Morgue Drawer Four (18 page)

You could say that about Ekaterina Something as well, because her apartment, which apparently had not been updated since the war, stank of rancid grease and cabbage. Every surface that Martin touched with his hand—before he wised up—was sticky. The woman herself looked the way you would expect someone who lives in an apartment like this to look: just as greasy and sticky as everything else in her environment. Perfect camouflage, one might well say, if this woman were a chameleon and not an approximately one-hundred-year-old Russian, Belorussian, or Ukrainian—if there’s any difference among those.

The idea that she’d discovered the photo of the body during her morning perusal of the
Cologne Advertiser
over coffee and rolls and then called the police is something neither Martin nor I could really picture. However, we didn’t need to ask how she came across the photo, because when she opened her refrigerator door to grab some butter to set out with the dust-dry crackers for us on the table, we saw that issue of the newspaper: apparently some fishmonger had used it to wrap up the woman’s purchases. The photo of the deceased girl’s lovely face was wrapped around six plump sardines whose heads were bloody and eyes cloudy. The stench took Martin’s breath away.

“You told the police that you recognized the woman from the photo in the paper,” Martin started.

“
Da, da,
I tolt police everything.”

The accent she spoke with was bad enough, but the fact that she had only a few teeth in her mouth all sticking out crooked from her lower jaw didn’t improve things. I didn’t want to try to imagine what Martin’s computer might write if she were dictating to it.

“It would be great if you could repeat it for me,” Martin said.

“Girl lived here, above me,” she said.

“Do you know her name?”

She shook her head. “No name on door, never tolt me.”

“Did you ever speak with her then?” Martin asked.

She nodded. “Hello and such.”

“Did she speak German?”

“Yes, but mother tonkue from Balkan or such.”

“Did she live alone?”

“
Da, da,
alone. But man sometimes was there.”

The toothless grandma winked at Martin! I roared with laughter, but Martin winced so big that you see it even through his duffle coat.

“What kind of man?” Martin asked after pausing to recover, during which he attempted, and totally failed at, a friendly smile.

“Tall.” She held up her arms in a gesture that meant more “fat” than “tall.”

“Bik man with nice car,” she added.

Our ears pricked up. “A small, silver, fast car?” I suggested, like the SLR, and Martin repeated the question for the grandma.

“Not small. Bik man, bik car.”

Ah ha, too bad. But actually that made sense. Fat men drive fat cars.

“Did she spend a lot of time at home, or did she have a job?” Martin asked.

“In day at home, in night away.”

“Maybe she served tables at a restaurant?” Martin suggested.

The grandma energetically shook her head, and then made a gesture that is understood internationally. Martin turned beet-red. The grandma grinned again and set her hand on his arm. Martin stared.

She let go of his arm. “Not on street.” For the next gesture, she rubbed her thumb and index finger together.

Ah ha. She meant that the dead woman hadn’t been some cheap streetwalker. But could a centenarian like this tell that? A woman who was running a shelf-life experiment in her fridge with sardines marinated in newsprint?

I answered the question for myself with a resounding yes. The woman was not stupid; she just had a strange view of modern residential environments, hygiene, and food preparation. But she had life experience, and that’s what we needed here. I took her at her word.

The only thing that was still bugging me now was the question of why this woman, who so obviously lived in her own world, had contacted the police. It certainly may be a prejudice on my part, but I have never before had the impression that those of our fellow countrymen and women with a westward-oriented immigration background had any particular fondness for German law enforcement. You get what I mean, right? That Russians piss on German cops wherever and whenever they can. Martin evidently had the same idea, but articulated it in a higher linguistic register.

“Ask her,” I said.

“She might interpret that as an insult,” he said.

“So what?” I said. “That’s actually what we want to know.”

Martin asked. Worded nicely. So nicely that at first Ekaterina didn’t at all understand what Martin wanted from her. Then the penny dropped.

“Where I am comink from, you can buy police like woman. Here, police goot.”

Sometimes it’s as simple as that. Now, in my short life I used to screw the cops over whenever I could, and here this antique matron loved the German police for their white vests, and so she performed her civic duty with great attentiveness. I was embarrassed. Secretly, of course, so Martin wouldn’t notice.

We left the apartment, the building, and that neighborhood, and I asked Martin what we wanted to do with the rest of our evening now.

“I’m dropping you off at the Institute,” he said. “Then I’ve got something else planned.”

