Morgue Drawer Four (2 page)

I had to ditch it. The body, not the cigarette. You don’t hand a car smuggler a car with a corpse in the trunk, not even if it’s an SLR. Or all the less if it’s an SLR? I was confused, but I knew the woman had to disappear. It’s not like she was going to do it for me, so it was time for me to come up with a really clever solution for this highly unusual problem, and fast. I took one more deep drag, flicked the butt away, and was just about to get back into the car when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I flinched so much I hit my chin on the top of the car.

“Hey, Pascha, you’re on time. Good job.”

The guy grabbing me and praising me like some lame-ass nursery school teacher was Kevin, and he had a goatee that looked like his girlfriend had painted it onto his jaw with fine eyeliner, and he was always smirking. Maybe he suffered from Bell’s palsy. But in any case I always found him repulsive, especially right now. He held out his palm.

I was gasping for air and howling because I hadn’t just hit my chin but also bitten my tongue, and I was frantically running through my options for making the body in the trunk disappear before Kevin took the ride to Olli. It was no use, my brain was a crashed hard drive, and so, totally exhausted, I just dropped the keys into Kevin’s hand, and he said his buddy could drive me back into town. I stood there motionless in the parking lot for a solid five minutes until I could bring myself to puke the remains of my greasy midnight burger into the bowl of a rest-stop toilet. Then I felt a bit better, and I made my way home.

It would definitely have to be public transit this time, and I thought about what would probably happen next. Kevin had several hundred horsepower under his ass and would crash, and the car would catch fire, rendering both Kevin and the dead woman into fine ash. That was my favorite vision. But there was another. Kevin drove straight to Olli, who glanced into the trunk, got annoyed that I had served him up a mummy on the side that he had not ordered, and immediately dumped the body at the front door to my building. Or he would distribute leaflets with a photo of the dead woman with the words: “Are you looking for this woman? Ask Pascha, Telephone 022…” Most likely, however, was that either Kevin or Olli would discover the body in the trunk, drive down the closest forest road, unload her there, and then sell the car to the East, just as planned. After all, I hadn’t seen any pools of blood or other contaminants in the trunk, so the transaction involving the almost brand-spanking-new SLR could go off without a hitch.

Having arrived at this reassuring thought, I got out of the overcrowded bus and walked the short distance to my favorite gambling joint and slid a few coins into the slots. Slowly I started breathing normally again, although my tongue still hurt like hell when hot coffee with four spoons of sugar flowed over it.

I played for five hours until I didn’t have a cent left. Not just all of my money, including the five hundred smackers out of the SLR, but worse: I owed Mehmet, the guy who runs the gambling joint, for several out-of-pocket loans, so my total debt at the end of the day ran a cool nineteen hundred euros. Not just debt from the slots, but that must already be obvious to you brainiacs. Mehmet was furious because officially he wasn’t allowed to give out loans, and now he’d have to pay up for the loss himself. I kept on telling him about my big job, and I promised I’d bring him the cash as soon as I got my cut. I hoped I would in fact get the dough Olli had promised me. My honeymoon would last forty-eight hours, and then Mehmet would hunt me down. The day had started out crappy, it had a catastrophic climax, and it had now ended in disaster.

I didn’t hear a thing from Kevin or Olli the next day, or the next, and that was slowly making me nervous. The forty-eight hours that Mehmet had given me were soon over, and I didn’t know how I was going to pay him back. I found fifty euros in my apartment, my emergency reserve in my rolled-up athletic socks that I hadn’t worn for decades, but if I gave Mehmet my sock money I’d be totally broke and he’d still be angry, so that wasn’t any solution. I started sitting around, alternately at home and at my favorite pubs, waiting for Kevin or another of Olli’s errand boys to show up and give me the promised two thousand euros, and I was getting nervous as Mehmet’s deadline approached. Even more nervous than I was before, I mean. I didn’t want to be standing around all stupid like a cow at the slaughterhouse waiting for the guy with the bolt gun, so I took a seat in the first-available streetcar and just rode, changed lines, and directions, and rode back, transferred to the bus, and rode all over town. I transferred back to the streetcar, where it was alternately ice cold and screaming hot, and I managed to wangle a window seat and wipe the condensation from the pane; outside there were already two centimeters of snow. Perfect. I hate snow. Anyone who loves cars must hate snow.

