forced on him. It’s a behavior related on many levels to this thing where you have to thank the person who slaps you in the face, but much friendlier, because no slap in the face, only praise. If he wanted something, all Reinhard had to do was whisper and everyone would immediately jump, and afterward he’d say, that was a grand idea you had.
Kressdorf wasn’t bothered by this. But Congressman Stachl was. He turned red every time Reinhard praised him like a little boy for something he hadn’t done. But Kressdorf only saw the big picture, i.e., the big contract. Because for a project like MegaLand, even a Lion of Construction can let a good-natured sadist have his fun and accept his praise for a cell phone ban that he himself imposed. And one thing you can’t forget: it was a project he would’ve jumped at all over again, just like he had back when he bought the cabin with his last few bucks.
“I could watch that rabbit for hours,” Bank Director Reinhard said smiling, his stout minister’s mouth beaming with satisfaction. And for my part: I could watch that Reinhard smile for hours. There was something about watching the animals feeding that was so peaceful to him that it had almost meant more to him than the hunt itself these past few years. And sometimes Stachl would even whisper blasphemously from behind a cupped hand: Reinhard doesn’t even like to shoot anymore, the animals behind the glass are enough for him.
You should know, a glass panel separated the hunters’ den from the rabbit pen. It’s all the rage these days with cabins, and it was Kressdorf who originally invented it. He’d had the glass wall installed with his last bit of cash at the time. But when Hunting Review did a multipage photo spread of his innovative idea, everyone copied it immediately, of course. Basically, this glass panel between the hunters’ den and the stables formed the basis of the whole Kressdorf empire, because people liked it, you wouldn’t believe. He hadn’t even demonstrated the one-way- mirror-at-the-press-of-a-button for them. No, just the plain glass function got people excited. So you’d be eating your bacon in the hunters’ den, drinking your schnapps, counting your millions, fondling your ill-gotten gains, and through the glass panel, you could watch the animals in their innocent animal existence. Interesting, though. Reinhard wasn’t amused one bit when Congressman Stachl made a joke about the bunnies behind the glass. Because that was too vulgar for Reinhard. He expected a certain niveau from a congressman, even at the cabin.
Now that it was morning, the girls weren’t in the rabbit pen anymore, anyway. They slept till noon, which was a foreign world to Reinhard. He’d never understood sleeping in, because the morning was the most beautiful time of day for him, and every morning at six sharp: the five Tibetans.
“You’ll have to excuse me, I’ll just be a moment…” Reinhard said to Kressdorf and pulled out his cell phone. Because that was the most important part of the deal, of course, that Reinhard should get to make at least one brief call, lifting the very ban, as it were, that Kressdorf supposedly had enacted. But always with contrite apology. Congressman Stachl had never dared, he just pretended he had diarrhea and made his important phone calls from the bathroom every five minutes.
And so, while Reinhard was on the phone in the hunters’ den, Stachl went to the bathroom again and turned his phone back on. Beneath his thick black hair his head was riddled with scars, one for every time it had bumped into the low ceiling in the cabin’s bathroom. At his height he couldn’t stand fully upright in there, and the congressman was a nervous telephoner as it was, fidgeting and gesticulating. Maybe his pent-up resentment toward Reinhard played a part, too, in him regularly hitting his head in the bathroom. If not on the window latch or the light fixture then on the deer rack or the cabinet that stored the toilet paper. Especially when a call startled him, he was at risk. Typical example: just now he forgot to stoop down on his way out the door. The text message had something to do with it, guaranteed. Because: emergency. Kressdorf’s wife couldn’t get hold of her husband and it was urgent for him to call her.
