible. So I jetted down there.

With the caps and face masks and gowns, all the figures around the stainless-steel tables looked pretty much alike, but Martin’s chubby form was easy to pick out, and his brain waves ultimately navigated me to the right table. I made an effort not to notice the body lying there.

“Hello, Martin,” I said.

“I’m very busy,” Martin’s thoughts told me, handling his scalpel with skillful precision. On the other side of the table there was a masked figure babbling all their findings into a dictation device. The jabbering distracted me a little, but I made an effort to concentrate on Martin.

“I’m sorry about last night,” I said. One could construe that as an apology, perhaps even as a confession of guilt, although it wasn’t supposed to be either. I was just hoping that Martin would soften up.

“I would hope so,” he replied instead.

So much for hoping for a painless reconciliation. Apparently I needed some heavier artillery.

“You really did a great job pulling that off last night,” I started. “I never expected two bruisers to be out there waiting to smash your window in.”

Martin mumbled “hmm,” but otherwise kept his attention strictly trained on the body.

“I’m really sorry, and I’d like to apologize that you came into contact with guys like that and that your car was damaged. All because of me.”

Now I had confessed considerably more guilt than I had planned, but Martin was really being very aloof today. I was slowly getting mad. He should fucking accept my apology and stop being such a sorehead. Dumbass.

“I’ve got to concentrate here,” Martin said.

A smooth rebuff. The kind I hated even when I was alive. My father was especially good at that. You come to someone with a totally important thing that can’t be put off, and he just says “hmm” three times and that he doesn’t have any time. Makes me puke. That’s why I had to leave home at the time. And now Martin was starting with the same thing. My patience was again being put to the acid test.

“Martin!” I yelled to finally get him to pay attention to me. “Martin, I’m desperate!”

Now, I thought, he really had to react. A person like him can’t just close his heart to that kind of cry for help, I thought.

Thought wrong. He didn’t budge at all.

I spun around myself a couple of times to let off some of my anger and not shoot some kind of pulse wave into his skull and instantly destroy all the convolutions in his brain. But then exactly the one thing I had gone to great pains to avoid the whole time ended up happening: I caught a glimpse of the body that under Martin’s hands was currently metamorphosing into a rotten-meat gyro. I shrieked.

I had completely suppressed the tattoos on the body’s ankles, but as I saw them now I remembered.

“That’s her!” I yelled. “Martin—that’s the woman from the SLR!”

Now I had him. His attention was all mine. He folded the face of the woman back up again (please don’t make me go into detail, but I’ll say this much: during an autopsy the skin over the skull is cut from ear to ear and folded forward and backward…), he stared at her face for a moment, and asked: “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” I said, but Martin presumably didn’t get that at all because the person standing opposite him with the dictation device was staring at him surprised and asked what was wrong. Obviously that guy hadn’t been privy to our conversation, and instead just saw Martin suddenly pause in mid-snip to smooth out the body’s face and stare at it. It was certainly understandable that this would strike him as a bit odd, but that guy was really getting on my nerves because he was drawing Martin’s attention away from the body and me again.

“I suddenly had the impression that I may have seen this woman before,” Martin said.

“You didn’t get that impression before we started, when you first looked at the face, but only now that you’re making incisions around her kidneys?” his colleague asked quizzically.

“Uh, yes.” Martin didn’t say anything else—anything else would presumably have been used against him.

“And?” his colleague asked again. “Do you know her or not?”

“Uh, no.”

“Can we continue, then?”

Martin nodded and returned to the offal that his likewise-masked dissector was delicately and cleanly separating and handing to him for diagnosis. Meanwhile I was somewhat starting to understand who does what during an autopsy, but of course at the moment that didn’t interest me at all.

“Who is she?” I asked Martin.

“Jane Doe,” he replied in his businesslike voice.

“What did she die of?” I asked.

“We don’t know yet.”

“But you’ll find out?”

Martin nodded. “The district attorney ordered the whole gamut.”

“What gamut?” I didn’t have the foggiest idea what he was talking about.

“We’re doing a full postmortem, including DNA and tox screen.”

He must have sensed my next question before I could even ask it because he immediately explained, “There will be a genetic examination and a toxicological examination. The crime scene investigation unit has already removed any potential external evidence on the body, and that will be examined by their forensic technicians.”

“Where was she found?” I asked.

“No idea. But she was lying outside for a few days,” Martin said. “There are signs of bites…”

“She wasn’t injured when I saw her,” I interjected.

“…signs of bites by animals, which happened because she was outside.”

I thanked him profusely and withdrew into my drawer. He could go to hell with his “signs of bites,” as far I was concerned. I truly didn’t need to know everything. The fact that the body of the woman from the stolen car had turned up gave me plenty of material to think about. Now finally there was a piece of evidence that my story was true. Provided, of course, that Martin and his colleagues found evidence to confirm my story. Otherwise he would just say again that I could have invented everything and simply identified any old body as the dead woman from the trunk. I had no idea how much information can come out of an “autopsy, including DNA and tox screen,” but I really hoped with all my heart that Martin would finally believe me and continue our investigation.

