greeting.
“By the police or by the kidnappers?”
Brenner had never seen a person change so much in three days. Except for someone getting an arm or a leg shot off, that’s always a sudden change, or slipping under a bus, both legs gone, something like that’s a sudden change, too, of course, but right after that would come Frau Doctor Kressdorf’s change. Because she must not have eaten a bite since the day her child disappeared, and even that doesn’t explain it, either, because-completely different type of person. If there is such a thing! It even looked to Brenner like her hair and eyes were a different color, but not what you’re thinking: dyed. No, like they’d really changed.
Character-wise, absolutely unchanged. And that was a huge relief to Brenner right now. No hysterical outbursts, no embittered remarks, not even a sigh or an accusatory look. Brenner was profoundly impressed by her self-control. She was utterly calm as she drove downtown, no aggressive accelerating, no abrupt brake slamming, no accusatory gear shifting, no demonstrative temperature adjusting, no frantic windshield wiping, no nervous window opening, no sacrificial-lamb turn signaling, no lane changing where it wouldn’t have been advisable to do so, and where the sensitive passenger and child-loser might’ve detected a sighing rebuke.
Brenner thought to himself, other families who’ve been affected by kidnappings should really look to her as a model. Not always making things more complicated, because when you’ve been affected by a kidnapping, you see it as your great hour having arrived. Finally, the big chance and now it’s my turn for once, now people will indulge all of my whims, and now everything around me will have to pay until it doesn’t know which way’s up anymore. Brenner had experienced this more often than not in his days on the force. Because the motto of families affected by kidnappings: the police will pay for everything that’s ever been done to me in life. And families affected by kidnappings wield power, you wouldn’t believe it, they drive doctors, psychologists, and social workers to suicide- ergo, all new victims of kidnappings.
“I have to tell you something,” Frau Doctor Kressdorf began abruptly after driving for a full minute in silence. But then she fell silent again, and it was only as she was turning onto the Ringstrasse that she found her words. “There’s something I can’t tell the police. If you can’t, or won’t, keep it to yourself, please tell me right now.”
“No problem. No one will hear anything from me.”
He would’ve liked to have said that with a little more conviction, but personally I think a dry promise isn’t the worst, because how do you prove to someone that you won’t tell someone else? It basically only applies to your best friend anyway, who’ll probably tell his wife the very same evening, who’ll solemnly swear not to tell anybody else, and her best friend will have to swear the same thing half an hour later. The more adamantly a person vows to keep a lid on it, the more certain you can be that, come tomorrow, the entire world will know. And you see, Brenner said it just that dryly, and he’s probably the first person in the world who’s never actually spoken a dying word of it to anybody. These are the things I like about Brenner. But since it’s just us, I’ll make an exception and tell you what the doctor said.
“I’ve done something that I could go to prison for.”
“You?”
Pay attention: if one of the advantages of driving is the freedom to shout openly, it only applies, of course, to when you’re driving alone. So why is Brenner shouting so loudly now when he’s sitting right next to the Frau Doctor:
“You?”
And what kind of a shout was that? A shout of surprise? A shout of rage? A shout of pain? I’m tempted to say, all of them together. Surprise, because naturally he expected her secret to involve her husband, the Construction Lion, who’d lured Knoll out to his house in the mountains. And rage, because he sensed that she’d already decided, before she even began her story, to withhold half of it. And pain, I don’t even need to explain to you, when you’re speaking for the first time with the mother-who looks like she’s aged thirty years in seventy-two hours-of the child you lost.
“Yes, me,” the doctor answered softly, and got honked at from behind for the crime of not stealing into the intersection while the light was still red.
Her confession of guilt made Brenner feel completely hopeless. Because one thing you can’t forget: nothing derails a manhunt more effectively than a self-afflicted guilty search party that constantly holds up the investigation with its self-blame.
Brenner would’ve preferred for her to tell him something about her husband. But the Frau Doctor didn’t have much of a clue about his construction business. That’s often how it is, that you don’t know exactly what kind of business your spouse actually does, main thing, the money’s there, main thing, the villa’s there, main thing, the park’s there, main thing, the yacht’s there, main thing, the staff’s there, main thing, the art’s there, main thing, the charity thing’s there, main thing, the therapist’s there, in other words, the most important things have got to be there, it’s got nothing to do with your own standards, my god, you could live a much more modest life by yourself, you could get by with a smaller villa, with a smaller park full of smaller trees, too, with a smaller yacht, with smaller paintings-and if you must, even with smaller charity things-but for the child it would be a pity indeed to grow up in cramped conditions, and that’s why it’s important for the family estate to be established a far cry from the poverty line. But now I’m talking as fanatically as Knoll, this kind of thinking’s contagious. You’ve got to be careful not to go sympathizing with Knoll all of a sudden just because he landed in the cesspit of a Construction Lion.
For a second there Brenner thought, the Frau Doctor knows what happened to Knoll, and she wants to tell me. He asked her very cautiously whether she believed there was a connection between her law violation and the kidnapping, and the Frau Doctor, completely calm and matter-of-fact, said, “I don’t know. In my situation, you believe everything could be connected with it.”
“We’ve all broken the law at some point,” Brenner said, purely out of discomfort.
But he was already thinking that she probably wasn’t talking about driving too fast, parking illegally, listening to loud music after midnight, vacuuming on a Sunday, or walking off with a pretty sweater from a boutique back when she was a med student.
“Terminating the pregnancy of a twelve-year-old girl.”
“Is that illegal?” Brenner asked, in an effort to cover up his relief that she wasn’t mixed up in Knoll’s murder.
“It depends.”
“You probably did it for the child.”
Already you can see how Brenner’s bad conscience had put him more on the side of the doctor than on the side of the law. Or not just a bad conscience, but sheer masculine sympathy for the doctor, too. And from a professional standpoint, it’s always better with confessions to give the confessor a good feeling. “Confession comes from comprehension”-they hammered that one right into him at the police academy, i.e., interrogation rule number one, if force doesn’t do anything.
The doctor gave him a look that made it clear she would refuse any and all excuses. Some people are so incredibly stubborn, they want the kind of guilt that they can hang on to and never let go.
“I meant to say, you must have done it for the twelve-year-old girl,” Brenner explained. Because suddenly it occurred to him that his remark-that she’d done it for the child-might have come out wrong, that maybe the Frau Doctor had thought he meant that she’d done it for the aborted child; that possibly, purely out of self-flagellation, she’d thought Brenner had referred to the aborted gnat as a “child.”
“The girl was poor,” the Frau Doctor said. “At first she didn’t tell anyone she was pregnant, and then it was too late. But I wasn’t supposed to do it. Not anymore by that point. And not before, either. Not without reporting it.”
They were coming back around now to where they’d first turned onto the Ring. And on this second lap around, the whole thing seemed like a hand over situation to Brenner, where the kidnapper demands, drive around the Ring until you receive the next instruction, i.e., a tactic to wear you down. And maybe that’s why you see so many cars here, day and night, driving in circles, because everybody’s waiting for their kidnapper’s next instruction.
“I don’t want to justify it to myself, either, that there are countries where it’s legal.” The doctor’s voice snapped him out of his thoughts.
“On the other hand,” Brenner said, because the Frau Doctor looked so crestfallen that all he wanted to do now was console her.
“On what other hand?”