Birgit! I could feel it, even though he was exerting his maximum effort to withhold these thoughts from me. “OK,” I said.

We drove to the Institute, Martin came in with me, turned the TV on in Conference Room Two, went down to the autopsy section, scrubbed his hands with hot water and disinfectant, and then called “see you tomorrow” and disappeared.

Of course I did not stay at the Institute. Late-night programming isn’t so great that I want to hang out in front of it all night if I’ve got an alternative. And this alternative was very interesting indeed.

Previously I hadn’t had much opportunity to study Birgit and Martin’s relationship very closely. The relationship did seem to be pretty new, generally. So quite a bit could still happen. I kept my thoughts strictly to myself so Martin wouldn’t notice I was there, and I drove with him to Birgit’s place.

She had obviously been waiting for him.

When she opened the door, her blond hair was illuminated by the lamp in her foyer, giving her an authentic halo, like in those little pictures of saints from religion class at school.

The rest was not saint-suitable. Her pinstriped pants, which I was already familiar with, were pretty frigging tight, and the white sweater she was wearing today fit her grille like such a soft coat of fur that you immediately wanted to pet it. It’s the same compulsion that overcomes every kid at the petting zoo. “A bunny rabbit, Mommy, a bunny rabbit!” and, presto, sticky kids’ hands are running over the furry curves. Martin’s hands restrained themselves effortlessly, however. I didn’t trust myself to peek into Martin’s brain because he wasn’t supposed to notice that the evening was going to be a threesome.

“Are you hungry?” Birgit asked. “I can make you something to eat.”

“No, thanks,” Martin muttered. “I grabbed something on the way over at Wedschi-Pärädeis.”

Wait a second, I thought. Did I miss something? I ran back through the events of the evening, and then I realized: “Veggie Paradise” must have been the name of that street food stand where you can get anything except for a proper bite to eat. Namely, something made of meat. Burgers, currywurst, schnitzel, half a roasted chicken with fries: that’s a proper German snack. But at the stand where Martin went there were only veggies. That has nothing to do with paradise. It should be called Herbaceous Hell. Or Parsnip Purgatory. But Birgit nodded and lead the way into the living room.

First the most important thing: there were no city maps hanging on the walls here. Also no kitschy pictures of horses with long eyelashes and wavy manes, no backlit skyline pictures, and no clowns. Hanging on the walls of Birgit’s living room were vacation photos. Hundreds of them. Some with Birgit, some not. Some of big cities—I recognized Paris right away—some of landscapes that looked mainly green. Maybe Ireland? No idea.

Martin had apparently not been here yet because he went over to the walls and studied the photos while Birgit opened a bottle of white wine, filled two glasses, and brought them over to Martin.

“Cheers,” she said, beaming at him.

“
¡Salud!
” Martin said, beaming back at her. Beaming through his eyes and his purple cheekbone.

They drank the way people drink wine. Sip by sip. Not like with beer, chugging the first can and yanking the second one open while you release the excess pressure produced in your system from the first. Nope, quite civilized here. When they set down the glasses, a disinterested observer might not have recognized that something was missing.

Martin had her explain the vacation pictures to him; it was Paris, and it was Ireland, and each picture had a little story to it. They laughed, sipped a bit of wine now and again, and the cautious touches grew more frequent. Sometimes they’d both point to the same picture and their hands would touch—gasp! Sometimes Martin would step ahead to the next picture while Birgit stayed put—body check, whoopsie!

I started missing my TV shows. Did he want to lay this piece of skirt or not? I had not come all the way over here to watch the G version of
La boum
! And apparently I had an ally in this, because right as I was about to lose my patience for real, Birgit leaned forward and kissed Martin. On the lips. Finally! I wanted to pat the bunny on her soft shoulder, but unfortunately I lacked anything to pat with.

Still, it was a start, I thought. Now surely Martin will get down to business, slide his hands under her sweater, knead her warm skin, especially over the curvy bits—and by that I don’t mean her shoulders. But on this point I’d expected too much of Martin. He didn’t exactly stay totally passive; he even kept holding Birgit in his arms after they finished kissing, but he didn’t go any further than that. In any case, not at a speed that one might perceive with the naked eye. Apparently people who drive trash cans don’t screw like people who drive Ferraris.

