you just not interested?
“Or are you jusht not intereshted?” the South Tyrolean asked.
“Tell me.”
“I hope your phone hashn’t been tapped.”
Brenner began to tremble, out of fright that Knoll was dead and out of relief that it wasn’t Helena, so much so that he wasn’t really listening to the South Tyrolean anymore.
“Because I did in fact see shomeone that day.”
“This just occurred to you?”
Now she was the one who didn’t answer.
“What did he look like, then?”
“I’m not talking about a he. It was a she.”
It seemed to Brenner like Knoll’s face was grinning snidely at him. But that wasn’t the reason why he dropped him back into the cesspit. Because let’s be honest: what else was he supposed to do with him?
CHAPTER 14
Sixty-three hours after Helena’s disappearance and just before midnight, Brenner stood in the South Tyrolean’s doorway, and immediately, she rolled her eyes. And believe it or not, Brenner rolled his eyes, too. Let’s be honest, great love stories don’t usually begin this way, but the eye rolling was warranted, and in fact, both sides were fully entitled.
Brenner rolled his eyes because he could barely make it through the door on account of all the plants-“gardening” doesn’t come close. And she rolled her eyes because Brenner still gave off a residual whiff of cesspit, even though he’d showered for fifteen minutes in the cabin’s swank bathroom and then put on a fresh set of clothes from his duffel bag. And before you ask what he did with his dirty clothes-he threw them into the Kitzbuhel Ache River. But the stink must have settled somewhere deep in his pores, or else the South Tyrolean simply had an acute sense of smell. Her description of the woman at the gas station was the opposite of acute- exactly as vague as his whiff of cesspit. Approximately all the women in the world were brought under suspicion. No height, no hair color, no nothing. And as for the child, she wasn’t even a hundred percent certain whether there’d been one.
“But she wasn’t a man-that you’re sure of,” Brenner grumbled. Because he was starting to get the suspicion that she had lured him over under false pretenses, just because she was getting bored without a newspaper.
“You think I don’t have eyes in my head?”
Brenner didn’t say anything to that, because first of all, he was far too tired to argue, and second, the South Tyrolean had cooked him such good midnight spaghetti that he nearly fell blissfully asleep at the table. Because South Tyrolean women: always good cooks. And when, after three plates of pasta, Brenner felt more pregnant than any patient who’d ever shown up at the abortion clinic, the cook even offered that he could spend the night. Not what you think, though! Because the South Tyrolean made it abundantly clear to him that he shouldn’t misunderstand her.
“Woascheh,” the South Tyrolean said to Brenner, but it was in South Tyrolean and really only meant, “You know, eh?”
Brenner understood it, no problem, because a classmate of his at the police academy was from Sterzing. Ladinig was his name, always won all the executive ski championships, and an avid mountain climber in the summer, driving home every weekend and mountain climbing. Interesting though, it wasn’t in South Tyrol where he crashed, but on the Matterhorn. Two weeks after their graduation from the police academy. Ladinig had always used the catch-all “Woascheh,” too, and so Brenner was able to understand the South Tyrolean now without any trouble.
And interesting: after just that one word he knew truly everything, and she wouldn’t have to explain in any detail why the topic of sex had long been, and would always be, off-limits for her. She wouldn’t have to open up to Brenner about how, during her early active years in South Tyrol, she’d already completed a comprehensive study of this science. Brenner would’ve understood, too, if she didn’t want to list off every fire department, every music festival, every small town disco, every teacher, every priest, every church choir director, before coming to the conclusion that “Tyrolean men are such emotional halfwits, you can’t even imagine.”
That surprised Brenner, because Ladinig had been one of his nicest classmates, beloved by women and everyone else. Personally, I can’t fathom how the Tyroleans could be such losers and brutes, but that’s exactly how Monika saw them. I think if she’d happened to grow up somewhere else, maybe she would’ve blamed it on that region, but she never came down off it, the Tyroleans in general and the South Tyroleans specifically-coldhearted Pinocchios.
Brenner didn’t even attempt to turn her argument around on her, along the lines of, I’m a graduate of Puntigam’s Elite Sex University, where the Kama Sutra comes from. And here you can see how exhausted he must have been to leave something like that out. Although, to be frank, since the pills, he hadn’t been all that interested anymore, and strictly speaking, he wouldn’t have needed Knoll’s death as an excuse for why he preferred to sleep alone.
The apartment was half the size of South Tyrol, on the ground level of an old building across from the gas station, cheap and dank and loud and all, but enormous. In spite of this, he wasn’t allowed to choose which room he got to sleep in, because she told him he should just take the first one if he was so afraid of plants.
“And besides, this way you won’t be far from the bathtub. Did you shwim in sewage?”
Brenner declined the warm milk with honey that she wanted to prepare for him-world-renowned South Tyrolean sleeping pill-because, on principle, no milk. And I have to say, the South Tyrolean was even looking at him a little amorously because it was a commonality that seemed terribly meaningful to her. With a certain pride that women often resort to when they can tack a minor health deficiency or nutrition problem onto their breasts, she explained to Brenner that she didn’t even have the enzyme necessary to digest milk. She couldn’t impress Brenner any more tonight, though, because he was already so tired that the word “enzyme” sounded like something inflammatory creeping into his ears.
He only sat there as long as he did because the few steps to the bedroom seemed insurmountable to him. And one thing you can’t forget-the plants kept growing all the while. What he really would’ve liked was to ask the South Tyrolean for a machete. Somehow the room came to him, though, and really he would’ve liked to just let himself fall into bed. Her comment about the smell had already grabbed hold of his pride, though, and so, with his remaining strength, he overcame the philodendrons and fought his way into the bathroom.
He slept so deeply that the next morning he didn’t know where he was. For a moment he thought he might have drowned in the cesspit like Knoll, slipped in while he’d been on the phone, fell on his head and straight up to heaven. You should know, it had been years since he’d felt refreshed upon waking up. He lay there so delicately covered, bundled, and swaddled, all in clean white, where a man might get to thinking, you see, you could live like this if you bought into marriage. And it wasn’t just the bedding he was covered with that was white but also the bed frame that cradled him on all sides like he was a newborn. Or let’s put it this way: Brenner was just now realizing that he’d fallen asleep in the bathtub last night, and slept so soundly that there had been nothing else for the South Tyrolean to do but cover him up right there in the tub.
A human soul has never traveled quite so fast from heaven to hell, though. Because Brenner was also just realizing why he’d woken up. The cell phone in his heap of clothes was ringing, and he would have given anything in the world for it to be “Unknown Caller.” But it was no unknown caller. Believe it or not, seventy-one hours after the disappearance of her daughter, the Frau Doctor was calling him.
Twenty minutes later her BMW was pulling into the gas station. Because that’s where Brenner had told her to go-not very sensitive I have to say, but in his grogginess he couldn’t come up with anything better than the gas station across the street.
Brenner stood there dumbfounded a moment before opening the passenger-side door, because the idea of the Frau Doctor sitting at the steering wheel and he getting into the passenger seat seemed very strange to him all of a sudden.
“The car’s the only place right now where I don’t have the feeling that I’m being listened in on,” she said in
