drummer, Mitch Mitchell, and he was playing “Foxy Lady” in honor of the red-haired woman in bed.
You know what’s interesting, though? When Brenner really did lose his mind out of fear eleven hours later, he didn’t fully realize it. But, for now, he lay there with a clear mind, watching Helena sleep and thinking to himself, so this is what it’s like when you lose your mind.
The pills probably helped save him from the brink. Because eighty-eight hours after Helena’s disappearance and a few minutes after her reappearance, the pills in him said: these things just happen in life. And as you’ve already noticed, the pills reassured him, the South Tyrolean is a little strange. My god, she took the child. Better than if someone else had taken her. She just borrowed Helena for a few days. “Borrowed” or “born,” they sound so similar that it can’t be that bad. You hear time and time again — the pills floated before his eyes- about women who don’t have children sneaking into maternity wards and snatching newborns. And anything that happens over and over isn’t not a little normal, the pills in Brenner argued. But the dinosaur in his chest said, Here I come! But the pills said, that can’t be a dinosaur, because-too musical, it must be Mitch Mitchell, who, out of thanks that you dedicated the PIN to him, is playing “Foxy Lady” for the South Tyrolean.
You should know, it was the pills that were holding Brenner’s mind together. And he didn’t actually lose his mind. He listened to his heart’s drummer drumming his heartbeat the whole night through and thought about what he should do now. And about why Knoll had landed in the cesspit if he had nothing to do with the kidnapping. How is it all connected, he asked himself, while Mitch Mitchell wouldn’t, wouldn’t quit hammering his foot into Brenner’s chest. He simply didn’t, didn’t get tired, and Brenner couldn’t, couldn’t stop thinking.
What had Knoll wanted from Kressdorf? Was he just another sidecar driver like the nanny’s husband? What had Kressdorf wanted from Knoll? Do Reinhard and Congressman Stachl know that Knoll is dead? Does Kressdorf know that Helena isn’t his? Brenner was riddled with so many questions but never, never the answers.
My god, “Foxy Lady”’s three and a half minutes should be long over by now, he groaned. But Mitch Mitchell played on till morning. He simply wanted to prevent Brenner-after Jimi Hendrix and after Noel Redding and after himself, too-from cashing in his chips before his time. The downside to such a vigorous heart massage, of course, is that there can be no talk of sleep. Helena was sleeping, the South Tyrolean was sleeping, Brenner couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t, couldn’t. But you’d think an answer to his questions would’ve occurred to him at least, like Helena’s accidental kidnapping and Knoll’s death being connected. But it didn’t, didn’t. And didn’t, didn’t. And didn’t, didn’t.
CHAPTER 17
It was shortly after four when Brenner finally stopped thinking. But don’t you go thinking he fell asleep or died. No, instead of “Foxy Lady,” Mitch Mitchell switched to “Castles Made of Sand” all of a sudden-in other words, Milan was calling Brenner’s cell phone. You’ve got to picture this: it’s after midnight, you’re lying in bed with a South Tyrolean, and before you can really get going, the kid shows up, and a few hours after that, Milan’s calling you, too-straight from a Yugo-disco. Because he’d found Sunny.
“If you ask me, she’ll be back there in no time,” Milan explained to Brenner.
But he didn’t understand. Acoustically, sure, understood, cell-phone-wise a first-rate connection-unheard of- but strictly brain-wise, it didn’t fully compute. You can’t forget, half an hour earlier the South Tyrolean had forced another glass of warm milk with honey on him because the sound of his grinding teeth kept waking her up. Warm milk with honey is the besht sleeping pill in the world, she’d proclaimed yet again. But as for the actual sleeping pill that she’d put in his milk, she didn’t say a word. And right about now when it’s starting to take effect, here’s Milan on the phone.
