Come, Sweet Death Read online

  And then, that opens up two more possibilities. Either there really is twenty-one under the cup, in which case Watzek loses, because he called bluff when there was no bluff.

  Or, what’s much more probable is that the Pro Meddler lied. In that case, though, it’s not the Pro Meddler who loses, but the middle man, i.e. Brenner, because he was too cowardly to lift the damn cup up himself, and instead sat there cooling his hemorrhoids between two chairs, so to speak.

  So many possibilities. And yet, not one came to pass.

  Because the Pro Meddler gets up and calls for the dumbwaiter now: “Until I know how much my brother told Junior, you two are staying put down here,” he said. “The dumbwaiter’s the only exit. And we’ll be putting it out of service. Until something occurs to you.”

  Brenner debated whether or not he should explain to Stenzl that his brother hadn’t been the target of the murder at all, that in truth it’d been all about Irmi. But, A of all, impossible that he would’ve believed him anyway. And B of all, the Pro Meddler had other concerns. And I don’t mean Junior’s books. No, all of the sudden, he had completely different concerns.

  As he talked to Brenner, he was standing with his back to the dumbwaiter. That’s why he didn’t see at first what Brenner was already seeing. That the dumbwaiter wasn’t empty. But crammed full like a can of sardines. With two fat cement workers.

  The one had his arms bound behind his back with his own belt, which at least didn’t look quite as ridiculous. But the other one’s arms were bound into a cross by a belt on which sparkled the golden letters: ESCAPADE.

  Because needless to say, it’s just not possible for some fat cement worker to have a knee so sharp that it instantly breaks your rib. The cement worker’s knee only felt as sharp as it did upstairs in the Golden Heart because between his knee and Brenner’s rib was Brenner’s Glock in the breast pocket of his coat. And when you’ve got the knee of a hundred-kilo cement worker pressing against your pistol, a rib like that’s nothing.

  Needless to say, the cement workers stripped him of his Glock right away. That part they did very well. It’s just that they shouldn’t have left it lying around the Golden Heart. The cement workers were commonplace goons who’d never touched a gun in their lives. In their heart of hearts, well, these were two decent-hearted people.

  Needless to say, it was Angelika who’d overpowered them with the gun in her hand. First, she forced the one to tie up the other at gunpoint, and then she tied up the second one herself with her ESCAPADE belt. Because the buckle had this very special mechanism, and just like that, you’re lickety-click defenseless.

  While the two cement workers were sheepishly explaining the whole story to the Pro Meddler and Watzek, the dumbwaiter started back up again.

  And interesting! Compared to the meaty cement worker’s knee, Brenner’s Glock was something pointy, sharp, and rib-cracking, but in Angelika’s delicate hand it had the effect of something crude and ungainly.

  Angelika handed Brenner back his Glock. And no sooner were her hands free then, vzzzzt, she’d sliced through the duct tape on Berti’s wrists with her own fingernails.

  The Pro Meddler looked about as embittered as if somebody had completely amputated his lips. And I have to say, given the circumstances, understandable.

  Because the plan was supposed to be for him and Watzek to be on their way and for the cement workers to take the dumbwaiter out of service and for Brenner and Berti to be left there in the basement stewing over Stenzl’s question.

  And now it was Angelika who had moved her dumbwaiter to checkmate.

  And now it was the Pro Meddler and the Watzek men who would sit stewing in the basement of the Golden Heart until the following night.

  CHAPTER 12

  In recent years, there’s been a lot of ballyhoo about the moon—crimes of passion and how the moon affects your haircut, your love life, and what have you. And how there are more car accidents when there’s a full moon, well, we’ve always known that.

  Interesting, though, how these things we’ve always known always turn out to be wrong. Because statistics and that sort of thing have proven: actually fewer car accidents when there’s a full moon because the light’s better. And when you drive an ambulance you don’t even need statistics because your own experience has shown: moon, zero effect. Based on the number of calls, there are other things you’ve felt way more. Let me break it down for you: humidity, ja, high pressure weather system, ja, the Föhn winds, ja, moon, nein.