Subsequent overtures proceeded in slow motion. It took another seventeen minutes for the sweater to land on the couch, and another twenty-five for Birgit’s pants to land next to it. Then they went into the bedroom where Martin also took off his sweater vest, shirt, pants, and socks. And off they went under the covers. At least they left the little nightlight on; I was quite grateful for that. They made out some more, felt each other up some more, all very carefully of course—but, still, we were heading in the right direction. Even Martin was getting revved up; at least he didn’t have some kind of physical problem. I’ll admit that was something I had been afraid of, because no normal person makes out for two hours if he doesn’t have to. And you have to if you can’t, you know, proceed. It’s as simple as that. Martin seemed able and willing, though, but something also seemed to be holding him back. I took a chance and got closer to his thoughts, but I couldn’t fathom what I found in there. Martin was hesitating because he didn’t have a raincoat with him and couldn’t decide if he should ask Birgit if she had one or if he shouldn’t say anything at all and just keep going as though this question were totally irrelevant.

I couldn’t take it anymore. I said, “Martin, stop making a big deal about it, just nail her, will you!”

His reaction was a disaster. Martin winced, everything in him went flabby, and his head writhed in a chaotic mess of ideas and feelings—horniness, shock, hatred (presumably for me), shame all mixed together. He leaped out of bed, stammered some incoherent babble in which the only understandable word was “sorry”; everything else was complete gibberish. He grabbed up all of his clothes, got dressed, apologized to Birgit once more, who was sitting in the bed bewildered, presumably wondering if she’d done something wrong or if the guy was just totally cuckoo, and he left the apartment.

I stayed with Birgit to try and console her, which of course didn’t work since she couldn’t hear me. She stood up, straightened up the apartment, looked unhappy, started to cry, drank another glass of white wine, although this time quite a bit faster. Funny how everything seemed to move faster when Martin wasn’t here. She went back to bed but got up after a half hour and turned on the TV. After she fell asleep on the couch around one thirty I snuck out.

It was a calm, dark night as I floated through the streets of Cologne unsure whether I should go to Martin’s place or back to the Institute. I didn’t do either; instead I spirited away the rest of the night, whooshing through the city, eavesdropping on people, and trying to establish contact with them. No use. No one could perceive me, no one could hear me, no one could share their thoughts with me. I felt alone. And I felt guilty. I regretted my outburst that had ended Martin’s nice evening so unpleasantly, maybe even putting an end to his relationship with Birgit, which had just been starting to blossom. I was going to have to ask him to forgive me. That’s not normally my thing, but I would definitely have to make an exception in this case.

The next morning Martin and I arrived at the Institute at the same time; he was climbing out of his trash can, and just as he closed the car door I said, “Martin, I’m sorry about last night. Please forgive me.”

He pretended he didn’t notice me at all. For a moment I panicked, thinking that now even this last connection to the world of the living had been severed, but then I sensed the amount of effort he was devoting to not noticing me.

I waited for another moment, but he didn’t give in. So I said again, “Martin, I asked you to forgive me.”

No reaction.

“I’m sorry, now don’t hold a grudge,” I tried again.

Nothing.

Martin entered the building, went into his office, hung his duffle coat up on the coat rack, put on his lab coat, and went downstairs. There was an autopsy waiting. I stayed close to him, although I didn’t look at the gory details, and I kept sending apologies in his direction. He by contrast had totally walled himself off. I begged again and again, and he ignored me again and again, in a huff. He was slowly starting to piss me off.

I gave him another hour, apologizing another three times. Then I changed tack.

He was standing alone in the break room waiting for the water for his tea to boil when I planted the idea in his brain that his fly was open. He looked down reflexively and checked the zipper—and right at the moment Katrin stepped into the break room, too. I had seen her coming; my timing was perfect. Martin blushed.

“Hello, Katrin,” he mumbled.

“Hi, Martin.” An embarrassed gesture toward the coffee machine. “Any coffee left?”

“Uh, yes, I think so.”

Katrin squeezed past Martin, grabbed a cup from the cabinet and poured herself some coffee. “Everything OK with you?” she asked as though in passing, but her intonation wasn’t as relaxed as the question was supposed to sound.

“Yes, yes, everything’s great,” Martin said, the whole left half of his face purple from his bruise and his eyes bloodshot. “Everything’s dandy.”

“Good,” Katrin said, pouring milk into her coffee and leaving the break room.

“That happened because you’re ignoring me,” I said. “Accept my apology and let’s be friends again.”

