operating table. It’s not exactly comfortable, either: first they get you to lie down-no one wants to lie there so exposed on the table-and then they disappear and leave you all alone. Please.
Four times 340 is 1,360, Peinhaupt calculated, which, subtracted from his net pay, left him with not even 700 euros. He would barely be getting by if it wasn’t for the money he got paid under the table for serving court summonses. For the anesthesiologist’s part, he could now take his time, because at 1,360, all doubt had been removed. He asked himself where the doctors had been this whole time. They finished prepping him for the procedure a few minutes ago, and then the light in the operating room went out. A minute later it came back on, but still no one had turned up. It occurred to him that he might have been lying under this harsh light for half an hour already waiting for the surgery, without a doctor anywhere in sight. Is it possible they put me under already? Maybe I only dreamed that the lights went out briefly while they were prepping me, and the emergency generator started up. Typical operation dream. You should know that Peinhaupt had declined the local anesthetic, and the Frau Doctor had said she suspected as much-fearful of even minor procedures, men tend to ask for general anesthesia. It’s not possible that the surgical team got scared off just because the power went out, Peinhaupt thought, it’s all just a hysterical dream, and I’m already long under. And it’s just my unconsciousness protesting against my most important body part’s vitality getting snuffed out, hence the dream that the light went out.
Suddenly Peinhaupt felt certain that everything must already be over. That he was just waking up in post-op, i.e., after a lucid nightmare. Because nothing else was possible, every other explanation was unthinkable. Peinhaupt could have been persuaded that it was the blade of the scalpel that was for holding and the handle for making the incision. The anesthesiologist must have really numbed him into a nightmare! This just can’t be real, Peinhaupt decided.
Watch closely, Peinhaupt’s lying there on the operating table nicely prepped like an inverse Adam, where the fig leaf is draped over his whole body except for where the fig leaf would cover Adam, when finally the door swings open, but it’s not the anesthesiologist who opens the door, and it’s not the urologist who comes in after him.
“Hey, Peinhaupt!”
And it wasn’t even Frau Doctor Kressdorf who yelled out in shock, “Hey, Peinhaupt!” Whether you believe it or not. His two ex-colleagues Sykora and Zand. Zand, Erich! And Sykora! His old patrol buddies, walking through the door, completely dumbfounded and gawking at the exposed patient on the operating table, and they don’t even laugh. In fact, Zand, Erich and Sykora seem petrified until Zand, Erich finally says, “Hey, Peinhaupt, what are you doing here?!”
CHAPTER 3
In retrospect, those seemed like the good old days to Frau Doctor Kressdorf. Like a carefree paradise. When she was still capable of getting worked up over a power outage or a water pipe breaking. When she still believed that a flooded clinic was reason enough to call the police. Or when a couple of cameras in the lobby had her running straight to the newspapers. And when, even in the middle of the power outage, it still occurred to her to call her driver before he got to Kitzbuhel so he could relay everything to her husband.
She couldn’t have known that her driver wasn’t even on the autobahn yet. Only in hindsight did she realize that, at the exact time of the power outage, Herr Simon was still standing in the gas station convenience mart and having a quick double espresso.
Two gas station drunks were hanging out there, too, but Herr Simon, only coffee. Because first of all, as a chauffeur, no alcohol, and second of all, it didn’t agree with the pills. Interesting, though. Since he’d stopped drinking alcohol, coffee had become all the more important to Herr Simon. He never would have dreamed of being called that back when he was still on the police force. But Kressdorf and the Frau Doctor and everyone at the clinic referred to him that way, a service name, as it were.