CHAPTER 5
“Now she’s given up,” one of the two gas station drunks said. The thin one, because the fat one was standing with his back to Herr Simon, but he had such a belly that his back brushed up against the neighboring table. And so you can see just how badly things were going for the chauffeur. That he hadn’t even noticed that his cell phone had been completely silent for ten minutes. You should know, when he still couldn’t get hold of Kressdorf after three tries, he gave up. And I suspect he only tried in the first place because he knew about the cell phone ban, and so it would have been a huge coincidence if Kressdorf had picked up. But Herr Simon didn’t turn off his cell phone after his pointless attempts, either. Instead he remained snug in that painful middle ground, without a solution and without any refuge, ergo triggering “Castles Made of Sand.” But when it suddenly stopped, it didn’t strike him as suspicious. It pains me when I think how slow his brain was compared to the gas station drunks, who noticed it before he did.
“Mine calls all day, too,” the thin one announced, loudly enough for the gas station attendant to hear it, too, from where he was putting away a stack of frozen Napoli pizzas in the refrigerated cases. “I don’t know what it is with women.”
Herr Simon took advantage of the gas station attendant’s brief glance over to point to his empty cup. And the gas station attendant gave a nod as if to say: I’ll just quickly put away the pizza boxes so that they don’t start thawing, and then I’ll bring you another espresso.
“That they have to have their beaks flapping all day long,” the thin one said.
“Tee tee tee tee tee tee tee!” the beer belly said in a high-pitched voice and made a motion like a bird’s beak with his chubby little left hand, a babbling goose, as it were.
“Not picking up’s the only thing that helps sometimes,” the thin one said. “Right, Milan?”
“Tee tee tee tee tee tee tee!” went the beer belly. I don’t know why the beer belly had such a high-pitched voice, presumably the female hormones in hops, and if you’re a man then you get breasts and a high-pitched voice, but what would be interesting is whether that’s true for nonalcoholic beer, too.
As he walked past, Milan said, “Your wife’s always on the phone with her boyfriend. Yugo-lover!”
The thin one laughed because he didn’t have a wife anyway, so the comment couldn’t really be taken as an insult, and in fact, was even very nice of Milan, who otherwise didn’t give the thin one an answer very often because when you’re a gas station attendant, your head grows weary of your gas station drunks over the course of the day.
“Tee tee tee tee tee tee tee!” went the belly-talker’s sausage fingers again. It had definitely been fifteen minutes already since Jimi Hendrix last sang, and Herr Simon still didn’t think anything of it. When Milan came with the espresso, the chauffeur asked him, “And your wife? What’s her name?”
“What’s your wife’s name?” Milan asked, smirking, and passed the question along to the thin one.
“Angelina Jolie.” The thin guy looked as serious as if he were providing the name of his wife to the emergency room at the hospital.
“Heidi Klump.” The fat one was quick to introduce his wife, too.
Herr Simon didn’t laugh, though. “The woman on the surveillance tape,” he pressed Milan. “The red-haired one who shops here every day.”
“No clue. She lives right over there. I always see her going into that house. But her name, no idea. She often comes in twice a day and buys-”
What she buys, Herr Simon didn’t catch. But that you can’t criticize him for, because it was drowned out by the forceful shouts and by the loud clattering of the CD rack and the box of lighters and the flashlight special and the lottery ticket dispenser and the keychains, all crashing to the floor.
He shouldn’t have overlooked the fact that his cell phone had been silent the whole time he’d been in the bathroom. The gas station’s bathroom, picobello, immaculate, that never happens-but pay attention, Herr Simon had left his cell phone lying out on the table, didn’t think anything of it and when he came back from the bathroom it wasn’t ringing anymore. So it’s almost his unconsciousness that you have to find fault with. Every human being has secret desires, don’t ask, and it’s possible he just wanted to be caught finally, possible he even wished for it somewhere in the very back of his head, yearned for the fat drunk to seize the opportunity and pick up the phone on a lark while he was in the bathroom.
Herr Simon wasn’t angry at the gas station drunk for it afterward. On the contrary, he even invited him out after the funeral. He was only mad at himself, and I should add that, for someone who used to be on the police force, there’s reason not to be purely happy in a situation where your cell phone stops pestering you. Because when