If not, I would probably be stuck here in the basement of the Institute for Forensic Medicine for all eternity, begging generations of coroners to review the case of Sascha a.k.a. Pascha Lerchenberg…What a horrific idea!

Of course, I could tell I was slowly working myself up into a certain hysteria, but being aware of a mental over-reaction does not necessarily mean that you can just set it all aside. To the contrary. Realizing that your psychological balance is severely disturbed quickly results in feeling even worse, even more pessimistic, and even sorrier for yourself. And that’s exactly what I was doing. Big time. I was wallowing in self-pity until at some point I was so bad off I would really have liked to sob. But how?

Instead a kind of shame suddenly overcame me. Really. I wouldn’t have expected it, either, but in fact I was ashamed of being a wimp. Even so, I wasn’t the only one who’d had a rough time the past few days. The woman getting the deli-slice treatment from Martin right now was also dead. And she had even more reason to complain. She wasn’t just a dead woman, but an anonymous body. No one had any idea who she was. Did she have a family who should be informed? Was she married, with children—who would now be half-orphans? She was such a burden to the person she was last with that he buried her anonymously, intending to leave her friends and family in eternal uncertainty. And then she also kind of became a victim again when I stole the car, and then she was disposed of like garbage for a second time. Human garbage that had been unloaded somewhere and eaten away at by animals. A nauseating end. Worse then mine. Truly.

I decided to include her in my investigation. That is, in the investigation of my case that Martin was supposed to be doing. And with that decision I returned to where my line of thought had begun: Martin simply had to help me. Maybe I could stir him up more with the sappy story of the anonymous dead woman. I would at least try.

The autopsy room had since emptied out, and I was relieved. Presumably my intrepid forensic pathologist was now sitting at his desk, nibbling on a baby carrot (he actually did that on occasion to fend off hunger in between meals) and writing whatever boring reports again. I whooshed out to find him.

He wasn’t at his desk, maybe…I hesitated. On his computer that program was running that he uses to dictate reports. I was already quite familiar with the icon showing his mic wasn’t turned all the way off but was just asleep. That means you just need to speak a command to reactivate it, and you can start chattering on again. I proceeded to the mouthpiece on the headset and intensely thought: activate microphone.

Nothing happened. I thought the command several times more, sometimes slower, sometimes faster, but always very clearly and distinctly. I don’t know exactly how to express it, but I was phrasing it at Martin’s pitch, so to speak. Still nothing happened. I was frustrated. All those famous electromagnetic waves or pulses, or God only knows what those nasty little things are called, they just did not seem to want to do what I wanted them to. That’s how it used to be in chemistry class, or when we would do physics experiments—and let’s just not even talk about gym at all. Presumably the deep-seated trauma from gym class was the only thing that really connected Martin and me, because the way he looked and moved I was sure he was always the last guy chosen for a team, too, and there was no way he ever earned more than a couple of event ribbons at school during the annual National Youth Games. The difference was: he had not only graduated from school (I had too, mind you) but also stuck around for another couple of years and then spent a few years doing his medical specialization and was now an esteemed member of the academic clique that, in my view, had always been the other part of the world’s population, the middle class. By contrast, I had dropped out of school because the guy I was doing my vocational apprenticeship under kept pissing me off, and the apprentice-level pay (that expression alone makes clear that we’re not really talking about money but at most alms) wasn’t anywhere near enough for my basic monthly alcohol and drug consumption—to say nothing of duds, wheels, and girl-related outlays.

Somehow I found myself on the verge of falling back into the schmaltz again. First the compassion routine with the dead girl, now regret about screwing up my career track—maybe I was on some path of knowledge, with atonement waiting for me at its end, and then paradise? I pulled myself together, forced myself away from the screen, and started looking for Martin.

I lucked out in the break room. Standing next to Martin were Katrin and their colleague Jochen (the guy with the old city maps), along with a man in a suit and tie, who I already knew was the boss and who was noisily slurping some steamy liquid. They were chatting about their upcoming move.
Move
???

My heart sank to my boots, figuratively speaking. That whole wing of the building was going to be cleared out. Only the bodies would still be lying alone in their morgue drawers, all life was going to be removed, to live on somewhere else. Here would dwell death, and it alone. The employees would stop by to do their autopsies, and they’d wash their hands and disappear. I felt like bawling yet again. Today was definitely not my day. I perched on Katrin’s shoulder, imagining being able to feel her satiny hair and touch her silky skin, and I gradually calmed back down. Slowly but surely, I started trying to establish contact with her. I whispered “Katrin” and “Kitty” and things like that, focusing my imagination on her hot high beams and blazing chassis and sending her a fiery look from my eyes and hot breath from my mouth, which I blew into the neckline of her tight-fitting sweater. I mumbled a whole litany of dirty comments into her ear, imagining her naked skin and quivering body materializing before me.

Nothing. No reaction. I was getting pretty tired of the whole thing, myself, because of course nothing was getting excited on my end, either. I was overcome with the memory of a time when my face was covered in zits and I had to regularly change my pajamas—and it wasn’t because of ring around the collar, if you know what I mean. Yet another maudlin tailspin into deep, emotional darkness.