  And the real triggers are in another class altogether, i.e. start of summer vacation, i.e. college rejection letters and teenage suicide, i.e. Danube Isle Fest with all its alcohol-poisoned cadavers. They’ve got nothing to do with a full moon.

  But the fact that this year the Danube Isle Fest would fall on a full moon of all things, needless to say, double-threat. Because that way the politicians could blame everything on the full moon again.

  And another thing that’s got nothing to do with the full moon. The fact that Brenner—after Angelika and Berti had bandaged up his rib, and he sent the two of them off to bed—couldn’t fall asleep.

  “Hello?” Klara finally picked up after he’d let it ring at least ten times.

  “Well, aren’t we up late,” Brenner said, taking the bull by the horns, as it were.

  “Simon.” Klara breathed a sigh of relief.

  “Nobody’s called me that in a long time,” Brenner said, because around EMTs, of course, only last names or nicknames, and Nicole had taken to calling him Brenni, terrible, but such things do happen in this life.

  “Are you in one of your sentimental moods again?” She gave a big yawn, and still half-yawning, she said: “Allow me to console you. It’ll all get better after two a.m. Two was always when your sentimental moods peaked.”

  “You seem to know your way around them pretty well.”

  “I’ve often found myself up at night lately.”

  Brenner thought his sentimental mood might be making advances on Klara.

  But instead, Klara, rather unsentimental: “So, what do you want?”

  “Back when we used to fight, you always thought a good deal of your logic.”

  “Compared to yours, it was hardly an art.”

  “You always said that music and logic activate the same part of the brain.”

  Klara had to laugh. “I think neuroscientists have got a little farther in the meantime. They’d almost have to, judging from the logical development of my own life.”

  “You can’t go claiming the opposite when it’s your logic that I need right now,” Brenner said.

  “Why do I get the feeling you just need somebody to talk to?”

  “Are talking and logic linked, too, I mean, brain-wise?”

  “If you’re any example, then, no, not likely,” Klara said, laughing. “But you can come by sometime, and we can talk.”

  “It’s just—it’d have to be now.”

  “You never could wait,” Klara said, rubbing his nose in it. And frankly, that was a little unfair, because Brenner was actually a very patient person. Too patient, you might say.

  But then, when he had to wait three whole minutes outside for a taxi, he nearly hit the roof. But then, the ride went fast, because never is there so little traffic in this city as at two-thirty in the morning.

  And thank god, you’ve got to admit. Because as the black Mondeo and the red GTI flew past the taxi, there might’ve been a few deaths if there’d been any traffic.

  “Those lunatics!” the taxi driver yelled. “They’re going to smash their own skulls on the next median!”

  That was another cause of accidents that as an EMT you saw more prevalently of late. The kamikaze duel between the newly licensed rookie drivers. Because it’d become something of a fad the last couple of years for rookie drivers to race each other in their souped-up vehicles on the empty streets at night. I’m just saying, Golf GTI and tinted windows and spoilers and grills and personalized license plates and Red Bull and, an
d, and—the laminate’s still cooling on their driver’s licenses.

  “Otherwise pretty quiet today, though,” Brenner said, hoping to calm the taxi driver down. Because for a moment he was afraid she might pursue the two lunatics.

  “The night before Danube Isle Fest is always quiet.”

  “People saving themselves for the big party.” Because Brenner, always a bit of a psychologist.

  “But every day there are more and more kamikaze drivers,” the taxi driver said, shaking her head.

  “Even though practically every day one of them gets laid up.”

  “It doesn’t help.” The taxi driver thumped her steering wheel. “For every one that dies, there are three new ones to take his place. Like with moths, you might be able to kill one, but you can never kill the eggs.”

  In Döbling, where Klara lived, it was so quiet that Brenner almost thought better of opening the garden gate. She sure didn’t pay for this house with what she made as a teacher, Brenner thought as she came out to greet him. Because needless to say, envy like that’s almost as tough to get rid of as all the kamikaze drivers.

