Authors: Wolf Haas
“You can ask Jurasic.”
“Jurasic’s in Vienna,” Brenner said. And at that moment it crossed his mind that he still hadn’t called the Vienna phone number that the waitress had written down for him.
“You can take my car.”
Now, Brenner was anything but a car enthusiast. He didn’t even have a car. But a little stroll in the silver Porsche? How should I put it? Who wouldn’t have been tempted?
“You just have to watch out with the anti-theft device,” Löschenkohl junior said and gave Brenner the key, as well as a keyless remote fob that would remove the steering-wheel lock at the press of a button.
And it was indeed at the press of a button that Brenner forced it open, but he wished that the damned iron thing could be stowed away at the press of a button, too. Because in a Porsche like this, there’s not much space, and it was the biggest steering-wheel lock he’d ever seen.
Brenner just shook his head, because he knew for a fact that professional car thieves could have a thing like this open in a matter of seconds. Whether it’s a little bigger or a little smaller, makes no difference: Freeze-It spray, hammer, open—and for all that, it takes ten times as long just to stow it. But then he wedged it behind the bucket seats on the diagonal, and that’s how it went.
And you see, that’s what I’ve been saying. Because, he didn’t even want to drive to Jurasic’s. He hadn’t even called her yet. Brenner just wanted to take a lap in the Porsche. And people always say, the child inside the man, and make fun of him for it. But if Brenner hadn’t taken the Porsche just now, then we’d have one more grave to visit at the Klöch cemetery today.
I need more time to complete this sentence than Brenner did to take the Porsche from Klöch to Vienna and back. Because two hours past midnight found him lying back in his staff bed. Needless to say, though, no talk of sleep.
These days, if you knock off four hundred kilometers on the autobahn in a silver Porsche—silver streak on the horizon, as it were—then you should just be glad adrenaline isn’t coming out of your ears. But adrenaline wasn’t the least of the reasons for why Brenner couldn’t fall asleep.
Because I’m not even done with this sentence yet, and Brenner’s already done with Helene Jurasic. This time she wasn’t playing around, and she told Brenner exactly how she got old man Löschenkohl’s fortune out of him. And in such detail that Brenner regretted not having drunk a whiskey, or at least a rum and coke, back at Little Joe’s.
As he lay in bed now, he could still see the taillights of cars on the autobahn, flickering through the darkness. The red dots approached so quickly that he sometimes thought the taillights were mounted on the front, i.e. oncoming traffic.
Brenner stared up at the wood-paneled ceiling, rubbing the tip of his left middle finger against his left thumb over and over again. You know, like when you have a blister someplace
and you can’t stop touching it. Except, now imagine someone popping open a blister he got from flashing his headlights so frequently over a few hundred kilometers of autobahn—also a minor world record.
It was three-thirty already, but he had to keep going back over again and again what Helene Jurasic had told him a few hours ago. And he could feel how nice and slowly the headache was creeping up from behind his collarbone. Because, first comes intoxication, then the headache—basis for a whole philosophy.
Brenner, though, not so philosophical now. Because, these days, a headache’s exactly the wrong thing to have with difficult thoughts. It’s like turning on the Turbo in a headache-Porsche, and so the headache enters from those tense neck muscles behind the left ear, and a few seconds later, you don’t know how you’re supposed to see straight anymore.
Needless to say, Brenner wasn’t going to make a dumb mistake like that now. Because he had something perfectly easy to think about. Really, is there anything easier than thinking the same thing over and over again? And Brenner was thinking again and again about how it had been Goalkeeper Milovanovic who opened the door at Helene Jurasic’s. And what Milovanovic and Jurasic then proceeded to tell him.
But I need more time to finish this sentence than Brenner did to grasp who the Bone Man was.
Four o’clock in the morning now, and Brenner still wasn’t asleep. And then, finally, the headache arrived. He tossed and turned, from one side to the other, and it seemed to him that the squeal of the bone-grinder was only getting louder.