I got off at a plaza with lots of people and a news kiosk, invested my sock money in alcoholic beverages, and took a train back downtown. I started getting tanked while I was still on the train. I got off somewhere—naturally I had the great fortune of landing in the middle of a roadwork site. And here I didn’t think we were still investing in infrastructure in this country anymore. I climbed up some temporary stairs along with other riders, elbowing my way through the congestion points, then I got lost and at some point took a pedestrian overpass bridge labeled with a sign saying “All Downtown Lines: Straight Ahead.” Meanwhile my field of vision had dramatically narrowed, the noises from my surroundings reached my jug ears as though from a great distance, but at least I wasn’t all that worried about my debts.

I felt the impact on my back despite my drunken stupor. It caught me at the least opportune moment. In front of me there were two landings of stairs leading downward, with temporary railings. My foot reached out a bit farther than planned because of the impact, causing me to miss the first step. The second step was covered with snow and was thus slippery, so my worn sole slid over the edge. The thin board that was supposed to serve as a railing had about as much hold as a tow rope made of elastic. The nail that was supposed to connect the temporary railing to the support column on the left gave way immediately and without hesitation, and the nail on the right followed shortly thereafter. In those seconds my gift of observation was indescribably good, good as never before, and perhaps that alone should have given me pause, but I had no time for that. My feet slid forward through the railing, I tipped backward, and the back of my head hit the wood forming the surface of the bridge unbelievably hard before I completely sailed over the side. I experienced my plummet into the depths in slow motion. Spinning around some kind of axis I slammed onto the pavement six meters below. The noise that my body and above all my cranium made on impact startled even those who couldn’t have seen my plummet at all because their backs were to me. As I was lying on my stomach with my face to the side, I was still able to make out faces turning toward me, but then I couldn’t see anything anymore.

The darkness lasted for just a short moment, and then suddenly, I suppose after about ten seconds, I was able to observe the entire scene very clearly—from above. Now, I’m sure we’ve all seen our fill of those near-death-experience ghouls who haunt talk show after talk show, describing their mystic experiences. They all observe their bodies from the outside, and then comes the tunnel, and the light, blah blah blah. So I didn’t give it much thought as I was floating over my twisted outer shell, which was littering the ground. I waited for the tunnel, the light, and ultimately to grow up again inside my own body. That’s how those reborn TV freaks always end up describing it.

So I hung around and waited. I watched people giving my body a poke, someone taking charge and blathering something about calling for an ambulance, someone pressing on my wrist and carotid and with a serious face taking the cell phone from the man calling the police, reporting into it that the accident victim was dead.

Now wait just a second, I thought, that guy is totally exaggerating. He’s welcome to pretend like he’s in charge if he thinks he’ll impress women that way, but there have got to be limits, thank you very much. Plus, his theatrical performance wasn’t even resulting in the fairer sex throwing themselves at him, sobbing. The bystanders were just doing what bystanders do: standing around and staring.

I don’t want to bore you with all the details, so I’ll give you just the digest version of the most important things: the police came, determined that I had fallen off the makeshift pedestrian overpass, pronounced me—as I still thought, inaccurately—dead, and called the coroner’s office.

“Hi, Rolf,” said the short, chubby man in a dark brown duffle coat (really, I swear, he came in a duffle coat) to the uniform, as he set down his bag and checked my body for life signs. “Hi, Martin,” Rolf, the policeman, replied.

“How long has he been here?” Duffie asked the crowd of gawkers who were now stamping their freezing feet behind the red and white cordon that had since been strung up.

“Seventeen minutes,” answered the eager hero with paramedic training. Brownnoser.

“Accident or foul play?” Duffie asked.

“Unclear,” replied a guy in civilian clothes who had given the orders for where the red and white tape should be strung up, and who generally gave the impression of being the guy calling the shots.

Policemen were scurrying around taking a thousand pictures of me, the bridge, the railing, and the bottle that had fallen out of my hand. They retraced the way I had come, measuring distances and angles, and they all looked terribly busy. Duffie—that is, Martin—knelt down next to me in the softly falling snow, studying me top to bottom, part of it actually through a magnifying glass he had pulled out of his bag. He combed every centimeter of my head, paying particularly close attention to the spot on the back of my head that had hit the plank on the wood overpass bridge, and then he crawled around with his face nearly to the ground trying to see as much as possible of the left half of my face, which I was lying on, before he finally turned me over. Then he did his examination again on my now-visible front side with the magnifying glass, and finally, finally he was through. He put the magnifying glass back into his bag, scanned around him, discovered what he was looking for, and gestured with his left hand. Two men came over, stuffed my body into my to-go box, and hauled me away.