Martin didn’t respond. I was starting to get really mad. What else could I do? I couldn’t kneel in front of him, I couldn’t hang banners from an overpass over the autobahn, I couldn’t buy him a beer, and I couldn’t apologize to Birgit for him.

I had been practicing the only thing I could do, for hours. I had apologized. Mountains of apologies. And still he insisted on being pigheaded. He apparently wanted no peace.

Fine. Then war it was.

Martin walked down the stairwell with a couple of his colleagues, and I screamed, “Watch out, a step is missing!” He hesitated in the middle of stairs, gripping the arm of the colleague next to him in terror and throwing him off balance. They both staggered but didn’t fall. Everybody stared at Martin.

“Uh, somehow I twisted my ankle,” Martin mumbled.

His colleagues gave him compassionate or concerned looks, and much too quickly they added that people did sometimes twist their ankles on these stairs, even though that was only semibelievable.

He was in the middle of an autopsy, where he was wielding the knife, and as he reached for the liver I yelled, “Don’t touch!” Again he winced, his hands trembling, and his colleague with the Dictaphone staring at him with a furrowed brow. He opened the chest cavity, removed the heart, and in my saddest voice, which I normally reserve for very, very sad situations, I said, “You’re hurting him.”

Martin dropped the heart. He was breathing shallowly, and there were beads of sweat on his forehead. He stabbed the scalpel into the body’s upper thigh and left it there jutting out, quivering. The Dictaphone guy and the dissection guy both gawked at Martin, stunned. Martin tore the mask off his face; he was as white as the wall, and his eyes were glowing frantically. He staggered to the men’s room and revisited his breakfast.

“Let’s be friends again,” I said as he was rinsing out his mouth.

He ignored me.

His boss was waiting outside the bathroom door.

“Jochen took over the autopsy,” his boss said, taking Martin by the arm. “Come on. We’re going to have some tea, and you’re going to tell me what’s got you so frazzled.”

Martin nodded. I was tense.

Of course Martin didn’t say what had him so frazzled. He sipped the fancy-schmancy upland Darjeeling
FTGFOP
1-2-3 garden tea that his boss orders through a licensed importer—in special packaging at a special price—and listened to his boss’s spiel about the especially fine bud tips of this particular tea’s leaves, the weather in the Himalayas, and the training of the women who harvest the tea leaves, but he was only half paying attention. He wasn’t able to concentrate, and his boss noticed that.

“So, what’s up with you then? We’ve known each other for twelve years, and I’ve never seen you like this before.”

Martin looked into his teacup. “I think I’m coming down with a cold,” he mumbled.

“That may be,” replied his boss, who of course was also a doctor. Specifically a corpse doctor, but at some point in their training they must also practice on living people. His boss knew his stuff, you had to hand it to him: he actually came up with the impressive diagnosis that Martin’s issues could not be
solely
due to a cold. The lack of concentration, the nervousness, the absentmindedness. (As if his ability to concentrate had given up the ghost—ha!) There had to be something else going on.

“Me,” I interjected, but unfortunately Martin’s boss couldn’t hear me.

“Are you having personal problems?” his boss asked.

Martin winced. “Uh, no.”

Liar!

“Are you involved in some sort of dispute with someone?”

This was quite an obvious question, of course, given Martin’s post-boxing-match face.

“No,” Martin said again.

Another lie!

“Do you think you can continue to perform your work in a professional manner?”

At this point Martin should have said no, but instead he said yes.

Yet another lie. There was no way Martin could seriously assume he could. Not if he was at war with me. I had the upper hand, and Martin knew it. But Martin displayed a pride and doggedness that I had not thought him capable of. Although of course his tenacity in absolutely no way presented any kind of obstacle for me. I would break him; of this I didn’t have the slightest doubt.

Martin’s boss left him alone, and Martin snuck back up the stairwell to his office. I briefly wondered why he never took the elevator, but then as we were going past it the elevator doors opened, giving us a view of a man who wasn’t wearing a lab coat but a regular winter coat. A visitor. Only after Martin and I were almost back to his office did I realize who it was: I’d seen him somewhere before. I zoomed back down a floor, but I couldn’t find the visitor anywhere. Meanwhile I wasn’t sure anymore myself if I hadn’t been mistaken. I hesitated for a moment and then whooshed back to Martin.