And then he had to think about Helene Jurasic yet again. And then about Milovanovic. And then about Löschenkohl junior, who’d loaned him his Porsche. And then about the waitress. And then about old man Löschenkohl. And then, for the fifth or sixth time already this night, he got up. And saw that it was still pitch-black outside. And then he made himself earplugs out of toilet paper so that he wouldn’t have to hear the squeal of the bone-grinder.
And then he thought,
why should the bone-grinder even be squealing day and night anyway?
And then he thought—because when you’re lying awake at night, you often think of every possible thing, things that would never occur to you during the day—
now that Milovanovic hasn’t run the bone-grinder in nearly two weeks, how tall the mounds of bones must be that are piling up around the basement
.
And then he didn’t stuff the toilet-paper plugs into his ears. He got so curious all of a sudden about what it must look like down in the bone cellar that he got dressed and went downstairs to the bone cellar.
He thought,
better not turn any lights on in the hall, you never know what good that’ll do
. And he noticed that, in the dark, sounds are much louder. And the sound of the bone-grinder was getting louder with every step that Brenner took in the direction of the bone chamber. And then, of course, huge surprise.
Because the door to the bone chamber was locked. That wasn’t the surprise, though, no—there was no noise coming from behind the door. No squealing, no nothing.
Now where did the squealing disappear to? If I can hear the
bone-grinder up in my room, but I can’t hear it down here, how many possible explanations are there? Either, someone turned the machine off while I was coming down here. And this someone is perhaps waiting behind a curtain for me, with a butcher knife. But here in the basement, not a curtain in sight
.
Or, the squeal that I’ve been hearing from my room this whole time hasn’t been the bone-grinder at all
.
Then, Brenner heard the squealing again. But from the opposite direction. And then he searched for where the squeal was coming from.
He walked back down the hall, but the squealing was everywhere and nowhere. He thought about whether he should wake up the bathroom attendant and ask her where the squealing came from. But, yesterday, out of concern for her son, the bathroom attendant had gone to her sister’s in Bad Reichenhall.
The bathroom attendant’s gone, and her son’s gone, and the waitress is gone
, Brenner thought, while in the half-dark he listened at the different doors in the basement. He even listened at every door of every single bathroom stall, and listened especially, of course, at the door to the bathroom stall that disguised the bathroom attendant’s apartment. And then he opened the stall door and listened at the apartment door. And tried the apartment door to see if it was open.
But, naturally, the apartment was locked. And then, Brenner forced it open. And then, he discovered that the squealing wasn’t coming from there, either.
So, back out of the apartment and out to the broom closet that was between the bone chamber and the women’s bathroom.
Now, if I could break into the apartment, then surely I can
break into the broom closet, too
. And then he noticed that the broom closet had a steel door. And he wondered,
since when do broom closets have steel doors?
He went back into the bathroom attendant’s apartment now and listened at the wall adjacent to the broom closet. When he placed his ear against the wall, it vibrated so much that his migraine-addled skull got one hell of a massage. And then, Brenner—immediate action.
He didn’t have time for the stairs anymore. No, he climbed right up and through the window of the basement apartment and out into the fresh air. And once there, he saw that he’d guessed correctly. The broom closet had a basement window exactly like the bathroom attendant’s apartment did.
It struck him just how early the dawn comes at this time of year. Even though it was still completely dark. But already you could feel it, any moment now, dawn would break. Even in the light of day, though, he wouldn’t have been able to see anything through the window because it was glued shut from the inside. And state-of-the-art, burglar-proof glass. A one-hundred-fifty-kilo man could take a running leap, and at most, the one-hundred-fifty-kilo man would shatter into a thousand pieces, but the glass still wouldn’t budge.
And then Brenner ran over to the Porsche and got the steering-wheel lock. By this point, dawn was so heavily in the air—you could’ve grabbed hold of it.
And then, as though on command, the birds began to chirp. Brenner couldn’t remember a time when he’d ever heard a racket like this. Until the explosion of glass, that is, when he thrashed the wheel lock into the window.
As he climbed down through the window, Brenner could
see less than nothing. But he could feel the dreadful cold of the walk-in freezer. The walls felt icy to the touch, like the igloo he’d built a hundred years ago. And then he found the light switch. And then: good night.
