“On the other hand”-it’s always bad to begin a sentence with “on the other hand” when you don’t know what you want to say after that-“it wouldn’t have done anybody any good if the abortion had waited any longer,” Brenner stammered. “How many months along was she when she came to you?”
“We calculate in weeks, not months.”
That was her entire answer.
“Got it. There used to be a saying: ten months but no cash on delivery.”
Brenner thought he could lighten up the mood a little, but the doctor hardened at his remark, and it wouldn’t have surprised him if she’d driven straight to the Hotel Imperial.
“I just meant,” Brenner said, “if they were that poor. Twelve years old and life already screwed up. You’ve got to help. You can’t just force morality about becoming a mother on a child like that. Women used to die because of illegal abortions!”
“I didn’t come to you for consolation,” she interrupted him. “My problem is that I can’t tell the police. I was even prepared to. But my husband’s convinced that this is exactly what Knoll set out to accomplish.”
“Knoll knew about it?”
Brenner was starting to feel like he was riding a merry-go-round as the palaces along the Ringstrasse went past him again, the Opera, the Hofburg Palace, the Parliament, the Burgtheater, and down to the Mint again, to the Ring Tower, around and around in circles. Or a few laps around the Lilliput Rail, but for some reason, instead of trees they passed buildings, and for some reason instead of Helena, it was her mother who sat beside him, and for some reason instead of being happy he was-how shall I put it-devastated would be an exaggeration; more like numb.
“My husband turned to Reinhard, and Reinhard advised Knoll not to use his evidence. Or else he’d call his loan due. We’d looked it up in the Land Registry-which bank Knoll was keeping the money in that he’d bought up the other units in the building with.”
Defense Ministry, Museum of Applied Arts, City Park, Schwarzenberg Square, Opera.
“I’ve wished ever since that he wouldn’t have let himself get cowed by Reinhard. Then that maniac wouldn’t have taken my child away from me.”
Brenner shot her a look like she was only telling him half the truth. But he couldn’t very well call her on it. He wasn’t telling her everything, either; quite the contrary, he even asked her now whether she’d heard anything from Knoll in the meantime, i.e. intentional misrepresentation.
“You know what I think?” she said, while they were stopped at a red light at the Schottentor for the fourth time. “Knoll is calmly waiting for me to go to the police myself with this story about having illegally terminated the pregnancy. Then I’ll be ruined professionally, and he’ll send Helena back to me.” Her voice faltered for a moment, but she kept impressive self-control-not even half a tear. “And he’s accomplished everything without making himself known. He’ll be rid of me without ever making contact with me.”
“It really wouldn’t have been badly orchestrated,” Brenner had to admit. “But most of the time criminals aren’t thinking about it from so many angles.” He couldn’t exactly tell her that Knoll was dead. Drowned in the cesspit behind her own house.
Instead he just pulled out the photo that Knoll had given him. “Was this your underage patient?”
The Frau Doctor looked at Brenner as if he were Knoll himself.
“Do you know where she lives?” Brenner asked smoothly.
“Where did you get that photo?”
Brenner shook his head. “Surely you have her address somewhere.”
“You really don’t get it! I don’t want you to find this girl. This isn’t about her.”
“So where does she live?”
Approximately one centimeter before a jingling streetcar crossed the tracks, the doctor yanked on the steering wheel and came to a stop at an empty taxi stand in the adjacent lane. She gave Brenner a look as if to say, the entire conversation had just been sadistic foreplay leading up to this second when she was going to eat him alive, the man who’d managed to misplace her child.
“I get it, you don’t want to put your patient in a difficult position. That it’s purely about Knoll for you. But the direct route doesn’t always get you anywhere,” Brenner explained to her, and shocked himself by how consistent this was with the truth according to Knoll. “Often it’s only through the detours. Our professions aren’t so different on this score. Doctors ask, too, whether you have cold toes at night when you go to them because of a headache. And those are opposite ends of the body.”
“Which you don’t know everything about.”
“That the head’s on the opposite end of the body than the toes, even non-doctors know that.”
But the next moment nearly saw Brenner and the Frau Doctor become Vienna’s latest criminal case. Because a furious taxi driver pounded on the windshield, and if Brenner hadn’t immediately locked the doors from the passenger seat, everything would have been over, guaranteed. He suddenly had an inkling of what Knoll’s last seconds must have been like, because unfortunately the passenger-side window was open a crack, and the atmosphere inside the car changed because of the killer cabbie, as if the entire car were sinking into a cesspit.
Interesting, though: the attack was good for the conversation, because as they drove off in a hurry, their conversation popped back into gear.
“I don’t know the girl’s address. I don’t keep any records of my crimes.”
“And she doesn’t have a name, either?”
“I only really know her first name. And even that she told me in an immigrant’s Viennese. How the kids talk who are born here but speak another language at home.”
“Oida! Oida! Oida! Oida! Go shit I say!” Brenner thought he could impress the Frau Doctor with how well he could imitate this throat malady. Maybe elicit a small smile in the midst of a desperate situation.
“You do that very well,” she said, but not with a smile; no, so coolly that despite the 77-degree weather, the windshield-washing fluid would’ve frozen, guaranteed, had he not just refilled the antifreeze a few days ago. Under better circumstances an even wittier reply would have come to him. But stricken as he was, he only heard hurtfulness in her remark. He only detected from it that she counted him among them, her staff; that he was the sort who, right from the outset, never had a chance in his life with someone like the Frau Doctor, because of education, because of age, because of manners, because of language, because of money, because of everything.
“And her first name was probably fake, too,” she continued. One thing you can’t forget: for her, the remark had been no big deal. She really did have other concerns. “Maybe it was just a nickname: Sunny.”
“Probably short for Susanna,” Brenner said, because he couldn’t help but think of the Susanna who’d once won the grand prize at the Linzer police department’s Christmas raffle, believe it or not, a ski weekend in Hintersoder for two, and no one was allowed to call her Susi-only Sunny.
“Short for Susanna,” the doctor replied, “I don’t think so. Susanna isn’t a particularly common name among immigrant girls. I think it’s more likely English.”
And Brenner, with particularly good pronunciation, “The sunny side of the street.” Not sung, of course, just spoken.
“Sunny side,” the doctor repeated pensively, as though she had to think about what it could possibly mean.
“I once paid for a young woman’s abortion, too,” Brenner began, hoping that with this story he’d get somewhere with the Frau Doctor yet. “In my police academy days. Her name was Hansi, short for Johanna.”
“Aha.”
“It was still illegal at the time, so she drove all the way to Amsterdam. I paid for all of it. Train, hotel, abortion.”
“And you went with her?”
“No, I didn’t have enough money. Two train tickets, then staying overnight, plus meals on top of that. But in hindsight I have to say, it would’ve been cheaper if I had gone. Because she changed her mind in Amsterdam.”
“She discovered herself with drugs instead.”
“Not drugs, exactly-hashish. And after a fun week she returned without the abortion.”
“So you’re a father?”
“Was.”
The doctor looked at him with utter sympathy, and Brenner saw the old Frau Doctor in her again, the one
