an elemental force. But the Yugo-kids didn’t understand and started leaving the dance floor one after another-in protest, if you will.
And when he returned to the table, Milan and Sanja were gone. He didn’t find them outside, either, and not at the entrance, not by the coat check, not at the bar, not in the bathroom. Sanja had disappeared. And when Brenner’s itinerant rage took square aim at himself now-you can’t even imagine. At first at himself, but then at Milan. When he nearly bumped into him. Right next to the men’s bathroom, by the delivery entrance. Now, even though it was only just getting light outside, Milan had his sunglasses right on his nose. But Brenner could tell from a single glance that he was dead.
CHAPTER 18
It had to come to this, though. When you’ve got Knoll murdered in the cesspit, then it’s safe to assume that somewhere, his murderer is running around. And you can’t expect him not to care, when day and night you’re thinking about why Knoll landed in that cesspit. Well, just thinking about it’s okay. But asking around, poking around, rummaging around Schrebergartens, newspaper photos, Yugo-discos! That kind of thing makes even the most well-tempered murderer nervous.
And when the murder victim is lying in your former boss’s cesspit, and when, shortly before his murder, he brought about a halt in construction to your boss’s biggest development project, and when, before his murder, he was still the main suspect in the kidnapping of your boss’s child, and when, on top of that, you saw your boss personally greet the murder victim in front of his house-then you can’t be surprised. So, of course, a few minutes after finding Milan, Brenner was lying in the trunk of a car, tied up as tightly as for a seafarer’s burial, and being transported to god knows where.
Interesting, though: even if you can’t see anything at all, you try to orient yourself somehow anyway. Where are they taking me? As far as your senses go, you haven’t got a chance in a trunk, of course. In a situation like this, when you can’t see anything, and you can’t hear anything either, except for traffic noise, you have no choice but to venture a good guess. You’ve got to gather your wits about you with a vengeance and bravely settle for a hunch- straight out of your head and into the blindness. And only afterward can you say-from how well you intuited the jolting, the turning, the braking and accelerating, the uphill and downhill-okay, hunch, right or wrong.
Sir had taught them that many years ago, their only instructor at the police academy to always wear a suit, and for that they nicknamed him Sir. They’d laughed at Sir back then, because that was a time when people were saying, just the facts, we’re not interested in anything else. And I’m apt to say, as long as the facts work, I’m fully in favor. But, in the dark, of course. In the trunk. With your eyes blindfolded. Blind like an embryo. Brenner was experiencing firsthand now how, in such godless darkness, you can’t look to the facts too much, and you can’t endlessly analyze the vibrations, either, because-it’s hopeless. Sir had been completely right about this: you must first start with the guess, the hunch, the maybe, the probably, the possibly. And Brenner’s the prime example of this right now. They wouldn’t take me to Kitzbuhel was his first thought in the trunk. That was actually more of a fear than a guess, but pay attention to what I’m about to tell you: a fear is also a guess.
So just when his fear had ventured this guess, it also seemed like the vibrations from the braking and accelerating and turning were confirming his suspicion. Or at least not disproving it! And don’t forget how well he knew the route. That could be the traffic light just before the on-ramp to the autobahn, he guessed, it’s always so ill-timed that if you want to make the second light up ahead, you need a rocket launcher. And that could be the off- ramp now, he guessed, when he got slammed against the side of the trunk so roughly that the centrifugal force nearly broke his neck. He hadn’t guessed anything else yet, of course. Namely, how much he’d be wishing in just a few hours that the centrifugal force really had twisted his neck. But no such luck, neck-wise Brenner took after his sturdy grandfather, in other words, his neck held out easily.
Then the car straightened out so fast and clean and suddenly, it was like Brenner was a suitcase in a spaceship being hurtled into the next galaxy. You also have to be careful with blind guesses, though. Under no circumstances may you succumb to the intoxication of a blind guess and adopt an anything-goes stance-from a spaceship to I don’t know what. Instead, always stick with the most probable variant, and you see, here the facts come back into play. Because if they’ve thrown me into a trunk, then I can’t suddenly be lying in a spaceship now. Much more likely: autobahn.