Now don’t go thinking that it bothered him, because: best job he’d had his whole life. Kressdorf’s chauffeur, always meeting interesting people, you get the idea. Congressman Stachl, for example, who was just on the gas station’s TV, on account of the morning news. Guaranteed that the gas station attendant and the two drunks didn’t know him. The fatter of the two only laughed at the congressman’s first name, because Aurelius Stachl, the fat drunk said, a name like that’s its own punishment. But he definitely wouldn’t have thought that Herr Simon might know Stachl personally. And not just know him, but know things about him. And he was overjoyed for Helena that her father had been given a chance with MegaLand because-college tuition, you can’t start thinking too early about that, and you can’t leave it all up to the Frau Doctor either. And one thing you can’t forget. The clinic still wasn’t completely out of debt, on account of the investments and the expenditures-don’t even ask.
Nothing on the docket now except getting Helena to Kitzbuhel. A glorious, sunny morning it was, and with his heart beating all the better from the espresso, he took those few steps from the gas station to the car with real attitude, like you might say, life: perfectly okay. When you think about what he was like a year ago, you’ve really got to say, hats off to the pills.
But when he saw that the car was empty, the pills had a hard time with him, of course. The double espresso stepped right into the foreground now because as he walked from the gas station to the BMW and didn’t see Helena’s head through the rear window, his heart stood still a moment, and then started pounding like he’d gulped down not just a double espresso but the contents of the entire coffee machine.
Interesting, though. His heart wasn’t beating where the heart’s supposed to beat, but in his head. Because his jugular must have been thicker than the fuel hose he’d gassed up the BMW with- unbelievable, what a car like this guzzles, but he told himself, why should it bother me, I don’t have to pay for it, and I’m too old for climate change.
The blood was pumping so hard through his arteries and into his brain now that his entire head was throbbing like the time he’d held his ear right up to the speaker at a Jimi Hendrix concert in Stuttgart, 1969. They fit seven people in an old Citroen on the drive from Leitner’s house to Stuttgart and back-eight of them, considering Leitner’s girlfriend was already pregnant by the drive home. But she told them all it wasn’t Hendrix’s, no, it was Helmut Kogelberger’s.
The hammering in his head was so loud that he didn’t even hear the truck thundering down the street. And I do believe, even to this day, that it saved his life. Because he only noticed the truck after it had driven past him, i.e., too late to throw himself in front of its wheels. And maybe, given how much blood was shooting into his head, maybe that much more of the pills reached his brain. Because suddenly there was a straw to grasp at again, a glimmer of hope again, a silver lining again, in other words- maybe I’m deceiving myself. Just because I can’t see Helena’s head through the back window when I’m fifteen feet away doesn’t mean that she’s not in the car anymore.
Maybe she fell asleep and is just a little slouched down in her car seat, and that’s why I don’t see her, Herr Simon told himself. Which was complete nonsense, of course, when he knew for a fact that he should be able to see the child from here. Nor can a child really slouch if she’s buckled correctly into her car seat, and Herr Simon never drove three feet without buckling Helena in according to the letter of the law-that you can’t fairly accuse him of.
But by the next step, direction BMW, the blood in his head was already floating that last straw out to sea. Who knows, maybe it’s just a reflection in the back window. There are so many cars today with tinted windows you can’t even see through. And now he really did see something, or so it seemed. Helena had turned herself around in her car seat and was staring at him, deathly pale and with panic-stricken eyes. But it was only the reflection of his own face and the panic in his own eyes that caused Herr Simon to barely recognize himself. Now with conviction, another step and another step, but even from two steps away, still nothing of Helena to be seen. And as he stood directly beside the car, still nothing of Helena to be seen, not even through the side window. And when finally, with trembling fingers, he pressed the button on the car’s key fob, it was of no use.
He kept pressing it, but the doors just unlocked and locked and unlocked and locked themselves, making that damned noise. Just once I’d like to understand how this remote-keyless-system actually works, because technology: a world of magic. Herr Simon was less interested in these sorts of things, he’d never had much of a grasp of technology, he used to get criticized for that all the time on the police force. A certain interest had awoken in him more recently since he’d become a chauffeur, because he’d counted himself fortunate a few times now to be living in an age when there are things that nobody would have dreamed of before, for example, unlocking a car from