He was sitting at his computer dictating reports. This report obsession was getting on my nerves. What a boring job. A
dead
-boring job, ha! On the other hand, writing reports struck me as pretty opportune at this particular moment because I could exert a direct influence on them. I waited for him to type a couple of lines. He was commenting on the visible external injuries when he handed the perfect spot to me on a silver platter, describing the head wound as “a calvarial fracture obviously sustained from a blunt object.” I supplemented: “We fear rain has been leaking into the poor bastard’s braincase.”

Martin’s upper body, which had been leaning back in his chair, fairly relaxed—or limp, if you will—shot upward. He leaned forward and hammered on the keyboard, deleting my insertion. Such a shame; that would have livened a dry report up a bit for once. Five lines later I inserted a question about what the deal was with the postmortem stab wound that the deceased had sustained to the upper thigh. Same reaction, this time even accompanied by involuntary snorting, like an angry bull. His office mate sitting across from him flashed a furtive glance in Martin’s direction.

Martin threw his cool new cordless headset aside, loudly rattled open his desk drawer, seized his old headset, plugged in it, and resumed dictating. His brain was formulating a hateful “na na” before he switched his train of thoughts back off to me in a
tour de force
of will.

Shit.

Without a ghost of a chance at influencing anything, it was suddenly much more boring for me to be present for the laborious genesis and composition of these reports. I was actually looking around for a more riveting form of light entertainment right when the tension in the room suddenly surged. Birgit had entered the room.

“Oh, hello,” Martin stammered when he saw her. “This is a surprise.”

Not a “nice” surprise, not “what a pleasure to see you,” no. Just a surprise. Way not charming.

“I, uh, I happened to be in the neighborhood…” Birgit said.

Apparently today was Big Lies Day. No one ever “just happens to be in the neighborhood” of the Institute for Forensic Medicine. There isn’t anything around it that would draw in random visitors. It’s surrounded by a cemetery and a multilane divided arterial with streetcar tracks down the middle. How bucolic.

“Yes,” Martin said, at last standing up, the cord to his old headset catching on some papers, which then tumbled onto the floor.

“Oh,” Birgit said, noticing the cord. Then her eyes moved over to the cordless one she had just given him, which in his irritation Martin had just tossed aside someplace an arm’s length away. “Someplace” in this case was among the mandarin orange peels on a paper towel at the corner of his desk—ready for the trash, as it were.

“I don’t think this was a good idea,” Birgit said with tears in her eyes, and then she turned and left.

Martin followed her, and the cord tightened across his throat, shifting the earpiece, which had always been too tight, so it slipped and jabbed his left eye. Martin freed himself from the hopelessly bent contraption and bolted after Birgit. I followed, inconspicuously.

Birgit was already running down the stairs at full speed, Martin and me in tow.

“Birgit,” Martin called. “It’s not how it looks.”

“I don’t care,” Birgit shouted back over her shoulder.

“I was getting some…interference on the cordless headset connection, and some other things going on this morning had already been annoying me, and I was in a rush, and that’s why I just quickly plugged the old corded one in again,” Martin erupted, a little out of breath.

“That’s fine, you can do your work however you want with whatever you want,” Birgit said. Her intonation was unambiguously bitchy. I hadn’t expected that from her at all, but her pain threshold had obviously been exceeded by this point.

They reached the main floor one right after the other. Birgit went through the glass door into the lobby, letting the door slam shut behind her, and Martin yanked it back open as though he wanted to rip it totally off its hinges.

To the left of us the elevator pinged.

“There’s that guy again!” I screamed, extremely agitated.

“What in blazes is wrong now?” Martin roared at the top of his voice.

Birgit swung around and glared at him in stunned horror.

“I didn’t mean…uh, not you…” Martin stammered. The guy from the elevator crossed the lobby and left the building.

“I’m going,” Birgit said. “And I’m not sure I ever want to see you again.”

Martin stood there thunderstruck, watching her as she left.

“The guy who was just in the corridor. The one who just left. I’ve seen him somewhere before!” I yelled again.

“Fuck off,” Martin thought.

“I can’t remember anymore when or where I’ve seen him. But it’s definitely—”

Important, is what I’d wanted to say, but I was interrupted.

“
FUCK OFF
,” Martin repeated more clearly, as though I hadn’t understood him correctly the first time.

“Just please go and ask at the reception desk who he was and what he wanted here,” I said.

“Go fuck yourself,” Martin replied, turning around. He slowly, deflatedly climbed the stairs back up to his office and resumed dictating his reports, but he was so unable to concentrate that half an hour later he packed up his stuff and drove home. I left him alone.