They were on the autobahn so long that Brenner’s perception of the infinite glide and soft ascent made him all the more certain of his prognosis: four-hour drive to Kitzbuhel. Your sense of time gets a bit tricky in the dark, of course, and time in the trunk’s always relative. Brenner was sticking to his prognosis now, although they hadn’t been on the road more than two hours according to his sense of time. But his spaceship-trunk was also traveling at an incredible velocity. Which Brenner ascertained from being stuck to the back wall the whole ride. He couldn’t rule out the possibility that the milk and honey were still overpowering him for a few minutes longer.
And one thing you can’t forget. When they exited the autobahn, he got chucked forward so brutally that it was like they were cruising at 250 into a well-cushioned wall. No chance to somehow absorb it, of course, when your hands are bound-in other words, nose and a rib. Because nose- and rib-wise Brenner took after his other grandfather, almost too delicate for his profession. Or then again, maybe not. It’s exactly that kind of delicacy which you need. Brenner owed some important information about the speed they were traveling to his rib and nose-in other words, hellish. And without the rib, without the nose, it’s possible that he would’ve thought it was too soon to be Kitzbuhel. But he knew he could calmly cling to his assumption. Or, better put, he had to cling to it. Because you’re not as apt to cling to a guess taken out of fear as you are to one taken out of, let’s say, hope.
And this feels just like the road that runs through the town of Kitzbuhel, he thought. His broken rib really didn’t need that pothole before the right-hand turn. And here we go steeply uphill, and those must be the switchbacks, and that’s got to be Schotterstrasse now, and this here-where they’re yanking me out of the trunk so savagely that I’m landing on the street with my broken rib and my broken nose and silencing the birds with my screams of pain, and where I’m polluting the majestic mountain air with my petrified sweat and where my teeth are biting into the sweet mountain grass-must be a place where there’s no one near or far, i.e., in front of the cabin where I last saw Knoll alive. And this would have to be the door, if I’m not mistaken, being unlocked by that panting roughneck with the ghoulish nicotine fingers, that just muffled another scream of pain from my throat.
Look, sometimes you can guess as accurately as a clairvoyant and you can observe as closely as an Apache and the whole bit won’t do you any good. Because if Brenner hadn’t guessed so well, if he’d fooled himself, if he’d fallen prey to an illusion, or expected an apology for his unjust dismissal along the lines of, Kressdorf is flying me to Las Vegas for a surprise concert, and if Brenner was just now figuring out that he’d deceived himself-because in reality he’d just been shipped to Kressdorf’s house in the mountains-then he wouldn’t have been any worse off for it. In fact, he’d be in the same exact god-awful place. Because accurate predictions won’t do you any good when you’re locked in a trunk and can only predict that soon I’ll probably be in an even more hopeless place. And even if you can predict with an almost uncanny clairvoyance that after being freed from the trunk the nicotine fingers will hold a gun to my temple, then you have no real advantage when it really does happen, except that you can be proud of what a good brain you’ve got waiting in your head for that gun.
But people are stubborn in this regard. Even in a hopeless situation, a person will still try to predict what’s going to happen next. Because there’s nothing else to be done. And Brenner, of course, was feverishly doing just that while his life was at its greatest risk-or would you say while his death was at its greatest risk? You see, I don’t know anymore, life at risk or death at risk. Anyway, Brenner was in the middle of it, ninety-five and a half hours after the South Tyrolean stole Helena from his car, i.e., half an hour before the start of the fifth day.
Where exactly they’d locked him up wasn’t difficult to guess, even with his eyes blindfolded. Because you can’t forget the smell of the rabbit pen. The animals weren’t there, of course, Kressdorf only got them on special occasions from their foster family. But the smell-merciless. It was the one thing that even the girls complained about when Bank Director Reinhard kept them behind the glass panel for hours on end before granting them a personal appointment. Congressman Stachl hated this quirk of Reinhard’s because then the girls would smell like the pen, of course, especially their long hair-dreadful. And in a weak moment he’d even spoken with Kressdorf about whether Reinhard just didn’t notice, whether his olfactory nerves were just that bad due to old age, or whether he was just making a point.
You can’t be ungrateful, though, because the nicotine fingers that groped his face and tore off his blindfold