He recognized Löschenkohl’s daughter-in-law right away. She still bore a strong resemblance to her sister. Even though only half of her was there. It was only on closer inspection that he was able to recognize Art Collector Marko, even though he was completely unscathed, lying there in his refrigerator case. Brenner had really only seen him briefly that once, though, when he’d said to Brenner at the gallery in Graz: “I pray you’re right. But I’d wager you’re wrong.”
That was two days ago. But it seemed like a different life to Brenner now. And needless to say, it really was a different life for Art Collector Marko.
And then Brenner discovered a third corpse. It was lying on its stomach, but in spite of this, very simple identification. Because Ortovic didn’t have any head on. And a moment later, Brenner could feel the steel door opening behind him.
Old man Löschenkohl was wearing the elegant burgundy pajamas that his daughter-in-law had given him on his sixty-fifth birthday. He took just one, two steps toward Brenner and asked him what it was that he was looking for here.
But Brenner couldn’t muster a word. Maybe you’re familiar with those meat cleavers that you only have to sidle up to a pig with and it splits in two. Well, old man Löschenkohl was trying to sidle up to Brenner a little now.
And how should I put it—he succeeded. Brenner hopped aside so nimbly that I have to say, at forty-five, an accomplishment. These days, though, if you find yourself faced with the
choice—off with the head or quick leap—then you take the quick leap, forty-five or not.
But maybe you don’t do it quite as nimbly as someone younger might. And that turned out to be why Brenner didn’t pull his left hand away fast enough. The cleaver came crashing down onto the butcher block, right where Brenner’s left hand pushed off from as he took his life-saving leap. Talk about luck—the old man only hacked off a pinky finger.
Hurt, it did not, but needless to say, no pleasure, either. And on top of it all, Brenner was now stuck in the corner. And it’s so easy to say, backed into a corner, figure of speech, but when you’re actually backed into a corner, it’s something else altogether. The old man was standing—meat cleaver in hand—between Brenner and the door. And the small window hatch: six feet high. Brenner was, in fact, twenty years younger than old man Löschenkohl. It goes without saying, though, when there’s a meat cleaver in somebody’s hand, age is relative.
And the old man raised the meat cleaver up over his head again. In this instant, and for the second time this morning, Brenner was struck by how unbearably loudly the birds were singing outside.
Because nowadays, when your life is coming to a close, it’s the insignificant details that catch your attention. And while the meat cleaver was diving down toward his square skull, Brenner was distinguishing between the good-morning songs of the wagtail, nuthatch, and warbler. Because Brenner had a grade school teacher back in Puntigam who taught them to differentiate between the various birdsongs, and this was what came to mind now as old man Löschenkohl was thrashing the meat cleaver down upon him.
But Brenner heaved himself out of the way again. Although it begs asking here: what sort of sense does that make? Whether he splits you on the second or the third attempt makes no real difference. But in a moment like this, of course, it’s purely the instincts reacting.
The cleaver sank so deeply into the butcher block that the old man almost couldn’t get it back out. In retrospect, it’s easy to say, those two seconds that it took the old man to get the cleaver out of the butcher block, that was Brenner’s chance, when he should have overpowered him. But when you’re lying in a walk-in freezer with only nine fingers, well, the matter looks a bit different. That’s the only way I can explain it: Brenner’s just lying there on his chopping block, and his mind’s somewhere else entirely.
Not what you’re thinking, though, life flashing before his eyes. Because that’s what it always seems to mean when you’re looking death in the eye, your whole life quickly replays itself in a second: kindergarten, school, driver’s license, the gradual dulling of your mind—all of it in one to two seconds like in a movie. But none of that, I’m telling you, was what was flashing in front of Brenner’s eyes in those two seconds before Löschenkohl had the cleaver back up in the air again.
Because as soon as a person’s closed the curtains on his life, he often gets a little wiser and more relaxed than in all the years he spent desperately clinging to his chunk of a life. And it was in this state that Brenner started connecting the dots in a way that he definitely wouldn’t have been able to in all those years of desperation.