weren’t that bad now compared to the smell in the pen. Interesting, though: Brenner felt blinder without the blindfold. Because of the mirrored glass separating the hunters’ den from the animal pen. From the other side you could see into his zone perfectly, but from the inside you couldn’t see who was behind the glass, you could only see yourself. Reinhard liked it that way, that he could see the girls but they couldn’t see him.
When you feel blind, your sense of smell intensifies, of course. And even Mr. Nicorette’s sense of smell might have been slowly returning to him in his withdrawal period. Because he told his freckled friend now that he badly needed to get out into the fresh air, he was suffocating in here.
But the foreman shook his head and pointed outside, where the sound of a car being parked could be heard. “There’s no time for that now. Just hurry up with him, then you can get some fresh air,” he said and then left the two of them there in the pen together. Nicorette looked offended and stuck his white plastic pipe back into his mouth. And it was this piddly little straw, of all things, that terrified Brenner. Because an interrogator’s cigarette would have been the protocol. Offer a cigarette, blow smoke in the face, ever see a match burn twice, and so on, all common cruelties, but the withdrawal pipe gave the thug a human quality, and a human quality is always life threatening.
“Did you know that decades of smoking reduces sperm count?” Brenner said. Because he thought he absolutely had to cover up how weak he was feeling.
The security guard from the construction site replied in his own way, i.e., with an attempt at ruining Brenner’s sperm count for good. But the poor watchdog didn’t have that much air left in him, because the kick sent sweat running down his forehead-you’d have thought it hurt him more than Brenner-and it was only after sucking on his straw a few more times that he’d pumped himself back up. He used his gangster patter on Brenner, he could find out fast or slow, nice or rough, however he liked-but anyway, what he was interested in: “Where’s Helene?”
It looked a little strange, the construction-site guard, muscular as an ox, not a hair on his head but twenty- five tattoos on his thick neck to compensate, and he was sucking on the nicotine pipe like an infant. You can only say this in retrospect, but there’s something tragic about someone still struggling to quit smoking even in the last hours of his life.
“What’s that, Herr Simon? Cat got your tongue? Where’ve you got Helene?”
It struck Brenner that he pronounced her name about as wrong as the South Tyrolean and her Marl boo ro. And believe it or not, that reminded him of the only book that his grandparents had owned, or better yet, of a story in the four-inch thick Pious Helene by Wilhelm Busch. That’s how the tattooed ox pronounced her name, like Pious Helene. No, that’s not true, his grandparents had two books, the Wilhelm Busch and The Doctor Pays a House Call. And very good pictures in both! But around a certain age he stumbled upon The Doctor ’s hiding place, and Pious Helene became boring to him, so from that point on, only The Doctor, don’t even ask.
Brenner criticized the tattooed ox now, but not for pronouncing “Helena” like Pious Helene. He acted like it didn’t bother him, because whoever has the gun gets to decide on matters of taste, that’s true the world over. Instead, Brenner answered, “You know for a fact I’m the first person who’d like to know where the girl is.”
“You’re the first person who’d like to know? Before her parents, even, or what? Are you the one suffering here or what?”
“No. The first aside from her parents, of course.”
Yup, you see here, the construction-site ox was just too stupid, because otherwise maybe he would’ve been able to detect from his hasty correction that Brenner was lying. But fine, analysis wasn’t his job anyway. He was just in charge of the questions. For the analysis, that’s what the gentlemen behind the glass were for. Don’t forget the baby monitor that Kressdorf would sometimes switch on, much to Bank Director Reinhard’s delight. He always liked listening to the girls babbling over it, background music, as it were, while he and Congressman Stachl negotiated life’s serious matters. Brenner, of course, was thinking only of the gentlemen behind the screen now, as the tattooed ox sucked the next question out of his little straw. “If you don’t want to say where Helene is-”
“Helena,”-now Brenner did interrupt him-“her name is Helena, and I don’t know where she is.”
“-then maybe you’d like to tell us where your friend Knoll is.”
Ah, of course. Knoll. For the first time Brenner saw that he might have a chance to walk away from all of this with his life. He wasn’t going to tell them where Helena was, in order to protect the South Tyrolean. He hadn’t given any thought yet to his own survival. But now all of a sudden he saw a chance for Knoll to save him again.
He was focused so intently on the room behind the glass that it almost seemed like he could see how the Bank Director and the Construction Lion and the Congressman were sitting and observing him. But not just him; they must have been observing each other, too. He realized now that at least one of them didn’t know anything about Knoll in the cesspit, or else they wouldn’t be letting the ox ask such stupid questions.
“Why should I know where Knoll is?”
“Because maybe you were the last person he was seen with. Nothing goes unnoticed in a Schrebergarten, you should really know better.”
“I followed Knoll there because I thought he would lead me to Helena.”
After half a ton of ersatz nicotine, the tattooed ox found his tongue again. “And him acquiring Neighbor’s Rights by purchasing that Schrebergarten dump, you didn’t know anything about that either of course. And that his lawyer’s already obtained a halt to the construction.”
“I don’t believe this!”
“What don’t you believe?”
“That you care more about your fucking construction site than you do about the girl!”
The giant infant had nothing to say to that, but curiously sucked a new question out of his white plastic teat. “So why are you running after Sunny, if you have nothing to do with the video?”
“So why did you go and kill Milan because of it?”
Brenner thought this might be an interesting bit of news for one or another of the fine gentlemen on the other side of the glass, too. And truly the watchdog couldn’t bring himself to answer it. The foreman stormed in, his mouth contracted so bitterly that it was smaller than his largest freckle.
“That was an occupational accident. Self-defense!” the talking freckle said. “The idiot pulled his toy gun. It’s insane that those exact replicas aren’t illegal!”
“Maybe it’s the real ones that should be kept out of your hands and the kids should be allowed to have their fun.”
“Well, it’s your fault you picked such an amateur for this kind of business. But we won’t hold it against you. Give us the video, and you can go home.”
“I have several videos,” Brenner said. “But no VCR. I don’t want to throw them away, either. They’re still memories, even if I can’t play them anymore.”
“You know damn well we’re not talking about a VHS cassette!” the tattooed ox shouted.
“A movie with Julia Roberts. A woman left it at my place when she moved back in with her husband.”
The foreman whispered something into his security boss’s ear, but Brenner simply kept talking.
“And then I’ve got another one with the 1976 men’s Olympic downhill event on it, because I got stationed in Innsbruck when I was a young cop. At one point I’m even in the picture briefly with the queen of Sweden-back then she was just a hostess with the Olympic Committee, but now she’s the queen of Sweden. That one I’m not erasing, of course. And at the end of the tape there’s a Western. But the end got cut off.”
Ninety-six hours after Helena’s disappearance, the light went on over in the hunters’ den, and Brenner saw who was behind the glass. It’s always a bad sign for the victim, of course, when the perpetrator takes off his mask. Because by that point, no further police contact is expected. Interesting, though: for some reason, what unsettled him most was the fact that Bank Director Reinhard wasn’t there.
CHAPTER 19
Ninety-six hours after Brenner had deliberated too long over which chocolate bar he should buy, Kressdorf and Congressman Stachl were standing to the left and the right of the open cesspit like two altar boys at a funeral. They looked up at the wooden balcony, where the two workers were slowly lowering Brenner down, direction: cesspit.