  Klara was normally dressed, though, I mean, not some god-awful millionairess’s leisure suit as the respectable address might’ve suggested. But more like she’d just got home from school. Because nowadays teachers can wear jeans, too, and with Klara it was completely justified, because still a terrific figure.

  “You’re looking much better today,” Brenner said, and it really was his honest opinion.

  “Two-thirty in the morning’s my best time,” Klara said, with a coy smile.

  What Brenner would’ve liked most was just to start right in on his case. But needless to say, out of politeness, he asked about her health first. And as tends to happen when somebody doesn’t really want to say something, it ends up coming out too fast. “What came of the exam?” he asked before he was even through the door.

  But Klara took her time showing him in and then offered him a place to sit in her living room before she said: “At my first exam six months ago, the doctor said my chances were ‘fifty-fifty.’ ”

  “And in English, no less.”

  “Yeah, these days doctors just don’t speak Latin anymore. Actually, he said it in German: Fünfzig Prozent. I just thought fifty-fifty sounded better.”

  “Fifty-fifty, like two outlaws taking a fifty-fifty split after robbing a bank.”

  “Exactly. As if there’s something to be won in any case. You know, when you’re sick, you’re constantly having to console healthy people.”

  “Look who you’re talking to. The sick even have to console the ambulance drivers.”

  “Would you like something to drink?”

  “I’d like to know what the doctor said at this visit, not the one six months ago.”

  “Whisky, maybe?”

  “Unbelievable what lushes doctors are,” Brenner said in deliberate misunderstanding so that she’d finally come out with it.

  “Ninety percent,” Klara was beaming.

  “Alcohol?”

  “Chance at recovery.”

  “Then you’ll be out robbing banks again in no time,” Brenner said quickly. Even without the whisky, he really had to swallow a few times before he could get anything else out. “All that about two in the morning isn’t true, you know.”

  “What about two in the morning?”

  “You said on the phone that sentimental moods peak at two, and it all gets better from there.”

  “And it does—only gradually. Not instantly, the way you men always imagine everything changing.”

  “I see.”

  “Out with it. What did you come here for?”

  “I’ve had a relapse into some detective work. A murder. And I’m standing all of a millimeter away from the solution, and I can’t see it.”

  “Maybe you need to take a step back so that you can see it.” Klara laughed. “I must sound like an old schoolmarm.”

  “Easier said than done, taking a step back. You can only take a step back if you know what’s behind you.”

  “Maybe it’d be best if you just tell me, so I can solve it all, just like that,” Klara said with a snap of her fingers.

  “That’s roughly how I imagined it going, too.”

  Then Brenner told her how Bimbo had been strangled with his own gold chain. And the story of Bimbo and Angelika Lanz in the Kellerstüberl the night before his murder. And how the police had arrested old Lanz.

  “Well, it’s understandable,” Klara said.

  “What about it’s understandable?”

  “Why they’d suspect him.”

  “And what’s not understandable?”

  “Why you’ve made it your concern.”

  Then Brenner told her how, after the incident with the sandler, Junior tasked him with finding out whether Pro Med was tapping their radio. And he told her how Junior had implied that Brenner might be to blame for Bimbo’s murder. And how the Pro Meddlers had possibly murdered Bimbo out of retaliation for Brenner’s clumsy snooping.

  “Pro Med would have to have some real skeletons in the closet to fight back with that kind of brutality, though,” Klara said, delighting in her own cleverness.

  And so, Brenner just came out with the whole story, how the brother of the Pro Med chief had got shot just two weeks ago. And how his girlfriend had got shot along with him. And how it was Bimbo of all people who’d been the eyewitness to the deed.

  “Now it’s getting complicated,” Klara said.

  “That’s just the beginning. Because while I was off investigating Pro Med’s radio, the Pro Med chief was suspecting me of actually investigating him on account of his finances. And the police were suspecting him of being behind the deaths of both his brother and Bimbo.”