After everything that had happened, it seemed to Brenner like the call luring him out to the Yugo-disco at four in the morning was stretching him to about eight feet. And Brenner had never been the tallest, so you couldn’t say, eight feet doesn’t mean a whole lot because your average medieval rack in the rec room could manage that. The phone call was pulling his head in the Yugo-disco’s direction, but sleep was pulling his feet in the opposite direction.
And so you see how a person’s mind can get a little dull when it’s stretched too far, because-with the South Tyrolean in his right arm and the cell phone in his left hand and the child’s snoring in his right ear and weariness in his bones and medicated sleep in his veins-Brenner couldn’t understand what Milan could possibly mean.
“What does that mean, ‘she’ll be back there in no time?’ ” he murmured into his sweaty pillow.
And Milan said, “If she keeps on like this, she’ll be pregnant again in no time.”
“Aha,” Brenner said, excitement tugging on his hair and the sleeping pill tugging on his leaden toes.
“But nothing to worry about,” Milan said.
“Nothing for you to worry about, or nothing for her to worry about?” Brenner asked.
“Nothing to worry about. Because in three months she’ll be fourteen,” Milan said. “Then an abortion won’t be a problem anymore.”
“Right,” said Brenner.
“Or at least it won’t be a problem for her boyfriends.”
Okay, that last bit wasn’t on the phone anymore. The excitement had yanked him so hard and the sleeping pill, thank god, had surrendered-otherwise Brenner would’ve been torn down the middle, like that fabled child whose two mothers pulled for so long that the child broke in half, and ever since there’s been man and woman-in other words, the eternal struggle over surrender. Brenner didn’t break in half, though. Instead, he sprang out of bed at four thirty in the morning and sped over to the Yugo-disco so he could talk with the girl.
He didn’t have to speed at all, though, because Sunny was still dancing like a wind-up toy when he got there. There was nothing left for Brenner to do now except for what men do best at a disco, i.e., drink beer and gawk.
“So what’s her real name? Where did you find her?” Brenner asked.
When someone asks two questions at once, there’s always a third in the throat. Because you have to wonder, what’s behind it, why did he ask two questions at the same time? Well, I’ll tell you two things. First, Brenner was far too tired to go breaking his head over old police academy wisdom. And second, it was about to get much worse, because Milan answered with yet another question now.
“Do you like lasagna?”
“Lasagna? Do they have that here?”
“No, that’s her name. If you drop the ‘la.’ ”
“Sagna? Why can’t you just say it normally? Simple: ‘Her name is Sanja,’ ” Brenner suggested.
“If I say Sanja in this noise, you’ll hear Tanja,” Milan yelled in his ear. “But if I say lasagna without the ‘la,’ then right away you understand Sanja.”
Milan looked stern yet sly, like one of those natural healers who condemns you to death for coffee or alcohol or enjoying life.
“Not bad,” Brenner answered. “So where did you find her?”
“Here,” Milan said.
“Where?”
“There!” Milan yelled and pointed with his index finger to somewhere vaguely in front of his feet. It was so loud now and the music was so good that even Brenner’s foot began to tap a little.
“There?” Brenner yelled back. “Like ‘over there’ without the ‘over’?”
You see, just before complete catastrophe, right before the world ends, there’s often a moment when human beings are in the mood for one more joke. But, okay, Brenner couldn’t have known, per se, about catastrophe and the world ending. And Brenner wasn’t thinking about what came after yet, but about what came before, i.e., whether it had been a terrible mistake to leave Helena in the South Tyrolean’s care till morning. Should he have brought her to the police immediately? Should he have notified the Frau Doctor right away? Could it possibly be a horribly bad sign that not even ninety-two hours had passed and the Zone of Transparency was already starting to rupture even though the fifth day had not yet begun? He thought about this while he watched Sanja dancing and Milan talking, because he could only hear Milan when he shouted directly into his ear.
Sanja danced with a stamina like she wasn’t interested in anything else in the world, and Brenner began to wonder whether she would ever stop.