  And then Brenner disclosed the story that Angelika had just told him a few hours earlier. How Irmi, who’d been accidentally shot, had been the girlfriend of Lungauer, whose eye accidentally got a spike driven into it by Bimbo of all people.

  “Accidentally again,” Klara said.

  “Accidentally Irmi and accidentally her boyfriend.”

  “Do you mean, two accidentallys equals one deliberately?”

  Brenner shrugged his shoulders. “Between the two of us, you’re the logician.”

  “Well, purely in logical terms, two accidents don’t necessarily indicate intent. But purely in intuitive terms …”

  “Can you imagine,” Brenner said, interrupting her intuitive silence, “if the bullet was actually meant for the seemingly innocent bystander?”

  “And all Stenzl had to do was move his head like so, and voilà, the motive’s covered up? But what would that mean, then?”

  “Exactly. That’s what I’m asking you for. You know I’ve always had a hard time when it comes to concentrating.”

  “Would you like some coffee?”

  Because old superstition, coffee’s good for the concentration. And the opposite’s true, too. That I can personally attest to.

  But the truth is never that simple, yet another important rule. People often come along and curry favor by claiming that the truth is simple. But, take note, the truth is complicated.

  As far as coffee goes, for example, what’s true is that drinking coffee is lethal for your concentration. Making coffee, on the other hand, staggeringly good for your concentration. There are so many little handles involved in making a cup of coffee, and that’s the best concentration aid that there is in this world. Because if you don’t drink coffee, generally speaking, you’re not making coffee, either, and you see, there it is: the truth.

  Now don’t go thinking that the truth occurred to Klara as she made coffee for the two of them, like some kind of reacquaintance gift to Brenner—or to celebrate her ninety-percent chance at recovery, ta-da, your culprit.

  But as they were standing there in the kitchen, and Klara was getting the coffee going, all the sudden she asked: “What’s that you’re whistling?”

  “Was I whistling?”
r />   The way she smiled at Brenner gave him goose bumps, which, after a certain stage of manhood, is actually quite unpleasant when you factor in feelings and all. And then she said: “You always did have that habit. I only had to think of the lyrics that went to the tune you were whistling, and I’d know exactly where your shoe was pinching you.”

  “Did I do that back in Puntigam, too?”

  Klara puckered her lips. Brenner was thinking she was about to give him one of those obliging aren’t-you-precious kisses on the cheek. But instead she just whistled.

  “What are you whistling?” he asked. At first he didn’t recognize it because, naturally, she whistled the melody so correctly that it was almost unrecognizable.

  And now Klara softly began to sing, her voice a little strained from the treatments: “Come, sweet cross.”

  “Come, sweet death,” Brenner corrected her.

  But Klara went and fetched a cassette and played it for him, and needless to say: Come, sweet cross. As it turns out, Brenner listened to way too much Jimi Hendrix in his youth and not nearly enough St. Matthew’s Passion.

  “You once put that on a tape for me.”

  “I know,” Klara smiled.

  “And ever since I saw you the other day, the melody hasn’t left my head. When I learned how ill you are—it gave me such a scare. I even tore my apartment upside down looking for that tape.”

  “You’d be searching a long time,” Klara grinned. “This is that cassette.” She pointed at the stereo.

  Because there are certain things in our lives, which we often work out in such a way that they won’t be as painful as the unadulterated truth. It’s only human, really. Only problem: as time goes by, we actually start to believe in the adulterated version.

  Needless to say, after nearly three decades, it came back to Brenner now. That he hadn’t left Klara because of Miss Bazongas. No, Klara had kicked him to the curb. After he’d left behind at her house for the third time the cassette she’d made for him. Which she’d gone to painstaking effort for weeks to put together for him. Because it was a recording of her singing in her choir.

  Because to Brenner, Klara’s delusions about Bach had always just been a matter of pretense, i.e. let’s go listen to the St. Matthew’s Passion in my room.